Without intellectus, reason seems to become mere contentless rule following, with no intelligible content. There are perhaps two distinct issues here. The first is the absence of intelligible content re discursive knowledge if it is all ratio (rule following) no understanding. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, but I think you were on the right track when you pointed out to Janus that he is taking the LNC as read. The same thing happens whenever one tries to exclude intellectus/understanding. There is no rule following without understanding; there is no modus ponens without understanding; there is no <PV~P> without understanding, etc.

If ratio pertains to "movement" then intellectus pertains to "location." There simply is no such thing as movement without location. Terms, inferences, and rules must all be understood before they can be used or manipulated.

To illustrate, we could train a dog to lick the consequent whenever he sees a modus ponens syllogism. He is arguably following a rule, but he is certainly not doing logic or carrying out a modus ponens. This is "contentless rule following." His rule is a quasi or pseudo instance of ratio, but without intellectus it can never rise to the true level of ratio at all. Rearranging symbols is not yet reasoning. Ratio without intellectus is not ratio.

You're attempting to ground logic itself in a notion of what is "logically compatible." This is circular without intuition. This is just an appeal to LNC as being intuitive. This seems like: "no intuition is required because the LNC is self-evident." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. :up:

but that's precisely the issue. The claim about intuitions is that we do know. And the debate is about whether such self-credentialing knowledge, absent either self-evidence or rational argument, is possible. — J

What do you mean by "self-evident" and what do you mean by "intuition," and how do they differ?

(p v ~p) appears to fit -- to "be the key" -- to two types of phenomena. It appears to be a law of thought, perhaps normative, perhaps transcendentally descriptive, perhaps psychological, depending on how we rate Frege. It also appears to describe necessary facts about objects in the world, all things being equal. My puzzle is: How is it that these are two phenomena, which resemble each other so closely yet have such different objects? Or am I wrong about that? Must I simply accept that the "key" of logic fits the "lock" of the world? — J

I think you need to try to figure out what you are referring to with the term, "different objects," or the term, "two phenomena."

Is a law of thought a phenomenon? Is a description of necessary facts about objects in the world a phenomenon?

What is the object of a law of thought? What is the object of a description of necessary facts about objects in the world?

The characteristically modern error is to posit two substances, such as the mind and the body, and then wonder how two "simples" could ever interact. In order to throw that approach into relief one must begin to query their categorizations, such as their "phenomena" and their "objects." One needs to abandon the mechanistic paradigm at its root, and to stop presuming that everything is of a level.

It's interesting that both the time-honored view of mind as reflecting the structure of reality -- a "unique fit" if there ever was one -- and the contemporary Witt-based view that questions about the relation of mind and reality are defective, aim at resolving the same question, the question I'm posing. I don't find either view persuasive on the merits. — J

I'm not convinced that you are posing a question of sufficient clarity.

Are you asking about the relation between logic and world? But what do you mean by "logic"? It will help if you get more specific. Is "logic" something different than, "the human capacity to understand the world"? If so, what is it?

That is all my point is. We define when we speak. If we are to speak, we must define. Once we define, once we have communicated a concept, a definition exists, in the word, out in the world among human beings, written in stone.

We dance around the elephant we keep inviting into the room when we think we are not defining things as we speak about things. — Fire Ologist

Well, this isn't quite so simple. Usually, when people talk about defining something, I think they have in mind more like a dictionary definition, an agreed-upon use of a word which makes it correct. But you've said, and I agree, that "stipulating a definition for the purposes of discussion" isn't like that. It's more like drawing a temporary distinction in terms so that two people can converse intelligently. I'm not sure what's elephantine here. — J

I think @Fire Ologist is correct in claiming that the issue is not stipulation:

What I'm calling the "wrangle" begins when someone tries to claim that the stipulation is correct. — J

I would clarify that the wrangle as we are now wrangling here, begins when someone tries to claim there are stipulations at all. — Fire Ologist

Word meaning is not actually stipulated, in the sense that meaning is determined by the speaker. What is necessary in terminological disagreements are not stipulative definitions, but rather provisional definitions or semantic narrowing or nominal definitions.

The difference lies in imposition. To stipulate a word's meaning to an interlocutor is to impose that sense of the word upon them. Instead we must seek our interlocutor's agreement, especially in the case of word-meaning. Specifying the sense of a word with a provisional definition or a narrowing of the semantic range provides this necessary room for agreement from the interlocutor. If two people are using a word in entirely different ways, then they are not successfully communicating, and the word should be dropped altogether (and replaced by the two different compositional definitions).

When you give an argument in an OP you have a responsibility to convey your meaning. You are free to use definitions which are idiosyncratic, but that will naturally lead to less engagement with the OP (because others will be less likely to agree/consent to idiosyncratic word use). It will also lead to the critique that you are using words wrongly, and this would be a just critique. A philosophy forum cannot function at all if the participants do not use words carefully and correctly.

In any case, @Fire Ologist is correct when he implies that each time we use a word we leverage a definition. A definition is what a word means, and every instance of every word has a meaning. At the abstraction of the language-group the meaning of a word is best captured by lexicography and dictionaries. At the level of the individual who speaks a sentence, the meaning of the word derives from her. This doesn't mean that her sentence is unrelated to lexicography or dictionaries or the language group, but the primary meaning comes from her and her appropriation of such linguistic realities. If we really want to know what she means by a word, then we ask her. If we cannot ask her then we will make do with more abstract approaches. But words do not exist primarily in some Platonic realm, or in dictionaries. They exist foremost on the tongues of speakers, and it is the speaker who must be queried in the first place. They may answer the query with idiosyncratic usage, and we may walk away after deciding that communication with such a person would be unduly burdensome, but it nevertheless remains the fact that the meaning of a word is found in the person who speaks it.

(The person who stipulates an idiosyncratic meaning is transgressing a convention, and it is burdensome to constantly distinguish the idiosyncratic meaning of their phonemes from the conventional phoneme meanings. All the same, in this case their meaning is not accessible via the conventions, and it still comes from the speaker. The normal and proper case occurs when there is a speaker who uses the language correctly, i.e. according to convention, and yet at the same time we understand the semantic shape to be completed and colored by their own personality and intellect—which is why familiarity with a speaker aids one in understanding their meaning, even when that meaning is not idiosyncratic.)

Humans are capable of both rationality and irrationality. Does that fact imply something about Evolution? Presumably you are saying that it does imply something about Evolution.

Spot on. I appreciate you weighing in. I guess not everything I said is muddled-headed to everyone. — Fire Ologist

I think your posts are very much on point.

The other bait-and-switch that usually happens in these contexts is that, when you ask someone what they mean by some word they are using, they go on a long diatribe about the complexities of lexicography and linguistic meaning. Lexicography is complex, but we don't need to plumb its depths in order to give an account of what we intend a word within one of our own sentences to mean. Indeed, in response to the lexicography questions earlier in the thread I pointed to Josef Pieper's studies on the words faith and belief, but it turns out no one was genuinely interested in lexicography at all. It's too hard. Better to query ChatGPT and call it a day.

It is fairly miraculous how all the “muddle” never reflects on him or his methods or his “uses of words.” It’s also quite amazing to me how little self-awareness of his condescension he has, and more importantly, how little awareness of how contradictory he is, like when he “refuses to tell you what [he] means by a word but yet continues to pretend to use it.” Pretend. Like gaming. Spot on. — Fire Ologist

:up:

I made that point with Galileo. When Galileo was arrested, he was obstinate in his beliefs under strain and duress. So, was he being a man of faith, starting a new religion? Banno dismissively said Galileo recanted. Totally missed the point. That only means Gallileo lost faith then (according to Banno’s use/definition of “faith”). Didn’t address my point, at all, as usual, which was simply that there must be something else, something more specific to faith if we are to distinguish what Gallileo held versus what a faithful person holds. — Fire Ologist

Yes, your point was clear and salutary. Obstinacy is an accidental property of faith, and certainly not a necessary feature. A case like Galileo shows this.

Sometimes when people utterly fail to provide arguments for their claims, it is because they view the issue as moot or unworthy of serious effort. That is likely what is happening in this thread with respect to the anti-religious posters. "Religion is irrational. Everyone knows it. Arguments are unnecessary." Of course these posters tend to do the same thing in other threads as well, but the problem is especially pronounced here.

This is unfortunate given the fact that our age is more faith-based than any previous age, and if our age does not figure out how to navigate the issue of faith/belief/testimony our societies will collapse. Most of the central disagreements in our age have only to do with the question of which authority is trustworthy. Such disagreements include things like politics, religion, medicine, history, ethics, etc. Ironically, the issue of faith in artificial intelligence and LLMs like ChatGPT is perhaps the most acute case. The most recent blowup due to different trusted authorities took place around the Covid-19 pandemic.

Another observation is that “being at cross purposes” seems to play a fairly significant role in dismissal. — Leontiskos

One thing I am interested in understanding are the cross-purposes involved in more minor dismissals. When people aren’t engaging rationally, what exactly is it that they are doing instead? What is their purpose or telos? (I have noticed that the number of people who restrict themselves to rational inquiry is incredibly small, even on a philosophy forum.)

In the U.S. Trump provides a good example. He dominates political discourse, and there are lots of people who say they want to discuss politics, but what they actually want to do is beat the anti-Trump drum. Rational discussion of a political issue strikes them as a distraction, and sooner or later they find their way back to their telos of beating the anti-Trump drum. One is then presented with the simple choice of either providing the person with the anti-Trump catharsis that they desire, or else finding an interlocutor who is able to engage in more interesting activities.

That sort of thing is a type for what happens in so many pseudo-intellectual dialogues. There is a feigned interest in X while the true interest lies in Y (and it is precisely the dissimulation which is frustrating). Soon enough focus is lost and the person falls back into the rut of their pet thesis or their pet modus operandi.* That shift is most readily apparent when one is faced with one’s own cognitive dissonance, and thus flees into safe, familiar platitudes. In severe cases the person’s whole approach becomes bound up with justifying that flight from genuine philosophical discourse.

