I think he just said morality was when humans go around sniffing each other's butts.

In your own way rock throwing is your schtick. If Bunny says "coffee is good"; in its own way it is , for consideration of coffee does make a man more logical and helps to focus the mind. Others physiologically see that coffee is a poison for the heart . Both are truisms and not to be denied.

I don't get it; what are you offering?

I like Dennett, even if we don't always agree. I mean look at him, he's adorable

I am attracted to the sort of "ontological epistemology" that talks about the knower entering into the thing known. I've only encountered it described as Love as a kind of knowledge. I'm not sure if it makes sense to equate that with the philosophical idea of qualia. The relationship to a meta-ethics is also a little confusing to me. When you speak of moral tonality and qualia it sort of suggests a kind of non-cognitivism to me, i.e that you are speaking of morality as something not reducible to placing truth values on certain propositions. Is that right? I feel like you would be a lot easier to understand if you could translate your ideas into a more neutral metaphysics or relate them to the meta-ethical categories that are more familiar, even if you think those categories are insufficient.

Most of what I write relates to "thoughts and thinking". I feel like a broken record,to myself, if not others. I'm really not capable of entering into discussions which bring up terms such as ethics or metaethics, not having the background, nor inclination; not a pejorative but a matter of experience.

In the morality to which I am speaking, seeing or appreciating a thought can only be appreciated in and for itself by a selfless perception. In that, this selflessness and denial of self is Love. the thoughts we see today, in our culture, are of a bare bones type.Just as the human corpse is evidence of a soul spirit being who has left the body at death, likewise, a thought is analogous to a living being which was alive before we came to earth but only seen in dead outline while living on the earth.

Believe it or not, i really try to make matters clear but each concept brings forth, by necessity, another or more aspects, which might explain my meanderings.

OK, dead thoughts, so what to do and what is the relationship of thoughts and thinking to our perceptions, inner and outer? I'll say this once for I know its tedious but in our perceptions of the tree, or lion, or magenta we are only seeing one half of the reality. Human beings are limited and so through thinking which is a perception of thoughts in a reality of spirit the human Ego Being brings the thought and tree together and in this reality is complete. That is the reality we all think we know of only in external perception. In this reality the human Ego Being is creative within the cosmos and manifesting a consciousness, or conscious behavior.

I can look at a coffee bean and by my path of knowledge can see how a man can bring forth the two aspects of the coffee bean, a poison and a stabilizer of logical thought. It is perfectly possible for anyone to grip the logical stabilizer whereas the poison would call for a further thinking which if the individual man cannot enter into this aspect himself another can well bring this type of truth to another.

The "proof" of these matters is the thought train, in and of itself, for a thought can certainly not be broken up in a retort and examined but the train of thought can be followed by another and in itself present the truth in these matters. If there is a fault in the thoughtful activity another can find the error without having to do the exploring of the thought world.

As you can see it is meandering but I stand by it and as far as Dennett is concerned he gets under my skin as no other. His denial of the fullness of experience leads me to believe that he should paint or compose music or write poetry and see that exploration of the worlds he purports to know about is also brought forth within the artistic world. the damn scientist in him needs to work with his nutty putty for I really, really, can't believe he believes what he says.

Since he gets to me that much there is probably an aspect I'm not seeing, ready to flip me on my head. Oh my O my, where is it??

Language is an interesting topic, but changing an information bearer because it resembles another is somewhat puzzling.

I mean, if I say that my car is blue it could be that I'm saying it has a color. If I used a somewhat rarer interpretation I could be saying it is depressed. If I used a unique interpretation I could be saying my car is Brianthemick2's dog named God.

The problem with accepting any given word as bearer of any given information is that you wouldn't know what you just accepted - since it could mean anything.

Any change on beauty/aesthetics as objective? You previously were undecided.

Seems like you could make a very similar argument for the existence of an objective arbitrary standard (dimension?) of beauty that instincts are somehow selected for the appreciation of. Not that I'd buy it

Morality: Pertaining to generally acceptable and unacceptable human conduct within a society or group. Occasionally pertaining to the internalized or idiosyncratic acceptance or lack of acceptance of human conduct.

