Is morality objective or subjective?

[Atla]

Actually, I do. But let's compare notes. What are you intending to convey, when you use that word?

Not objective morality. Morality not being objective doesn't mean that we can't strive for a higher moral rightness, and expect others to strive for a higher moral rightness, that can go beyond the individual. That's pretty much the point of morality.

No: you said you thought I didn't understand what "subjective" means. I'm just asking what you think you mean by "subjective." Just give me your defintion, so we can be sure we're on the same page.

Now you're just playing games. The topic is objective vs subjective morality.

The definition was as I said: not objective morality.

[Iwannaplato]

You can't convince somebody who's already decided the case, and then closed his mind. And Atheists, absent any evidence at all, have done exactly that.

Which is one of the problems we all face when trying to show stuff to diverse sets of other people with different beliefs from us.

It won't be, provided one is willing to be shown. If one insists on the "self-identification' criterion, meaning that everybody who says, "I'm Christian" has to be regarded as such, absent any verification at all, then it will be a problem for such a person. But if one follows the word of God, it actually is very clear.

There's some swing room between 'anyone who says they are a Christian and 'most people who claim to be Christian are not.' Then to the first sentence, well everyone can say 'I did a great job, you weren't willing to be shown.' But we've all got a problem showing to others we disagree with. And this includes theists to other theists. And tell the other theists that they are the wrong kind of theist or not the kind of theist they are claiming or aren't really theists may work in some small % of cases, but it doesn't circumvent the problem of showing.

It depends. An indoctrinated Muslim extremist? Sure. But a Western Christian who meets the Biblical criteria? Humans are all fallible, but I have to says that I find them very tractable and reasonable people. They can be persuaded.

So, you can show people who share beliefs with you. Most categories of humans do pretty well with the group they share values and authority sources with. This includes non-theists as well.

that isn't true, actually. I know a lot of people who are quite consistent that babies are not be murdered.

They are all antiwar then as a basic minimum starter. And I don't mean anti-war in the sense that they don't like it or view it as a last resort. But would not support any war.

But I can only answer from my own perspective, in which abortion is objectively wrong. And you would have a point, a reason to question God, if like me, you believed in a God, and that abortion is wrong. As the case is, human beings have free will; and free will entails the power to do either what God wants, and what He doesn't want for you. Murdering the innocent is exactly what evil does; are you surprised? You won't be, when you realize that a lot of people are using their free will to disobey God. You could go down the whole list of human attrocities, from abortion to genocide, and prove it to yourself easily.

But does this mean that God has failed the innocent? No. As for the babies themselves, the ones harmed thereby, God takes care of those: we don't know their situation, nor can we speculate either way, since we are simply not told

So, how do you know God takes care of those if you are not told?
Why then is it an abomination? IOW we tend to get two messages from Christianity. One that the act itself is monstrous, the other that it is absolutely forbidden. If God takes care of those babies, it ends up being a blip in what turns out to be an eternal life of joy with God. A horrible blip, but actually much less painful than what many people born with horrible diseases go through - iow diseases not caused by some human and certainly not the person themselves causing. IOW words God puts some babies through more pain than any aborted child suffers. And the aborted babies then live a joyful eternity. The babies who end up being born in pain with horrible diseases may also enjoy enternal joy if they behave. No chance of falling out of grace for the aborted.

Abortion is not one of the innovations of man dealt with in detail in Scripture. The Bible says a lot of things about the value of life, about the preciousness of a human being, about the right to live and the responsibility not to murder, but nothing about what to do after somebody invents a technology that allows the murder her own baby...just as it has no explicit statements about cotton gins, computers, or motorcycles, though it always has principles that apply. What would we expect, though?

There have been abortifactant herbs long back into history and certainly before the time of Jesus.

Because I am getting tired of talking to people who can't face stuff I had to go through the pain of facing.

Should I ask what that was? Do you mean abortion?
[/quote]

I don't understand. You quoted just one piece.
I wrote:

It depends on what that God is and has done.

I mean, why put babies in atheist wombs or theist wombs where the theists will have an abortion? What kind of God does that?

Let me ask you this: if someone you knew handed their kids over to someone they knew what a pedophile, would you judge them harshly?

Why are you so forgiving when it comes to God? (who also puts babies into to wombs in pedophile households.

