All statements are true/false solely by virtue of correspondence to what has happened. Moral statements are no different.

If you cannot figure out a sensible coherent way to incorporate this into your framework, then it's time to fix your framework.

The human moral sensibility is built upon thought/belief(rudimentary) and thinking about thought and belief(complex thought/belief replete with naming and describing practices)...

Prior to our ability to name our mental ongoings, we were having them.

That is true in a point of view invariant kind of way. Any notion of morality that consists of moral judgment alone is impoverished. Any discourse in morality that meets only that as a standard has an emaciated criterion/notion at it's heart.

Belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour was always and is still yet formed and held long before we begin language use in earnest(long before naming and describing practices are first being learned). During these earliest of our thought/belief formations, we are finding out, remembering, and thus establishing what sorts of behaviours we do not like. At this age, there is no difference in the mind of the person, between what we like/dislike and what's acceptable/unacceptable.

However, we...

...as people who are capable of reporting upon our own thought/belief, are also capable of knowing that liking and/or disliking an others' behaviour begins prior to language, and that morality has an emotional element.

That's where emotion can be observed in it's earliest stages.

Moral discourse best keep this in mind.

Read the eyesore.
— creativesoul

Cut down the eyesore, and I'll read it. I'm not in the mood for a word search. — S

No thanks Sapientia. You've already made up your mind.

It's not about keeping a promise.

Read the eyesore.

The truth conditions of "There ought be a rose garden on Monday" are that it was promised to be planted the day before. — creativesoul

Belief and truth are distinct. That has no bearing upon that example.

Well, I did say previously that you can always bite the bullet. — Moliere

The bullet is misplaced.

For myself, at least, any theory which would say "There ought to be a dead family because the head of household did not pay a debt back to a loneshark" is true -- is a theory which is false. — Moliere

You'd base this rejection on the idea that that statement is somehow reflective of the speaker's notion of what's moral/immoral, but it's not.

Moral facts don't bear moral judgment. Rather they consist of morally relevent content/events. In that example, I'm not using the term "ought" as moral value judgment. It's an utterance based upon what has been promised to happen. The utterance of ought is true - just like every other truth-apt claim - by virtue of matching the relevant facts, not by virtue of being met with my approval.

"There ought be a dead family" is true because that's what was promised. It's about what makes the promise itself meaningful, and thus the utterance of ought based upon it true. We all know this much. Why else, if we were actually in that situation, would we fear for our lives? When sincere promises are kept, the world changes to match the words. That's why.

We can know that our family ought be dead if the loan shark keeps their promise, without saying that that would be good.

Then "There there ought be a dead family" is true if you don't.

The promise happened. The statement corresponds to what happened - in part, and just like every other true statement - by virtue of what it means.

The truth conditions of "There ought be a rose garden on Monday" are that it was promised to be planted the day before.

"There ought be a rose garden" is true if one promised to plant a rose garden.
— creativesoul

That conditional is not true in and of itself. It would require one or more additional premises, premises which others might well have good reason to reject... — S

I have no clue what you're trying to establish as a valid objection. Actually, I have no clue what you think that that string of words means. There's a bit of a gap here in shared meaning.

Good to see you, by the way!

On my view conditionals are not truth apt. Truth conditions are not the sort of thing that it makes sense to say are "truth-apt" for they are a vital part, and elemental constituent, an ingredient - as it were - of what makes "truth-aptness" possible.

I have no idea what being true 'in and of itself' even means. No thing is true in and of itself. That reflects a gross lack of understanding regarding what sorts of things can be true/false and what makes them so.

Being true requires meeting truth conditions. Being called "true" requires meeting only belief conditions(personal warrant). Being logically true requires meeting only validity conditions. Being sound requires meeting both truth conditions and validity conditions, but does not require belief conditions.

Being true and being believed does not require language. Being believed to be true does. Being sound does. Being believed to be sound does.

Moral statements are truth-apt for the same reasons that other truth-apt statements are. They have truth conditions that can be met.





Furthermore, and well worth arguing over...

Pay closer attention.


