Alzrius
The EN World kitten
But there is a "no politics" and "no religion" rule, and meta-ethical discussion can easily cross into those fieds.
That's not necessarily the case; just because it could doesn't mean that it will.
Disagreement is your prerogative. And if you don't believe me, pick up a recent volume of Ethics, or Philosophy and Pubic Affairs.
I don't need to pick one of those up to disagree with you - citing outside works without quoting how they supposedly support your argument is just an appeal to authority.
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 example is based on the presumption that saying "because I wanted to" is not justification unto itself, which clearly isn't the case. You can examine an action insofar as judging the morality (or lack thereof) of the action itself, but that's a separate question. Saying that the action requires justification for why it was undertaken at all is a faulty premise, since it sets up a "burden of necessity" for doing anything. That's leaving aside the practical consideration of the futility of asking these questions (of others) at all, since you can't examine the veracity of their responses with any objective criteria; people can and do lie about their motivations.
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?
By recognizing that each person's moral framework is different, and that any examination of the morality of an action - which is not the same thing as an examination of justification - will be specific to each person, and each person alone.
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.
That only seems like a big cost because some people find the implications of moral relativism therein to be offensive; I find it far worse to say that any changes to cultural moral values are somehow more worthwhile than values that were previously held because the new values are somehow objectively more true.
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.
I disagree, insofar as I'm saying that the implication of "it is not easy" is actually a cover for the sentiment of "this is uncomfortable," since it implies a moral relativism that most people don't care for.
This last sentence is bare assertion. Obviously, those who believe in objective moral truth deny it.
It's actually a rejection of the assertion that was being stated previously. Those who hold that an objective moral truth exist are the ones who need to support that stance, since they're making a positive affirmation. The default presumption is that something isn't true until you prove that it is, rather than being that something is true until you prove that is not.
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!
None of that is evidence of the objectivity of moral truth, per se. Simply put, these are a combination of the popularity of certain ideas and the personal exultation which some people hold them in. Saying that X idea will reliably (though not perfectly) lead from war to peace does not state anything about that idea being a reflection of an objective moral truth. It's just that that idea is a popular one, and so it's presumed to be profound, and that therefore it must be something greater. The conclusion does not follow the assertions.
I think you're misunderstanding Parmandur's point.
I disagree (see below).
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.
To which I hold that there is no metric by which that can be measured, and that attempting to do so is simply passing personal judgment over another person's life, rather than holding them up against any objective moral value.
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.
That would be better as we would understand it, but there's no criteria for saying that that's empirically the case. Just because you can procure a consensus about something doesn't unto itself suggest anything about its objective nature. (That's leaving aside the idea that some philosophies hold that suffering in this life means greater things in the next one, and so such bonded labor is therefore more fulfilling on an objectively moral scale, at least under that belief. The idea of "finding greater meaning in a life that's normally regarded as 'less worthy'" is one that's been the subject of many stories, plays, and other tales.)
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.)
This is largely splitting hairs, since it's still your own values being projected onto a state of objectivity. Again, popularity and personal exultation are not enough to say that a given morality is therefore empirical.
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!
See above. It's not that they're denying that claim per se, but rather than they're pointing out that the point your making does not meet the criteria for being called objective.
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.
Except that view presumes that the moral nature is already an established fact that's being challenged, which is the case for the age of the Earth but is not the case for the moral nature of the life that someone lives. The two, in other words, do not occupy the same state in terms of how they're being debated, because the objective nature of morality has not yet been established in the first place.