moral relativism

[Pistolero]

I know when two are compatible....and what brought them into intercourse....

Do not let me disturb your exchange of brain fluids.

[jamesconroyuk]

grrrrr

[jamesconroyuk]

Did I mention the trifecta?

The First Three Axioms of Synthesis - Defined Formally - The Trifecta

Vita Sentit.

Vita Aedificat.

Vita Affirmat.

Vita Sentit - Life perceives.
It opens its eyes to the world. Every feeling, every sensation, the dawn of awareness. Life experiences the world, recognizes itself in the mirror of the universe. Without this perception, nothing matters. Without it, nothing even exists.

Vita Aedificat - Life builds.
It takes what it perceives and shapes it. Life resists entropy by creating order, structure, growth. From cells to societies, from atoms to algorithms, life constructs systems to hold the world together. It is not passive; it is a builder, a creator, a relentless architect.

Vita Affirmat - Life affirms.
It chooses itself. In every choice, in every act of survival and flourishing, life says, Yes, I continue. It moves forward, against death, against decay, always striving. Life, in its deepest essence, must affirm itself, or it ceases to be.

And that's the cycle: Perception, Creation, Affirmation. This is the rhythm of existence itself, in its purest form.

Now, more formally.

1. Life is, therefore value exists.

Formal Statement: Without life, there is no subject to generate or interpret value.

Explanation: Value is not a free-floating property. It is always attributed by a living subject. Rocks do not assign value. Dead universes do not weigh worth. The existence of life is the necessary condition for anything to be regarded as good, bad, true, false, beautiful, or ugly.
Implication: All systems of ethics, reason, or judgment are parasitic on life. Value is not discovered; it is enacted by life.

2. Life builds, therefore growth is what is valued.

Formal Statement: Life persists by resisting entropy through structure, order, and adaptation.

Explanation: From the molecular to the civilisational, life constructs patterns that propagate itself. This is not moral, it's mechanical. Growth, complexity, cooperation, and innovation are selected for because they enable continuation
Implication: What sustains and enhances life tends to persist. “Good” can be structurally defined as that which reinforces this persistence.

3. Life must affirm itself, or it perishes.

Formal Statement: For life to continue, it must operate as if life is good.

Explanation: A system that ceases to prefer life will self-destruct or fail to reproduce. Therefore, belief in life’s worth isn’t merely cultural or emotional, it’s biologically and structurally enforced. This is not idealism; it’s existential natural selection.
Implication: To endure, life must be biased toward itself. “Life is Good” is not a descriptive claim about all events; it’s an ontological posture life must adopt to remain.

You can find the formal paper https://www.academia.edu/128894269/Synt ... _All_Value

[jamesconroyuk]

I often face accusations of either being in some way "Randian" ( i.e. Morally Objectivist ), or another popular one is that it's a "Naturalistic Fallacy" ( i.e. Hume's Guillotine )

Neither are true and miss the point...

My paper describes a framework that is 100% DESCRIPTIVE and 100% DEDUCTIVE.

No "Is-Ought" - just is.

Not morally prescriptive in any way.

Good = positive value.

Bad = negative value.

No one has ever defined these any differently - they just get caught up in what their perception of positive value is.

Plants judge value. They judge sunlight to have positive value ( i.e. it's Good )

Refer to the trifecta - thats a great ocean floor to start from with any judgement - and it's undeniable.

This isn't my opinion - it's a fact.

[iambiguous]

Easy now cowboys and cowgirls...

Have I walked into the middle of a lover's tiff?

Start here:

Just for the record, some here [and others there] have accused me of being obsessed with Satyr. It's actually just the opposite.

I first encountered him years ago at ILP. By then though the "war" between ILP and KT had resulted in him being banned. Why? Because he simply cannot, will not tolerate anyone who refuses to agree with everything that he says. He is the personification of the didactic/pedantic bully.

I became a "user" at KT. I would effectively challenge his arrogant, autocratic dogmas until one day I came upon this:

You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum

He tossed me into the "dungeon". Where over and over and over again I continued to make a fool out of him.

Okay, okay: if I do say so myself.

There are so many preposterous claims he makes about me here...and I suspect that he knows it. He just can't help himself though. He seethes when someone dares to challenge him. Most here know what I am talking about.

