Some conversations generate little in the way of disagreements or disputes. In large part because the gap between the words used and that which the words are said to represent are minimmal or nonexisting. If, for example, Bob says to his brother, “our sister had a miscarriage yesterday morning on the way home from church” the words either delineate objectively what is, in fact, true or they do not. And this can be confirmed in any number of ways. Sure, there might be logicians or epistemologists or linguists etc who take it apart with a fine tooth comb and argue over this or that “technical” aspect of the words. For example, was it really a church she attended if the service took place in a friend’s apartment? Was it really Bob’s sister if Bob was just informally “adopted” by the family and thought of her as his sister? If a congregation thinks of the apartment as a church and if Bob thinks of her as his sister than, for all intents and purposes, this denotes “the truth” for many. But maybe not for others.
But if Bob says, “our sister just had an abortion and that’s murder”, can this be said to reflect “the truth” because Bob believes abortion is murder? Here a conversation would generate many disagreements and disputes. Some quite heated. Can the gaps then be closed “wisely”? Can philosophers close them logically? Can scientists close them methodically? Or is this the function of God and religion and mystics? A leap of faith that does not rest on rational discourse? I don’t believe in God myself. But just because I don’t believe in him does not mean he does not exist. Anymore than Bob believing in his existence [and using that belief to condemn his sister’s abortion as murder] means he does.
But the paradox is always the same: what motivates us to actually behave as we do is not necessarilty what is true…but what we think is true. So, it would seem that if philosophy is defined as the love of [or search for] wisdom its function would be to grapple with how close words can come to encompassing that.
Anyway, in respect to all this, I think it is important to always remember that, regarding big chunks of human interaction [the most important ones, perhaps], philosophy can denote nothing at all wisely. But this will never stop many philosophers [and assorted gurus] from insisting it can. Then what? Who has the wisdom to resolve that?
In my opinion: no one.
Unless, of course, they think they have. Which is why having the belief is often so much more important than whaterever the belief actually is.
If I am interpreting you correctly, you are not saying that there is no common reality linking our subjectively assigned meaning together. If the absence of that reality were true, how would it be possible that we (you and I) could communicate? So, there must be some common reality between us… or, more on-topic, a common way of experiencing it, which enables us to assign meaning that is similar enough to make communication (including disagreements) possible. That we may disagree on which meaningful-word more precisely represents our differing experiences of that reality is an exception that proves the rule.
That said, it seems like what you are actually saying is that, where our experiences differ strongly enough, there is no way of filling the gap between them – if there is a dialogue, we will bring our own stash of meaningful-words, relative to our experience, and will not recognize the other’s experience and corresponding meaningful-words as a true representation of reality.
You are basically saying that conflict resolution is impossible.
Have you never experienced the resolution of some conflict with another?
Or have I misinterpreted you?
[ I recommend this Google: “Needs Theory, John Burton” ]
i will push your post a bit siedways to what you have ment, to illustrate what i think philosophy can easily do.
the sucessfull application of the scientific method, as thomas kuhn observed, relies on a critical division. first one has to cut a chunk of reality that is small enough so the scientific method can be practically applied to it, and also big enough for the scientifical method to yield any results.
for instance considering “the color of animals” is a too big chunk. when criticising this choice for a subject for the application of the scientific method, people might say “the task is too vague” or the “terms are undefined”. this is just marginally true. the problem lies, in fact, with the too great scope of the task proposed. it needs to be broken down into smaller bits before the scientific method can be usefully applied. this is similar to refining a point or defining a concept, but not the same thing. “all animals” is neither vague nor undefined, it is just too vast.
on the opposite, considering “the color of my white cat” is too small a chunk, and it will likely be dismissed as an useless, menial task, unlikely to yeld any benefit.
it takes genius to find the right question to ask, which in our case would be the right task. for instance maybe “the color of all indoor living female cats” might be a way to reduce human mortality ? maybe because some very specific polutants are almost impossible to detect, except they modify in very speciffic patterns said colors ?
