No, I would want an argument that would justify when I tackled him and held him down because “it is not good to kick puppies for fun.”
Good. Then you hopefully have “one ought not kick puppies!” and the backing of your community. Which is, coincidently, what you might actually have - if you can have the assault charges against you waived.
No, but they clearly involve contradictory ethical truths. So either we affirm a large number of contradictions, or we index them to avoid contrasiction, or we identify one set of ethical truths that is a meta-standard. That’s the trilemma.
The other points about being able to assert one’s values over another’s is irrelevant. That would be true even if we were the ones in error, or if error were impossible because such claims are not truth-apt. No one denies that you can attempt to force your claims on others.
A claim that is completely consistent with relativism too though.
If nothing in the description can get us to the ethical import, then there is nothing there to “recognize.” This is precisely why the direction has to go both ways.
And it’s still unclear to me how the description below is supposed to work for unindexed ethical truths that have nothing to do with anyone’s values. This would be a sheer preference or prescription preferred and prescribed by no one. You cannot even say it is intrinsic to the nature of things, because that would be invoking an “is,” so this would be an appeal to a free-floating bare oughtness.
I know. So you are NOT doing ethics then. Which you got annoyed at me for mentioning before. Sigh…
You want to just focus on how “he is kicking” and “he ought or ought not be kicking” are different, and analysis like that.
But you are setting out Foote’s ethics too? And the components of your metaethics include “ought” which includes “good”, but you really think you don’t have to discuss them. Not more than evaluation is the direction it comes from and “obvious” is all we need to say about how ‘ought’ functions in dealings.
Even metaethics has to include ethics’ practical application, but nowhere do I see anything useful or helpful to determine “what should we do”, namely how to deliberate “what is good”.
That’s kind of a bummer.
So are you saying “one ought not kick puppies” is a good argument to justify the assault when dealing with a person who was kicking puppies? Or are you saying I should hope it’s obvious to the judge and jury that “kicking puppies is bad” because they won’t need an argument with “oughts” in it either?
What if my community said “explain yourself! - You ought not assault anyone!” Is there any use in asking “what ought I have done in the first place?” Should I have assaulted the nut job? Is it ethical (not-meta ethical) analysis to consult a judge and jury, and to reason this out and find a just, ethical, moral, legal solution? I don’t even know what you would say. Is there any actual ethics we need to iron out to ensure the metaethics hits all the notes?
Much too fast. Here I’d use Davidson’s Radical Interpretation, charity and triangulation to look at what the ethical shares with other discourse. Well beyond the scope of this thread. What we do not have is anything like relativism, for the reasons Davidson has already given. Your use of “index” is here problematic, unless you care to explain how ethical statements are all indexicals.
You expect me to present a complete ethics. That’s not in the remit of these fora, unless @Jamal has taken to admitting doctorates. I think I’ve been more than generous with my time. Cheers.
“Abortion is evil” and “abortion is not evil” are contradictions. It’s easy to think of plenty like this. Appealing to Davidson makes no sense here. Davidson does not say it is impossible for different individuals or cultures to ever hold contradictory beliefs. If “abortion is evil” and “abortion is not evil” are both true, that’s a contradiction, if they are true only in their context, that is indexing, and if only one is true for all contexts, that’s your meta-standard that is not delimited to any particular culture or language game.
It’s your explanation of direction of fit that implies indexing. As noted, there are other ways to avoid affirming contradictions.
First, what exactly is being “triangulated” in this case? You’ve already claimed that absolutely no fact, no description, no is, can ever get us to an ought. If ethical truths are not grounded in the world, what are the points of the triangle here? Normally it is the interpreter, the interpreted, and a shared, causally efficacious world that both are responding to. That cannot be the case here because the realm of “ought” is sui generis. A theory about “attributing true beliefs” doesn’t straightforwardly apply to values if you claim that values have the opposite direction of fit. This seems like mixing oil and water.