Then, as with AJ, he refuses to go anywhere near here:

Now, what is still of interest to me is how [Satyr] and others of his ilk here would enforce [politically, legally] their own dogmatic "natural" philosophy. In other words, if they encompassed that power here in America.

Then the part where I ask him to note what Hitler got right and what Hitler got wrong regarding his own views on race.

So, why "she" above when I'm a he?

Well, he often accuses me of "arguing like a woman."

I'll be completely honest, I didn't have the time read or unpack most of that - I really don't have time to ego-stroke in forums like you guys do, or comb through long lists of quotes taken out of context.

I'll be completely honest myself then.

From my frame of mind, your own ego here seems to revolve largely around sustaining philosophical axioms up in the philosophical clouds. In other words, you strike me as but one more of Will Durant's "epistemologists":

"In the end it is dishonesty that breeds the sterile intellectualism of contemporary speculation. A man who is not certain of his mental integrity shuns the vital problems of human existence; at any moment the great laboratory of life may explode his little lie and leave him naked and shivering in the face of truth. So he builds himself an ivory tower of esoteric tomes and professionally philosophical periodicals; he is comfortable only in their company...he wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him....He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology. He ceases to be a philosopher, and becomes an epistemologist."

Though, sure, if your idea of philosophy revolves around exchanging definitions and deductions up in the theoretical, technical, axiomatic clouds, there are any number of folks here who will be happy to accommodate you. Pistolero in particular.

As for myself, in regard to meaning and morality, I am only interested in bringing definitions and deductions down out of the didactic clouds.

Abortion is murder. Anyone that thinks otherwise needs a good dressing down.

"My body my choice" - my backside.

So, here "life is good" includes, what, arresting women who have abortions? Forcing women to give birth...or else? Instead, I can only only come back to you "going to a clinic that performs abortions. Outside are protesters insisting that an abortion is the murder of a human baby. How do you suppose they would react to the above? Philosophically, Is abortion good or bad?"[/b]

Then you can go inside the clinic with your epistemological axioms. Shame the doctors and the women for not grasping that abortion is murder?

Then, perhaps, this part:

Pedant

a] one who is unimaginative or who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge

b] one who makes a show of knowledge

c] a formalist or precisionist in teaching

I'm thinking b myself.

[iambiguous]

I often face accusations of either being in some way "Randian" ( i.e. Morally Objectivist ), or another popular one is that it's a "Naturalistic Fallacy" ( i.e. Hume's Guillotine )

Neither are true and miss the point...

My paper describes a framework that is 100% DESCRIPTIVE and 100% DEDUCTIVE.

No "Is-Ought" - just is.

Not morally prescriptive in any way.

Good = positive value.

Bad = negative value.

No one has ever defined these any differently - they just get caught up in what their perception of positive value is.

Plants judge value. They judge sunlight to have positive value ( i.e. it's Good )

Refer to the trifecta - thats a great ocean floor to start from with any judgement - and it's undeniable.

This isn't my opinion - it's a fact.

Just more of the same, in my view.  A bunch of words defining and defending yet more words still. In other words, they never refer to anything pertaining to the lives that we actually live from day to day.

And, yes, Rand was particularly "arrogant, autocratic and authoritarian" in regard to her own moral philosophy.  She claimed to encompass it...metaphysically?

And just like Satyr, she was fanatically insistent that her own "axioms" were ever and always the bottom line. She would shame and shun anyone who dared to challenge her:  

"Branden and Rand had a notoriously messy falling out — a split so tumultuous that she publicly denounced him and his then-wife, Barbara, and ordered his name stripped from the dedication of future editions of 'Atlas Shrugged.'"

On the other hand, admittedly, she did take her own moral philosophy down out of the theoretical clouds. She intertwined her own axioms in all manner of social, political and economic interactions. Of course, this was accomplished through fictional characters in novels but at least she attempted to connect the dots between words and worlds.

[Pistolero]

Mary....words refer to actions...not more words.
You want words to refer to more words...like free-will.
Like morality...don't ya, Miss Land?

Words OUGHT to refer to other words.
Then your collectivism might become reality....
Then abortions will have no impact...

You want words to remain up in the clouds, dear.
You refuse to connect them to reality.

