Subjective Morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

It can’t be a matter of opinion whether or not there are facts about something; all that can happen is those facts, if they are real, being described through different frameworks.

That whatever facts there are, are being described (and employed) by different frameworks (and many deeply subjective agents), is also a statement that a moral realist can agree with.

I’m still not sure if we're dealing with scientific facts or logical truths, though. There’s the language problem: for me, a scientific fact cannot be moral in nature. It must by definition be amoral.

Your cannots and musts express a position, but not a justification.  Cornell realism is an expression of scientific naturalism.  If scientific naturalism cannot be trusted to produce scientific facts or logical truths...........

[vulcanlogician]

I've put myself on the sidelines for this thread. But I think it would help the debate along if the moral skeptics took a solid position.

Ethical subjectivism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:

1. Ethical sentences express propositions.
2. Some such propositions are true.
3. Those propositions are about the attitudes of people.

This makes ethical subjectivism a form of cognitivism. Ethical subjectivism stands in opposition to moral realism, which claims that moral propositions refer to objective facts, independent of human opinion; to error theory, which denies that any moral propositions are true in any sense; and to non-cognitivism, which denies that moral sentences express propositions at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitivis...bjectivism

[robvalue]

A scientific fact must be something that can be objectively determined by any observer, following a particular method. Therefor any moral judgement contained within that fact/method must be objectively defined also. This is the problem. I can’t just insert the word "wrong" into a scientific claim, without being explicit about what that means. It can therefor only be one definition among many possible ones. It can’t retain its element of moral evaluation outside of the scientific statement.

That’s the problem, I think. I see it as the smuggling of moral language into scientific statements, to make them appear to be some sort of fact about morality. But it’s only a fact about whatever morality is being assumed in the first place.

You can have facts about various different moralities that individuals may hold, or about various ethical systems. But again, you can’t deduce whether the whole systems are wrong or right scientifically, for the same reasons. You also can’t scientifically say which is correct or incorrect, without defining what those criteria mean. So we're back to the circular problem: correct in what way? To determine that criteria is just to define a particular moral/ethical system indirectly.

I’ll say this though. There’s one standard that can be applied to any moral system. Well, any system, really. Internal consistency. I can’t tell you that what you think is wrong is wrong, but I can point out ways in which your moral statements might appear to contradict each other. By doing so, I may change your actions, if you agree that I have indeed found a contradiction. Either that, or you accept that your system isn’t logically coherent, and that you’re okay with that. I can maybe also point out ways in which you are failing to achieve your own moral goals, through incorrect/inefficient practices.

[The Grand Nudger]

A scientific fact must be something that can be objectively determined by any observer, following a particular method. Therefor any moral judgement contained within that fact/method must be objectively defined also. This is the problem. I can’t just insert the word "wrong" into a scientific claim, without being explicit about what that means. It can therefor only be one definition among many possible ones. It can’t retain its element of moral evaluation outside of the scientific statement.

That’s the problem, I think. I see it as the smuggling of moral language into scientific statements, to make them appear to be some sort of fact about morality. But it’s only a fact about whatever morality is being assumed in the first place.

You can have facts about various different moralities that individuals may hold, or about various ethical systems. But again, you can’t deduce whether the whole systems are wrong or right scientifically, for the same reasons. You also can’t scientifically say which is correct or incorrect, without defining what those criteria mean. So we're back to the circular problem: correct in what way? To determine that criteria is just to define a particular moral/ethical system indirectly.

I’ll say this though. There’s one standard that can be applied to any moral system. Well, any system, really. Internal consistency. I can’t tell you that what you think is wrong is wrong, but I can point out ways in which your moral statements might appear to contradict each other. By doing so, I may change your actions, if you agree that I have indeed found a contradiction. Either that, or you accept that your system isn’t logically coherent, and that you’re okay with that. I can maybe also point out ways in which you are failing to achieve your own moral goals, through incorrect/inefficient practices.

I'm not looking to establish that such concerns are..well..unconcerning, only pointing out that those concerns are equally concerning to anyone who has made a commitment to scientific realism, or scientific naturalism.

I've bolded the relevant bit, I think?

