Moral Realism?

[Jichard]

Good, so you agree that you have an ethical system that has zero effect on ethics.

That's a lie, since I never claimed that.

By the way, moral realism is not an ethical system. It's a meta-ethical position. It's stunning that you still don't recognize the difference, since I spent at least 5 posts on another thread explaining to you that meta-ethics is not same thing as normative ethics. Apparently, you either weren't paying attention, or deceptively pretending that this wasn't explained to you.

And it has zero effect on discovering what is actually right or wrong.

That's because normative ethical positions answers normative ethical questions like that, while meta-ethical positions answer a different set of meta-ethical questions. So, once again, what you wrote is as silly as objecting to Cell Theory by saying that it has zero effect on dicovering the shape of the Earth. That's stupid because Cell Theory is not a position meant to answer questions like that. Similarly, moral realism isn't in the business of answering questions of normative ethics. It answers questions in meta-ethics.

seer, this has been explained to you no less than 5 times. For example:

Listen Jichard I know that moral realism is not directly dealing with specific moral questions - I GET THAT.

Awesome. Then why did you ask this, as if moral realism was in the business of addressing that?:

"So why is lying for personal gain is wrong? Again, of what practical use is believing that - especially if others don't?"

And you are being dishonest or mistaken, I am not longer asking why things like lying are wrong, and I haven't for a number of posts. So again - of what practical use is moral realism, what dos it tell us about the world. How does reasoning in this way help anything?

I already told you:

"That's not what I said. What you wrote is as ridiculous as saying practically Cell Theory is useless, since it doesn't tell me which actions are morally right and morally wrong. Different positions answer different questions. So just as Cell Theory isn't in the business of answering the question of which actions are morally good or morally bad, moral realism isn't in the business of answering that question. Moral realism instead answers a different set of meta-ethical questions. That doesn't mean moral realism is useless, anymore than it means Cell Theory is useless."

And I even gave you links discussing the sort of meta-ethical questions moral realism answers:

Start with Wikipedia and proceed from there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism

Or you can read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on this, or the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on this.

I was operating under the assumption that you knew what moral realism (and other meta-ethical terms) meant, especially since you were discussing meta-ethics. Should I drop this assumption?

At which point you did what I've been criticizing you for doing: acting as if moral realism needs to answer questions like "why is lying for personal gain is wrong? Which, of course, blatantly confuses meta-ethics with normative ethics and involves incorrectly assuming that meta-ethical positions need to answer questions normative questions answer in order for meta-ethics to be relevant.

And yet here you are, pretending that moral realism needs to answer questions of normative ethics.

Why are you so wilfully dishonest that you repeat the same mistakes over and over, while pretending thye hve not been addressed?

So again, what good is it?

Please stop dishonestly pretending that his has not been explained to you: it answers meta-ethical questions.

Fallacy of appeal to consequence. Might as well say that Cell Theory is false and useless, since it doesn't have a positive effect on behavior. That would be silly, of course, since the point of Cell Theory is not to change behavior. It's to answer biological questions. Similarly, the point of moral realism isn't to change behavior. It's to answer meta-ethical questions. You keep evading this point.

[seer]

That's because normative ethical positions answers normative ethical questions like that, while meta-ethical positions answer a different set of meta-ethical questions. So, once again, what you wrote is as silly as objecting to Cell Theory by saying that it has zero effect on dicovering the shape of the Earth. That's stupid because Cell Theory is not a position meant to answer questions like that. Similarly, moral realism isn't in the business of answering questions of normative ethics. It answers questions in meta-ethics.

No it is not a silly question, this is from the web site you are fond of quoting from.

Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that there are moral facts. Suppose even that the moral facts are properly thought of as at least compatible with science. One thing Moore’s Open Question Argument still seems to show is that no appeal to natural facts discovered by scientific method would establish that the moral facts are one way rather than another. That something is pleasant, or useful, or satisfies someone’s preference, is perfectly compatible with thinking that it is neither good nor right nor worth doing. The mere fact that moral facts might be compatible with natural facts does nothing to support the idea that we could learn about the moral facts. David Hume seems to have been, in effect, pressing this point long before Moore, when he argued that no moral conclusion follows non-problematically from nonmoral premises (Hume 1739). No “ought,” he pointed out, followed from an “is”—without the help of another (presupposed) “ought.” More generally, there is no valid inference from nonmoral premises to moral conclusions unless one relies, at least surreptitiously, on a moral premise. If, then, all that science can establish is what “is” and not what ought to be, science cannot alone establish moral conclusions.

