A perfect god can not exist?

That's correct. But not all actions are necessarily right/wrong or good/bad actions. The principle of bivalence holds only for actions that have a right or wrong character.

The trouble is, of course, that it is not clear that there are moral states of affairs.

My point is this.....follow this example first:


Is stating something as better or worse than something else a proposition or an ethical statement?

Because if it's a proposition I propose the proposition, "It is always the case that raping someone is worse than not raping them" <---this would therefore be necessarily true or false and therefore would have something meaningful to say about morality(rape is wrong)


The point is I think it is possible to state an ethical statement in the form of a proposition which would then fall under the principle of bivalence and therefore prove that morals are not relative.

What do you mean by "worse"?

What do you mean by "worse"?

It should be "raping someone is always morally wrong"

what do you mean by actions that have a right or wrong character?

Just to clarify my understand of the principle of bivalence, I understand it to say that all propositions must necessarily be either true or false. Basically implying propositions cannot be both true and false and that propositions cannot be neither true nor false. Furthermore It would seem that propositions cannot change their truth-value either.

sheesh. The proposition is not "Happiness in all times and cases is better than misery." The proposition might be better expressed "the intrinsic value of happiness is, in some cases, more valuble than misery." I don't think you need to be making it into a universal generalization about all times and cases.

And still, how you are citing Kant seems to be still construing ti as a Kantian Moral judgment, which I don't think it is.

that's what I'd like to say but by throwing the word "wrong" in there he's going to claim that such a statement is NOT a proposition and therefore is not required to be necessarily true or false

Some actions are right, some actions are wrong.

And I don't see this alleged problem with the principle of bivalence with respect to moral jugments. Can you please explain?

That's his problem. The statement "Raping someone is always morally wrong" is always true and is never false.

Oh, I agree. Happiness is sometimes better than misery. But that's hardly the proposition you originally claimed was a necessary truth.

take your pick....I mean worse as in "more undesirable"

I just mean that if one can classify or phrase an ethical statement in the form of a proposition, then it would necessarily fall under the law of bivalence. That being the case it would necessarily be the case that morality could NOT relative as 2 people on opposite sides(one thinking true on thinking of false) of any propositions cannot both be right.

And I agree, but in order to actually debate with someone who does not agree, one must attempt to use something which is ''legitimate'' within the other persons ''own system''

Well something like "rape is undesirable" sounds a lot like "ice cream tastes good". Some people actually like getting raped. I guess you could argue that if you like being sexually assaulted then it isn't rape but that just makes the "undesirable" in "rape is undesirable" redundant since you are defining rape as undesirable sexual assault rather than just any sexual assault. You'd be saying "undesirable sexual assaults are undesirable". Of course that's true.

No. The principle of bivalence does not hold for right/wrong properties. It only holds for the values of true/false properties of propositions.

Not really. All I said was that happiness is better than misery. I take that to be a necessarily true value jugment about the intrinsic value of happiness. It doesn't matter if it is overridible by some moral and ethical principle.

Why? According to who? Right and wrong are just as objective as true and false. Bivalence holds for ALL propositions. That's the whole point behind bivalence.

Moral progress is impossible with moral relativism as is accountability and responsibility

That's correct. Bivalence only holds for true and false propositions, not right and wrong making properties.

Propositions are not "right or wrong." Propositions are only "true or false."

Only actions (or events, etc.) are "right or wrong." To think otherwise is performing a category mistake!

So what's the problem?

If it is overridable, how can it be a necessary truth? True in all possible worlds.

"Some things are truly wrong". Proposition or not?

Could you, in principle, build a machine that detected wrongness without simply hard-coding it with all the output values you want to register for different inputs?

We can build machines that measure height. We all agree in advance that the machines measure height. So, when we use the machines on something and they tell us the height, we have settled it. If you thought the height was different, you were wrong. The same does not work for wrongness.