K

This statement is true in the context of me and my son. It is false in the context of me and my brother-in-law. Is it true or false? Or does it depend?

K

Longbow:

You could show me how one or more of my claims don't fall directly out of those two premises. If you agree with my premises and all of my claims are reducible to logical conclusions based on my premises, then you are forced to accept my claims or reject deductive reasoning.

Longbow

One of the points of contention is over the objectivity of morality. In a nutshell, what actually such an issue is really about is wether or not moral statements have propositional content. Some have disagreed with this, arguing that there are objective rational principles of action that do not have propositional content. I am going to ignore that for now and just give you the quickest spiel I can on this.

One of the major overtones of this entire thread has been what, if any, content in a sentence like "X is wrong" can be said to be "true"? Or to what extent can there be somethig like knowledge of morality? There is a large contingent here that believes there is none -- no statement of the form "X is wrong" is meaningfully "true". (Perhaps it is worth noting that when I say "true", I mean it. I don't mean some flakey "true" for one person but "false" for another or anything like that.)

So, in order to understand whether or not a sentence contains an assertion, you must analyze the sentence and interpret it. For instance, the Logical Positivist, C L Stevenson, wrote the well known paper "On the Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms" that argued that a moral statement like "X is wrong" is really an imperative "Don't do X" combined with additional emotive content. The reason that he has what must seem like a superfluous add-on of "emotive content" is because you have to explain why the sentence is declarative and yet means the samething as the profoundly different imperative sentence. His explanation was that the restructuring of the imperative sentence into a declarative form was just a way of adding on "Dammit!" for instance. So, saying "X is wrong," matter of factly without raising your voice or acting belligerently really just means the same thing as yelling "Don't do X, dammit!" while acting agitated. That is, it is supposed to convey the same thing -- it has the same content.

So, there is one example of how one can legitimately argue that moral statements are subjective. One must, in fact, argue this. Even and perhaps especially the Logical Positivists who were predominantly preoccupied with the meaning of sentences and semantic analysis of the language that philosophical problems were couched in recognized their burden of proof when it came to showing that morality is subjective especially through a novel interprettation of moral statements. And why is that? Because moral statements are declarative setences that are intended as assertions that peopls can use to effectively communicate with one another. Under those circumstances, unless you have a really good reason not to, you must interpret them this way. Anything else is misrepresenting what the person said and if you do this in the context of carrying on a debate, say with a Christian claiming you are immoral for being an atheist, then you are creating the infamous Straw Man. (If you take a sentence they wrote and interpret it as subjective for no good reason when they clearly did not intend for it to be that way, then that is a straw man.)

So, in short, you must assume that any statement of the form "X is wrong," has propositional content unless you can show otherwise. That means that there is an "objective foundation" to morality. All morality is is the collection of all such statements. Does that put things in a little more perspective? Perhaps an even shorter version that I seldom use, but that you see often is to apply the test of objectivity. To test if a statement p has propositional content (and so to find if the subject that p arises in is objective), you ask yourself if it makes sense to say "Is it true or false that p?" If it does, then it is said that p "purports to be objective" (prima facia). That is, p seems to have propositional content or that the statement seems to contain a proposition or assertion of some sort. Let's take it for a test drive.

p = "Go to the store."

"Is it true or false that p?" = "Is it true or false that 'Go to the store'?"

It doesn't make any sense. So, the imperative sentence "Go to the store," does not have propositional content.

p = "Ice cream tastes good."

"Is it true or false that p?" = "Is it true or false that 'Ice cream tastes good'?"

It is not quite as unintelligible to ask such a question, but the answer does seem to be no to the question because p is not intended by those that state it to be true or false. So, one might tend to say that p doesn't have propositional content. It is kind of academic though when you consider the following:

p = "I think ice cream tastes good."

"Is it true or false that p?" = "Is it true or false that 'I think ice cream tastes good'?"

Now this does have propositional content. It is either true or false that the author of the statement likes ice cream. In fact, the former statement if it were to have propositional content, would probably mean this -- that the author likes ice cream. In any event, if you apply this to moral statements:

p = "Eating ice cream is wrong."

"Is it true or false that p?" = "Is it true or false that 'Eating ice cream is wrong'?"

