RCSaunders wrote: ↑Sun Mar 15, 2020 6:31 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Mar 15, 2020 2:33 pm
I would not say so, neither do ethicists and philosophers generally. I'm no friend of Hume, obviously, but I have to give him his due in this situation. He's described the problem well.
There is no problem! You think so, because you accept the word of authorities, ethicists, and philosophers, who, just as I said, "swallowed Hume's deceptive question (and every philosopher who followed him) has propagated that lie," and you've swallowed it too.
Heh.
You don't know me very well, obviously, despite all our talking.
Now, you probably should know from our previous conversations that I'm no "shrinking violet," and not likely to take anybody's word for things. And the fact that I've been here half a dozen years should tell you I'm not an easy man to make conform. But I suppose you may believe as you like about that, because you can't know for sure...
But consider again how unlikely it would be that I would ever agree with Hume about anything. Hume, he's actively AGAINST Theism, and on the opposite side from me, in no indefinite terms. Aggressively so, I might add. So if anybody had an incentive to argue that there was an alternate way to do moral thinking, it was Hume.
And in fact, that's what he did: he argued that Emotivism was the answer. Of course, we all now have seen the problems with Emotivism, and nobody thinks Hume's solution was any good -- but most philosophers are secular, and would be delighted if Hume had been right. In fact, secular ethicists would STILL be delighted if anyone had solved Hume's Guillotine...and they'd give that person a Nobel Prize.
Yet, they know he wasn't right about the solution he proposed. Emotivism, they can see, is full of logical holes. And still, against their wishes, they recognize he was right about the problem.
Now, you may not personally want to believe that. But either all the other moral philosophers are just fools, or else you've missed something there.
Hume's premise was wrong. What "is" [the empirical] does not determine any objectives, and without objectives there are no values. That is the point and the only point I made. Everything else you wrote is irrelevant to that point.
I addressed it, actually. "Objectives," "goals," "ends," "outcomes," -- call them what you will (and you've called them by several names), they themselves need
justification.
And in fact, you're half agreeing with Hume already. Because if "the empirical does not determine any objectives," and "without objectives there are no values," then Hume was quite right: IS cannot be translated into OUGHT, under any circumstances. There, you and he agree.
Where you go wrong is that you suppose that people's mere HAVING of objectives can equal JUSTIFICATION of those objectives. But as I said, if that were true, then the Final Solution was justified by nothing more than the fact that Nazis chose it as their objective.
And neither you nor I is going to swallow any line of thought that makes that true, right?