jlowder

Are ad hominem attacks really necessary? I didn't "tell you" anything. I asked a question. You either have an answer or you don't. Please describe one situation in which MC would be false.

I can think of situations in which the prima facie principle MC is overriden by another moral principle. I cannot, however, think of situations in which MC is false.

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Remember that you had made the mysterious statement:

I asked for an explanation of how a moral proposition can be both true and false. You then implied that there are situations in which MC is false. But notice that that does not show how MC can be both true and false, which is the claim we were discussing.

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(BTW, the presupposition of your ad hominem attack is false. I presently accept moral realism but am undecided between intersubjectivism and objectivism. And even if I were an objectivist, as I have stated repeatedly on this board, moral objectivism and moral absolutism are not interchangeable. Moral objectivism is consistent with the view that moral principles merely describe prima facie duties or obligations that are overridable. But this doesn't even matter since I am not defending moral objectivism in this thread.)

[ August 18, 2002: Message edited by: jlowder ]

[ August 18, 2002: Message edited by: jlowder ]

[ August 18, 2002: Message edited by: jlowder ]</p>

tronvillain

That is not an ad hominem attack - I was actually amazed that you were apparently unable to think of an example yourself, and the first explanation that occurred to me was that your on morality has limited your imagination in certain areas.

When is the statement "You should not burn babies for fun." false under subjective morality? Well, if the statement depends on the perspective of the person making the statement, then it will be false when that person enjoys the burning of babies and is not bothered by the potential negative consequences of such an act. Granted, from the persective of most other people such a person would be considered monstrous, but that not relevant to the discussion.

Now, you said:
Are you blind? As I said earlier, it is trivially easy to imagine a scenario in which MC is true, and it is almost as easy to imagine a scenario in which MC is false. It is a short leap to imagine both situations occuring simultaneously, in which case "You should not burn babies for fun" will be both true and false. To make it either true or false, you have to specify to which situation the statement is meant to apply.

Frankly, I am surprised you are having trouble with this, since it seems to be explicit in what you quoted:
Obviously, for a statement like MC to be true or false, it must apply to someone with specific subjective states. If it is simply a general statement, then it may easily be true and false, in that it may be true given one person's subjective states and false given another person's subjective states.

jlowder

Well, I took it as an insult, just as I took your statement, "Are you blind," as an insult. If you didn't it intend for your statements to be an insult that makes it better, but they are still abrasive.

Even on the assumption that simple subjectivism is true, your argument is fallacious. This is because, on subjectivism, when two different people make a statement like MC, they are not making the same statement. As Sayre-McCord notes:

jlowder

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord's essay on the different types of moral realism may be found on the web by clicking <a href="http://www.unc.edu/~gsmunc/Papers/Many%20Moral%20Realisms.DOC" target="_blank">here</a>.

dk

dk: Lets be clear, the mind-body problem is what makes this discussion difficult. Mental constructs of abstractions, concepts, ideas and forms are universal. The central question is:

• How can universal -concepts, -abstractions, -ideas and -forms be assigned to a particular thing. Or
  How is philosophy to understand (explain) a particular thing -in terms of universals?

From an historical perspective Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Hume (Berkley and Lock) and Kant offered different solutions to the mind-body problem. In the 20th Century Phenomenalism has emerged the rule i.e. adherence to strict experimental science. Phenomenalism eliminates self evident principles like identity, contradiction, excluded-middle, causality, and finality from the conversation on the pretext of necessity, reliability and verifiability. The affect of Phenomenalism upon moral philosophy refocuses the study solely upon appearances (sense-experience), because only the appearance of a thing can be empirically tested. This doesn’t solve mind-body problem, but pushes it off into the realm of the social sciences, and in effect makes morality a function (reaction) of positive findings. Meanwhile, the social sciences have fallen far short of expectations, and its arguable they have made no substantive progress over the last century. In fact many people think the social sciences have gone nowhere, but ride the coattails of mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry. The systematic scientific approaches taken by demographers, communists, social services, mental health providers, public schools, great society engineers and correctional facilities have a dismal track record.

Mr. jlawder, I don’t want to argue history, but I would like to ask.
1) What do you need to know, to make up your mind about moral realism,
2) What’s the alternative?