it is this that forms the true “leap of faith” in science. from a strictly logical standpoint, the “leap of faith” has been discussed on a couple other threads. but from a pragmatic standpoint, the serious leap is required when we try to persuade ourselves, and others, that bubbling liquids in a retort somewhere are relevant to who knows what other practial issue. why should we believe that catalythic burning of fluids will yield greater efficiency for engines ? why should mollecular manipulations of organic polymeres bring about a surge in industrial efficiency and output ? etc etc
discussing philosophy requires a very similar leap. why should i believe that discussing religion with pinnacle or genetics with future man or whatever else with whomever else will yiled and results whatsoever ? and from a strictly logical viewpoint, it shouldnt and i shouldnt. but it takes genius to find the right questions, and the right discussions.
and there is something that can be done to increase the reader’s faith that in fact answering is not just wasted breath. and that would be what randall calls " the gap[s] between the words used and that which the words are said to represent are minimmal or nonexisting". observing that gap, so that it is always small enough to not be out of our reach, but big enough so there is something worthwile to derive from its closing is, i suspect, the key for success of one branch of philosophy discussion.
there are others, but most people, especially people with a scientific/engineering background will consider this one the “only” or “best” one.
I am saying that when we use words to encompass a relationship between "in my head’ and “out in the world” some of these words will denote meaning more or less objectively and some will only connote a particular point of view.
I like to express how this “works” as follows:
1] You and a friend are eating breakfast. You are having eggs and she is having cereal. Another friend approaches and asks what you’re eating. You both say cereal. Now, unless you are triple bogey short of a hole in one in the intelligence department, you would never call eggs cereal. Why? because these two things have word-sounds [“eggs” and “cereal”] that clearly denote different things [for people sharing the same language and culture]. The connotative element is minimal here.
2] after you finish eating, you exclaim, “those were the best eggs I ever had!”. Your friend says, “and that was the best cereal I ever had!” Then you get into a discussion over whether eggs taste better than cereal. Here, of course, the word that denotes meaning is “taste”. Unless one of you is afflicted with a medical condition that does not permit you totaste, it is not likely there will be any disagreement over what you both mean by “tasting”. On the other hand, you can debate until you are blue in the face and never resolve whether eggs taste better than cereal. Here
the meaning of the word “better” is strictly connotative—literally in this case a matter of personal taste, eh?
3] Later in the day you are watching a DVD and one of the characters has an abortion. You and your friend get into a heated argument about whether abortion is “moral” or “immoral”. Again, the word that clearly denotes meaning here is “abortion”. As a medical procedure, it is not likely that one of you will insist that abortion means fixing a broken lawn mower or harvesting grapes. Ah, but regarding the “rightness” or “wrongness” of abortion, you are right back to debating whether eggs taste better than cereal, right? The most gifted philosophers and scientists on the entire planet are utterly impotent in resolving it.
Thus, in my opinion, the words many construe as most important to us—freedom, justice, right, wrong, good, bad, etc.—are just vantage points expressed connotatively by different people in different sets of circumstances. An Amish wife and mother viewed by a modern day feminist may be construed as “exploited” and “oppressed” by a “pathriarchical” system. But that is not how she perceives her life. Nor do the Amish view the world of Wall Street brokers as a “better” way to live.
So, the most important function of philosophy might perhaps be this: figuring out which words we can use to denote meaning and which words we can’t.
We can therefore resolve conflicts when they revolve around questions of fact. At least we can if the facts are able to be ascertained empirically. But when the conflicts revolve instead around value judgments we can’t. Or rather we can if we admit the resolutions will never be more then a consenseus or a compromise. In the abortion example this is what Roe v. Wade is—a political negociation that lands somewhere in the middle of the legal spectrum.
Consequently, if the conflict were about what an abortion is and I said it was a medical procedure to terminate the life of a human fetus and someone else said it was an operation to remove the gall bladder, we could resolve it by looking the word up in a dictonary or by asking a doctor. But if the conflict was about whether it is moral or immoral to kill the fetus there is nothing in any dictionary that will tell us…and for every doctor who insisted an abortion is unethical you will find one that says it is not unethical. Then what?
