0
   

A perfect god can not exist?

 
 
Extrain
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:41 pm
@Night Ripper,
Night Ripper;155368 wrote:
What do you mean we can't measure a buildings height? Of course we can, we've got lasers that can measure it more precise then practically necessary. In principle we can measure it down to the Planck length.

I dare you to tell the judge at your next speeding ticket hearing that things like height and speed can't be measured or don't exist. I guess you won't be able to measure the time you spend in jail either.


I dare you to tell the judge his judgment that your raping toddlers is wrong is his own subjective judgment, and not really a wrong action because wrongness cannot be measured or doesn't really exist.
Night Ripper
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:43 pm
@Extrain,
Extrain;155370 wrote:
I dare you to tell the judge his judgment that your raping toddlers is wrong is his own subjective judgment, and not really a wrong action because wrongness cannot be measured.


The judge will laugh and tell me that she's not there to determine if what I did was wrong but whether or not it was illegal. Which of course, it would be.
Extrain
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:47 pm
@Night Ripper,
Night Ripper;155373 wrote:
The judge will laugh and tell me that he's not there to determine if what I did was wrong but whether or not it was illegal. Which of course, it would be.


You must have a low opinion of the moral character of judges if you think he thought raping toddlers was morally permissible but coincidentally illegal. Raping toddlers is wrong whether or not Criminal Law says so.
Amperage
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:47 pm
@Alan McDougall,
Night Ripper already espouses the principle of bivalence which states that all propositions are necessarily either true or false. Therefore it stands to reason that if I state a proposition such as:

Rape is always wrong.

and I think it's true and you think it's false, then one of us must necessarily be wrong. This follows from the LEM, non-contradiction, and bivalence together implying that the proposition must necessarily be true or false and cannot be both and cannot be neither and the value cannot change and these axioms hold for all subjects.
Night Ripper
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:49 pm
@Extrain,
Extrain;155377 wrote:
You must have a low opinion of the moral character of judges if you think he thought raping toddlers was morally permissible but coincidentally illegal.


I don't recall saying that. I said it would be irrelevant. Judges are there to enforce law not morality. If they were then cheating on your spouse would probably land you in jail.
0 Replies
 
Extrain
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:49 pm
@Amperage,
Amperage;155378 wrote:
Night Ripper already espouses the principle of bivalence which states that all propositions are necessarily either true or false. Therefore it stands to reason that if I state a proposition such as:

Rape is always wrong.

and I think it's true and you think it's false, then one of us must necessarily be wrong. This follows from the LEM, non-contradiction, and bivalence together implying that the proposition must necessarily be true or false and cannot be both and cannot be neither and the value cannot change and these axioms hold for all subjects.


It doesn't matter. He's wrong. Moral properties of right and wrong do not hold bivalently for all actions. So his application of LEM to all actions performes a categorical mistake.
0 Replies
 
Night Ripper
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:51 pm
@Amperage,
Amperage;155378 wrote:
Night Ripper already espouses the principle of bivalence which states that all propositions are necessarily either true or false. Therefore it stands to reason that if I state a proposition such as:

Rape is always wrong.

and I think it's true and you think it's false, then one of us must necessarily be wrong.


Check this out.

Quote:
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false (they are not truth-apt). A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world."[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible.[1]
Non-cognitivism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
jeeprs
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:52 pm
@Alan McDougall,
is there a moral law? Is there a basis for morality and ethics in reality, or are they simply versions of a civil contract? The Bible, the Mosaic Code, and traditional moral systems from other cultures, are based on the existence of moral law.
0 Replies
 
Wisdom Seeker
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:55 pm
@Alan McDougall,
there can be no perfect god, but we can be.
0 Replies
 
Amperage
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:55 pm
@Alan McDougall,
you still have the problem with relativism that anything you hold as right is right therefore if you think relativism is wrong you are right....but this is a contradiction, thus relativism defeats itself in this manner.
Extrain
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:58 pm
@Night Ripper,


Non-cognitivism is false for the reason of the objection listed below.