It seems even deities have trouble showing what is moral.

Do you have the courage to actually face what this might mean instead of coming with some kind of mental gymnastics?

Because I am getting tired of talking to people who can't face stuff I had to go through the pain of facing. And I do not mean, agree with me and deal with X forever. I mean to actually sit with cognitive dissonance. Instead of immediately rushing to some explanation because the really fundamentally scary thing simply cannot be true so let's get past it immediately.

I am raising the issue regarding the behavior of your deity. I'm not an atheist, but here I am asking about your courage to face the contradictions and sit with them instead of quickly brushing them away.

A good father would not put their child into a situation where they knew a person with murderous tendencies had power.
And yet, your God puts babies in the wombs of people who have had abortions, or whose worldview supports the idea of abortion, or who have said they would abort a child if they got pregnant. Why would a loving father do that?

The same goes for the issue around pedophilia. There are households with ongoing pedophilia in which the woman gets pregnant again.

How could a loving father do that? Not the human father, in either case, who may well be the pedophile, the heavenly father.

Can you sit and face the fears that can arise mulling over that, or do you find that your mind quickly jumps to something else or quickly throws out a solution, perhaps like the one you wrote above....
God takes care of the innocent. Well, not at first in any case.

For a human parent to put their child in a room with a murderous person or a pedophile and leave them, well sure, that murderer or pedophile has free will and could choose not for follow their usual tendencies.

But we'd still judge that parent poorly for their choice.

I hope one of my two paraphrases makes this clearer.

Right now I am having the problem of showing. Showing that there are spaces in the Christian belief system that should lead to a more or less immediate dark night of the soul. I think this is true for any belief system I've heard of, and in most cases pretty much everyone just jumps to a solution or changes the channel. Or gives some 'yeah, but it has to really be ok in some way I can't imagine' format.

[Immanuel Can]

'the oughtness to breathe'

You don't know what "oughtness" is, in the field of Ethics. I can see that, now. You think it can be physical.

[Harbal]

'the oughtness to breathe'

You don't know what "oughtness" is, in the field of Ethics. I can see that, now. You think it can be physical.

He ought to know better.

[Immanuel Can]

To say 'X is morally right/wrong' is not to say 'it's a fact - a 'fixed state' that X is morally right/wrong'.

Let's say that's so. Then it's only to say, "I cultivate within myself a delusion that X is morally right/wrong." Because then, it fails to have reference to any external reality beyond the bare facts of the situation, which, as Hume argued, do not produce warrant for any moral assessment.

Do you agree that saying something is so doesn't make it so?

Of course. But if you agree with that axiom, what does "so" mean in that statement? If you apply it to morality, it denies your thesis.

You say, above, that for you, "morality" doesn't reflect any empirical or physical situation. "Morals" aren't outside of the person. They're subjective. But if that's true, then there's no "so," no "state of affairs" to which they refer at all.

So instead of saying "Saying something doesn't make it so," you need to be saying, "Saying something is so is ALL that makes it so, in the area of morality."

If not, please explain why - because I think this is self-evident. For example, thinking or saying the earth is/isn't flat has no bearing on the fact of the matter - even if the agent doing the thinking or saying were a god.

Well, the "God" case would be problematic, since whatever God knows is true. But as for the rest of us, I agree...the axiom is obvious. But if you try to apply it to morality, it denies subjectivism. That should concern you.

Now, apply this fact to moral assertions: thinking or saying something is morally right/wrong doesn't make it morally right/wrong. Or do you think it does? And if so, why this special pleading for moral assertions?

The "special pleading" isn't coming from me. It's coming from the person who says, "Morals are purely subjective," and yet insists that the answer to a correct evaluation of moral affairs pre-exists such an assessment in the same way physical phenomena pre-exist our perception of them. He's an objectivist, but doesn't realize he is. He thinks that moral rightness or wrongness "is so" before anybody knows it, and yet he also insists that morality is purely a matter of subjective appraisal. He's simply inconsistent.

A subjectivist has to think that thinking DOES in fact "make" morality all it is, and all it can ever be. It can never be more than a "thinking," or a collection of "thinkings" in the heads of groups of individuals suffering similiar delusions.

