Wiploc

Right. If there was a god, and if he could make moral rules that were in some relevent sense binding, and if he said that Baptists should have only one wife but Mormons should have several, then the morality of how many wives you should have would be relative to whether you were a Baptist or a Mormon.



Yes. Linda Tripp, for instance, was charged under a statute that specifically said that people who don't know about the law aren't guilty of violating it.



Now we have at least one foot into the swamp. What people mean is what they intend when they speak. Attempts to interpret moral statements often take the form of assuming that people mean what they would have meant if they had made sense. Such attempted translations can be useful and informative, but I'm not sure they can be said to be true.



Thanks.



It's a problem.



Yes, but, notice where we see it. We don't see it as a whim of people. It is a fact that societies where people are nice to each other are likely to be better societies in important ways. That's not a subjective whim, it's objective fact. So---if you want to call yourself a moral realist---it is fair to say that we see this pattern woven into the fabric of the universe. You'd need a different (and very weird) universe for it to not be true.

crc

Minnesota Joe

Well, I think the point is not to twist the interpretation of the way people use it, but to argue that "I ought to do X" can't have any absolute truth value since there are cases where you ought not to do X. You said it yourself, these ought claims aren't right even in every specific case. But if there is an implied desire/wish as the antecedent, they start to make some sense.

Gotcha, good point.

The AntiChris

I don't disagree that such societies would tend to correspond with my criteria of "better", but I don't see in what sense those criteria are objective?

Chris

Alter

You're sticking to the technical definition of atheism. Similarly, you could technically define a Christian as "one who believes in the divinity of Christ", but that would say nothing about their morals. Or you could say it's "one who believes the bible is the word of god and must be obeyed", but then you have to check their clothes to see if they're wearing any blends, to see if they're lying.

ORRRR,

You can go with the MOST COMMON FORM, which in the US means someone who believes in Christ, and follows most of the good parts of the bible, but ignores the bad parts and questionable parts, and is unsure about the stricture saying to kill homosexuals because their band teacher in high school was gay but is still a really nice guy.

Similarly, I give you the OBJECTIVE morality that MOST atheists follow. Poll us, see how many of us consider the Golden Rule to be one of the highest moral duties. And it IS the atheist scripture, IIRC, for Secular Humanists, and I'm sure it's coded that way for a few other groups as well.

Sure, there's a few nihlists, and the Universists are pretty subjective in worldview, but the rest of us are moral, and our morals do NOT depend on theism.

Wiploc

Every moral system has the what-if-somebody-disagreed problem. All you we can say is that those who disagree are---according to our moral system---immoral.

The objective parts of objective morality are that the moral rules really probably would produce a "better" society if people followed them more of the time, and people really do have substantial agreement on what would be "better" about a "better" society as long as we stay vague and abstract in our descriptions.

crc

The AntiChris

No. My problem isn't with those who might disagree - I'd be asking the same question even if I thought everyone would agree.
This is rather ambiguous. It's not clear if the first part of this sentence is conditional on the second part?

If we take the first part in isolation:
I'm having big trouble understanding what you're saying here. It seems as though you've assumed the objectivity of "better" in your justification of objective criteria for better? Can you rephrase?

Alternatively, you may be saying moral rules are objective when "people really do have substantial agreement on what would be "better" about a "better" society". But I'm sure this can't be what you mean?

Chris

Wiploc

I began (a few posts ago) by observing that most moral rules are of two types. One type involves reducing current gratification in order to get more gratification later. The other type involves reducing your own gratification in order to increase other people's gratification. I infer that the essence of morality is giving up happiness in order to increase happiness. If we agree on that meaning of the word, then we can talk about objective morality without talking about whether we should want morality.

If we don't agree that that is what "moral" means, then our disagreement is about a definition. Moral rules can still be objective; their objectiveness isn't reduced by not having a word for them.

In my view, the is/ought gap is dealt with by starting at ought. Those of us who are at ought (who are agreed, in very rough terms, on what society ought to be like) can talk about objective rules for achieving that society--- without worrying about whether there is an objective sense in which we should want to achieve that society. This oughty talk is moral discourse.

People who don't want the kind of society that you and I implicitly agree on are sociopaths. They are not bad in any objective sense, but they are not moral, because "morality" is about how to achieve the society that they have no interest in achieving.

Morality is about that, not because it objectively should be, but just because that's what the word means.

This is my own theory of morality. I have no authorities to cite. One advantage (if you want to call it an advantage) of this theory of morality is that it will probably allow me to say that I believe in objective morality (in case I ever figure out what other people mean by that, and if I decide it's a good thing).

crc

The AntiChris

Is this the same argument Alonzo uses? It never made sense to me when he argued it and I'm afraid it makes no more sense when you say it.

I just don't see failure to agree what "moral" means as a failure to find a word for moral rules. Rather than indicating a failure to reliably comprehend an objective truth, it's always seemed to me that any disparities between individual opinions on the meaning of morality simply confirm the highly personal nature of moral reasoning.
Just as a matter of interest, does your belief in an objective morality influence the way you form your moral opinions or the way you conduct your moral discourse?

Chris

Minnesota Joe

Yeah, this is where I get confused. Prior to a little reading, I would have simply denied that "You ought X" could be true or false in and of itself--and that includes all the pathological examples like, "You ought not torture for enjoyment". It seems that the best explanation for why there is confusion, is that there aren't any objective moral truths in the way we think of "truth" usually.

But my intuition is that there is something right about taking a statistical approach to the matter. There are certain rules of cooperative behavior that might have some benefits for both the individual and the group. So, "If I want those benefits, I ought X". I just don't know if we can call it objective in the traditional sense. Carrier call it normative, which also seems to synch with the statistical sense.

The AntiChris

I'd agree that a certain limited set of rules appear reasonable, sane - possibly even self-evident, but in what sense 'objective'? :huh:

Chris