function of social contexts comes along with a moral component - of commitments, responsibilities, duties, pledges, plans and attempts to change toward better functioning. — fdrake

Again, I don't see the determinism here that any kind of moral realism or universalism would require.

To me there's two things going on here. There's the question of what is/isn't morally good. For a large number of questions I think there's a right answer to that question. It's a linguistic question, no different to asking "what is the correct way to use the term 'morally good'". In proper Wittgensteinian sense the answer is not clear cut, it's fuzzy at the edges, but this fuzziness cannot be resolved ever. Likewise with social contexts. When the grocer delivers potatoes, you 'ought' to pay him because that's the meaning of the work 'ought'. It means 'that action which the social context places an imperative on you to do'. So if someone were to say "When the grocer delivers my potatoes I ought to punch him in the face" they'd be wrong. That's not what 'ought' means.

The rights and wrongs of question 1 can be resolved by studying language use. Similar to this is another type 1 question about determining one's next actions "what should I do next". Here it's obviously not about the meaning of 'should' because language need not be involved. As you know I advocate the active inference model of mental activity, so for me there's only inputs, predictions, and resolutions. The inputs here might also be social information, they might be internally generated. In each case they are an attempt to model the cause of some collection of affective states "why am I feeling this way?". The grocer delivers his potatoes and I feel an urge to pay him (or in some other way resolve this indebtedness). The best model for that is moral obligation, we pay him to test this prediction, he goes away smiling, all is well, we've resolved the uncertainty. Likewise with empathy, a desire to cooperate etc.

So with you and your partner, you have this conversation, it results in a series of affective states in your physiology, one of which is this desire to act in accordance with the spirit of the agreement made. You model this, resolve it by acting in that spirit and (hopefully) get the expected result.

But...

These are all type 1 questions - what to do, what can be said. The second type of question, which often gets conflated with the first, is - why, when we ask, does everyone else come up with a similar/different answer in the same context. We can ask this of models about the physical world, morality, logic, aesthetics...

With models about the physical world, the best answer is 'there's an external reality'. That's why I think that dropping my keys will cause them to land on the floor, and so does everyone else, because we're all interacting with the same external world which has patterns and rules.

Asking this question of morality is where questions of moral realism come in. The how of making moral decisions is not via any meta-ethic. We can prove that using fMRI scanning, we definitely do not need to consult areas of our brain responsible for things like meta-modelling to make moral-type decisions. There does seem to be some similarity in some moral decisions, there's also a lot of dissimilarity. So there's an interesting question as to what causes this. My preferred answer is long and complicated because I tend to think morality is a messy combination of numerous, often conflicting, models. The point is, though, that whatever model we come up with to explain the similarities/dissimilarities, it has no normative force for exactly the reason you gave.

If we look in an entirely external realm to social contexts for a validation procedure for our moral conduct, we're no longer attending to the nature of moral conduct. — fdrake

The objectivism being discussed here is an attempt to take a model of why there are similarities and dissimilarities, and then treat the model as if it were the source of the moral imperatives we're investigating in our second order question. It speculates that the similarities are because there's and objective universal 'ought' among us, the dissimilarities are the result of inadequate thought given to accounting for other people's 'oughts'. It does this with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, but that's another matter. The important thing is that it then treats this model as if it were the source of the moral imperative it was originally collating. That if the model predicts your 'ought' is one of the dissimilarities, the your 'ought' is wrong. We know the dangers of treating outliers as errors just because they don't fit the model.

So basically, I agree with you completely that "looking to an entirely external realm from social conduct for a validation procedure for our actions actually does violence to the very intelligibility of moral conduct". Meta-ethical models cannot tell us what is right and what is wrong, nor even how to work that out, because meta-ethical models are outside of the social context within which morality makes sense. That's why I'm so opposed to them.