In these more minor cases we should try to work through the problems, but how is that done? One way is by enforcing <standard Socratic principles of dialogue>. Another is by becoming painfully clear about what thesis the person is arguing for and what arguments they are relying on to support it (i.e. a move towards formalized argumentation).

Yet the root problem is a bit deeper, and regards a rectification of the sub-philosophical telos. This is where Socrates really shines, and he usually preempts the whole issue by asking his interlocutor if they want to engage in dialogue at the outset. The general idea is to somehow persuade or encourage one’s interlocutor to engage in real philosophy instead of simply regurgitating the half-baked thoughts that have been floating around their heads for the last 15 years.


* This is precisely the age-old problem of <rationalization> or subordinating reason to the passions.

- :up:

How can you speak about anything of substance on this forum without delineating distinctions? How is any delineation not some form of definition? And now, once you admit to defining, why persist in raising "cannot set out the necessary and sufficient conditions" as if you aren't defining your terms all of the time anyway?

I know you think a person of faith, acting on their faith qua faith, is not being rational, and that faith qua faith can be used to support heinous evil. All of that may be true, but then, why would you think you have not defined something of the "rational" and given some border and color to "evil"? If one challenges your commentary, you resort to "you shouldn't define terms". — Fire Ologist

There are a few posters who engage in a pretty wild form of definition sophistry, and this is how they manage to get away with irrational posts. When someone uses a word, either they know what they mean by the word or they don’t. If they know what they mean by it then they will be able to tell you what they mean by it. If they don’t know what they mean by it then they are talking nonsense by literally saying meaningless things. If they refuse to tell you what they mean by a word but yet continue to pretend to use it, then they lack good faith and will not provide meaningful engagement.

The anti-religious in this thread hold something like the following: <Religious persons are irrational; their irrationality has something to do with ‘faith’; and I don’t have any real sense of what I mean by the word ‘faith’>. So what they are really saying is that religious beliefs are irrational. We may as well just drop the word “faith” since it is a meaningless pejorative in the mouth of the anti-religious. Hence the claim is: <Religious persons are irrational and I can’t say why>, or equivalently, <Religious persons are irrational because faith is irrational, and I can’t say what faith is beyond associating it with irrationality>.

For me that level of muddle and bias is not worth engaging. But suppose we take pity on the anti-religious and give them a lesson in philosophical argumentation. In my thread <here> I point out the difference between an assertion and an argument. “Faith is irrational,” is an assertion, not an argument (and it is by no means a definition). Note too that the inference the anti-religious has in mind is actually this, whether or not they are willing to admit it:

3. Faith is irrational
4. Anything which is based on the irrational is bad
5. Religion is based on faith
6. Therefore, religion is bad

If the anti-religious wants to do philosophy then they have to turn 3 into a conclusion. At present it is an assertion or an unsupported (and controversial) premise. So they at least need a middle term, and one way of doing that would be the following:

1e. All X is irrational
2e. All faith is X
3. Therefore, all faith is irrational

Here is the middle term that Tom was groping at earlier in the thread:

1a. Believing in the absence of sufficient justification is irrational
2a. Faith involves believing in the absence of sufficient justification
3. Therefore, faith is irrational

(See The Oxford Handbook of Religious Epistemology, linked <here>.)

Banno has at long last stumbled upon his own rationale:

1b. Obstinacy is irrational
2b. (Religious) faith involves obstinacy
3. Therefore, (Religious) faith is irrational

-

Hopefully this highlights what is actually going on in the thread. It has nothing to do with definitions; it has to do with arguments, namely arguments that the anti-religious prefer to leave unarticulated given their weaknesses. This is what is often at play when someone refuses to say what they mean by a word (and here I am thinking especially of @J, who uses this tactic gratuitously). It is, “If I say what I mean by the term then my argument will be shown weak; therefore I refuse to say what I mean.” Ergo, my first thread: Argument as Transparency.

(The answer to Banno is to <make a distinction with respect to the second premise>.)

For example, if I'm a Satanist, it might be that my evil ways are dictated by my ideology, and so you could rightly criticize Satanism. But if I'm a Christian and my evil ways are not dictated by my ideology, you can't rightly criticize my Christianity. If you can show, however, that Christians are disproportionately evil (even though there's nothing in their ideology that entails that evil (as there is with Satanism)), then I'd be interested in knowing what that is. — Hanover

Anti-religious bigotry has now taken on a life of its own, but the underlying tradition here is Enlightenment Rationalism. It was the Enlightenment's "Sapere Aude" which attempted to sideline faith—religious or otherwise. That tradition targeted faith itself, not Christianity per se. The anti-religious in this thread are mostly just involved in begging the question. Although some Enlightenment thinkers managed more than simply begging the question, there were nevertheless 18th century figures who already saw the folly, such as J. G. Hamann. Namely, they saw that "rationalism" possessed no foundation—historical or otherwise—upon which to stand. It is little more than borrowed capital pretending to assert itself as sovereign.

Enlightenment Rationalism was an interesting idea, but nowadays Hamann's critique has become common knowledge, namely that the project was a failure and a conceited naivete. Even many of the Enlightenment thinkers themselves quickly recognized how unstable and flighty their so-called "rationalism" was.* Logical Positivism was the last real gasp of air from that tradition, and so it's not surprising that the descendants of Russell are still sporting Enlightenment bumper stickers.

But the whole "faith is bad" propaganda campaign is an unkempt grandchild of that tradition.

(Curiously, Anglophone moral anti-realism flows out of Enlightenment thinking, and this is the place where Banno is perhaps most schizophrenic: affirming moral realism without having any substantial foundation or rationale for that stance. That's a clear symptom of Enlightenment-style thinking. Interlocutors of such moral realists are inevitably tempted to call that form of moral realism "faith-based" (in the anti-religious, pejorative sense).)


* Enlightenment Rationalism crashed and burned so hard that we are now left with the opposite extreme: strong reactions against the idea that reason has any efficacy whatsoever as a political force.

What is meant by Christian faith as being a virtue I suppose is a commitment to the truth of the teachings of Jesus Christ, which might just be a statement that the highest virtue is to believe in what is right and just and true. — Hanover

Yes. When Christians talk about the virtue of faith they are not talking about generic faith. They are not saying, for example, that every act of faith-assent is virtuous. They are saying that faith in the true God is virtuous.

Aquinas says this explicitly, "The faith of which [Aristotle] speaks is based on human reasoning in a conclusion which does not follow, of necessity, from its premisses; and which is subject to be false: hence such like faith is not a virtue" (ST II-II.4.5.ad2). Faith in a guarantor who is capable of falsehood is not a virtue, but God is the First Truth (i.e. it is God's "truthfulness" that causes divine faith to be virtuous).

Classically, none of the theological virtues (viz. faith, hope, and love) are natural virtues. That is, none attain to virtue in Aristotle's strict sense unless their object is God.

Or else Pieper:

Is it "good" to believe?—In human intercourse belief is not simply a "virtue". What belief in revelation means for man's goodness becomes apparent only when the content of rev­elation is considered: God himself communicates. — Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, and Love (Treatise on Faith)

I believe that the problem with this discussion is that its scope is becoming too large... — boundless

Let me give my diagnosis, which is more general.

When we draw a conclusion we require premises. In this conversation we have to be mindful of where the premises are coming from. So if someone says, "Eternal punishment is unjust," we need to ask about where their premises about justice are coming from. And if someone says, "Eternal punishment is incompatible with God," then we have to ask where their premises about God are coming from. And if someone says, "Eternal punishment is incompatible with Christianity," then we need to ask where their premises about Christianity are coming from.

The difficult thing in this conversation is that you keep claiming to make arguments from "logical possibility." The problem is that there simply is no such thing as an inference to an empirical state of affairs from logical possibility. We cannot infer a particular fact about reality from "logical possibility." Granted, one can say, "Hopeful universalism is justified on logical possibility," but this is merely to claim that hopeful universalism does not contain within itself a logical contradiction, and as I've said, most things do not contain within themselves logical contradictions.

So as soon as the conversation moves from, "My position is not logically impossible," to some stronger and more substantive claim, the discussion naturally becomes enormously more complicated. At the beginning of the thread I was the one claiming that eternal punishment is not logically impossible, or else that it is not impossible given certain minimal premises, and it is obviously very hard for opponents to argue that eternal punishment is impossible. In order to do that, they have to supply premises, but since there is some unfamiliarity with philosophical argumentation, therefore many have no clear sense of what sort of premises they are drawing upon to try to justify their claim that eternal punishment is impossible. Strictly speaking what is needed is a formal argument for the conclusion.

First, about repentance. It seemed to me that we did agree that the possibility to commit mortal sins, orienting the will to sin, alone is not enough to explain the thesis that it is at a certain point it's simply impossible to repent. — boundless

Right: if we hold to the single premise about the possibility of mortal sin, then we have excluded hopeful universalism. Note though that "mortal sin" may not be the best term for this, given its orientation towards death (as a definite reality and state).

(Incidentally, I believe that the dogma that during this life it's assumed that it's always possible to repent lends support for this conclusion. it's interesting that you seem to say that experience here suggests to us that in some cases even during this life repentance is not possible... to me this would contradict the dogma.) — boundless

This is a matter of two different premises, which I tried to explain earlier. The idea is that the dogma does not bear on metaphysics, but rather on hope. We are not to give up hope while someone is still alive.

Whether that is a true dogma would be interesting to investigate. At the very least it is a strong doctrine.

This leads, in my opinion, to the conclusion that something else is needed to explain the hopelessness about the fate of the damned, — boundless

Sure, but this pertains to the burden of proof. I don't see that I have the burden of proof regarding the idea that death presents an endpoint for human activities, particularly activities of change. When you phrase it in such a way one is led to believe that the a priori or assumptive position is hopeful universalism, and anyone who wants to challenge that position has the burden of proof.