You want gender, and race to remain a social construct.
Just words referring to other words.....not to behaviors, to actions...to something all can independently perceive.

Like Dasein....you want it to mean whatever the fuck you want it to mean....because connecting it to reality will take that away from you, won't it?
You want words to remain theoretical, abstract, because then, a nit-wit, like you can believe whatever bullshyte she wants, and will not have to defend it.
Because whomever makes you doubt the crap in your subjective head, is imposing themselves upon you....mind-raping you.

[Belinda]

Mary....words refer to actions...not more words.
You want words to refer to more words...like free-will.
Like morality...don't ya, Miss Land?

Words OUGHT to refer to other words.
Then your collectivism might become reality....
Then abortions will have no impact...

You want words to remain up in the clouds, dear.
You refuse to connect them to reality.

You want gender, and race to remain a social construct.
Just words referring to other words.....not to behaviors, to actions...to something all can independently perceive.

Like Dasein....you want it to mean whatever the fuck you want it to mean....because connecting it to reality will take that away from you, won't it?
You want words to remain theoretical, abstract, because then, a nit-wit, like you can believe whatever bullshyte she wants, and will not have to defend it.
Because whomever makes you doubt the crap in your subjective head, is imposing themselves upon you....mind-raping you.

Dasein is where you are from moment to moment. Dasein is not essence of you.

Daseine chime with values ; values are endemic to human beings at all times and pertain to each and every Dasein, to different degrees.

[Pistolero]

Why does Mary refuse to use words, representing concepts, to anchor them within a shared reality?
She bitches about it all being abstract, vague, "words referring to words," "up in the clouds," using her feminine terminology...
But she refuses to bring it down to earth.
Her feminine version is based on Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's adaptation of Dasein, as circumstantial - I forget the term they used, but it amounted to the same.
Sartre's Being and Nothingness was a rip-off of Heidegger's Being and Time...Sartre being a Marxist and Heidegger having flirted with Nazism.
But Sartre believed in free-will.... That's a problem for Miss Land.

So, what does Mary consider "bringing it down to earth"?
She means placing it in a circumstance - a context - where emotions become a factor, because Mary cannot rationalize her postmodern positions.
She learned the technique from postmoderns, who trained her into the linguistically subversive methods of neo-Marxism, i.e., postmodernism - according to the Frankfurt School manual.
In her feminine mind, placing abortion, for instance, within the contexts of a "poor woman" who made a mistake and got impregnated by a man she, later, changed her mind about, is how she can usurp reason with emotion.

But, again, why does she refuse to use words to connect concepts with perceptible, independently, falsifiable, actions?
Concepts like 'will', or 'morality' or 'race/ethnicity', or 'sex/gender,' or 'beauty', or 'man/woman.'
The answer is simple and in line with postmodernism and how it treated the cocnept 'woman.' Gender.
Because if we use words, as they were originally used, to anchor concepts within perceptible experienced reality, it would deny her postmodern tactic of subjectively defining these words, and then accusing anyone who attempts to correct her definition and erroneous use, of being an authoritarian, imposing their will upon them.
She cannot allow error to prevent her from attaining her naive, idealistic goals.
If concepts remain "up in the clouds" they can mean anything...to anyone...at any time - they remain entirely and completely subjective.
Nobody is wrong, because it is all subjective.

If, for example, we anchor 'morality' upon independently verifiable actions, behaviors we can observe in man and many other species, she cannot then define the cocnept in a way that will support her collectivist objectives.
She cannot claim to be amoral, whilst being obsessed with Nazis, ignoring the atrocities perpetrated by communists, most of which were Jews, in the Holdomor, for instance....nor can she pay any attention to the ongoing ehtnic cleansing in Palestine. She can amorally imply that Nazis are evil......the only evil ever in the history of mankind...without having to explain the contradiction, because she refuses to define morality.
Defining words would deny her the feminine tactics she is employing.

She, an amoralist, who does not believe we have free-will, a choice. accuses Nazis of what, exactly?
And why only the Nazis?....why does she continuously refer to that period of time, when there are plenty of other atrocities?
Because Nazism is the nemesis of Marxism.
Hitler believed that the Jews created communism, and communism was his enemy. That's why he made them his enemies.

