But if being a capital did consist in "nothing other than people calling it the capital or saying it is," it could still be an empirical fact that Paris is the capital of France. Similarly, 'The mayor of Paris is called Anne' can be empirically confirmed.

I don't really understand the question to be honest. You're saying that because Paris is the capital of France merely by decree, it is somehow less an empirical fact than that the sun is currently not shining on Paris?

Well I think others here are equally astonished at your position.

So as you say, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is the capital of France, but what is given here is a matter of fact that could have been otherwise.

the statement 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot possibly be false right now if nothing has changed regarding the designated status of Paris . — John

In other words, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is the capital of France.

He's got another definition of analytic: a truth whose negation is a contradiction. Note that the question of how to define 'analytic' has been addressed by many philosophers. It is not just assumed to be obvious--although I think it does point at an intuitive distinction.

EDIT: But yes, fair point: I misread you. I agree that France as it now is, having Paris as its capital, cannot not have Paris as its capital. But as has been said already, that's not what is at issue here. — jamalrob

I don't really understand the question, and I'm not sure I want to get into it right now anyway, as TG has hit the nail already. Plus I'm on a crappy iPad keyboard.

EDIT: But yes, fair point: I misread you. I agree that France as it now is, having Paris as its capital, cannot not have Paris as its capital. But as has been said already, that's not what is at issue here.

Are you seriously suggesting that France could have a capital other than Paris? — John

:D

Sorry John, but this made me laugh heartily. France could have had another capital, just as the US could have had a different president. TG is right. If that's not empirical, then nothing is.

Cool, so we end up with this:

She intends to live in harmony with others.
To live in harmony with others you have to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.
Therefore she ought to treat others as she would wish to be treated herself.

Some will question whether it's characteristic of a human being to want to live in harmony with others, so that the argument is seen to come down to her own personal desire. And this is probably just a different way of putting the objection that the derivation concerns merely instrumental oughts and not moral obligations. This is the sticking point.

All right. Ought from is, second attempt:

She intends to be a firefighter.
To be a fighter you have to get training at firefighters' school.
Therefore she ought to get training at firefighters' school.

Clue: it has been addressed by someone in the discussion already.

The problem here is that the intent of ethics is not to maintain the status quo. It is not to maintain the human form. Ethics is all about improvement, that's why it is concerned with what ought to be, rather than what is. Therefore any such naturalist ethics, which derives what one ought to do, from a principle of what the human form is, misses the mark, and should be rejected because it has no provisions for improvement of the human species. And when we move to produce the premise of what the human form ought to be, there is an issue of objectivity. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree this looks like a problem, but as we're in the realm of virtue ethics here, we probably shouldn't ignore the basic distinctions in Aristotle between potential and actual, and between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-should-be. In a nutshell, the telos. What the human happens to be and what the human can become can conceivably be contained in the concept of the human form of life. That is, the what is can be either statically and mechanistically conceived, or conceived more holistically--in that oughts are not cast out of the realm of is's--and thus teleologically.

Of course, that probably just shifts the problem by a step, because the question may come back: what about a distinction between human-telos-as-it-is and human-telos-as-it-should-or-could-be? My feeling is that insofar as human is a legitimate category, and insofar as humanism is the right attitude, and insofar as some sort of humanist naturalism accommodates the endless creativity of history, you can draw a line somewhere without thereby foreclosing on future change.

Having said that, it takes some work to get all this from virtue ethics. There's no doubt that Aristotle's normative ethics are concerned with maintaining the status quo in important ways. And I'm not sure how contemporary ethical naturalism like Thompson's fares against these objections.

It's in After Virtue. There are reasonable summaries of the argument here on Wikipedia and here on the IEP.