Or in other words, you want to draw the conclusion of hopeful universalism, and yet that conclusion is not in any way secured by the claim, <If we assume the mere premise of the possibility of mortal sin, then hopeful universalism is not excluded>. This is very similar to what you did with Augustine and Chrysostom. The argument would look like this:

1. If we assume the mere premise of the possibility of mortal sin, then hopeful universalism is not excluded
2. We assume and agree to the premise of the possibility of mortal sin
3. Therefore, hopeful universalism is not yet excluded
4. Therefore, hopeful universalism is true

(4) does not follow. Put differently, no one has claimed that the hopelessness of the damned follows from the mere premise of "mortal sin" (or the ability to place one's end in something other than God).

When I say that "mortal sin" does not exclude universalism (or hopeful universalism), this is a very minimal claim (because I do not actually limit myself to the premise of "mortal sin"). This part of the discussion goes back to Aquinas' response to the first objection. What he is doing there is responding to an objection; not giving a sufficient argument for Hell.

(Incidentally, I think Hart's conclusion is disproportionately reliant on the premise of Platonic metaphysics, namely the ineluctability of the Good. I've covered this in my exchange with @Count Timothy von Icarus. Similarly, I think the intuitions of the West now oppose Hell, for all sorts of reasons. So I am not surprised that Westerners are intuitively opposed to Hell and thus believe the burden of proof lies elsewhere.)

A problem with classical theism, however, is that God is assumed to be omniscent and, if I recall correctly, God already knows how everything will end. So, in this case, it is weird to me to think that God would desire that everybody if He already knows that some will never be saved*. So, probably, this means that what God wants is just to offer salvation to everybody, rather than to save everybody — boundless

Again, this is either the topic of foreknowledge and future contingents or else the topic of predestination and future contingents, both of which are very large topics with lots of different ideas, solutions, objections, etc. It's actually a much larger topic than universalism.

But the general idea of a free will defense is quite simple: God is free and humans are free, and whenever one free being desires or wills that something happen for another free being, as long as that effect is contingent upon the patient's freedom it is not necessary or inevitable. The idea of willing something contingent is a basic notion between free beings. So on Christianity God wants all free beings to be saved but he does not force them, and their fate is not necessary/inevitable.

Regarding the 'cohercion' part, well, I am not sure that this is coercion. — boundless

We have a situation where everyone will do something no matter what. There is no possibility for them to do anything else. If that isn't coercion then I'm not sure what is. As far as I know, the only theologians who would not see that as coercion are, ironically, Calvinists. Most theologians would say that if an agent necessitates an outcome vis-a-vis agents, then the agents are being coerced. Only Calvinists explicitly reject the idea that necessitation is sufficient for coercion.

Anyway, even if you were correct, it would not exclude the hope in universal salvation. — boundless

If God coerces everyone to be saved then universalism is true. No need to hope.

FInally, regarding the evangelization, you continue to think that the traditional view of hell is essential for it. It might be. I don't know. — boundless

Rather, I've pointed out that universalism is incompatible with rational motivation towards evangelization, not that Hell is the only possibility. The problem is that on universalism the end is inevitable, and it is irrational to deploy contingent means in order to achieve an inevitable end. Evangelization is only rationally motivated if the end is contingent.

Anyway, I want to thank you for this discussion. It is has been an interesting discussion for me. Possibly, you are right that it's time to stop the conversation for now at least. — boundless

Sounds good. I'm glad it has been helpful. I think it was fruitful and I appreciate your candor and thoughtfulness. I think this was a good summary post that you wrote. I am happy to give you the last word unless you actually want me to respond to something further.

Yes, sometimes it's just seem hard to change direction even in this life. I can agree with that. But sometimes, religious literature itself make some incredible examples of redemption in cases of people that seemed beyond any hope for that (both inside Christian traditions and outside... if you read the case of Angulimala, in the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures, you find an incredible case of 'change of mind' of a criminal that occurred during the encounter with the Buddha). — boundless

Yes, there are definitely those cases, which is part of why we don't give up hope for the living.

In any case, I believe that experience is indecisive here. — boundless

What is decisive, if not experience?

Given these extreme cases, I would say, however, that we have good ground to believe that the 'change' can always happen — boundless

What evidence do we have that change takes place after death?

Well, I don't think that if there is a future life, it will be like this one. — boundless

But don't you think we will be able to repent in the afterlife, as we can in earthly life? Isn't that precisely what you are claiming?

God's salvific will is universal (God loves and wills the best for everyone)
If a sinner sincerely repents, then God will show mercy
Having committed a mortal sin by itself doesn't imply that sincere repentance is not possible

If one accepts these propositions, the simple logical conclusion (whether or not one thinks that God's salvific will will inevitably be realized) is that repentance will always be possible — boundless

No, that's simply not the logical conclusion. Maybe try to write an argument with inference rules if you think that is a valid conclusion.

The additional premise you need is <We can repent in the afterlife just as we can repent in this life>, and I've pointed out how implausible that premise is.

I believe that the second propositions here would contradict the second proposition in the first series. — boundless

But it's a strawman. No one has said that God decreed an arbitrary time limit. What is being said is that every piece of evidence we have shows death to be definitive. The only organic opposition to this conclusion is found in traditions which hold to reincarnation, which nevertheless does not posit progress in a disembodied state.

And there is also Scriptural evidence for such a view. The first example that comes to mind is Luke 16:19-31.

Right, and as I've said, the logical contradiction is more pronounced than that. The universalist can say that Z is inevitable, that Z cannot occur without Y, and that Y cannot occur unless we do X. But this is a contradiction. — Leontiskos

Out of curiosity, do you believe that being evangelized is a necessary requirement for salvation? What about those who never heard the gospel, are they beyond any hope? — boundless

I think you need to face up to this logical contradiction in your view, as I've been pointing to it for quite awhile now. Do you have any answer to this argument about the fact that something cannot be contingent and inevitable at the same time?

I don't think one can logically hold that evangelization is necessary unless they reject universalism. Regarding evangelization and sacramentality, <here> is a conversation about a helpful historical study, hosted by a Balthsarian.

However, God let us the possibility of rejection, because if there were not such a possibility, we would not be able to freely accept God's grace. — boundless

That's right, and I've explained why your view rejects that possibility. To say that one can reject God for a finite amount of time but not forever is to say that one can never ultimately reject God.

However, if one rejects God, such a person would act against one's own nature, after all, and would experience painful consequences (like, say, deciding to do a substance abuse and experiencing the consequences associated with that). The more one rejects God, the more one deprives himself the highest good for him. The experience of painful consequences of these rejections (whether in the form of remorse, the experience of exclusion and so on) could lead to a 'change of mind', precisely because the sinner here finds no ultimate satisfaction elsewhere and might become aware that his or her rejections were, after all, mistakes and then choose the good (also, if we accept that evil is privation, it would seem that it isn't inexhaustible). — boundless

Ergo: coercion, as I've explained. On this view the makeup of creation coerces humans to eventually accept God. They literally have no other option.

If you don't think that this is compatible with free will — boundless

The idea that no one can ultimately reject God contradicts the idea that God can be rejected in a meaningful sense.

I hope that I clarified thay my difficulty is that I can't seem to able to reconcile the traditional doctrine of unending hopeless torment with other various traditional doctrines (all of them, I suppose can find support in Scripture). It's difficult to me that one can sincerely believe in something that finds incoherent or in a group of ideas that seems difficult to reconcile with each other. So, I don't think that I would be persuaded by an 'exegetical debate' if I am not persuaeded that, indeed, the traditional doctrine of hell is indeed compatible with other traditional doctrines. — boundless

That's fair, but it's worth noting that Christianity has found Hell to be more compatible with Christianity than universalism to be compatible with Christianity, for 2,000 years, to such an extent that the universalist position has been extremely historically rare. The literal logical contradiction with the urgency of evangelization is a great example of why universalism is incompatible with Christianity.

Like so many issues, if one approaches this objectively then I think universalism loses by a long shot. Suppose we take an agnostic who has no "horse in the race" and give them the Bible, or Christian tradition, or arguments from experience, or philosophical deductions. Would they come to the conclusion of universalism if they have no predetermined desire for it to be true or false? I don't think so. I don't think they will come to the conclusion that any of these sources support universalism. Another way to see this is to note how much of Christian tradition and Scripture universalists end up shrugging off. For example, Hart is forced to translate Matthew 25:46 as, "And these will go to the chastening of that Age, but the just to the life of that Age." This is completely nuts, as the text is clearly paralleling two eternal destinies: punishment and life. If Hart wants "the chastening" to be temporary, then he has to admit a temporary Heaven. :grin: I am just not capable of that level of mental gymnastics.

Note too that when I wanted to attend to methodology, presenting one verse at a time and seeing whether the set of pro-universalist or anti-universalist verses looks to possess more force, I was prepared to present a large number of verses that are strongly anti-universalist. You ignored my question about Luke 13:23-28, which was the next piece of evidence I had planned to present. The point is that I have been acting merely defensively in this thread. If I were to go on the "offensive" and start providing all of the Christian evidence for Hell then I believe the scales would tip even further.

Sorry - I am getting tired of this conversation. I feel like I've answered the points you've raised and now I'm just repeating myself. For example, I have explained multiple times the contradiction between a contingent means and a necessary end, and you keep offering long considerations that do not actually help you in avoiding that contradiction.

We could have another 30,000 word exchange on the interview with Lusvardi, but I don't want to do that. As I said, I don't want to spend so much of my free time discussing Hell. I think we've had an interesting and fruitful conversation, but I don't want it to go on forever. Maybe this is a good place to stop. Or at the very least, let's draw it to a close in the next few posts.