I think that underdetermination is radically anti-authoritarian, no? A social fact might engender that a person or institution acts in some way, but by itself it does not make that act satisfy any criteria other than those included within the behavioural commitments of the person or institution involved in the act. — fdrake

Exactly. To be anti-authoritarian it needs to remain under-determined. The opposite of the 'we can work out what is morally right/wrong in every case' project. Moral 'oughts', as they actually exist in the wild, are complex, but always take the form of parameters, never pointers. One cannot continue to be 'less wrong'. One eventually reaches a point where one is simply no longer wrong. everything within that category is equally 'not wrong'.

you are claiming that people should procreate in the hopes that their progeny will reduce suffering? — schopenhauer1

Yes.

You realize this is an absurd, unnecessary pyramid scheme right? By creating more people, you are creating more sources of suffering, thereby needing more people to prevent suffering. — schopenhauer1

Yes. That's why I said the antinatalist's only coherent counter is the immediate annihilation of the human race. Anything less and the next stage ofvthis 'absurd pyramid' is going to happen anyway, whether you like it or not.

it is also unethical to use people as suffering-reducers. — schopenhauer1

Is it? So one cannot call for help, because one cannot use another person to reduce suffering? How grossly individualistic. If one is morally bound to reduce suffering, then one reasonably assumes that others are too. That being the case, those others are already suffering-reducers. You cannot coherently talk about a certain ethical code (do no harm, do nit force others) as if it were categirical and then treat ither miral codes (reduce suffering) as if they were nothing more than a persinal choice which we shouldn't assume apply to others. All one is doing by giving birth is facilitating a duty of the next generation to help reduce suffering.

That is causing the very harm that needs reduction in the first place. — schopenhauer1

No it isn't. The harm in need of reduction is caused by other people having children. The reduction in question is caused by you having children. Two different events. All that is required to make the decision sound is that you have reason to believe you're a better than average parent.

There is no reason to cause the situation for harm to take place in the first place — schopenhauer1

Have a look back at the proposition I actually opposed. Unless you are advocating the immediate annihilation of the human race then the situation in which harm takes place is happening anyway, that is not within your control.

Seems a bit grand to call them words. Is anything much lost by calling them social signs or expressive vocalisations? — apokrisis

No, I suppose not. Only perhaps the similarity with words which have become symbolic or triggers, there seems a neat connection there to 'words' which always were.

they stand outside the grammatical system in which a word is a semantic unit being organised within the constraints of some syntactic rule. — apokrisis

Not sure they do. I'm not particularly well versed in grammar, but "shh" or "ah" still has a correct place in sentence structure doesn't it? You couldn't put them just anywhere and expected to be understood?

My claim is only about what makes grammatical speech so special - the power of symbols and rules. That doesn’t rule out every other step along the way to full fledged language. They don’t have to be eliminated from the repertoire. We are still social animals as much as grammatically structured thinkers. — apokrisis

That's fair enough if you circumscribe it that way, I suppose one could. Would words used purely emotively or as behavioural triggers then cease to be words, would they be, by their use, ruled out of 'grammatical speech'? Is saying "no" in answer to a simple question using a word, but saying "no!" to banno's cat something else?

I didn't say that such responses were.learnt without recourse to mental imagery (that would be a different argument). I only claimed that they are used without such recourse. My use of the word "duck" to someone which has learnt the appropriate response, dies not (in that use) involve any mental imagery or conceptualising in either the speaker of the responder, as such it is false to say that words always point to things. Sometimes they don't.

I should re-iterate, I think, that this aspect of words triggering a Pavlovian response is only one small part of the argument against ostention in general. As @StreetlightX has already said, you really ought to read Philosophical Investigations for a broader picture. I'm focussing on something very specific here.

I don't think that a course of action is specified in the agreement above. In my experience, whenever I should improve my conduct or avoid doing something based off of an agreement, the details of what to do are always left up to me. The agreement doesn't commit me to a specific course of action, just that I try something relevant and be more mindful. — fdrake

I've probably confused things a bit by talking about intentions. I'm trying to avoid the word 'ought' because it seems to beg the question.

Is not "trying something relevant" a course of action? I don't think the lack of specificity detreacts from the point that the 'ought' (ought to try something relevant) is already present in the two agreeing minds rather than being something which emerges from agreement over some other matter. The matter over which there is agreement is that you ought to try something relevant. Keeping the 'ought' firmly in individual minds.