Here's a report of what has actually happened more times than we can possibly know. We can know that it has nonetheless.

A sincere speaker says "I promise to plant you a rose garden on Sunday".

It only follows by virtue of what the statement means(in addition to having a sincere speaker), that there ought be a rose garden on Monday. This is irrefutable.

"There ought be a rose garden on Monday" is true each and every time someone voluntarily enters into a moral obligation to plant a rose garden on the day before.

That's what it means. Promises are moral statements, as a result of being about behaviour. Moral judgments are made about promise makers. Making a promise is voluntarily obligating yourself to actually perform certain behaviours(to make the world match your words).

Morality is all about what counts as acceptable/unacceptable behaviour. Making a promise is a moral state of affairs as a result of being something that happened that is morally germane/relevant.

Our ability to imagine that which has not happened has no bearing upon what has. The promise has been made by a sincere speaker. The world ought be changed in whatever way it takes to match their words because that's precisely what they mean when spoken sincerely.


Of course we can imagine unforeseen possible situations/circumstances arising that would no longer allow the speaker to keep their word. Reasonable people would not hold the speaker accountable in such cases. That does not change the meaning of making a promise when having a sincere speaker.

Clarify then... what comes through a subject that is not subjective?

Under the definition you use everything ever said is subjective. It matters because the notion of objectivity is the basis of all your objections here.

Your favorite. I despise the dichotomy.

Morality is thought and belief. Thought and belief are neither objective nor subjective. Morality is neither.

Since it is the case that all morality consists of thought/belief, and all thought/belief consists of that which is not existentially dependent upon the thinking/believing subject, as well as that which is, thought/belief is neither. If thought/belief is neither, and all morality is thought/belief based, then all morality is neither.

By the way, the golden rule leads one to being ok with a sadomasochist treating them they way they want to be treated.

In layman's terms...

The Golden Rule mistakenly presupposes that everyone likes being treated the same way.

It is still yet... a very good 'rule of thumb'... especially when the person using it likes healthy productive and/or good things to be done to them.

A perfect rule if everyone likes good things.

Folk don't learn and know why and/or how they've acquired most of the beliefs that they hold until they carefully consider their own worldview.

Some behaviours are already considered acceptable/unacceptable by a person prior to comparing/contrasting their own worldview with others'. Comparing one's own thoughts/beliefs about the world and/or ourselves to an others' is to think about thought/belief.

Our 'sense' of acceptable/unacceptable thought/belief and/or behaviour is being built long before we begin talking with metacognitive terms. We name that which existed in it's entirety prior to our naming it.

Unfortunately, many folk still draw correlations between some religious deity and/or belief and morality.

Do you think people ordinarily intend objectivity when making moral claims?
— Andrew M

I have no idea. We'd need to do the empirical research and do pretty extensive polls. — Terrapin Station

Polls?

:smile:

They either think/believe that something is unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour or they do not. Lots of other folk have room for exceptions. Reasonable folk still think it's wrong in the unexceptional cases.

When someone says "That's immoral/wrong/bad/evil", they take a strong stance against that.

The objective/subjective dichotomy is inherently incapable of taking proper account of that which consists in/of both, and as a result... is neither.

Morality is just such a thing.

The objective/subjective dichotomy fails here as well as leading to a reductio(for those who know, you know, for those who don't, it's simple and convincing). In light of all this, continuing to use that dichotomy as standard is to use a false dichotomy.

The subjective/objective dichotomy serves only to add unnecessary confusion to our subsequent thoughts about morality and what's good, in the moral sense of "good". It is proof positive that inherently incapable frameworks are in use.

Religious beliefs, in the sense I'm talking about, have two major flaws. They unnecessarily presuppose entities, and they are based upon logical possibility alone.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster shows that that is not enough for warranting certainty in belief.

Unfortunately, this topic uses the term "belief" in an unnecessarily limited scope.

There is no such thing as personal belief since you do not exist in a vacuum, detached from the rest of society and other people. As long as you interact with other people and the world, you will project your personal belief into other people’s world-view and influence their choices. — Christoffer

If there is no such thing as personal belief, then there is no such thing as projecting it.