I'm a bit wary of psychological explanations especially when they're used to explain away positions that I don't agree with (they often appear more convincing then they should be). — shmik

I think that's wise, not only with psychological explanations but also with historical explanations (whether the latter reduce to the former, as you imply, I won't attempt to address). For example, we could explain Descartes' Meditations as a response to the insecure standing of natural science in his lifetime, and can further say that science turned out not to need absolutely certain foundations anyway, so it doesn't really matter. But hyperbolic doubt and the cogito still remain standing as important philosophical challenges and insights. I think we can synthesize these attitudes and say that the best philosophers are those who best bring out the problems particular to their milieus.

But the question of historicism, similar to the question of psychologism, is one I'm still thinking about.

I said a bit more about all this recently in this post in the "moral facts" discussion.

Well, the significant shift I was referring to began in the Enlightenment and came to full fruition in the early twentieth century, so I don't think there's a generational difference that maps to the relevant cultural shift. I think it's that people, philosophers included, are still unwilling to allow ethics to be entirely contingent and relative (if they think about it), at the same time as they find it difficult to justify this. MacIntyre's historical analysis is an attempt to untangle this mess. One thing to notice is that although you can't get an ought from an is, this is just because we're using the post 17th century understanding of "ought", which is of an imperative detached from real desires and goals. You can get what is now called an 'instrumental ought' from an is--but not a 'moral obligation'.

In my experience, when people say "I am lying" they mean something more like "What I just said was a lie". I don't think anyone says that language can be reduced to logic, but we still have to deal with the paradoxes that come up when we take a part of language and formalize it.

It's actually an example that MacIntyre uses in After Virtue to make the point about function (he uses a sea captain). I'll have to read that bit again to see what he gets from it, but I seem to remember it was kind of in passing.

8-)

Saying that I would also say that moral realism could still be argued for using your approach. But I think that by pursuing the ought/is distinction you'd also be handicapping your account. Working from memory here I thought that was exactly what was so strong about After Virtue; he was calling into question the whole distinction by means of going back to Aristotle and pointing out that our concepts don't need to have this distinction, that it is, after all, a distinction (as opposed to a reality).

One could almost say that we understand "fact" in relation to our understanding of "value" -- that the latter defines the former, and the former the latter. So to speak of moral facts is to smash these together, but by using the language of the very distinction which is being put into question. — Moliere

Yes. I was just playing with the is-ought thing to see what happened.

And your example seems to have force because we do not define firefighters functionally. I have fought a fire, but I have never been a firefighter, because that is a matter of uniform, training, qualification, etc. And because one can wear the uniform and ride on the fire-engine and not do what one ought to do, the conclusion has moral force and does not follow from the premise. — unenlightened

Yeah, I guess it only works insofar as the ought is understood non-morally.

Rather than a telos which governs what a firefighter is meant to do, there is an ethic which the world and the firefighter expresses. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Empty rhetoric. The firefighter may be said to express her telos.

Ought from is:

She is a firefighter.
Therefore she ought to do whatever a firefighter ought to do.

This works because a firefighter is defined functionally. There is a function characteristic of a firefighter, and this is what it is to be a firefighter (telos and nature are one).

Or does it work? Discuss...

Aristotle treats moral value as ideal — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, he doesn't.

It is something "we are meant to be" separate to our actions in the world — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, it isn't.

@TheWillowOfDarkness It is a mistake to understand that for the sake of which as something like a Kantian imperative we are somehow bound to follow. I get it that you don't like this as a description of human nature, or that you simply don't accept the notion of a human nature at all. There's no need to keep saying it.

The human telos, and the purposes and intentions of human action deriving from it, have nothing to do with a "grand outside rule".

So far, no. I'm asking again for the "ignore list" function the next time I send a list of feature requests to the developers.

I don't know if I have the energy or ability to mount a critique of your posts, because I can't see how to do so without the hard job of correcting what appears to me to be your mis-characterization of virtue ethics and teleology, and without the even harder job of arguing fully for virtue ethics (or some kind of virtue ethics). On the one hand I agree that "there is no separation between the world and its moral significance", but on the other hand I disagree that virtue ethics is or must be contrary to this. Generally you seem to view telos as akin to Kantian duty or an appeal to God standing over us and outside us. This is not how I understand it at all. Maybe you're equating virtue ethics with its Thomist version?