You certainly think that the answer to this question is no. I claim it is yes. (In this case, I woudl claim that p is false.) Before you jump to any conclusions, consider that people that make a statement like p certainly think the answer to the question is yes, not no. And it is not unintellible to ask the question like in the first example I gave you. For instance, "Eating ice cream is wrong" is NOT the same sentence (and does not have the same content as) "Don't eat ice cream" (as the Stevenson suggests). Of course you might side with Stevenson, but then you must defend a very postive assertion.

In other words, the burden of proof is not on me to show that the subject of morality is objective. It is the other way around. Subjectivists must prove otherwise. (Believe it or not, I did try to limit that as much as possible. But I wanted to be fairly thorough in explaining the whole idea of propositional content and why it is important.)

Kant's explanation certainly is not an evolutionary one. Morality is not a physical phenomenon. And, while behavior is a physical phenomenon that one can study scientifically, Kant was not making arguments about behavior. He was concerned with morality.

Perhaps now is a good time to introduce compatibilism while I am at it. Kant was also something of a metaphysical determinist. However, his moral philosophy is based on free will. So, he must be contradicting himself, I suppose. This would be just a classic -- frankly, I surprised I don't see it more.

Compatibilism is the view (as the name suggests) that moral free will is compatible with metaphysical determinism. Many people claim that our behavior is even strictly predestined (determined), but yet the notion of a "free will" when it comes to moral agency is actually true. The reason is because it means two different things. There is no moral agency in your will not having been caused, for instance. The issue of whether or not you act out of your own free will has to do more with whether or not the causal chain of events leading up to your actions must include your will. It is like asking whether or not water damage was caused by the flood or not. It might even be indirectly caused by the flood. But, as property and casualty insurance professionals say, if there is an "unbroken chain of events" connecting the flood and the water damage, then the water damage can be attributed to the flood.

In a similar fashion, when someone says that you did something "out of your own free will", they do not mean that your will wasn't caused by some other phenomenon (although they might claim this as well). They merely are saying that the action is attributable to your will. Your will may then be attributable to somethng else (but at that point it doesn't really matter).

In any event, the reason I am bringing this up is to show just how independent the basis of morally evaluating behavior is from the behavior itself. Morality is NOT, in general, a discussion of what gives rise to certain kinds of behavior. Everybody seems to understand this. Some people nonetheless claim that it turns out that this is what it reduces to. In that case, they have to defend this view. Most people though don't hold such a view -- or at least not most well-informed people. So, if you persist in taking it for granted that the topic of morality is a subtopic of human behavior in general, then it seems clear enough that you just aren't talking about what they are.

What is true is that moral behavior is a kind of behavior. But morals aren't a behvior, and how moral behavior comes to be moral is not by how such behavior happened to come to pass. It is intrinsic to the nature of the behavior, itself, regardless of how such behavior arose (Kant and I would claim, at any rate).

Longbow

I see why you think the guy at the water cooler is a jerk. You really don't know anything about what you are talking about. People that think that morals are just ideas are not called "subjectivists". And people that think that the objects of mathematics are ideas are not morons, you jackass. I don't think I know of a single mathematician that thinks that the objects of mathematics are physical objects. So what do you think they are? Ghosts?

They are abstractions -- ideas. Morals are abstractions, as well. And, as you will probably come to find out over and over again in life, you are a belligerent idiot.

Longbow

Okay...

(Just kidding, but of course I have something to say about it.)

Okay, something like this might be true -- that is wrong to cause needless suffering. But, it is not the basis of morality. Instead it is just a moral. Actually what it is is a moral statement that is sometimes true and potentially false depending on the situation.

What this is is a description of how one comes to believe something, not a justification for that belief. For instance, "I looked up at the night sky and made several calculations, and it wasn't until then that I really bought into the General Theory of Relativity," is an explanation of how I came to believe the General Theory of Relativity. It is not the justification for the General Theory of Relativity. The justification is some other very much more complicated thing. Even the particular case of what that person used to justify it is the calculations he actually did, not that he did some calculations.

In like fashion, these explanations of how people act and how people come to hold the particular beliefs they do is not a justification of the beliefs that they hold. And what you are really talking abotu anyway is sympathy or empathy not morality.

