@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
amist, commenting on my description of Utilitarianism, wrote:That sounds a lot like a subjective system of ethics,
How so? As Joefromchicago pointed out, there's a difference between an ethicist saying "I value ice cream, therefore it's ethical for people to eat it", and his saying "
people value ice cream, therefore it's ethical for them to eat it." The former statement is subjective; the latter is objective; Utiliarianism falls into the latter category.
"I value ice cream" is an empirical statement about you, the truth of which is determined by whether or not you value ice cream, and could presumably be tested by asking you about your feelings towards ice cream and observing your behaviour around it. "Most people value ice cream" is likewise an empirical statement whose truth is determined by most people's feelings towards ice cream, and could be tested in similar ways.
"Ice cream is valuable" is another matter entirely. If you think this is true because of some intrinsic property of ice cream, then I don't see how you could argue for this without begging the question. If you think that "Ice cream is valuable" is true because most people value it, then you're moving away from the platonic conception of moral truth, as something that is somehow out there in the world before human beings come along, towards a more pragmatic view (i.e. Rorty, later Wittgenstein, etc.) of ethics based on actual moral practices rather than some peculiar notion of immutable moral truth: ice cream is valuable because people actually value it.
Clearly, actual moral practices might have been different. Most people might have hated ice cream, or even regarded it as not being subject to value judgements. This makes moral truth, on your view, dependant on how people actually judge in practice, rather than somehow being "out there" in the world on the platonic view. However, I don't think this makes moral statements false, or meaningless; that is only a consequence of outdated positivist views on language. There seems no reason to me why we should construe moral facts along the same lines as facts about cats on mats; after all, we are quite happy to say that mathematical statements are true (most people anyway), and we don't construe them along the same lines as talk about the world (only platonists do that). This does, however, mean that moral truths are contingent, in the sense that they are socio-historical accidents.
This implies something that is not far off relativism; though, it certainly does not imply any strong form of relativism. However, I don't that is a problem. The other options are passive scepticism, or a ridicule inflicting dogmatism. A touch of postmodern irony is a happy middle way between Scylla and Charybdis.