Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6416036" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION], [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION] - 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!Facile remarks about burdens of proof and "having set a high bar" are just that - facile. 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. 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.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).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. [MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION], 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! 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).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.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.Nor do [MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION]'s posts above. 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."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).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.</blockquote>

Verification