I understand relativism as the referral of all judgments back to a set of criteria, the relativity arising in that your set of criteria differs from my set. But is that the limit?

Demonstrate why it's not.

Apparently the relativist stops there and allows as how it's a matter of preference, opinion, and therefore we on one side have no grounds beyond our personal views to condemn the other side.

Please demonstrate anytime in history where any one group of people have made a collective decision that appeals to any type of provable objective code.

If you can't, then how can you manage to type out paragraph after paragraph pertaining to, effectively, nothing? It's very straightforward. Any extended dialogue develops in the nuances of believing in an objective reality. If you can't first perceive and demonstrate that objective reality then stop waffling.

First of all, I've explained why I think that Kant's categorical imperative is a joke directly in reply to you at least a couple of times now. Your forgetfulness or dishonesty in this regard is not excused. I don't know why some people here seem to think that this sort of denial is acceptable as a response. It isn't. Rank Amateur is by far the worst for doing this, as he does it with such frequency that it beggars belief.

Secondly, I read as far as your straw man that I cannot find anything at all wrong with the actions of the infamous mass murdering humans (I strongly believe that it is counterproductive to dehumanise them by calling them monsters. That they were human is extremely important to explicitly acknowledge) of the 20th century, and I decided not to read any further as result.

Hear, hear! Less waffle, more demonstration.

Dude, your analysis is praiseworthy and spot on. But is it really worth your time and effort? We're at 47 pages. When is enough enough?

I like your “notion of truth”, but doesn’t analytic philosophy demand more than a notion?

I’ll go first: truth is the non-contradiction of a conception with its object. — Mww

The best definition of truth that one hundred years of analytical philosophy was able to produce would seem to be Tarski's deflationary T-sentence: “'Snow is white' is true iff snow is white”.

It reminds me of Aristotle's: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” Apparently not much progress with a definition! But we do have a notion of truth which is in accordance with those two formulations, I would say.

And I think your formulation exemplifies the same basic logic of correspondence.

Expressed in the terms of your formulation, for me the object of moral thinking is harmonious community. So, to say that murder is good is a contradiction with its object, because, as Kant pointed out, murder cannot be a general moral good if the object of any moral good is social harmony. "Murder is good" thus cannot be true.

The objection that some have raised that murder might be good for say a serial killer is inapt, because the question is whether murder can be a general good, and not merely whether it could be a good for a few psychopaths.

Ah, new terms to add to the catalogue of evidence in support of my charge against Tim: "Trumpian", "disgusting", "sickening", and "toxic". They are accompanied by "mere", "destructive", "childish", and others. Related is the guilt by association fallacy with Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others, although that's actually a 3-in-1, as it's also a straw man and an implied ad hominem: a straw man, because unlike them, we judge their actions to be wrong, yet Tim deliberately says otherwise; and an ad hominem because the suggestion is that you shouldn't even consider what a moral relativist says, because he is like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and others. The general category for these sort of fallacies is an appeal to emotion.

But you appear to either refuse to, or cannot, generalize that view even so far as to say that their actions, among the most horrendous in recorded history, are simply wrong simpliciter. — tim wood

Because I don't want to claim that the world is some way that it isn't ontologically. The idea of something being morally wrong simpliciter is false in terms of what the world is like ontologically. I see our job as philosophers as being to analyze, observe, report what the world is factually like. It's the same thing that scientists should be doing. We're just using a different methodology.

If they're not wrong, then nothing is wrong. — tim wood

They're wrong subjectively, when we make the subjective judgment in question. They're not wrong objectively.

I do not mean to disqualify your view that it's wrong. But your expressed view is a misstatement. — tim wood

Nope. I'm reporting what the world is factually like.

What, then, is the natural, or default, state? Nothing is wrong? Nothing is right? — tim wood

Things are morally wrong or right from subjective perspectives. Subjectivity is the correct realm for moral judgments. We need to talk about them in the context of the correct domain. Not a domain that makes no sense for them, because it's not what the world is like.