There's the question-begging rub. Why must a moral opinion be the result of a delusion?

I'm using the term "delusion" in its simple sense: a perception that is not a product of external phenomena, and thus is ungrounded in reality. And that's what subjectivism requires us to believe morality is.

Not so. We usually provide - or can provide - factual reasons ('objective criteria) for our moral opinions. Those reasons are, as always, open to rational appraisal.

And all I've been asking is for you to make those "objective criteria" fit into a single prohibitive (or endorsing) syllogism. Just one. It seems not much to ask of a view that claims to speak about "morality."

To repeat: non-moral premises can't entail moral conclusions. So there's no such thing as a non-moral (factual) premise/criterion from which a moral conclusion can be deduced. But by all means produce an example that falsifies my claim.

Here, you assert again that "morality" is untethered from empirical reality. So it's not the ontological "wrongness" of killing that makes killing "bad." "Bad" turns out only to be a word some of us choose to use to characterize our feelings/experiences about a particular kind of act. But that "act" isn't actually bad, according to subjectivism, and that feeling is spontaneously generated within the observer himself. So goes your version of things.

But Hume was wrong. The empirical world was not what he thought it was, a bare plane of non-moral acts. It is, rather, as the Theist insists, a stage infused with moral givens. There is a right way and wrong way to treat anything on that stage, and that right and wrong way pre-exists the moralizer, just as the thing itself pre-exists him. He may get it right, or he may get it wrong; but saying, there's a universal, sharp fact-value divide is what Scripture denies. It says that nature itself should give mankind enough evidence to begin, at least, to suspect there's a God, and to know what His nature is, and to have intuitions (or conscience) about moral responsibility to Him.

Romans 1: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible mankind, of birds, four-footed animals, and crawling creatures. Therefore God gave them up to vile impurity in the lusts of their hearts, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for falsehood, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. " (underlines mine)

So if the Bible's right, Hume was wrong. His divesting of the moral qualities of reality was arbitrary and unwarranted by reality. And empirical facts do entail moral conclusions.

Now, you can say, "I don't believe any of that." And I accept that you don't. But what you can't say is, "A Christian is obligated to agree with Hume." Hume was simply an Atheist speaking to Atheistic suppositions. He has no juice for Christians, except that they can say, "You see? Without God, you begin to stunt then lose your moral sense as well." And that's observationally true, too. The world under Atheism has not become a better place for it.

No, actually, I'm not. That's again not the argument here.

Rather, the point is simply that if the so-called "subjectivist" claims to get his criteria from outside of himself, then his legitimizing of his moral judgment is not proceeding subjectively, from himself, but rather from the objective world. But as you have pointed out, the Humean argument is that there is no "ought" inside any "is", meaning that the objective world does not offer us any value-criteria. It offers us only cold, valueless facts, upon which we emotively impose our own sense of values, delusory as they are.

Your use of 'legitimizing [a] moral judgement' says it all. It can also be called 'justifying'. And this involves offering reasons.

Of course.

And those reasons are, necessarily, moral or non-moral.

"Necessarily"? No. Only "arbitrarily made" so, by the Atheist. The fact is that there are obvious moral precepts so deeply coded into reality that even we, imperfect as we are, can't fail to notice them. A thing called "conscience" remains with us, even if we warp it and stunt it by our resistance to God; we know we're lying, abusing, stealing, injuring...even when we deny we know it. As University of Texas professor Jay Budziszewski has so aptly put it, there are "things we can't not know." He adds, "People who pose as moral skeptics are playing make-believe, and they are doing it badly."

But it's the subjectivist who, like yourself, finds himself forced to appeal to objective reality, contrary to Hume. For he wants to say that "morality" is still "a real thing," and one that "is so" independent of "thinking." That cannot be true, if morality is, as he also insists, "purely subjective."

Your argument from 'God says X is morally right/wrong' to 'therefore X is morally right/wrong' is clearly invalid.

You mean "untrue." "Validity" refers to formality in syllogisms. In any case, it's not what I said. What I said instead is that morality is grounded in the nature, character and revealed will of God. It's not an either-or. That's a false dichotomy. It assumes that moral status has to exist prior to its Source, or else that Source must be merely arbitrary. God is neither pre-existed by things, nor is his consistency of action and character "arbitrary," as if He could "do otherwise" than do things which we rightly characterize as "good." (But that's the old Euthyphro mistake, so we don't need to wander into that one here.)