Here is Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) speaking to the doctrine more directly than he does in Spe Salvi:

No quibbling helps here: the idea of eternal damnation, which had taken ever clearer shape in the Judaism of the century or two before Christ, has a firm place in the teaching of Jesus, as well as in the apostolic writings. Dogma takes its stand on solid ground when it speaks of the existence of Hell and of the eternity of its punishments. — Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life

True — Bob Ross

I want to say that this is the truer statement:

Faith, unlike ordinary belief or trust, is best can be understood through its persistence under conditions of strain, doubt, or suffering

Faith is always resistant to certain things that direct inference is not resistant to, whether it is religious or not.

I am a theist that does not believe in an eternal immaterial mind/soul but that because God is all just God must resurrect at least those that did not get proper reward or punishment during their lifetimes [to reward or punish them]. — Bob Ross

Okay, fair enough. I would agree that if humans are not eternal by nature then Hell doesn't make sense, similar to the way that it would not make sense to punish someone for 200 years if they only exist for 100 years (or more generally, to act on a substance for x+y duration if the substance only exists for x duration). And I don't think we need to explore too deeply the idea of God artificially prolonging the existence of a substance.

Preachers need a God with charisma, it's in their interest not to make him too "weird". — goremand

Okay, but that seems to fly in the face of the weird caricatures from New Atheist types (or their historical antecedents, such as Carl Sagan and Bertrand Russell).

More directly, the Christian claim is that God descends to man in man's hour of need, so it's not surprising that the "bottom-up" part would also be in place. I guess I don't see why philosophical and religious notions of God must be incompatible.

(Offline until tomorrow - take your time.)

Tell me if this is this a fair characterization of your view. You seem to think that values (or else moral premises) are brute, in that they cannot be generated or corrupted. Everyone has them, but nothing guarantees that one person's set of values will overlap with another person's, and the values never change. So we can mutually influence people who have overlapping values, but we cannot mutually influence people who do not have overlapping values. ...Something like that? — Leontiskos

I don't think so, overall, but i'll be specific.

[...]

Values constantly change. This is another reason its somewhat arbitrary, even on some shared value basis (on my view, obviously). This says to me the overall thrust of this conception is not what I'm going for.. but...

[...]

That seems right. — AmadeusD

Okay. What I'm trying to do is figure out what your position or argument is so that I can interact with it and critique it. For example, you said:

For Muslims, there's predictive power, for Christians there's predictive power - but overall its extremely hard to predict what people will think is 'good' — AmadeusD

I read this as saying <Muslims have common values and therefore we can predict what a Muslim will deem good; and Christians have common values and therefore we can predict what Christians will deem good; but there are no common values—or very few common values—that Christians and Muslims share. Or that everyone shares. And therefore we cannot predict what everyone will deem good>.

My point is that the interaction with a complete stranger, such as the Egyptian, seems to show that we do have common values, and that there is therefore a morality common to all human beings. Do you agree that if there are some values which we all share, then there is a moral system that is common to all human beings, namely the system based on those shared values?

Yeah. I can't see the point of the argument if its just to assert that we have shared values. Obviously we do, even if we didn't know that empirically. I can assume anyone striving to stay alive shares that avlue with me, whether i know htem personally or not. — AmadeusD

Okay, good, and that partially answers the question I just asked.

I guess I would want to know your criteria for determining whether moral influence has occurred. — Leontiskos

This is a tricky one, because it causes me to have considered how other minds can access other minds. I think it would be extremely hard to ever tell but the criteria would be if you've influenced another's values. Then, their values, being the basis for their moral system, subsequently influences their action. Does that make sense? I still have no idea how you'd know, in the event, other than verbal report. — AmadeusD

Yes, that is a good answer. That's what I had assumed as well. Now, <We morally influence another person when we influence their values; sometimes we do influence another person's values; therefore moral influence does occur>. Do you agree with that?

When I write a syllogism in that way it is almost always <{Premise 1}; {Premise 2}; {Conclusion}>.

If "right" and "wrong" are to inform moral systems (all common understandings seem to think so - so this isn't a comment on your system, which i take to be non-moral, and instead a better concept that morality for describing behaviour anyway) then that supposed fact is contradicted by the obvious fact that 'right' and 'wrong' give us nothing which could inform the system as they are too ambiguous and essentially self-referential. This is why i say 'brute' in the face of people's use of those words. If someone says "My moral system rests on "right and wrong"" and hten I ask "What do they mean" they will tell me the same thing in a different word order. Recursive, perhaps, and a dead-end rather than incoherent. — AmadeusD

Right, and that makes perfect sense to me if we are conceiving morality and especially right and wrong in terms of categorical/exceptionless moral norms. I've highlighted this a few times, but again:

This is to say that the definition which eludes J and AmadeusD is bound up with categorical/exceptionless moral norms. The idea is that morality is really about rules which admit of no exceptions (and this flows simultaneously from both Kant and divine command theory). The exceptionless character of the rules makes them autonomous, sovereign, untethered to any ulterior considerations, particularly prudential ones. To give a reason for an exceptionless rule is almost inevitably to undermine the exceptionlessness of the rule itself. It's not an unworthy puzzle... — Leontiskos

The idea here is that a notion like that of a categorical/exceptionless wrong is incoherent because by its very nature it cannot be rationally justified, and that which is rationally proposed yet with no hope of rational justification is incoherent (because it cannot be rational and non-rational at the same time).

I think yours is a fair critique of categorical/exceptionless norms, but I don't think morality is reducible to categorical/exceptionless norms.

And they make no sense in this context, to me. Yay!!! LOL. — AmadeusD

...continuing my last point, the same thing applies to "right." When 'right' is conceived of as categorical/exceptionless, then we get the same problem, but it is equally true that 'right' is not reducible to categorical/exceptionless obligation.

Natural language itself seems to support me. Suppose you bring the water to your lips, the Egyptian says something that seems like a negative NH (for maybe he is speaking a foreign language or trying to bypass a language barrier), and then your friend who is also about to drink water says to you, "I don't know if this is the right thing to do." Now if that word really made no sense to you in that context, your friend's utterance would make no sense to you. But I would expect that such an utterance is meaningful to you, precisely because 'right' is not as nonsensical as you are claiming.

Yes. You can only regret something on the hypothetical basis something else could have been done. — AmadeusD

I would agree that to regret act X requires that X was contingent, but I don't see that this implies that the regret is hypothetical. A hypothetical regret would be something like, "I regret X if..." Similarly, every non-hypothetical ought-judgment is contingent given that something else could be done, and yet this does not make it a hypothetical judgment.

Rubbing my nose is not moral. — AmadeusD

I agree:

Objection 3 to the first article gives the complement of human acts, “But man does many things without deliberation, sometimes not even thinking of what he is doing; for instance when one moves one's foot or hand, or scratches one's beard, while intent on something else.” In his reply to objection 3 Aquinas says, “Such like actions are not properly human actions; since they do not proceed from deliberation of the reason, which is the proper principle of human actions.” — Leontiskos

-

Again, if you take all acts to be moral, fine. — AmadeusD

To be clear, I take all (human) acts to be moral (in the sense specified in my OP). Nevertheless, I am granting for the sake of argument your claim that moral acts tend to be conceived as grave acts, such as acts that pertain to the possibility of death. I address those ideas in Objection 2 and especially Objection 5 of my OP. Objection 5 is basically saying, "You can do that if you want so long as you recognize the Sorites paradox involved." On that conception of morality morality will be "incoherent" in the same way that a Sorites paradox is "incoherent."

But I also don't quite understand what's being said here - perhaps that[s because (as outlined above) changing someone's action isn't a moral influence, but an empirical one. My values aren't involved in whether or not I act on such and such (that I have incorrectly assessed) and someone's putting my assessment right. My values remain exactly the same, but the data is fixed. In the Egypt example, had I perhaps not even known that drinking water in Egypt could lead to sickness, all he's done is given me information in a really weird form (that socially, I can understand). — AmadeusD

Okay, this is great reasoning.

My idea here is something like this: our acts of "data-gathering" are evaluative and value-driven. That idea goes fairly deep, but we can simplify it. We can say that we usually trust ourselves and our own faculties of knowledge, and that when you formed the judgment to drink the water you were trusting your own faculties of knowledge (and that this involves valuing your own faculties of knowledge). When the Egyptian utters his NH you are required to weigh your own faculties of knowledge against the Egyptian's faculties of knowledge (in the particular circumstance). Whether you choose (C) or (C2) depends on whether you decide to trust your initial judgment (and your own faculties) or his judgment (and his faculties). Of course your own faculties are also involved in judging whether to accept his NH, but the point stands, namely that there is a question of whether to value your initial judgment or the Egyptian's judgment—your unaided faculties of knowledge or the Egyptian's faculties of knowledge. Even after possessing the data a choice must still be made between (C) and (C2), and at least one of those options will involve a shifting of values.

I think you can make morally forceful arguments about what you think is right and wrong to potentially influence another's values. Suggestions about acts don't do this. — AmadeusD

I agree with the first sentence and I don't quite understand the second sentence. "Suggestion" is a vague word, given that we could either include or exclude suggestions from counting as NHs. Given that suggestions are usually thought of as hypothetical, I would tend to agree with the second sentence.

Not quite. The point is more to delineate between types of suggestion. If death is a possible outcome, then even the suggestion to avoid a behaviour is moral given the 1 or 0 nature of death. In other contexts, only the suggestion to shift the value underlying an action would be a moral suggestion as there are disparate and potentially infinite possible outcomes/attitudes. But that certainly comes close. — AmadeusD

Okay, and I am happy with that. It is stronger than the interpretation I ventured.

It looks like you have a kind of (inclusive) dichotomy, <A suggestion is moral if it fulfills at least one of two possibilities: either it bears on a behavior whose possible outcome is death, or if part of the suggestion is to shift a value underlying an action>.

Note that I would prefer 'NH' to 'suggestion' given the ambiguity of 'suggestion.'