I understand relativism as the referral of all judgments back to a set of criteria, the relativity arising in that your set of criteria differs from my set. — tim wood

I'm not saying anything like this. I'm saying that moral judgments are something that individuals do, and that's all they are--something that individuals do. That's the correct domain for them. Every individual could do some moral judgment identically (ignoring nominalism for a moment). We could all have the same criteria. Nonetheless, it's still just something that we do as individuals. We can't get correct or incorrect a "non-personal moral judgment" because there is no such thing.

Apparently the relativist stops there and allows as how it's a matter of preference, opinion, and therefore we on one side have no grounds beyond our personal views to condemn the other side. — tim wood

Again, and again, and again, and again . . . we've tried to correct this misunderstanding of yours. NO ONE IS SAYING WHAT YOU JUST SAID ABOVE. No one. The correct domain for moral judgments is what we think as individuals. What we think as individuals in this case, for most of us, happens to be that we condemn people who murder. We don't say this because the universe outside of people says that there's a problem with murder. We, as individual people operating in the world, thinking about it, etc. feel that there's a problem with murder. Hence we condemn it.

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What's the tl;dr version?

Sometimes it seems like we should rename this place the logorrhea forum.

Far too much waffle. I'm not willing to put in the time and effort required to analyse all of that.

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I vote that analyses such as these be archived for the purpose of being a valuable lesson in how not to argue against moral relativism, or even, really, how not to argue in general.

OK, I guess. I’m not happy with tautological truths myself, but ehhhh.....I’ll never be famous.

Agreed on harmonious community, if one thinks of morality as an act, or a set of actions.

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Poisoning the well. You're just pissed off because I'm like a gadfly with attitude. I am "toxic" like Socrates was "toxic" to the Athenians. But Socrates wasn't as wry or caustic as me. So I guess I'm "doubly toxic".

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I'm far too principled to cave in to such petty judgements, which is what you really want from me. But I do at least consider them, because I'm philosophical like that.

I gotta say, being an unabashed transcendentalist, if ANYBODY had said he’d said anything about Kant in general and the CI in particular, I would have known about it. I would have researched the crap out of it just to see where it was right or wrong. Like you, I went back through the entire thread, and found not a gawddamn thing about anybody telling you anything about the CI, joke or otherwise.

So I’m with you, for whatever that’s worth. I wouldn’t have gone through the same trouble as you, just to find out the same thing and come to the same conclusion. There’s dishonesty in the building, dishonorable and disrespectful, herein never to be taken seriously.

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He who hasn't the courtesy to speak to me directly is both blind and judgemental. He obviously didn't look hard enough, as the following proves:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/265816

It wasn't hard to find at all. I used the advanced search function and found it with ease in a matter of minutes. Yes, I know, he now has egg all over his face, and I can't think of anyone more deserving.

He owes me an apology, but this has gone so far that I think that I would throw it right back in his face, even if he did offer me an apology.

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Well yes, that's actually the point, at least in part: I find the categorical imperative to be a joke, and I have my reasons. It is a joke to me, but in a wider sense also. (Believe it or not, I am quite aware that not everything is all about me). Of course, I acknowledge that others judge it to be of far greater significance. It is of greater significance to them. What I said is not merely about mere, foolish, toxic, destructive, me. Such criticisms about Kant's categorical imperative, which are also necessarily about what I think, whether that's implicit or explicit, happen to resonate with others also. Kant is only human after all, he is not God. God is dead, and Kant is human, all too human. His writings are largely a symptom of the moral prejudice of a philosopher, and that is largely true of many of those philosophers who came before him.

And yes, you don't see reason in meta-ethical moral relativism. You don't see reason in it largely because you still don't even understand it, 47 pages later, in spite of reasonable efforts. And you don't even understand that you don't even understand it. You persist in attacking your own misunderstanding, and you seemingly have no qualms in resorting to unreasonable and underhanded tactics in pursuit your narrow-minded goal to "defeat" meta-ethical moral relativism, or amoralism, or moral nihilism, or chaos, or doom, or destruction, or Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Trump, disgusting, evil, toxic monster! (They're all one and the same to you, right?).

