Alonzo Fyfe

This provides a nice compact way to pinpoint the three most basic errors in your criticism to date.

(1) The interpretation of DU as "denying that moral assertions were prescriptions" was always your interpretation and never a part of what I had actually claimed. I objected to your concept of "prescription". You have responded since then with the question-begging assumption that your concept of "prescription" was without error and, therefore, I am saying that desire utilitarianism is not prescriptive. Thus, you have continued to argue against a straw man that you have constructed.

(2) Regarding your claim that I said that moral statements are just descriptions of a naturalist property. What I actually said that moral statements are statements that are both descriptive and prescriptive. All value statements describe relationships between states of affairs and desires. In doing so, they are descriptively true or false. At the same time, they are prescriptive for those people who have the desires spoken of in the description.

(2) As for "denying that moral claims were judgmentally internal?", you are confusing statements about the causal conditions for an action and the truth of a proposition. All human actions -- and uttering a proposition is a human action -- are done for the purpose of fulfilling the desires of the agent (given his beliefs). However, the truth of the proposition uttered does not depend in any way on what the agent desires or believes (except statement of the form "I desire . . ." or "I believe . . ." -- which still have an objective truth value.)

The person who utters, "The earth is round" does so because he thinks that this action, taken in the context of other actions, will best fulfill his desires, given his belief. But the truth of the proposition, "the earth is round" is independent of the agent's desires or beliefs. You cannot infer from the fact, "he only said that to advance some personal agenda" to "advancing a personal agenda is a part of what 'the earth is round' actually means.' This has been an on-going fallacy in your reasoning, confusing the meaning of a proposition with the motivation for uttering it.

Clearly your prhase, "...motivated to condemn or praise DU-moral acts," references a speech-act. All intentional actions (including speech acts) are best explained in terms of the beliefs and desires of the agent who is performing the action.

So, I congradulate you on once again defeating this straw man that you have constructed. If you have anything that you would like to say about desire utilitarianism as I have presented it, I would like to hear it.

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

Your last post, though addressed to Hiero5ant, deals with some of the very issues that I’ve been addressing, so I’ll reply to it. It will be interesting to see whether Hiero5ant and I have the same take on this.

Yes, but you never denied that DU implies that moral assertions are not prescriptive in our sense. The fact that you don’t “accept�? that sense is irrelevant. It’s our sense that’s relevant here, because calling a statement “prescriptive�? in that sense means that it intrinsically involves prescribing, or recommending, or advising, or expressing a preference for, an action. This is the sense in which you have repeatedly stated that moral statements are not prescriptive. But now you say “The “[b]whole point[/i] of a moral statement is to direct others to regard the object of evaluation with condemnation and punishment�?! Surely anything that can be called the “whole point�? of a statement independently of the context must be part of the meaning of that statement. And if part of the meaning of a moral statement is that it “directs others to regard the object of evaluation [i.e., the act in question] with condemnation�?, surely this qualifies as “prescribing or recommending or advising�? people not to do this sort of thing? If directing everyone to condemn and punish an act doesn’t qualify as “prescribing�? that it not be done (in the sense I described earlier), I don’t know what does. In any case, if it doesn’t, it merely means that the term “prescriptive�? doesn’t quite capture what Hiero5ant and I have been getting at when we’ve tried to point to the essential quality that statements must have to qualify as moral statements, but which statements like “It would be right to do Y�? or “Smith ought to do Y�? lack in DU. A statement whose entire content consists of expressing the proposition that a certain state of affairs holds (i.e., that a certain act or class of acts and the set of all desires stand in a certain relationship to one another) does not “direct�? anyone to do anything. It doesn’t even suggest that Y is in some sense the “thing to do�?; that Y is in some sense preferable to the alternatives. To get to anything like this you need an evaluation of some kind. For example, you might say that the statement “Smith ought to do Y�?, in addition to expressing the proposition that Smith’s doing Y would maximize desire-fulfillment, also expresses an evaluation of this result as preferable in some sense to the alternatives. But this additional evaluative content is precisely what DU denies: it claims that the descriptive content is the entire content of the statement. Absent any evaluative content, “Smith ought to do Y�? doesn’t express or imply anything whatsoever about “what to do�?; it’s merely a neutral observation about the effects of Smith’s doing Y.

Yes, but in your sense of “prescriptive�?. In that sense, “prescriptive�? is just a subcategory of “descriptive�?. When you say that moral statements are “both�? descriptive and prescriptive, you’re merely saying that (according to DU) a moral statement expresses the proposition that a certain state of affairs obtains, and that the state of affairs in question involves desires. It remains true that moral statements are just descriptions of a naturalist property. The fact that this property has properties of its own doesn’t change anything.

That’s nonsense. Saying that Smith’s doing Y would fulfill a desire that Jones has is not “prescriptive�? in any reasonable sense for either Smith or Jones. It’s not “prescriptive�? for Smith because the desire in question isn’t a desire that he has, and it’s not prescriptive for Jones because Jones isn’t the one who has the choice of whether to do it. There’s no question of “prescribing�? to Jones that Smith do Y, and the existence of a desire in Jones isn’t in any recognizable sense “prescriptive�? for Smith. (A better choice of language – i.e., one that has some relationship to how the words involved are actually used by competent English-speakers – would be to say that the existence of such a desire is not motivating for either Smith or Jones – not for Smith because it’s not a desire of his, and not for Jones because nothing can motivate Jones to perform an act of Smith’s, any more than anything can motivate me to repeal the law of gravity or change the past.)