You are, and I concede this point. If I have changed my value assessment, then he's influenced me morally. But coming back to the example, he's just given me information by inference. he knows something I don't. My values didn't change. — AmadeusD

Okay. Again, this is a crucially important claim, and I tried to critique it above.

↪frank Potentially not 'on a whim' because values tend to be a bit more deep-seated. But I can do it while sitting quietly in my bedroom, unconnected to media or other people. — AmadeusD

This relates to regret, too. We can recalibrate our own moral system, and yet we don't seem to do so arbitrarily. Often we seem to be either responding to consequences in real life, or else trying to make our moral system more internally consistent. I think these considerations are also precisely what are operative when we interact with other moral agents and influence one another's values (e.g. real life consequences, logical consistency, etc.).

Thank you for the recommendations! I will check those out. — Bob Ross

:up:

Some of them will involve things that are worth thinking about or arguing about, which is of course what true inquiry should involve.

Is the word 'assent' in this post mean anything different than 'to agree or affirm'? I get the feeling it is doing more work here in your explanation than I am appreciating. — Bob Ross

No, that's pretty much it. "The same proposition can be held with different modes of assent." A Thomist would say that assent is a more generic act, and that we can assent to a proposition in different ways, such as by faith, or demonstration, or opinion, or probabilistic reasoning, etc. So an act of faith involves assent, but assent does not necessarily involve an act of faith. For example, <2a. “I do not have faith that the airplane will fly, but I assent to the proposition that the airplane will fly"> must involve some non-faith basis for assent. Tom Storm was reducing all non-faith-based assents to one category, which is incorrect, but I was just illustrating the different possibilities regarding faith and assent, with the existence of God and airplanes (i.e. his chosen examples).

The seed is already there, so to speak. — goremand

Okay, fair enough.

If you say so. My impression is that a lot of stuff gets lost in this game of telephones. The God of the common believer has always felt very "human" to me, he's our father, he loves us, he'll take care of us in the end, etc. A far cry from the timeless, genderless, emotionless, unfathomable "being" all the serious thinkers seem to end up with. — goremand

I think that's the false inference, though. "The preacher said God loves us therefore he has an undeveloped notion of God." The vocal atheists make that assumption, but the parishioners don't. It is really a kind of circular reasoning for the (vocal) atheist to find that inference plausible.

Christian theism is both philosophically and Scripturally informed, and therefore in that case a "personal" God is not unphilosophical. There are tensions, sure, but that tradition is very old and well-developed. You find the same thing in some other religions too.

I wonder why it is that when I spoke of "atheists generally" your mind went straight to Dawkins and Hitchens and not to these guys. — goremand

I have been talking about vocal atheists (or evangelistic atheists, if you like). That's what I think this thread is centered on, and it's also what seems most pertinent as far as perceptions go. I also think the number of atheists who read Feuerbach & co. is extremely small. Marxism is a larger category, but it isn't as focused on religious debate.

No quite, but that they do so brute. There's no particularly convincing principle that would ensure people are moved by anyone else's moral views, but to become closer to avoid rejection (I assume you would agree that this is visible in social groups whereby the opinion of the group prevents members from dissenting at risk of either ejection or abuse). There's development, but it seems lateral to me. So maybe I'm being a little hasty, and merely positing that moral progess isn't coherent. — AmadeusD

Tell me if this is this a fair characterization of your view. You seem to think that values (or else moral premises) are brute, in that they cannot be generated or corrupted. Everyone has them, but nothing guarantees that one person's set of values will overlap with another person's, and the values never change. So we can mutually influence people who have overlapping values, but we cannot mutually influence people who do not have overlapping values. ...Something like that?

The first seems correct. — AmadeusD

Good, I agree.

The second is non sequitur in a sense. — AmadeusD

The second clause is a premise, so it is not claimed to have followed from something.

That we influence each other's values doesn't give me a reason to think there are any moral facts about the interactions.

[...]

That could be wrong, but it is why I can't get on with the transition being made to the conclusion here. I agree, there are substantially shared values and I'd be an idiot to deny that - but that this makes interpersonal communication moral doesn't work for me. — AmadeusD

The conclusion of my syllogism was, "Therefore, there must be substantially shared values." It sounds like you agree with the conclusion, but you think it does not lead to some other, unmentioned conclusion.

The "influence" you speak of only seems to occur in intellectual exchanges, not moral ones. And there, rarely, as this exchange is showing hehehe. — AmadeusD

Well do you think moral influence occurs rarely or not at all? It can't be both.

Edit: Sorry, I misread this. I guess I would want to know your criteria for determining whether moral influence has occurred.

I have done so, though, plenty of times, throughout this exchange: The reliance on "right" and "wrong" are incoherent in a theory which requires that they are set by the theory itself. — AmadeusD

If you haven't shown the two or more parts that fail to cohere with one another, then I don't think you've shown anything to be incoherent. I am saying that if something is incoherent, then there must be two parts that can be shown to fail to cohere. Can you isolate those two parts and show why they fail to cohere? Or do you want to proffer an entirely different understanding of incoherence than the one I have offered?

Understandable. The former is simply the result of the latter, and given there is no universal moral system, that seems implicit, and hte only thing available for discussion. Perhaps I should have noted this. — AmadeusD

Okay.

That is plainly hypothetical? — AmadeusD

Do you think regrets are hypothetical? I give reasons for why I think they are not in my OP.

I don't see this moving my comment on the structure of that exchange. B to C is a matter of fact. — AmadeusD

I mean, he changed your mind about what the right action is. You thought it was right (or at least permissible) to drink the water, and he led you to believe that it is not right (i.e. not the right thing to do). You told me that we need to use words like "right" and "wrong" if we are to talk about morality, and now I am using those words. So given the criterion you provided, it seems that when you are persuaded that it is not right to drink the water you have been morally persuaded (especially given that this issue potentially bears on death, and therefore fulfills the criterion you add below).

Would you say that someone saying "Hey, its raining, take an umbrella" and you doing so, means that was a morally forceful suggestion? I don't — AmadeusD

(NB: feel free to disregard this request for an argument. See below.)

Okay, but why not? Do you have an argument? What is a morally forceful suggestion and when does some suggestion fail to count as one? Else, see Objection 2.

If death isn't a possible outcome, then the suggestion is arbitrary in a moral sense (for me, and on
my understanding of common conceptions)). — AmadeusD

Okay, thanks. You've answered my question about an argument, so disregard that. You are saying <If death is not a possible outcome, then the suggestion which bears on the outcome is not moral>. Good. I may come back to this, but it is in line with Objection 2.

As do I. just don't see them as moral propositions. — AmadeusD

Okay.

Or, I am considered their values as compared to mine and understanding whether or not, in the exact context, their value might be more practically effective. Is that still moral, to you? — AmadeusD

We may need to circle back to this, because it is an important claim on your part. In the first place I would want to say that it seems like you are considering borrowing from the Egyptian's "more practically effective value." If I am right in this, then it seems that your values or value-hierarchy has been influenced by the Egyptian. But my inquiry at the very beginning of this post now becomes important.

For me and I think for most people (B) is a moral NH. As you imply, the Egyptian may be offering an NH that will save my life, and we commonly take that sort of NH to be moral.

(Sorry, I think I missed . That is helpful and provides some clarification for me.)

Right. I guess Banno's argument would be pretty good if faith-based assents were never altered. Except to believe that you would have to be living under a rock. Banno speaks of “bullshit arguments,” and yet his own arguments fall over like a feinting goat at the faintest movement of a mouse. No cow-tipping required. :smile:

I don't believe Banno or @Janus are even attempting to give a clear definition of what faith is. Instead, they are using notions without clarifying what the idea of it is that we should use for the discussion. I agree that anyone that believes faith is belief despite the evidence is deploying a straw man of theism: I am just not sure if they are even committing themselves to that definition. — Bob Ross

Indeed. :up:

Apologetics can be interesting when one has an interlocutor who has a sincere intellectual openness to the subject. When such an interlocutor is lacking it is helpful to supplement the exercise by reading an author who possesses the intellectual openness and subtlety of mind needed to genuinely explore such topics. Let me recommend a few such treatments, as I think you might enjoy that deeper intellectual stimulation.

The first is Josef Pieper’s treatise on faith which I referenced at the end of <this post>, or else his longer book-length treatment on the same subject. Another is Joseph Ratzinger’s more existential and highly accessible treatment found in the opening chapters of his Introduction to Christianity. A third, more difficult text, is John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent, which Anthony Kenny calls a “classic of epistemology in its own right” that has “much to say of general philosophical interest about the nature of belief, in secular as well as religious contexts.” (Wittgenstein compared his On Certainty to Newman’s great work.) And then there is of course Aquinas’ justly famous treatments, particularly at the beginning of the Secundae Secondae of the Summa Theologiae. I am sure one could find other penetrating treatments of the subject, but those are a few that I have found valuable. I suspect you would resonate with Pieper more than the others at this stage of the game.

I don't see how this is necessitated from eternal punishment; e.g., God could revive people. — Bob Ross

Okay, but I don't know of any theists who hold that God artificially extends human existence in that manner.

Well, I believe that some universalists would argue that that passage on Judas means that it would be better if was aborted. Not sure I am find it convincing - after all, it is undeniable that it does seem to suggest that he would be better for him to have never coming into existince. — boundless

It seems like the same conclusion would follow even if the text means that it would have been better for Judas to have been aborted.

What you say about that 1 Tim 2:3-4 is also true. Even if we accept that 'everyone' really means 'all human beings without exception', the text merely says that it is God's desire to save everyone. To make another example John 3:17 taken at face value would imply that God's intention is to 'save the world'. This of course doesn't by itself imply that, indeed, everyone will be saved. — boundless

I think that's right. I think we could find lots of examples in Scripture where God desires or wills to do something and yet that thing does not ultimately materialize.

