Philosophy Now Forum

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:55 pm**

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:40 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:12 pm So how do you prove a "moral truth" to be an objective truth?
The same way I "prove" that 1 meter is 1 meter is objectively true; or that this color is red is objectively true.

I define it that way.

Which is objectively true when you define objectively and true as you define them for the purpose of defining them together as objectively true.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:07 pm**

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:49 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:47 pm Ah, so you have a tape measure that measures morality.
You are so daft is proves very difficult to communicate with you.

Does the average tape meaasure distance; or does it measure what has been defined as distance?

Why is the 1 meter mark at that particular spot on the tape measure?
Why isn't it at half the distance?
Why isn't it at double the distance?

It doesn't matter where they decided to put the meter mark, as long as it is in the same place on all tape measures, which it is. And space is part of the physical world, whereas morality is just a concept. One man might think sex outside of marriage is morally wrong, but for someone else who doesn't see it that way, no moral issue even exists.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:17 pm**

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:07 pm It doesn't matter where they decided to put the meter mark, as long as it is in the same place on all tape measures, which it is.

It's not reall. It's only on the same place on those tape measures which have been correctly calibrated in accordance with the definition.

That's how instrument calibration works.

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:07 pm And space is part of the physical world, whereas morality is just a concept.

Space is a concept.

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:07 pm One man might think sex outside of marriage is morally wrong, but for someone else who doesn't see it that way, no moral issue even exists.

Yeah well... One might think that a meter is as long as a measuring tape says, but other people might think it's double the length.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:33 pm**

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:17 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:07 pm It doesn't matter where they decided to put the meter mark, as long as it is in the same place on all tape measures, which it is.
It's not reall. It's only on the same place on those tape measures which have been correctly calibrated in accordance with the definition.

That's how instrument calibration works.

But agreement about how to calibrate an instrument is arrived at with reference to facts about the physical world. There are no mind independent facts relating to morality.

Space is a concept.

Yet it takes as much petrol to travel through a given amount of that concept as it would if it were real.

Yeah well... One might think that a meter is as long as a measuring tape says, but other people might think it's double the length.

But that would make no difference to the thing the tape is measuring.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:25 pm**

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 4:57 am I posted this sometime ago. No response from PH then.

Frege-Geach Problem Destroyed NonCognitivism
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30150

That's because it doesn't even address the problem. It just pretends it doesn't exist. That's not the same thing.

Somehow, non-cognitivists need to describe whatever it is they want to say the phenomenon "morality" actually is. They can argue it's a total illusion, if they want, and they should simply say so, if that's what they believe. But if they want to say that non-cognitivism "describes" morality, then the Frege-Geach problem returns: and that is, in what sort of syllogism will they do that?

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:29 pm**

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:31 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:27 am
Hello, Peter?

From your continued reticence, I can only take it that you've no answer to the Frege-Geach problem.
This is not my area, as you probably know, but I watched a video about this "Frege-Geach Problem ", and it seems to me that it only highlights a problem with language, and doesn't do anything to reveal any truth about morality, or what right and wrong are.

It's more than a problem of "language," IF we believe that morality is a real thing at all. It's a total failure of the worldview of certain ideologies, like emotivism or non-cognitivism, to be able to describe that phenomenon.

Now, if we want to argue that morality is nothing, that's one way they can go. But so long as they insist it's a real thing, even just phenomenologically, they owe us to show that their worldview is able to explain it plausibly, using some substitution in the "boo" syllogism.

If they cannot...well, that tells you how much they (don't) know about morality. It means they insist it's real, but can't at all explain how it works in their own terms.

That's a basic incoherency in their own view, regarless of anybody else's. It's a big in-house problem.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:42 pm**

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:25 pmSomehow, non-cognitivists need to describe whatever it is they want to say the phenomenon "morality" actually is.

Other than people's emotional response to events, what phenomena relate to morality?

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:42 pm**

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:29 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:31 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:27 am
Hello, Peter?

From your continued reticence, I can only take it that you've no answer to the Frege-Geach problem.
This is not my area, as you probably know, but I watched a video about this "Frege-Geach Problem ", and it seems to me that it only highlights a problem with language, and doesn't do anything to reveal any truth about morality, or what right and wrong are.
It's more than a problem of "language," IF we believe that morality is a real thing at all. It's a total failure of the worldview of certain ideologies, like emotivism or non-cognitivism, to be able to describe that phenomenon.

Now, if we want to argue that morality is nothing, that's one way they can go. But so long as they insist it's a real thing, even just phenomenologically, they owe us to show that their worldview is able to explain it plausibly, using some substitution in the "boo" syllogism.

If they cannot...well, that tells you how much they (don't) know about morality. It means they insist it's real, but can't at all explain how it works in their own terms.

That's a basic incoherency in their own view, regarless of anybody else's. It's a big in-house problem.