Second, even if we stretched Davidson to the extreme, you would just be reaffirming indexing here.
If two cultures aren’t talking about the same thing when they seem to contradict each other on abortion, because they work from different webs of belief, then when Culture A says: “Abortion is evil” and Culture B says: “Abortion is not evil,” they are just talking past each other in a case of total equivocation.
And sure, this move ensures that there is no real moral disagreement between them, but only because the meaning of phrases of the form “is evil” are being indexed to the speaker’s background web of beliefs. Which is also utterly implausible. Different cultures don’t mean radically different things by “abortion” or “infanticide” or “evil” such that claims of A and not-A between them aren’t contradictory.
I think Banno’s admission here was helpful, if only he presented his ideas in light of the fact:
More simply, what Banno is doing is ad hoc “throwing stuff at the wall and seeing if anything sticks.” The T-schema, “seeing,” second-order functions, direction of fit, etc. None of this is thought out. Banno is just recycling his old ideas and seeing if they might satisfy ethical normativity. It turns out that none of them do.
At some point it isn’t Banno’s fault if undue attention is being paid to his ideas. Granted, he presents them with a disproportionate level of authority and gravity, but once one realizes that the ideas are unpolished perhaps even to the point of incoherence, energetic engagement becomes an unskillful approach. Perhaps the next thing thrown at the wall will stick and perhaps it won’t, but the methodology is not a reliable way of producing philosophical insight.
It’s also worth pointing out that analytics like Banno are more deeply invested in Hume’s is/ought gulf than they realize. It’s not just a minor principle. It’s a central axiom of their entire philosophical edifice. To question it is a bit like pulling on a central strand of a spider’s web and hoping that none of the other strands will be affected. That’s why the ad hoc approach does not produce any fruitful results. You can’t shoehorn ethical normativity into a centuries-old philosophical paradigm which is founded on its exclusion.
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They are, though. This is still the same resistance I outlined from your previous response. If you’re not able to get beyond this, you wont see the forest whether or not you can see trees.
They aren’t, and that’s not what either @banno or I have described. This is getting weird..
Are not what has been argued constitutes an “ethical truth”. I genuinely, in all good faith imaginable, ask you ro re-read my previous response, carefully and slowly - because what you’re arguing against was not in it.
Tim, what’s an “ethical norm”?
I agree. But that is all it could possibly be describing. And it’s a descriptive claim.
That would be simpler and easier, and seems to be Mackie’s take. I really enjoy Mackie and think his Ethics is probbaly the clearest take on this problem. But this makes a claim something like this:
There are ethical truths, but, none of them obtain.
That seems far, far, far worse of a claim that one i’m making (whcih is totally coherent, once you drop the clinging to wants).
No, that wouldn’t be fair. But mistranslating people such that you cannot agree with them is just as unfair. That may be the impasse.
Unfortunately, I agree. They seem to respond to spectres of some kind.
I would say this functions well. The reason is that we’re not having suppose an apriori fact about kicking puppies (lets say). What we can do is just look at the world, and recognize that kicking puppies is wrong.
Again, had it been “kicking puppies is bad” we get to a conversation about cross-cultural thoughts and why those inform the ethics of that time.
I thikn there’s a pretty easy spanner to throw out here anyway: In a world where no one had any issues whatsoever with kicking puppies for fun, how would you even begin to make a case about it being wrong (as opposed to bad)?
There is something brute in this - but there’s just no lower level to go to (aimed largely ar others, I just liked this line).
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I think this sums up the exasperation of your ways:
Do you see why someone would infer you are a moral non-objectivist? Is it unreasonable or uncharitable for someone to infer it from that?
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There’s a way of not addressing what someone has said; it consists in applying a label. Labelling gives the illusion of addressing what has been said while talking about something else.
So, what does a “moral non-objectivist” say? Is it the same as what I say?
But then, why not just address what I have written instead? Why resort to the label at all?