But on the other hand, IMHO the Christian tradition has been insistent to describe God in classical theistic terms. God is omnipotent, omniscent, God's will is changeless and so on. How can God desire the salvation of the 'world' if He already knows that some will not be saved? If God is omnipotent, can God's will be frustrated? — boundless

Classical theism has always distinguished God's antecedent from consequent will (or else has drawn other divisions that amount to the same thing). That said, the body of literature on foreknowledge or predestination and future contingents is very large.

It seems to me then that a 'exegetical debate' doesn't give us compelling arguments. — boundless

All we need to ask is whether it is more plausible to affirm or deny universalism, given some text. Whether the text pushes us in one direction or another. What someone finds "compelling" is fairly subjective.

Probably you are right. — boundless

I'm glad you agree.

Yes, sorry for that. Anyway, I didn't want to 'prove' universalism by questioning their arguments. I just wanted to point out that even in those times there wasn't a consensus on how to interpret some ambigous passages.

Anyway, point taken, I should have at least clarify why I 'invoked' St Chrysostom's thoughts. — boundless

Fair enough.

Yes, that's a tautology, but it is a tautology that follows from what we have been saying and agreeing upon. We agreed that in this life it is said that it is always possible to repent, even if we can fix in sin our own will. — boundless

I think my example of the opium addict contradicted this idea. Empirically speaking, it seems that it is not always possible to reverse direction. Doctrinally speaking, we do not foreclose hope for the living. But here we are talking about the "logical" point, and that is what I was questioning. That is what seems tautological.

Arguably, this is also true in the afterlife — boundless

Based on what argument? It seems like you want to assume that the afterlife is no different than earthly life, and I can't think of any reason to assume that. Almost everything we do in earthly life is changed by death. Why think the ability to repent is different? There is nothing else in earthly life to which we would be tempted to say, "I'll save that for after I die," and yet you seem to think that repentance could be saved for after we die. That cuts across the grain of all our earthly experience, and I think Christianity is being deeply rational when it says that repentance too cannot be postponed until after death. The urgency found in Scripture testifies to just the opposite.

The point is that an universalist might still say that evangelization (in some form) is needed for repentance. Of course the universalist says that salvation can happen after this life, so evangelisation is this life isn't strictly necessary for salvation. — boundless

Right, and as I've said, the logical contradiction is more pronounced than that. The universalist can say that Z is inevitable, that Z cannot occur without Y, and that Y cannot occur unless we do X. But this is a contradiction. They are holding that Z is inevitable and that it depends on a contingent X. Nothing which depends on a contingent event is inevitable. The universalist who thinks the free and contingent act of evangelization is necessary is actually involved in a logical contradiction. This is why universalists who leave religion behind are being eminently rational.

Frankly, I am not sure why you think I am making 'emotional appeals'. I'll just ignore this insinuation. — boundless

Okay, sorry, I must have misread you.

God here begins to look like the guy who tortures you until you finally give in. Or who sets up the universe in such a way that you will suffer until you finally give in. — Leontiskos

You seem to have missed the point here. In the analogy it isn't God who tortures but the illness. If you like, remove the word 'illness' and think about, say, a substance abuse. Arguably, the torment of the patient would be caused by free actions of the patient himself or herself, at least initially. The compassionate doctors will try always to heal the patient. Assuming that the doctors will try forever to heal the patient, will the patient at a certain point be irrecuperable. — boundless

Where does the illness come from? It comes from the universe that God set up. So it still looks like the universalist God "sets up the universe in such a way that you will suffer until you finally give in."

If suffering tends to produce a certain outcome, then infinite suffering will necessarily produce that outcome. On this view there are some people who decide to love God freely, and there are others who are forced to love God after an extended period of suffering pushes them into that outcome. Even on Manichean dualism this looks like a problematic view, namely because it is coercive.

And yet, at a certain point, it seems that God and the Church simply stop to do that. Is it because the sinners at a certain point will be irrecuperable? If so, why? — boundless

Because that's what reason tells us. It's also what Scripture tell us. Death constitutes a finality. That's the reasonable position. It is far less reasonable to hold that things can be postponed until after death than to hold that things must be done before death. The position that repentance can be postponed until after death can be logically possible and highly unreasonable at one and the same time. Perhaps we have been focusing too heavily on logical possibility. On purely philosophical premises, everything apart from a formal contradiction is logically possible, which means that almost everything is logically possible.

But note one thing, however. Let's assume that the illness is caused by the patient's free choices (like in the case of substance abuse). That is, the patient is actually responsible for his or her ill-being.
In both the 'universalist' and 'traditionalist' cases, the doctors want to save the patient. Only in one case, however, the doctors' will is realized. In the other, it won't.
In the form case, the end is the hoped one.
In the latter case, the end is tragic. Of course, it is not a refutation of the latter scenario, but it is interesting to note that. — boundless

Yep.

Then why should we listen to Wayfarers conception of God? How many % does he represent? — goremand

The question is not what percentage Wayfarer represents, but what percentage the object of his critique represents. I actually think Wayfarer's critique is applicable to a large percentage of the vocal atheist population, and more importantly, it is applicable to a large percentage of the TPF atheist population.
Beyond that, various people have noted that the critique will not apply to more precise indictments of Christianity, including myself.

Atheists generally get their idea of God from elementary religious education, from interacting with casual believers and from listening to sermons in church directed mainly at casual believers. You can't really blame them for not appreciating these sophisticated, esoteric alternative accounts of God of interest mainly to a small number of theology-inclined people. — goremand

Along the same lines, I think this is just false. The caricatures that atheists present are not found in elementary religious education, among casual believers, or in church sermons—unless the atheist limits themselves to Westboro Baptist sermons, which they may well do.

There is continuity between the academy and the general population. Parishioners learn from pastors who read theologians. They are all on the same page, it's just that there is a time lapse between the academy and the general population. The same holds for atheists, and the general vocal atheist is learning from anti-theologians like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who are themselves wielding the caricatures. Atheists who draw from more able minds are not as vocal (because they are drawing from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, Feuerbach, Comte, etc., and these thinkers are much more careful and nuanced in their representations of theism).

And also how dangerous it is for a trans woman to be in a men's prison. — Michael

We haven't been focusing on that question as much, and I think it has more to do with rights than expedience. This is because the trans woman in the women's prison potentially endangers the 99%, whereas the trans woman in the men's prison potential endangers the 1%. So if we restrict harm to individual harm, then even on a flat harm analysis it would require an enormous harm differential to rationally prefer the safety of the 1% to the safety of the 99%.

Practically speaking, the trans person is going to require special attention no matter where they are placed. If we had infinite money they would have their own prison.

Why should women be put at risk of male violence to protect men? — Malcolm Parry

And yes - if we want to think about the historical situation of females in relation to males, then this is another consideration. @AmadeusD has spelled it out a few times.

- Okay. :up:

Are we agreed that the prison question should be evaluated in terms of expedience and not rights? Or at the very least that criminals have forfeited many of their rights and therefore we are thinking more in terms of expedience than rights? By "expedience" I mean that we are focused on things like harm, cost, manageability, pregnancies, etc.

Your reasoning seems to depend heavily on the empirical question of how dangerous a male or else a trans woman is within a women's prison. I grant that if we knew for certain that no trans woman would ever cause harm within a women's prison, then your position about women's prisons would be golden. Similarly, if we knew that trans women would cause no more harm than the average woman, then your position would be secure.

Questions of perceptions and discrimination are also pertinent, and they could be leveraged to widen the meaning of "cause harm."

My system of morality is not something you have asked about. What i consider right and wrong is bespoke, as I take it to be for everyone. That doesn't mean people's 'right' can't overlap, or that the ydon't regularly do so - that is how morality works.
But I couldn't possibly argue that anyone else need care what I think. If right and wrong are just so, no theory can move someone. That is my contention. We just do our best to find people with whom our bespoke boundaries work well. There is some force in this - societies have a profound effect on what people think is right and wrong, personally. But there are no universals there, imo. — AmadeusD

Okay, interesting. To be honest, I was not at all expecting you to admit that you possess a “moral system,” and therefore I had not thought to ask.

Your thesis here seems to be that you have a moral system and your wife has a moral system and everyone else has a moral system, and that none of these moral systems really interact with or shape one another (e.g. you say the Christian and the Muslim have different values and that's that). For example, you presumably don't think moral argument is really possible. This is actually an important support for your “arbitrariness” notion, and I think it is incorrect. Let’s revisit my argument and example:

1c. We all make non-hypothetical ought-judgments (NHs for short - plural)
2c. Our NHs are able to be evaluated, both by ourselves in retrospect, and by others
3c. These evaluations are themselves NHs
4c. We respect these evaluative NHs, or at least some of them
5c. Therefore, at least some evaluative NHs have force
6c. Therefore, the "rhymes and reasons" are not arbitrary

[...]

A) You decide to drink water, raising it to your lips (1c)
B) A complete stranger tells you not to drink the water (2c, 3c, 5c)
C) You decide not to drink the water, or at the very least you give the stranger's utterance due consideration (4c) — Leontiskos

Note that the example is precisely about (moral) interaction between moral systems or moral agents. (A), (B), and (C) each represent a different NH, and there is a causal connection or influence from one to the next. What this means is that our moral systems are not quarantined off each from the other. When (A) leads to (B) and (B) leads to (C) you and the “Egyptian” are influencing each other’s actions and moral judgments. Even if (C2) is substituted where you instead decide to drink the water, (C2) is still a different NH than (A) given that (C2) includes the consideration of (B) whereas (A) does not.

The “respect” and “force” of 4c and 5c represent transitions between NHs and considerations that inform NHs. If the “rhymes and reasons” were arbitrary then none of this interaction between moral systems would be possible, and there would be no ‘respect’ or ‘force’.

Specifically, my contention is that <If there were no substantially shared values, then moral persuasion and influence between individuals would be impossible; But it is not impossible; Therefore, there must be substantially shared values>.