But from where, then, can we get the moral premises needed? Of course no answer is to be found in a claim that certain norms are in force or that a powerful being commanded something since, in both cases, nothing about what ought to be done follows from these claims without assuming some further moral claim (e.g. that one ought to obey the norms in force or that one owes allegiance to the powerful being). If at least some fundamental moral principles were self-evident, or analytic truths, or at least reasonably thought to enjoy widespread consensus or to be such that eventually all would converge on those principles, there might be some plausible candidates. Yet the few principles that might be candidates—one ought to treat people with respect or one ought to promote human welfare or, other things equal, pleasure is good—are all either so abstract or inspecific in their implications that they could hardly alone work to justify the full range of moral claims people are inclined to make.

These considerations highlight a crucial difficulty moral realists face even if one grants the existence of moral facts: they need some account of how we might justify our moral claims. Otherwise, whatever the moral facts are, we would have reasonable grounds for worrying that what we count as evidence for any particular claim is no evidence at all.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#4

So my intuitive objections were not silly in the least.

[Jichard]

No it is not a silly question, this is from the web site you are fond of quoting from.

No, it's a stupid question for the reasons I explained to you:

"That's because normative ethical positions answers normative ethical questions like that, while meta-ethical positions answer a different set of meta-ethical questions. So, once again, what you wrote is as silly as objecting to Cell Theory by saying that it has zero effect on dicovering the shape of the Earth. That's stupid because Cell Theory is not a position meant to answer questions like that. Similarly, moral realism isn't in the business of answering questions of normative ethics. It answers questions in meta-ethics."

Nothing in what you quote-mined rebuts that, seer. You're (once again) misrepresenting sources you don't understand. Nowhere in what you quoted is it said that moral realism is a normative ethical position that needs to answer normative ethical question. Nowhere. So it's not my fault that you're still assuming that moral realism needs to answer normative ethical questions.


So, once again, please don't misrepresent sources on topics you don't understand. Instead of quote-mining sources to fabricate the impression that you understand what you're talking about, how about actually learning about the topic? For example: finally learning the difference between normative ethics and meta-ethics. That'd be a nice first-step for you to take.

So my intuitive objections were not silly in the least.

No, your objections were silly, and had nothing to do with the sources you quote-mined from. You literally have no understanding of what you just posted, as usual.

[seer]

No, it's a stupid question for the reasons I explained to you:

"That's because normative ethical positions answers normative ethical questions like that, while meta-ethical positions answer a different set of meta-ethical questions. So, once again, what you wrote is as silly as objecting to Cell Theory by saying that it has zero effect on dicovering the shape of the Earth. That's stupid because Cell Theory is not a position meant to answer questions like that. Similarly, moral realism isn't in the business of answering questions of normative ethics. It answers questions in meta-ethics."

Nothing in what you quote-mined rebuts that, seer. You're (once again) misrepresenting sources you don't understand. Nowhere in what you quoted is it said that moral realism is a normative ethical position that needs to answer normative ethical question. Nowhere. So it's not my fault that you're still assuming that moral realism needs to answer normative ethical questions.


So, once again, please don't misrepresent sources on topics you don't understand. Instead of quote-mining sources to fabricate the impression that you understand what you're talking about, how about actually learning about the topic? For example: finally learning the difference between normative ethics and meta-ethics. That'd be a nice first-step for you to take.



No, your objections were silly, and had nothing to do with the sources you quote-mined from. You literally have no understanding of what you just posted, as usual.

Nonsense Jichard, this thread is about Moral Realism and your own source brought up some of the very same objections I did, about Moral Realism. And it is not difficult to understand what I just posted, it is self-explanatory and not the least bit out of context. You just don't like what it said. Here is more:

Putting aside the arguments that appeal to moral disagreement, a significant motivation for anti-realism about morality is found in worries about the metaphysics of moral realism and especially worries about whether moral realism might be reconciled with (what has come to be called) naturalism. It is hard, to say the least, to define naturalism in a clear way. Yet the underlying idea is fairly easy to convey. According to naturalism, the only facts we should believe in are those countenanced by, or at least compatible with, the results of science. To find, of some putative fact, that its existence is neither established by, nor even compatible with science, is to discover, as naturalism would have it, that there is no such fact. If moral realism requires facts that are incompatible with science (as many think it does) that alone would constitute a formidable argument against it.

Noncognitivists and error theorists alike have no trouble respecting naturalism while offering their respective accounts of moral claims. In both cases, their accounts appeal to nothing not already embraced by naturalism. Of course noncognitivists and error theories disagree in crucial ways about the nature of moral thought, and noncognitivists and error theorists disagree among themselves too about which versions of their preferred accounts are better. But they all are, from the point of view of naturalism, on safe ground.