A common misconception about "absolute" morality is that it isn't circumstantial. I suppose this depends to some extent on how you define "absolute". But, even the most extremely objective and uncompromising moral world views are circumstantial to one extent or another. Kant's philosophy, for instance, is. (Of course, there are some famous examples where he seems to claim a given moral isn't such as lying. Notwithstanding that, his views usually require that the particulars of the situation be specified prior to rendering a moral evaluation of action. And, as a matter of fact, lying is not always an injustice according to Kant, but I don't want to go into that long discussion unless you want to.) In any event, soemthing like the circumstantiality of morality does not show that morality is subjective. Not many people (certainly not many well-informed people) think that moral evaluations must occur in the absense of fully specifying the particular actions to be evaluated.

Sentiment is subjective. Empathy is subjective. And, if this is what you think morality is all about, then it is no wonder that you think that morality is subjective. However, especially the way you bring it up, it sounds more like the best you can think of off the top of your head. If you start taking my arguments more seriously, or even, I claim, just start doing a thorough survey of the alternatives, you might start changing your mind about a few things. For instance, if you start trying to charitably interpret the arguments of people like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, etc. or modern philosophers like John Rawls, Stephen Darwall, Martha Nussbaum, etc. you will see a lot more possibilities out there than this sort of thing. And what you should really do, is read these authors thinking that they really have something new, something different -- something you haven't thought of before -- to say.

But, the point really just is, that this is a picture -- a model -- of how many people come to have morals. It is not even close to sufficient to explain the 2500 years of moral philosophy.

Moral knowledge would be just like any other knowledge. You learn it -- sure. But what you are describing is conditioned behavior which is not learning anything in the sense that one learns in school, say. And while behavior is acquired through conditioning, knowledge of morality is not.

Morality is not just personal values and sentiments.

Longbow

You haven't provided a counter-example.

You posted this in response to, among other things, "So, again, we have common declarative sentences that are intended to be assertions by those that state them and that are communicative."

I didn't say merely objective and communicative. I also said that their authors intended for them to be assertions. "X is ugly," is not usually intended to be objective. People that say this are sayign that they don't like X, but fully allow for the possibility that someone else might. However, when someone says that "X is wrong," they do not mean that it might be okay for someone else.

More precisely, you can interpret such a statement as "X is ugly" in a variety of ways. If it is interpretted as "The author of this statement doesn't like X," then it is actually a thorouoghly objective proposition about the author of the statement. Moral statements are not about the author. When someone says, for instance, that "Prostitution is wrong," they do not mean merely that they choose not to engage in it. They intend to convey that it is wrong for anyone to engage in it.

So if this is what you claim moral statements mean, then it is clear that they don't. In any case, I said as much in my first post. You are passive-aggressively evading the point. I didn't say that all declarative sentences contained propositions. I said that the use of such a structure, in general, signifies that an assertion is being made. So the fact that a declarative sentence is being used means that you now must show that the sentence does not contain a proposition.

You have the burden of proof. Stop trying to passive-aggressively shift it.

Longbow

You've got to be kidding me. If you make it in a specific context, then it could be true. If it is made in reference to several possible situations where in at least one of which it is false, then it is false. That morality depends on context has nothing to do with whether or not a moral statement is true of false. "That particular act of yours under those particular circumstances was wrong," is as much a moral statement as any. Any general statement is reducible to a composite of such specific statements. When any one specific statement is false, then the general statements that include it are false.

Longbow

What?!? "God's law" being predicated on the physical existence of god, no it wouldn't. However, once again, you must account for the fact that I do not make any assertions about the physical existence of anything. I limit it to the epistemological issue of whether or not there is such a thing as moral knowledge.

K

Longbow:

I never said physical anything. That's a strawman invented by you. Why don't you reread what I really did say.

Kharakov

So what is morality? (answer please)

I was trying to describe how one learns empathy.

I was trying to describe somebody learning empathy, which I believe is essential for moral judgement. I don't believe conditioning makes you realize that it is wrong to make other people suffer. Are you talking about being conditioned not to inflict suffering because of empathy?

Can you give me an example of a moral that does not involve 'not causing needless suffering'?

Giving less happiness than one can is equivalent to causing needless suffering. Not doing evil is not being good.

Kharakov