Parmandur said:
Both "morality has some objective character" and "morality has no objective character" are positive assertions.
Again, this is flatly incorrect. The latter is a negative assertion, hence why it's saying that something is
not true.
pemerton said:
I've referred you to the two leading journals in contemporary Engish-language moral and political philosophy: Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs. If you want to see what the methods look like, download any article from a recent issue and read it!
Again, you fail to grasp the futility of an "appeal to authority" statement; that's not even withstanding the issue of the rhetorical futility inherent in saying "go read something here, and you'll find something or other that agrees with me." That doesn't come close to the standards of what constitutes a debate.
pemerton said:
Facile remarks about burdens of proof and "having set a high bar" are just that - facile.
That you've been reduced to name-calling suggests otherwise.
pemerton said:
If I said the mainstream view in geology is that the earth is over 4 billion years old, or that the mainstream view in contmporary biology is that speciation is the result of natural selection rather than divine intervention, you wouldn't expect me to cite anything.
Hence one of the many, many differences between the agreed-upon nature of objective reality, versus the proposition of a so-called objective truth.
pemerton said:
These things are obviously true, known to anyone with a passing familiarity with the disciplines. Well, I have more than a passing familiarity with contemporary anaytic moral philosophy. I publish in the field, I know some of the leading figures, I supervise students in the field and send them to be examined by others with knowledge of what those others regard as mainstream or deviant, etc. In short, I know what my peers (and betters) think about their discipline.
Again, waving supposed credentials fails to live up to the "show, don't tell" rule of presenting supporting evidence in support of your claim. (Though honestly, the whole idea of introducing expert testimony into the inherently-personal realm of moral philosophy - due to it being entirely subjective and all - has always struck me as being, well...facile, to use your turn of phrase.)
pemerton said:
Likewise remarks about "goal-post shifting" are misplaced - I have the whole time been talking about philosophers, using such labels as "contemporary English-speaking moral philosophy" and "contemporary analytic moral philosophy" - these are co-referring expressions, and are intended to exclude non-analytic philosophers (primarily existentialists, phenomenologists and other heirs of the Hegelian/post-Hegelian tradition).
To put it another way, you're referencing the works of others with only vague specificity, refusing to provide either quotes regarding what you mean or citations to reference them (beyond a hand-wave towards some titles in general), and then expect that when people point out that you're being vague, that must mean that they know less than you do. That's not debating a point, that's obfuscating one.
pemerton said:
The reasons among analytic philosophers for favouring objectivism are nothing to do with mysticism or metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. They are the features of moral language and discourse that I've pointed to: that there are no differences in the logic of argumentation, in truth and falsehood predication, in epistemic claims, etc between moral and evaluative predication and descriptive predication.
Except that it can easily be demonstrated that there are differences between descriptive predication and moral predication. The former can be used to discuss either the inherently subjective nature of morality, or the subjective or objective nature of reality; the latter is only able to discuss the subjective nature of morality. The idea that there's no differences between them is preposterous.
pemerton said:
Alzrius, in his response to those examples, demonstrates a tremendous ignorance of the philosophy of predication. In saying, for instance, that "the use of "and" is a conjunction, used to link two ideas together (which need not necessarily be related)" completely misses the point that "and" is (or is at least typically taken to be) a truth-conditional conjunction, and hence the way it "links two ideas together" is by taking their truth-conditions as inputs. Which implies that moral sentences have truth conditions that can be taken as inputs. Alzrius, if you have an unpublished treatment of "and" that allows for relativistic truth conditions in a technically adequate way, by all means send it to me!
Leaving aside that having to cast insulting terms like "tremendous ignorance" betrays the fact that you're struggling to come up with a counter-point, what you quoted does not at all "miss the point" that you raised - rather, it deftly refutes it. The nature of the conjunctive "and" here does not at all necessitate that it be truth-conditional; that's a claim so outlandish that it's hard to take seriously. Simply because you can link two ideas together does not mean that they'll therefore both need to be true, which necessarily undercuts the nature of your point that these truth conditions can be taken as inputs. Consider that being sent to you, pemerton.
pemerton said:
I've pointed to some of the methods that objectivists identify as pathways to objective moral truth: reason, intuition, investigating human nature, etc. I haven't tried to prove any actual moral truth, but if you want to see some philosophers actualy using these methods I can point you to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (purporting to derive some objective moral truths from facts about human nature in combination with intuition), the same author's Law of Peoples (purporting to derive some objectve moral truths from facts about history, primarily the resolution of the wars of religion), Michael Smith's The Moral Problem (using the well-known approach to analysing response-dependent predication to analyse moral predication, and thereby to come up with a novel theory of the basis for its objective truth), John Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights (purporting to derive objective moral truths in the manner of the Catholic natural law tradition), Joseph Raz's The Morality of Freedom (presenting a theory of value pluralism, and of natural rights and duties, grounded in an Arisotelian conception of human nature and human interests) and Frances Kamm's contribution to Jamieson's Singer and His Critics (using a method of intuitions with a broadly Kantian framework).