Why then, does she obsess over Ayn Rand, a Jewess, ironically, and her Objectivist philosophy?
Because Rand represents the other Marxist nemesis...Capitalism.
Objectivism is a pro-Capitalism manual.....and so Objecivists are her other targets....
They also have no choice....and she hates capitalism for what reason, if she's an amoralist?
Expoloitaiton? On what grounds is exploitation 'bad' if she's an amoralist?
On what ground does she despise objectivism and Nazism? if she's an amorlaist and nobody has a choice?

We see here the contradictions created when she attempts to ground her delusions in reality.

Just look at how obsessed she's become with the cocnept "Dasein."
It doesn't matter how Heidegger used it, or defined it.....it remains abstract enough for her to define it in her own subjective way.
That's the point.
Defining any cocnept by attaching it to actions, would expose her motives and the quality of her mind....
In this way she need not read nor understand what Heidegger wrote...since it's all subjective, you see?
Her understanding is as good as any other.
It's all subjective...or it OUGHT to be so.

Anchoring concepts in reality places her in "a one way" situation...that is it limits her, and necessitate understanding. In this way she can remain as obtuse and ignorant as she wants, whist peddling her Utopian Collectivism, by subverting all perspectives that resit her postmodern objectives.

She wants words to refer only to other words....and for them to remain as abstract as possible.

[Belinda]

Why does Mary refuse to use words, representing concepts, to anchor them within a shared reality?
She bitches about it all being abstract, vague, "words referring to words," "up in the clouds," using her feminine terminology...
But she refuses to bring it down to earth.
Her feminine version is based on Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's adaptation of Dasein, as circumstantial - I forget the term they used, but it amounted to the same.
Sartre's Being and Nothingness was a rip-off of Heidegger's Being and Time...Sartre being a Marxist and Heidegger having flirted with Nazism.
But Sartre believed in free-will.... That's a problem for Miss Land.

So, what does Mary consider "bringing it down to earth"?
She means placing it in a circumstance - a context - where emotions become a factor, because Mary cannot rationalize her postmodern positions.
She learned the technique from postmoderns, who trained her into the linguistically subversive methods of neo-Marxism, i.e., postmodernism - according to the Frankfurt School manual.
In her feminine mind, placing abortion, for instance, within the contexts of a "poor woman" who made a mistake and got impregnated by a man she, later, changed her mind about, is how she can usurp reason with emotion.

But, again, why does she refuse to use words to connect concepts with perceptible, independently, falsifiable, actions?
Concepts like 'will', or 'morality' or 'race/ethnicity', or 'sex/gender,' or 'beauty', or 'man/woman.'
The answer is simple and in line with postmodernism and how it treated the cocnept 'woman.' Gender.
Because if we use words, as they were originally used, to anchor concepts within perceptible experienced reality, it would deny her postmodern tactic of subjectively defining these words, and then accusing anyone who attempts to correct her definition and erroneous use, of being an authoritarian, imposing their will upon them.
She cannot allow error to prevent her from attaining her naive, idealistic goals.
If concepts remain "up in the clouds" they can mean anything...to anyone...at any time - they remain entirely and completely subjective.
Nobody is wrong, because it is all subjective.

If, for example, we anchor 'morality' upon independently verifiable actions, behaviors we can observe in man and many other species, she cannot then define the cocnept in a way that will support her collectivist objectives.
She cannot claim to be amoral, whilst being obsessed with Nazis, ignoring the atrocities perpetrated by communists, most of which were Jews, in the Holdomor, for instance....nor can she pay any attention to the ongoing ehtnic cleansing in Palestine. She can amorally imply that Nazis are evil......the only evil ever in the history of mankind...without having to explain the contradiction, because she refuses to define morality.
Defining words would deny her the feminine tactics she is employing.

She, an amoralist, who does not believe we have free-will, a choice. accuses Nazis of what, exactly?
And why only the Nazis?....why does she continuously refer to that period of time, when there are plenty of other atrocities?
Because Nazism is the nemesis of Marxism.
Hitler believed that the Jews created communism, and communism was his enemy. That's why he made them his enemies.

Why then, does she obsess over Ayn Rand, a Jewess, ironically, and her Objectivist philosophy?
Because Rand represents the other Marxist nemesis...Capitalism.
Objectivism is a pro-Capitalism manual.....and so Objecivists are her other targets....
They also have no choice....and she hates capitalism for what reason, if she's an amoralist?
Expoloitaiton? On what grounds is exploitation 'bad' if she's an amoralist?
On what ground does she despise objectivism and Nazism? if she's an amorlaist and nobody has a choice?

We see here the contradictions created when she attempts to ground her delusions in reality.

Just look at how obsessed she's become with the cocnept "Dasein."
It doesn't matter how Heidegger used it, or defined it.....it remains abstract enough for her to define it in her own subjective way.
That's the point.
Defining any cocnept by attaching it to actions, would expose her motives and the quality of her mind....
In this way she need not read nor understand what Heidegger wrote...since it's all subjective, you see?
Her understanding is as good as any other.
It's all subjective...or it OUGHT to be so.

Anchoring concepts in reality places her in "a one way" situation...that is it limits her, and necessitate understanding. In this way she can remain as obtuse and ignorant as she wants, whist peddling her Utopian Collectivism, by subverting all perspectives that resit her postmodern objectives.

She wants words to refer only to other words....and for them to remain as abstract as possible.

But sometimes Dasein is dogmatic.

[iambiguous]

Logic and Morality
Colin McGinn

It is true that we have formal logic as taught in university logic courses, while morality can scarcely claim anything comparable (though there is deontic logic).

"Deontic logic is the field of philosophical logic that is concerned with obligation, permission, and related concepts. Alternatively, a deontic logic is a formal system that attempts to capture the essential logical features of these concepts". wiki.

Let's focus here on a particular moral conflagration of note. Gun control, say. So, using deontic philosophical logic, how would you go about pinning down what all rational -- virtuous? -- men and women are obligated to believe about buying and selling guns.

As for the "essential logical features of these concepts", I'm even more intrigued with how they might be intertwined in the lives that we live.

But the logic and morality I am talking about are pre-formal—they are embedded in our natural competence at dealing with the world and are probably innately based.

Either that or some here [like Maia] are convinced that they are "somehow" in possession of an "Intrinsic Self" that ever and always obviates dasein. They just know "deep down inside" that how they think and feel about things like gun control reflects the most "natural" assessment. And since no one else is them, they can't possibly grasp this frame of mind. In fact, any number of them might claim that their own Intrinsic Self has led them to conclude just the opposite about gun control.

Logical reasoning existed before Aristotle tried to codify it, and morality pre-dates attempts at explicit refined statement. These are primitive forms of human competence, not dissimilar to language competence before grammarians came along.

Grammar and morality?

We'll need a context, of course. How about...gun control? Okay, grammarians, do your thing and note how deontic logic enables you to, what, provide us with the most rational and morally sound assessment of it?

The distinction between logic and morality is relatively recent and may not have been salient to early humans. We know quite well what is meant by the “ethics of belief”, and we are not shy about pointing out fallacies in other people’s moral reasoning. Sound reasoning is sound reasoning—and it is what we should be aiming at.

Actually, the preponderance of moral objectivists I have come into contact with insist basically that, logically, spiritually or otherwise, their own moral philosophy does in fact reflect the one and the only One True Path to enlightenment.

The distinction between logic and morality is not as sharp as we tend to think these days (I suspect it is less sharp in the ancient world than in the post-Christian word). Shoddy logical reasoning is deplored, as immoral action is. You should keep your promises and you should follow modus ponens; we can worry about fine points of logic versus morality later. If we suppose that animals possess rudimentary forms of logic and morality, are they really distinct modules in the animal mind? Logic and morality bleed into each other.

On the other hand, whatever, for all practical purposes, that means? You tell me. How? By illustrating your own text here existentially pertaining to gun control or any other instance of conflicting goods.

[popeye1945]

If morality had as its focus its proper subject, there would be no moral relativism. In a global village, morality needs to be based upon human commonality, and that commonality is our common biology. Morality is about the security and well-being of the individual and the collective individuals of all societies. It's time to let go, as far as morality is concerned, of the differences of age-old mythologies/religions and cultural differences, as they might interfere with the creation of a common global morality. Biology is the measure and the meaning of all things, so it should be the creator of a common global morality.

