moral this and that

[Zoot]

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=103687

Hiero5ant will argue for the position of normative noncognitivist subjectivist moral antirealism.


"There are no such things as true moral values, true moral principles, or true moral laws, because sentences which are moral assertions are not the kind of sentences that can even be true or false, any more than "Please close the door" or "Hooray for closed doors!!!!" can be true or false."

Alonzo Fyfe will argue for the position of desire utilitarian subjectivist moral realism.

"Propositions containing moral terms have a truth value. Some of them are true, and their truth value is independent of the mental states of the person uttering the proposition. Moral properties are not intrinsic to any object, event, or states of affairs. They are fully dependent on desire such that, if there is no desire, there is no value. Furthermore, things have value only insofar as they are desired."

I look forward to reading through this debate, but the first thing that occurs to me is that these two people may be talking about quite different things when they say moral terms have or don't have a truth value.

[Ronin]

normative noncognitivist subjectivist moral antirealism.



* head explodes

[Zoot]

Ow! My most of me!

[Weaselboots]

I agree with Ronin. I'm pretty sure they are in English, and i could probably even maybe understand what each word means on its own....maybe.
I have no idea what "normative noncognitivist subjectivist moral antirealism. " means at all.
"desire utilitarian subjectivist moral realism." nah no clue.
I guess alot of other people do, so i'll just stick with smaller words.

Reminds me abit of biz speak-
Our business is going through a paradigm shift.
We need to syndicate this decision
We leverage partnership in the face of potential business
We interconnect resources in the face of highly available synergy
We interconnect expectations because of vital core values
etc etc

[Adora]

I'd read it if I could care... but I mean, there's just so much better things to use the internet for. Like poking stupid people and looking at pr0n.

[Dragar]

Zoot, I've been meaning to comment on this for ages, but I'm fairly certain your langauge of preferences can be interchanged with the langauge desires (and vice-versa) at will. Desirable also requires context, etc.

[Dragar]

My last comment for a while, since I have to learn about how stars transport their energy around the place, but I was reading Alonzo Fyfe's Desire Utilitarianism (http://www.strongatheism.com/philosophy/desireutil.html), and thought I'd add a single comment.

Halfway through, he introduces the notion of 'good' to mean 'is such as to fulfill the desires in question.' And this is fine.

Then he goes on to say this:

Moral terms evaluate desires relative to all other desires that exist.

Emphasis mine.

And rightly he says this is where subjectivists disagree, but also says this is where they go wrong.

He justifies this by saying:

While it is true that all evaluations relate the object of evaluation to some set of desires, they do not all relate the object of evaluation to the desires of the speaker. 'Beauty' does this -- it relates the object of evaluation to the desires of the person seeing or listening. However, 'injury' relates the object of evaluation to the desires of the person injured, not the desires of the person viewing the injury.

My first criticism would be his use of 'injury' here. I'd have used 'injury' to mean the same thing as 'broken', in that the functional abilities of the system were impaired. By his definition, a person with broken legs but who has no desires which require non-broken legs to be fulfilled is not injured.

He then says:

Neither does the concept of 'duty', nor does another person's 'rights' depend on what I like and do not like. If it did, then "I prefer chocolate ice-cream to vanilla" would be a moral statement, no different from "I prefer the execution of murderers to life in prison." If it did, then inferences of the form, "I want Jenny to have sex with me, therefore Jenny has a duty to have sex with me," would be valid. We would see no difference between these types of claims, if moral claims related objects of evaluation solely to the desires of the speaker.

Personally, I don't see a difference between these types of claims. Duty, like beauty, is subjective - and in rejecting that (with no justification) is where he diverges from our line of thinking.

Let's look at what he is justifying again:

Moral terms evaluate desires relative to all other desires that exist.

I'd argue that this is simply false, as it contradicts observations of reality. People rarely consider every desire in existence - mostly the consider their own, and perhaps their immediate friends, family, community and possibly country. Rarely to they consider every desire in existence.

When I think 'is this wrong? Is this right?' I'm only evaluating desires if I first specify 'right-in-the-context-of-desire-fulfillment-of-all-humans', or whatever. Which quickly turns to nonsense when the majority of all humans desire something that the minority doesn't.

Thoughts?

[viscousmemories]

My first criticism would be his use of 'injury' here. I'd have used 'injury' to mean the same thing as 'broken', in that the functional abilities of the system were impaired. By his definition, a person with broken legs but who has no desires which require non-broken legs to be fulfilled is not injured.

I think he was referring to intangible injury, there. I think his use of 'injury' in this post (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=1611129#post1611129) makes his point a little clearer:

Relationships between states of affairs and desires exist. Objectively true and false statements can be made about whether states of affairs are 'such as to fulfill the desires in question'. If we look at the vast landscape of value-laden terms -- 'harm', 'abuse', 'injury', 'illness', 'health', 'dangerous', 'poisonous', 'useful', 'beautiful' -- we see that we can understand each of these in terms of relationships between states of affairs and desires.

We can even capture the vast majority of our moral language in this analysis -- in terms of whether desires fulfill or thwart all other desires regardless of whose they are.

Personally, I don't see a difference between these types of claims. Duty, like beauty, is subjective - and in rejecting that (with no justification) is where he diverges from our line of thinking.
I think his point is not that these assessments aren't subjective, but that they aren't equal. And his justification being that the desire-thwarting power of the death penalty is far greater than that of an ice-cream preference.

Moral terms evaluate desires relative to all other desires that exist.
I'd argue that this is simply false, as it contradicts observations of reality. People rarely consider every desire in existence - mostly the consider their own, and perhaps their immediate friends, family, community and possibly country. Rarely to they consider every desire in existence.

When I think 'is this wrong? Is this right?' I'm only evaluating desires if I first specify 'right-in-the-context-of-desire-fulfillment-of-all-humans', or whatever. Which quickly turns to nonsense when the majority of all humans desire something that the minority doesn't.
I don't think he means that individuals evaluate desires relative to all other desires, but that when trying to determine the weight a particular moral judgement should have, it has to be considered in the context of its universal desire-thwarting and desire-fulfilling potential.

And all of this is from his other writings on the subject. I still haven't read this particular debate yet. :eek: