What could make morality objective?

[Peter Holmes]

My argument is we can approach Morality like what we do with Science which generate relative objective scientific truths and facts on a reality which is "co-created"* inevitably by humans collectively.

To be more precise "Co-created" is emergence of reality as it is where such an emergence imperatively must be intertwined with the human conditions.

Note I can understand all your points and perspectives, but they are limited, narrow and shallow.

Note: I understand your argument, and it is unsound, because your premises are false or at least unjustified.

We don't create the reality that we - including scientists - describe by means of factual assertions produced, no doubt, through intersubjective consensus. To describe a thing is not to create it - unless you're equivocating mystically on the meanings of 'describe' and 'create' - which I think you are. What we call reality does not 'emerge' when we describe it. That is hippy-woo claptrap.

[Skepdick]

What we call reality does not 'emerge' when we describe it. That is hippy-woo claptrap.

Then stop with the hippy-woo claptrap and tell us what the word "reality" describes.

You are using the word descriptively, right? Or is that back-door prescriptivism you are trying to pull on us?

[Peter Holmes]

A name isn't a description. Grammar 101.

[Skepdick]

A name isn't a description. Grammar 101.

Peter doesn't even understand the difference between grammar and semantics.

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RED

horse.png

^^^ HORSE

[Peter Holmes]

Semantics is a specialised discipline within grammar, along with phonology, phonetics, morphology, and so on.

And a name is not a description.

[Skepdick]

Semantics is a specialised discipline within grammar

If that were true then what does "grammar" mean?

But it's not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar

The term refers also to the study of such rules and this field includes phonology, morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, semantics and pragmatics.

And a name is not a description.

Yes, it is.

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RED

Q.E.D

[Peter Holmes]

A name is not a description. So someone who thinks a name such as 'reality' describes something - predicates something of a thing - is making a mistake and needs to correct herself.

[Skepdick]

A name is not a description.

Objection overruled. Demonstration to the contrary stands.

So someone who thinks a name such as 'reality' describes something - predicates something of a thing - is making a mistake and needs to correct herself.

Somebody who thinks the words "reality" and "thing" don't describe anything is making a mistake and should correct himself.

Or stop using those words.

[RCSaunders]

https://www.wiley.com/en-ca/The+Blackwe ... 1405176576

I've read it, cover to cover. If anyone else has a serious intention of knowing what the best current "natural"-type arguments for the existence of God are, here they are, and they can grapple with them too. The book is academic, documented, and precisely argued, in an edited, peer-reviewed source, published by one of the top philosophy publishers in the world, Blackwell.

I doubt you'll find a better source anywhere. If you do, let me know...I'll want to read it too.

At $255.75 US ($306.75 CAD), it must be printed on platinum paper. There is something essentially wrong with any idea that requires book after book and argument after argument to defend it. If the evidence of anything is so overwhelming it will be obvious to anyone who encounters it.

Why are there no books of, "apologetics," defending the truth of Chemistry, or Mechanics, or Astronomy? What is meant by evidence is the kind of evidence the sciences are based on, not some abstruse arguments based of the outer regions of the most doubtful aspects of philosophy.

From one review:

I have to say that this is without a doubt the most difficult book I own! ... Not for the laymen, as the articles are written by analytic philosophers for analytic philosophers. ... Just as a heads up, the essay on the ontological argument assumes that you know propositional calculus! For those having a deep interest in apologetics as well as philosophy of religion, this book is a must have...but not for the faint of heart!!

[Peter Holmes]

Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, OUP, 1998, page 177

grammar

1 The entire system of a language, including its syntax, morpohology, semantics, and phonology.

2 Popularly, the structural rules of a language, including those relating to syntax, and possibly morphology, but excluding vocabulary (the semantic system) and phonology.

I prefer the original and scholarly meaning to the vulgar and schoolroom meaning of 'grammar'.

And a name is not a description. The name 'dog' does not describe what we call a dog in any way whatsoever.

[Immanuel Can]

Natural is any observable and demonstrable phenomenon that can be experienced by the physical senses
Now can you apply this definition to your metaphysical God so that we can examine the evidence for him

Done.

https://www.wiley.com/en-ca/The+Blackwe ... 1405176576

I've read it, cover to cover. If anyone else has a serious intention of knowing what the best current "natural"-type arguments for the existence of God are, here they are, and they can grapple with them too. The book is academic, documented, and precisely argued, in an edited, peer-reviewed source, published by one of the top philosophy publishers in the world, Blackwell.