I don't defend that conception as a coherent theory - it just, plain and simple, is what people mean when they speak about morality. — AmadeusD

I'm not convinced that something which is incoherent can be described as a unity. The only way to rigorously define a system which is thought to be incoherent is to delineate its contradictions. An incoherence is a mishmash, and thus if the description does not point up the mishmash it is not a description of an incoherent system.

What? No. That I don't understand this the way those who defend that conception do has nothing to do with whether it exists. It exists, and is 'used' constantly by most people. That is what people mean when they say 'moral'. It is 'right'. What they mean you are free to interrogate. I did, found it wanting, and rejected it as a coherent theory. — AmadeusD

Continuing, an incoherent "thing" is not an (existent) thing at all. Instead it must be two or more existent things that contradict or fail to cohere with one another.

I take it you more-or-less feel the same and want to propose a system on other terms. That's fine. — AmadeusD

Sort of. I think the complexity of morality can be reasonably construed as coherent. See for example Objection 3, which anticipates your position exactly.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/morality here it is, and the first entry contains exactly my conception in slightly more verbose terms. — AmadeusD

With respect, "A set of personal or social standards for good or bad behaviour and character," actually strikes me as considerably different than, "The debate between right and wrong."

Hmmm, it doesn't seem to prima facie as I see it. "That's inadmissible" is a pure observation. There is no imperative in that statement. There is, hiding, the potential for the next move to be prescriptive. This is purely descriptive. That utterance doesn't even require that someone intended to admit the item in question. Just that someone noted it wasn't admissible. — AmadeusD

First, by [inadmissible] I was substituting for your own words, namely immoral/wrong/bad. Second, an NH need not be an imperative or a prescription. For example, when you regret a past action and judge that you should have acted otherwise, you are engaged in a non-hypothetical ought-judgment, but not an imperative or a prescription.

Herein lies the problem with almost all 'ought's, even NH ones. "That's inadmissible. Don't attempt to admit it, as you will be admonished by the court and waste your client's money" for instance. I might just disagree that it's inadmissible. I disagreed with the Egyptian gentleman in his assessment of my drinking water in Egypt. — AmadeusD

Sure, and I've never disagreed with this.

But in any case, there's nothing in it that makes any action 'correct' or 'right' other than in terms of some arbitrary end (other than, as noted, death). — AmadeusD

(A) requires that you think drinking water is right. (B) requires that the Egyptian thinks it is not right. (C) requires that you are persuaded that it is not right. (C2) requires that you are not persuaded that it is not right.

(If you want you can substitute "the right thing to do" instead of "right".)

Maybe I find it extremely hard to understand where the notion that these sorts of values are universal comes from, or that shared values provides morality per se, rather than a working execution or moral concepts which may be quite disparate (and in fact, need be given the ambiguity of 'right' and 'wrong'. But there's intuition there). — AmadeusD

Yes, and we could dive deep into Srap's skeptical response. A simpler approach might be to note that in (B) the man assumes a shared value (which is apparently assumed to be universal, given that you are complete strangers). And if you give his NH due consideration then you yourself are assuming a shared value (which is apparently assumed to be universal, given that you are complete strangers). Hence the analogy with color, where even the person who says there are no existent colors still believes in colors on another level.

(Again, one could claim that the Egyptian never assumes a shared value and never utters a non-hypothetical ought-judgment, but only ever utters hypothetical ought-judgments. I don't think this is empirically true. I think humans are constantly engaged in NHs. I think NHs really exist.)

- Okay, interesting. Thanks for the answer. :up:

This is a problem that is very widespread and I think it stems from an inability to ground human dignity and worth in anything in post-modern liberalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ding ding ding. :up:

See also:

My suggestion would be to think about a vegetarian who confronts you, "No species is, tout court, inferior to another." Do you have to stop eating meat? Is their claim falsifiable? Does "tout court" have a discernible meaning in that context? If we cannot enslave those of a certain race, can we enslave those of a certain species?

(Of course it is possible that this suggestion will only confuse you - haha. Still, if natural reason can make these sorts of judgments about species, then at least some "tout court inferior" claims are not nonsensical or unfalsifiable. Note too that racism only came to an end with substantive answers to the falsifiability question. Racism would never have come to an end if we just claimed that the racist had the burden of proof (because the burden of proof is culture- and time-relative).) — Leontiskos

The pertinent question is: should bathrooms, sports teams, prisons, etc. be divided by biological sex, by gender identity, by something else, or by nothing at all? — Michael

What is your answer to the question?

I don't need to read — Janus

Believe me, it is easy to see that you don't read in this area.

From a historically conscious perspective, the whole notion of calling the Christian God evil is unfathomably confused (it's no coincidence that our most cogent illustrations of evil and even of the Problem of Evil come from Christians themselves). Then add the fact that you cannot even produce a substantive reason for why racism is wrong, or should be prohibited. That's pretty standard philosophical-academic problem in the contemporary Anglo-American world: moral truths do not exist and moral claims are not truth apt. Which gives us the average amateur philosopher on TPF saying, "God is evil! Also, evil doesn't exist."

It would be extremely difficult to underestimate the anti-religious thinking sentiment on TPF. What is desperately needed here is reading and information.

I don't know if that is so, just surmising. — Janus

You should find a theological treatment of the problem of evil and actually read it. That way your appraisal will be based on at least one piece of real evidence.

As far as popular writers who come to mind, there's Brian Davies, Eleonore Stump, David Bentley Hart, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright...

Very fair, but that isn't my position. My position is that "wrong" and "right" are ambiguous, amorphous and probably indefinable terms which create a problem for morality to do what it purports to do. Your concept is askance from this, but it seems tp want the same security people find in : — AmadeusD

I'm pretty confident in my ability to persuade someone regarding moral truths (I might begin with things like pain, suffering, empathy, the Golden Rule etc.). In a highly speculative context like TPF, where everyone is running around claiming they don't believe in morality, I tend to show them that they do actually believe in it, regardless of how they conceive of it. For example, in my recent thread hardly anyone claimed that racism is not wrong. I think once we see that morality pertains to action and action is inevitable, then it is easy to see how morality is inevitable.

My position is that "wrong" and "right" are ambiguous, amorphous and probably indefinable terms which create a problem for morality to do what it purports to do. — AmadeusD

Well, this goes back to my claim that morality has force, and if something does not exist or is incoherent then it can have no force. You might like the chat between Sam Harris and Tom Holland that I posted recently. If Holland is even half-right then Christianity dramatically overhauled the moral conscience of the West. So I want to say that it does what it purports to do, even if you question how exactly it does it.

I can't relate to it, at all, despite it being relatively sound in form. It doens't speak to me about right and wrong, and therefore doesn't seem to be a moral system. It's a system for making decisions based on data towards what can, in most instances, be considered arbitrary ends. I know you feel that a collective agreement shifts that. I do not, so impasse there for sure . — AmadeusD

I think you are right that my thread does not present a moral system, in the sense of Aristotelian ethics or Utilitarianism or Kantian deontology, or something like that. Instead, it's about the breadth of the moral sphere - it's about which actions are generically moral and which actions aren't.

It's more like this. Suppose someone claims that colors do not exist. The thread is like arguing that everyone thinks colors exist, even those who claim that they do not exist. Excepting those with visual problems, everyone gets up in the morning and thinks they see color. Maybe it doesn't, but the fact that everyone, including my potential interlocutor, thinks it does apparently bears on the question. Even if everyone sees somewhat different colors, it still seems like color exists.

I suspect that even you, when you look back on a bad mistake you've made in life, could catch yourself half-consciously saying, "That was the wrong thing to do." If so, then I'd say you used the "unintelligible" word in a perfectly ordinary and intelligible way, morally judging a past action.

Okay, gotcha. :up:
Yeah, I have a feminist friend who has dealt with that sort of thing. She is "old school" in that she gravitates towards Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but those philosophies are heretical in the more aggressive parts of the trans community.

That's it, in a nutshell. If our human notions of goodness and justice are so far off the mark, from God's point of view, then why call God "really" good or just at all? It's just words, at that point. I think there are ways to "get God off the hook" but this isn't one of them. It's as shameful as a parent whipping a child into the hospital while saying, "But this is just a sign of how much I love you." Yeah, with love like that, who needs hatred? — J

This is a bit like saying, "All teh theists are Westboro Baptists!" It's an irresponsible strawman.

Reformed theology is problematic.* Also, the Reformed constitute a tiny fraction of Christianity. So why take the beliefs of a 2.5% minority and pretend that they represent the whole group? ...Because it's fun to be indignant, and focusing on the crazy minority offers that opportunity.

* Or rather, some. It's not even fair to characterize that whole group this way.

I often see this as well-poisoning by association. I don't paint all TRAs in the light of terfisaslur. But they exist and are worth mentioning. — AmadeusD

I'm not quite sure what you meant by this. I am sure there are bad actors on both sides. I'm just not convinced that "bad acting" is a good basis for a philosophy thread in the Humanities and Social Sciences section. I can understand if @fdrake is frustrated by bad actors, but I don't think that frustration translates into rationale for policy positions. And maybe fdrake recognizes this when he says, "I'm not particularly trying to conclude something reasonable."

The exact same logic applies to sexual assault. — AmadeusD

:up:

Yes, but they have every reason to believe that the currently accepted canon of scientific knowledge is based on actual observation, experiment and honest and accurate reporting by scientists. — Janus

Everyone who has faith in an authority has reasons to believe the authority is credible. No one who has faith in an authority lacks reasons to believe the authority is credible.

Else, see where I critique in detail the basis you gave for considering some faith-assents to be less faith-based.

1 ) Talking about trans women's rates of sex offence using data.
2 ) Construing trans women as latent rapists on the basis of their {alleged} manhood.