I think the broader point I'm making is that moral imperatives aren't mysterious things carved in stone tablets, nor are they properties of an indifferent nature, they're part of our social fabric. If we're willing to deflate morals into social facts, then we should treat them like social facts. — fdrake

I can definately go along with this, but only with the huge caveat that social facts also massively underdetermine. There is a huge quantity of moral dilemmas the resolution of which do not have existing social facts regarding them. My concern with moral realism is a political one really, a leveraging of the authority 'facts' carries to enforce socially novel, ideological moves.

This looks a little circular. How do we determine what is an "innate property" of minds other than by observing overwhelming intersubjective agreement? — ChrisH

We check to see if it's present from birth, we see if it changes in response to cultural changes, we see if we can find a plausible neurological mechanism whereby it would be necessitated. Not an exact science, of course, but better than nothing, I think.

A reached agreement should be followed? Otherwise it's not an agreement. — fdrake

What I'm trying to get at is whether a reached agreement is anything more than just a state of two parties having the same idea about what course of action will be tried next. If so, then I'm not quite seeing any way in which it avoids subjectivism. The mere fact that you both agree about your intentions doesn't make those intentions objective, they just happen to coincide at that time. I may be missing the point, but it seems you might want to make the 'ought' objective by saying it's a property of the agreement (which is a state of the world). But it seems to me that that agreement is about the state of each other's minds (where the 'ought' resides), and so is only a temporary symmetry in an otherwise fluid landscape of mental states.

the event corresponding to "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" entails that I ought to try and satisfy the agreement? — fdrake

How does "my partner and I agree I should try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work" differ from "my partner and I agree I ought to try to be more courteous towards her after a shit day at work", and thus render the entailment a tautology?

The use of 'objective' is complicated and gets into long arguments about realism, but roughly...

By 'objective' I just mean something outside of any individual's mind which can act as a truth-maker for propositions about it. That we all need to inter-subjectively agree that thing exists outside of our minds is secondary - everything that exists in the human linguistic world does so because we agree it does to a sufficient extent that we can use it to cooperatively get stuff done, so it is trivial to concern oneself with the categorisation of what 'really' exists unless one is involved in something like neuroscience, or perhaps cognitive psychology where such a distinction might be useful to one's investigations.

What's important, I think, is that there are things which we agree are outside of individual's minds, and there are things which we agree are within (or properties of) people's minds, even though all such agreement is fuzzy and it slightly underdetermines. The source, or reason, for such agreement need not always be a concern.

So, in morality-talk, 'objective' would be a fact about something which that group of language users agree is outside of individual's minds, and in this case, the structure and function of our brains is a property of objects outside of individual's minds.

Everyone agreeing on some moral imperative, by this definition, would still not make it objective because those same people would still all agree that the only place that imperative could possibly be was within the minds of each individual, and if it arrives, or varies with culture, then it cannot be an innate property of those minds as objects (brains).

Basically, agreement is not sufficient for objectivity. Imagine if, for a time, all trains were green. The fact that, at that time, all trains happen to be green wouldn't make 'greeness' an innate property of trains. For that to be the case we'd need some necessary connection to some property already defininitive of trains. Having wheels, for example, is not just something all current trains just happen to be similar on right now, it's integral to the definition of the object (remembering that definitions are always fuzzy, so integral here is not universally the case - think Wittgenstein's example of Moses - 'greeness' is not one of the props, wheels is).

So with opinions or beliefs, it just happening to be the case that everyone in some group has the same, or similar, one is insufficient to assume having such an opinion is a property of the object (in this case, the brain). Them having such beliefs from birth, universally across cultures and a plausible mechanism by which they're propogated, is sufficient to assume objectivity.

You've just side-stepped the point of objection. Either you have a view of morality which most people would consider sociopathic, or you accept, as most do, that failing to help reduce suffering when is it well within your power to do so is bad, even if that means forcing another to help (if forcing another is the only action you can take - you yourself are unable to help for some reason).

