Posts about Moral Realism as Properly Basic

(9th May 2017, 15:35)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:Indeed. The revulsion people feel towards the Holocaust is evidence that there are moral facts.

The revulsion people feel towards the holocaust is evidence that there are moral opinions, not that there are moral facts.  This is weak, Chad.  The feelings are evidence that people have feelings.  Nothing more.  Perhaps you'd like to explain how you torture moral facts out of this?

You seem to have a penchant for ignoring intentionality. Feelings are not just feelings - they are feelings about something. Feeling don't just arise for no reason in response to nothing. The horror of tragedy, outrage at injustice, and the pangs of conscience are responses tosomething about or in the world. Sorry, but I'm going to go with the idea that the wrongness of the Holocaust is immediately obvious to anyone with a properly functioning conscience. If someone is going to say that it isn't they better have a damn good reason. Do you?

(9th May 2017, 21:56)Jörmungandr Wrote:

(9th May 2017, 19:23)Neo-Scholastic Wrote:Exactly right. I want you to come out clearly and say that the evil of the Holocaust is not a moral fact. If someone has to explain to you why it was wrong then you wouldn't understand anyway.

You're fucking hysterical. If there are moral facts, they exist only in as much as they are a reflection of a shared, evolved psychology. As such, I don't believe there are any absolute moral facts, including whether the holocaust was evil. Moral truth is relative, the appropriate level of context being that of the species. A lion cares not one whit that humans were killed during the holocaust.

I must give you credit for managing to fit 3 logical fallacies in less than a paragraph. First, you try to invalidate my replies with an ad hominen. Then you make the genetic fallacy as if the origin of conscience has any bearing on its current relevance. Finally, you issue a non-sequetor because of course the scope of moral obligations is limited to human agency in the same way that structural failure is relevant only to buildings and bridges. Limited applicability has no bearing on its reality.

(9th May 2017, 21:56)Jörmungandr Wrote:Your appeal to emotion with the "wouldn't understand [it] anyway" remark is noted and ignored. You're simply begging off on providing an explanation because you, yourself, are incapable of providing an explanation...

You misunderstood my intention. I’m saying that moral realism is a properly basic belief. It only loses its warrant if there is a valid objection or defeater. A properly functioning conscience operating in an environment amenable to its use prompts us with what appear to be real moral imperatives. It is no different than a properly functioning memory allows someone to recall past events. It’s not perfect; people forget. Or they’re too tired to think. And sometimes people disagree. But it is silly to conclude based on its limitations that there are no facts about the past. Everyone assumes their memories are true until shown otherwise. It is the same with moral imperatives.

(9th May 2017, 21:56)Jörmungandr Wrote:That doesn't even remotely follow. Any connection between something real and our mind's contents is a result of selective pressures upon the evolution of the brain. Only under your theory of the mind is the connection between reality and the contents of the mind fortuitous, literally. You call it God. It's nothing more than explaining the resemblance between mind and reality as something that "just happened"; it's magic, according to you.

Magic is when people try to use symbolic representations to produce effects or extract information from reality. That sounds more like what you are proposing. You seem to have forgotten that I consider cognition as participating to various degrees in actual reality not some parallel subjective world that may or may not correspond to external reality (your claim). Natural selection works equally well with my model so that is not a valid way to distinguish between our stances.

(9th May 2017, 21:56)Jörmungandr Wrote:So I'm expected to accept whole hog your metaphysical gobbledy gook about moral facts, but you don't need to do squat.

My only epistemic obligation I have in claiming warrant is to consider possible objections and defeaters to moral realism. It is no different than other properly basic beliefs like the belief that external objects exist or that other people have minds like my own. (Actually, according to you I don’t need to do anything, do I? And yet you stated it as a moral fact, didn’t you?) You have no defeaters.

Moreover, if there are no moral facts then moral opinions are nonsense since they have no object. It’s like debating the color of Abraham Lincoln’s cell phone. Without some external reference point moral opinions have no content and are absolutely worthless.