I mean, if someone were to point to some moral fact, say in a book of all moral propositions, that said something you disagreed with would you really change your mind? Aren't we committed to our ethics more than we are convinced of them through the evidence? — Moliere

I've said as much a long time ago. If it could be proved that moral realism is correct and that the proposition "it is wrong to murder children" is false or even that the proposition "one ought murder children" is true then I still wouldn't murder children. My actions are motivated in part by my wants/feelings and in part by what's pragmatic; they're not motivated by some reasoned understanding that there are something like moral facts.

the term (and moral predication) "is wrong" is a universal qualitative property which is left ambiguously ungrounded. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

The final statement would be ""Hating people based on their race, according to Moliere and Cartesian trigger-puppets, is wrong."

The use of referents, which are the abstract or concrete entities represented in moral statements, to warrant an obtaining states of affairs on the grounds of individually relativized subjective psychological states, as the pragmatic truth-makers which have been implicitly embedded within our former semantic theories, would enable a fully-functional, internally consistent and subjectively self-contained metaethical theory. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Carrying on from my previous comments about not understanding the meaning of moral claims, what still needs to be explained for this to be a fully-functional metaethical theory is an account of this "is wrong" universal qualitative property. What does it mean to have (or not have) this property? How does the proposition "Hating people based on their race, according to Moliere and Cartesian trigger-puppets, is wrong" differ from the proposition "Hating people based on their race, according to Moliere and Cartesian trigger-puppets, is X"?

Hopefully, given the content of my previous reply, you can make an accurate presumption with regards to my answer. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

Quite the opposite! :D I am lost at times, I'm afraid, but I'm trying to follow along.

I will state what I think I can understand from your post.

It seems to me you're saying whether your believe in moral facts depends upon certain variables whose values change or vary, and depending upon the value of those variables your belief with respect to moral facts also changes. And, if I read you correctly, you're stuck between deciding whether the entities to which moral statements refer are either psychological or in some sense a property that is, at least in some sense, independent of psychological entities.

I want to note that I could not tell you what a fully-functional, internally consistent and subjectively self-contained metaethical theory is, or why it is a desirable end such that it would convince me to use referents as pragmatic truth-makers in the particular manner you're espousing. This is not to say that I am against it, even, but that I am noting where I am not grasping. Honestly I get the sense that I am out of my depth. But if you're still getting something out of replying, then I'll respond in kind.

This is a guess on my part but I'm wondering if your focus on reference is because of me mentioning moral error theory? -- that moral error theory would be incorrect as long as you could identify a way of parsing moral sentences into ones which have a definite reference which are, thereby, truth-evaluable due to their being entities we can check.

Am I right about that?


............................


I take a fact to be a true statement.

A statement is any sentence within our language which follows the form of a proposition. It is this form which makes a statement truth-apt.

Moral statements, then, are sentences that follow the form of a proposition that are also in some way meaningfully related to morals.

By "the form" I only mean the subject-predicate form, where some subject has a predicate attached.

The main predicate that comes to mind here for me is ". . . is wrong" or ". . .is right" -- with any successfully referring name ". . . is wrong" forms a sentence that is both moral and truth-apt.

Keeping things general you may pick any event you feel is not controversial to evaluate with the ". . . is wrong" or ". . . is right" predicate. Whether the analysis is correct is not here interesting.

To me what's interesting is that there's simply an obvious difference between --

Richard Nixon was wrong when he lied
Richard Nixon was right when he lied.
Richard Nixon lied.

And whether the first or the second is true differs from whether the third is true.

Meaning, sure, we can start to parse all this ethical-talk into a logic of truth. But the difference between sentence 3 and sentence 1 or 2 remains, and should even be apparent, regardless of using the same predicate ". . . is true".

For many circumstances it can even be rational for a person to hold either 1 or 2, in spite of them being contradictories, insofar as they at least believe 3.



I guess I'd gauge to see what you feel about there being a difference between these sentences, and whether or not that difference is apparent -- because that's sort of the whole crux right there. If you don't think there's a worthwhile difference then that's where'd I'd be stuck.

I've said as much a long time ago. If it could be proved that moral realism is correct and that the proposition "it is wrong to murder children" is false or even that the proposition "one ought murder children" is true then I still wouldn't murder children. My actions are motivated in part by my wants/feelings and in part by what's pragmatic; they're not motivated by some reasoned understanding that there are something like moral facts. — Michael

I suppose it just depends on the person. The Holy Book is still at least claimed by people as a moral guide, which is certainly more ambiguous than the book of moral propositions, but pretty close in comparison I think. Abraham was already mentioned in this thread, but he was good because he bowed before God's will in faith. I asked the question rhetorically, but it's not too far from what people do sometimes.

Further, I'd say there's a difference between what your actions are motivated by and what is the correct thing to do. Like, one is a psychological fact about you, and the other is just what people should do or something -- and in general I don't think anyone here is espousing some kind of bare-bones Pure Rationalist Being or something. But it's still meaningful to ask if your actions should be so motivated.

After all, there are people motivated by all kinds of things. But that doesn't mean that just because Richard Nixon wanted to lie that Richard Nixon should have lied, even if it were a pragmatic thing.


So moral facts could, for all the lack of motivation to think of morality in these terms, still exist. This is only to say that while you wouldn't change, your refusal to change wouldn't demonstrate that there are no moral facts or that there is such a fact.

he realized that the only thing worse than his depression was the psychiatric treatment he was receiving for it — baker

Sorry to hear that.

From inability to let well alone, from too much zeal for the new and contempt for what is old, from putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art and cleverness before common sense, from treating patients as cases and from making the cure of the disease more grievous than the endurance of the same, good Lord deliver us. — Sir Robert Hutchison (1871 - 1960)