RE: Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?
October 6, 2018 at 8:08 am
(This post was last modified: October 6, 2018 at 8:43 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(October 6, 2018 at 1:55 am)robvalue Wrote: Khemical and I seem to have agreed that I’m a moral realist, even though by all accounts I still call morality subjective. I’m not going to argue about this language further. I feel I’ve made a good effort to describe my position and no more progress is going to be made on this front. Like I’ve always said, there are an infinite number of possible objective moralities to pick from. One can simply check for internal consistency.Internal consistency does not make for a fact. The contents of a fantasy may be internally consistent - but that wont make the existence of the dragon factual. At best, you would be making factual statements about the system. Don;t get me wrong, that's useful as well...however.
-moral system x says stealing lolipops from children is bad
and
-stealing lolipops from children is bad
.......are not equivalent propositions. Nestled within moral realism, as a consequence of it...being the notion that some moral statements are true, is that many (perhaps most) moral statements are false, or at least not objectively true. Now it may be the case that the two statements above, one about a moral system, and one about a moral conclusion, both arrive at truth - but it doesn't mean that they both do so objectively, or that the moral system x doesn't make other non-factual moral statements.
Quote:I still suspect that realism is meant to be saying more than this, that there are statements about morality itself that can be said to be true or false, not just for any moral system. I’m surprised Vulcan agrees with Khem, since he seemed to be adopting this latter position.It says more than what you mentioned up above sure. It says that some moral statements are facts, not..merely, that they are consistent with the system from which they were derived.
Quote:The possible objections to true or false moral statements, even after allowing morality to be defined as you will, seems to be more to do with epistemology or the parsing of logic rather than morality itself. Objections can of course be raised at any stage, and with validity, and I tend to acknowledge these but then apply a "behaves as if..." principle of pragmatism to move on.Well, sure, true and false statements, what we can confidently say of them, are grounded in logic, in epistemology. If there were moral facts, they would be just like any other fact.
Quote:I’ll do some more reading on all these subjects to see if I can understand more. Thanks so much to everyone for your input so far!
PS: It was my understanding that moral realism supported one, "correct" morality. To me, that is what most people mean by "objective morality", not "morality that becomes objective once you announce what morality means to you".
Neither of those things are what moral realism contends. One is a common use of the term where nit witted believers are concerned, the other is a trivial expression of semantic coherence (also common for nit witted believers "magic books says x, which is consistent with magic book!"). If I declare that my moral system is pickles, then the comments that follow from pickles and are consistent with pickles don't automatically become those comments that a moral realist is allowing for.
For a minor aside that might go further to answering an earlier question you had - about why it mattered, what it's utility was, and I can do that with respect to the notions above and a current issue we have here in Ameriland. There are things that a trumpist might say..which are consistent with trumpism and have a moral component. These would be the alleged moral facts of trumpism. These facts would inform trumpist policies. I find it -incredibly amusing- that the believing set...long warning others of the dangers of budding moral relativism and subjectivity in our society...now find themselves in the boat constructed out of an obvious terminus for both. The drive to make everything politics is nothing other than the drive to make everything an opinion. The bad hombres are criminals. CRIM_MIN_NULS! They deserve the treatment that they and their children are receiving. If you disagree, well..that's just your libtarded opinion. To some extent, they were primed to take this position, even as they railed against it, as their concept of objective morality was already based more on the need for their ethics to be the right ethics...for their semantic coherence to outline truth. In their defence, they think they've been cultured warred in precisely this way, because they never understood that comments about their moral positions as opinions were a polite way of saying "fuck off nitwit".
It's no surprise that the position of secular humanism, for example..is at odds with the body politic of believers in Murrica, at present. They're fighting to maintain their traditional normative authority, looking to die on the hill of being pricks to people they don't like. Whores, fags, and filthy browns. A moral realist can call that objectively immoral, demonstrably and factual wrong. Or, you know..it's "just politics", "just an opinion". 50/50.

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