Well the post was responding to your comment about the consequences of “Thomism.” Thomas was a medieval philosopher.
And my response isn’t “it wasn’t like that in medieval times,” as I’ve used many examples from other cultures to make this same point. It’s “it isn’t that way outside of Enlightenment premises, namely the premise that the world is purposeless and valueless.”
As Anscombe writes:
Hume defines “truth” in such a way as to exclude ethical judgments
from it, and professes that he has proved that they are so excluded.
He also implicitly defines “passion” in such a way that aiming at
anything is having a passion. His objection to passing from “is” to
“ought” would apply equally to passing from “is” to “owes” or from
“is” to “needs.”
Wouldn’t these sorts of core metaphysical assumptions be, on your account “hinge propositions?” So calling them old, or unfashionable as a key objection, aside from being parochial, would just seem amount to nothing more than criticizing one “game” according to the standards of another “game?” In virtue of what is the superior “game” superior such that it stands as the meta standard for all such “games?”
So what are “ethical truths” true in virtue of if “perfect knowledge of how the world is,” of “every cause and every state of affairs,” doesn’t grant us knowledge of them?
At the very least, “ethical truths” seem to be a sui generis sort of truth, and they must have a different ontological ground since they can have nothing like a truthmaker in the world.
But if complete knowledge of the world doesn’t include knowledge of ethical truths, how are such truths ever known? What faculty allows for such knowledge?
I would simply deny that ethics is about “obligation?” Who is this an obligation to? In virtue of what does it obtain? How or why is anyone “obligated” to do anything is in a specifically ethical sense?
I’d agree with Anscombe here that the idea of basing ethics on a “moral ought,” something like a legal “obligation” with no law-maker, is incoherent. These two threads have been a great example of this. We’re up to five posters now who make various objections about ethical theories because they fail to correspond to the specifically “moral ought,” and yet no one can define what they mean by “moral ought.”
I would say the deontic is posterior to the good. If someone asks why we “ought” to prefer the better to the worse, this seems to be putting the cart before the horse. That we should prefer what is truly better to what is worse is constitutive of practical reason in the same way that the desirability of truth and knowledge over falsity and error is constitutive of theoretical reason.
I cannot think of why anyone would say they can ground ethics in “definitions” either. Wouldn’t it be instead knowledge of things, namely man and the world, or at least the most relevant aspects of the world that are known in such appeals, not “definitions?”
Earlier you said the “moral” can be known and communicated. What exactly is known in this case then, and how does it relate to knowledge of man and the world?