I have the time of day for the former, the latter can suck a bag of dicks, believing something in the manner of ( 2 ) and motte-baileying back to ( 1 ) can suck a larger bag of dicks. It isn't just about being factually correct, people can believe all this stuff in the wrong way. I am not saying you're doing this specifically. I'm bringing the calcified prejudices I usually bring to this discussion's terrain, where knee jerk reactionary crap suffices. — fdrake

You seem emotionally invested in casting your opposition in a bad light, which is why your construal of the lobbyists lacks prima facie credibility. The more charitable and reasonable alternative to (1) is to recognize the strength differential between males and females, and to recognize that this strength differential accounts for the reason society separates incarcerated males and incarcerated females in the first place. That's the elephant in the room for your reasoning: Why are incarcerated males and females separated at all? The fact that this still remains the elephant in the room is a rather significant problem. Presumably to grant the elephant recognition would be to lose a lot of motivation for the negative construals.

At the very least, the idea that men are generally more physically dangerous to women than women are (given the strength differential), is not irrational. If you put two mammals in a room, the potential for significant harm rises as the strength differential increases. Criminality would seem to exacerbate this dynamic.

And maybe an interesting question is this: for the sake of argument, if a group of people come to a true conclusion via invalid reasoning, should we accept or oppose the conclusion? Probably we want to accept the conclusion while opposing the reasoning. But in this case it's not clear why invalid reasoning from the relatively small group of lobbyists should invalidate a true conclusion (about prisons) for the entire population.

- Very clear. :up:

Even your take imports that to ignore a NHO would be 'wrong'. — AmadeusD

Part of what that thread is getting at is this. Everyone takes themselves to be doing and seeking things that are right and not wrong, good and not bad. A non-hypothetical ought-judgment is always about what ought to be done, and you could say that what ought to be done is the right thing to do. When we critique ourselves or experience regrets, we are judging that the action we thought was right was in fact wrong; or the action we thought was good was in fact bad; or the action we thought ought to be done in fact oughtn't have been done. That's the basis of morality, and everyone is engaged in it. A categorical/exceptionless norm is just a special kind of moral premise, one that not everyone accepts.* Nevertheless, to say, "I don't believe in morality because I don't believe in categorical/exceptionless norms," is not right, given that morality is not reducible to categorical/exceptionless norms. Just because someone is fascinated or even obsessed with the notion of categorical/exceptionless norms does not mean that this is all morality is.

Maybe the easiest way to see this is to note that civil law is a moral construct which nevertheless does not necessarily contain categorical/exceptionless norms.

* And moral judgments derived from categorical/exceptionless norms are just one species of moral judgments / non-hypothetical ought-judgments.

No one does. That's my entire point lol. — AmadeusD

So you want to criticize people who use the words "right" and "wrong," because you think the words are meaningless. And then when I avoid using these words that you deem to be meaningless, you criticize me for not using them? It seems like you've erected a game where I lose by default even before I begin.

This is a widely accepted conception of morality. — AmadeusD

What "conception"? You yourself claim that your definition of morality is meaningless, and therefore there is no conception. If it is not meaningless, then you should tell me what the conception is.

Given the first reply above this one, it seems pretty clear that either morality doesn't exist or... — AmadeusD

Again, in order to determine whether something exists one must explain what they are talking about. If you say, "Morality is about right and wrong and I have no idea what right and wrong mean," then we have no candidate which could exist or not exist.

Oxford Languages, Cambridge and several AI models. — AmadeusD

So <here> is the Cambridge entry, which is publicly accessible. It says nothing about debates and nothing about "wrong," although the word "right" does occur in a few entries. So it looks like your definition does not come from Cambridge dictionary, unless you are using an older version?

I couldn't possibly hold a view i've noted has a fatal flaw, could I? — AmadeusD

What is its fatal flaw? That it doesn't mean anything?

I don't generally find it useful to argue other peoples positions for them, but I did that here:

With that said, there are more productive ways to approach such difficulties. First we define morality as that which pertains to rational action, at which point we can try to relate various subdivisions: categorical/exceptionless moral norms, non-hypothetical ought-judgments, weighted moral values or "ceteris paribus rules," and hypothetical imperatives. The tendency among our moral anti-realists is to reduce moral norms to the first subdivision: categorical/exceptionless norms, probably because this is the most potent kind of moral norm. Its potency also makes it the hardest to justify, and therefore it is understandable that someone who reduces all of morality to the most potent variety of morality also comes to the conclusion that morality itself is impossible to justify, and that morality is therefore little more than a pipe dream.

[...]

(This is to say that the definition which eludes J and AmadeusD is bound up with categorical/exceptionless moral norms. The idea is that morality is really about rules which admit of no exceptions (and this flows simultaneously from both Kant and divine command theory). The exceptionless character of the rules makes them autonomous, sovereign, untethered to any ulterior considerations, particularly prudential ones. To give a reason for an exceptionless rule is almost inevitably to undermine the exceptionlessness of the rule itself. It's not an unworthy puzzle, and I think it comes down to the same issue of ratiocination vs intellection. ...And nevermind the fact that J's pluralism will balk at the idea of intellection, even though his mystical "metanoia" is quite similar to it.) — Leontiskos

So presumably you want to say that something is moral if it is obligatory, and that this means that it must be done. On this view a moral norm is therefore a categorical/exceptionless norm.

But the problem here is making that first subdivision the whole of morality. In everyday life it just isn't. For example:

Because this is precisely what people mean when they speak about morality. "That's immoral!" means "that's wrong" or bad. — AmadeusD

First note that the claim, "That's [inadmissible]" is a NH, and every negative NH entails the claim, "You should not do that." Thus, "Note that a non-hypothetical judgment is not the same thing as a categorical imperative. We could say that all categorical imperatives are non-hypothetical judgments, but not all non-hypothetical judgments are categorical imperatives" ().

Now suppose someone becomes a vegetarian because they don't want to cause animal suffering. Nevertheless, one day they are starving and they find a live mouse caught in a live trap. They eat the mouse to stay alive and yet nevertheless continue to consider themselves a vegetarian. Your view is apparently that in order for them to hold the norm, "It is immoral to eat meat," they must wield that norm as a categorical/exceptionless norm. But this is a strawman. It's not how morality is viewed in real life. In real life if a vegetarian allows certain exceptions to their rule this does not disqualify their vegetarianism from being of a moral nature.

You have not been able to say what you mean by morality (or by "right" and "wrong" - the words you use to define morality). So I've offered you a definition, namely one that pertains to categorical/exceptionless norms. You might claim that this is not your definition of morality, but I can hardly be faulted at this point for providing you with a definition, given that you have continually failed to give a clear definition yourself. This definition of morality is incomplete. It is not colloquially adequate. If it were colloquially adequate then the vegetarian in question would not be acting morally in admitting exceptions, but everyone thinks they are acting in a morally-infused manner even if they admit exceptions.

If you want to reduce non-hypothetical ought-judgments (a.k.a. NHs) to categorical/exceptionless norms, you could do it even though it requires a bit of bastardizing. We could construe the vegetarian eating the mouse as saying, "Given the unique circumstances I am in, one should categorically/exceptionlessly eat the mouse, even though one should not eat the mouse in alternative circumstances." Again, this is in fact conflating two different subdivisions of morality, but someone who is intent on categorical/exceptionless norms might want to try to construe it that way.

I'll reverse this section, because it is extremely important to notice that these words are required if you want to talk about morality about actions. That is literally what morality is - the discussion of right and wrong actions. Even your take imports that to ignore a NHO would be 'wrong'. You don't use that word, but without it you have no basis to claim any kind of coherence between the theory and actual actions. We can simply kill ourselves, and there's no valence to it. — AmadeusD

I am not following this, and I am especially curious to know what your third sentence is supposed to mean.

The language problem here is generalizable:

• Amadeus: You are not talking about X.
• Leontiskos: Well, what do you mean by 'X'?
• Amadeus: By 'X' I mean 'Y and Z'.
• Leontiskos: Okay, but what do you mean by 'Y' and 'Z'?
• Amadeus: I don't know what I mean by 'Y' and 'Z'? {NB: 'right' and 'wrong'}
• Leontiskos: If you don't know what you mean by 'Y' and 'Z' then your critique is not meaningful. In that case you are literally saying, "You are not talking about [the I-know-not-what]."

So many of the recent discussions on TPF have hinged on the burden of proof. You are basically saying that you don't know what morality (or else right/wrong) means, and that I have the burden of proof to explain what it means. I then say, "Okay, I will just avoid that word altogether," and you object. That is the especially problematic objection on your part. If someone knows what they mean by a word, then they don't need to use that word. And if someone wants to object, then they must be able to say what they mean by the words contained within their objection.

I agree with the problem in terms - but those terms, being so ambiguous, are a fatal flaw in there being a stable concept of morality beyond this (which anyone with half a brain can understand the intent of, even without decent definitions. We all conceive those words clearly for ourselves). If you are trying to entirely overhaul the concept of morality to fit something people do not usually talk about under that head, so be it. Its just not in any way convincing to me and doesn't seem to pertain to anything one would normally consider moral. — AmadeusD

I don't think you can claim that you "conceive of the words clearly" while simultaneously being unable to say what you mean by them. The whole crux here is that you do not conceive of the words 'right' and 'wrong' clearly.

Not sure why you're trying to avoid that word, though. It is hte basis of what we're discussing after all.. — AmadeusD

No real discussion is merely about words. The token m-o-r-a-l-i-t-y is not the basis of our discussion. Discussions are about concepts, and a token with no attached concept is not a word at all. The I-know-not-what is not a basis for anything, for it has no content.

It requires a concept of right and wrong. — AmadeusD

Wrong: "Not correct" (Cambridge)

On that definition the non-hypothetical ought-judgment, "Do not drink the water!" is a claim about what is wrong/incorrect. ...But now you will want to say that it is about wrong but not about "moral wrong," and the whole circle will repeat itself...