It seems like this is a matter of categorizing things. When you get into a discussion about which tastes better, eggs or cereal, I think most people here could agree that something fallacious is happening; tastes are not the sorts of things that can be proven to be ‘better’ than each other. To try to do so is to mistake one sort of claim “X is my favorite” for another sort of claim “2 + 1 = 3”.
Before I address the point about abortion, let me create my own example. Suppose you and your friend are watching a science-fiction program, and you get into a heated discussion about the planets. One of you believes that Pluto is the farthest planet from the Sun, the other believes that Neptune is. Neither of you know for certain, neither of you have the equipment to prove your point, and neither of you has a source of info that the other would consider beyond question. You’re stuck reciting what you remember hearing, and quoting scientists to the best of your memory, and no resolution is possible. Nevertheless, Pluto and Neptune are out there, doing their thing.
With the issue of abortion, and in fact all tough moral debates, the question is, which example do they more closely resemble? Now, it could be that tough moral issues are like eggs and cereal: Trying to come to an absolute resolution is an error in the first place, because moral quandaries aren’t the sorts of things that can be resolved. But it could also be like the astronomy issue- there is an answer ‘out there’, but our skills, resources, and etc. aren’t suffecient for us to grasp it absolutely. In other words, it may just be that certain moral issues are in fact just very difficult.
Isn’t there room for a third option here? Moral statements could be neither empirically verifiable nor mere value judgements. They could be like statements about numbers, for example.
Well, then the debate becomes else- either something irresolvable, or something resolvable in a different kind of way. It's popular, these days, to point out that we have many issues that seem 'impossible to resolve'. I would make this counterpoint- many people, on both sides of an issue like abortion, [i]take themselves to have resolved it[/i]. Some of them even believe they have come to their conclusions through sound arguments and solid evidence. If you acknowledge that fact, then saying abortion is 'impossible to resolve' isn't exactly right. What we ought to say is 'it's impossible to reach global concensus'. There could be a whole host of reasons for this. Perhaps one side is being driven by something other than reason, or perhaps most people who have an opinion on the issue haven't done enough critical thinking to back their opinion. After all, some people still believe the world is flat, or so I've heard.
To me, the fact that it [i]seems right [/i] to apply scientific facts and rational arguments to the abortion issue tells me that we do have at least a way of proceeding, and that gives me reason to think issues like this are resolveable. The debate between eggs and cereal seems completely different in that respect.
I really like your example of cereal vs. Pluto, but if I may ask, is not there an underlying question behind this, and all, comparisons? The assemblage of ‘facts’ into a world view is necessary prior to even the most elementary contrasts. For instance many are now considering whether to de-planet Pluto because it does not correspond to the definition of what a planet should be. If Pluto is only another nameless rock of methane ice, no-one would be arguing about it in their living room. Only when ‘facts’ have been coalesced into definable worlds, do debates about their qualities acquire valuation, and those valuations are based on the values contained in the primordial form of the reference-world.
I'm not sure I follow exactly where you are going with this, but let me reply with something I hope to be relevant:
When we compare our beliefs to each other to determine who is right or wrong, we’re relying on three things we we take (consciously or unconsciously) to exist as universals among all points of view:
1.) The experience of having been wrong. This is the most fundamental of the three. Things happen which we did not expect, we do not always get our way, and we change our minds about issues.
2.) Once we realize we can be wrong, the inevitable conclusion is that there is something outside ourselves. Most of our ideas refer to external things, and there is some potential disjuction between those things and our ideas (based on 1).
3.) The notion that logic is something to be respected. We see that a = a, that something cannot be both itself and it’s denial at the same time in the same sense, and if our ideas lead to those results, we see that our ideas are mistaken. Essentially, there is a way to measure and reduce the amount of disjunction we discover once we realize 1 and 2.