So your criticism of what could be called 'moral non-objectivism' - its inability to provide objective criteria from which to deduce moral opinions - is trivially correct - but also demolishes moral objectivity of any kind.

That's a non-sequitur. It means, "Since we all must believe 'moral non-objectivism' is true, there is no moral objectivity." But the "since" is incorrect. We do not need to believe that. It's merely assumptive on the part of the speaker. It is not logically necessary at all.

To "have reasons" is not enough. A psychopath or rapist "has reasons" for selecting his victims; that goes not one step in the direction of proving he's moral.

You need more than reasons (or motives) for doing things; you need justification by way of moral criteria...if morality exists as a property of reality, which a subjectivist must necessarily deny.

Please notice the question-begging here.

There is none. It's quite obvious that "having reasons" is no good as a moraljustification for anything. As I say, a psychopath "has reasons." Stalin and Hitler "had reasons" for what they did, and could tell you what they were. It's not even empirically reasonable to try to deny that. You know it's so. For even when you, yourself go against your conscience, it's always "for reasons."

So I return to this: it seems perfectly reasonable to think that a person who claims to "have reasons" for a moral judgment should be able to make those "reasons" explicit in a very simple syllogism. And if he can't, it would seem obvious he doesn't "have reasons" after all.

Or else, he should simply realize he knows NOTHING about any "morality" (that is, about any can-be-justified version of morality) at all. Being unrelated to, and uncriticizable with reference to, any objective reality, it's simply another form of mass delusion.

[Peter Holmes]

1 Having a reason is no justification for a moral opinion.

2 'My team's invented god says so' is a justification for a moral opinion.

Spot the contradiction?

[Immanuel Can]

2 'My team's invented god says so' is a justification for a moral opinion.

It's interesting that you find it necessary to use an argument I've refused to adopt, and that you've avoided all the terms I did use. I wasn't reticent to say exactly what I mean.

It seems you're finding it necessary to misrepresent my case in order to have some way of seeming to "refute" it.

A made-up line, with a criticism that doesn't address what was said...why would you prefer that to an actual quotation, or to responding to the line of argumentation I actually DID use?

[Harbal]

To say 'X is morally right/wrong' is not to say 'it's a fact - a 'fixed state' that X is morally right/wrong'.

Let's say that's so. Then it's only to say, "I cultivate within myself a delusion that X is morally right/wrong."

I could always say I cultivate an opinion that X is morally wrong, rather than a delusion. That way, I am not asserting a fact or asking anyone to agree with me, so that I am under no obligation to justify anything. I could, however, still be asked how I arrived at my opinion, and I could respond by explaining how I arrived at it. And then if you were to arrive on the scene, and say, "Ah, but your personal opinion has nothing to do with what is and is not actually moral", I might say that it is an opinion about a moral issue, and therefore a moral opinion, in my opinion. I don't see how that is stepping on God's toes in any way. Surely I'm allowed to have opinions.

[Immanuel Can]

You can't convince somebody who's already decided the case, and then closed his mind. And Atheists, absent any evidence at all, have done exactly that.

Which is one of the problems we all face when trying to show stuff to diverse sets of other people with different beliefs from us.

Yes. But it need not end there. The decisive difference is the question of what form of arbitration of differences will the two interlocutors accept?

Will both be willing to change their minds if a sufficient sort of data appears, in terms of reason, authority, demonstration, logic, and so on? Everyone should be able to say "yes," but then the other interlocutor has to be able to produce the data warranting the change.

But too often, the conversation simply becomes one entrenched view against another, with no grounds of arbitration agreed upon. That's the real problem.

It won't be, provided one is willing to be shown. If one insists on the "self-identification' criterion, meaning that everybody who says, "I'm Christian" has to be regarded as such, absent any verification at all, then it will be a problem for such a person. But if one follows the word of God, it actually is very clear.

There's some swing room between 'anyone who says they are a Christian and 'most people who claim to be Christian are not.'

"Swing room"? I'm not sure I see what you're aiming to say, there.

