Atheism and Ethics

[Angrboda]

I think I'm a credible authority on what I'm talking about when I use a word.  So, If I say I'm talking about a thing that contains x with a word y..and you say..no..the thing you're talking about with the word y does not contain the thing x...it's pretty clear we aren't talking about the same thing.  Pretty basic.  I mean..If we both use the word cat to refer to different things then it's clear we aren't talking about the same thing when we say cat..right?  Is it just my opinion that what I'm talking about when I say cat is a small mammal with a tail and whiskers that goes meow all over the internet?  No.

Like usual, I'm fine with giving the word to whomever thinks this is a hill to die on.  Moral content by any other name, and all that.  Your hypothetical morality with no harm content can be called morality and we'll call my hypothetical fleefarpity with harm content fleefarp.  While we're at it, I say we stop using cat and start using bastard for the small mammals with tails and whiskers that go meow all over the internet.

Long story short, at this level, it doesn't even make sense to say "that's just, like, your opinion" - because we're just defining terms and clarifying what we're talking about.

From a personal standpoint, I don't find you a credible authority on that. FYI.

You're conflating facts and explanations. A person who subscribes to relativity might explain gravity as being a curvature of spacetime, whereas a flat earther might explain gravity as the result of the earth accelerating underneath people on the surface. In a truly pedantic sense, yes they are not talking about the same thing, but at the end of the day, their common referent is the phenomenon of acceleration experienced by objects on the surface of the earth, aka gravity. FYI I never said that morality did not involve harm, only that it was not essential. I don't know whether you simply misread or whether you simply don't understand Moore's fallacy, but whatever it is, what you took away from my statement was not an accurate comprehension of what I said. When we talk about morals, we are talking about the facts of moral perception and moral judgment. That your explanation of those facts differs from mine does not in anyway indicate that we are not talking about the same thing, except in the anally pedantic sense mentioned earlier. I don't know whether you are incapable of seeing the distinction between your theory of morals and the facts of morals -- unintelligent people frequently aren't capable of said distinction -- or whether you've simply failed to think rigorously. Regardless, your contention that we are not talking about the same thing is wrong, IMNHO.

(ETA: It occurs to me that what Harris said is an example of what Dennett calls a deepity. Something that, in a trivial and unimportant sense is true, but which on the level of a profundity is not. It seems as if you've embarked on a quest to abet one of Harris' many species of caustic rhetoric as if it were a profundity when it is not. I can only suggest that this makes you look silly. Hell, quoting Harris at all in a discussion of morality makes you look silly, but that is a discussion for another day.)