Not at all. To say that a statement is “judgmentally internal�? means that a judgment (an evaluation, if you will) is an intrinsic part of its meaning. What Hiero5ant and I are saying is that moral statements are judgmentally internal. Obviously when someone says “Smith should do Y�? he is ordinarily expressing his preference that Smith do Y rather than something else, just as a person saying “X is true�? is ordinarily expressing his belief that X is true. But “I believe that X is true�? isn’t an intrinsic part of the meaning of “X is true�?; it’s simply the case that when someone says “X is true�? it’s usually (in part) because he believes that X is true, and because we know empirically that this is so, we can reasonably infer from the fact that someone says “X is true�? that he probably believes it. Thus ordinary descriptive statements are not “belief internal�?: an expression of belief in the truth of a statement is not an intrinsic part of its meaning. The claim is that moral statements are fundamentally different. One cannot, as a matter of logic, consider that Smith should do Y without considering praising Smith for doing Y or blaming him for not doing Y to be appropriate responses. If someone considers blaming Smith for doing Y to be an appropriate response, he does not in fact consider that Smith should do Y. (Again, it would be necessary to add something about universalizability to make this rigorous, but I don’t think that this is where our disagreement lies.) By way of contrast, according to DU theory, someone for whom the maximizing of overall desire-fulfillment is not the “highest good�? will quite naturally often consider that “Smith should do Y�? in the DU sense but consider blaming Smith for doing it or praising him for not doing it to be appropriate responses. Which is why Hiero5ant and I say that the DU analysis fails to capture a vital element - the “essence�?, if you will - of the meaning of moral language as ordinary, competent English-speakers use it. Because if someone considers blaming Smith for doing Y or praising him for not doing it to be appropriate responses, we would ordinarily (i.e., when we're using moral language in the ordinary way, rather than Fyfe-speak) say that he considers that Smith should not do Y. Since this is the only thing about “Smith should [or should not] do Y�? that’s truly independent of context, it would seem to follow that that’s what it means – or at least an intrinsic part of what it means - (in ordinary use) to say that someone considers that Smith should not do Y. How else do we distinguish between something that’s an intrinsic part of the meaning of a statement and something that’s just an incidental part of the meaning in some contexts?

Hiero5ant

We don't seem to be disagreeing much anymore, except for the word "observations" in the above. I see people persuading people, and when I say "power" I mean that in the manifold Foucaultian sense encompassing political, military, economic, cultural, social, emotional, religious, aesthetic, etc. I certainly didn't mean to imply that moral change is strictly a matter of physical force, just of the exercise of "power" broadly construed.

Of course, I don't think ontological queerness is any kind of prima facie evidence against anything in particular. The point is that eliminating them where possible is a desideratum of explanatory models, and that as far as the explicit theory of antirealism (and the implicit assumptions in psychology) is concerned that desideratum is present.

I had to run a search on "Bomb" and "internal", and the best candidate was this post from May, which I assume you're referring to. I plead out-of-state wedding that week.

The relevant passages are these:

As I see it, in the quoted passages you:

1) Deny that all prescriptive terms share the same phenomenological aspects.
2) Claim that certain kinds of prescriptive statements aren't judgmentally internal because you can "say them but not mean them".
3) Define "cognitive" in such a fashion that it applies to every possible sentence.
4) Assert that an anti-realist who uses ordinary language "refutes himself".

Of these, only #2 bears on the truth of judgement-internalism, and it's frankly a rather weak objection. Realism and cognitivism debates are about what people mean when they use language appropriately, not about what they don't mean when they use language deceptively.

And I was being charitable when I talk about what can "never be explained" -- I was operating from the implicit assumption that you and I are both interested in explaining things correctly, because we are both interested in getting at the truth of the matter. I assume that when my interlocutor reads "can't be explained" it is interpreted as "can't be accurately explained", not "it's not even modally conceivable that this could be the case."

Once again, here is how the exchange has gone. I say that moral antirealism is a parsimonious, good explanation. You respond by saying "but one can always make nonparsimonious, bad explanations which are logically consistent!" What else is left?

No, I do not. It is an illustrative analogy. Analogies are not evidence. It is an example of a nonrational process occurring within the brain which gives rise to the appearance of representation of mind-independent facts about the world.

None of them. It is an analogy. It is an attempt to illustrate for readers an example of the epistemic virtue of parsimony as applied to theoretical explanations of human speech acts. That is all. Period.

I specifically made it an analogy to antirealism, not noncognitivism.

Once again, I have never, ever said or even implied that strange things don't exist. I have said that their elimination is a desideratum of explanatory theories. I believe they refer to real properties because there is a reasonably determinable rule for applying them, there is known (or strongly suspected to be) an empirically informed reductive description of them, and they play a role in the observation-conditionals of scientific theories. They're spookier than direct relations of sense-data, but not as spooky as the miracle of transsubstantiation. YMMV.

Who's using this taxonomy? Send them my way and I'll set 'em straight.

Hiero5ant

Alonzo Fyfe :

I have very little to add to BDfKG's last post, except to 1) dissent from the notion that propositions are not "belief-internal" -- but this is irrelevant to the present discussion -- and 2) reiterate that you're continuing to legislate your private definition of "prescriptive" into everyone else's language. There are real debates in philosophy about whether moral statements are judgment-internal, but there are no debates among current philosophers over whether moral statements are "Fyfe-judgment-internal", because no one but you uses that definition. Desires are not prescriptive, sentences which command, praise, enjoin, condemn, approve, or disapprove of actions or things are prescriptive. I can't emphasise "sentences" enough.