If you disagree with this, then that's fine, but your position is no better than the neo-con liberalism which seems to be polluting our societies at the moment ("not my problem!").

If you agree, then having a child, and raising them as best as you can to be both happy themselves and helpful in reducing the suffering of others is no different to fetching a stronger man to help lift an old lady who's fallen. We, quite fairly, use others to reduce harms to the extant we're able because if we're to have an ethic at all, then we presume it applies to others also (otherwise it's pointless).

As I said, the only way round this for the antinatalist is either a neo-con 'not my problem' ethic (which I'd hardly class as ethics at all), or a method of ensuring with 100% certainty that they will be no next generation in need of help, ie the immediate annihilation of the human race.

For me, it demonstrates the developmental trajectory from iconic to indexical to fully symbolic levels of language. And how this becomes so as novelty (which would demand the whole brain being applied) becomes reduced to the simplest habit (where the brain simply emits a response without conscious deliberation). — apokrisis

Interesting. I saw it going the other way. The reason I mentioned "Na" was that it is from a class of words which I don't see as ever having indexical meaning - "Shhh", "Oi", "Hey", "Ah"... They're word's which just 'do something' on a very primitive level. They're still cultural though, so I think that puts them squarely within language still. Someone from 300 years ago on the other side of the world might not know what on earth you're doing if you asked them to "Shhh". They still require a community of language users to use them that way, but they haven't been through any iconic or indexical stages, they are just 'when I make this sound, you do this action' and we learn the correct response through childhood. We know that "Na na na na" is just part of syncopation, we don't try to work out the meaning. When the teacher says "Shhh!" everyone falls quiet (if they don't there's trouble), the learnt response is direct.

The evidence of directly learnt responses to words opens up that possibility even with words whose meaning is also referential - ie just because a word refers to something, it doesn't mean that's always what it's doing in an expression. As Wittgenstein says, "Slab!" doesn't just refer to the slab, it gets the assistant to bring it. "No!" doesn't cause a baby to contemplate the sate of mind in the adult that this negation might be referring to - it gets them to stop. What's interesting about "No!" is it stops even children who (through maybe autism) have not fully developed a theory of mind yet. If you asked them about another's intentions, they might well become confused, but if you yell "No!" when they're reaching for a second biscuit, they'll stop reaching for it - not just stop doing everything - stop doing the thing they had in mind to do. Now, "No!" can't index their own desire to stop (they clearly didn't want to), if it indexed the adult's desire that they stop we'd expect to see the same confusion we see when talking about other people's intentions, but we see neither, they just stop. "No!" just stop them. It just does something to the world, by Pavlovian response, no semantics of any sort required.

As @ChrisH has already said, you holding a view as to the damage the upholding of personal liberty has done during this pandemic has nothing to do with your claim that

"

Science can tell us who is right — ChrisH

To uphold that claim we would need a falsifiable scientific theory about the correct relative values and a controlled trial to test that hypothesis.

It seems to me that, in common with the majority of moral realists, what you really mean is not science but 'common sense'. The trouble with 'common sense' is that whilst a very useful concept on a broad scale (we do not need a scientific test to tell whether rape is a bad thing) it starts to get co-opted into political or personal ideologies at a fine scale ("it's just 'common sense' that we should protect our borders", "it's just 'common sense' that we need schools to teach children how to read" etc.

Exemplified by

most everyone knows what's right and wrong if they care to give it some thought. — Janus

Where 'giving it some thought' means thinking about it until they come up with the same answer you have.

This is why, to make it's case, realism always has to turn to extreme examples...

We know, for example, that raping your neighbours' daughter, killing their dog or breaking into their house and robbing them of all their valuables will not normally be likely to contribute to their temporal flourishing.