I doubt you'll find a better source anywhere. If you do, let me know...I'll want to read it too.

I'm happy to go with surreptitious57's definition of 'natural' for now. And I endorse the request for your take, rather than a link to a book.

I think you'll find the book better than any synopsis anyone could possibly supply in these spaces. And I sense your skepticism will require significant proof, which this provides, rather than one individual's gloss on somebody else's best version of the argument.

I find the arguments therein very winsome; and they're presented by some of the world's leading experts, as well. Some of them involve things like String Theory, at which I have to confess myself a relative novice, so there are arguments in there that others are better to judge. But those that fall within my competencies, I find excellent.

The point would be this: you said that "there is no evidence." Very clearly, there is. And that evidence exists at the highest academic level. Now, one can say, "I don't accept that evidence," or "I don't like that argument," or even "I'm afraid to look at the evidence," and one can also decide to say why, or just avoid the evidence -- but what one can no longer rationally do, in view of texts like this one, is say "there is no evidence." That boat just doesn't float anymore.

And we might have known. An issue that has occupied some of the best scholarship for some two thousand years plus is highly unlikely to be a trivial issue, the sort of easy thing dismissed with the wave of a hand and a claim that "there is no evidence." Very clearly, some very smart people found some very compelling reasons to think the question was deserving of consideration.

To save time: what do you think is the strongest natural evidence for the existence of a god?

I think that "natural" evidences don't really convince anybody who's determined not to accept evidence from nature. People like Francis Bacon, the father of science, liked natural arguments. So did people like Newton, or Pascal...not foolish men, to be sure. But not everybody does; and for those who do not, there is always an alternate explanation for everything, that is "good enough" to allow them to continue not to consider.

At most, natural arguments can take an obdurate man where his excuses for NOT believing lack warrant, and he is, to quote Romans "without excuse." But Jesus Himself said, "He who has ears, let him hear." That implies that some people will listen, and some are determined not to listen. I can think of no argument at all that can force a person to accept anything as evidence, if he is determined not to. As the old saying goes,

"A man convinced against his will / Remains an unbeliever still."

No argument is persuasive if we're speaking to one who will not hear. Fortunately, we do not have to be like that. It's always a choice: "I will consider," or "I will not."

(And to repeat, this has nothing to do with the the objectivity or subjectivity of morality.)

That's clearly incorrect, as you can see if you understand the Moral Argument, for example as presented in the Blackwell Guide. Whether or not a Creator of the cosmos exists is absolutely essential to the question of whether anything can every be "right" or "wrong."

[Immanuel Can]

If the counter arguments are convincing, I would have accepted them.

Well, it seems apparent to the rest of us that several lines of argument have been good enough to show that your "solution" to the is-ought problem isn't a solution at all. For some reason, none of these seem as compelling to you as they do to us. I'm not sure there's a next step, therefore.

Here is a comment from SEP re Hume's latest view on theistic morality;

In the moral Enquiry Hume is more explicit about what he takes to be the errors of Christian (or, more cautiously, Roman Catholic) moralists.

This isn't entirely incorrect. Roman Catholic moralizing also has some significant vulnerabilities, founded as it is on a presumed continuity between "pagan" and "Christian" morality. But Roman Catholic theory departs significantly from Protestant understanding on morality, and Hume never even attempted to address the very substantial differences.

Your quote further relates to the RC claim that pagan "virtues" are, to use their term, "glittering vices." Again, this shows how "vices" and "virtues" are on a single plane, for Catholicism. This is not the supposition of the majority of Christian ethical thought, however. As for "monkish" virtues, only the RC's have "monks" at all. So it's clear that Hume had the Catholics squarely in mind -- which explains why he went after the Natural Law theory of ethics so specifically. About genuine Christian ethics, he neither thought nor had anything to say.

[Immanuel Can]

https://www.wiley.com/en-ca/The+Blackwe ... 1405176576

I've read it, cover to cover. If anyone else has a serious intention of knowing what the best current "natural"-type arguments for the existence of God are, here they are, and they can grapple with them too. The book is academic, documented, and precisely argued, in an edited, peer-reviewed source, published by one of the top philosophy publishers in the world, Blackwell.

I doubt you'll find a better source anywhere. If you do, let me know...I'll want to read it too.

At $255.75 US ($306.75 CAD), it must be printed on platinum paper.

High quality academic books are not cheap, you'll find. But second-hand bookstores and libraries can often help with that. If one wants access to the actual BEST of something, one generally has to be willing to put oneself out a bit to access it.

