Quickly looked up some etymology of "objective" on Wiktionary and Etymology Online. The former has a second sense of "Not influenced by the emotions or prejudices" (antonym "subjective"), from French "objectif", which also has a second sense of "objective; impartial" (antonym "subjectif"). The latter says "1610s, originally in the philosophical sense of "considered in relation to its object" (opposite of subjective) ... Meaning "impersonal, unbiased" is first found 1855, influenced by German objektiv" (NB that 1855 is 50 years before Rand was even born). Looked up that German "objektiv" on Wiktionary (because EtymOnline doesn't have it) and it just says "objective (not influenced by emotions)", but lists a bunch of synonyms like "neutral", "unbeeinflusst" (uninfluenced), and "unparteiisch" (impartial, unbiased).

So, this sense of objectivity meaning just impartiality, neutrality, unbiased-ness, and opposition to "subjectivity", comes from way before Rand.

This "objective is what many subjects will agree about" — boethius

That is not objective in the relevant sense. If it matters who or how many people think something, then it’s not objective.

The question is whether you take your point of view, or their point to view, or any particular point of view, to be the end of moral inquiry — i.e. because someone thinks so, such-and-such is moral, to them, but to someone else who thinks differently, the same thing might not be moral — or if it’s possible that one or more of you is wrong in some sense stronger than just that someone else disagrees.

Basically, might you be wrong right now, even though of course you currently think you are right, or is thinking that you are right all that there can possibly be to being right, such that if you later change your mind, what is right then has just changed, but what you’d thought was right before WAS right before (because you thought so), rather than you having been wrong before and now being, at least, less wrong?

It's wrong in my judgement, yes — ChatteringMonkey

Sorry, I guess I phrased that ambiguously.

I meant, is at least one of those judgements (either yours or theirs) wrong?

this particular "term of art" sets up directly the false dichotomy with moral subjectivism — boethius

That's not a false dichotomy though, that's exactly what is meant by it: not "subjective" in the sense of relative to any particular subject.

Even empiricism about reality is "subjective" in that it has something to do with subjects: empiricism appeals to sensory experience, which is had by the subjects of that sensory experience. But besides radical empiricisms like subjective idealism or solipsism, it's not "subjective" in the sense that what any particular subject experiences matters more than any other; the objective empirical truth is that which is available to all subjects' sensory experience, without bias.

Likewise, even if (as I agree) morality has something to do with we subjects, that doesn't mean it has to be "subjective" in the sense that solipsism or subjective idealism are, a sense opposed to "objective". It can just be "subjective" in the sense that empiricism is "subjective", and still possibly be "objective" in the sense that our usual empirical realism is "objective", i.e. unbiased.

Also, "object" in general doesn't only have the one sense that we use of physical objects, as a "being" or "entity". It can also mean "end", "purpose", "aim", "goal", etc. (As in, "the object of this exercise is ..."). A moral object is something that something can be good for. It's basically just a good, a thing to be sought after, what to work toward. Moral objectivity implies that there is something that is actually good to strive for and work toward, rather than just whatever various subjects feel like doing; just like factual objectivity implies that there is something that is actually real to know and understand, rather than just whatever various subjects perceive.

#0
This site can’t be reached, www.ucs.mun.ca took too long to respond. — boethius

It loaded for me, and this is what it says:

2. Moral Objectivism: The view that what is right or wrong doesn’t depend on what anyone thinks is right or wrong. That is, the view that the 'moral facts' are like 'physical' facts in that what the facts are does not depend on what anyone thinks they are. Objectivist theories tend to come in two sorts:
(i) Duty Based Theories (or Deontological Theories): Theories that claim that what determines whether an act is morally right or wrong is the kind of act it is.

E.g., Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) thought that all acts should be judged according to a rule he called the Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim [i.e., rule] whereby you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." That is, he thought the only kind of act one should ever commit is one that could be willed to be a universal law.

(ii) Consequentialist Theories (or Teleological Theories): Theories that claim that what determines whether an act is right or wrong are its consequences.


Utilitarianism is the best known sort of Consequentialism. Its best known defender is John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Essentially, utilitarianism tells us that, in any situation, the right thing to do is whatever is likely to produce the most happiness overall. (The wrong thing to do is anything else.)

So either talking about something we already have a word for ... or talking about Rand. — boethius

I’m actually responsible for that page being only a disambiguation page. It used to be a messy article that wasn’t sure whether it was talking about minimal (universalist) or robust realism, with a few Randians acting like it was about their thing. Shuffling that content off into their respective articles (that already existed) and making that one a disambiguation was part of a general cleanup of metaethics articles I did over a decade ago.

I can only help but notice the close association with Rand and that Randiasm will be taught in this "introduction to Ethics". — boethius

That says that ethical egoism will be taught, not Rand specifically. And like with the Wikipedia article, it does seem appropriate to note that Randians also use this term differently, and distinguish that sense from the generic one.

My Google has 2 and 3 switched compared to yours, FWIW... though I seem to be getting different results now than I did last night, as that one Rand article is now at spot number 10 instead of 6. Above it are two SEP articles that it seems you didn’t get down to:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-relativism/

and

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-objectivity-relativism.html

Which both use “objectivism” throughout to mean the same thing I do here: non-relativism.

Sounds like something someone in a simulation would say. — Mac

If there exists a simulation for someone to be in, then solipsism isn’t true.

Edit: You can critique certain moral conventions of other cultures which you find atrocious. — ChatteringMonkey

And if that culture disagrees with your critique (as they would), is at least one of you wrong in your judgement?

