As I had mentioned the moral-facts-deniers are lost in the natural thickets and mazes of Morality and Ethics.
Moral-Facts-Deniers make the following claims;
- Moral Judgments and moral statements are;
1. not moral facts
2. not state-of-affairs
3. not propositions
4. not truth-apt, neither be true or false
5. express desires, attitudes, opinions and beliefs
6. Prescriptive [ought] not descriptive [is]
7. Not mind independent
Caveat: This write-up has nothing to do with morality related to a God nor Platonic universals.
Here are some clues to what I had claimed, i.e. their moral views are fundamentally Emotivism NonCognitivism.
Majority of points are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotivism
- Emotivism is a meta-ethical view that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but emotional attitudes.[1][2][3] Hence, it is colloquially known as the hurrah/boo theory.[4]
Influenced by the growth of analytic philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century, the theory was stated vividly by A. J. Ayer in his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic,[5] but its development owes more to C. L. Stevenson.[6]
- Emotivism reached prominence in the early 20th century, but it was born centuries earlier.
In 1710, George Berkeley wrote that language in general often serves to inspire feelings as well as communicate ideas.[11]
Decades later, David Hume espoused ideas similar to Stevenson's later ones.[12]
In his 1751 book An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume considered morality not to be related to fact but "determined by sentiment":
- In moral deliberations we must be acquainted beforehand with all the objects, and all their relations to each other; and from a comparison of the whole, fix our choice or approbation. … While we are ignorant whether a man were aggressor or not, how can we determine whether the person who killed him be criminal or innocent? But after every circumstance, every relation is known, the understanding has no further room to operate, nor any object on which it could employ itself.
The approbation or blame which then ensues, cannot be the work of the judgement, but of the heart; and is not a speculative proposition or affirmation, but an active feeling or sentiment.[13]
- In moral deliberations we must be acquainted beforehand with all the objects, and all their relations to each other; and from a comparison of the whole, fix our choice or approbation. … While we are ignorant whether a man were aggressor or not, how can we determine whether the person who killed him be criminal or innocent? But after every circumstance, every relation is known, the understanding has no further room to operate, nor any object on which it could employ itself.
The above of where the "No Is from Ought" of Hume came to be, i.e. there are no moral facts but only beliefs, opinions, expressions of emotions and attitudes.
The "No Is from Ought" was adopted by the Logical Positivists to condemn moral judgments as fact_less and meaningless because they are incapable of empirical verifications.
- The emergence of logical positivism and its verifiability criterion of meaning early in the 20th century led some philosophers to conclude that ethical statements, being incapable of empirical verification, were cognitively meaningless.
This criterion was fundamental to A.J. Ayer's defense of positivism in Language, Truth and Logic, which contains his statement of emotivism.
Ayer's view in more details;
- Ayer argues that moral judgments cannot be translated into non-ethical, empirical terms and thus cannot be verified; in this he agrees with ethical intuitionists.
But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition as "worthless" for determining moral truths,[17] since the intuition of one person often contradicts that of another.
Instead, Ayer concludes that ethical concepts are "mere pseudo-concepts":
- The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content.
Thus if I say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money," I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, "You stole that money."
In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it.
I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it.
It is as if I had said, "You stole that money," in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks. …
If now I generalise my previous statement and say, "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence that has no factual meaning—that is, expresses no proposition that can be either true or false.… I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments.[18]
- The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content.
Ayer agree with Subjectivism but he is not a Moral Subjectivist because he rejected moral statements as proposition, thus Ayer is a NonCognitivist.
- Ayer agrees with subjectivists in saying that ethical statements are necessarily related to individual attitudes, but he says they lack truth value because they cannot be properly understood as propositions about those attitudes; Ayer thinks ethical sentences are expressions, not assertions, of approval.
Thus in the lingo of Morality & Ethics, the moral-facts-deniers are Moral Emotivists under the umbrella of Moral NonCognitivism. Onus is on them to justify if otherwise.
The above is the historical background on how the moral-facts-deniers were infected with the Moral-Covid-Virus to claim Morality cannot be objective.
What could make morality objective? by Peter Holmes
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