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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6416086" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION], I don't know what you're trying to prove, but you don't seem to have understood my posts very clearly.First, you complain about a lack of citations. I have offered multiple works. Do you want page numbers for A Theory of Justice? Look up "reflective equilibrium" in the index. Do you want to read Raz's account of the interest theory of rights? From memory, it's in chapter 8 of The Morality of Freedom. These are actual examples of actual moral argumentation by leading contemporary figures who regard morality as objective.Do you want to read a defence of non-objective morality? Then read Blackburn's Spreading the Word and Ruling Passions. Do you want to read a devastating critique of Blackburn? Then read Bob Hale's essay "‘The Compleat Projectivist’, The Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1986): 65–84. (This doesn't deal with Ruling Passions, which is a more recent work, but Hale's objections are easily extended to cover Blackburn's later work - if you PM me I can send you my relevant unpublished work.)If you want to read the most sophisticated version of moral anti-objectivism out there, I recommend a paper I've already cited upthread: Stephen Barker, "Is Value Content a Component of Conventional Implicature?", Analysis 60 (2000): 268–79.You seem strangely obsessed with quotes, as if pages of argument can be boiled down to a bumper sticker. For reasons of copyright, among others, I can't cut and paste 12 pages from Analysis, 20 from The Philosophical Quarterly and 300+ from Harvard or Oxford University Press. But do you really think I'm lying about the contents of these works? From my point of view, you're in the same situation as someone who, when told that they can learn about natural selection in Darwin's Origin of Species or Dawkins's The Blind Watchmakr asks for a quote to prove the point!Moving from citations to some of the assertions that you make: You might regard your refutation as "deft". I can tell you that it probably wouldn't pass in an undergraduate essay. You are getting hung up on matters of "burden of proof" that have no relevance to the discussion. For instance, you claim that you don't have to prove anything because you are simply denying a positive assertion, namely, that morality is objective. Well, I can play that game too, if I want: I can deny that morality is subjective, thereby - by your logic - putting the burden on you to prove that it is subjective!There are some arguments where burden of proof matters, but this is not one of them. You are advancing a theory of the semantics of moral discourse and the metaphysics of morals. Your theory is as affirmative as that of any objectivist. If you want anyone to take it seriously, you have to provide reasons for it. That's what Blackburn, Gibbard, and their predecessors such as Russell, Ayer, and Hume do. Even the existentialists, who are less interested in technical argumentation than analytic philosophers, give reasons for thinking that there are no objective criteria for value. (I mean, Being and Nothingness is notorious for its length. What do you think Sartre is doing in all those pages, if he doesn't feel the need to show that his anti-objectivist conception of value is correct?)Moving onto your actual claim to have refuted me: you don't even seem to know what you're refuting. You seem to think you are providing reasons why morality is not objective - though I haven't actually noticed any (eg you haven't pointed to any facts of usage, any metaphysical considerations, etc - I think you are gesturing at an argument to best explanation, but you are not engaging with any of the relevant data points that such an argument would have to deal with). But in any event, I have not asserted that morality is objective. Nor have I denied that it is. As I stated a long way upthread, I am not interested in having that argument on this board (and, as I have also stated, I am happy to circulate my relevant work by PM if you are interested).All I have done is to point out that (i) the mainstream view among analytic moral philosophers is that morality is objective, (ii) there are certain reasons for that view, draw mostly from considerations of usage of the sort I have pointed to, (iii) objectivist moral philosophies aren't just hand waving, but rather have theories of epistemic acces to moral truth, and of methodology in moral reasoning, and (iv) relativist/subjectivist views face a non-trivial challenge that I have labelled the hypocrisy objection.You haven't given any reason to doubt (i) - for instance, you haven't identified any mainstream analytic moral philosophers who are anti-objectivist. I believe that's because you don't know of any. For instance, my guess is that you've never read Simon Blackburn or Allan Gibbard or Terrence Horgan or Mark Timmons, and so don't recognise them as leading moral anti-objectivists. (And, for that reason, as opponents of the mainstream view.)I would also point out that, contrary to what you say in your post, the question of whether a certain view is mainstream among a group of academics is an objective matter of fact, whether the academics are philosophers or geologists.You have not seriously enaged with (ii). For instance, you haven't addressed the difference between falsehood predication in the context of first-person pronouns (which are subjective in meaning) and in the context of moral argument. And your claim that it is "outlandish" to claim that "and" is a truth-conditional operator - a view which has been mainstream at least since Frege - suggests that you've not taken an introductory course in either logic or philosophy of language.You have not engaged at all with (iii). For instance, you haven't given any reason to think that moral truths can't be derived from facts about human nature (for instance, what is your argument against the claim that going to school rather than working as a bonded labourer in a carpet factory does not, in the typical case, give a child an objectively more flourishing life?).And in your response to (iv) you concede that waging a war to impose a moral view is no different from mere power projection. But you don't seem to recognise that that appears to render it impossible to distinguish the conduct of the Union from the Confederacy in the US Civil War, or to distinguish the conduct of the Allies from the Germans in the Second World War. Each side, on your account, was as justified as the other - ie fully justified by its own lights but not justified in any genuine sense. Are you sure you want to bite that bullet? Nearly all human relationships involving power - within families, within communities, within and between nations - are structured on the premise that there is a difference between the mere exercise of power and the justified exercise of power. This is what is taken to distinguish (say) police from bank robbers, executioners from murderers, and - in the case of present-day Iraq - the US and Australian soldiers who are there from their IS counterparts.Nietzsche, and some who follow him, are prepared to deny these distinctions, but they recognise that this is radical revisionism. I'm not sure you've really given the issues the same depth of thought.</blockquote>

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