Looks backwards to me Willow.

So, is the concept of a moral fact any more odd than the concept of any fact? For me, @Wayfarer and @Moliere are looking at this the right way:

Awareness of the distinction between objective and subjective is very much bound up with the rise of modernism — Wayfarer

Whether it be odd or not would just depend on our expectations. So if we live in a universe which has moral facts, but believe that there are no moral facts, then it would be odd to find a moral fact. — Moliere

The idea of moral facts does seem a bit odd, but rather than supporting the case for a moral subjectivism or emotivism, it might rather be evidence that the idea of a fact in general already carries with it an implicit exclusion of morality and the human attitudes and language relevant to it.

We can understand this historically and sociologically, and the imperative to take this approach is supplied by the history of philosophy. In Aristotle, meta-ethics and normative ethics, fact and value, are integrated; but in the twentieth century meta-ethics and normative ethics became separated, and fact and value got divorced some time earlier. So I don't see how one can address the question of moral facts without paying attention to how the question came up in the first place, and like MacIntyre, I think this is a properly philosophical endeavour (it's not so much that philosophy is necessarily secondary to and derivative of history and society, but that philosophy is too rarely historical and sociological).

For the middle ages mechanisms were efficient causes in a world to be comprehended ultimately in terms of final causes. Every species has a natural end, and to explain the movements and changes in an individual is to explain how that individual moves toward the end appropriate to members of that particular species. The ends to which men as members of such a species move are conceived by them as goods, and their movement towards or away from various goods are to be explained with reference to the virtues and vices which they have learned or failed to learn and the forms of practical reasoning which they employ. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics (together of course with the De Anima) are as much treatises concerned with how human action is to be explained and understood as with what acts are to be done. Indeed within the Aristotelian framework the one task cannot be discharged without discharging the other. The modern contrast between the sphere of morality on the one hand and the sphere of the human sciences on the other is quite alien to Aristotelianism because, as we have already seen, the modern fact-value distinction is also alien to it. — MacIntyre, After Virtue

Aristotle had a teleological view of human beings (and of the other things in nature). For him, it is essential to what a human being is (so we seem to be talking about facts) that it has certain characteristic goals and thus values.

But the Enlightenment rejected teleology to produce a mechanistic understanding of nature and increasingly of human beings as well. This annexed the realm of facts. To take the mechanistic stance on human behaviour is to remove any talk of reasons and purposes, which means that insofar as there are facts about human beings, they cannot involve reasons and purposes, thus they cannot be about morality as traditionally understood. Which leaves the idea of moral facts looking rather...odd.

Thus the alienation of morality from what it is to be human, of values from facts, makes it almost inevitable that morality will then be seen as either eternal, like mathematics, or else illusory or subjective.

The radical upshot is that most modern moral philosophers, paying no attention to this history, don't know what they're talking about. And this is not just about the history of philosophy; it is about the changing meaning of morality in changing historical and social circumstances.

So my answer is: yes and no. On the one hand, moral facts do seem a bit odd to us moderns, but given a different way of living, they need not.

To expand on @The Great Whatever's concise answer...

I have trouble distinguishing between analytic and a priori for example. Do they just have the same meaning with 2 different ways of saying it or is there some other distinction? — ladyphoenix86

Good question. Some philosophers have believed analytic and a priori to be coextensive, and the same goes for synthetic and a posteriori. From this empiricist point of view, whatever is analytic is a priori and whatever is synthetic is a posteriori, and vice versa.

But they have different meanings. Analytic-synthetic is semantic, and a priori-a posteriori is epistemological.

Analytic-synthetic is about what makes a proposition true. Analytic propositions are true by virtue of what their words mean, and synthetic propositions are not true merely by virtue of what their words mean. One of Kant's ways of thinking about the difference is that analytic truths don't tell us very much, i.e., they are explicative, whereas synthetic truths can tell us something new, i.e., they are ampliative.

