That does sound right, but moral realism could still be true—actually, the term “moral” is meaningless in our example. Moral1 realism and moral2 realism are what’s at stake. Consider two scenarios—scenario1 and scenario2. In scenario1 my preferences are moral1 and in scenario2 my preferences are moral2. In scenario1, moral1 exists in the ideal map—my preferences are an instantiation of moral1 - so moral1 realism is true. Moral2 realism may or may not be true, depending on whether some other agent has those preferences. Similarly, in scenario2, moral2 realism is true and moral1 realism may or may not be true.
Let me try to be more clear then. Your definition of moral realism is:
There exists a subset X of the ideal map such that X = morality
In our toy example, there is morality1 and morality2. Morality1 is my current preferences, morality2 is my current preferences + a preference for murder. So is moral1 realism true? What about moral2 realism?
Consider scenario1. Under this scenario, my preferences are my actual current preferences, i.e. they are morality1. Now we return to the questions. Is moral1 realism true? Well, my preferences are a subset of the ideal map and in this scenario my preferences the same as morality1, so yes, moral1 realism is true. Is moral2 realism true? My preferences are not the same as morality2, but someone else’s preferences could be, so we don’t have enough information to decide this statement.
Scenario2, where my preferences are the same as morality2, is analogous (moral2 realism is true, moral1 realism is undecidable without further information).
It sounds like you are arguing for meta-ethical relativism where whether or not a moral judgment is true or false is contingent on the preferences of the speaker making the moral judgment. Is that right?
Not really. Whether a moral judgement is true or false is contingent on the definition of moral. If I say “what you’re doing is bad!” I probably mean “it’s not moral1“ where moral1 is my preferences. If the hypothetical-murder-preferring-me says “what you’re doing is bad!” this version of me probably means “it’s not moral2” where moral2 are those preferences.
But those aren’t the only definitions I could be using and in fact it’s often ambiguous which definition a given speaker is using (even to the speaker). For example, in both cases in the above paragraph when I say “what you’re doing is bad” I could simply mean “what you’re doing goes against the traditional morality taught and/or practiced in this region” or “what you’re doing makes me have a negative emotional reaction.”
To answer the relativism question, you have to pin down the definition of moral. For example, suppose by “moral” we simply mean clippy’s utility function, i.e. moral = paperclip maximizing. Now suppose clippy say’s “melting down 2 tons of paper clips is immoral.” Is clippy right? Of course he is, that’s the definition of immoral. Now suppose I say the sentence. Is it still true? It sure is since we pinned down the meaning of moral beforehand.
If we substitute my own (much more complicated) utility function for clippy’s as the definition of moral in this example, it becomes harder to evaluate whether or not something is moral, but the correct answer still won’t depend on who’s asking the question since “moral” is a rigid designator.
Whether a moral judgement is true or false is contingent on the definition of moral.
Of course.
But it just doesn’t solve anything to recognize that ‘moral’ could be defined anyway you like. There are actual social and linguistic facts about how moral language functions. The problem of meta-ethics, essentially, is that those facts happen to be paradoxical. Saying, “my definition of moral is just my preferences” doesn’t solve the problem because that isn’t anyone else’s definition of moral and most people would not recognize it as a reasonable definition of moral. The metaethical answer consistent with that position might be “everyone (or lots of people) mean different things by moral”. That position is anti-realist, just instead of being skeptical about the metaphysics you’re skeptical of the linguistics- you don’t think there is a shared meaning for the word.
As an aside: I find that position less plausible than other versions of anti-realism (people seem to agree on the meaning of moral but disagree on which actions, persons and circumstances are part of the moral and immoral sets.).
The first part of our disagreement is because either you’re implicitly using a different definition of moral antirealism than the one in your post or I just don’t understand your definition like you intended. Whatever the case may be, lets set that aside—I’m pretty sure I know what you mean now and concede that under your definition—which is reasonable—moral antirealism is true even for the way I was using the term.
But it just doesn’t solve anything to recognize that ‘moral’ could be defined anyway you like.
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.
There are actual social and linguistic facts about how moral language functions. The problem of meta-ethics, essentially, is that those facts happen to be paradoxical. Saying, “my definition of moral is just my preferences” doesn’t solve the problem because that isn’t anyone else’s definition of moral and most people would not recognize it as a reasonable definition of moral.
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.
As an aside: I find that position less plausible than other versions of anti-realism (people seem to agree on the meaning of moral but disagree on which actions, persons and circumstances are part of the moral and immoral sets.).
