There are no objective moral truths.

If you think that murder is "right" than will you be the first volunteer to let some blood thirsty low life murderer to take your own life?

Your proposition sounds like pure anarchy to me. Mutual consent and maturity side on caution and principle and not just emotion.

There are the consequences and "the cost" to take into consideration when deciding what is right and wrong.

These are not just social constructs they are rules for survival and civilization not something to be just taken lightly.

As people mature they (for the most part) move from the purely emotional adolescents toward highly intellectual adults.

That takes stopping and thinking about things before one blindly follows into foolhardy and reckless behavior.

RexRed wrote:

If you think that murder is "right" than will you be the first volunteer to let some blood thirsty low life murderer to take your own life?

Your proposition sounds like pure anarchy to me. Mutual consent and maturity side on caution and principle and not just emotion.

There are the consequences and "the cost" to take into consideration when deciding what is right and wrong.

These are not just social constructs they are rules for survival and civilization not something to be just taken lightly.

As people mature they (for the most part) move from the purely emotional adolescents toward highly intellectual adults.

That takes stopping and thinking about things before one blindly follows into foolhardy and reckless behavior.

Do you support the death penalty Rex? "Yes" or "no" will do.

Guilt is not the same as wrongness. Somebody with a very strict religious upbringing might feel guilty whenever they have sex, but that does not mean that sex is wrong.

agrote wrote:

Guilt is not the same as wrongness. Somebody with a very strict religious upbringing might feel guilty whenever they have sex, but that does not mean that sex is wrong.

I would interpret this as their religion leading them to misperceive the facts of morality.

No doubt books have been written around the argument that there is no such thing as morality, but I doubt that they've been written from your perspective.

And what sort of dissertation is 7,500 words? Sounds more like a senior thesis than any kind of post-graduate dissertation.

agrote wrote:

I don't know very much about Platonic forms. Please explain what you are saying.

You plan on writing a "dissertation" on a philosophic topic and you don't know what Platonic forms are? Excuse my mild astonishment here, but what exactly are they teaching you at your school?

Now, from what I can gather here (and correct me if I am mistaken), you seem to think that the two statements ["this table is brown" and "killing is wrong" do assert the same kind of fact, i.e. that there are "moral facts" that are ascertainable in the same way that the color of a desk is ascertainable. I think that's impossible, and that you're setting up a strawman argument if you think that other people make take that position. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.

If by "moral facts" you mean a statement based on a deductive argument, like "killing is wrong, then I think you're right -- there are such "moral facts." But if that's the case, then you're going to have to make a much more convincing argument than simply saying "there are no such facts," since, as I pointed out above, such an argument would also suggest that there are no deductive facts at all. And I'm not sure if you're willing to sacrifice the truth of "2 plus 2 equals 4" so that you can eliminate the truth of "killing is wrong."

agrote wrote:

Lots of people believe in moral facts, or they at least use language which implies that there are moral facts. So my argument that there are no moral facts is not a case of strawman bashing.

People believe a lot of silly things.

Why people believe those things, however, is a matter for psychologists, not philosophers.

If, then, you think that "moral facts" are perceptible in the same way that the color of a desk is perceptible, then one is entitled to ask whether you espousing something like Platonic forms.

agrote wrote:

If a behaviour is neither right nor wrong, what is it? Can't I use the word "okay"? I don't think that "it is okay to do x" is the same as "it is right to do x".

If a behavior is neither right nor wrong, then it is morally indifferent. A morally indifferent act would be just as ok to do as not to do, so saying that it is ok to do something that is morally indifferent is telling us nothing that we did not already know. You can still say it, but I don't understand why you'd bother.

Thomas wrote:

agrote wrote:

Guilt is not the same as wrongness. Somebody with a very strict religious upbringing might feel guilty whenever they have sex, but that does not mean that sex is wrong.

I would interpret this as their religion leading them to misperceive the facts of morality.

And joefromchicago thinks I'm "strawman bashing"!!

The particular book I mentioned makes a similar argument to the one I intend to make.

It's not a post-graduate dissertation. It's a third-year undergraduate dissertation - possibly similar to what would be called a 'senior thesis' in America?

I'm doing a joint-honours course with Psychology, so only half of my course has been Philosophy classes. And I just haven't selected any modules that mention Platonic forms, or anything else to do with Plato, so I've never been taught anything about him. I think I've heard of Platonic forms from a couple of introductory books, but that's all.

I didn't say anything about "killing is wrong" implying that the wrongness of killing is a fact that can be percieved through the senses. Some people do talk of conscience being a 'sense' of right and wrong, but that isn't something that I have mentioned so far.

You imply that there are different kinds of facts. What are these different kinds of facts? Do you just mean facts that we can percieve, and facts that we can't percieve?

I am not arguing that saying "killing is wrong" implies that we can percieve some fact that killing is wrong. I am arguing that it implies that there is some fact that killing is wrong (just as there is some fact that "philosophy is an academic subject") - some fact that exists whether or not we percieve in it or believe in it.

For example, a Christian might believe that "God says that it is wrong to kill, and therefore it is wrong even for an atheist to kill" or something like that. They seem to be making an assertion that "it is factually true that it is objectively wrong to kill". It looks to me like such people believe in moral facts, or hold beliefs that imply the existence of moral facts. Such people are not made of straw.

So you admit that lots of people do believe in moral facts, then. So you no longer think I am strawman bashing?

I'm not asking why people believe in moral facts. I'm just saying that they do, and that the believe is incorrect. And I am a Psychologist (sort of). AND plenty of philosophers have adressed questions of why people believe what they do, such as Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, and Dennet in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, who actually adresses the question of how morality may have evolved.

Okay. I don't think I am espousing something like Platonic forms. See above.

agrote wrote:

Thomas wrote:

agrote wrote:

Guilt is not the same as wrongness. Somebody with a very strict religious upbringing might feel guilty whenever they have sex, but that does not mean that sex is wrong.

I would interpret this as their religion leading them to misperceive the facts of morality.

And joefromchicago thinks I'm "strawman bashing"!!

On re-reading, I notice an analogy that answers your point even better: Seeing is not the same as the truth, either. People might see a near object as being larger than a remote one, but that doesn't actually mean the near object is larger.

x = There are no moral truths

That would make x wrong and you're contradicting yourself..

I propose that there is no moral reality. Moral claims such as "it is wrong to kill" are not objectively true. They just reflect the views of particular societies, or the emotions of the speaker, or they are based on incorrect moral theories.

That may be true. But I don't think that what you have just said is sufficient to conclude that "it is objectively true that it is wrong to rape babies for fun".

It could be a coincidence that all societies agree that baby-rape is wrong. You'd be better off finding some sort of explanation of what makes it wrong. It can't be wrong because everybody believes it is wrong, surely? By objectively wrong, I mean "wrong regardless of what we believe."

If it is objectively wrong to rape babies for fun, then it would still be wrong to rape babies even if all societies thought it was morally acceptable. Would you agree?