I assert exactly what I intend to assert, namely, "Raping toddlers is wrong." So the non-cognitive paraphrase is an incomplete paraphrase and violates linguistic meaning.
Quote:

4.1 The Embedding Problem

Non-cognitivism as presented to this point is incomplete. It gives us an account of the meanings of moral expressions in free standing predicative uses, and of the states of mind expressed when they are so used. But the identical expressions can be used in more complex sentences, sentences which embed such predications. Thus far we have not considered what the expressions might mean when so used. We say things such as the following:
[INDENT]It is true that lying is wrong.
Lying is not wrong.
I wonder whether lying is wrong.
I believe that lying is wrong.
Fred believes that lying is wrong.
Is lying wrong?
If lying is wrong he will be sure to do it.
If lying is wrong then so is misleading truth-telling.
[/INDENT]So, in addition to their analyses of unembedded predication, non-cognitivists owe us an account of the meanings of more complex sentences or judgments such as these. Leading contemporary non-cognitivists have all tried to provide accounts. As it turns out, the task is difficult and generates much controversy.
The task is difficult in virtue of two interrelated considerations (1). In many cases what the non-cognitivist says about the meanings of moral sentences used in simple predication cannot plausibly apply to the same sentences when embedded. For example, if a non-cognitivist says the meaning of 'Lying is wrong' is explained by the suggestion that it serves to express disfavor towards lying in the way that 'Boo lying!' might, that does not seem to be a good explanation of what the very same words are doing when they are used in many embedded contexts. For example if those words occur in the antecedent of a conditional, or when a person says, 'I wonder if lying is wrong' they may well not express such disapproval. Nor is there a convention which justifies competent listeners in an expectation that the speaker has such an attitude of disapproval towards lying. So more must be said to explain such embedded uses. And (2) whatever we say about the meanings of moral predications when embedded in various contexts, we would like it to make sense of the way these more complex expressions interact in inference and argument with more straightforward predicative uses of those expressions. The first consideration makes this harder to do. Normally we believe that the status of an argument as valid depends, at least in part, on the words not shifting in meaning as we move from premise to premise. But given that the noncognitivist account of the meaning of the expressions when unembedded does not straightforwardly extend to their embedded use, it is not obvious how this constraint will be met (Geach 1960, 223).
Consider the following example from Geach (1965, 463):
[INDENT](P1) If tormenting the cat is bad, getting your little brother to do it is bad
(P2) Tormenting the cat is bad.
Ergo, getting your little brother to torment the cat is bad.
[/INDENT]The argument is valid. But if the entire meaning of 'tormenting the cat is bad' in the second premise is well explained by saying that it is suited for use in expressing disapproval of tormenting the cat, then that meaning cannot be the same as the meaning it has in the first premise (which one might accept even if one approves of tormenting cats). This doesn't show that the expression is not being used emotively in the second premise; a descriptivist can agree to that. But it does indicate that more will need to be said to explain what is going on. For straightforwardly descriptive arguments of the same form, the explanation of why the argument is valid relies on the idea that the phrase in the antecedent has a constant meaning that it represents both unembedded and embedded. This is what Geach has called The Frege Point: "A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition" (Geach 1965, 449). As Geach saw it, we need to think of predication as constant across embedded and unembedded occurrences of predicative moral sentences so as not to commit a fallacy of equivocation in making arguments.Moral Cognitivism vs. Non-Cognitivism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
kennethamy
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 05:59 pm
@Extrain,
Extrain;155276 wrote:

Empirical testability is not a necessary condition for claim to have a truth-value. You can't test the hypothesis you were once born, but does that mean there is no fact of the matter about your being born? No.

"Torturing babies is morally wrong" is not empirically testable, but it is more likely to be true than false--just as the pythagorean theorem is not emprically testable--but it is more likely true than false.

.