It seems that to do work, we need to subtract from the total amount of energy in a system and if that system depends on the total amount of energy in that system, any extraneous work done with it will bring it to a halt. — TheMadFool

Correct.

How about electricity? Electrons in orbit around an atomic nucleus? I haven't come across claims that electric charge causes space to curve and so the explanation that electrons are actually traveling along a "straight line" in curved space doesn't work. A non-zero amount of work is being done by electrons in orbit then, no? — TheMadFool

Electrons don’t actually orbit, there’s some fuzzy quantum mechanical stuff that goes on there instead. Before QM existed, it was a problem in physics as to why electrons stayed in orbit and didn’t either crash into the nucleus or fly away instead.

For the moral constructivist there also is a correct answer, if we are to take the "full context" into account... because full context also implies moral conventions and personal obligations that may apply in that particular situation. If we are to take the full context into account there doesn't seem to be a whole lot left of what one would consider universal. — ChatteringMonkey

The difference of import here is whether a particular event, the same event, can be simultaneously good and bad to two different observers, both of whom are correct in that judgement. So, somewhere in the world some old man owns a little girl as his personal sex slave. His neighbors thinks that’s fine. Other people half a world away think that’s morally atrocious. Is at least one of those judgements of the same event wrong, or not?

That’s a different question from whether keeping sex slaves is okay if it happens in one country and not okay if it happens in another, i.e. different details of different events.

I've lived in the US my entire life and associating lower-case "objectivism" with Randianism sounds very weird and parochial to my ear, like something only someone who gets all their information from right-wing talk-radio would think. I know you're not that kind of person, quite the opposite, but it seems like you balk at that term like you've only really heard it from that kind of person. Maybe you've had the misfortune to associate a lot more with them than I have. (If it's not clear, I definitely don't sympathize with them).

FWIW, a quick Google for "moral objectivism" shows only #6 out of the top ten results having anything to do with Rand, and the rest using the more general sense that I'm using here.

The "explanation" I offered in the first paragraph - mass curving space - doesn't seem to do the job then, no? — TheMadFool

In the orbiting object's frame of reference, it's not changing velocity. It's going in a straight line. "Straight" just looks curved to us who expect space to be flat. ("Straight" actually does look much much straighter for objects moving at a proper speed, c -- actually, what looks straight is defined by that -- but all the stuff that gets slowed down by the Higgs field etc curves a lot faster per its minuscule distance traveled; hence why such interaction gives rise to rest mass). So it's experiencing no acceleration. "Straight" in a curved spacetime is actually defined by whatever motion happens in the absence of acceleration: whatever path something in free fall takes. An orbit is just a free fall ("ballistic") trajectory that arcs "high" enough to loop back to where it started before hitting the thing it's falling toward.

Also, take another known type of force-at-a-distance, magnetism. I don't recall any scientific claim that magnets bend space and yet it seems possible to put a magnetic object in orbit around another magnet. — TheMadFool

Magnetic field lines spiral toward poles, not in ballistic arcs, so it's not really so easy (if it's even possible) to put magnetic objects in "magneto-orbit" or something around each other. In free fall, they'll move however makes their opposite poles touch, not in nice ellipses around each other.

Regarding perpetual motion machines, my understanding is that the biggest obstacle in constructing such machines is friction - the engineer's arch adversary. However, with force that acts at a distance, friction is not of any concern, no? — TheMadFool

Friction is the first line of concern, and frame dragging is basically a kind of gravity friction, which radiates gravity waves the same way regular friction radiates heat. But even if you did have a completely frictionless system, it would only continue in perpetual motion so long as you didn't extract any energy from it, which would make it at best useful for a battery: put energy in, later take the same amount out, with no loss. Which would still be really useful, but not a source of unlimited free energy like the usual perpetual motion people want them to be.

Frame-dragging is what causes gravitational radiation. Basically, a moving mass moves what "stationary" is relative to it as it moves (this is frame dragging in general; the moving mass "drags spacetime", or at least inertial frames of reference, with it), so an oscillating mass (moving back and forth, like in an orbit) produces waves in spacetime as it drags spacetime back and forth with it, and those waves in spacetime are gravitational radiation.

The main point for an objectivist (and I hope and think most of us are objectivists) is that nothing is ever right just because someone thinks it is right. — Congau

:100: :up: :clap:

Just here to note that keeping is and ought separate doesn’t have to mean rejecting the objectivity of oughts. They can be addressed entirely separately, but still equally.

Sure, but physical state PQR doesn’t equal any chemical state. “Every F is identical to some G” doesn’t entail “Every G is identical to some F”.

So, if you can completely describe all physical states, you can also completely describe all chemical states; but you don’t have to understand the physics talk to do chemistry talk.

Chemistry is not identical to physics — RogueAI

No, but every chemical state is identical to some physical state. But not the other way around: not every physical state is identical to some chemical state.

Perhaps the ethical theory you had in mind is the one called Hedonism or Epicureanism. Both rely on the "pleasure principle" as the arbiter of good & evil, which is indeed the basis of egocentric self-interest. But as an ethical principle it lacks the Altruism necessary for the Public Good, and it provides no reason for Deferred Gratification essential for mature human behavior. :smile: — Gnomon

Hedonism isn’t egotism. Utilitarianism is a hedonistic and altruistic moral theory.

Also, even egotistic hedonism can support delayed gratification out of enlightened self-interest.

Except no one thinks chemistry is identical to physics or subatomic particles — RogueAI

No one except basically everyone. If you model the physics of a system of particles that bind together into atoms and molecules that then interact with each other, you end up modelling chemical reactions for free. But, you could also just talk about the chemical reactions, without having to talk about that physics stuff at all. One reduces to the other, but not vice versa.

