Sorry, but I was trying to back up your argument, rather than oppose it. My apologies. I find your moral antirealism - if that's the right term - very persuasive.FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Sep 23, 2023 1:28 pmI would like to draw your attention to some relevant factoids.Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Sat Sep 23, 2023 1:01 pm Premise: In English, the term 'murder' is strongly associated with moral wrongfulness.
Conclusion: Therefore, (it's a fact that) murder is morally wrong.
Now, for 'murder' substitute 'homosexuality', 'abortion', 'capital punishment', 'eating animals', or any other morally contentious issue. In each case, is legality relevant? And if so, does that redeem the non-sequitur?
1. I'm talking in Wittgensteinian terms about what can meaningfully be doubted, stop trying to foist legalism onto me. I already made that point when I said that it makes no more sense to prove that murder is bad than it does to prove that what lies below is 'downwards' from that which is up. Any competent user of language knows that the direction to take to get from above to below is down because that shit is built into the concepts. Wrongness is similarly built into the concept of murder.
If you are describing something as murder you cannot assert that it was right in the same way that if you are saying X is below Y then you would not talk of moving "up from Y to X". You've read Wittgenstein, you should know how this works.
2. I didn't offer it as a resolution to a controversy about whether murder is wrong (or rape), it is the explanation for why there is no controversy over whether those things are wrong. In some other society where murder or rape were not wrong, those guys wouldn't have any exact translation for our concepts of murder and rape, the concepts would be alien to them. They would ask you what you meant by this special word that means a "forbidden stabbing" and they would look at you funny when you tried to explain.
3. I only extended my description as far as rape and murder for a reason. You might even note that normally you are accused by IC and Henry of not being able to say three things are wrong: rape, murder, and slavery. The third of those is more interesting in this context because it hasn't always been freighted with the conceptual luggage of wrongness. It has instead become a word of that sort. In a better forum I would work that point a lot harder, but here, I can't see it panning out.
4. Please try to remember from time to time that I am at least as good a moral antirealist as you are. If you are interpreting any argument I present in moral realist terms, you have probably misinterpreted me.
I hear what you're saying about moral language games. I suppose what I'm getting at is that talk about language - which is all that talk about concepts amounts to - is separate and different from the reality outside language, which is neither linguistic nor conceptual.
So the word 'murder' may well be universally freighted with 'moral wrongness' - but that doesn't make it a fact that murder is morally wrong. It just means it's a fact that we think murder is morally wrong, just as we used to think slavery is not morally wrong.
