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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6414521" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think I've got a general idea, yes.For me, the setting that taught me how to GM was Oriental Adventures (mid-80s version).Following this issue too far will break board rules.But some things are clear. It's clear that moral belief is subjective. So are beliefs about the nature of the physical world. It's also clear that truths about the physical world are objective. And the mainstream view in English-language philosophy is that moral truths are similarly objective.Giving an account of moral reform that fits within a non-objectivist account of moral truth is not trivial. The basic difficulty is that, if moral truth is subjective, then moral reform seems really to be simply a reshaping of things in accordance with one's desires. And it is hard, then, to articulate how such activity counts as reform rather than wish fulfillment or self-aggrandisement. Why are others obliged to conform to my desires?I think that Nietzsche and the existentialists frame this question, but they don't answer it. Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer have interesting technical accounts of subjective moral truth, but didn't manage to deal with the issue I've just described. My view is that Simon Blackburn doesn't either, although he purports to. I've done technical work in the field that I'm happy to circulate by PM to anyone who cares, drawing on Stephen Barker's philosophy of language ("Is Value Content a Component of Conventional Implicature", Analysis 2000; Renewing Meaning (OUP, 2004)). Barker's approach offers more powerful technical resources than Russell, Ayer and Blackburn deploy, but it's not clear that these resources ultimately resolve the problem of holding others to account by reference to my desires.I think, utimately, this is why philosophers like Nietzsche and Foucault substitue aesthetics, and self-cultivation, for morality and moral reform. I'm not saying they're right (nor that they're wrong). But I am saying that their views are not without motivation.</blockquote>

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