You might want to argue that it may be a pivotal aid to their eternal flourishing, or even lead to events which increase their overall temporal flourishing, but these would be indiscernible for our present moral deliberations. — Janus

No, I wouldn't want to make that case and nor would anyone nowadays, but that's not because an objective morality exists for all moral dilemmas, it's because an objective morality exists for this particular moral dilemma. We have in-built tendencies toward empathy/sympathy, cooperation, and care for those weaker than us. If any of those are transgressed we feel a sense that something wrong needs to be righted, we fell compelled to act to correct this mistake because our beliefs about the world are such that interacting with it in this way has the result we expect.

But there's absolutely no reason at all (and in fact very compelling psychological evidence to the contrary) to believe that these in-built tendencies solely inform all decision making about moral dilemmas. As I've said before, one thing 'science' can tell us is that moral dilemmas involve parts of the brain responsible for valuation, disgust, group identity, dopamine cycles, habituation, and rule-following. All of these areas are highly adaptable and modified by the society and method of your upbringing. It is telling that for people so heavily invested in what 'science' can tell us about mask-wearing, you all blithely ignored what science actually can tell us about moral decision-making.

There is a difference between ethically virtuous actions and actions that are obligatory. — ProbablyTrue

Yeah, for most people I think that's true. And it does seem to be based on proximity, but also ability. The difficulty required to help is often considered a justification for not helping, and I wonder his much the proximity element is just linked to that. We recognise it's impossible to help all people all the time, so we have parameters.

I don't know where any kind if 'average line' would be, but I think it only requires a general principle to counter antinatalism in this way.

One only needs to be reasonably confident that one's child will probably be capable of reducing suffering (putting whatever reasonable amount of effort in), and it becomes reasonable to assume they'll therefore have such a duty.

Once born, of course one can help reduce harm. — schopenhauer1

Optionality isn't the point. The point is that if someone chooses to walk by we would probably think them a sociopath. No one's talking about being forced to walk by, we're talking about an obligation to help.

Sounds like a fairly convoluted post hoc ethics stemming from, rather than leading to, a commitment to antinatalism.

So - don't use people and don't harm people, but it's OK to let them be used or harmed, so long as you're not doing it. You're aware, I presume how odd an ethical position that is? If someone routinely saw another person in pain and just walked by we would likely label them a sociopath.

"One less person procreating, is one less person who will suffer" — schopenhauer1

I don't see how you can justify that assessment. That person's net effect on the world might be to reduce the suffering of others to a greater extent than their own suffering was increased by being born. The 'logic' of antinatalism (such as it is) does indeed rely on immediate annihilation of the human race, because if there's even one person left, it is possible that creating a second person could feasibly reduce overall suffering.

There's far more going on in Isaac's posts than just pointing. — Banno

:point:

Words are just scribbles with an agreed upon referent so that we end up syncing the images in our minds - what images in the mind another image (scribble) refers to. — Harry Hindu

But haven't I just given an example where this is not the case. If I yell "duck!" I'm not expecting that you sync my image of you ducking with your image of you ducking. I'm just expecting you to get your head down. In fact, I could prove to you with fMRI, that Pavlovian response triggers, even if they're words, pass neither through the ventral pathway of object recognition, nor through the areas of the cerebral cortex where we might expect with some concept recognition, but rather straight to the sensorimotor systems to get you to duck.

I've used the word 'duck' to make you get your head down, and at no point did either of us have to picture someone ducking. I've simply learnt that that word in that context has that particular effect on the world, and, as @Banno's Quine quote nicely shows, alk that's needed for me to keep using it this way is "frequent predictability of verbal and nonverbal reactions".

I wasn't asking about correct usage. I was asking about what makes a word a word? — Harry Hindu

What makes a word a word is about the correct usage of the word "word".

You seemed to think that I understood what "Na" means. — Harry Hindu

No, I think you understood what I meant by referring to it as a 'word', hence we don't have anything to discuss about whether it's really a word.

I do understand the scribble, "word" and that "Na" isn't one. — Harry Hindu

This is what I was asking you about. By what method of arbitration are you concluding that my referring to "Na" as a 'word' is an incorrect use of the term?

Thanks for looking. I know how annoying it is to have some study in mind and not be able to track it down. I'll have a read of the paper you linked though, looks interesting. I asked my wife about it (she knows more than me about this sort if thing), and she suggested the Douglas Gillan experiments on transituve reasoning in chimpanzees in the 80s, does that sound likely?