[Belinda]

If morality had as its focus its proper subject, there would be no moral relativism. In a global village, morality needs to be based upon human commonality, and that commonality is our common biology. Morality is about the security and well-being of the individual and the collective individuals of all societies. It's time to let go, as far as morality is concerned, of the differences of age-old mythologies/religions and cultural differences, as they might interfere with the creation of a common global morality. Biology is the measure and the meaning of all things, so it should be the creator of a common global morality.

But there was more than biological morality going on when a few Australians entered the water beside a great white shark to rescue it from being stranded.
(Guardian this morning)

[popeye1945]

If morality had as its focus its proper subject, there would be no moral relativism. In a global village, morality needs to be based upon human commonality, and that commonality is our common biology. Morality is about the security and well-being of the individual and the collective individuals of all societies. It's time to let go, as far as morality is concerned, of the differences of age-old mythologies/religions and cultural differences, as they might interfere with the creation of a common global morality. Biology is the measure and the meaning of all things, so it should be the creator of a common global morality.

But there was more than biological morality going on when a few Australians entered the water beside a great white shark to rescue it from being stranded.
(Guardian this morning)

Hi Belinda,
Anything you could consider in the human realm is biology, for biology is the measure and the meaning of all things. The saving of a white shark is just an example of the recognition of the self in all, that we of a common carbon-based biology are all in this together. Many a heroic act is a puzzle to the agent. They might say it just grabbed him, the realization that you and the other are one gives an impulse. Schopenhauer touches upon this in 'The World as Will and Representation." Compassion for a shark, what is your explanation, if not a biological realization of a commonality, suffering and its relief speaks across species.

[iambiguous]

Logic and Morality
Colin McGinn

Where does prudential reasoning fit? It is surely only logical (rational) to consider one’s own future wellbeing—so we might assign prudence to logic. But prudence is also behaving well to one’s future self, so that it falls within morality.

Is it even possible to encompass human morality more...philosophically? Prudential reasoning aimed at sustaining one's well being into the future? Okay, let's see if we can pin this down by zeroing in on the most rational and logical future pertaining to behaviors revolving around a moral conflagration of note.

Some moralists have even supposed (I think rightly) that prudence is a special case of morality—we have moral duties towards ourselves, as one sentient being among others. So prudential reasoning is both logical and moral—it has a foot in both camps.

Theoretically, say?

For example, are Donald Trump's executive orders taking us into a more or a less rational [virtuous] future? How would we go about determining this? How would we go about configuring our philosophical assumptions into actual political legislation?

Or should we say that the idea of a dualism of camps is mistaken? Isn’t the line more blurred than contemporary culture recognizes? We think there is no morality in logic textbooks and that moral issues can’t be resolved by formal logic: but that is surely too narrow a view of both fields. Logic is up to its ears in normative notions, and morality is a domain of logical reasoning.

For instance, consider the "normative notions" that have been accumulated philosophically over the centuries by these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies

The A's alone account for nearly fifty schools of philosophy.

If you are trying to resolve a complex moral issue, such as abortion or animal rights, you will find yourself invoking principles drawn from logic and from normative ethics—as we currently understand those fields. But from a ground level perspective these distinctions are blurred and irrelevant: you are just reasoning with whatever bears upon the topic.

Okay, start here:

https://www.britannica.com/procon/abort ... procedures
https://www.britannica.com/procon/vegetarianism-debate

Note the most principled/reasonable assessments.

You are applying your logical and moral competence to a real world problem with a view to doing what is right.

Uh, define competence?

When you avoid deriving an “ought” from an “is” are you doing logic or morality? When you declare that all sentient beings have rights is that intended as a moral principle or a logical one? It functions as an abstract axiom used to draw conclusions—it is irrelevant whether it crops up in a standard logic text (they don’t even include modal logic).

So much more to the point [mine] are the moral objectivists among us who refuse to make that distinction. Some go so far as to insist that morality encompasses nothing less than a metaphysical truth.

One that revolves "philosophically" around, say, capitalism? Or "scientifically" around socialism?

And what is particularly irrelevant for almost all objectivists is the fact that other objectivists insist it is their own One True Path that actually reflects the one and the only truly enlightened assessment of, well, everything, right?

We shouldn’t have too narrow a view of logic, and we shouldn’t neglect the abstract character of much moral reasoning. I am inclined to say simply that moral reasoning just is logical reasoning—logical reasoning about questions of value.

Now all we need is a context.