The historical record shows that our own notions of what counts as moral/immoral evolve along with our understanding and/or knowledge over time. What we hold to be moral/immoral is subject to historical, familial, cultural, and/or societal particulars. There's no denying that much. So, changes in our rules(conventional 'morality') reflect the changes in our moral belief about what's right/wrong as well as our justifications for holding such. Presumably, these changes are not made arbitrarily, but rather as a result of our coming to believe that what we once thought/believed to be moral was not(that we were mistaken).

If what's actually good is determined solely by our own moral belief, then there could be no way for us to be wrong/mistaken about what's good. Thus, our rules would not change. Our moral belief would not evolve; but we are, we have been, they do, they have, and it does.

So, I think the standard position here would be to say that goodness exists in such a way that we 'discover'(scare-quotes intentional) it as compared/contrasted to inventing it and/or defining it. It shows itself to us, so to speak, sometimes despite differences between it and our moral belief about it. We discover what's good or not, in much the same way that we discover what else is true/false about our own worldview.

I think the line of thinking would be to say that we have conflicting emotions, and moral duty is just another emotion, a sort of pleasure, that some people have. — Moliere

Perhaps, but that would be a strawman to one who has and is thus bound by his/her moral duties, regardless of their own unhappiness about it. Moral duties/obligations may invoke emotion, but they are not equivalent to it any more than any other thing that invokes it. Doing what's good does not always invoke positive feelings.

Using "Boo" and "Hurray" as synonyms for wrong/right renders both meaningless when attempting to take account of those who do what is right in cases when they do not like doing it, or want to.

"Boo to doing what's right" may take proper account of one's feelings while they're doing what's right, but since that is the case, it cannot the case that "Boo" is equivalent to something someone thinks/feels is wrong, and "Hurray" is equivalent to something someone thinks/feels is right.

If "Boo" applies to both, that which someone holds as immoral(like kicking puppies), and something someone holds is moral(like helping those less fortunate even when one doesn't really want to), then we've arrived at an issue of equivocation, false analogy, utter meaninglessness, and/or incoherence.

Being helpful is always good.

"Is good" is what one says when making a value judgment based upon one's worldview(which includes moral belief).

Does Moore's Open Question Argument apply here?

Insofar as people believe that moral utterances can be true or false they're simply mistaken. They have mistaken beliefs about the ontology of moral utterances.
— Terrapin Station

I would argue that anyone who holds that moral utterances cannot be true or false have mistaken beliefs about thought and belief. — creativesoul

Sure, and then what you'd offer as empirical support would be? — Terrapin Station

This isn't the place, but I guarantee that the empirical support for my position is much stronger than the empirical support for your own claim regarding the ontology of moral utterances.

You could always address the rose garden scenario... No one else seems to want to.

From the SEP article linked earlier...

Moore's main argument... ...was what has come to be known as the “open-question argument,” though he actually stated in a couple of slightly different ways. Consider a particular naturalist claim, such as that “x is good” is equivalent to “x is pleasure.” If this claim were true, Moore argued, the judgement “Pleasure is good” would be equivalent to “Pleasure is pleasure,” yet surely someone who asserts the former means to express more than that uninformative tautology. The same argument can be mounted against any other naturalist proposal: even if we have determined that something is what we desire to desire or is more evolved, the question whether it is good remains “open,” in the sense that it is not settled by the meaning of the word “good.”

Doesn't this argument only apply to positions that fail to distinguish between a referent(pleasure, well-being, etc.) and it's evaluation(good)?

It reminds me of justificatory regress...

On Friday, speaker A says "I promise to plant you a rose garden on Sunday". Speaker A is speaking sincerely.

On Monday, there ought be a rose garden.

The above statement, an utterance of ought, is true, and it doesn't presuppose another ought. Rather, it follows from what "I promise to plant you a rose garden" means.

Isn't this quite similar to Davidson's(I think) notion that if one knows what it takes for some claim to be true then one knows what it means? Isn't this the case for all 'truth-apt' claims(those capable of being true/false), including but not limited to those called "moral claims"?