Don’t you think that request ought to go both ways?
You said the position you are talking about is not relativist; that it’s not all about preference, but you also say objectivity has nothing to do with what you are saying either.
Your whole discussion with @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus (which you vaguely approve) is circling around this same (apparent to some) incoherence.
It’s basically: how do you keep is/ought separate and say the ought side isn’t all relative/preference?
“Non-objectivist” seems like @TheEudemian is trying to play ball and make sense of this.
It’s amazing how some use a discussion forum mostly to tell each other what not to discuss.
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You said that objectivity is not validly a part of ethics and that moral facticity exists: those are both facially incoherent with each other.
The first claim is moral non-objectivism; insofar as it is the denial of moral objectivity.
The other threads I’ve started all work towards explaining this. I’ve argued that the language of object and subject hides relevant detail. Arguing using labels is similarly stultifying.
Then, instead of dismissing my attempt at getting to understand your position (of which you even explicitly acknowledged); just tell me about your position in good faith.
If you are going to dismiss peoples’ discussions with you where they are being extremely charitable to your position to try to understand it; then definitely don’t lie and say they are disingenuously straw manning your position and being bad faith.
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If you haven’t been able to follow the previous hundred posts, then there is good reason to apply the law of diminishing returns.
I’m still here, if you have anything specific to ask. Otherwise, re-read my posts.
Someone says “one ought not kick puppies for fun.”
Another says “it is true that one ought not kick puppies for fun.”
Obviously they are different statements, but is the difference only relevant to the meta-ethnician, or is it relevant to the person seeking to determine what one ought not do? Are both of these quoted statements possible moral truths? Or just the second?
The question of whether there are moral truths is not the question of whether people make moral laws and statements using the word “ought” in them and how this impacts the logic of valid arguments. The question of whether there are moral truths is, to lean on the example, whether we can determine if in fact it is true that one ought not actually kick puppies for fun.
The statement “one ought not…” is a moral statement. Adding “it is true that one ought not…” doesn’t make it a moral truth.
We need access to what actually is to inform ourselves on what is true. And what actually is needs to include what actually is good, to inform ourselves on what is morally true.
So if there is an is/ought gap, there can be no informative moral truths.
This is basically limiting the domain of what types of theories are actually doing practical reasoning (ethics), and what types are using the words “ought” and “truth” and doing something else (analytics).
Right.
Can’t have any sound appreciation for moral authority without any sound appreciation for moral truth.
Can’t tell the difference between needing to take a crap and needing to do the right thing absent any actual good arising in what is.
Can’t really integrate the import of Foote’s later retraction of her earlier positions if you remain transfixed by the lack of “ought” in the “is”.
This has stalled progress on these threads.
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We need to discuss whether puppies have any right to their life when it comes to seeing whether kicking puppies is morally right or wrong. We cannot go anywhere if we don’t establish puppies’ rights to their life first.
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What this shows, yet again, is how little of the discussion you two understood.
These are truth- functionally equivalent. Whatever truth value is assigned to one, the same is assigned to the other. Given that, the remainder of your post falls apart.
Did everybody get that? Yet again, Banno had to take time out of his day to remind us how much smarter he is than me. It’s true, I’m pretty stupid. Can’t speak for @Leontiskos. (I’ll let Banno do that.)
Well no, it means my question wasn’t a good prompt. Any answer you gave to the question wouldn’t reframe the rest of the post. So you’re wrong there.
Let me rephrase to incorporate your clarifying addition to what I said, adding the bold:
So whoop-de-doo. You are right on the meta-“ethics” but that doesn’t speak to the rest of the post.
This is still unaddressed:
And it still seems clear to me that:
Fine if you don’t want to address it or think it doesn’t need to be addressed to make your meta-ethical points. I think it would help to address it.
But yet again, you remain supercilious. (Although in my case, maybe not supercilious, just factually superior. I can’t speak for Leon.)