RE: “Normative” ethical theories
September 30, 2025 at 7:02 pm
(This post was last modified: September 30, 2025 at 7:07 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
I wouldn't call it particularly wishful thinking. If moral statements can be true or false that very well might be bad for us, or bad for an individual, or just bad in general in a particularly shitty world. OTOH, if moral statements couldn't be true or false then we'd have little to no reason to worry about all our aberrant thoughts and abysmal outcomes.
As for prescriptivity - and I assume you mean logical prescriptivity here- you can only get that in a genuine sense from cognitivist meta-ethics. Morality based on yuck and yum doesn't logically entail any commitment. If you're thinking of prescriptivity as something like gravity, that makes you do a thing like it makes water flow downhill...no, I don't think any moral statement or understanding has that sort of juice. There's often space between what would be logical to do, and what we actually do. Such that, to use an earlier analogy, my doctor might say to me "these numbers are bad" and at least on the face of it that does seem like there would be a logical and prescriptive entailment there. Chiefly that I cut out the burgers and fries. The doctor is speaking from a realist and consequentialist perspective.
-but I don't. I'll probably choke on one of those things eventually. Traipsed all over the world doing plenty of fucked up shit and trying to avoid doing other fucked up shit and it's gonna be a french fry that ends me, not a fried circuit as I glitch out incapable of resolving my moral programming against my practical reality.
As for prescriptivity - and I assume you mean logical prescriptivity here- you can only get that in a genuine sense from cognitivist meta-ethics. Morality based on yuck and yum doesn't logically entail any commitment. If you're thinking of prescriptivity as something like gravity, that makes you do a thing like it makes water flow downhill...no, I don't think any moral statement or understanding has that sort of juice. There's often space between what would be logical to do, and what we actually do. Such that, to use an earlier analogy, my doctor might say to me "these numbers are bad" and at least on the face of it that does seem like there would be a logical and prescriptive entailment there. Chiefly that I cut out the burgers and fries. The doctor is speaking from a realist and consequentialist perspective.
-but I don't. I'll probably choke on one of those things eventually. Traipsed all over the world doing plenty of fucked up shit and trying to avoid doing other fucked up shit and it's gonna be a french fry that ends me, not a fried circuit as I glitch out incapable of resolving my moral programming against my practical reality.
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