I am not meaning to say that we consciously discover these things, they part of what it means to be human as far as I can tell.
It’s these three things (and there could be others) that make it possible for our discussions to have meaning, regardless of how we form our world-views. When you and I talk about Pluto, we are assuming that there is a single thing which some of your ideas, and some of my ideas refer to, we know this particular something that has properties we discover, rather than determine (our ideas do not define the thing in itself), that those properties relate to each other in a way bound by logic. Issues which are unresolveable, such as Pluto’s being a planet, or cereal tasting better than eggs, are ultimately unresolvable because one or more of these three conditions don’t apply.
In other words, I don’t think our ideas are completely bound within the sets of values we create for ourselves, if that’s what you’re driving at.
Bateson said adroitly, “Information is any difference that makes a difference”. And the same can be to large extent said of ‘facts’. When arguing about the factual state of something, one is presupposing a ‘world’ in which the said ‘difference’ makes a difference. That world contains ‘valuations’ embedded in it, -they are the fabric by which its assemblage coheres- but there are other ‘worlds’ in which the said ‘facts’ do not make a difference, and therefore do not exist as ‘facts’, or make a different difference, and therefore their factual state is distinct from that of other worlds.
Take for instance abortion, that heated debate. First one must understand the point at which facts make a difference. Is it abortion to kill before the umbilical is cut? Is it abortion in the 2nd trimester? Is abortion to use spermacide? Is it abortion to ‘pull out’? Is it abortion to have the twinkle in your eye, and to decide against having sex? Once the ‘facts’ have acquired the discernable difference, from two points of view, we realize that the connective tissue in the two argued worlds is laid bare. In each case there is a difference that makes a difference.
What is complex is that these worlds are made in reference to larger, trans-personal world orders, language, culture, species-based worlds that are not necessarily commensurate.
It becomes much simpler if one asks, is this a difference that makes a difference, and why? What one will stumble upon is that each world presupposes a teleos of parts, largely focused on locating the subject within a field of meaning. There are no innocent facts because each ‘fact’ implies an orientation. As much as cereal is a matter of taste, that is orientation, so is Pluto, to the degree that differences are acknowledge to be constitutive.
The occasion of :
2.) Once we realize we can be wrong, the inevitable conclusion is that there is something outside ourselves. Most of our ideas refer to external things, and there is some potential disjunction between those things and our ideas (based on 1).
may very well reveal the sense that ‘things’ lie outside of ourselves, but ‘ourselves’ are only elements of a constitutive world.
your points are all well taken.
And the problems you mentioned are solved by making philosphy not only the Love of Wisdom and the search for wisdom, but also and what is more the Love of and the search for The Wisdom of Love.
The Wisdom of Love provides Love as the wise word that loves all other words and their opposites.
Then when we love all words, 2 things happen:
Love means all words,
and,
all words mean Love.
#2 means that all the meanings of words are simply other words which also mean Love.
This then solves all the problems you mentioned as to your example on murder:
If Love of all words is the wise first rule,
then the first misrule is to hate any word or to kill Love for any word by hating that word.
Then the first murder is to kill Love for any word by hating that word.
It is that ‘spiritual and psychological’ muder that leads to physical killing with Hate.
This understanding of thr Wisdom of Love solves whatever the problems are or could be in your first para, which u solved by using the more limited Love of wisdom which auto included the wisdom of Love.
In your 2nd para, what is true to Bob is that he believes in hatred for what he is against and so must hate abortionists who do the abortion that he thinks is murder that he hates. Bob does not understand that to hate an abortion or an abortionist is the first abortion: the abortion of the life of Love. he can easily be shown why and how his hate for abortion and abortionists actually make for MORE abortions since it compounds the original hatred that led to the first abortion.
RP: “Can the gaps then be closed “wisely”?”
Yes, the Hate for words which makes the gap of Love or the hole of Love or th absence of Love between words and so disconnects and separates words from each other can be filled with Love for all words which Love then connects and unites words with themselves.
RP:“Can philosophers close them logically?”