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After 47 pages, I think I've shown that I have the patience of a saint, but even saints have their limits. Members like Isaac and Terrapin Station clearly know what they're talking about and are more than capable of setting you straight, but you should try much harder if you genuinely want to gain an understanding of moral relativism. As for me, I've grown sick and tired, as it has been dealt with ad nauseam.

And as for Kant and his categorical imperative, you haven't said anything at all which would give me reason to withdraw or rethink my criticism. Merely saying that I don't understand him and suchlike is not a valid response, and don't even think about giving me a "You too!" style response, because I have put great effort into explaining moral relativism to the likes of you and Rank Amateur, even though it has been a thankless task, yet you've shown very little improvement, if any. We're still having to correct the same basic misunderstandings 47 pages later.

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First of all, although I am far from an expert, I do have some background knowledge here, as a matter of fact. I know that yourself and others might want to make out like I'm a know-nothing on Kant, but that simply isn't true.

Secondly, I don't think that quoting from the SEP, or worse, directly from Kant, is the best way to get his point across. I think, generally, the best way to get a point across is to be clear and to simplify and avoid jargon where possible.

What I find annoying about Kant, and this is especially true of Kant, is the amount of jargon he coined, which needs to be translated in order to be understood. I already knew about "hypothetical imperatives". I wasn't too clear on "practical reason". One online source states that he defined it as the capacity of rational agents to act according to principles (i.e. the conception of laws). And this stuff about "rational agency" and "autonomous will" and the like is similarly obscure unless you are already fluent in Kantanese, which I'm not. I'm not fluent in Hegelese or Heideggerese either, although Kant isn't half as bad as those two. And it annoys me that that's even a problem in the first place, because I doubt the supposed necessity of it.

But anyway, yes, of course I disagree with Kant's categorical imperative. That much is surely obvious. Though, evidently, I haven't just dismissed it as a joke, in spite of doing so initially, and justifiably in response to your bare assertion which it was replying to, in accordance with Hitchen's razor. I've submitted criticism, and I stand by that criticism.

Bringing up hypothetical imperatives seems to miss the point of my criticism. Kant might well have had them in his sights, but so what? They make way more sense, and are way more relatable than his categorical imperative. I am criticising his categorical imperative. I am asserting that he largely failed, because the categorical imperative is largely alien and useless and ineffectual. I know enough about logic to recognise a logical conditional when I see one, and that is how it is commonly argued. I'm just skipping ahead to that key bit. One can ask, "Why should I act only according to that maxim whereby I can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law?". And that's when the conditional kicks in. "Well, if you were to...". But I don't. And my morality is just fine, thanks. I know that intuitively. The categorical imperative is redundant and artificial. I am not subservient to any supposed universal moral laws. That is not my measure of right and wrong. My own conscience is sufficient for the job. How can that objection be overcome? I don't think that it can. That's what I meant when I said that it has no force over myself and others. It cannot override my moral foundation in moral feelings. It is just a curious little thought experiment, but it isn't at all practical or realistic. What's practical and realistic is simply appealing to your conscience without any need for Kant's abstract and rationalist way of thinking.

You’re right, it’s not impossible, if something new is available. — Mww

New thought/belief.

New thought/belief about the societal/familial rules of acceptable/unacceptable behaviour.

All new moral thought/belief that knowingly and deliberately goes against the societal grain begins by questioning the truth, veracity, and/or dependability of the morality that one already has.

The ability to do that takes something else. Something aside from the rules we first learn to live by.

In Sapientia's candidate, we could very well have all this and more. So, yeah...

It is possible for one to learn to how to disagree with the morality adopted within his/her/their original worldview.

It takes something else. It takes thinking about one's own thought/belief(worldview) in terms of the re-evaluation of behaviour and/or the historic 'moral concepts' such as good/evil, good/bad, praiseworthy/blameworthy, etc.

Thinking in such terms requires being able to use such terms in some acceptable form or other.