Since likelihood is a function of evidence, and you claim that the sentence in question is not empirically testable, I don't see how it could be either likely or unlikely. The Pythagorean theorem is not testable, but it is not just true, it is a necessary truth.
Night Ripper
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:00 pm
@Amperage,
Amperage;155388 wrote:
you still have the problem with relativism that anything you hold as right is right therefore if you think relativism is wrong you are right....but this is a contradiction, thus relativism defeats itself in this manner.


The alternative to saying everyone is right is saying everyone is wrong.

Quote:
Moral error theory is a position characterized by its commitment to two propositions: (i) all moral claims are false and (ii) we have reason to believe that all moral claims are false. The most famous moral error theorist is J. L. Mackie, who defended the metaethical view in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Mackie has been interpreted as giving two arguments for moral error theory.
The first argument people attribute to Mackie [2], holds that moral claims imply motivation internalism (the doctrine that "It is necessary and a priori that any agent who judges that one of his available actions is morally obligatory will have some (defeasible) motivation to perform that action" [3]). Because motivation internalism is false, however, so too are all moral claims.
The other argument often attributed to Mackie [3] maintains that any moral claim (e.g. "Killing babies is wrong") entails a correspondent "reasons claim" ("one has reason not to kill babies"). Put another way, if "killing babies is wrong" is true then everybody has a reason to not kill babies. This includes the psychopath who takes great pleasure from killing babies, and is utterly miserable when he does not have their blood on his hands. But, surely, (if we assume that he will suffer no reprisals) this psychopath has every reason to kill babies, and no reason not to do so. All moral claims are thus false.



Moral skepticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amperage
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:01 pm
@Night Ripper,
Night Ripper;155391 wrote:
The alternative to saying everyone is right is saying everyone is wrong.



Moral skepticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
is this your belief?

---------- Post added 04-22-2010 at 07:02 PM ----------

Night Ripper;155391 wrote:
The alternative to saying everyone is right is saying everyone is wrong.



Moral skepticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Night Ripper;155384 wrote:
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false

Moral error theory is a position characterized by its commitment to two propositions: (i) all moral claims are false

so on the one hand you want to be a non-cognitivist which states that ethical sentences DO not express truth or falsity and on the other hand you want to claim everything as false???

These 2 pieces of information contradict each other IMO
Night Ripper
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:02 pm
@Extrain,
Extrain;155389 wrote:
Non-cognitivism is false for the reason of the objection listed below.

I assert exactly what I intend to assert, namely, "Raping toddlers is wrong." So the non-cognitive paraphrase is an incomplete paraphrase and violates linguistic meaning.


The very article you quoted goes on to list responses to that objection. Keep reading.
0 Replies
 
kennethamy
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:03 pm
@Night Ripper,
Night Ripper;155391 wrote:
The alternative to saying everyone is right is saying everyone is wrong.



Moral skepticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Isn't another alternative, some are right, and some are wrong?
0 Replies
 
Amperage
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:04 pm
@Alan McDougall,
Non-cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences do not express propositions and thus cannot be true or false

Moral error theory is a position characterized by its commitment to two propositions: (i) all moral claims are false

are these 2 not contradicting each other? It would seem to me one could not espouse both...
0 Replies
 
Night Ripper
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:04 pm
@Amperage,
Amperage;155392 wrote:
is this your belief?


No.

Amperage;155392 wrote:
These 2 pieces of information contradict each other IMO


Right, see above.
Amperage
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:05 pm
@Night Ripper,
Night Ripper;155398 wrote:
No.



Right, see above.
wouldn't one have to hold such a position to 'legitimately' counter the arguments presented against thus far??
Extrain
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Apr, 2010 06:06 pm
@kennethamy,
kennethamy;155390 wrote:
Since likelihood is a function of evidence, and you claim that the sentence in question is not empirically testable, I don't see how it could be either likely or unlikely. The Pythagorean theorem is not testable, but it is not just true, it is a necessary truth.


I agree. But remember, there are some who contend (a la Quine) that to say that all mathematical truths are necessarily true is false. So one has to appeal to likelihoods in order to justify what appear to be necessary truths.

"Happiness is better than misery" I also take to be necessary a priori.
 

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