Then to the first sentence, well everyone can say 'I did a great job, you weren't willing to be shown.' But we've all got a problem showing to others we disagree with. And this includes theists to other theists. And tell the other theists that they are the wrong kind of theist or not the kind of theist they are claiming or aren't really theists may work in some small % of cases, but it doesn't circumvent the problem of showing.

As I say, everything depends on the willingness of both to accept suitable arbitration of the differences. If they can agree on the sorts of data to be regarded as relevant, then it gets easy. Without that, it's almost impossible.

That's why, as you observe...

It depends. An indoctrinated Muslim extremist? Sure. But a Western Christian who meets the Biblical criteria? Humans are all fallible, but I have to says that I find them very tractable and reasonable people. They can be persuaded.

So, you can show people who share beliefs with you. Most categories of humans do pretty well with the group they share values and authority sources with. This includes non-theists as well.

Christians are easier to discuss things with, because they agree on the authority for arbitration of disagreements. Other Theists are more problematic, but at least can share some fundamental assumptions, and so may agree on how to arbitrate the discussion. Atheists tend to refuse all forms of arbitration, and to insist on things like relativism, non-cognitivism, subjectivism, Hume's guillotine, and even outright anti-rationalism, sometimes. So one is left with only things like science and reason to which to appeal, the problem being that they regard science as merely material and morally neutral already, and they often back off reason when it demands too much of their Atheism...such as when they are asked to give evidence for it, and reply, "I don't have to..."

So it's very hard with Atheists. But again, the problem is finding a common basis for arbitrating essential questions.

that isn't true, actually. I know a lot of people who are quite consistent that babies are not be murdered.

They are all antiwar then as a basic minimum starter. And I don't mean anti-war in the sense that they don't like it or view it as a last resort. But would not support any war.

I haven't done any demographic investigation of this, but personal experience suggests to me that Christians are very anti-war, as a group. And that's consistent with not wanting to kill, of course. Still, in the case of an evil aggressor, participating in the defense of the innocent could well be a moral duty. I'd have to see the case in question in order to tell you whether I thought a particular person was pro or anti war.

However, if you haven't seen the film "Hacksaw Ridge," you really should. It shows a person who found his own moral position relative to that question, and lived it out from first to last. It's one of the best films in recent memory, too...you should enjoy it.

So, how do you know God takes care of those if you are not told?

Well, "takes care of" is admittedly a bit unclear. I should add to that.

What I'm saying is a statement of faith in the character of God Himself, a vote of confidence in what I know about who He is. God is love, and God is righteous. He's a God of justice. All this, I already know. So though I do not know the particulars of how He adjudicates the situation of those aborted, and though I would simply be speaking out of turn if I said I did, I'm at peace that whatever solution to that unjust situation God finds, at the end of the day we'll all see He did the right thing. And knowing God, I'm content to wait upon that, even though I haven't got knowledge of all the particulars. That's honestly the limit of what I can say about that.

If God takes care of those babies, it ends up being a blip in what turns out to be an eternal life of joy with God. A horrible blip, but actually much less painful than what many people born with horrible diseases go through - iow diseases not caused by some human and certainly not the person themselves causing. IOW words God puts some babies through more pain than any aborted child suffers.

Notice that this constructs the situation in a particular way: you're assuming that whatever happens is God's doing. That would mean that human beings, including the aborter and the doctor behind her with the scissors and suction hose, are not responsible for what they do.

But you don't believe that, do you? You don't believe that you are not a free agent, that you have no will of your own, and that you're simply a pawn in a deterministic scheme of some kind, do you? But if you don't, then you know who's responsible for that action...and it's not God.

Now, what you CAN perhaps say is, "Well, God's powerful; and he could prevent any babies from dying that way." And that is true. But should He? You might instantly think He should. But if He does that, then where does that rule stop? Should God prevent us from murdering babies, but not from murdering adults? How about children? How about killing animals? How about harming the environment? What about theft, embezzlement and exploitation? What about savage gossip? At what point would we be happy to say, "God, you're powerful enough to stop X, but please, leave Y and Z alone, so we can still have freedom and choices?"

I'd be interested in seeing how you adjudicate that question.