But the deeper criticism is that even under your own, private, idiosyncratic definition of "prescriptive", it is flatly false to say that the "whole point of a moral statement is to direct others to regard the object of evaluation with condemnation and punishment." There is nothing -- nothing -- about the property of desire-maximization that is inherently more laudatory or condemnatory than any other naturalistic property, like "taking place on a Tuesday" or "fulfills Andrew's desires". However, there is something inherently laudatory or condemnatory in words like "good", "bad", "wicked", "awesome", "great", "pathetic", "virtuous", "obligatory", "right", because such words are judgmentally internal. Once again, moral terms are inherently prescriptive (in the sense that everyone but you uses the word), but statements of desire-maximization are not inherently prescriptive (in the sense that everyone but you uses the word). Therefore, desire-maximization is not the referent of moral language. Q.E.D.

Hiero5ant

I missed the editing window on this. Please read "sentences" as "speech acts" in the above.

Alonzo Fyfe

Greetings:

No. I have disputed what it takes to make a sensible recommendation. A sensible recommendation says that "R" (the recommended state or action) "is such as to fulfill the desires in question."

Anybody who recommends R, where R is not such as to fulfill the desires in question, is recommending something which there is no reason to bring about. No real reason. No reason that exists in the real world. Because the only reasons that actually exist are desires.

If you recommend R, the question comes back, "Why R?"

And if the answer to this question does not refer to some "desires in question", then the recommendation can be thrown away. It is grounded on fiction. Baseless.

Furthermore, the "desires in question" need not be those of the speaker. If I recommend a movie to you, it does not have to be on the basis that the movie fulfills my desires, or even that your going to the movie fulfills my desires, but on the basis of my belief that seeing the movie will fulfill your desires.

Then the question comes up, "Whose desires are we talking about when we make moral recommendations?"


Of course it does.

However, when I prescribe a movie for you to see, I make my best guess as to which movie will fulfill your desires, not mine. We may like entirely different types of movies. Yet, it makes perfectly good sense for me to say, "Actually, I didn't like it, but I think you would enjoy it. If you're not doing anything this evening, you should go see it."

Accordingly, when I prescribe for society as a whole, it makes no sense to base that description solely on my own desires -- my desires count only as a portion of that society. Prescribing for a society looks at all of the desires in society. Saying, "Society should direct its tools of condemnation and punishment against X", I am not saying that, if society does this, it will tend to fulfill my desires alone, because my desires are the only desires that count. Such a statement makes sense as a recommendation to the society as a whole if it is an act that would tend to fulfill the more and the stronger of the desires that exist in that society as a whole.

As a result, it is quite possible that the actions that it makes sense for society to condemn and to punish are, at the same time, actions that I desire to perform. No person can look at their own likes and dislikes and determine what it is best to prescribe for society as a whole. The inference simply is not valid.


I do not see how anything else is required. If a person has a desire that 'X', then he has a motivating reason to take actions that make or keep 'X' true. Pointing out that 'X' will be true if you do 'S', then this is all the direction you need to do 'S'.

Inventing something above and beyond this to do the 'directing' is entirely unnecessary.

Again, I see no reason to take 'preferable' to require anything more than 'fulfills more and stronger desires than the alternative.' You assert that something else is needed, but I do not see the need.

In particular, when those who suggest that a "something else" is needed, suggests that this is something that exists in a realm distinct from the universe of "is" in which we live but in a different type of reality -- the realm of 'ought', that is distinct and separate from 'is' yet, somehow, interacts with it. This 'something else', I am told, is something which cannot be objectively studied, and has no role to play in true or false propositions.


Allow me to interrupt right here for a minute.

I "might" say this, but I wouldn't. I have spent quite a few electrons refuting the idea that actions either do or should aim at maximum desire fulfillment.

My view is that the term 'ought' refers implicitly to some set of reason for action, and it says that there are more reasons for doing X than for not doing X. Furthermore, I assert that the only reasons for action that exist are desires.

We get the "desires in question" by looking at the context of the sentence, and that the statement is true if and only if Y will fulfill the more and the stronger of those desires than any alternative.

However, it is quite possible that something can be such as to fulfill the more and the stronger of one set of desires, but not fulfill the more and the stronger of a different set. Thus, "If you want to rob a convenience store without being recognized you should wear a mask," is one 'ought' statement that refers only to the desire to rob the convenience store without being recognized. However, it is not the case that the agent has a moral obligation to wear a mask. Moral obligation refers to a different set of desires. "Good" desires. Desires that praise, blame, reward, and punishment can bring about and which tend to fulfill other desires.

As written, your statement is ambiguos as to which desires the 'ought' is referring to. It has no context. The statement "Smith ought to do Y" is like the statement "Jim is taller."

Taller than what?

Until you have a reference, something more is, in fact, needed before you can judge the statement true or false. Something is lacking. However, it is not some strange type of prescriptivity. What's missing are the desires that the person making the statement is saying that 'Y' will fullfill.

[Note, again, 'ought' refers to reasons, not just desires, but desires are the only reasons that exist.]

Again, this takes me back to what I said about "preferable" above. The only sense of "preferable" that I need is the sense that says, "fulfills the more and stronger of the desires than any alternative."

You keep saying that I need this "evaluation" to explain these things, but I see no more of a need for them than I see a need to postulate a designer to handle gaps in evolutionary explanations.