Yes, Philosophers can logically close them wisely with the premise of the wisdom of Love for all words.
RP:“Can scientists close them methodically?”
Yes, scientists using the Science of The Love of Words can methodically close them.
RP:“Or is this the function of God and religion and mystics?”
Not only! We are to and can use the same Axiom God uses and solve the problems. Love is simply the word that re-binds and re-ligaments the intrinsic ontological interdefinability of all words, especially of all opposite words, and so makes a re-ligion of them!
RP:“A leap of faith that does not rest on rational discourse?”
As with all other words, faith, being also a word, also works by Love. So a leap of faith means first a leap of Love. And the Rationality of Love which loves all words and their opposites, is the reasonable and rational basis of all rational discourse, including a rational discourse of irrational numbers.
RP:" I don’t believe in God myself."
That is ok and normal, opposite thoughts being as natural to their opposites as words are normal to opposites. Your only problem with that belief is the same problem as that with those who believe in God: the problem of hating who or what you don’t believe in.
RP:“But just because I don’t believe in him does not mean he does not exist.”
Exactly! Therefore the only problem is hate for the opposite of what we believe!
RP:“Anymore than Bob believing in his existence [and using that belief to condemn his sister’s abortion as murder] means he does.”
Exactly! But Bob and Bob’s attitude of hatred or spirit of murder is more to be condemned than you if you hated who you did not believe in: his own God tells him to LOVE his enemies or oppposites! matthew 54:43-48. 1 Peter 5:8-9.
RP:“But the paradox is always the same: what motivates us to actually behave as we do is not necessarilty what is true…but what we think is true.”
But what we think is true is TRUE… to us! So the seeming paradox can easily be solved but only solved by THE WISDOM OF LOVE for all words and their opposites, which wd help Bob to see that his first murder is to murder his love for himself by hating himself as a murderer!
RP:“So, it would seem that if philosophy is defined as the love of [or search for] wisdom its function would be to grapple with how close words can come to encompassing that.”
Correct, but it has to be expanded to the Wisdom of Love which includes both the Love of Wisdom and the Love of Fooldom.
Then in that Love, we can see that words perfectly encompass and enclose that wisdom for, for example, there is wisdom in foolishness just as there is foolishness in wisdom; there is weakness in strength just as there is strength in weakness; where ignorance is bliss, it is foolish to be wise and wise to be a fool.
RP:“Anyway, in respect to all this, I think it is important to always remember that, regarding big chunks of human interaction [the most important ones, perhaps], philosophy can denote nothing at all wisely.”
Correct as to the limited Philosophy: The Limited Love of Wisdom! That P. loves everything and hates nothing and so denotes hatred by nothing. The true wisdom of Love loves both Everything and loves Nothing, and so denotes LOVE even by Nothing!
RP:“But this will never stop many philosophers [and assorted gurus] from insisting it can.”
It will never and can NOT ever stop since we all need the Wisdom of Love, which is what they are really lpoking for and so can NOT stop even when it looks like the impossible quest!
RP:“Then what? Who has the wisdom to resolve that?”
No one in Hate of any word.
All those in Love for all words and their opposites.
RP:“In my opinion: no one.”
Exactly! No one…in hate for any word.
RP:“Unless, of course, they think they have.”
And even if they know that they don’t have, they must keep on searching.
But those in Love of all words not only think they have but know that they have since they can also prove it!
RP:“Which is why having the belief is often so much more important than whaterever the belief actually is.”
Yes!
Very interesting and arresting tboughts!
The Happiest holidays and the best new year to you and yours!
It seems like there's an issue of relevance that you're bringing into things. We decide a context in which certain facts are relevant, and other's are not. The issue of human abortion may have a completely different context, with different relevant facts, from the perspective of a dog, or a God. Like what you were hinting at with Pluto- Pluto has to have some importance to people for us to bother talking about whether it should be a planet or not. There are plenty of icy chunks out in space we aren't having that discussion about, after all.