Meanwhile, here's how I adjudicate it. I say that God knows. I trust His character and His intentions. He knows how much latitude people have to have in their choice-making in order to be genuinely and authentically free agents...even though some of the choices they make will be contrary to His will and purposes for them and for each other. And I look at the fact of God's power, and say, "Well, God can create justice out of any situation; He's not short of ability to do that." So I can rest in the conviction that what God allows is necessary for purposes beyond our full grasp, and that any situation, no matter how unfair or awful, will be answered by His final judgment. If I wanted to know all the reasons-in-play for any particular situation, I could not; for I am a limited and finite creature who can only speculate about all the intricacies of what's going on in the world. So what I have to do is understand who God is, and be confident that His providence is better than I can know.

And having not just a realistic appraisal of my own finitude but also the assurance from what I know of his previous actions and revelations of Himself, that's a reasonable confidence to have.

Abortion is not one of the innovations of man dealt with in detail in Scripture. The Bible says a lot of things about the value of life, about the preciousness of a human being, about the right to live and the responsibility not to murder, but nothing about what to do after somebody invents a technology that allows the murder her own baby...just as it has no explicit statements about cotton gins, computers, or motorcycles, though it always has principles that apply. What would we expect, though?

There have been abortifactant herbs long back into history and certainly before the time of Jesus.

I'm sure that's true. But in ancient days, children were generally regarded as such a vital resource that only a demented woman would wish to get rid of one. They were the whole future a woman had...not only her family but her security, her retirement program and the source of her credibility in ancient communities.

It's only in our day we've become so morally bankrupt and so financially "liberated" that we regard children as a burden. Historically, people tended to have as many as they were able, or as many as came. And childlessness was considered a curse.

What the Bible does talk about, and what happened far more often than abortions, was other forms of infanticide. In Hindu countries, for example, the outright murder of female babies was common, and has been for a long time. But again, we have to go back to our answer to the abortion problem for rectification for that.

Right now I am having the problem of showing. Showing that there are spaces in the Christian belief system that should lead to a more or less immediate dark night of the soul.

I think you're underestimating the seriousness with which Christians routinely face the problem of evil. They really do recognize it. Anybody who doubts they do should consider that the oldest book in the whole Bible is the book of Job; and it deals with that very issue in excruciating detail.

Any Christian has to think through the issue of evil. It's one of the most obvious facts of the universe. He can't overlook it. And, to be frank, it was one of the issues that made me a Theist, eventually; I saw that only the Bible had an authentic answer to evil. I did not find similar clarity in the many other Atheists and skeptics I was reading at the time. From them, I saw only the denial of the problem, in one form or another.

But have you ever thought about the Atheist "problem of evil"? There is one, and it's far more dire than they will even recognize. For if there's no God, then there's absolutely no grounds for calling anything "evil" -- at least, not for calling it "evil" and expecting anybody to have to agree. And this raises a very interesting paradox: how can an Atheist, who does not believe in any sort of objective "evil," think he's making a case when he indicts God for "allowing evil"?

Now, talk about dodging the problem...

[Immanuel Can]

To say 'X is morally right/wrong' is not to say 'it's a fact - a 'fixed state' that X is morally right/wrong'.

Let's say that's so. Then it's only to say, "I cultivate within myself a delusion that X is morally right/wrong."

I could always say I cultivate an opinion that X is morally wrong, rather than a delusion.

Don't let the word offend you: it's accurate.

An "opinion" is something that could be correct or incorrect; if my "opinion" is that Notts Forest will take the Prem next year, that's an opinion...however unlikely (alas, alas), it's technically possible. Bad opinion? Maybe. But it's an opinion.

But if my view is that the Wrexham women's team will take the Prem, then I'm deluding myself, because the Wrexham women's team isn't in the Prem, and thus cannot possibly take the cup. I have departed reality. I am imagining things that definitionally cannot be.

The subjectivist has already insisted that his moral judgments are incapable of being objectively correct. They are "not in the Prem league," when it comes to truthfulness. Absent any objective referent, anything he decides is not merely an "opinion," but actually a self-deception of a sort. He's seeing things that "aren't there."

That's the difference between an opinion and a delusion.

[FlashDangerpants]

An "opinion" is something that could be correct or incorrect; if my "opinion" is that Notts Forest will take the Prem next year, that's an opinion...however unlikely (alas, alas), it's technically possible. Bad opinion? Maybe. But it's an opinion.