The great asset of Cornell realism is that it directly adopts widely accepted views about the nature of natural properties and scientific knowledge in order to answer the foundational questions of moral metaphysics and moral epistemology. What are moral properties? Highly complex natural properties, individuated by their causal profiles—Boyd calls these homeostatic cluster properties. Are there, generally, properties like this? Yes; healthiness is one; moral properties are properties like that. How do we know about moral properties? By looking for directly observable properties that are characteristically functionally upstream or downstream from the moral property that we are interested in (provided that we have justified background beliefs about the functional roles of moral properties). Do we, generally, have knowledge like this? Yes; this is how we have scientific knowledge; moral knowledge is knowledge like that. In this way, the theoretical resources of scientific realism also turn out to support moral realism (Boyd 1988).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/

[DLJ]

I've put myself on the sidelines for this thread. But I think it would help the debate along if the moral skeptics took a solid position.


...

Hrrmph! I can't get beyond the first question. I'm suspecting a begged question.

Do you know what the author of that flow diagram means by:
a) moral
b) judgements
c) beliefs

(I'm OK with 'do' and 'express').

[The Grand Nudger]

It shouldn't take a reworked dictionary to answer, affirm or object to any position or question on that chart, lol.  

A moral judgement is a statement or proposition in which we assess the moral state of x.  Beliefs are things we take to be true. Non cognitivists state that moral judgements simply aren't the kind of statements that -can be- true or false. That we are not expressing states of mind which are beliefs by their utterance or conception.

[DLJ]

It shouldn't take a reworked dictionary to answer, affirm or object to any position or question on that chart, lol.  

A moral judgement is a statement or proposition in which we assess the moral state of x.  Beliefs are things we take to be true.  Non cognitivists state that moral judgements simply aren't the kind of statements that -can be- true or false. That we are not expressing states of mind which are beliefs by their utterance or conception.

Thanks for the reply.

I can only repeat my request:

"Do you know what the author of that flow diagram means by:
a) moral ............. ???
b) judgements .... ???
c) beliefs" ........... "Beliefs are things we take to be true."

Cheers.

[The Grand Nudger]

The answer is yes, and so do you, lol.  There is nothing novel going on with any of that..it's a flow chart of the points of divergence for a multitude of moral theories - not a trick question.  You just quoted me answering your question..and then asked it again......?

The difference between non cognitive moral theories and cognitive moral theories is whether a person thinks that we are expressing a belief, or something else. So, when you think about a person making a moral judgement, including yourself..do you think that this moral judgement describes a state of belief? That the person intends to communicate what they take to be true? The reason that it's important, is that if you do think that..and are therefore a cognitivist, non-cognitivist objections to any form of moral realism (or cognitivist subjectivism) are irrelevant.

So..let's say you're an error theorist, as an example. If you object with a comment along the lines of "but what if the non-cognitivists are right" then the cornell realists answer (far removed by substantial aditional commitments and disparate answers) can say "then you and I are both wrong". Conversely, if an error theorist asks a cornell realist "how do you overcome the objections of noncognitivism" - the answer is "the same way you do".

You'll have agreed, if you agree with cognitivism (and yes, even though you're a subjectivist - again..in my example) that moral statements -purport to report facts-, and so contradiction of that statement in the case of cornell realism but not in the case of error theory is inconsistent. If you had a valid objection to cornell realism as an error theorist....it could not be the comments of non-cognitivists...the disagreement would lie elsewhere.

[vulcanlogician]

The term ‘moral judgement’ can refer to an activity, a state, a state-content, a capacity or a virtue. The activity of moral judgement is that of thinking about whether something has a moral attribute. The thing assessed might be an action, person, institution or state of affairs, and the attribute might either be general (such as rightness or badness) or specific (such as loyalty or injustice). 

https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/t...gement/v-2

[The Grand Nudger]

For an example in thread.   

Vulcan has some sympathies for non naturalism.  I'm going to just call him a non naturalist for purposes of this example.  We're both objectivists, but lets assume that I answer yes to every question on that chart.  I land in analytic functionalism.  

Between us...a cogent disagreement on morality cannot lie in the judgement dependent, error, or noncognitivist theories.  We have excluded those items together.  Our moral positions are in disagreement, but implicated with each other by the rejection of mutually exclusive propositions to -both- of us.