You've just got the relation backward: mental states are a kind of brain state, and talking about brain states can tell you things about mental states, but not necessarily vice-versa.

Like how a description of subatomic particles can tell you what's going on in chemistry, but you don't have to know anything about that deep physics to talk about chemistry.

Frame-dragging does very, very slightly slow down the Earth's orbit around the sun. We can see this more notably in the case of very very massive objects orbiting very very close to each other, e.g. two black holes. The reason they get closer together (and eventually merge), and in the process give off a bunch of gravitational waves that we can now detect, is that they gravitationally sap each other's orbital energy (via frame dragging), which energy goes into powering the gravitational waves. The same thing happens to the Earth and sun, just on a much, much smaller scale, because they're so tiny compared to black holes, and relatively far apart.

Even if it weren't for that, though, two objects in perpetual orbit around each other still wouldn't be a perpetual motion machine in the ordinary sense, because you couldn't get any useful work out of the system without then slowing it down. If frame dragging wasn't a thing, and two bodies were in a perfect orbit together, they would continue like that forever so long as you didn't try to take any energy away from either of them. If you did take some energy away, then they would get closer, and eventually stop orbiting each other when they merged.

You're stretching the ideas of "communication" and "information" too broadly to justify this. — Tarrasque

I'm using the terms as they are used in modern physics, for the "in principle" cases. The more colloquial senses of the terms that you seem to want are merely "in practice" cases.

Even communication between your floating blob brains could be facilitated, if for example some alien being came by, read one's mind with super tech scanners, beamed a message about that into another's mind with super tech transmitters, and so on back and forth. So long as communication of information, in the physics sense, is in principle possible, then you could concoct some ludicrous way around whatever ludicrous "but what if they can't talk to each other" scenario.

Do you think that if no people existed to make empirical measurements of things, nothing would exist? — Tarrasque

Observers don't have to be humans -- again, using the modern physics sense of the term "observer". If a rock floating through space has "no way of telling" that some other object exists, in that that other object doesn't affect the rock in any way at all, neither directly nor by affecting something else that affects the rock, then that other object cannot meaningfully be said to be in the same universe as the rock -- they are completely causally isolated from each other.

I've kind of lost track of what this subthread has to do with the topic though. It seems like we're talking about ontology and arguments for or against physicalism. Was this just because you reject physicalism and so see no reason to reject moral non-naturalism's non-physical objects?

"If there is a beer, then get me one" makes sense, while "If get me a beer, then there is a beer" does not and might as well be gibberish. The disjunctive form of the latter is "There is a beer or not get me a beer." I wouldn't be so hasty to claim that conditional imperatives make "perfect sense."

"If the saints ought to be praised, then the demons ought not to be praised" does not seem equivalent to "if you praise the saints, then don't praise the demons." "You praise the saints" could be true while "the saints ought to be praised" is false. — Tarrasque

Now you're talking about encoding a different kind of conditional again.

First we had conditionals purely relating hypothetical states of affairs to each other, "x being F implies x being G" style, and that was no problem.

Then you brought up implications between imperatives or moral propositions, "be(x being F) implies be(x being G)" style. I've since explained how that's not a problem.

Now you've brought up implications that are apparently between indicative/descriptive/factual and imperative/prescriptive/moral propositions. I've already addressed this nicely in a post about Forrester's Paradox (the Gentle Murder Problem) before, so I'll just quote that post here:

That's not the only way of encoding the "if you murder, you ought to murder gently" sentence into deontic logic though. It's not even the one Forrester himself uses. Forrester encodes it as "Smith murders Jones" implies "Smith ought to murder Jones gently", which then suggests that in any case that Smith does murder Jones, that is the right thing to do (provided he did so gently). That no murder is ever wrong, so long as it's happens, and it's gentle. If it's not gentle then it's wrong, and if it doesn't happen, then it's wrong. That's the weird thing about Forrester's encoding.

An alternative encoding, which I prefer, is to take the entire conditional "if Smith murders Jones then Smith murders Jones gently" and say that that whole thing is obligatory: it's not that there's an obligation that holds in the case of certain facts, it's that there's a conditional relationship between obligations. It's only if you ought to murder than you ought to murder gently, not just if you do murder.

The usual objection to that solution is that "if P then Q" is logically equivalent to "Q or not P", so obliging "if Smith murders Jones then Smith murders Jones gently" is equivalent to obliging "Smith murders Jones gently or Smith doesn't murder Jones" (which is fine by me so far), and therefore "Smith murders Jones gently" satisfies the obligation: so long as you murder gently, you've still done the right thing.

My retort to that is, as you brought up, the background assumption that you ought to not murder at all. That assumption is the only thing that makes "you ought to murder gently" (and therefore you ought to murder in the first place) sound like an absurd conclusion. But given that assumption, one of the disjuncts of "Smith ought to murder Jones gently or Smith ought to not murder" is ruled out, and the other affirmed: it is not the case that Smith ought to murder Jones gently, because it is not the case that Smith ought to murder Jones, which means it must instead be the case that Smith ought to not murder, which... yeah, he oughtn't. No problem.

To put it another way, "it ought to be that (if you murder then you murder gently)" is also logically equivalent to "it ought to be that (you don't murder un-gently)", which is true if it ought to be that you don't murder at all, which we presume is the case. So there is no problem with this encoding of the sentence in question. — Pfhorrest

So "If there is a beer, then get me one" would be encoded as "be it the case that (if there is a beer you get me a beer)", or equivalently "be it the case that (you get me a beer, or there is no beer)", or "be it not the case that (there is a beer and you don't get me a beer)".