But I don't see this question of relevance as affecting the way facts are in themselves. At one particular moment, the fact "3+3 = 6" may be vital to saving my life. At another, it may be completely unimportant. But prioritization is grouping, and grouping involves sets. To say that relevance affects the nature of a fact would be like saying 7 is one thing when taken as an element in the set of all prime numbers, and another thing when taken as an element in the set of all odd numbers. Rather, it is the facts about 7 which account for why it can properly be considered to be part of both sets.
Similarly with abortion, while in one person's view abortion is 'a great wrong, equivalent with murder' and in another person's view 'a slightly undesirable, yet permissible behavior', both of these views are based on universal facts about abortion, [i]coupled with[/i] facts about those persons themselves (such as their awareness of the independant facts of abortion).
So I would say there is no 'world' in which "X number of abortions occur every year" is not fact. Rather, in different 'worlds' that fact may be grouped with the important, the unimportant, the known, the unknown, and so on.
You seem to be blurring the very things you make distinct.
“So I would say there is no ‘world’ in which “X number of abortions occur every year” is not fact.”
As you say, in a dog’s world that is not a fact.
The illusion of mathematical certainty has gone a long way to providing a sense that there is an ultimate referent. 2+2 = 4 is not a fact to a tick, which is only looking for variations of light and dark and the chemical evidence of mammalian breath. What you appear to be missing, or at least slide into is the idea that ‘facts’ exist without constitutive worlds. Mathematical certainty occurs due to the orientation of the subject, and there are those to which it does not exist at all, for instance you before you were taught it.
What is germane is that when ‘factual’ states come into debate, the role played by the difference of their difference, the teleos of facts in their world must be brought forth. In the case of abortion, such concepts such as ‘soul’ and ‘God’, no doubt play a part. When such ‘facts’ as ‘soul’ and ‘God’ no longer make a difference, the facts of abortion change.
Ah, I see, RP (can I say RP for short?)… but, how about this?.. All that must be done, as social creatures, when we are faced with conflicting values between individuals/groups (and would like to see a positive resolution), is to focus on the values we do have in common (with the other individual/group) (especially values that are particularly “strong”, relative to our other values), and work on having our other values (especially those clashing with the values of the other individual/group) conforming to (being consistent with) those common values, so as to alleviate the (universal) cognitive dissonance resulting from the inconsistency between our own values.
How is '2+2=4' at all different from the 'breath of a mammal'? There must be factors that seperate them, for you to say one is a fact to a tick, and one is not. These factors must be external to the tick's world, for if '2+2=4' was not in the tick's world, and also had no qualities external to the tick's world, it would be nothing at all, and I doubt my calculator could function if 2+2=4 was nothing at all. These external qualities, which allow you to distinguish the one from the other, are what I am talking about when I say 'facts'. Your usage of the word 'facts' seems to mean a combonation of 'concerns' or 'beliefs'.
Each ‘fact’ implies world. To not acknowledge that is only to presume the world in which you are in. 2+2 = 4 is a relationship between tautologically arranged concepts, a relationship upon which your calculator has been engineered. The products of your calculator do not become meaningful until they enter the world that is implied by mathematics. The urge to ground mathematics into a logic of the real is really the urge to erase evidence of the presumption of ‘world’. Russell gave up on this logical endenvour. Gödel demonstrated that it cannot be done. The assurances of mathematical certainty has by analogy comforted many minds as to the certainty of their other ‘logical’ conclusions. What has been displaced is the world in which such ‘facts’ gain meaning, and in fact existence. The assurance of mathematics strikes me as similar to the way alchemists used to heat cinnabar and cause globules of liquid Mercury to ‘sweat’ from the hard core. By trick of analogy, the associations drawn from the tautological constructions of mathematics do not point to the ideologies that produced them, but rather seem to imply some concreteness beyond their demonstration. Beyond demonstration is only a subject and his/her/its world.
