Atheism and morality

[Inigo]

Whether or not moral theories of philosophers are 'bonkers', again, says nothing about whether or not they work. Hume's work on causality seems bonkers to me, but it still seems valid regardless.

Can we lower the post length people? My thumbs hurt.

I mean by 'bonkers' totally implausible. If someone describes a view as 'bonkers' one should take them to mean that it is totally implausible. They're unlikely to be commending it to you!

They are bonkers because each one has huge glaring flaws. That's another way of saying 'they don't work'!! They do not explain what needs to be explained. They're trying to explain something, they fail to explain it.

Now, I could go through each one and say what I think the flaw is. But you've just said to keep the posts short. So what do you want?

I'll say how I see the terrain at the moment. Very roughly there are 'naturalist objectivist' views. These identify moral properties with objective natural properties of some kind. The glaring flaw with these views is that they cannot accommodate the prescriptivity of morality. Objective natural properties don't issue instructions. To think that one can is as bonkers as thinking that a table can - indeed, it is in effect exactly the same thought! And even if such views could somehow make sense of morality's prescriptivity they could not explain the inescapable rational authority of those prescriptions. So such views, though popular, are spectacularly implausible. There's more wrong with them than right. One might as well identify morality with an orange.
Then there are non-naturalist objectivist views. These views recognise that moral properties are prescriptive and that objective natural properties are not (so one gold star to them) but this motivates them to posit 'non-natural' properties instead. What they mean by such strange things is objective properties that somehow issue instructions. They tend to give these posits fancy labels so that no-one will notice how bonkers such things are. They will call them things such as 'sui generis normative properties'. See? That makes it all seem alright doesn't it? One doesn't have to say 'instructing properties that just somehow exist but are no part of the natural word' (which would get one locked up, surely), one can say instead 'sui generis normative properties' and then you sound clever and respectable. Just a label though, and the view is bonkers.

Then there are subjectivist naturalist views that identify moral properties with subjective statets of natural agents, such as ourselves. Wrongness becomes the property of being disapproved of by us or something like that. Such views have the upside of being able to accommodate the prescriptivity and favouring nature of morality, but not its objectivity or inescapable rational authority. They're not bonkers so much as just obviously false.

Then there are expressivist views. These deny that we're even describing when we say things such as 'that act is wrong' and insist that we are expressing our disapproval and/or issuing an instruction. This flies in the face of the evidence and inherits the same basic problems as the subjectivist view.

And that's about it.
Then there's my type of divine command view which has none of these huge flaws and so should be endorsed.