What do I need it for? What can I do with such an entity (that one can show is clearly doable) that I can't do without it?


And a desire is a mental state that motivates an agent to bring about a particular state of affairs in which the thing desired is made or kept real. And that desires are the only reasons for action that exist.

So, if a person has a desire that 'P', and I can show him that 'P' is true in 'S', then that person has a motivating reason to act so as to bring about 'S'. Even if bringing about 'S' thwarts other desires, he has a motivating reason to bring about 'S'. It simply gets outweighed by stronger reasons to not bring about 'S'.


Yes it is.

It is prescriptive for Jones. It tells him that he has a motivating reason to find some way to get Smith to do Y. Jones may not be able to perform Smith's action, but he has the capacity to alter the world in ways that will influence Smith's action.

It is also prescriptive for Smith, in a sense, because, now that Smith knows that Jones has a motivating reason to get him to do Y, he can use this in fulfilling his own desires. Perhaps Jones would be willing to bargain. Perhaps he needs to worry about the possibility that Jones may resort to threats and violence. Either way, Jones' motivating reasons are relevant to the choices that Smith makes.

On the case of moral 'ought', this is the prescription that I am talking about.

Moral 'ought' tells society that a whole that they have a lot of motivating reasons to use praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to strengthen malleable desire-fulfilling desires and inhibit malleable desire-thwarting desires. It also warns people not to acquire these desires that others have reason to condemn and punish, and to nurture desires that others have reason to praise and reward.


This is going to be redundant, but I want to put these two positions side by side for future reference.

When someone says “Smith should do Y�?, he is performing an intentional action – in this case, a speech act.

He is performing that act because he believes that act will best fulfill his own desires, given his beliefs. The causes of the speech act are the beliefs and desires of the agent. However, this does not imply that the meaning of the proposition spoken makes any reference at all to the internal states of the speaker.

To determine what a statement means, we do not look at the agent’s reasons for saying them. We look at what is taken as evidence supporting the statement, and what the statement is taken to logically entail. We look at how it fits with other propositions.


Did I say that it was? If I did, I must have been writing too fast again. Clearly ‘X is true’ does not imply ‘I believe that X is true’. It is quite possible for X to be true, even though nobody believes it.

What I meant to say is that the speech act “X is true�?, if sincere, is caused, in part, by the mental state, “I believe that ‘X’ is true.�? We can infer that the person who says ‘X is true’ believes it, not because it is a part of the meaning of ‘X is true’, but because it is the best explanation for a sincere utterance of ‘X is true’.

Even if X is false, if the person sincerely utters, ‘X is true’, we can infer that he believes it – not in the sense of logical entailment, but in the sense of causal antecedent.


I disagree.

First, there is the case of, “If you want to rob a convenience store without being recognized, you should wear a mask.�? There is nothing in this that entails praising Smith for wearing a mask or condemning him for his decision not to do so.

Next, I hold that all ought or should statements are hypothetical, in the sense given above. They take the form, “If these desires are to be fulfilled, then agent(s) should do X.�? Moral statements are directed at everybody and say, “If more and stronger of all desires are to be fulfilled, then people generally should praise/condemn/reward/punish X.�?

Now, if it would not fulfill my desires to have people target X in a particular way, I would not make the statement. If I make the statement, we can rest assured that it would fulfill both that Now, I would not say that if I did not wish X to be targeted in a way. So, if I say it, ‘X is wrong’, then it suits my interests to have everybody condemn X. And, consistent with this, I am condemning it myself. Yet, this does not say anything about the meaning of the term. It speaks only to the conditions of a sincere utterance. These are not the same thing.

Just as, a sincere utterance of “X is true�? is that one believes it. It is still not the case that “I believe it�? is a part of the meaning of “X is true�?.

Okay, I have read this sentence about 47 times, and I’m not understanding it at all.

I will offer some points that I think might be relevant, but I do not get the point.

Namely, desire-fulfillment does not identify desire-fulfillment as any type of “highest good�?. It says nothing more than that the fulfillment of desire is the only reason for action – that no other reason for action exists. As a result, whenever we talk about reason for action, we must talk about desire fulfillment, or what we talk about is not a reason for action in the real world.

Anything you have to say about a “highest good�? does not apply to desire utilitarianism. There is no way to rank desires as “higher�? or “lower�?. This would require some other type of value, a ‘higherness’ and ‘lowerness’ which desire utilitarianism says does not exist.

Now, you are smuggling a lot in this concept of “appropriate response�?. What does it take for something to be “appropriate�?? What is this “appropriateness�??

A person who thinks, “Smith moral-should do Y�? believes that people generally have more and stronger motivating reasons too praise those who do X and to condemn those who do not do X. If course, if a person thinks this, then the “appropriate response�? for people generally would be to praise those who do X and condemn those who do not X. This will almost always imply that he thinks that it would be appropriate for him, as well, to be praising those who do X and condemning those who do not.

However, it is not necessarily the case that what it is appropriate for people generally is appropriate for the agent. Yet, in those cases where it is not appropriate, the agent will not, in fact, praise or blame, or make the speech utterance of the form “Smith moral-should do Y.�? He will not say it, but we have shifted now to the conditions for a speech act, which, as I said above, are different from the truth conditions for a proposition.

It is still true of the proposition, “Smith moral-should do Y�? that people generally have a more and stronger motivating reasons for praising those who do Y, and condemning those who do not do Y.


