Philosophy Now Forum

Sigh. I wonder if he'll ever make the breakthrough to understanding that the truth of a premise (or premises) and the validity of a conclusion are all that matter in any kind of argument. At his current rate of not progress, I can't see it ever happening for him. There is no way you will ever get h...

That's exactly why I asked you what the "betterness" is a proprty of. Surely you agree that the wavelength of light is a property of the light not a property of our beliefs about the light? That's the sort of of objectivity that makes sicence possible. Morals have no equivalent objective ...

If you don't use the concept of "betterness' then you can't make any decisions at all. Not just in morality but in everything. The point is that "betterness" is not based entirely in your feelings. Of what is "betteness" a property other than human judgements? There is noth...

For that you just moved the same problem onto another entity. By making the 'objective' wrongness conditional on the rightness of property and the 'betterness' of other uses for it. The imperative is hypothecated on the prudential assumption that it is good not to take property away from people, an...

Pete is unusual mainly in that he seems content to argue the basic sceptical point without feeling any particular need to fill in the gap created by that doubt. The question for him, in this thread anyway, doesn't stray from "is morality subjective or objective?" to other questions such a...

As I say, I think we all know about subjective morality, so it would be more interesting -I think- to explore how there could even be such things as objective moral truths. Well, there would be verifiable reasons for why something is moral/immoral. For example, if theft is allowed, people would hav...

Have you even read his argument? How to be a Moral Realist? Boyd https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240034001_How_to_Be_a_Moral_Realist No. Your summary is enough to dismiss it. Or didn't you describe it correctly? In the intro for the paper Boyd wrote "It will not be my aim here to esta...

You've required us to assume that morality is subjective, and that having any authority behind morality makes it somehow not moral. But that's your key weakness: you need to prove those suppositions, not just to tell us to assume them, and then build your case out of them. Good luck with that. I've...

Another way to view this is to consider the very many ways in which philosophers have attempted to define the proper way to locate that which is morally desirable. There's usually a prima facie plausibility to the matter, and in general it is upon closer inspection that we find there is something im...

How does God know what's right or wrong? Does he know what objective property of a situation makes it right, or are we just elevating his opinions above those of Harbal because we think Harbal is smaller and therefore less important than God?

Atla's point about combining moral approaches into a convergent system merits more consideration. If we look at what Kant was doing when he systemised the synthetic a priori into being, it was to create order. This is why VA bangs on about Kant's supposed completeness; he arranges it such that every...

Imo bottom-up and top-down approaches to morality are both insufficient, they have to be combined into one system. That's probably the broad topic of Ch4 or Ch5. I haven't really dsecided what thing comes next yet but that's a stop along the way for sure. We need top-down restrictions like: let's n...

You are a sex tourist who rents wives. Of course you pay for everything.

Huh? There have been Empires that were not Monotheistic (Rome for the first 600 years, Egypt, Babylon and more). There have also been Empires with diverse religions (the Mongols, who had the largest empire of all time and adopted a variety of religions from their conquests). Of course all of these ...

A person can most definitely predict without knowing, there is an entire gambling industry predicated on exactly that. If his prediction were ever to be 100% guaranteed to be correct every time, as God's is, then it's certainly a form of knowing. There would be no important distinction between know...