I mean, no one in the real world has ever proposed rendering down 16 year olds as far as I know, but there are some real-world horrors or simple tragedies that someone somewhere thought they were on the side of moral good on for perpetrating.
Sure. But this doesn't tell us that beief entails moral truth. It just tells us that some people's judgements of right and wrong are flawed.
PS typically plays in a space where it's not obvious, and then asks the PC's to decide. It plays in those places using D&D's alignment as a tool, showing where it's not obvious if an action is Good-as-defined-by-D&D or not, Evil-as-defined-by-D&D or not and inviting the PC's to figure out what they think about it.
To me this seems harmless, and indeed the basic starting point for any serious RPGing - I think D&D-stye GM-adjudicated alignment is a serious obstacle to RPGing, at least as I like to do it - although the D&D system of alignment categorisation seems largely redundant at this point (why would anyone use D&D's alignment system to try and think hard about real moral questions, unless they had already inherited as a legacy component of their game?).
It's the "belief makes truth" thing that I think is half-baked.
I don't see why that'd be so. I'm not aware of any "no philosophy" rule on EN World.
But there is a "no politics" and "no religion" rule, and meta-ethical discussion can easily cross into those fieds.
I'm always skeptical when one person ascribes a "mainstream view" to a group at large; that said, I'm not in much of a position to refute it either, so I'll say that if that's the mainstream view of English-language philosophy in general, then I find myself disagreeing with it strongly.
Disagreement is your prerogative. And if you don't believe me, pick up a recent volume of Ethics, or Philosophy and Pubic Affairs.
The main reason that most serious philosophers in the analytic tradition are moral objectivists is because it is
hard to give a technical account of non-objective morality that accomodates our experience of using moral language and engaging in value-driven practices.
Here is a trivial example: A does X. B asks A "Why did you do X?". If A answers "Because I wanted to!" A has given B a mechanical explanation for his/her action, but has not justified it. In general, that I want to do something isn't a good reason for doing it. If A answers "Because it was the right thing to do" it seems that A has offered a justificaiton for his/her action.
This seems to imply, then that "I want to do X" and "X is the right thing to do" are different propositions. But on a non-objectivist account of morality they are likely to end up being synonyms, at least in some fashion. So how, then, would justification by reference to moral value be meant to work?
This is why many sceptics about moral objectivity tend to be revisionists about our moral practices: eg Nietzsche, John Mackie, the existentialists. But revisionism can itself be quite hard to take seriously. For instance, it seems a big cost to say that social changes which
seem to be responses to the demands of justice (eg various forms of emancipation) are
really just changes in social practices comparable to conventions about dress codes or what to do and say when you greet someone.
I am not, in this thread, arguing one way or the other on the issue of objectivity. What I am arguing is that treating moral claims as lacking objective truth-value is not an easy, low-cost move within a broader theory of moral argument and political reform.
while we can say that what we experience of the natural world is limited (via empericism, expert testimony, and logical deduction) to a set of beliefs, the reason we can purport that there is an objective physical world beyond our beliefs is that we have some degree of evidence for that, insofar as certain beliefs will not be born out by (what we understand as) interactions with the physical world, regardless of how dearly we hold them.
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By contrast, there are no "moral truths" by which a person's moral beliefs can be applied against
This last sentence is bare assertion. Obviously, those who believe in objective moral truth deny it.
What sort of evidence can they point to? Evidence about human nature and hence human flourishing (eg Aristotle). The evidence of reason (eg Kant, or in a very different way Michael Smith). Ideas in human history that have led from war to peace (eg Rawls' deduction of the fact of reasonable pluralism from the resolution of the wars of religion). Non-empirical intuition (GE Moore points to this; so might many religious thinkers).
Again, I'm not saying that any of the arguments based on this sort of argument is sound. (No that they're not.) But it's not as if no moral philosopher has ever grappled with the question of how human beings might gain epistemic access to moral truths!
I think it is empirically provable, that is objective, that being fit and healthy is morally superior to being a drug addict, for a low-hanging example.
That some pursue self-destructive behavior does not argue against an objective nature to ethics, any more than someone believing the world is flat argues against objective physics.
that example is a rather poor one, since it defines anyone who has a particular medical condition (which is what drug addiction is) as somehow being less moral that someone who doesn't have that condition. By your example, anyone who is struggling with drug addiction is living a less morally-worthwhile life than someone who hasn't had to; that's not an example of objective morality, but of personal judgment over another person's worth.
I think you're misunderstanding Parmandur's point.
Parmandur, at least as I read the post, is not saying that those who are addicted to narcotics have less moral value. The claim is that the lives they are living is not a fully flourishing one.
Equally low-hanging fruit for this style of (Aristotelean-inspired) theorising about human wellbeing is a child working as a bonded labourer in a carpet factory in Bangladesh. I suspect that Parmandur would regard it as an empirical truth that such a child would be living a better life if s/he was taken out of that situation and put into a school where s/he was supported to develop his/her intellectual and other human capacities.
The "good" and "better" here aren't judgements about the morality of the drug addict's behaviour, or that of the child labourer. They're judgements about the quality of the life they are living. (More generally, Aristotelean moral philosophy doesn't begin from a concept of
duty but rather from a concept of
wellbeing.)
Now, it is obviously open to someone to try and deny the claim about the drug addict - to argue that a life of narcotics addiction is just as flourishing and valuable as any other form of life. Likewise for the child labourer, although as a practical matter I think that one will have fewer takers!
But from Parmandur's point of view, the fact that someone might deny these claims is no different from someone denying (say) that the earth is 4 billion years old. The existence of denial doesn't, in and of itself, entail that truth is subjective.