Moral realists, in contrast, are standardly seen as unable to sustain their accounts without appealing, in the end, to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism. This standard view can be traced to a powerful and influential argument offered by G.E. Moore (1903). As Moore saw things, being a naturalist about morality required thinking that moral terms could be defined correctly using terms that refer to natural properties. Thus one might define ‘good’ as ‘pleasant’, thus securing naturalistic credentials for value (so long as pleasure was a natural property) or one might define ‘good’ as ‘satisfies a desire we desire to have’ or as ‘conforms to the rules in force in our society’ or ‘promotes the species.’ Any one of these proposed definitions, if true, would establish that the facts required to make claims about what is good true or false were compatible with naturalism. Yet, Moore argued, no such definition is true. Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive. For in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was on offer, it always made sense to ask, of things that had the naturalistic property in question, whether those things were (really) good.Putting aside the arguments that appeal to moral disagreement, a significant motivation for anti-realism about morality is found in worries about the metaphysics of moral realism and especially worries about whether moral realism might be reconciled with (what has come to be called) naturalism. It is hard, to say the least, to define naturalism in a clear way. Yet the underlying idea is fairly easy to convey. According to naturalism, the only facts we should believe in are those countenanced by, or at least compatible with, the results of science. To find, of some putative fact, that its existence is neither established by, nor even compatible with science, is to discover, as naturalism would have it, that there is no such fact. If moral realism requires facts that are incompatible with science (as many think it does) that alone would constitute a formidable argument against it.

Noncognitivists and error theorists alike have no trouble respecting naturalism while offering their respective accounts of moral claims. In both cases, their accounts appeal to nothing not already embraced by naturalism. Of course noncognitivists and error theories disagree in crucial ways about the nature of moral thought, and noncognitivists and error theorists disagree among themselves too about which versions of their preferred accounts are better. But they all are, from the point of view of naturalism, on safe ground.

Moral realists, in contrast, are standardly seen as unable to sustain their accounts without appealing, in the end, to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism. This standard view can be traced to a powerful and influential argument offered by G.E. Moore (1903). As Moore saw things, being a naturalist about morality required thinking that moral terms could be defined correctly using terms that refer to natural properties. Thus one might define ‘good’ as ‘pleasant’, thus securing naturalistic credentials for value (so long as pleasure was a natural property) or one might define ‘good’ as ‘satisfies a desire we desire to have’ or as ‘conforms to the rules in force in our society’ or ‘promotes the species.’ Any one of these proposed definitions, if true, would establish that the facts required to make claims about what is good true or false were compatible with naturalism. Yet, Moore argued, no such definition is true. Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive. For in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was on offer, it always made sense to ask, of things that had the naturalistic property in question, whether those things were (really) good.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#4

See, that wasn't hard to understand.

[Jichard]

Nonsense Jichard, this thread is about Moral Realism and your own source brought up some of the very same objections I did, about Moral Realism.

Once again, nowhere in that source (which you misrepesented, by the way), does it bring up the objection you did. And that's because that sources is not stupid enough to confuse meta-ethics with normative ethics.

So, once again:

"That's because normative ethical positions answers normative ethical questions like that, while meta-ethical positions answer a different set of meta-ethical questions. So, once again, what you wrote is as silly as objecting to Cell Theory by saying that it has zero effect on dicovering the shape of the Earth. That's stupid because Cell Theory is not a position meant to answer questions like that. Similarly, moral realism isn't in the business of answering questions of normative ethics. It answers questions in meta-ethics."

Nothing in what you quote-mined rebuts that, seer. You're (once again) misrepresenting sources you don't understand. Nowhere in what you quoted is it said that moral realism is a normative ethical position that needs to answer normative ethical question. Nowhere. So it's not my fault that you're still assuming that moral realism needs to answer normative ethical questions.

And since you're not being honest, I'm going to ask you directly: is moral realism a meta-ethical position, or is it a position in normative ethics?

And it is not difficult to understand what I just posted, it is self-explanatory and not the least bit out of context.

No, it's out-of-context and you don't understand a word of what was said.

Here's a simple way to show this, by asking you two question I know you're too uninformed to answer:

Was Moore a moral realist?
Is the open question argument an objection to moral realism?

You just don't like what it said. Here is more:

You don't understand what's being said, just like when you lied about the source you quote-mined on physicalism. You pretended the source disagreed with me, when it actually agreed with the point I'd emphasized to you and which you'd lied about. I really thought by now you would have learned not to do that.

See, that wasn't hard to understand.

Once again, please do't pretend you understand the sources you misrepresent. You'll get caught rather quickly.

[seer]

Was Moore a moral realist?
Is the open question argument an objection to moral realism?


