Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

They proliferate insomuch as meaningful distinctions can be made between them.  Aren't they the contexts in your own "truth in context"?  

Probably not credible to clutch at the pearls about it now.

The categorization thing is your jam, man. There's not much interest in listing bullet points from a wikipedia page. Sure, they're contexts, but certainly not "the" contexts, and they aren't particularly interesting ones.

Now, if you'd like to show how ANY "ism" can arrive at a specific moral position about anything (animals, let's say), then I'm all ears.

My view, predicated on the idea that moral systems (a) are based on emotional positions that are rationalized post facto; (b) depend on imagined alternate realities that cannot be factual, actually allows some clear path forward in analyzing moral questions.

But I'd like you to actually take a stab at any moral position. Is rape wrong? Why? How about abortion? How about killing animals? In what sense can any of these things be taken as wrong, and by what non-arbitrary process are they to be arrived at? Is burning old ladies at the stake wrong? How are you so sure that it is, when thousands or millions were once sure that it wasn't?

[The Grand Nudger]

Interesting enough for you to create a term to refer to all of them, that lacks any of their specific content or communicative value or factual accuracy, while getting every one of them fundamentally wrong. Let's not pretend that this thing you've been discussing with me doesn't interest you.

-and then..we'll remind ourselves that a true thing may be uninteresting, and a false thing may hold immense interest. There's nothing anyone can ultimately do if your objections to x are objections of disinterest as opposed to objections of fact, or if your assertions to truth are actually based on your subjective level of interest, rather than reference to purported facts.

[bennyboy]

Interesting enough for you to create a term to refer to all of them, that lacks any of their specific content or communicative value or factual accuracy, while getting every one of them fundamentally wrong.  Let's not pretend that this thing you've been discussing with me doesn't interest you.  

The "-isms" are all you, dude.

The idea of truth-in-context applies to any context, including but not exclusive to whatever "ism" you want.  But that doesn't mean I'm interested in wading through a comprehensive list of all the "isms" that people have given words to.  I can read wikipedia if I give a shit about any of that.

You've brought up a few examples.  It would be much more interesting to discuss a couple of them in plain English, using ideas of our own, to see if we can understand how we arrive at those ideas, how we generate confidence about their rightness, and so on.

[The Grand Nudger]

The isms are either all me, or I need to come up with my own ideas. Pick one.

It's completely pointless to reference a specific example if you cannot.. or more probably will not... understand the underlying concepts. It will be an endless litany of you calling things such as airspeed..just..like..an opinion, or maybe a feeling, dude. All I've hoped to answer in this thread or any other that we've ever had on this topic, is the opq. How can we x. Well, if we can...here's how - and you've been given every opportunity to become aware. There will either be movement here...even if you still disagree..or there will not, and all of the rest of your shit is empty posturing and post hoc addendum. You are frustrated, and because you are frustrated, you insist that the ideas are foreign to us - that they are not our own, as though foreignness to us was an indicator of truth aptness.

Much like "truth in context". If you aren't interested in the answers to your own questions..then maybe don't ask?

[bennyboy]

The isms are either all me, or I need to come up with my own ideas.  Pick one.

It's completely pointless to reference a specific example if you cannot.. or more probably will not... understand the underlying concepts.

Labels aren't concepts. If you want to apply an "-ism" as you see it to a moral question or one of knowledge (and you have to some degree in this thread), then that's fine.

I'm very happy discussing concepts. I'm not interested in going through the bullet points of your internal wikipedia page.

If you're interested in "realism," then explain how that particular paradigm applies to the OP, or to our discussions of morality. In what way can you arrive at a sensible moral world view that is based purely on what is real, rather than (as I suggest) imagining a non-existent other-world, which is inherently non-factual?

Keep in mind that in this discussion, we are currently not considering real burning witches. We are imagining once-burned witches of another era. We recognize an imagined world in which scenes of burning-at-the-stake is abhorrent.

In short-- I don't think the kind of moral views you are discussing are coherent. I think that you THINK they are, but in fact it's an example of the kinds of categorical conflation I mentioned earlier. If you are actually willing to lay claim to any moral position, and explain why you take that position, I'm pretty sure I can demonstrate that it matches my definition morality-- and that this could not be otherwise.

So go ahead-- take a clear position on anything, and explain why you hold that position in unambiguous terms. Prove me wrong!

[The Grand Nudger]

If you're interested in "realism," then explain how that particular paradigm applies to the OP, or to our discussions of morality.  In what way can you arrive at a sensible moral world view that is based purely on what is real, rather than (as I suggest) imagining a non-existent other-world, which is inherently non-factual?

In a realist understanding, we can prove a moral fact the same way we would go about proving any other kind of fact.  You arrive at a sensible moral worldview the same way you arrive at a sensible view of anything else.  The latter, I think, is a lower bar.  

Keep in mind that in this discussion, we are currently not considering real burning witches.  We are imagining once-burned witches of another era.  We recognize an imagined world in which scenes of burning-at-the-stake is abhorrent.

Oh we probably are, aren't we?  They burnt witches then, we find creative ways to kill even more now for equally absurd and counter-factual reasons.   

In short-- I don't think the kind of moral views you are discussing are coherent.  I think that you THINK they are, but in fact it's an example of the kinds of categorical conflation I mentioned earlier.  If you are actually willing to lay claim to any moral position, and explain why you take that position, I'm pretty sure I can demonstrate that it matches my definition morality-- and that this could not be otherwise.

