(December 8, 2017 at 3:38 pm)Khemikal Wrote:(December 8, 2017 at 3:29 pm)SteveII Wrote: No, that's not even close to a complete answer. First, you want us to look at 19th century justification through a 21st century cultural lens. Second, you totally ignored how we are to evaluate the 21st century: which has anything but consensus. Third, whatever method you are going to propose in your next post must be capable of producing a moral fact that is good for all time in human past as well as the future--in order to be considered objective.That's not what it means for something to be objective, as I've repeatedly explained to you across threads and time. It's easy to explain why. If someone had measured the water level on the seawall in some town in 1800 - that would produce an objective fact. If they made the same measurement in 1900 and 2000 (and then in 2100) it would not be surprising to find that the water level had changed and at no point would any of the disparate measurements be any less objective or accurate than the previous or next measurement on grounds of having been different from each other.
Relevant facts of a matter can change, if and when they do change, any objective moral system must change to remain -objective-. It would be incoherent to toss out todays measurement, or claim that it were a subjective measurement..just because the water was an inch higher or lower than it was 100 years ago or would be 100 years from now.
Do you understand?
Quote:Now, imagine you are in the 19th century and you are defending moral realism. Would you have arrived at the same conclusion on abortion you are going to show us? If not, then your view that moral facts exist is hypothetical and can't really be known for sure--which is useless as a moral theory.Me, sure? It's not really a fair question to you, though..because I've never been (and likely would not have been) the kind of person who subscribed to victorian morality. There were people in victorian times arguing against victorian morality....and if all things were equal then I would have been one of those folks.
I take it, by your refusal to engage in your own line of questioning..you had no interest in following it through? That it was pretext for a trivial reassertion of your own objections to objective morality and moral realism? I have to ask..which of us is the moral realist, again?
Theists seem to have this bizarre obsession with objective being unchanging . Never got that line of thinking as it kills moral progress and assumes we can't learn anything new about moral facts .
Seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy -- myself.
Inuit Proverb
Inuit Proverb