A priori-a posteriori is about how we know things or how we justify our knowledge. A priori knowledge is known independently of experience. A posteriori, or empirical, knowledge is known from experience. The thing to note about a posteriori knowledge is that because it is confirmed or disconfirmed by experience, it tells us what happens to be the case, and not what must be the case, i.e., this kind of knowledge is about what is contingent. In contrast, a priori knowledge is neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by experience, and so concerns what must be the case, i.e., this kind of knowledge is about what is necessary.

As you've noticed, some philosophers think there is synthetic a priori knowledge.

why is 'synthetic a priori' different to 'analytic a posteriori'? — ladyphoenix86

To know a synthetic proposition a priori is to know something that is not true merely due to the definitions of the terms involved, and to know it independently of experience too. This is important because, if such knowledge is possible, then we can have substantial, ampliative knowledge (from the synthetic component) that does not depend on experience, i.e., that we attain using our own reason unaided by experiential confirmation.

Analytic a posteriori knowledge, on the other hand, seems impossible. It doesn't make much sense to say a sentence that's true by virtue of the meaning of the constituent words can be known from experience. If you understand it then you know it's true already, without any perception or investigation of the world.

The main thing I haven't really addressed here is what "independently of experience" precisely means, because it can be interpreted strictly or loosely.

Eek. My first instinct is to say that there is no barrier in principle to the creation of artificial persons, or agentive rational beings, or what have you (such vagueness precludes me from coming up with a solution, I feel). Do you think there is such a barrier? Putting that another way: do you think it's possible in principle for something artificial to possess whatever you think is special about human beings, whatever it is that you think distinguishes a person from an animal (or machine)? Putting this yet another way: do you think it's possible in principle for something artificial to authentically take part in human community in the way that humans themselves do, without mere mimicry or clever deception?

Would help to know if there were a real 'I' before trying to replicate it artificially. — Wayfarer

Hey, nice dodge. ;)

See, I don't think that any element, nor the totality, of those systems, has the reflexive first-person knowledge of being, or experience of being, that humans have, or are; it is not an 'I'. So, sure, you could feasibly create an incredibly clever system, that could answer questions and engage in dialogue, but it would still not be a being. — Wayfarer

I guess the question is, could there possibly be artificial "I"s? Computational A.I. might not get us more than clever devices, but why in principle could we not create artificial minds, maybe some other way?

(I'm just being provocative; I don't have any clear position on it myself.)

Are you joking? I already said:

The computational theory of mind is one philosophical view among many, and it's been heavily criticized. If it's your position then cool, but don't pretend it's not a philosophical issue. — jamalrob

Yeah, recently I've been feeling like reading Schop again, and I never thought I'd say that. I never did read much of volume 2.

That was an important book in my philosophical education, the one that suddenly made transcendental idealism click. It didn't detract too much from it that his characterization of the will is probably off the mark, as discussed here on the old PF.

Though they're old-fashioned in media terms, I thought the Magee videos were wonderful. Not black and white, not all men, and not all wearing ties. Marcuse didn't wear a tie, for instance. Figures.

The question is whether the mind is an algorithm, meaning the human mind, which m-theory is suggesting might be one of the philosophical implications.

It's certainly an algorithm (what else could it be?) — tom

The computational theory of mind is one philosophical view among many, and it's been heavily criticized. If it's your position then cool, but don't pretend it's not a philosophical issue.

Well thanks everyone that had the foresight to start a new place for the community to migrate to then. — m-theory

On behalf of the original TPF crew: you're welcome. @Hanover was our guiding light, of course. Now there's a true visionary.

(Y)

Note that we use a hosted service called PlushForums, which is based on some kind of fork of Vanilla Forums, so I'm not actually a developer of the software. However, the developers do respond to feature requests.

But you only see it if you go to "Mentions" in your profile menu, don't you? Or is it that you're not clicking on the notification and it's still telling you in the title bar that you've got mentions?

You mean clear the items in your list of mentions? Not that I know of. Why would you want to do that?