See above; name-dropping without any further citations (let alone providing a proper quote for discussion and analysis) does not an argument make. Saying "go read the books that (I purport) agree with me" is something that's done when you can't make the points you want to make.
pemerton said:
In good faith I've pointed you both to the basic views in the literature, the basic moves, the difficulties etc. I've offered to circulate work by PM and neither of you has taken up that offer. As far as I can tell neither of you is familiar with any of the relevant authors in the field eg Mark van Roojen, Terrence Horgan, Mark Timmons, Simon Blackburn, Alan Gibbard, Bob Hale, Stephen Barker, John MacFarlane, etc.
Saying that this is a good-faith argument is hypocritical in the extreme here, since all you're doing is calling out names and saying "these guys support me! Honest!" As far as I can tell, you're completely unfamiliar with the idea that you have a higher burden of proof to live up to if you want to actually appeal to authority.
pemerton said:
If you don't care about that stuff, that's fine. Hours in the day are limited for all of us! But you wanted to know why I think that Planescape's relativist metaphysics is incoherent, and from my point of view I have more than answered that question. As I said some hundreds of posts upthread, there are interesting approaches to relativistic/subjectivist moral discourse, which can try and handle some of the problems I've articulated, but Planescape does not engage with any of them.
Just so long as you're willing to accept that it's valid that from the point of view of others, you haven't answered that question at all.
pemerton said:
Nor do Alzrius's posts above.
Except that this is self-evidently not the case, as per my posts above.
pemerton said:
For instance, you can't possibly resolve the hypocrisy problem implicit in a relativist's defence of warfare against Germany or IS by saying "you can recognize that everyone will have a value system that is different from yours, while still having values that you hold to be personally unchanging . . . Tony Abbott can believe whatever he wants, but that by itself doesn't mean that his beliefs are more valid than anyone else's."
Again, despite your saying that that can't be so, it clearly is, since it has been resolved.
pemerton said:
This is so underdeveloped as an argument that's it a little hard to know where to start, but here are some ways in: the word "valid" in the last sentence is undefined, but seems to be being used as a synonym for "truth". Hence what is being said is that Abbott's beliefs are no truer than those of IS. Which is odd in itself, because the two are in contradiction (eg Abbott believes IS are evil, IS believe IS are good, it's not clear that both beliefs can be true given that each entails the negation of the other). Furthermore, if IS's beliefs are as true as Abbott's, then Abbott's justification for attacking IS seems to utterly fail - all he is doing is projecting his power onto them, which means he is committing the very crime he claims that they are committing when he jsutifies attacking them! (This is the hypocrisy problem.) The issue of "values that are personally unchanging" is also irrelevant and is not something I have been talking about. Abbott may have believed all his life that IS is evil, and vice versa. The duration and firmness of conviction doesn't change the fact that, if relativism/subjectivism is true, then in attacking IS Abbott is apparently acting on merely personal convictions, and hence is no better off than IS is (this is the hypocrisy problem recurring).
It's actually a powerfully developed argument, which is why you're having a hard time trying to knock it down. That said, here's how the refutations you do make can be shown to be invalid (that is, not being able to withstand logical scrutiny): The fact that Abbott's beliefs are no truer than those of IS is not odd at all, because the two being in contradiction is the indicator that neither has any greater degree of truth than the other - both are personal beliefs, and so have no objective metric by which their "truth" can be judged. Both beliefs can be equally "true" at the same time because they're held by different individuals, none of whom have any empirical methodology (or credentials, for that matter) in how they would pass judgment on the beliefs of others. Given that Abbott's justifications are thus no truer than anyone else's, then it makes it clear that all he is doing is projecting his power onto them - hence the definition of wars as being struggles of military power, rather than a contest of opposing ideologies (which further would lead to the idea that those who win wars are those with the truer morality, which is clearly an objective falsehood). Of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with "committing the very crime he claims they are committing," since that's a conflation of a legal argument with a moral argument. As such, Abbott's attacking IS is indeed his acting on personal conviction - that's not hypocritical because he's acting in accordance with his own beliefs, while recognizing that the beliefs of others are different from his own, even if they have no greater weight insofar as how "true" they may be.
pemerton said:
Bertrand Russell, in his essays on the significance of the compossibility or non-compossibility of human desires (for a summary treatment, I recommend Alan Ryan's Bertrand Russell: A political life), tries to give an account, on a non-moral objectivist basis, of an asymmetry between various moral attitudes such that acting on certain attitudes doesn't enliven the hypocrisy objection. It might be interesting to explore this in Planescape, but I think you'd have to make some changes. Planescape doesn't generally emphasise compromise and co-existence.
More reference-less name-dropping. Try an experiment in your next post - don't mention anyone else's work unless you can quote it directly and cite the source.
Yeah, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. 
