If you're correct wouldn't even the most trivial action by a sentient being have to have the metaphysical property of right/wrong? Seemed like that was your position in our last exchange. Been a long time and I may have misunderstood.

I dont think they all do (though I may have said that in the past. I used to think materialism was definitely wrong too - now I just think it's probably wrong).

I certainly think there is a moral dimension to lots of our actions we dont always consider, but they are at the trivial level. Also, we are limited time/energy wise. It's reasonable to adopt a rule about giving money to beggars and then apply that whenever it comes up, even though the 'more moral' thing might be to discuss the beggar's situation, what they plan to do with the money and then vary the amount accordingly.

There are other constraints on our behaviour besides a duty to act morally.

Interesting....And how does that make you feel?

I mean that we are talking about something being one thing or another.

I also acknowledge that the my big toenail on my left foot is not what we are talking about when we are discussing morals.

When we are talking about moral stuff, we are talking about crap that agents like or dislike about what agents do. "I don't like that sort of thing" is true in the fact that it is subjectively true. It requires a subject to dislike the object.

If no one minded rape, it would be fine.

What agent like and dislike is subjective. Eating **** isn't objectively wrong. It is just subjectively yucky.

And the difference between not liking being served bitter coffee and not liking being cheated by the merchant is?

Intention.

Sure. What I'm hoping to achieve here by conceding that moral realism is intuitively appealing is to get smrk2/bunny to understand that subjectivism is an alternate hypothesis about the semantics of moral statements, and therefore if you want to show that it is incoherent you have to judge it by its internal consistency, not its consistency with principles from rival semantic hypotheses.

So when I say "this coffee is good", is there a property of goodness that belongs entirely to the coffee, as opposed to be a property of a relationship between features of the coffee and features of my mind?

It really seems like the question of demarcating moral from non-moral is much more of a problem for you than for everyone else (including other non-platonic moral objectivists) and it's not really a big or interesting problem at all (I sketched out my view upthread).

It's like you are are asking "what makes something a religious issue rather than a non-religious issue" and someone saying "well, if it has to do with religions, or scriptures, or gods it's a religious issue" and you saying "aha! what if a bible falls off a shelf and hits someone on the head... is THAT a religious issue?" We pretty much all agree on what statements are in the domain of morality, and weird cases about baristas making bad coffee aren't really illuminating anything imho.

OTOH, it really is a bit less transparent when you say that the thing that puts a statement into the moral category is that it has an inscrutable moral property that you can't describe in non-moral terms. It's all a bit 'dormative quality'.

No I didn't mean good in that sense. I think aesthetics is purely subjective.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I don't understand subjectivism, I don't have the view that its incoherent.

*shrug* you might have misunderstood - I'm not presenting any kind of "challenge". I don't have any A-ha moment, I'm just expressing my ignorance. Fwiw, I'm getting somewhere.

I consider that analogous to the fact that mental phenomena don't reduce to physical ones.

Ok fair enough.

I know your motivation for posting is to challenge your own views, not others, so if the barista line of argument wasn't going anywhere I'll drop it.

Heresy.

Can you explain the difference between moral goodness and non-moral goodness? I have to be honest, I don't know how you can say that you don't understand subjectivism when you adopt it for non-moral issues like aesthetics... seems like it should be straightforward to understand, even if you reject it.

I'm particularly confused by the conjunction of the above quote and this one:

How do you reconcile these two quotes?

E.g. Does "charity is good" and "this coffee is good" have the same semantic treatment or not?

Maybe I've gone seriously off the rails. This just seems like equivocation to me.

I think the first means "charity is moral" and the second means "this coffee is high quality".

Yeah, that does sound stupid.

Maybe I'm just incapable of dropping the assumption of moral realism.

I'm a little rusty, clearly. The barista thing wasn't an argument at all. Probably best forgotten.

I'm trying to prevent equivocation by asking you to expand on how you use the word 'good' in different contexts. Well what I'm trying to draw out is whether you have two qualitatively different meanings for "good", which one of your quotes (apparently) denied and the other (apparently) affirmed.

It seems like your last couple of responses have clarified this anyway: you use 'good' in a subjective sense for (some?) non-moral evaluative claims, but in an objective sense for moral evaluative claims. NB: I don't think there's anything wrong, a priori, with having two different definitions/usages of a word, just trying to establish the parameters of your moral views.

To slow things down I'm going to ask you if the above represents your view accurately instead of continuing straight down the path I was originally headed.

Not being able to understand moral non-realism is a bit of a problem, but even within moral realism you should appreciate that you have one particular (and somewhat idiosyncratic) view. I'm just trying to understand your particular moral philosophy to a similar level that I understand other moral realist positions.

No problem.

1) Swindling people is bad.
2) Making bitter coffee is bad.

An objectivist about (1) would say that the "badness" is in some way a feature/property of the swindling of people. Presumably, as a platonist, you would say something like: the idea of "goodness" exists and insofar as that idea relates in the correct fashion to the event or object in question it is "good."

A subjectivist about (1) would say that the "badness" isn't found in some property of the event itself, but rather in our attitudes, emotional states, or reasoning about being swindled (notice that this isn't necessarily relativistic). For instance, Hume argues that moral evaluations arise from our desires and emotional responses to actions. But that is only a general claim, to distinguish his view from rationalistic and objectivist accounts. More specifically, he claims that moral evaluation is the result of a specific kind of emotional attitude--the kind of emotions we have towards events or character traits when we take a general or common perspective of sympathy towards others rather than a more singular self-interested perspective.

This answers your question of how a subjectivist might regard (1) as a moral statement but not (2). The condemnation in (1) expresses or states an attitude towards a class of action that is the result of taking a more general perspective, whereas the attitude in (2) is the result of a more specific perspective.

Fair enough, I was not careful enough here. It would be incoherent if the same proposition "murder is wrong" turned out to be simultaneously true and false. But if we're treating "murder is wrong" not as a whole proposition but as an expression with an implied contextual element for the speaker's attitude, then obviously it is not incoherent to accommodate the assertion "it is true that murder is wrong" if that really means "it is true that I dislike murder" and the assertion "it is false that murder is wrong" if that really means "it is false that some other guy dislikes murder". Implausibility aside, it's misleading because it's not that the speaker's attitude makes some whole moral statement true, it's that there is no moral statement until a speaker asserts her attitude.

I don't think it is a problem for either side of the debate as to whether people make moral claims.

It can be objectively true that you don't like something.

The soul lives within states of SYMPATHY and ANTIPATHY. In the Sympathetic State the object of our attention is experienced within ourselves as what one may call "soul warmth". In the highest of Sympathetic States there occurs a negation of self by the soul which becomes open to its environment.

In the Antipathetic State there is of course is a blockage of the externals to the soul's state. Strangely enough the cognitive process, including our power of memory are the direct result of this Antipathy. Man does not imprint a memory or make a cognitive act until he, in a sense, divorces himself from the sympathetic state, which can be seen to be, a selfless giving.

In the above are two aspects of a soul activity with the externals of the human being. To bring it to flower the internal aspect of the human being is as external to the soul as the outer environment. The states of sadness, hate, anger, joy, etc...are all cognized by the soul and as much as a tree is cognized. The duality of subjective and objective falls apart in this perspective.One does not come to the recognition of "anger" until the anger has left and what we have is a memory and of course a cognitive state.

And so, the soul has met her externals, whether inward or outward. If I come across a asafoetida bush I can be sure to be repelled by the smell but i still must have had a sympathetic appreciation of this fetid smelling herb and later on, judged it foul, or other some such characterization.

Therefore: "I Dislike the Asafoetida Smell"; a judgment based upon my reaction to the herb. the soul has done its job, experienced the herb, and there is a consequential judgment. Is my judgment short sided?

Wikipedia again, to the rescue.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida

As apparent from Wikipedia the Asafoetida herb has many characteristics from a cooking herb to medical appreciations. Someone had to devised some such way to bring its virtues to fruition. If you believe this was trial and error then I’ve got a bridge to which you might take an interest.

The question is: how does “morality’ fit into this picture? Does the human being go around smelling others, dog like, and come to appreciation of his environment, inner or outer?. When a man makes a judgment to what is the reference?

Living within the abstractions of modern language and thought the fact that the Asafoetida herb knocked you on your heels is not a factor in the judgment. This type of thought denies anything that can affect it, thereby living within the language, devoid of meaning; an internal meaning which exists within the object of consideration, not the meaning related to one’s personal self, which is of course is, in some circles, self indulgence. This Eagle without wings is the modern thought which will not sympathetically enter into relationship with the object of its considerations. In some august circles it has been relegated to a lesser entity, and called “qualia”. Dennett is a dip.

The meaning is that whether saving a child who is in the midst of almost drowning, conjuring up a picture of a bridge to be built, or planning and creating the plutonium bomb there is a moral tone to the act and the individual man lives within this moral tonality. The moral tenor of the object of your consideration is not dependent upon the individual man’s predilections but stands on its own. The will full activities of the individual man are morally bound , like it or not.

To those who state that it’s a matter of “choice” as to what they will do there is a ¼ truth to this but you can’t forget the effect of the outer entity upon your particular soul. It’s not a matter of glazing over the logic involved and work from a perspective of only the “chooser”, and nothing else. In fact, do an egregious act or “think” the act are both morals in action. The relativistic relationship of morality is again a ¼ truth for the same reasons; the activity or other being is not placed into consideration.


Couple of aphorisms;1) The so called “laws of nature” and mathematics are absolutely true for the earthly world the Moral laws are the laws of the spiritual world.

2) The being who has been judging, mulling, thi8nking in the above is that higher being of man his “Ego” or “I” which in religious parlance is the ineffable name of G---. This “I” is in the high regions of the spiritual world where the individual man performs his spiritual activity, or thinking. So as not to incite umbrage, I speak to this “I” as within all men, quite capable of improving whatever I’ve offered.

I haven't read more than the first sentence of a carlo post in about two years, but I don't have the heart to hit 'ignore'.