I’m not saying that there aren’t limits on what definitions of “moral” are reasonable, but the fact remains that the term is used in different ways by different people in different times—or at least it’s not obvious that they mean the same thing by moral. Your post goes a long way towards explaining some of those uses, but not all.
Maybe. I was aiming for dominant usage but I think dominant usage in the general public turned out to not be dominant usage here which is part of why the post wasn’t all that popular :-)
Well if you think you have found a moral paradox, it may just be because there are two inconsistent definitions of “moral” in play. This is often the case with philosophical paradoxes. But more to the point, I’m not sure whether or not I disagree with you here because I don’t know what paradoxes you are talking about.
To be clear- it’s not moral paradoxes I’m worried about. I’ve said nothing and have few opinions about normative ethics. The paradoxical nature of moral language is that it has fact-like aspects and non-fact like aspects. The challenge for the moral realist is to explain how it gets it’s non-fact like aspects. And the challenge for the moral anti-realist is to explain how it gets it’s fact like aspects. That’s what I was trying to do in the post. I don’t think there are common uses of moral language which don’t involve fact-like aspects and non-fact like aspects.
Fact-like: we refer to moral claims as being true or false, grammatically they are statements, they can figure in logical proofs, changing physical conditions can change moral judgments (you can fill in more).
Non-fact-like: categorically motivating (for undamaged brains at least), normative/directional like a command, epistemologically mysterious, in some accounts metaphysically mysterious, subject of unresolvable contention (you can fill in more)
Maybe. I was aiming for dominant usage but I think dominant usage in the general public turned out to not be dominant usage here which is part of why the post wasn’t all that popular :-)
To be clear- it’s not moral paradoxes I’m worried about. I’ve said nothing and have few opinions about normative ethics. The paradoxical nature of moral language is that it has fact-like aspects and non-fact like aspects. The challenge for the moral realist is to explain how it gets it’s non-fact like aspects. And the challenge for the moral anti-realist is to explain how it gets it’s fact like aspects. That’s what I was trying to do in the post. I don’t think there are common uses of moral language which don’t involve fact-like aspects and non-fact like aspects.
Fact-like: we refer to moral claims as being true or false, grammatically they are statements, they can figure in logical proofs, changing physical conditions can change moral judgments (you can fill in more).
Non-fact-like: categorically motivating (for undamaged brains at least), normative/directional like a command, epistemologically mysterious, in some accounts metaphysically mysterious, subject of unresolvable contention (you can fill in more)