I have an opinion that Nottingham Forest is the second silliest name for a football team. You might hold an opinion that this honour belongs to Aston Villa. The matter is moot, there is no real truth in it, even if I did make the cardinal mistae of using the word "is".

I don't believe Notts Forest will win anything of significance next season. Maybe I am of the opinion that they will not, but that doens't mean that all opinions are truth-apt, only that there appears to be such an option.

[Immanuel Can]

... that doens't mean that all opinions are truth-apt, only that there appears to be such an option.

There is no option of the Wrexham women winning the Prem. The Prem is a men's league, and the Wrexham woman aren't even elligible for it.

So if I say the Wrexham women will win the Prem, you have every right to note that I believe things that are totally illusory...I'm having delusions about what it takes, or even what it means, to win the Prem. I may not even know what the Premier League is.

[Harbal]

Let's say that's so. Then it's only to say, "I cultivate within myself a delusion that X is morally right/wrong."

I could always say I cultivate an opinion that X is morally wrong, rather than a delusion.

Don't let the word offend you: it's accurate.

No, if I think I have an opinion, and I actually do have an opinion, that is not a delusion. If I were to start believing in invisible, all powerful entities, that would be a delusion.

An "opinion" is something that could be correct or incorrect; if my "opinion" is that Notts Forest will take the Prem next year, that's an opinion...however unlikely (alas, alas), it's technically possible. Bad opinion? Maybe. But it's an opinion.

But if my view is that the Wrexham women's team will take the Prem, then I'm deluding myself, because the Wrexham women's team isn't in the Prem, and thus cannot possibly take the cup. I have departed reality. I am imagining things that definitionally cannot be.

You are committing some sort of fallacy here, which really surprises me because I know how strict you are about fallacies. The type of view, or opinion, you are referring to here is of a different category to the type I am talking about. Yours refers to something actual in the physical world, so it could turn out to be false if the actual thing turns out not to correspond to it. I am talking about the type of opinion that is not "truth apt". I think that's the term for it, but philosophy jargon isn't my strong point. Think of opinions like: I prefer Italian food to Indian, or I prefer blue to red, or I prefer toothache to country and westen music. Those are not subject to any objective truth -although the last example might appear to be. A moral opinion is of that type. That does not mean I regard matters concerning chicken vindaloo as being of similar status to those of genocide, but I have no doubt you will try to spin it that way. We can have opinions about trivial things, and we can have them about things of great importance.

[FlashDangerpants]

... that doens't mean that all opinions are truth-apt, only that there appears to be such an option.

There is no option of the Wrexham women winning the Prem. The Prem is a men's league, and the Wrexham woman aren't even elligible for it.

So if I say the Wrexham women will win the Prem, you have every right to note that I believe things that are totally illusory...I'm having delusions about what it takes, or even what it means, to win the Prem. I may not even know what the Premier League is.

We've already covered a similar situation with your insistence that you understand Frege-Geach in the face of your obvious ignorance about the actual theory. Your mistaken beliefs, truth-apt but incorrect, don't show us that all opinions are truth-apt, only that some are, and then some are of course incorrect. That doesn't serve as any sort of counter if we can also show that some opinions are not truth-apt.

[Peter Holmes]

2 'My team's invented god says so' is a justification for a moral opinion.

It's interesting that you find it necessary to use an argument I've refused to adopt, and that you've avoided all the terms I did use. I wasn't reticent to say exactly what I mean.

It seems you're finding it necessary to misrepresent my case in order to have some way of seeming to "refute" it.

A made-up line, with a criticism that doesn't address what was said...why would you prefer that to an actual quotation, or to responding to the line of argumentation I actually DID use?

I didn't misrepresent your argument. You said the following:

'It's quite obvious that "having reasons" is no good as a moral justification for anything.'

And elsewhere, many times, you've said that what your team's invented god thinks/says is morally right and wrong is indeed factually/objectively morally right and wrong. And that's to have a reason - a justification - for a moral opinion. So that's a flat contradiction.

You can call your team's invented god 'God', as do all other theists. But so what? The agent doing the thinking/saying is irrelevant, because the claim is false for any agent.

So you do have a reason - a premise - for your moral opinions, and your premise is false.