We do not do this by looking at the conditions for making an utterance. We do this by looking at its logical relation to other propositions.

“I prefer that Smith do Y�? simply does not fit into the same logical space as “People generally have a motivating reason to praise those such as Smith who do Y.�? Your preference that I do Y does not entail an obligation on my part to do Y. It does not even imply that I have a reason to do Y. There is absolutely no way that we can get a proposition of the form “I should do Y�? from any preference that you may have.

There is also no way that you can get a proposition of the form, “Jim should condemn me if I do not do Y�? from your preference that I do Y. And yet the moral statement that I should do why implies not only that it is appropriate for you to condemn me for not doing Y, but that Jim condemn me as well. And that Mary and Assad and Boris and Juan also condemn me.

There is also the problem of the reciprocity of many moral terms.

“I have a right to do X�? implies “It is wrong for anybody else to interfere in my doing X.�? Yet, if you assert that I have a right to do X, then why is it “inappropriate�? for Jim to interfere with my doing X?

I have listed a number of ways in which individual preferences do not fit into the same logical space of moral terms. It does not fit into the logical space in which children learn the meaning of moral terms. Jim hits Sally in the playground. Jim gets yelled at. “you should not hit people, it’s wrong�?. Jim does not walk away with the idea, “I guess that I have a preference not to hit Sally�?, because, clearly, he did have a preference for hitting Sally. Nor does Jim walk away thinking that ‘wrong’ means ‘my mom does not like it,�? because he will hear other people use the word ‘wrong’ when talking about things that his mother does like.

Yes, if you look at "causes for a speech utterance", you will get internalism, because the causes of a speech utterance are the beliefs and desires of the agent. On the other hand, if you look at "logical space" you do not get internalism. Internalism does not work, because we regularly tell people that they morally ought to do or refrain from actions without given a moment's consideration to what they want to do. The problem of logical space is most obvious when we look at how we use moral terms when talking to children, and the 'meaning' that it makes sense for the child to infer from the logical space in which moral terms are used.

Alonzo Fyfe
Atheist Ethicist Blog

Bomb#20

I've learned to beware of Hiero5ants bearing allegations of agreement. Are you agreeing that moral discourse is more like scientific inquiry, or are you claiming I agree it's more like the struggle for power?

Would you argue that the increase of approval of integration among white Americans had nothing to do with observing pictures of government officials blocking school doors?

Can you define this Foucaultian sense intentionally? You frequently offer extensional explanations of your terms that leave me wondering what property it is that the listed items share, and what connection the property has to ordinary usage. There's a Cassellian sense in which saddle pommels, culverts, marigolds, and seaports are masculine, but listing them doesn't really clarify what it is they have in common, or whether there's anything male about them.

But you still want to talk about it, so I still need to clarify the issue. What is ontological queerness? What characteristics in a postulated entity are evidence for it? Is there a reason to think moral facts are ontologically queer? Do you have a definition in mind more intentional than "Moral facts, planet-pushing angels, automobile gremlins, etc."? Is consciousness ontologically queer? How about schizophrenia?

Hopefully, your forthcoming intentional definition will make clear why this is a desideratum. But as of now, it looks like you simply attach negative-sounding labels like "queer" and "spooky" to possible entities you desire to be excluded from theories. It's not obvious why explanatory models should steer clear of odorless, tasteless, invisible, or supervenient entities -- characteristics you offered as evidence for queerness. Such entities are postulated in many of the sciences.

Personally, I find the proposal of a class of "truth-apt" linguistic entities that look like propositions and quack like propositions but are not propositions a little queer. YMMV. Perhaps your forthcoming intentional definition will make clear why they aren't.

No problem. I'm under continual severe time-pressure myself. Take all the time you want.

That's a puzzling response. You yourself chose which paragraphs to quote from my post. You yourself called the ones you selected "relevant". Then you tell me part of what you quoted (a part that was on a different topic, being, after all, a separate response to a separate passage of yours) doesn't bear on the truth of judgement-internalism. What's up with that?

As for your characterizations of the content of my post, they weren't especially accurate...

I'm not saying anything about "all prescriptive terms". I do not know what you mean by "prescriptive", because you systematically refuse to give a definition that isn't a list. If you'd just explain what the property signifies, then I can check whether the items you ascribe it to really have it, and I can check whether it corresponds to a phenomenological aspect. If, as I suspect, it turns out that what you have in mind is a disjunction, then we can go on from there. I have no objection to disjunctive properties or to words for them; but they're a fertile ground for logical fallacies and we'll need to be on guard against them.

I said nothing of the sort. That's your misreading, based, seemingly, on an unfalsifiability engine: a policy of preemptively defining any counterexample to your generalization to be "not meaning it". If you simply include "it's judgmentally internal" in your criteria for using commands and prescriptive language "appropriately", then you can certainly prove all appropriate uses are judgmentally internal; but that won't have any philosophical significance.

The people in my examples mean exactly what they say. The doctor who prescribes life-saving medicine to the patient he loathes is making a deliberate choice to put his physicianly duty ahead of his personal hostility, and it's ridiculous to suggest that he's hypocritically saying things he doesn't mean. What he writes is a genuine, honest-to-goodness, appropriate, prescription. And if you have in mind criteria for "appropriate use of prescriptive language" that don't include it, your criteria are wrong. Whatever else we end up including in the term "prescriptive", if it doesn't include medical prescriptions then it's a non-starter. You might as well define "dog" as a domestic quadruped and insist on that basis that Fido, who came home from the vet with three legs, isn't a dog any more.

