Do moral setences and utterances have meaning?

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This looks like a great form to have a meta-ethical debate on.

My position is "yes", they do. The meaning of "right", "wrong", "immoral", and "moral" focus on certain actions we consider beneficial and, when universalized, remain beneficial to all people. Actions which maximize welfare are "moral", those that diminish welfare are "immoral".

This, of course, is just a preliminary draft of my thesis. It avoids the nuances of real world actions and attempts to get to the core of the matter, in basic and abstracted form.

They can - the fact that a statement has a moral component is independent of whether it is true or not. For example, if I say "nazism and genocide are evil," most people would agree that was a true statement and it had meaning. If someone were to say the opposite, it would generally be regarded as untrue, and I would say it does not have meaning.

Last edited by monty on 18 Jun 2009, 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I suppose this depends on how we define meaning.(trying to get the nuances clear)

People invest a lot of themselves and their personality into their moral causes, and whenever they invoke these causes, they are invoking something of personal and experiential importance and bring up something that a lot of people can know and understand.

In terms of analytical understanding though? I tend to doubt it. I mean, these oughts would have to be conceptualized as either spiritual forces or emergent intellectual forces and neither seems compelling as the notion of divinity is typically full of all sorts of problems with it and is often seen as violating Ockham's razor, and I don't think that the idea of emergent intellectual forces makes much sense as I do not see how they would bridge the is-ought distinction nor are they foundation of our moral intuition(which is likely the true foundation of moral realism rather than a deeper epistemic rationale). So, I don't see a reason to think that moral claims really refer to any external truth, even though they have no meaning without referring to some transcendent ought.

In any case, I question your own theory of ethics.

There are a few issues that come to mind:
1) What do we define as a "person" in terms of moral significance? In order to your theory to hold, there must be an analytic criterion rather than an arbitrary criterion or even a subjective criterion.
2) Who is the "we"? After all, if we are reductionist, then there are no groups or necessary commonalities but only individuals with perhaps some linkages based upon intersubjectivities.(and perhaps not even identical conceptualization of these intersubjectivities) As such, without a universal mind, how can we determine a universal wrong? Not all people will even agree with the lines drawn by making a claim.
3) If morality is purely linked to welfare maximization, then wouldn't utterances such as “Let there be justice, though the world perish.” not really make sense? It seems to me that the phrase is a moral statement, but very anti-utilitarian, and on that basis, reducing all moral intuitions to utilitarian intuitions seems problematic. I also doubt that there is anything more significant to your theory than just a personal systemized intuition.
4) Why is morality meaningful? I mean, electrons do not have oughts, so why would people have them? What grounds your theory? Why should people *care* about morality? If morality is not something that people necessarily have any reason to care about then why should they be moral? If morality is something that people necessarily have incentive to care about, then how can their obedience be moral because then morality is no longer an end in and of itself (a value) but rather a means to an end. (number 4 is pretty universal)

I suppose I have put forward enough arguments for my anti-realism.

Forgive me if I misunderstand you, but this looks like a generic utilitarianism, no? I'm not a fan of utilitarian morality.

Neo-nazis would consider that a false statement and consider the opposite to be true. The issue then is basically whether or not moral statements can be confirmed. If one can prove that something has the property of "wrong" then perhaps there would be merit to the claim, however, there are a number of problems with the continued disagreement in ethics, and the fact that "moral updating" seems to occur over time. Not only that, but the urge to call something "immoral" does seem to emerge from intuitions rather than rational analysis and is pushed for by many individuals despite the failings of their reasoning to prove something "immoral" and even pushes them to clutch at straws so they may call something immoral with some "rational" grounding.

If you have any better way to define morality, go right ahead.

Deontological ethics/categorical imperative.

OK, so you think all acts are inherently good or evil? Could you give me an example, and also provide reason for why you think that particular act is inherently good/evil?

Yes.


Deception, murder, and theft are all evil.

And now you have to provide reason why you think so, without using utilitarianism.

That's not difficult. Kant did that and discovered a cure for insomnia at the same time.

"Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end."

Categorical Imperative, formulation 2

That's not a reason, that is a command (or suggestion) without a reason.

The reason is embedded in the command, i.e. we define a priori the conditions of a moral act (i.e., those actions which do not treat people as a means to an end but instead as an end to itself); it is as valid as defining a moral act in terms of the consequences.

Translate to:
"The meaning of "right", and "wrong", "immoral", and "moral" focus on certain actions we consider desirable and, when universalized, remain beneficial to all people [note the fact that the latter clause closely resembles the first formulation of the categorical imperative]. Actions which satisfy the given condition are "moral", those that do not are "immoral".

Either way all you're positing is a moral axiom; I don't think there's much of a difference logically in what utilitarianism does from what deontological systems do.

Really though, this question is what is meaningless without a theory of meaning. Wait...

Attributing "good" and "evil" to actions is a human-subjective concept. "Good" and "evil" are not intrinsic to actions, but are labels we place upon our analysis of the results of said actions. For instance, if theft is evil, using the cliche example: would you consider a man stealing a loaf of bread to feel his starving wife and children to be an evil action? Would the "good" action in this case be for the man to let his wife and children to starve? It's easy to say "well the man should get a job", but such blanket solutions are not always practical. If a man is driven to steal to feed his family, is it not justified to consider his situation BEFORE labeling his action as evil? This is why absolute intrinsic morality fails. Whether we like it or not, all morality associated with actions is wholly situational regardless of the statistical likelihood of the reason for the action--the reason specific to every case is ALWAYS important in discerning morality.

I prefer a Buddhist adaptation of this entire problem. There is no such thing as "good" and "evil". Instead there is "skillful" and "unskillful". Skillful actions decrease the amount of suffering in the world. Unskillful actions increase the amount of suffering in the world. Unskillful actions are not evil, they are just something to be avoided because the end goal is to decrease the amount of suffering in the world. And yes, there is a such thing as an action being more unskillful than another action. While the man stealing bread for his family may have a net unskillfulness (even though the skillfulness of decreasing starvation is present) because of his act of theft of property from another person, that action is in no way comparable to the unskillfullness of Goebbels' genocide.

Sorry, but I don't believe in just defining things into existance. I could define a moral act as killing as many people as possible. A priori, even.


That's correct.


I think utilitarianism at least holds no pretentions of being objective, while deontological systems do.


We're all lost in the big burrito we call the universe.

I've voted other.

Individualist morals and group morals will always differ. You cannot maximise welfare to an individual and a group at the same time. There is no real base meaning, any meaning will always be contextual.