I was just asking a question you don't have to answer. I used to work in Mcds like 10 years ago I don't really have anything positive to say about it.

Anyway we are getting side tracked. You never responded to my post about morals.

Not sure why you bring this up! I looked into become a hermit ages and I'm not sure where I would stand in terms of landownership if I decided to pitch a tent in someone elses property out by a lake somewhere.

This does not make much sense, as your question was actually answered in the very post you quoted.

Well, first you stated that morals do not exist, when this is argued against you go into a longwinded post about what morals actually are. These two points seem mutually exclusive.

When you say morals do you really mean power over people?

No, I do not. You, however, did.

The concepts can interplay, but to claim they are the same is just a waste of good language; a bit like saying falling is the same as breaking a leg.

So what do you mean?

I think you need to keep track of your own conversation. You stated that morals did not exist, they were just <something else>. Then you stated that they were <yet something else>.

All I have done is point out that saying what morals are is a pretty bad argument to support the claim that morals do not exist.

Ok cool. I understand

I brought it up because you said you cant avoid people all the time. But you can avoid them more then you currently do. You can buy land and be a hermit. Its dirt cheep some places.

Just from a practical standpoint (of a philosophical amateur) I'm not seeing how adding a conditional changes much. Aren't you just imbedding a non-cognitive assertive clause in a cognitive statement?

P1 <Boo Murder>
P2 If <boo murder>, <boo Dave> for killing his wife?

Does putting a non-cognitive assertion on both sides of an equal sign create a cognitive moral statement?

Robin Agrees probably thinks that your epistemic standard of "consistency", just like moral standards, is a disguised attempt by you to assert power over him and his ability to believe what he wants by forcing him to adhere to made-up standards.

Sick bump, sign me up if OrP wishes to continue this or start a new thread. The thing here was that earlier I said something like I thought that noncognitivism was plausible as a theory of moral language, but it was nevertheless not worth calling morality. OrP's main point was that I can't in the same breath entertain the possibility that noncognitivism is true while saying that it's not worth calling morality, because if noncognitivism were true then it is what morality is. We don't necessarily need to pick it up there, but I am curious if my last point about the majority of philosophers being cognitivists had any significance. I can buy the story that non-philosophers, who would not have philosophical clarity on what propositions and truth-aptness are, mean to express something non-cognitive when they utter seemingly propositional, truth-apt statements like "murder is wrong", but philosophers know what propositions and truth-aptness are, and most of them are cognitivists, so how can the descriptive component of noncognitivism be true?

Error theory is as much an ontological bargain as noncognitivism (unless you go all Plato's Beard on non-referring moral terms).

I'll read into the details if I must, but I have heard him on a few podcasts and I heard mostly shoptalk. On the main questions eg is there a mind-independent fact by virtue of which we should or should not condemn rapists, quasi-realism either collapses into regular moral realism or it doesn't, and I take it that it doesn't, so it's just another anti-realist view.

Anyways, +1. OrP we gave you a year for this long post about the Humean tradition of moral philosophy. How dare you deprive us for so long. Who do you think you are, George RR Martin?

It was a poor positing of the position by me it's less clear because wrong appears on both sides of P2. The cognitivist may hold that when we use conditionals we are not normally expressing a desire but a belief. I'll return to this later but the section from SEP explains it better than I will.

The Embedding Problem

I'm not sure that there's any meta-ethical position that the majority of philosophers agree on, we could similarly pose that question to moral realists on their different account the properties that moral statements refer to.

Yep, error theory concedes that moral statements are descriptive but don't refer to any actual properties so all are wrong.

The most interesting realist position for me is that realism can be correct even if there's no mind independent properties. The argument goes along the same lines that we understand colors as existing but they only exist in the sense that there are minds to understand them.

What I also found interesting is that it's possible for non cognitivists like R.M. Hare to argue a non cognitivist position on meta-ethics claiming that moral statements are prescriptive rather than descriptive but that doesn't prevent him also defending a particular account of preference utilitarianism.

I was going by that philpapers poll that gets linked around here now and then, something like 56% of all philosophy faculty lean towards moral realism, 64% lean towards cognitivism, with both numbers higher if you filter by those specialize in meta-ethics. Sure there may be different views on realism or cognitivism that may compete to be the correct one, but we should expect them to be in the same ballpark, like libertarians are in the same ballpark whether they are agent causal libertarians or noncausal libertarians.

Not sure how that helps, what makes it the case that the truth of moral statements does not depend on the subjective opinion of people?

Thing is I don't think that they are necessarily in the same ball park. That there's a distinction between cognitive and non cognitive anti-realists suggests this. I think convergence on these positions are persuasive without being compelling. My understanding is that Non-Cognitivism has fallen out of favour over the last 50 years but it may have been that the majority of meta ethicists were non cognitivists during it's heyday.

If you tell me that the flag of Japan has a green disk in the middle do I have to cede because that's your subjective opinion? You're right it's a challenge and not one I'm sure of my position on. It's at the heart of the disagreement between the analytic and synthetic realist and it's why I'm less than compelled by the convergence at realism given just how distinct these positions are.

