Quote:
Originally Posted by Chuckychess
As I said in an earlier post, one cannot ascribe value to something unless you know (or assign to it) a purpose. If you didn't know that airplanes flew, then you would be unable to accurately assign a value to airplanes. A $100 bill would be virtually worthless to you if you didn't know that it had monetary value. It would just be a piece of paper with words and drawings on it.
In my worldview, to say that "x is moral" is essentially saying that "x is approved of by God." Morality is non-cognitive (within my worldview) in the sense that we can't "figure it out." It only has meaning because God gives it meaning.
Two comments:
First, you seem confused about the moral non-cognitivism thesis. Here is the summary from
SEP:
Quote:
SEP
Non-cognitivism is a variety of irrealism about ethics with a number of influential variants. Non-cognitivists agree with error theorists that there are no moral properties or moral facts. But rather than thinking that this makes moral statements false, noncognitivists claim that moral statements are not in the business of predicating properties or making statements which could be true or false in any substantial sense. Roughly put, noncognitivists think that moral statements have no truth conditions. Furthermore, according to non-cognitivists, when people utter moral sentences they are not typically expressing states of mind which are beliefs or which are cognitive in the way that beliefs are. Rather they are expressing non-cognitive attitudes more similar to desires, approval or disapproval.
If moral statements are meaningful (have a truth-value) in your worldview because they are given one by God, then you are not a noncognitivist. I.e. if you believe that it is
true that rape is immoral, even if the reason you believe this is because God said, "Don't rape," then you are not a noncognitivist.
Second, your claim is inaptly put. When you say that if atheism is true, then objective morality is impossible, you don't mean that a
belief in objective morality is inconsistent with atheism. Rather, you mean that assuming your account of morality being based on God is correct,
which no atheist has any reason to assume, then if atheism is true there is no objective morality. In fact, most atheists
reject your understanding of morality, since you unnecessarily (in their view) predicate it on the existence of an imaginary being.