If you still don't see how the Frege-Geach problem presents a challenge to the idea that moral statements are inherently imperative, I'll just leave you with an article that covers the problem and the solutions that have been attempted for it. Considering that you aren't super familiar with this problem, and it is oft considered the predominant challenge for views like yours, I'd suggest that you get more acquainted with it than just talking to me about it.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-cognitivism/#EmbPro — Tarrasque

I'm quite familiar with it already, as I'd hope these ready responses to your objections would demonstrate.

Yes, embedded truth-apt propositions are still in the business of reporting fact: that is, being evaluable as true or false and having no other baggage necessarily attached to them. — Tarrasque

Embedded descriptive propositions are not directly reporting the truth of something, though. "If P then Q" does not report that P is the case; rather, it says that, supposing P were the case, it would report that Q was also the case. If it were a problem for the kind of cognitive imperatives or exhortations that I take moral propositions to be, it would also be a problem for descriptions or reports. Whatever it is that an ordinary non-moral proposition does, it's not directly doing that when embedded in a conditional, any more than an imperative or exhortation or anything else does. But we can solve that problem, in a way that works for both cases.

This is far more plausible than the inverse solution, that is, claiming all descriptive sentences to also be some sort of imperative — Tarrasque

I'm not claiming that all descriptive sentences are some kind of imperative. I'm merely bringing a speech-act analysis to indicative sentences. Impression of descriptive opinions is just ordinary non-moral assertion of facts; I'm not saying that that's doing anything different than what it's ordinarily taken to do. The only new things I'm adding to the mix are to say that we don't only express prescriptive feelings ("desires") and impress descriptive thoughts ("beliefs"), we can also express descriptive feelings, and impress prescriptive thoughts. It's turning the linear dichotomy of only expressing feelings about prescriptive matters, and only impressing thoughts about descriptive matters -- the usual divide held by most of the analytic philosophical world -- and breaking it up into a two-dimensional account, where we can have both impressible thoughts and expressible feelings about either descriptive or prescriptive matters. We can think and say things about prescriptive matters in a way just like we think and say things about descriptive matters, without having to reduce the prescriptions to descriptions; just like we can feel and say things about descriptive matters in a way just like we feel and say things about prescriptive matters, without reducing those descriptions to prescriptions.

People having privilege isn’t a problem. Other people lacking it is. The solution to privilege isn’t to take something away from those who have it, but to give that same thing to those who don’t.

Is that not a kind of relativist?

What you were asking for in your explanation of what you meant by a "moral objectivist" was simply anyone who believes there are "correct" moral evaluations regardless of anyone's opinions or feelings. — ChrisH

Yep, you got it.

No, I don't think I am a moral objectivist (which does not make me a "relativist" in the usual sense - see Pfhorrest's explanations). — SophistiCat

Then are you a nihilist?

If it's not correct because I or anyone says so then just what what is it that determines whether or not a moral evaluation is "is correct for everyone to make". — ChrisH

Different kinds of moral objectivism will give different answers to that. I’m not here in this thread to discuss my answer (already doing that elsewhere), just wondering how many people think there is some answer vs how many don’t. If you think there isn’t or can’t be any such answer, just vote “no”.

I think it's possible for some propositions to be 'correct' regardless of anyone's opinions or feelings (that's pretty much what objective means). — ChrisH

Some moral propositions, not just non-moral ones? If so, vote “yes”.

I think this is a plausible enough account. I don't find it strikingly more plausible than moral opinions just being beliefs, but it works well on its own terms. — Tarrasque

You could if you like think about it in different terms, without really changing anything about it. You could call what I call intentions "moral beliefs", and call desires something like "imperative perceptions", and then talk about "non-moral beliefs" and "non-imperative perceptions", with "belief" and "perception" as the more general terms in place of where I use "thought" and "feeling". Or call perceptions and desires “feelings” as I do, but call all “thoughts” “beliefs” and then separate them into “moral beliefs” and “non-moral beliefs”. I'm really not attached to the language, just the structure of the things named by whatever language. All that matters to me philosophically is that we distinguish the things in these boxes from each other, whatever we decide call them:



Choices of what to call them is a much more superficial matter.

Just as beliefs could be described as perceptions about our perceptions, intentions could be described as desires about our desires. Is something like this what you are implying? — Tarrasque

Something like it, but not quite exactly, because the second-order opinions ("thoughts") each involve both perceiving and desiring things about first-order opinions, it's just a difference as to which type of first-order opinion the reflexive perception-and-desire is about.

It's not clear that an ability to communicate is a necessary feature of conscious beings. I don't find it problematic to imagine a single world that contains three beings who cannot communicate with each other. A conscious being could have no ability to manipulate its own body, for instance. — Tarrasque

This is a matter of principle vs practice again. Anything that can have any causal effect on something else is in principle capable of communicating with it, even if in practice they have no conventional obvious communication ability. (There are some amazing hacks that can get information off of computers not connected to any network, or monitor speech in a room with a computer with no microphone, etc, by using overlooked tiny effects between hardware and software, for example). If two things are causally isolated such that in principle no information about one of them can reach anything that can reach the other one, then from each of their perspectives the other seems not to exist at all, so they’re basically in separate universes.