Given that Crows can plan three steps ahead, it's an interesting point. — Banno

Yeah, that's along the lines I was thinking. Something interesting in the way 'logic' is being defined. Also interested in this concept of 'reasoning depth', and how the researchers might be identifying that within the experimental conditions.

Strange that this wall of scribbles seems to be trying to point to all sorts of stuff that isn't other scribbles, like mental states, pointing at pictures, and the actual, objective relationship between words and what they mean, regardless of what us "stupid" people think. — Harry Hindu

But it's not 'pointing' to those things. The fact that a word stands in some relationship to some referrant(s) does not in of itself mean that the word must therefore be 'pointing' to it.

Obviously words can't point, so I can only assume that those who believe they do are using the term metaphorically to mean something like that the word draws the listener's attention to the referrant, much like pointing draws the observer's attention to the object.

The problem with this account is that it underdetermines actual word use. I suppose you could (as has been tried) twist every word use example as drawing the listener's attention to something (object, concept, state of mind), but this is utterly trivial as everything falls into that parenthesised list, and following another's talk cannot be done without paying it some minimal attention.

What's missing from the equating of word use with metaphorical pointing (in this astonishingly broad sense) is the ability to then distinguish word use which actually is pointing (in the more traditional sense).

"Look, a golf ball" really is trying to draw your attention to a golf ball. "Duck!", is just trying to get your head out of it's path. I don't care if your attention is drawn to the ball, nor my state if mind, nor the concept of ducking. I don't care if you simply have a Pavlovian response to people shouting "duck!". I just want you to duck. The word may have referrants, but that doesn't mean my use of it is pointing to them.

Experiments have been done to test apes for a capacity to learn simple logic rules. The evidence is they struggle to master more than a step or two of reasoning depth even with training. — apokrisis

Don't suppose you happen to have a citation for this by any chance? I'll find it on Scholar if not, but asking you might be quicker.

Apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting you. — ChrisH

No problem at all, it wasn't that clear, that's why I thought I ought to clarify. My preferred methods for getting at why people believe what they do can be quite confrontational and are often mistaken for an argument in it's own right. I don't avoid making positive claims, just that it's not what I'm doing here.

Isaac is (in my view perfectly reasonably) disputing this claim. — ChrisH

To be clear, I'm not actually disputing the claim so much as trying to find out how the OP (and others) believe it to be the case. I haven't particularly (nor do I really intend to) forwarded my own opinion on the matter, though I'm not hiding it.

That said, you have hit the nail on the head when you say...

It's precisely what's in question here. — ChrisH

If the claim were merely that science can provide useful information to help us make judgements then I doubt even divine command theorists would disagree. The position is clearly that science can somehow actually distinguish a (single?) 'right' answer. It is that position I'm probing.

Then all it takes for a scribble or sound to be a word is for someone to assert it is a word? — Harry Hindu

I didn't say that. I asked you what arbiter of a word's correct use you'd prefer if not mutual understanding?

You got me Isaac, I'm not a scientist. That's why I look to people who are.

https://wapo.st/3fdqWXy — Thomas Quine

What is it in that article which tells you what level of risk is scientifically proven to be appropriate to take relative to the value of individual liberty. I've read it, but it only seems to point to what the risk is, not how we decide whether to take it.

the practice of science has clarified the fact that there can be no inter-subjective force to claims that predict nothing that can be observed and agreed upon. This would seem to be the case with the claim of eternal flourishing. — Janus

Agreed on the principle, though I'm not sure how 'science' showed this, unless you're taking a really broad definition of science. But the point here is that in order for this "science can show us the way" approach to have normative force, it too has to make predictions, the results of which can be observed and agreed upon, and I see no evidence of that in terms of human flourishing which are clear enough to provide guidance in any real moral dilemmas. For example...