The planets are physical objects obeying physical laws. Their orbits exist independent of our own opinions about them. In fact, I believe Pluto’s orbit, being ellitpical, is such that Pluto is not the farthest planet out at particular points in its trip around the Sun. Further, there are some scientists who do not even consider it a planet at all. But this is only because of how planets were defined. No definition is going to change either the physical reality of Pluto or its orbit. It is what it is. These are not value judgments revolving around what they ought to be.
I don’t agree. Even the most mundane of human moral issues involves interjecting into a set of facts a value judgment that revolves around whether these facts ought to be as they are—or some other way. With no objective or essential or universal way for a mere mortal to resolve it. For example, is it right or wrong to go nude in public? Is it right or wrong to put a bumper sticker on your car that has expletives on it? Is it right or wrong to let your lawn grow wild? How couldwe resolve any of these?
Yes, I addressed this point in response to another post. I meant only that moral issues are impossible to resolve absolutely; or in the manner Kant suggested: deontologically. We can’t deduce categorical imperatives that all rational minds would embrace because not to would be irraional. In the abortion debate most people would agree it is more reasonable to abort an 8 day old embryo than an eight month old viable fetus. But that does not establish any fact about the embryo/fetus vis a vis the debate about what it means to be a human being. How could we establish that objectively?
All knowlege is based on assumptions not backed by logical reasons. You cannot prove or provide logical evidence that your senses show you the real world. You cannot prove or provide logical evidence that a conclusion gotten using logic is a true conclusion. In a similar way, you can’t prove or provide logical evidence that something has value or not.
The only difference is that most people agree that logic works, and that what our senses tell us is correct, and there is extensive disagreement about what has value.
All of this is true. As it turns out, Neptune was further from the Sun until right around the turn of the century. What I want to show is that debates about factual, empirical things can [i]appear[/i] just as fruitless, and just as insoluable, as debates about things like abortion, if the relevent data is remote enough to the people having the discussion. From appearences alone, debates about moral issues [i]may[/i] just be extremely difficult, with very remote facts, much like my hypothetical about the planets.
I don't know that we can, but there are many matters of empirical fact that seem insoluable in the present day as well. It still may just be that human beings happen to be better at resolving empirical dilemmas than we are matters of ethics. What's in question here, is the existence of a qualitative difference between moral issues, and empirical issues, that make one resolvable about the other not. Moral issues involve value judgements, that's true. But I reject the idea that all value judgements are purely subjective- they seem to me to be subject to credibility in the same was as other assumptions.
For example, consider the belief that the outside world exists more or less as we percieve it, vs. belief that we are all brains in jars being fed sense-data. Even if you think there's some way to prove which of these is true (I don't), you have to admit most people believe one over the other as an assumption.
Imagine a moral system based on the value judgement that bacteria life was more important than human life. Assuming it was internally consistant, and it's conclusions all flowed marvelously from this value judgement, wouldn't we still see it as [i]flawed[/i] somehow? Would that perception be just plain wrong, or is there something to it? I, for one, take the presence of moral ideas as a clue that matters of values may not be as subjective as we take them to be.
The same way we establish anything else objectively: Whenever presenting an argument, we never show anything to be true, we only show it to be 'true if', right? Those few things that aren't contingent truths are tautologies. So, what is the difference between an argument that is true [i]if[/i] a certain premise is true, and an argument that is true [i]if[/i] a certain value judgement is accepted? Is it just that the premise could, theoretically, be proven itself? Is an infinite regress better than an assumption?
That is what must be done because that is all that can be done.
And it’s all that can be done because there is no way to encompass a philosophical [or scientific] agenda that reflects an objective assessment of human moral and political interaction. In fact, out in the real world it mostly revolves around power…around who has political and economic and military might to actually enforce what they insist is right.
And yet in this world, paradoxically, the philosophy of pragmatism [whatever works] is still a profoundly radical perspective because most people are convinced of the opposite: that the truth will surface eventually if we think through a conflict logically and/or put our faith in the Lord to see us through to embracing the Right Thing To Do.
The reality of power often never even comes up at all in philosophical discussions of ethics.