As an aside, I’d say they disagree on both. They often have different definitions in mind and even when they have the same definition, it isn’t always clear whether something is “moral” or “immoral.” The latter isn’t necessarily an antirealist situation—both parties may be using the same definition and morality could exist in the ideal map (in the sense that you want), yet it may be difficult in practice to determine whether or not something is moral or not.
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)
That does sound right, but moral realism could still be true—actually, the term “moral” is meaningless in our example. Moral1 realism and moral2 realism are what’s at stake. Consider two scenarios—scenario1 and scenario2. In scenario1 my preferences are moral1 and in scenario2 my preferences are moral2. In scenario1, moral1 exists in the ideal map—my preferences are an instantiation of moral1 - so moral1 realism is true. Moral2 realism may or may not be true, depending on whether some other agent has those preferences. Similarly, in scenario2, moral2 realism is true and moral1 realism may or may not be true.
As written this isn’t clear enough for me to make sense of.
Let me try to be more clear then. Your definition of moral realism is:
In our toy example, there is morality1 and morality2. Morality1 is my current preferences, morality2 is my current preferences + a preference for murder. So is moral1 realism true? What about moral2 realism?
Consider scenario1. Under this scenario, my preferences are my actual current preferences, i.e. they are morality1. Now we return to the questions. Is moral1 realism true? Well, my preferences are a subset of the ideal map and in this scenario my preferences the same as morality1, so yes, moral1 realism is true. Is moral2 realism true? My preferences are not the same as morality2, but someone else’s preferences could be, so we don’t have enough information to decide this statement.
Scenario2, where my preferences are the same as morality2, is analogous (moral2 realism is true, moral1 realism is undecidable without further information).
Is that clearer?
It sounds like you are arguing for meta-ethical relativism where whether or not a moral judgment is true or false is contingent on the preferences of the speaker making the moral judgment. Is that right?
Not really. Whether a moral judgement is true or false is contingent on the definition of moral. If I say “what you’re doing is bad!” I probably mean “it’s not moral1“ where moral1 is my preferences. If the hypothetical-murder-preferring-me says “what you’re doing is bad!” this version of me probably means “it’s not moral2” where moral2 are those preferences.
But those aren’t the only definitions I could be using and in fact it’s often ambiguous which definition a given speaker is using (even to the speaker). For example, in both cases in the above paragraph when I say “what you’re doing is bad” I could simply mean “what you’re doing goes against the traditional morality taught and/or practiced in this region” or “what you’re doing makes me have a negative emotional reaction.”
To answer the relativism question, you have to pin down the definition of moral. For example, suppose by “moral” we simply mean clippy’s utility function, i.e. moral = paperclip maximizing. Now suppose clippy say’s “melting down 2 tons of paper clips is immoral.” Is clippy right? Of course he is, that’s the definition of immoral. Now suppose I say the sentence. Is it still true? It sure is since we pinned down the meaning of moral beforehand.
If we substitute my own (much more complicated) utility function for clippy’s as the definition of moral in this example, it becomes harder to evaluate whether or not something is moral, but the correct answer still won’t depend on who’s asking the question since “moral” is a rigid designator.
Of course.
But it just doesn’t solve anything to recognize that ‘moral’ could be defined anyway you like. There are actual social and linguistic facts about how moral language functions. The problem of meta-ethics, essentially, is that those facts happen to be paradoxical. Saying, “my definition of moral is just my preferences” doesn’t solve the problem because that isn’t anyone else’s definition of moral and most people would not recognize it as a reasonable definition of moral. The metaethical answer consistent with that position might be “everyone (or lots of people) mean different things by moral”. That position is anti-realist, just instead of being skeptical about the metaphysics you’re skeptical of the linguistics- you don’t think there is a shared meaning for the word.
As an aside: I find that position less plausible than other versions of anti-realism (people seem to agree on the meaning of moral but disagree on which actions, persons and circumstances are part of the moral and immoral sets.).
The first part of our disagreement is because either you’re implicitly using a different definition of moral antirealism than the one in your post or I just don’t understand your definition like you intended. Whatever the case may be, lets set that aside—I’m pretty sure I know what you mean now and concede that under your definition—which is reasonable—moral antirealism is true even for the way I was using the term.
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.
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.
As an aside, I’d say they disagree on both. They often have different definitions in mind and even when they have the same definition, it isn’t always clear whether something is “moral” or “immoral.” The latter isn’t necessarily an antirealist situation—both parties may be using the same definition and morality could exist in the ideal map (in the sense that you want), yet it may be difficult in practice to determine whether or not something is moral or not.
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)
You are so much better than me at saying what I think. =O