Concerning my other example, an order is a performative speech act. The point of an order is to bring into existence the state of affairs that an order has been given. In this respect, it's rather like saying "I promise...". To give an order you don't mean is to make a joke, to say something with the understanding that the recipient will know you don't mean it, so you will both realize that he is not really in a having-been-ordered state. That's not what's going on in my scenario. If the sergeant thought he wasn't under orders, say, not to run up the hill and throw a grenade into the enemy pillbox, and the lieutenant knew it, then the whole purpose of the lieutenant saying "Stay away from that pillbox." would be lost -- the command wouldn't protect the lieutenant's conscience or his ass. He intended to bring the having-been-ordered state of affairs into existence; and since that is what orders are for, he meant what he said and he used imperative language appropriately.

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. It wasn't me making "cognitive" overly broad; it was you. I was simply working from your statements, showing what they imply. If a conclusion that follows from them is absurd, that's your problem, not mine. You wrote:

1) REALISM: "Moral claims attempt to refer to states of affairs in the world, and some of them are true."
...
2.2) Noncognitivism: "There are no moral truths, since moral properties are not among the furniture of the universe, but moral claims only superficially appear to be trying to refer to facts when instead they are expressions, commands, emotes, warnings, praises, blames, etc.; therefore moral claims as they are ordinarily used are not even the sort of sentences to which truth-functions apply."

These were on two non-overlapping branches of your taxonomy, which means you defined attempts to refer to states of affairs in the world as cognitive.

"I'm asking about prescriptivity in the sense that a statement expresses a value, a preference, a normative attitude; I'm really running out of synonyms here to try to show what all these things have in common..."

Values, i.e. preferences, are a physical phenomenon. They're characteristic of sentient animals' brains. They're a high-level pattern implemented on a substrate of neurons and voltages, much as a Lisp interpreter is implemented on a substrate of Pentium machine-language. An animal preferring one thing to another is a state of affairs in the world -- those cells and force-fields are arranged one way rather than another. A statement that expresses a value, a preference, is a statement that attempts to refer to that state of affairs. It is therefore cognitive, according to your stated criterion.

You called statements expressing preferences "synonyms" for statements expressing normative attitudes, and offered them as your explanation for what "prescriptive" means.

"Having identified prescriptivity as the sine qua non of moral statements,"

Your various claims thus collectively imply that moral statements are cognitive. Yet you claim moral statements are noncognitive. Of course that makes "cognitive" apply to every possible sentence: a self-contradiction implies everything. A fortiori, it implies "cognitive" applies to every sentence. It equally makes "blue" apply to every sentence. You need to abandon at least one of your premises.

we have to ask, "is it even conceptually coherent to ask of an imperative, 'what fact makes this so?'?" I would have to say that, not only is it grammatically incoherent to ask whether "Shut the door!" is true, it is conceptually incoherent to do so.

Just so. An imperative is the classic example of a noncognitive sentence.

I'm asking whether moral statements are necessarily prescriptive in their use in the way that "Please close the door" or "Writers should strive for clarity and precision" is necessarily prescriptive: whether moral statements necessarily order, command, beseech, inveigh, praise, value, condemn, reward, or otherwise express a normative attitude towards something or someone.

Since a statement that commands is evidently noncognitive, and a statement that values is evidently cognitive, the obvious premise for you to abandon is your premise that they share the same phenomenological aspects. But it's your inconsistency, so it's your call which premise to abandon. Of course, for the same reason they imply every possible sentence is blue, your premises also imply they themselves are mutually consistent. If you choose to keep them all, that's your call too.

That's a hasty generalization. I asserted that you refute yourself, not that every anti-realist using ordinary language does. Many anti-realists have refrained from saying all the things you've said.

It is of course entirely possible that in ordinary usage "prescriptive" covers both commands and preference expressions. But that could just mean plenty of English-speakers find disjunctive properties useful. Your reasoning appears to run:

Commands are prescriptive speech.
Commands are noncognitive.
---------------------------------------------
Prescriptive speech is noncognitive.

As long as there is anything besides a command in the list of things "prescriptive" refers to in ordinary language, this is a non-sequitur.

Of course. The people in my examples were not using language deceptively. If you disagree, you have a tin ear for language.

Okay, sorry, bad example. Let me try again. I'm a realist, and that's not what I say -- heck, you can explain why Kasparov moved his rook two inches forward without allowing for the existence of such a thing as a desire to win a chess game, if you give a sufficiently detailed description of the interconnect pattern of the neurons in his brain, and their firing frequency transfer functions, and the mechanical response of muscle fibers to electrical stimuli. That would be a correct explanation, and it would make the postulation of supervenient "desires" unnecessary. That doesn't mean "Because it threatened a bishop-pawn fork, and his opponent needed the pawn, so he had to break off his attack in order to take a defensive precaution, and Kasparov wanted the attack stopped because he wanted to win." isn't a better explanation.

I'm a desire realist, yet I do not say you can't explain behavior correctly without including desires. I'm a moral realist, yet I do not say you can't explain behavior correctly without including moral fact reference. What is absolutely necessary in a correct explanation does not exhaust the set of what belongs in a correct explanation. Your description of the realist position was inaccurate, and that is why I protested it.

