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whowhowho comments on A confusion about deontology and consequentialism - Less Wrong Discussion

5 [deleted] 11 February 2013 07:19PM

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Comment author: whowhowho 14 February 2013 01:08:42AM 2 points [-]

If individual moralities have enough of a common component that we can point to principles and values that are widely-shared among living people and societies, that would certainly count as a "fact" about morality, which we could call a "moral fact". And that fact is certainly "objective" from the POV of any single individual, although it's not objective at all in the naïve Western sense of "objectivity" or God's Eye View.

And it is stll not an objective moral fact in the sense of Moral Objectivism, in the sense of a first-order fact that makes some moral propositions mind independently true. It's a second order fact.

Dictionary definitions are worthless, especially in specialized domains.

I've never seen that distinction in the specialised domain in question.

Comment author: bogus 14 February 2013 02:25:41AM *  0 points [-]

And it is stll not an objective moral fact in the sense of Moral Objectivism, in the sense of a first-order fact that makes some moral propositions mind independently true.

I don't think that's a coincidence. Whether there is some kind of factual (e.g. biological) base for morality is an interesting question, but it's generally a question for psychology and science, not philosophy. People who try to argue for such a factual basis in a naïve way usually end up talking about something very different than what we actually mean by "morality" in the real world. For an unusually clear example, see Ayn Rand's moral theory, incidentally also called "Objectivism".

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