Subjective: Pertaining to the thinking subject, rather than the object of the thought.

Objective: A thing or event that exists independently of thinking subjects.

Acceptance is subjective. There must be a thinking subject accepting the thing that is to be accepted.

You don't like Mad Libs? He seems both nice and quite exuberant about whatever he is talking about.

I like it when he gets into a discussion with a similarly minded person. I also Like that he uses Capitalization in a unique Way.

This is my point as well. If you don't believe that aesthetics are objective then how can you believe morality is?

I'm not sure that presents much of a problem. Our language is littered with these kind of indexical assumptions. For instance, "Barack Obama is the President of the US" seems like a straightforward proposition, but its truth-value is partially determined by whether it is spoken by someone living between 2008 and 2017.

I think the real problem for cognitive subjectivists here is that their proposed interpretation has a difficult time explaining the wide range of linguistic behavior associated with moral statements. For instance, if moral statements refer only to our own emotional reactions, then what are we arguing about in cases of moral disagreement?

Grunching.

Bunny, this may have been covered but how does one go about determining the moral truths?

haven't seen Bunny claim anything about epistemology. FWIW

I don't have a problem with indexical assumptions per se, but then "Barack Obama is the President of the US" isn't by itself a proposition, is it? It sounds wrong to me to say "Barack Obama is the President of the US" is made true when spoken by someone living between 2008 and 2017; what is true or false, assuming there are no other indexical assumptions, is the proposition "Barack Obama is the President of the US in [insert time here]".

It seems like they get all the problems of explaining linguistic behavior, with no clear benefit against an error theorist. An error theorist obviously doesn't disagree that "I disapprove of murder" is truth-apt, so what exactly does the subjectivist gain by claiming that moral statements are truth-apt but mind-dependent?

A subjectivist gains a solid explanation of the relationship between moral statements and moral motivation, or bridging the is-ought gap, if you like. That is much harder to explain for an objectivist-based accounts.

Why is that hard to explain for an error theorist, there is no ought, and hence no is-ought gap? We can believe that we are motivated by desires without describing our motivations as moral, no?

Sorry, I started answering a different question halfway through my response. But let me put it back to you like this:

As an error theorist obviously doesn't disagree that "I disapprove of murder" is truth-apt, and subjectivism gives a good explanation of moral motivation, what exactly does the error-theorist gain by claiming that moral statements are mind-independent but all false?

He would gain (arguably) a far more plausible approach to what moral statements are supposed to mean. And he could still explain motivation in terms of desires or approval, he would just not call it 'moral motivation'.

I think it’s unquestionable that for the large majority, the sight and smell of a murderer human body is displeasing aesthetically. My question for Bunny is. If you believe morality to be objective, what reason do you have for believing that aesthetics are not objective? After all, our sense of aesthetics does certainly serve as a guide to our behavior, just like our sense of morality. Their function at the fundamental level is no different.

P.S. It has probably been asked before but for some unexplained and intuitive reason, I feel very proud of this question. It brings to mind the role of evolutionary biology and its explanations for our most fundamental attractions and repulsions (which form part of our morality - perhaps even all of it at the very roots).

Yep. I should probably describe actions as moral rather than good, just to avoid this. Cheers.

Thanks. I'm actually making much more progress with understanding what they're going on about this time around. My problem with subjectivism has always been understanding their claims - I never really found them wrong, since I never really understood what they were saying. That's no doubt due to most of my discussions being about defending objectivism, rather than the other way around.

Still undecided (although I'm leaning towards the view that it's subjective).

Makes sense. Being wrong but sensible isnt a big deal.

I dont really understand the argument. Because one thing is subjective, everything must be?

I think it's analogous to the way we go about determining mathematical ones. I'm not really fussed if my view implies it's impossible to know moral truths though - I'm not completely sold on the idea that we know any truths.