This, from the guy who wrote:

[editing note: I'm moving another paragraph up from down below to deal with them together]

Can it be that you did a cut-and-splice job on my post, immediately forgot you'd done it, and then believed your work was "how the exchange has gone"? You did not say "moral antirealism is a parsimonious, good explanation."; and I did not say "but one can always make nonparsimonious, bad explanations which are logically consistent!". If you're going to insist on making up attempted paraphrases of my statements and debating them rather than me, please include the actual quote so we can all see the extent to which your paraphrase resembles the original.

I don't know which of your claims you are equating to "moral antirealism is a parsimonious, good explanation.", but when one of your claims looks like that to me, I'll respond by challenging the parsimony of postulating a class of "truth-apt" linguistic entities that look like propositions and quack like propositions but are not propositions. I won't respond with the irrelevant comment you impute to me.

As for which of my claims you're equating to "but one can always make nonparsimonious, bad explanations which are logically consistent!", I've said a variety of things from which this can be inferred, but it wasn't their point and they weren't responses to anything I took to mean "moral antirealism is a parsimonious, good explanation." If you're talking about "But the planet-pushing angels might really exist.", I didn't say that in order to pointlessly show consistent but bad explanations exist. That was part of my critique of your claim that the sociology of science cannot be explained without reference to muons and clades and pulsars and genes, a claim that appeared to evidence a misunderstanding of why science is privileged. Please don't take my answers out of context. And since from every proposition a great many other propositions follow, please don't draw an inference from my words at random and assume whatever you picked was my point. My point in responding is typically to refute some claim of yours in the passage my statement is a response to. In this case, I was refuting the claim "If people do attempt and always fail (always fail in principle, not just in practice), then it's difficult to see on what grounds any criticism could be levelled".

Sorry to misunderstand, then. Since I never, in any way, shape or form, challenged the virtue of parsimony, it seems that that part of our discussion was wasted effort.

Yes, of course you did. And now I'm using it as an analogy to noncognitivism. Is that a problem? If you think your roommate's speech works similarly enough to moral speech for it to be an appropriate antirealism analogy but not similarly enough to be an appropriate noncognitivism analogy, why?

So, do you think it's desirable to get rid of "paranoid" and "schizophrenic" from explanatory theories even though these properties exist? Or do you think there's a subclass of things you find "strange" and "spooky" that it's desirable to keep in explanatory theories? If the former, why do you explain your roommate's orations with the phrase "severe paranoid schizophrenia"? If the latter, why do you characterize the things it's desirable to eliminate from explanations as strange, spooky, queer, invisible, supervenient things, when that's a set which includes a lot more members than the ones you think we should dispense with?

If set AB is the union of set A, which we should exclude, and set B, which we should retain, then it's pretty silly to argue "We shouldn't have X in our theories because X is in AB and AB-members are undesirable." It makes a difference whether X is in A or X is in B. Can you offer any reason we should think moral facts are spooky like transsubstantiation rather than spooky like schizophrenia?

Okay, there's evidently some subtlety here that's lost on me. In your taxonomy, you wrote:

1.3) Subjectivist Realism: (Actually the limiting case of Relativism) ""Moral claims attempt to refer to states of affairs in the world, and some of them are true, but their truth is solely dependent on whether the speaker herself believes them to be true."

What's the point of calling this theory a species of moral realism, if not to qualify the speaker's moral belief as a moral fact?

Hiero5ant

I'm saying that we agree about the "people persuading people" part of the story, and as I specifically said, we still disagree about the "observations" part -- read as "observations of moral facts". My assertion has always been that it (moral discourse and moral progress) is fundamentally and radically unlike scientific inquiry. I'm not saying that you agree that it's "more like" the struggle for power, only that you agree that social and political struggle were "a part of" the development. I know you also think that something science-like was involved, but we've never discussed to what extent or in what proportion you think these two parallel tracks occurred.

No. I was only disagreeing about "observations of moral facts". I've never claimed that the civil rights struggle took place through exclusively telepathic means.

It's a family resemblance term, so necessary and sufficient conditions aren't going to really capture it. If you want a quick-and-dirty version try this one from Weber: "By power is meant that opportunity existing within a social relationship which permits one to carry out one's own will even against resistance and regardless of the basis on which this opportunity rests."

There's no "one way to be queer" any more than there's a "one way for music to suck". How about this: we say that something is ontologically queer when it is one or more of a) metaphysically unlike other entities of its kind, b) explanatorily impenetrable, c) has causal attributes without having attributes of extension, d) requires an ad hoc faculty of intuition for its epistemology that is itself inexplicable or resistant to analysis.

So we would say that Cartesian mind-substance, which is causally efficacious but not spatially extended, of which we are allegedly aware through some faculty other than empirical perception, which is somehow "correlated with" the pineal gland but not identical to it, is ontologically queer. This doesn't mean that "therefore it can't exist". It just means that materialist theories of mind are explanatorily preferable because (among other things) they eliminate it. It's a desideratum, but not a requirement.

Plenty.

As I said above, considered as a separate ontological substance, absolutely. Considered as an epiphenomenon or as an artifact of perspectival shifts in descriptions, it's not. Mirage has been making some wonderful points on this in the Volition and Reductionism thread.

Did you mean to type "non-truth-apt"? Because that's been my position. And at any rate, they are indeed strange. They stand in need of explanation. I've never shied away from admitting that, and contrary to BD-from-KG I feel quite strongly that the burden of proof in the argument is on the noncognitivist in her battles against the congntivist, even though the burden of proof is on the realist as against the anti-realist.