Well I can’t really argue about it, because I don’t know enough. I just think this Frege-Geach thing is a red herring, or some sort of fishy thing.

Maybe I'm not doing morality properly, but I don't tend to think in syllogisms. Anyway, I don't find this Frege-Geach nonsense the slightest problem for my views about morality, so I'll leave you to iron it out with those who take it seriously enough to let you waste their time on it.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 5:01 pm**

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:06 pm
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:57 am
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:31 am
This is not my area, as you probably know, but I watched a video about this "Frege-Geach Problem ", and it seems to me that it only highlights a problem with language, and doesn't do anything to reveal any truth about morality, or what right and wrong are.
It is an extremely technical problem, but it only applicable if you believe that the semantic content of the phrase "it was wrong of you to steal that money" is identical to the semantic content of "you stole that money" accompanied by a frown*. They have to be fully interchangeable because the second is the actual meaning of the first. That interchangeability is the Frege part of FG. The sematic indentity between the moral statement that expresses a cognisable proposition and an underlying "true meaning" of itself isn't cognisable is required for the FG to have anything to do Fregean substitutions to.

Pete has never expressed a non cognitivist argument once that I have read. Me and IWP at least have been curous once or twice as to what his active theory would be, but his position appears to be that he doesn't need an active theory. He's been sat there for years challenging people to show how a collection of factual premises could imply a moral conclusion (which is another way of stating the is-ought problem) and nobody has passed that test, I belive he takes the view that he doesn't need anything more than this for his streamlined purposes.

* That's from Ayer, which is one of the more prominent branches of the ol' non-cog tree. In his version of NC the cognisable statement (the truth apt part) is a mirage and underneath we are just expressing emotions which are not the product of nor the inputs for truth apt statements. Alternative non cognitivist theories exist, but for this purpose they all do that same sort of switcheroo with the meanings. Which is the absolutely only reason Frege-Geach is a problem for any of them.
I don't see how any of this philosophical gymnastics establishes anything about morality and moral values. The terms right or wrong only have meaning within a specific context, or set of conditions. So the statement, killing is wrong, on its own has no truth value. A certain type of killing is legally wrong, because it contravenes a particular criminal law. If that law were abolished, then that form of killing would no longer be wrong in a legal context. So when someone says, such and such a killing is wrong, we can reach for a law book and confirm it, but we can only confirm that it is wrong in relation to a specific set of rules. We can't do that with moral right and wrong, because there is no rule book to measure them against. Anyone could write such a book, of course, but it wouldn't have any authority behind it, like crininal law does. So when anyone says that something is morally wrong, it is only wrong according to that person's own moral rule book, but it might not be wrong according to yours or mine.

To put it bluntly, to understand this topic one needs to do a deeper dive into early 20th Century philosophy, the questions they were posing, and the objectives they were chasing than is likely to work on this site. But VA already quoted sopmebody doing a useful potted history in his old thread:

Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 5:03 am A Critique of NonCognitivism re the drowning of noncognitivism:

The noncognitivist rejects realism and claims that moral judgements express not beliefs but rather non-cognitive states.

Part of the attraction of noncognitivism is that it seems to respect the insights of Moore's work without resorting to non-naturalism, which is thought to be ontologically problematic.

However, something was looming on the horizon that would take the wind out of the non-cognitivist's sails and would change the metaethical landscape,
a problem that some philosophers believe has left non-cognitivism dead in the water: the Frege-Geach problem.
-Alan Fisher

What he references here is G.E Moore's rather unhelpfully titled naturalistic fallacy which was the big problem of the day and challenges people like VA to explain how moral properties of goodness and whatnot reduce to natural properties of objects. It's the same test which VA attempts to pass by finding 'oughtnesses' in brain cells and DNA, and needless to say, he utterly fails.

Non cognitivism tries to do away with that in the logical positivist manner. Under LP, things need to have truth values and truth conditions in order to mean anything at all. A mean spirited side swipe at Immanuel Can would note that he suddenly becomes a positivist when he tells us that if there is no ultimate truth to morality then there must be nothing to be said about it at all (the more extreme logical positivists are famous for saying that all metaphysics is meaningless on the same basis). But I digress, as is my magnificent way. The point to take away from this paragraph is that according to logical positivism moral language is nothing but squeaks and grunts unless there are truth values, and moral non-cognitivism was at least initally created to make it so and thus not have to worry about naturalistic fallacies interfering with the reduction of moral properties to natural ones by not reducing thus.

