so I got my philosophy paper back...

[ghosts_on_tv42]

and the comment I saw the most was that I needed to defend my claim that moral standards can only exist in the mind.  The implication of this was that any objective standard must have a conscious entity to conceive it (I took this to be something like the Judeo-Christian God, but more on that later).

Anyway... the professor's counterexample was the

Comments

[ext_128853]

Been a while since we've chatted loftily.

I feel as though moral relativism has acquired a cynical connotation that I don't see in the worldview. I see a false dilemma that assumes any variety of morality exists. The question of moral law can be dismissed (in such a fashion) as easily as the question of God can be dismissed--not in an atheistic way, but in a non-theistic way. I don't believe morality is a very useful way of judging actions in the world, and as such I don't believe in justice (or really injustice) or other such absolute designations. Instead I believe in pragmatism, comprehension, sustainability, pleasure, pain, intuition, and empathy.

But I digress. In terms of proofs:

You can argue against the premise, as I begin to do above.

Inductively, and then by contradiction, you could theoretically compile a list of every moral precept that has been declared as some time of natural law, eternal form, or any other objective truth by a significant number of sane and honest people. You can then find an example of a significant number of sane and honest people who have believe in a precept that contradicted the former. The critique of that mode of argument is that it ignores the possibility that one culture or ethical code may actually be superior to others. But these claims have been debunked recently as associated with scientific racism and social Darwinism, and you should have no problem doing away with those.

You could argue by definition, I suppose, which might be deductive in a way. If you can take different prominent definitions of "Good," either separately or fused together, and show that no actions or thoughts can fall under that definition purely, you will be able to prove, perhaps, that there is nothing universal about morality. Besides the obvious criticism that you might have missed a definition, if you argue well, the only other hole I can see is that the moral good is perhaps in a realm that humanity cannot perceive (a heavenly location, or in the realm of "Eternal Forms"), and so we cannot know if such forms exist or not, and therefore their existence cannot be proven false. But this is a logical fallacy, and can be nullified.

A lot of these questions of morality can be approached in the same way that one would approach a proof to contradict one of the many proofs of God's existence. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica is a good place to start, and there are many, many more beyond his five.

QUESTION: If a person states a claim that he or she believes to be true, and that claim later turns out to be false, was that person honest? Is honesty itself a reasonable label to place on such a statement?

[notthegoatseguy]

QUESTION: If a person states a claim that he or she believes to be true, and that claim later turns out to be false, was that person honest? Is honesty itself a reasonable label to place on such a statement?

I should know the answer to this, because it's like question #1 in my Logic 201 course.