IT is obvious that kowtowing to what are baseless ideas of individual liberty has greatly reduced human flourishing — Janus

Obvious to you, maybe, but if you're going to extend the meaning of 'science' to cover 'stuff you reckon after having a look at the newspapers' then I really think that's too broad.

The science on mask-wearing, as I understand it (I'm not following it with spotlight, so I could be wrong) is that there is a reasonable likelihood that mask-wearing will reduce the R value and therefore spread of Covid-19, and that Covid-19 spreading at a high rate will probably cause X number of excess deaths.

Actual experts in their field disagree with both of these positions (the likelihood with which mask wearing is effective overall, and the value of X)

I don't know what the confidence intervals are in actual numbers, but they're not high.

Risks are taken with people's lives for the sake of individual liberty (your freedom to drive a car for example). So it is not the case that 'human flourishing' (among all those who agree with it as a metric) requires that no one's lives are put at risk by anyone's activities - it has been agreed upon that 'flourishing' will contain some activities which carry a risk to others - that sometimes we need to risk life in order to gain a level of freedom which we think worth the risk.

If I take that level to be a 1:500 lifetime risk, where someone else takes that level to be a 1:100,000 lifetime risk, how does science tell us which risk level is worth taking for the benefit of greater freedom? All we've had so far is a furious spewing of data telling us what the risk is. I'm asking how science tells us which risks are worth taking.

What makes some scribble or sound a word, and not just a scribble or sound? — Harry Hindu

You appeared to understand what I meant when I referred to it as a word. Is there some other arbiter of correct language use you have in mind?

"Na" in the musical work cited appears to exemplify (point up) qualities of articulation in an electric guitar riff, etc. — bongo fury

Wow, so the Barber of Seville must have been astonishingly ahead of it's time. Or does "La" point to something different to "Na". Do tell.

compare places where the pandemic is raging out of control at least in part because of a libertarian resistance to mask-wearing and quarantine with those places which at least partly contained the virus by restricting individual liberty. — Thomas Quine

Do you understand what 'science' is? Controlled trials, models, theories, predictions, experiments, statistical analysis, refined models... It's not you reading some newspapers and having a guess.

Notwithstanding that, I asked for the science that tells us that mask-wearing is better than personal liberty in the long term. All you've presented here is a load of anecdotal evidence of how you reckon the conflict played out in the very short term. If you think that's science then please, please don't get involved in anything important.

↪Banno

What other uses does a word have? — Harry Hindu
— Harry Hindu

This sounds like a fun game. We say a word and Harry tells us what it's pointing to. Can I try one...

The "Na" in...

" Na na na na na na na na na na na na na " - My Chemical Romance.

why would someone have invented the polio vaccine, the steam engine, the lightbulb, or the computer if they could just sit around all day. — Outlander

You shouldn't confuse your own selfish laziness for the state of all people.

I'm wondering where you're getting all the moral imperatives from. — Isaac


The same place anyone else gets moral imperatives from, their own reasoning. — darthbarracuda

So your reasoning is...?

Well you're free to ignore whatever you please. — darthbarracuda

I'm aware of that. I'm asking about your thought process, not asking for your permission. You said that people 'should' be more aquatinted and comfortable with suicide. In another response you say people 'ought' to help, and that people ought not to interfere. I'm wondering where you're getting all the moral imperatives from.

Because over a million people attempt suicide every year, and countless more think about it every day. — darthbarracuda

That's just a statement of fact, I'm asking why people 'should' take any action at all about it. I could completely ignore that fact, why should I not?

Is blending a salad wrong? — Noble Dust

Maybe, but that would be the problem of the person who put the salad in, not the blender which blended it. Blenders are supposed to blend whatever is contained in their receptacle (provided it is blendable) when the button is pressed. So long as they do that, they are working. If they stop doing that, they've gone wrong. The point was just that we can no less say this of people even if we turned out to be entirely deterministic machines. Part of that machinery is clearly to have a view on what other such machines are 'supposed' to do, and so part of that machinery can still clearly form a view that such other machines have 'gone wrong'.

people should be more acquainted and comfortable with suicide. It shouldn't be this "other". — darthbarracuda

Why 'should' they?

