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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6415735" data-attributes="member: 8461">This showcases the failure of the assertion you're making, since you can't seem to cite a specific instance to back your claim up. That's leaving aside the idea that "mainstream" means "supported by an authority" rather than "popularly-held," which I disagree with. If you want to claim that your point of view has a mainstream one, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that, which means that it's then incumbent on you to provide the requisite citations, rather then tell everyone else to just go look them up if they want verification.This is a dicey contention; something being "mainstream" means that it's what's held amongst the majority of an area under discussion, per se, rather than being something held by an authority; you're the one who held that that was the case amongst "English-language philosophy," and as such the onus of showing that the majority of all English-language speakers who engage in philosophy (in whatever regard) agree with you on that. You've set a very high bar for yourself; I'm simply calling you on it.It's here that you move the goalposts, since you've now added the word "philosophers" onto the group you were referring to, significantly shrinking the field. That's overlooking the strawman argument of "you don't want to look up the sources I mentioned without citation, and so therefore you must be ignorant," which is a fairly poor debate method.I'm pointing out that, insofar as you've demonstrated them, these techniques fail to accomplish their stated goals of establishing objective moral truths.No, the people who say that there are objective moral truths have to produce arguments. Showing how their arguments are invalid (and to date, all of the ones presented here have been) is enough to prevent their point from being affirmed. Hence, we can safely say so far - within this context, at least - that there are no valid techniques for establishing objective moral truths.Given that you've given no indication that you're familiar with the literature, since citing evidence requires a quote and a citation, I don't think you want to go down this road.Actually, I'm pointing out that the techniques that you're citing as valid have serious issues with their validity. Calling that "pettifogging" does an injustice to the very kind of philosophical discourse you claim to champion. It should be noted that this isn't a question of whether or not "moral truth" has similarities to other kinds of truth, but whether "moral truth" exists at all, and how one would go about determining that. This is rhetoric. For one thing, the use of "and" is a conjunction, used to link two ideas together (which need not necessarily be related). You're positing that just because there's a factual truth in the first idea, that the conjunctive use of "and" causes that truth to somehow bleed over into the second idea, which does not follow. With the initial premise rendered false (see above), this assertion no longers follows. Likewise, this is disingenuous because it refers to "errors of usage" as being related to errors of moral assertion, when in fact such errors are purely with regards to how the thought is being constructed, rather than what it's positing. At this point, the entire argument has come undone because the first two principles that it's based on have been shown to be false. The reliance on "error of usage" at this point is being itself utilized in an erroneous fashion, since it continues to rely on the confusion between construction of a coherent statement and the moral dimensions that such a statement makes. In this case, you are in fact making an error of usage when you say to the butcher "what you just said is false," because while the statement that he made might be false as per your own moral code, you've phrased your rebuttal in the same objective manner as his initial statement. Ergo, the thought is correct in its construction (or rather, its presentation) but wrong with regards to its moral dimension. Here, at least, you acknowledge the problem, but you're not doing anything about it. Just because such sentences can appear (identically) within such sentences, that does not mean that such sentences are a gateway between that which is held to be a belief and that which is held to be knowledge (unless you're making the argument that there's no difference between the two whatsoever, which is a mode of thinking that some people put forth, but which otherwise makes it very hard to hold a discussion in that regard).Notwithstanding more name-dropping without actual citation, this gets to the core of your argument; you seem to hold that assertions such as the ones you've made are unassailable, and that those attempting to argue against them must take a different tack in order to present a counter-claim. However, I've demonstrated above that this is not so, and that because such assertions are required to put forth the belief that there is an objective moral truth to begin with, showing that they lack validity knocks that entire line of thinking down.Actually, my point was very clear; your response, however, is very confused. The reason that "because I want to" is not a failure as a justification is because no justification is necessary - simply put, they can say anything (or nothing at all) and have satisfied the burden of justification because, strictly speaking, no such burden exists to begin with. Hence, it's implicitly satisfied from the beginning.In which case, I believe that your example was not a valid one; subjective conceptions of morality are inherently easy to "get off the ground" because they are the default position from which the debate takes place - they are the standard against which an objective moral argument must overcome to be validated.This is a moot point, however, since they'd be superfluous.The issue here is that you're taking this "general rule" - which is simply a notation of popularity - and trying to lay the framework for it representing an objective truth, which does not follow. Just because we'd find it repugnant that someone had a moral framework where killing someone because they felt like it was justified, that gives no basis for saying that your moral framework is somehow more intrinsically valid because of that. Under the framework of person A, it's clear that their actions required no justification; hence why they did it.In other words, you want justification under the moral framework that person B is said to hold. However, there's no intrinsic reason to value person B's moral framework over person A's with regards to which is empirically more valid. All of the contexts which would require justification are either ideological (that is, personal) or function (e.g. it's impractical to be around someone who kills because they want to). There's no objective moral to be found.Except that it's fairly easy to show how their positions aren't that plausible. It depends, unsurprisingly, on the notion that since some values are held to be universal, that they therefore must be something more than a wide-spread belief. That assertion alone does not present validation for what it espouses.It's pretty straightforward - I'm noting that morality is inherently personal and has no objective elements to it whatsoever, despite the popularity of certain aspects of most moral frameworks.You're arguing against a claim I didn't make. Noting the inherent personalism of various moral frameworks does not speak to the degree of sincerity with which people hold them; quite the contrary, I'm of the opinion that people tend to mistake a high degree of personal sincerity as being indicative of some sort of external validation for their beliefs (e.g. if something feels rapturous, then it must come from an external source).No, it wouldn't. That would be the most basic of calls to make. As the fundamental level, it was a war to try and enforce their beliefs on the other. Which one was "true" and which was not was entirely relativistic to each person. I disagree; it makes sense only under the assumption that they've mistaken their opinion for being something more than sincere opinion.I disagree; they're simply presenting it as being more than a subjective conception of morality, and relying on the (fairly safe) assumption that they'll receive widespread consensus in that regard - but just because the values they hold are popular, that doesn't make them true. (I also suspect that talking about real political conflicts here is taking us into a danger zone where moderation is concerned).Which is an inherently personal claim to make, since to the IS members, they clearly do yield that level of justification, whereas ours do not.As the default assumption, non-objective morality isn't something that you'd argue against per se; rather, you'd need to argue in favor of an objective morality, which is fundamentally different. But that's a hard case to make.Hence the relativity that's involved in the inherently personal nature of morality - they recognize that in some cases a so-called "moral truth" would be justifiable, and in others it wouldn't be. They see it as having the inherently subjective nature that makes that possible.There's nothing at all difficult for moral relativism to account for here; you seem to be under the impression that moral relativism goes beyond recognizing that everyone has a different set of moral values, and further requires someone to necessarily hold that their own values be fluid with regards to any moral situation, paralyzing them from making even a statement of personal morality. This is completely false; 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. You don't have to think that you have the Truth, with a capital T, on your side to hold a sincere belief in a moral framework.Leaving aside that you don't know what Tony Abbott is thinking - no one is in a position to objectively determine whether someone else is being honest or not - this is another example of why a sincerely held belief that you know a moral truth doesn't make it so. Tony Abbott can believe whatever he wants, but that by itself doesn't mean that his beliefs are more valid than anyone else's.</blockquote>

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