Re: "Oughtness to Breathe" a Fundamental to Morality is Objective
Posted: Wed Mar 13, 2024 4:06 pm
That's an interesting point. He's obscuring the directedness of the ought in either case. So instead of if one wishes to be good, one ought to be nice to kittens (the basic morla ought), or in order to continue enjoying cream cakes for a long time, one ought to eat no more than one per day (a basic prudential ought), VA just doesn't mention the objective and tries to not deal with it. In VA arguments, if something is usual then that is enough to establish one of these oughtnesses. But that leaves him in a dog-legged situation where he still needs to deal with the motive and whether it is moral or prudential and how it makes for the ought part of the oughtness. His plan appears to be to just wish it away.Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Wed Mar 13, 2024 10:18 amEven prudentialness isn't coming from that framework.Then you have to explain whether the oughtness comes from an prudentialness or a moralness.
X leads to Y. Description and causation. That something is prudent, even something so radically obviously prudent as breathing, is application. It would be using science, not that anyone needs to in relation to breathing, which people struggled to do, except when suicidal, long before science arose.
So, it's a game. Instead of using language from the Framework of science, he uses a word with moral nuances.
And then it becomes objective when used in morality proper, which he himself says doesn't really exist now.
So, it's objective.
Simon Blackburn calls that the "regress-or-elephant problem". VA can only explain oughtness with one of these KFC-buckets, by leaving motivation out of this one he needs to create another KFC to expain the missing motive, but to not break the "objective" part of this one, he must leave out anything that isn't objective there, leading to the next FSCK also not including motive but rather kicking hte can down the line again .... and thus we have elephants all the way down.... OR, he will have to stop it here, at the first elephant, either by properly accounting for motive (but that will put him back in the circle) or by a more radical reductivist strategy that asserts motive is irrelevant/illusory/epiphenomenal.
Those are all terrible choices. He should have just abandoned the bad argument.