Robust moral realists do make positive arguments in favor of realism. Cuneo's The Normative Web and Scanlon's Being Realistic About Reasons are two well-regarded books that do just that. — Tarrasque

I'm not really interested in the mere fact that philosophers have made claims in support of moral realism (I took that to be self-evident). If you personally find any of these claims persuasive, I'd be interested to hear why, but the mere fact of their existence is something I already know.

Anyhow, this notion that there are "no ideas" of what an objective truthmaker for realism could be is related to your misguided claim above that moral realists have no positive arguments. You will realize that this just isn't the case if you read more about metaethics and moral philosophy. — Tarrasque

Fair enough. I didn't really word that well. I don't mean that there are literally no suggestions. What I meant was that there are none which have met the standard of a shared reality, such as the idea of predictive inference has had as a truth-maker of claims about the physical world - The claim "things appear to fall toward massive objects at a predictable speed" is made true by repeatedly dropping objects and finding them to do exactly that. Almost everyone on earth agrees that this is the truth-maker of such claims, even 6 month old babies adopt beliefs on the basis of repeatable predictive results. It is fundamental to human cognition. A handful of ideas from some philosophers does not even come close.

Yes, whether or not you think something is true comes down to a "subjective feeling" of whether or not you think it's true. This "subjective feeling" has no bearing on whether or not it actually is true, but it is something we use to assess what seems true. This is necessary to all facts — Tarrasque

No it isn't. Some facts can be tested to refine the sense we have of them seeming true, others cannot. This is a crucial distinction. It might 'seem' true that the mirage is made of water, I can walk up to it to test this 'seeming' and try to drink from it. If it doesn't behave the way I expect water to behave I discard that 'seeming true' and replace it. Most importantly, everyone else on the planet does the same thing with their 'seemings'. So I can talk to anyone else about what a mirage 'really' is and they'll already agree with me about the process by which I refined my idea about what 'seemed to be true'.

A moral claim is not taken to be true in virtue of accounting for everyone's intuitions. — Tarrasque

Again 'accounting for' is just a subjective judgement which will differ in everyone's mind so it doesn't have any impact on reducing the subjectivity of the moral claim in the first place. This is in contrast to 'predicting an outcome' which reduces the subjectivity of claims about what seems to be the case physically. If I say "It seems to me as if the smaller ball will fall slower than the larger ball", and someone else says "It seems to me as if the larger ball will fall slower than the smaller ball" we can reduce the subjectivity in these different intuitions by dropping the two balls and seeing which one falls fastest. If someone says "abortion is wrong" and someone else says "abortion is not wrong" we cannot reduce this subjectivity by seeing which accounts for all moral intuitions. The first person will say "abortion being wrong seems to account for all moral intuitions" and the second person will say "abortion being not-wrong seems to account for all moral intuitions", nothing has become more objective than their original stances.

a theory that what is moral is what maximizes the amount of guitars in the world is likely not congruent with anyone's reflective intuitions about morality. — Tarrasque

This is just because we've learnt to use the word 'moral' in the way others use it. We wouldn't use it to describe something which is outside of common use. That doesn't mean we can in any way refine all the things which are inside common use. If anything with four legs and hairy coat is a 'snarf', then we cannot, from our collection of all things which fit that category, determine which of them is really a snarf. They all are, because they all fit the definition.

If free will is impossible, then talking about the rightness or wrongness of what a person does would make as much sense as talking about the rightness or wrongness of what a blender does. — RogueAI

Are you saying that you've never heard the expression "My blender's gone wrong"?

Those who argue that to mandate mask-wearing is immoral believe that individual liberty and personal choice is more important to human flourishing.

Science can tell us who is right. — Thomas Quine

Really? So what scientific model would you be using to tell whether individual liberty or mandatory mask-wearing is more important to long-term human flourishing? Science can tell us how many more people might die if we don't mandate mask-wearing (let's say studies converge on an average of 10,000 extra deaths with a 95% confidence). Now how does science tell us how many extra deaths at what confidence level outweighs individual liberty?