Compare to...

Speaker A says "There is a beer in the fridge". Speaker A is being sincere.

It follows by virtue of what the statement means, in addition to having a sincere speaker, that there ought be a beer in the fridge. There is no other ought being presupposed here. The statement of a sincere speaker 'is an is', not an ought. :cool: Speaking sincerely 'is an is' not an ought.

Do these sorts of utterances of ought somehow not qualify/count as being moral utterances? Looks like a negation of Hume's guillotine to me.

When I say "It is raining" does that, on your view, mean the very same thing as "I think it is raining"? — Moliere

Yes, with the only exception being when one is unsure.

It seems to me that there's much lost in nearly all philosophical discourse/debate as a result of not drawing and maintaining the distinction between thought and belief and thinking about thought/belief. All conceptions of morality are products of the latter, all discourse about morality and rules and such are as well... yet thinking/believing that something ought and/or ought not be done is not. Our 'sense' of what's acceptable/unacceptable behaviour does not require us to think about it as it's own topic and/or subject matter. Temporally speaking, we had thought/belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour prior to naming it.

So... there's a gap here. I wonder, if like other things that we discover, if there's some 'sense' of morality that exists and/or existed in it's entirety prior to our naming it and/or describing it. If there is/was, then we could get it wrong. The conventional definition certainly does get it wrong, if that is the case.

Not sure if it adds to this thread, or if I could make it seem relevant enough to others here, so I'll leave it here aside from saying this, and then offering a bit of support for it...

Hume's guillotine is a product of thinking about thought/belief, and while it may be true that one cannot derive an ought from an is without presupposing another ought(I'm seriously doubting that that is true), this does not bear upon morality unless one holds that moral claims ought be conclusions, or only specific kinds of utterances of ought count as being a moral claim.

Where there is no language, there can be no thought/belief. — creativesoul

Where there is no language there can be no truth. — creativesoul

Where there is no language there can be no meaning. — creativesoul

So, these are commonly held statements of belief. Another is that propositions exist independently of language. Yet one more is that the content of belief is propositional. All are logical fictions.

My approach is that true claims correspond to actual events(what has happened or is happening).

...When one tells another that there is a cat on the mat, if they're speaking sincerely and truthfully, then there ought be a cat on the mat.

Meaning is important here. — creativesoul

This utterance of ought above is not the standard/typical/garden variety moral utterance, is it?

And yet it makes perfect sense, given that we know the meaning of the statement. Why would it be any different regarding the earlier promise?

When one promises another that there will be a rose garden, if they're speaking sincerely and truthfully, then there ought(one day) be a rose garden, simply because that's what it means.

Insofar as people believe that moral utterances can be true or false they're simply mistaken. They have mistaken beliefs about the ontology of moral utterances. — Terrapin Station

I would argue that anyone who holds that moral utterances cannot be true or false have mistaken beliefs about thought and belief.

...they probably do mean "it is good' is true', — Janus

If they're thinking about statements of thought/belief, rather than simply asserting their own.

Alright Banno... I do not understand how one arrives at the claim that "is good" is unanalyzable. Can you set it out in simple terms?

I'm reading/studying the link...

:wink:

Well, sure, you can double-down and bite the bullet. But can you see why someone might find the theory unappealing? It seems somewhat elaborate and unnecessary to claim its all emotion, on the face of things, and goes against what we mean by moral statements. — Moliere

Besides neglecting statements and all this above, emotivism cannot take account of conflicting wants/preferences and moral duty.

Sometimes it is "Boo, it is good"...

Clearly "Hurray" and "Boo" cannot account for what's going on with everyday moral considerations.

If "It is good" means "I think it is good" why wouldn't you just say "I think it is good"? — Moliere

There's no meaningful difference, assuming a sincere speaker, unless one is unsure.

Yes, an ought cannot be derived form any is... — Janus

That's the common understanding and/or agreement. My approach challenges this long held notion.

Indeed. I recognize that problem. The definition is one that I grant due to current convention. Morality(the rules) is not always good.