Historically/genealogically as previously suggested in the judge example. — Cavacava
I don't think you made a mistake. Although wikipedia lists 'normative moral relativism' as one of three categories of moral relativism, I have never encountered a normal moral relativist either in person or on the internet. I suspect that it is an empty category whose only use is as a straw man by religious apologists who want to argue that being a moral relativist means that one would have no complaint against, and take no action against, a genocidal dictator.I did not realize there was such a thing as normative moral relativism, forgive my mistake. — m-theory
Sibling 1 is a pacifist. Sibling 4 is in favor of killing people just because they're on your property without permission.
In your view their different stances on this issue are suggested by the herd.
How are their different views determined however? Why is sibling 1 a pacifist while sibling 4 is in favor of killing someone just because they're on your property without permission? You're saying that those differences between siblings in the example I explained are determined "historically/genealogically as previously suggested in the judge example"? What different history/genealogy are we talking about?
Again, descriptively, that is obviously how things work now and how they've always worked, regardless of anyone's ontology of ethics. — Terrapin Station
It seems you must have some way of judging between preferences,
— anonymous66
Of course, and we do. We think about them and state what we think/how we feel. — Terrapin Station
I'm trying to understand moral relativism.. I'm trying to understand what it would be like for me to be a moral relativist (and trying to determine if any moral relativists actually exist).
— anonymous66
Have you ever had a moral disagreement?
Say for example a friend of yours did something that you believed was morally questionable.
You understand why your friend thought what he did was right but...
If it had been you then you would have done it differently.
That is what it is like to be a moral relativist.
What it aims at is to describe why people or cultures believe that their values are moral. — m-theory
Though, of course, I like many think the significance accorded to Nietzche's views to be spurious, his ideology having served in turn for example to provide a pseudo-authenticity for Neo-Nazi ideology as currently resurected by the extreme right - claiming as it does to constitute an ultimately 'invarient objective good' and using the tired old line to justify ignoring 'conventional' morality, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs"! — Robert Lockhart
Do you actually make judgments? Or do you think about them and talk about how you feel? I thought THE difference between moral relativists and moral objectivist, is the claim by moral relativists that there is nothing wrong in and of itself... that all talk of morality is only talk about preferences. While moral objectivists believe that there is a way to judge between right and wrong. That some actions are wrong... (i.e. there is something wrong with people who kill for fun, vs. killing for fun is an acceptable preference). The moral objectivist believes that some people are mistaken about morality, while the moral relativist believes that it's only a matter of preference... a moral relativist couldn't be wrong about a preference. — anonymous66
So, in your view, there is no objective standard for right and wrong, it's merely a fact that the strongest impose their morality on the weaker? — anonymous66
And you personally wouldn't impose any preference of your own on anyone else, because you believe that all preferences are equally valid? — anonymous66
This is what looks like a contradiction to me. I see people telling me that they are moral relativists, that that morality is only a matter of preference, but also they admit that they care very much about morality, and that they want to impose their preferences on others. — anonymous66
So, not descriptive... — anonymous66
how would you explain this: we have a family with four siblings, who were all raised by the same parents, went to the same schools, the same churches, there was some overlap of friends, they mostly saw the same movies, none of them read many books, etc., and the issue of how it's ethically acceptable to deal with the perpetrators of a home invasion comes up, and one is a pacifist who says that under no circumstances is it okay to react with violence, and another says that it's okay to react only with sufficient force to subdue the perpetrators until the authorities can apprehend them (after you've called 911, of course), and the third says that it's okay to incapacitate them or even kill them so long as they're threatening you in any manner, and the fourth says that it's okay to shoot and kill them even prior to them even entering your home--as long as they're on your property you can shoot and kill them, just you should them drag them into your house and make them appear armed.
So, why do you judge the preferences of not allowing rape and murder to be better than allowing rape and murder? — anonymous66
I think that the circumstance as you have described it, does not allow for much in the way of rational decision, rather I think that each one of the siblings reactions are based on their particular history. So any explanation of their action, which might be insightful, would have to delve into the particular history for each. — Cavacava
That question suggests that despite being an apparently competent speaker of English, you have no conception of what preferences are. I have preferences about murder and rape, and preferences about whether we should allow people to murder and rape. For some reason, you keep reading relativism/subjectivism as if it suggests that we'd have no such preferences. — Terrapin Station
Emotivism:
Moral judgments are not truth-apt, but rather, are expressions of sentiments
of approval or disapproval: e.g., saying “Murder is wrong” amounts to saying “Boo to
murder!”: “..if I say to someone ‘You acted wrongly in stealing that money’, I am not stating
anything more than if I had simply said, ‘You stole that money.’ In adding that this action is wrong, I am not making any further statement about it, I am simply evincing my moral disapproval about it. It is as if I had said, ‘You stole that money,’ in a peculiar tone of horror, or written with the addition of some special exclamation marks. The tone, or the exclamation marks, adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence. It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker.
“If now I generalise my previous statement and say, ‘Stealing money is
wrong,’ I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning – that is, expresses no
proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written ‘Stealing money!!’ – where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show, by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is being expressed.” (Ayer, “The Emotive Theory of Ethics,” p. 124)
But emotivism also raises certain worries
:
•Ayer claims that when we make moral judgments, what we’re doing is expressing
our emotional reactions to the thing we’re judging. But it seems possible to judge something is morally wrong without having any emotional reaction to it, or even feeling positive about it. Examples: the “amoralist” – a person who knows what’s right and wrong but doesn’t care – seems imaginable; we’re sometimes amused by other people’s misfortunes even though we know they’re bad (Kasey); children learn to recognize things as right and wrong before the learn the appropriate emotional responses to them (Will).
•Ayer has trouble accounting for the apparent prevalence of moral disagreement and dispute – if moral judgments are in fact just expressions of emotion, they can’t contradict each other, and we can’t reason about them, so why argue? Ayer argues that we stop engaging in such disputes once all matters of empirical fact have been settled. Does that seem right? And in any case,it still seems to us, even if we can’t settle our disputes about moral judgments, that we are contradicting each other when, for example, we argue about the morality of abortion.But emotivism has difficulty accounting for that seeming contradiction.
•Finally, our practice of making moral judgments treats such judgments as propositional in a number of ways – we use them in logical arguments and draw inferences from them, we “embed” them in other kinds of statements and use them in un-asserted context. It’s not clear whether the emotivist account of the nature of such judgments can explain why we can do this.
The problem I have is that you say you are an emotivist, but you also tell me you can make judgments about morality. It seems to me that emotivists can only tell me what they prefer (or as Ayer puts it, an emotivist would tell me about his emotional reaction). It seems to me that you do acknowledge that people do have disagreements, but according to emotivism, all disagreements are merely a difference of preference (or rather a difference of emotional reaction) I'm trying to determine what an emotivist would do with those differences. — anonymous66
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