If you don't hold that moral language is empty squeaking and grunting (boo / hurrah being the normal term for that) then you aren't a non cognitivist. Ignore the stuff about truth values, that only matters if you are asserting that truth values are required to allow popositional discourse and that is only the case if you are a logical positivist, and you are not that, and neither is Pete.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 6:37 pm**

FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 5:01 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 1:06 pm
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 9:57 am

It is an extremely technical problem, but it only applicable if you believe that the semantic content of the phrase "it was wrong of you to steal that money" is identical to the semantic content of "you stole that money" accompanied by a frown*. They have to be fully interchangeable because the second is the actual meaning of the first. That interchangeability is the Frege part of FG. The sematic indentity between the moral statement that expresses a cognisable proposition and an underlying "true meaning" of itself isn't cognisable is required for the FG to have anything to do Fregean substitutions to.

Pete has never expressed a non cognitivist argument once that I have read. Me and IWP at least have been curous once or twice as to what his active theory would be, but his position appears to be that he doesn't need an active theory. He's been sat there for years challenging people to show how a collection of factual premises could imply a moral conclusion (which is another way of stating the is-ought problem) and nobody has passed that test, I belive he takes the view that he doesn't need anything more than this for his streamlined purposes.

* That's from Ayer, which is one of the more prominent branches of the ol' non-cog tree. In his version of NC the cognisable statement (the truth apt part) is a mirage and underneath we are just expressing emotions which are not the product of nor the inputs for truth apt statements. Alternative non cognitivist theories exist, but for this purpose they all do that same sort of switcheroo with the meanings. Which is the absolutely only reason Frege-Geach is a problem for any of them.
I don't see how any of this philosophical gymnastics establishes anything about morality and moral values. The terms right or wrong only have meaning within a specific context, or set of conditions. So the statement, killing is wrong, on its own has no truth value. A certain type of killing is legally wrong, because it contravenes a particular criminal law. If that law were abolished, then that form of killing would no longer be wrong in a legal context. So when someone says, such and such a killing is wrong, we can reach for a law book and confirm it, but we can only confirm that it is wrong in relation to a specific set of rules. We can't do that with moral right and wrong, because there is no rule book to measure them against. Anyone could write such a book, of course, but it wouldn't have any authority behind it, like crininal law does. So when anyone says that something is morally wrong, it is only wrong according to that person's own moral rule book, but it might not be wrong according to yours or mine.
To put it bluntly, to understand this topic one needs to do a deeper dive into early 20th Century philosophy, the questions they were posing, and the objectives they were chasing than is likely to work on this site. But VA already quoted sopmebody doing a useful potted history in his old thread:
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 5:03 am A Critique of NonCognitivism re the drowning of noncognitivism:

The noncognitivist rejects realism and claims that moral judgements express not beliefs but rather non-cognitive states.

Part of the attraction of noncognitivism is that it seems to respect the insights of Moore's work without resorting to non-naturalism, which is thought to be ontologically problematic.

However, something was looming on the horizon that would take the wind out of the non-cognitivist's sails and would change the metaethical landscape,
a problem that some philosophers believe has left non-cognitivism dead in the water: the Frege-Geach problem.
-Alan Fisher

What he references here is G.E Moore's rather unhelpfully titled naturalistic fallacy which was the big problem of the day and challenges people like VA to explain how moral properties of goodness and whatnot reduce to natural properties of objects. It's the same test which VA attempts to pass by finding 'oughtnesses' in brain cells and DNA, and needless to say, he utterly fails.

Non cognitivism tries to do away with that in the logical positivist manner. Under LP, things need to have truth values and truth conditions in order to mean anything at all. A mean spirited side swipe at Immanuel Can would note that he suddenly becomes a positivist when he tells us that if there is no ultimate truth to morality then there must be nothing to be said about it at all (the more extreme logical positivists are famous for saying that all metaphysics is meaningless on the same basis). But I digress, as is my magnificent way. The point to take away from this paragraph is that according to logical positivism moral language is nothing but squeaks and grunts unless there are truth values, and moral non-cognitivism was at least initally created to make it so and thus not have to worry about naturalistic fallacies interfering with the reduction of moral properties to natural ones by not reducing thus.

If you don't hold that moral language is empty squeaking and grunting (boo / hurrah being the normal term for that) then you aren't a non cognitivist. Ignore the stuff about truth values, that only matters if you are asserting that truth values are required to allow propositional discourse and that is only the case if you are a logical positivist, and you are not that, and neither is Pete.

Once again - what Flash says. And nicely tied in with the LPs. Thanks.

Perhaps it boils down to: if moral assertions have no truth-value, then what can they possibly mean? Actually looking at the ways we use them - their various functions in context - isn't acceptably rigorous.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 7:22 pm**

Will Bouwman wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:42 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:25 pmSomehow, non-cognitivists need to describe whatever it is they want to say the phenomenon "morality" actually is.
Other than people's emotional response to events, what phenomena relate to morality?

Well, here's what we know: human beings seem to practice a thing they call "morality." That makes it a phenomenon, meaning no more than "a thing that happens."

