You could make a case that it is a normative statement—certainly not everyone would consider it not to be. It would have been clearer if I’d phrased my response as a question: ‘would you consider that statement to be normative?’
My sense is that you have a pretty good idea of how philosophers use the word ‘normative’, and you’re pursuing a level of clarity about it that’s impossible to obtain. Since it (by definition) doesn’t map to anything in the physical or mathematical worlds, and arguably even if it did, it just isn’t possible to identify a class of phenomena with which you could concretely associate the word. It’s a convenience notion moral realists use to gesture at what they hope are sufficiently shared concepts. If you’re sceptical that it succeeds, maybe you just aren’t a moral realist...
Oh, I like this. Seems good to have a word for it, because it’s a set of constraints that a lot of us try to fit our morality into. We don’t want it to have logical contradictions. Seems icky. Though it does make me wonder what exactly I mean by ‘logical contradiction’.
You could make a case that it is a normative statement—certainly not everyone would consider it not to be. It would have been clearer if I’d phrased my response as a question: ‘would you consider that statement to be normative?’
My sense is that you have a pretty good idea of how philosophers use the word ‘normative’, and you’re pursuing a level of clarity about it that’s impossible to obtain. Since it (by definition) doesn’t map to anything in the physical or mathematical worlds, and arguably even if it did, it just isn’t possible to identify a class of phenomena with which you could concretely associate the word. It’s a convenience notion moral realists use to gesture at what they hope are sufficiently shared concepts. If you’re sceptical that it succeeds, maybe you just aren’t a moral realist...
Yup
Self-pimp: http://www.valence-utilitarianism.com/posts/moral-exclusivism
Oh, I like this. Seems good to have a word for it, because it’s a set of constraints that a lot of us try to fit our morality into. We don’t want it to have logical contradictions. Seems icky. Though it does make me wonder what exactly I mean by ‘logical contradiction’.