I'm not sure I follow, cognitivism and noncognitivism are views about the meaning of moral language. The former says that moral statements express truth-apt propositions, the latter says that they don't. Since there may be finer points at stake with how cognitivism is formulated, I assume that there are different philosophical formulations of cognitivism, I'm just guessing that the differences are narrow enough that cognitivists are all in the same ballpark with each other. I'm quite cloudy on the history, but that there's a difference between cognitivist and noncognitivist anti-realisms today just indicates a disagreement about the meaning of moral language among people who deny the existence of mind-independent moral facts/properties, no?

If I say, "In my opinion, this Japanese dish is delicious", the fact here, what is true, is the whole thing; that in my opinion, some dish is delicious. 'X dish is delicious' is not a fact, and 'the flag of Japan has a green disk in the middle' is similarly not a fact established in your example, it's only a fact that in my opinion it is.

It's more the distinction between cognitivists on realism suggests that the differences aren't narrow enough to consider them in the same ballpark.


But it is a fact that the flag of Japan has a red disk in the middle. We can conceive the flag has a red disk in the middle even if there are no minds to perceive it, it's a property waiting to be discovered.

This way of talking about moral value is most commonly associated with John McDowell and David Wiggins and is usually referred to as "sensibility theory." An early example is from McDowell's article, "Values and Secondary Qualities," where he draws on the distinction in Locke between primary (mass, shape, etc.) and secondary (color, taste, etc.) qualities and claims that moral properties are analogous to secondary qualities--objective without being mind-independent.

Cheers, it was a reference to McDowell's response to Mackie that I was thinking of. I'll check that chapter out.

Oh, I probably didn't write that comment about ballparks clearly. I meant only that there may be different formulations of realism but all comfortably in the ballpark of "realism", and there might different types or formulations of cognitivism, but in the ballpark of "cognitivism", not that the two ballparks are one and the same ballpark. So concerning the second, if noncognitivists want to advance a descriptive claim about how moral language works, I don't get how they get around the fact that most moral philosophers cognitivists.

So the analogy is supposed hold that "The flag of Japan has a red disk in the middle" is an objective, mind-dependent fact and something like "The conduct of Japan in WW2 was reprehensible" is also an objective, mind-dependent fact? Is this supposed to be a more palatable option for a person with strong realist leanings who may find the realm of mind-independent morals a bit spooky? Doesn't do much for me to be honest. It is an objective fact that any two people/cultures may hold contrary mind-dependent moral judgments, now what if there's no objective mind-independent moral fact to decide between them?

They consider them wrong I guess. I'm fine with us disagreeing on how we weight that most moral philosophers are cognitivists. The more compelling arguments in favour must come from the literature.

We aren't looking for a objective mind independent moral fact on this account of realism.

If someone has moral realism leanings it seems that they should explain what are the objective moral properties, these properties can be natural or non natural but it seems remiss to claim a leaning without knowing what it is that's real about moral properties.

There's a better response to this.

In Andrew Fisher's Metaethics An Introduction he outlines the appeal of three positions in metaethics. These are Cognitivism, Internalism the idea there's a necessary link between judgement and motivation, and the Humean account of motivation in that an agent is motivated when a belief has a corresponding desire. All three have intuitive appeal according to the author and the case he makes is good though I'm not qualified to judge conclusions.

However it is widely considered that these three positions taken together are incompatible. If Beliefs alone are not sufficient to motivate (Hume), and Moral Judgement necessarily motivates (Internalism) the Moral Statements must be Non-Cognitive. Similarly for Cognitivism and Hume as long as motivations are External and Cognitivism and Internalism if we drop the Humean account of motivation.

If we just consider these three positions similarly dispersed among ethical philosophers then we can't use the convergence of these beliefs to rule out Non-Cognitivism.

Admittedly this is stuff I'm only informing myself of and I'm not particularly committed to any position as it stands.

I'm not sure why this is supposed to be so problematic for noncognitivists. Is your idea that philosophers who accept cognitivism in some sense stipulate that they are using moral language to make truth-apt claims, thus proving that noncognitivism is false?

A couple responses. First, I think you are overestimating how much respect some of these philosophers will have for their colleagues. Remember Hume saying that the metaphysical speculations that should be burned as worthless? Or the logical positivists who claimed all non-empirical philosophy to be meaningless? Or Wittgenstein, who claimed that the role of philosophy was therapy rather than truth-seeking?

Second, I'm not sure that this really contradicts noncognitivism. Claims about the meaning of moral language can be understood as contingent claims--this is how moral language is actually used and what it actually means, not that this is the only way it can be used or meant. Thus, it could be possible that some philosophers stipulatively create a new moral language that is cognitivist, without thereby showing that noncognitivism regarding ordinary and usual moral language contexts is incorrect.

On this account of realism, how does it make sense to condemn a rapist? In what way can the type of objectivity claimed by this view be leveraged?
My current stance is that some variation of robust moral realism has to be true in order to make any sense out of passing judgments, like condemning rapists. This is obviously no argument that robust moral realism has to be true, and in fact I am completely fine with any anti-realism out there being true, or some secondary realism being true, but then I don't see how these views avoid 'anything goes' as a consequence.