It's my old charity gene acting up again. I spent quite a lot of time digging through a clunky search engine through 9 months of your posts and comparing their contexts in the threads to try and find what you might be referring to as your arguments against judgment-internalism, and that was the most I could find. If you're criticizing me for putting in too many passages, the explanation was that I was trying to be as charitable as possible in addressing anything that you might even remotely consider to have been your arguments on the topic. If you're criticizing me for omitting arguments against judgment-internalism that you've made, then by all means post a link to them; or if you have new ones to make, I'm always interested in hearing them.

Since your responses seem to agree with my contention that only point #2 had any bearing on the truth of judgment-internalism, I'm going to stick with those rather than go full-on into Necromancy (although I might be game for starting a new thread on any of those topics), {Edit -- I'm going to leave the last one on because it restates an error you make in a later point within the post}

I'll re-restore the quoted portion from your post in May to defend my characterization of it.

What's probably complicating our mutual understanding of these examples is a fascinating and subtle distinction between kinds of speech acts which often occupy the same grammatical space. I might not be disagreeing with what you take me to be disagreeing with.

Both doctors formally making prescriptions (note different sense of word) and officers giving orders can be simply performatives (in virtue of their unique and predefined social status). No matter how much I might want to, I can never doctor-prescibe you a medicine or lieutenant-order you to do something because I am neither of those things, in the sense that I am not equipped to undergo those acts qua performatives.

But lieutenants can also perlocute orders and doctors can also perlocute prescriptions.

No noncognitivist of whom I am aware has ever said that moral assertions are illocutionary performatives (although now that I think of it, that would be a fascinating theoretical exercise). What noncognitivism claims is that moral assertions are all perlocutionary speech acts.

In fact, I think this makes a damn good definition of moral noncognitivism: All moral statements are perlocutionary speech acts, and no moral statements are constantive illocutionary speech acts.

Back to the examples.

In what sense do the people in the examples "mean exactly what they say"? In the sense that their speech acts are performatives; the very act of their utterance with the appropriate authority means that they mean it.

In what sense don't the people in the examples "mean exactly what they say"? In the sense that their acts are perlocutionary in the sense that the lieutenant doesn't want the order to be carried out, in the sense that the doctor doesn't want the patient to get better.

Normative noncognitivists don't claim that performatives are judgmentally internal. Normative noncognitivists do claim that perlocutionary speech acts are judgmentally internal, because it's a tautology, because that's what it means for something to be a perlocutionary speech act. So if you meant your examples as performatives, then you are correct, but your point is irrelevant to moral j-internalism, but if you meant your examples as perlocutions then my characterization of your post stands: "the prescriptions are not judgmentally internal because the people involved 'don't really mean them'."

But neither army orders nor doctors' prescriptions are moral claims, so I still don't see what your argument is to the effect that moral claims are not j-internal.

Check.

Roger.

Still in agreement.

Yes.

False, bollocks, balderdash, and a thousand times false.

1) Speech acts that express attitudes do not “attempt to refer to attitudes�?, not in the representational, truth-functional sense. The two are distinct. You once again illustrate my point that you are defining “cognitive�? so broadly that it applies to every possible utterance. According to your reasoning, sticking out my tongue and going “THHBBBTHTTT!!!�? is “cognitive�? because it “refers to�? the state of affairs of my displeasure.

2) Weren’t you the one criticizing me for allegedly claiming that "Joe disapproves of eating meat" was a moral fact? But here you are, saying that expressions of value are facts because they “refer to�? the fact that the utterer holds that value.

Agreed, “synonyms�? was sloppy. Consider that stricken.

Only under a definition of “cognitive�? that says that “Boooooo!�? is cognitive.

Well, I’ve had my premises misstated before, but it’s a rare thing to have the conclusion misstated. Try:

Moral claims are perlocutionary acts.
Perlocutionary acts are noncognitive.
----------------------------------------------
Moral claims are noncognitive.

Or, I was reading them as examples of the type of speech act actually relevant to noncognitivism.

As you and others may have noticed, we haven’t really spent any time in this thread at all listening to the positive theoretical commitments of Bomb#20-Realism. (Heck, the thread was supposed to center around whether D.U.’s “desire maximization�? identifies a coherent property, and I have little hope that those arguments will ever return to the fore.) They’d probably be worth starting a thread on, but as you correctly point out, I can’t hit what I can’t see.


1) I report that others say that they are moral facts. I do not myself say they are moral facts, any more than my reporting that catholics consider the eucharist to be a miracle means that I am “prepared to call the eucharist a miracle�?. It’s not my fault that people make silly claims about moral truths being cognitive because they’re “facts about attitudes�?. I report, you decide.

2) I’m not the one in this thread asserting that “expressing a preference�? “states a fact.�?

{Edit -- I spent some time discussing the difference between expressing an attitude and describing an attitude in this post in the Noncognitivism Outside of Metaethics thread. }

Hiero5ant

Selected passages:

There is, believe it or not, a name in metaethics describing the position you argue for above, viz. the conjunction of the claims that 1) there are no intrinsic "ought-to-be-done-ness" properties in the universe and 2) assertions of ought-to-be-done-ness have no role in true or false propositions.

I'll give you three guesses about what it is, but the first two don't count.

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

I’m leaving on a five-day trip in the morning. I’ve tried to prepare a response to your latest screed before leaving, but it has just been impossible. I’ll try to get back to it reasonably soon after returning on the 14th. But even then it will take a while. Hiero5ant, feel free to respond in my absence (or even in my presence!)