Me, I just bought the book.

Why are there no books of, "apologetics," defending the truth of Chemistry, or Mechanics, or Astronomy?

Because they deal with different kinds of explanation.

Textbooks on such matters generally do not draw metaphysical conclusions. It's not that there are no metaphysical implications, or that these are different spheres of knowledge, but that people expect their science textbooks to tell them what data or procedures are, and what the data obtained thereby indicates -- not not what data means. And certainly, nobody asks their textbooks on, say mechanics" to range into such things as teleological claims or moral statements. In science textbooks, these conclusions are simply left to chance, or left tacit, or considered "excessive," because they move beyond the mechanics of the method itself.

Do you want metaphysical conclusions from your physics textbook? Is the physicist or biologist even well-positioned to tell you what entropy "means" or what moral relationship you should have to farmed beef?

From one review:

I have to say that this is without a doubt the most difficult book I own! ... Not for the laymen, as the articles are written by analytic philosophers for analytic philosophers. ... Just as a heads up, the essay on the ontological argument assumes that you know propositional calculus! For those having a deep interest in apologetics as well as philosophy of religion, this book is a must have...but not for the faint of heart!!

Right. I'm not kidding you here. These are good arguments. If you want to take a shot at them, you're going to need to be very smart. But I'm thinking that maybe at least one of them falls within the range of something you personally know well, and you'll be equipped to pass your own judgment on them. I'm hoping that works out. If that's not the case, then all I can say is that now you can see the evidence is out there...not that there "is no evidence," as Peter has thought up to now.

[RCSaunders]

Why are there no books of, "apologetics," defending the truth of Chemistry, or Mechanics, or Astronomy?

Because they deal with different kinds of explanation.

Textbooks on such matters generally do not draw metaphysical conclusions.

Evidence based knowledge does not have to be defended by endless mental gymnastics, just clear reason. I see you use, "metaphysical," as H.L. Mencken understood it:

No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune telling.

That is exactly my opinion of those who claim their reasoning transcends the need of evidence because it deals with metaphysics. It's nonsense.

But then, most of what most people believe is nonsense.

[Immanuel Can]

Why are there no books of, "apologetics," defending the truth of Chemistry, or Mechanics, or Astronomy?

Because they deal with different kinds of explanation.

Textbooks on such matters generally do not draw metaphysical conclusions.

Evidence based knowledge does not have to be defended by endless mental gymnastics, just clear reason.

But what's "evidence," RC?

Does it mean just things you can see, touch, taste, smell, put in a beaker, roll down an inclined plane, mix in a test tube, put under a microscope, and so on? If it does, then the only "evidence" for anything is physical evidence. Rational arguments then can't be included; for ironically, rationality is an operation that does not depend for its outputs on any specific kind of physical content to the exclusion of another. It's a handle-that-fits-various-pots, and is employed just as well in purely mathematical abstractions as with anything concrete.

But without rational arguments, how does the scientist know what his experiment is "telling" him? He can't decide, if he really thinks rationality is unreal, because rationality is one of those non-physical realities he's at pains to deny exist at all, so he cannot trust it. He would then do experiments for no particular reason, and with no identifiable results...since the mechanism he needs in order to do his science (reason) happens also to fall into the category of things he claims he doesn't believe in.

You can see the inherent illogic of that, I'm sure.

But what about our present topic, morality? We can't put it in a beaker, or heat it up with a bunsen burner, or squeeze it in Vernier callipers...so does that mean it doesn't have any reality at all, since it isn't "evidence based" in the expected way? If so, we can all be amoral, at the very least. We may even become, without rational censure, what's conventionally called "immoral" -- though that category of description will have ceased to have any meaning for us.

I see you use, "metaphysical," as H.L. Mencken understood it:

Not at all. I use it very broadly. For example, I would say that moral ideas are metaphysical. So are abstractions and concepts. Mathematical operations surely are. So are valuations, intentions, relationships, purposes and meanings. So is the human mind -- though not the physical brain, which is not itself the mind.

You get the idea: anything not-physical-but-still-real, in other words.

What we accept as evidence will pre-determine what we will be able to see. If a person considers only the deliverances of his senses to be "real," then he will continually fight against his creeping intuition that he is not being honest with himself...and, of course, he will continually live in a contradiction: believing, for example, that the mind he uses to doubt is not real, but the brain in his skull, which of itself is only meat, is.