I don't think non-factual assertions - such as moral and aesthetic ones - are meaningless. The logical positivists were wrong about that. And their mistake came partly from a misreading of the Tractatus - which the later Wittgenstein recognised and painstakingly corrected.Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 7:52 amYou are following the footsteps of the logical positivists [note Ayer] where due to their arrogance based on ignorance insisted that whatever of morality is nonsense and useless.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 7:37 am There's no contradiction in my argument. Morality (moral discourse) deals with what we call moral rightness and wrongness. And it's a fact - not merely my opinion - that what we call moral rightness and wrongness is a matter of individual or collective opinion.
If you think there are no such things as facts - so that what we call objectivity is impossible - then by all means state that claim and support it with a sound argument. (Spoiler; then I'll explain why you're wrong.)
The influential wrongness of AJ Ayer
Ayer’s work tells us important things about the shortcomings of Anglophone philosophy
Ayer was catapulted to fame by Language, Truth and Logic, a book published at the philosophically precocious age of 26. Inspired by a year in Austria in the company of the Vienna Circle, he had returned to proselytise his version of the group’s creed.
The members of the Vienna Circle—which included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Kurt Gödel—did not all agree in detail but they shared a conviction that all philosophical metaphysics and most ethics to date was not so much wrong as meaningless nonsense.
Scientific claims made sense because there was some way of testing their truth. But how can we test, say, whether everything that exists is essentially immaterial or whether an action is morally right or wrong?
These claims appear to be meaningful because they come in the form of grammatically correct sentences with proper words. But since nothing could ever show them to be true or false they were, the Circle believed, meaningless.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/phil ... of-aj-ayerSubsequent to the defunct logical positivists, the philosophers [you probably are following] made changes, but insufficient to make it more rational, thus your wasted effort in ignorance.His real change of heart seemed to be a more gradual realisation that his youthful enthusiasm for logical analysis failed to touch on what matters most in life.
“It seems that I have spent my entire time trying to make life more rational and that it was all wasted effort,” he said in 1986.
As far as moral facts are concerned I have justified them as matter-of-fact throughout this thread and others.
When will you tire of tilting at this straw windmill?
Meanwhile, you haven't presented one sound argument for the existence of - grammatical chimera! - a moral fact. And we've shown you 'a thousand times' why such a monster can't exist.