So moral deliberation "happens." What we don't know is if that "happening" is legit or not. It could be like the phenomenon of children imagining human faces in the curtains in their windows at night...a thing they do, but not related to any objective realities at all...an assemblage of imaginations. So it could be nothing.

But we don't think it's nothing. Still, that doesn't mean it isn't nothing. And if it's not nothing, then what is this "phenomenon"? Every worldview needs to be able to give some explanation for what it is -- if only to say, "It's a delusion." But if an account is going to say that morality is a something, then it owes us to be able to say what that worldview account holds it to be.

Hence, the Frege-Geach syllogism. Any worldview that acknowledges the phenomenon of morality to be more than an illusion should be able also to say how it functions to approve or prohibit at least one behavior or action. Lacking that, it has to be nothing more than an odd sort of common delusion: but it doesn't "moralize" anything, or add any determinative information to a situation.

Now, if you want to say that morality is no more than an "emotional response," then the corollary is going to be that it's a trivial phenomenon that is not actually capable of approving or prohibiting anything. Rather, you're back to the "boo" version of the Frege-Geach syllogism. And if that's what you think is the case, then look at that syllogism again, and see if it makes any sense to you. If it doesn't, then maybe it's not doing a good job of saying something about what morality is...even as merely a phenomenon.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 7:24 pm**

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:42 pm Maybe I'm not doing morality properly, but I don't tend to think in syllogisms.

That's okay if you don't, of course.

But if the question is, "Is there any logic behind account X of morality," then the Frege-Geach is a tool to expose that logic for our consideration. That's all. If there's none, no logic, and morality is just an illusion, then we have no need of the Frege-Geach -- or of morality itself. It doesn't refer to anything real.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 8:00 pm**

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 7:24 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 3:42 pm Maybe I'm not doing morality properly, but I don't tend to think in syllogisms.
That's okay if you don't, of course.

But if the question is, "Is there any logic behind account X of morality," then the Frege-Geach is a tool to expose that logic for our consideration. That's all. If there's none, no logic, and morality is just an illusion, then we have no need of the Frege-Geach -- or of morality itself. It doesn't refer to anything real.

Morality isn't about logic, just like love isn't about logic. You surely can't deny that love can be an incredibly powerful motivator, and I find that so can morality, even though neither depend on logic and rationality.

I know there is such a thing as subjective morality, because that's the kind I practice, and if objective morality also exists, I can't imagine where it could possibly eminate from.

While I have your attention, IC, can I just remind you of my request from an earlier post, just in case you missed it. It's just that I am concerned about what would happen if I ever found myself in the position of having objective morality of the kind you advocate imposed on me, and it were to conflict with my subjective morality:

Whatever else you quote, selectively quote, respond to or don't respond to, will you respond to this question:

Let’s imagine you got your way, and society went back to being run on religious morality; what would the implications be for people like homosexuals and pregnant women who don’t want to have children?

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 8:29 pm**

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:33 pm But agreement about how to calibrate an instrument is arrived at with reference to facts about the physical world.

Really? Which particular facts about the physical world determined that a meter is that particular length and not any other length?

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:33 pm There are no mind independent facts relating to morality.

I have no idea what a "mind-independent fact" is or would be like. Facts matter only to minds.

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:33 pm Yet it takes as much petrol to travel through a given amount of that concept as it would if it were real.

Travel needs not require petrol.

Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:33 pm But that would make no difference to the thing the tape is measuring.

But it would certainly make a difference to the truth-value of the result.

It would no longer be true that I am 1.8 meters tall if you used a measuring tape calibrated according to a different definition of a meter.

Posted: **Mon Jul 03, 2023 8:54 pm**

Skepdick wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 8:29 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 2:33 pm But agreement about how to calibrate an instrument is arrived at with reference to facts about the physical world.
Really? Which particular facts about the physical world determined that a meter is that particular length and not any other length?

A meter isn't a measuring instrument -unless it's a gas meter, or something like that, but that isn't the sort of meter you are referring to- so it can't be calibrated; thus your question is senseless. No wonder they wouldn't let you be a real policeman.

Slapstick wrote:
Harbal wrote: There are no mind independent facts relating to morality.
I have no idea what a "mind-independent fact" is or would be like. Facts matter only to minds.

Do you know anybody with a mind who could explain it to you?

Septic wrote:
Harbal wrote: Yet it takes as much petrol to travel through a given amount of that concept as it would if it were real.
Travel needs not require petrol.

But it usually does when travelling across very large concepts.

Slipperydick wrote:
Harbal wrote:But that would make no difference to the thing the tape is measuring.
But it would certainly make a difference to the truth-value of the result.

It would no longer be true that I am 1.8 meters tall if you used a measuring tape calibrated according to a different definition of a meter.

Does it mean a lot to you to be 1.8 meters tall?

Philosophy Now Forum

Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Re: Is morality objective or subjective?