I certainly wasn't imagining this. I was imagining three men and an elephant, not myself watching three men and an elephant. When we stipulate a hypothetical, just "what if X," it's not required that we assume we are there watching X. I can cogently say "let's assume a hypothetical world where neither of us exist." We couldn't possibly be in such a scenario to observe ourselves. We can still talk about what might be the case if it were true. — Tarrasque

We necessarily imagine from some perspective or another though. If we imagine a world where we don’t exist, we imagine a world that doesn’t contain us as we really are, from some disembodied viewpoint. When we’re imagining the three men and the elephant, we’re imagining it from some viewpoint where we can observe all four of them. But if there isn’t actually any such viewpoint possible, because they’re all so completely isolated from each other, then all we should be imagining is each of their separate viewpoints, from which none of the others can ever seem to exist, nor the whole elephant, so what would it mean to claim that those things do exist, in some way that will never make any noticeable difference to anyone?

This is still running into the Frege-Geach problem.

P1. The saints ought to be praised.
P2. If the saints ought to be praised, then the demons ought not to be praised.
C. The demons ought not to be praised.

An exhortation is "an address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something."
An imperative is "an authoritative command."
The important thing about both of these is that the semantic content of them is, necessarily, an urging. The fact that you class "the saints ought to be praised" as an exhortation means that, by speaking it in P1, I am necessarily urging that the saints be praised. However in P2, I say the same words as in P1, but I don't urge that the saints be praised or not praised. So, it seems that when I say "the saints ought to be praised," the content of my sentence cannot necessarily be any kind of imperative if we want moral modus ponens to work.

This is a problem that typical cognitivists, who would classify "the saints ought to be praised" as a claim purporting to report a fact, do not encounter. — Tarrasque

Conditional imperatives make perfect sense. It helps to remember that material implication is equivalent to a kind of disjunction: “if P then Q” is exactly equivalent to “Q or not P”. I can easily command someone to do Q or not do P, which is the logical equivalent of ordering them to do Q if they do P, or “if you do P, do Q”, without any kind of embedding trouble. It might look like there should be in the “if-then” form, but there’s clearly none in the “or” form which is identical to it.

It might also help to resolve the appearance of the problem if we factor the “be()” out to the whole conditional at once:

be(the saints being praised only if the demons being not praised)

or

be(the demons being not praised or the saints being not praised)

If the meaning of regular descriptive claims has to to impress a belief, this seems like it will subject non-moral modus ponens to the Frege-Geach problem as well. — Tarrasque

If that were a problem, then every account of what people are doing with words would be subject to the same problem. If you take an ordinary indicative sentence to be reporting a fact, as you say, that’s still doing something, but in the antecedent of a conditional is it still doing that same fact-reporting? Whatever solution allows ordinary conditionals to work there, it should also work for whatever else other kinds of speech are doing, so long as there is a “truth-value” that can be assigned to that kind of speech, i.e. each such utterance is either a correct or incorrect utterance of that kind.

Is all this information already written in your book? — Tarrasque

Yes. I used to be doing a series of threads asking people to review chapters of the book itself, but a mod asked me to stop that as too self-promotional. So instead, at their suggestion, I'm just starting discussions about the ideas (that I've already written about) that I expect will be new to people (and skipping over the things that I expect will be old hat and just rehash arguments everyone has had a zillion times).

I’m asking about your views, so correct according to you. But not correct just because you say so, or because anyone says so. Just, do you think that there is something correct, independently of whoever says so?

If not, just answer “no”.

Not philosophy generally, but the "what is the meaning of life?" question is a curse.

The analogy I used to make sense of it when I was finally stricken with it last year, over a decade after I finished a degree in philosophy, is that you have been floating along on the surface of an infinitely deep sea, and it suddenly occurs to you that you're not standing on anything and that that is somehow a problem. But the sea is infinitely deep, so if you try to touch the bottom, to reach down until you find something to stand on, you'll just sink forever and drown. Alternatively, you can realize that the alternative to touching the bottom isn't just reaching your hands up and hoping that SuperJesus will whisk you off into the sky; you'll just drown if you do that too. The pragmatic thing to do is just relax and keep floating, and realize that you don't need to touch the bottom, or for there to be a bottom, for you to keep your head above water -- nor does there need to be some flying savior to pull you up either. You can just float, and that is normal and fine and there was never any other alternative to that (besides drowning) to begin with.

This pragmatic metaphor applies also to more technical philosophical matters like epistemology, where it is analogous to an argument against justificationism, and in favor of critical rationalism. Asking for a chain of justifying reasons "from the ground up" and rejecting anything that can't meet demand leaves you rejecting everything forever, because there is no ground, the water goes all the way down. Instead, just float -- accept whatever seems to be true, for no reason more than it seems so -- and only reject things that would weigh you down -- reject things that have proven themselves false.

In deontology, it's analogous to liberalism. Everything is by default permissible, except things that can be shown bad.

And so on.

You and @Kenosha Kid are the first two to come to mind. He really seems to go back and forth about whether he actually seems like a relativist in practice, throughout his descriptions of his position, but he consistently calls himself one.

I have a vague sense that there have been plenty more in the past, but I'm generally terrible about remembering names anyway, so I can't say who off the top of my head.

:100: :up: :clap:

Given that I think there is no purely rational, or unbiased, way of justifying proposals that some deserve moral consideration and others don't, then I would say that anyone who says that some should be privileged are wrong. So, among those "several people" you referred to only those saying that the same moral consideration is deserved by all would be correct. — Janus

That sounds like moral objectivism as I mean it, then. :up:

(To clarify, the "some" option before didn't mean that only some people matter, but that at least some people in a disagreement about who or what matters must be wrong, because there is such a thing as being right -- in your case, and mine, the right ones being reckoned those who think everyone matters. The "all of them are wrong" option would be moral nihilism, and the "none of them are wrong" option would be moral relativism, which I'd argue is tantamount to nihilism anyway).