So go ahead-- take a clear position on anything, and explain why you hold that position in unambiguous terms.  Prove me wrong!

Misusing a word again.  Realism is coherent - you simply disagree with it for reasons unrelated to realism as you tell them.

[bennyboy]

Realism is coherent

Prove it. Demonstrate that any "moral fact" is both moral in nature and also an objective fact.

[The Grand Nudger]

Realist moral statements often take the form of a transitive argument. If a is equal to b, and b is equal to c, then a is equal to c. I already covered this, but again and breifly -

if mountaintop removal mining is harmful
and what is harmful is what is bad
then mountaintop removal mining is bad

Thus, the hypothetical realist moral statement is coherent - though, as I also already discussed, that's a pretty low bar. For a moral statement to be true, as envisioned by moral realism - the statement or argument cannot simply be coherent, it must be coherent and accurate with respect to the facts it purports to report. The set of all conceivable coherent statements is far larger than the set of all true statements.

[bennyboy]

Realist moral statements often take the form of a transitive argument.  If a is equal to b, and b is equal to c, then a is equal to c.  I already covered this, but again and breifly -

if mountaintop removal mining is harmful
and what is harmful is what is bad
then mountaintop removal mining is bad

Thus, the hypothetical realist moral statement is coherent - though, as I also already discussed, that's a pretty low bar.  For a moral statement to be true, as envisioned by moral realism - the statement or argument cannot simply be coherent, it must be coherent and accurate with respect to the facts it purports to report.  The set of all conceivable coherent statements is far larger than the set of all true statements.

Well, I suppose we're dealing with a particular formal definition of "coherence" as well, as this certainly doesn't meet the criteria for literary coherence.  Any child capable of understanding that syllogism would immediately start asking questions about what it means to harm a mountain, or how somebody can know that's "bad."

I can tell you what I think will happen in practice with this kind of argument.  It won't come in little sets like this that are clear bullshit.  It will come in complex chapters of big fat hardcover text books with "Harvard phD" written on the cover, mentioning perhaps a couple dozen other like works in the first chapter and implying "Read all these, or you won't really be qualified to comment on what follows."  It then will present all kinds of "facts," like charts about American strip mining correlated with budgie deaths in the Netherlands or something. But in the end, if it takes 500 pages to answer a simple question, you're probably not answering the question at all.

The biggest fear of bullshit-mongers is that some simple moron like me will step into the room and say: "Yea, but. . . why is it bad?" And then the author will have nothing left to do but hysterically gesture toward his 500 pg. book, which if you read closely enough might as well be titled, "Why the Emperor's New Clothes are Not Only Real but Also Super-Important." All the face-plant memes in the world won't obscvure the fact that the question is unanswerable in any way that doesn't beg the question.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, I suppose we're dealing with a particular formal definition of "coherence" as well, as this certainly doesn't meet the criteria for literary coherence.  Any child capable of understanding that syllogism would immediately start asking questions about what it means to harm a mountain, or how somebody can know that's "bad."

People ask questions about coherent things, that's good - and one wonders what the point of asking questions about incoherent things would be, anyway.

I can tell you what I think will happen in practice with this kind of argument.  It won't come in little sets like this that are clear bullshit.  It will come in complex chapters of big fat hardcover text books with "Harvard phD" written on the cover, mentioning perhaps a couple dozen other like works in the first chapter and implying "Read all these, or you won't really be qualified to comment on what follows."  It then will present all kinds of "facts," like charts about American strip mining correlated with budgie deaths in the Netherlands or something.   But in the end, if it takes 500 pages to answer a simple question, you're probably not answering the question at all.

You would interpret a 500 page report on all of the ways that mountaintop removal mining is harmful as not answering the question of how it was harmful?  

The biggest fear of bullshit-mongers is that some simple moron like me will step into the room and say: "Yea, but. . . why is it bad?"  And then the author will have nothing left to do but hysterically gesture toward his 500 pg. book, which if you read closely enough might as well be titled, "Why the Emperor's New Clothes are Not Only Real but Also Super-Important."  All the face-plant memes in the world won't obscvure the fact that the question is unanswerable in any way that doesn't beg the question.

Yes, nothing left to do but point to 500 pages worth of reasons to make the statement.

While you perceive this to be a dilemma of some kind - that would be pretty much a best case scenario for any realist statement..about morality or anything else. A very large set of factual data to refer to. In an objective morality, the more you know, the more accurate and specific your moral statements can be. If you wanted to consider the issue of mountaintop removal mining, it would help to have a subject matter expert. The subject in question this time has gone through alot of revision and regulation precisely because of reports like that. We can still doubt that the first premise as I wrote it is sound or the syllogism as expressed is factually complete. We can do this by saying, for example, that the things about mountaintop removal mining that we refer to when calling it harmful can either be done some other way, that these specific harms can be mitigated, or remediated. Or, if we prefer, we could accept that mountaintop removal mining was itself harmful, but that the alternatives were more so and thus, mountaintop removal mining is a mitigation of some greater and more general harm.

In practice..and with respect to mountaintop removal mining - we do both (then ultimately and inconsistently defer to the almighty dollar, ofc).