Moral realists, in contrast, are standardly seen as unable to sustain their accounts without appealing, in the end, to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism. This standard view can be traced to a powerful and influential argument offered by G.E. Moore (1903). As Moore saw things, being a naturalist about morality required thinking that moral terms could be defined correctly using terms that refer to natural properties. Thus one might define ‘good’ as ‘pleasant’, thus securing naturalistic credentials for value (so long as pleasure was a natural property) or one might define ‘good’ as ‘satisfies a desire we desire to have’ or as ‘conforms to the rules in force in our society’ or ‘promotes the species.’ Any one of these proposed definitions, if true, would establish that the facts required to make claims about what is good true or false were compatible with naturalism. Yet, Moore argued, no such definition is true. Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive. For in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was on offer, it always made sense to ask, of things that had the naturalistic property in question, whether those things were (really) good.

So according the the link the moral realist must appeal to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism.

And against the possible justifications Moore would say: Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive. For in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was on offer, it always made sense to ask, of things that had the naturalistic property in question, whether those things were (really) good.

So Moore is saying that moral realism is not compatible with naturalism. Correct?

[JimL]

So according the the link the moral realist must appeal to putative facts that fly in the face of naturalism.

And against the possible justifications Moore would say: Against every one, he maintain, a single line of argument was decisive. For in each case, whatever naturalistic definition of moral terms was on offer, it always made sense to ask, of things that had the naturalistic property in question, whether those things were (really) good.

So Moore is saying that moral realism is not compatible with naturalism. Correct?

Let me ask you this question seer. If the moral nature of your god were reversed, then as far as you are concerned, all that you now consider to be good would be evil, and all that you now consider to be evil would be good. Is that correct? Yes or no?

[seer]

Let me ask you this question seer. If the moral nature of your god were reversed, then as far as you are concerned, all that you now consider to be good would be evil, and all that you now consider to be evil would be good. Is that correct? Yes or no?

And if you were raise a good Hitler youth in 1930s Germany would you have a problem shoving Jewish children into the showers?

[Tassman]

And if you were raise a good Hitler youth in 1930s Germany would you have a problem shoving Jewish children into the showers?

If morality were an absolute set by a god, as you claim, something could be moral even if every human being disagreed.

[JimL]

And if you were raise a good Hitler youth in 1930s Germany would you have a problem shoving Jewish children into the showers?

Notice you did not answer the question seer. So, I will ask once again. If the moral nature of your God were reversed, then as far as you are concerned, would all that you now consider to be good, be evil, and all that you now consider to be evil, be good. Yes or no? In other words if according to your objective moral standard, i.e. your God, murder was a good thing, would you agree? Why or why not?

[JimL]

And if you were raise a good Hitler youth in 1930s Germany would you have a problem shoving Jewish children into the showers?

Btw, thats the point I'm trying to make seer. Yes I would have a problem whether it was Hitler or God that ordered me to murder children. I wouldn't do it in either case, would you?

[Tassman]

Btw, thats the point I'm trying to make seer. Yes I would have a problem whether it was Hitler or God that ordered me to murder children. I wouldn't do it in either case, would you?

Of course you wouldn't and neither would I. Which raises the question of just how moral is an act which is (allegedly) mandated by God if every person in a society disagreed and was of the opinion that it was wrong, e.g. stoning to death an adulterous woman?

[seer]

If morality were an absolute set by a god, as you claim, something could be moral even if every human being disagreed.

Of course. But since we are made in His image, and have His law written on our hearts it is unlikely that we would ever get that far removed from goodness.

[seer]

Notice you did not answer the question seer. So, I will ask once again. If the moral nature of your God were reversed, then as far as you are concerned, would all that you now consider to be good, be evil, and all that you now consider to be evil, be good. Yes or no? In other words if according to your objective moral standard, i.e. your God, murder was a good thing, would you agree? Why or why not?

Jim I noticed that you did not answer the question also. The point is God's moral character is immutable, it can not change, He can not be other than He is. So I need not entertain impossibilities. On the other hand it would not be impossible for you to have been raised in a culture with different moral values. And if you were raised a good Hitler youth in 1930s Germany you would probably had little problem herding Jewish children into the showers.

[seer]

Of course you wouldn't and neither would I. Which raises the question of just how moral is an act which is (allegedly) mandated by God if every person in a society disagreed and was of the opinion that it was wrong, e.g. stoning to death an adulterous woman?

That is just silly Tass, if you were raised a good Hitler youth I doubt very much that you would have had a problem executing Jews. Or if you were a follower of Mao or Stalin you would have had little problem with executing dissenters. Your present moral sense is just an accident of birth.