Most of what you're saying about partial orderings is morally objectivist in the sense I mean. It's only when you get to that C, D, and E might be "correctly" ranked differently by different people that you get relativist. If it is correct for everyone to assess C, D, and E as equally permissible, and A and B as equally impermissible, then that is a morally objective evaluation. It only becomes relativist if, for example, C is better than D according to one party, and D is better than C according to another party, and both of them are correct about those orderings "to each other" or something.

Well I would say there are facts about what constitutes well-being for any person or even organism. There are also facts about who thinks which human beings' or organisms' well-being matters. — Janus

The question then is which of those facts matters for determining the morality of something. If several people disagree about whose well-being matters (or about what constitutes well-being), are none of them wrong, some of them wrong, or all of them wrong? Only “some” means moral objectivism.

Sounds like a yes then. It was this bit that made me think you meant otherwise:

and who or what different people consider to be others worthy of moral consideration — Janus

As though the facts about well-being depended on who thought whose well-being mattered or something.

I’ve slightly reworded the OP to mention nihilism to hopefully avoid that conflict for others.

If you think that what makes a moral claim correct or not is whether someone agrees with it (so what those different people think changes what is correct from viewpoint to viewpoint), then no.

That option is “no”.

Sorry it's taken to long to get back to this, besides my birthday Saturday my Sunday got really unexpectedly busy.

This can be explained easily in terms of second-order desires. I might have a certain desire, but desire not to have that desire. In such a case, the "desire I wish I had" is not affecting my actions, but the "desire I do have" is. Being a slave to my vices might be my first-order and second-order desires conflicting. If X being good is a belief, I can sincerely hold that X is good and yet not intend to X. While I want-to-want-to-X, I unfortunately don't want-to-X. — Tarrasque

Intentions, as I mean them, are "second-order desires", in the same way that beliefs are "second-order perceptions", though neither in quite so straightforward a way, hence the quotes here. "Thoughts" in general (beliefs and intentions) are, on my account, what happens when we turn our awareness and control inward, look at our "feelings" (desires and perceptions) and then judge whether they are correct or not. To think something is good and to intend it are thus synonymous: the thing that you think is good, that you intend, is the thing that you judge it would be correct for you to desire.

You still might nevertheless not desire it, just like disbelieving an illusion doesn't make you not perceive it, but just as believing is thinking something is true, intending is thinking something is good, which is different from just desiring it (feeling like it's good), just as belief is different from perception (feeling like it's true).

This seems to imply that, in deliberating different options, only the maximal one is "good." This precludes the idea of deliberating between multiple good options. It doesn't follow that just because going to the gym is not the most good, it is not good at all.

"Going to the gym is good, but I don't intend to go to the gym." could reflect that I am not going to the gym because of a conflicting greater good, I agree. But, I can still cogently evaluate going to the gym as good, while not intending to do it. — Tarrasque

The distinction here is between a general evaluation of the goodness of going to the gym, and the goodness of you in particular going to the gym right now in particular. You can intend to regularly go to the gym, think it's good for you to do so, but because your kid just broke a leg and needs to be taken to the hospital, intend not to go to the gym right now, because you think it would be bad if you went to the gym right now instead of taking your kid to the hospital.

Just like how saying "it's true that horses have four legs" means it's generally true that usually horses have four legs, but that doesn't mean some particular horse cannot only have three legs. Sometimes it's false that some horse has four legs.

So, if I understand you correctly, experiencing a first-person appetite is an irreducible ought. I'm still not confident that this is the case. The fact of my appetitive experience is a physical fact, even from the first-person perspective. If I were in pain, I could, say, go through an MRI and verify that I am in fact in pain. Of course, I don't need to do this to have the experience of being in pain. Similarly, I don't have to go through an MRI to verify that I am having a perceptive experience of looking at a painting. If where I have pain, I have an ought, there seems to be a relationship between "me factually being in pain" and "what ought to be the case.". — Tarrasque

An MRI is a third person description of you, not your own first-person experience. Completely regardless of what a third-person description of the mechanics underlying someone's experience of pain, their first-person experience of that pain is what moral judgements are to be measured against. (And NB that "X will hurt" isn't the meaning of "X is bad" on my account; the meaning is something more like "avoid X". Whether it hurts anyone is just part of the criteria to use for judging whether or not to agree to avoid X, to agree that X is bad, just like empirical sensations are the criteria to use for judging whether or not to agree that something is descriptively true).

In the same vein as above, do you think that "I am hungry, yet I ought not to be fed." is some kind of paradox? If "I am hungry" entails "I ought to be fed," it must be

[...]

Bloodlust could easily be defined in terms of an appetite, though. What makes hunger an appetite? It is an experience of a certain sort that can only be satisfied by an actualization through my sensations, in the case of hunger, me being fed. — Tarrasque

This isn't really acknowledging the distinction between experiences and feelings, which is crucial to my account. Experiences aren't propositional; you don't experience that something is true or that something is good. "I am hungry" doesn't directly entail "I ought to be fed"; rather, feeding me is merely one thing that can result in satisfying my hunger. Anything else that could satisfy my hunger would equally suffice; say, some caffeine, which suppresses hunger. In contrast, bloodlust is specifically a desire for someone to hurt, it has propositional content, a particular state of affairs in mind. That state of affairs doesn't have to be realized, on my account, but the experiences in response to which someone desires that state of affairs does, somehow, without disregarding others', to bring about a universally good state of affairs.

(Of course, we'll always fall short of universally good, just like we'll always fall short of universally true belief, but the procedures for how to deal with those shortcomings are topics about epistemology and a part of what's usually considered normative ethics, which I'm planning later threads about; they're not necessary just to talk about what things mean).

It's the blind men and the elephant again. The tail-guy's perception of a rope doesn't have to be satisfied for a universally true description of what they're feeling, but the sensations he has that inspire him to perceive a rope do need to be satisfied: to be true, the answer "it's an elephant" needs to account for why tail-guy perceives something rope-like, and thankfully it does.

Likewise the sadist's bloodlust, his desire to kill, doesn't have to be satisfied for a universally good prescription, but his appetites, the experiences that inspire him to desire to kill, do need to be satisfied, somehow, or else there is still some bad going unresolved, some suffering that he is undergoing without respite. That satisfaction could involve some other outlet, some kind of medication, some other therapy, something, but it doesn't have to (and of course shouldn't) involve him actually killing people.

But there is still an elephant. They may not be making methodological mistakes, but their perceptions of various objects where there is in fact an elephant represents a deviation from what is actual. — Tarrasque

Is there actually an elephant, when there is no possibility in principle of anybody ever telling that there is one instead of e.g. a rope? Bearing in mind that if there is no way in principle of them communicating with each other or anything they have mutual access to, then on what grounds could you say they even exist together in the same world? When we imagine this, we're imagining that you and I have some kind of privileged access where we're aware of all three of them and of the elephant, but they're all absolutely blocked off from awareness of each other or of any part of the elephant besides their tiny little bit. But if we can interact with them (to observe them), and with the whole of the elephant (to observe it), then in principle there is a communication channel, through us, by which they could observe each other and the whole of the elephant. You can't really seal parts of the universe off from each other completely like that, without effectively removing them from each other's universes, separating them into separate bubble worlds, in which case why couldn't different things be true in different worlds?

I definitely don't think that we necessarily interpret it as an utterance. "Expression" and "impression" seem to be, as you have so far used them, properties related to what a speaker is intending with their words. What you're now saying implies that if I take someone to be impressing a belief on me, they are in fact doing so.
In the case of the dead bugs, applying "expression" or "impression" in the intentionary sense is a clear error. What am I applying them to? The dead bugs? The piece of paper? If a piece of paper that was written on by nobody can cogently be claimed to impress/express beliefs, the terms become a lot less meaningful. I can similarly say that a mountain impresses on me the belief that it is large when I look at it. — Tarrasque

All linguistic meaning is inferred by the audience about the speaker. If you read the bugs as words and not just as bugs, you're already reading them as though they are an utterance by some speaker. What kind of utterance you interpret them as determines how and whether you will evaluate the truth (in the broad sense, i.e. correctness) of them. Actual speakers use words that have agreed-upon meaning in the linguistic community to try to convey various meanings to their audience, but it's always up to the audience what meaning they will take away from it. If there is no actual speaker (or writer, etc) at all, then there is no actual meaning being conveyed in the first place. If an audience nevertheless reads in meaning to something that's actually meaningless (like a random pattern of dead bugs), it's up to the audience to read in what their imaginary speaker meant to convey by their message.

E.g. if the dead bugs say "I don't like your hat", but there isn't actually anybody who doesn't like anyone's hat who wrote that, the dead bugs just look like that sentence, what meaning should a reader take away from it? Who should they feel insulted by? Nobody, because nobody actually wrote that.

With these clarifications, you will have to retreat to the weaker claim that they only resolve Moore's paradox from the perspective of someone who assigns impression/expression to the sentence in the same way that you have. If their evaluation of impression/expression differs from yours, they are still correct in taking Moore's paradox to self-contradict. You might be fine with this conclusion. — Tarrasque

Sure, if they take Moore's sentence to mean "I believe X but I don't believe X" or "X is true but X is false" or something like that, then they can take it to be contradictory. My account of impression/expression is an account of why it seems like it shouldn't seem contradictory, but nevertheless it does seem contradictory, i.e. why this is a "paradox" and not just an obvious either contradiction or non-contradiction. Someone who took Moore's sentence to mean one of the things above wouldn't see anything paradoxical about it, but people generally do, so some explanation of the differences and relations in meaning between "I believe X" and "X is true" is needed to account for why they do.

This restructuring alone does not resolve the Frege-Geach problem. A statement of the formal form be(P being Q) is a prescription. Its utterance prescribes a state of affairs. This is clear in the case of the atomic sentence P1: be(X being F), or "it ought not to be the case that there is stealing," if you'd rather. Prescription is the semantic content of that proposition. In the context of the antecedent in P2(IF be(X being F), then...), the semantic content of "be(X being F)" does not prescribe. We see, then, that be(X being F) in P1 and be(X being F) in P2 have different semantic content. In classical logic, we would now have to use different variables to represent them, and our modus ponens would no longer be valid. — Tarrasque

Remember that "be(x being F)" is a shorter form of something like "it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(x being F)". Likewise "is(x being F)" is a shorter form of something like "it-is-the-case-that-there-is(x being F)". These are meant to be equivalent to "x ought to be F" and "x is F"; we're just pulling the "is"-ness and "ought"-ness out into functions that we apply to the same object, the same state of affairs, "x being F".

So if "if x ought to be F, then..." is no problem, then "if be(x being F), then ..." should be no problem either, because the latter is just an encoding of the former in a formal language meant to elucidate the relations between "is" and "ought" statements about the same state of affairs.

I only use the imperative form of the copula, "be", to name that function, because I take "oughts" to be a kind of generalization of imperatives: "you ought to F" and "you, F!" are equivalent on my account, but you can say things of the form "x ought to be G" that can't be put into normal imperative form. "Oughts" are more like exhortations than imperatives: "Saints be praised!" isn't an order to the saints to go get praised, but it is basically the same as a general imperative to everyone (but nobody in particular) to "praise the saints!" and also basically the same as "the saints ought to be praised", which likewise implies that everybody (but nobody in particular) ought to "praise the saints!"

The importance of using "truth," for me, is the consistency with the vernacular in logic. Formal logical relationships, most crucially entailments, are based in the truth or falsity of their propositions. Claiming that something is "not truth-apt" should imply that it is not evaluable in formal logic, not usable to form valid arguments, etc. Since you use "correctness" in the same way "truth" is used in logic, I think it is important to call it truth. — Tarrasque

Perhaps we could more neutrally distinguish them as "cognitive truth" and "descriptive truth", since the most important feature of my moral semantics is rejecting descriptivism without rejecting cognitivism. On my account moral claims are "truth-apt" in the sense that matters for cognitivism, but not "not truth-apt" in the sense that matters for descriptivism. They're not telling you something about the way the world is, but they are nevertheless fit to be assigned yes/no, correct/incorrect, 1/0, "truth" values.

The particular words used to distinguish these two concepts don't really matter to me at all, just that they are distinguished, and not conflated together: that not only descriptions are taken to be apt to bear the kind of boolean values needed to do logic to them.

I have your principle of descriptive truth down, I think: "X is a descriptive truth if and only if X is, in principle, empirically verifiable as true."

What I'm after is a similar principle for your establishment of moral correctness. "X is a correct prescription if and only if..." what? You have explained your idea of prescriptive correctness, but I've found these explanations a little vague. I'm looking for a definition of what "prescriptive correctness" really is, in the form of a principle, like the above for descriptive truth. I'd have trouble trying to just throw "appetitive experiences of seeming good or bad in the first-person" into a principle like that without horribly misinterpreting and butchering what you're saying. — Tarrasque

I would state the parallel principles instead as:

"X is descriptively true if and only if X satisfies all sensations / observations"

and

"X is prescriptively good if and only if X satisfies all appetites".

Claims that something is descriptively true or that something prescriptively good can both be "cognitively true" / correct in the same way, they can both carry boolean values that can be processed through logical functions.

But this is getting away from mere philosophy of language; I almost went into a huge multi-paragraph thing about epistemology and the ethical equivalent thereof here.

The meanings, on my account, of ordinary non-moral claims, and moral claims, respectively, are to impress upon the audience either a "belief", an opinion that something is (descriptively) true, that it is, that reality is some way; or an "intention", an opinion that something is (prescriptively) good, that it ought to be, that morality is some way.

It's technically a different question as to what kinds of states of affairs can be real or can be moral, and then a further question still as to how we sort out which of such states of affairs actually is real or moral to the best of our limited abilities. Those are topics I intend to have later threads about: ontology and epistemology, and two halves of what's usually reckoned as normative ethics which I term "teleology" and "deontology".

The relationship between "murder is wrong" and "you ought not to murder" is that "you ought not to do what is wrong." The non-naturalist has no problem assuming this premise, and neither do you. In fact, you seem to espouse(in agreement with many realist positions) that what is wrong is implicitly that which you ought not to do. If this counts as crossing the is-ought gap, then you cross it yourself when you hold "murder is wrong" as interchangeable with "it ought not to be the case that there is murder." Also — Tarrasque

The difference is that I'm not claiming "X is wrong" describes some kind of abstract moral property of wrongness of object X, and that on account of that property, we ought not to do X. I claim that "X is wrong" just means "X ought not happen", which in turn is a more general, universal form of sentences like "(everybody) don't do X" or "let X not happen!"

Somewhat, but also somewhat not. Take the example of information on the edge of the observable universe. It is, even in principle, impossible for us to verify that information. This is because part of what it means to be us is that we are here, and if we cannot verify some information from here or somewhere we can get to from here, it is not verifiable at all to us. You could stipulate that if someone was on the edge of our observable universe, that information would be verifiable to someone. So, in one sense it is verifiable "in principle," but it is not verifiable "to us" in principle. — Tarrasque

This seems related to the black hole information paradox. The edge of the universe is the cosmic event horizon. It was a problem that information could seem to be lost when falling across a black hole event horizon. If it had been actually lost, then so far as I know, just like particles actually having no definite position, the universe would actually be indeterminate about that state of affairs. If the universe has any information about some state of affairs, if that state of affairs actually exists, then it will have some impact on something about the universe; and even if we're not technologically capable of reconstructing the information from that impact, that information has nevertheless reached us in the form of that impact.

That black hole information paradox got solved in a way that the information wasn't actually lost, because the infalling particles have effects on the stuff happening right at the event horizon, which does eventually bring the information back to us in the form of Hawking radiation. It seems like lightspeed particles moving away from us at the edge of the universe could have some impact on the other stuff there at the edge of the universe that is still capable of communicating with us, and so information about that escaping stuff could still make its way back to us in principle.

If you are going to assert that mathematical truths are merely truths of relations between ideas, belonging in the middle of your fork, you need to support that. This would require an account of analyticity. Distinguishing between "things that are true by definition" and "things that are true in virtue of a contingent fact" is much harder than you might initially think. — Tarrasque

I have a whole thing about the contingent facts about definitions (and, hence, analytic a posteriori facts) that I'm going to do a later thread about.

"What conditions would a person have to satisfy for them to have knowledge of X?"
The latter is my question to you. If what can be true is constrained by what we can know, then before we ask what is true, we ought to ask what we can know. Before we know what we can know, we must know what it is to know at all. So, what conditions does a person have to satisfy to have knowledge of X? — Tarrasque

I plan to do a later thread on this topic, so I'll defer answering until then.