>So your claim is that naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this?
In this instance, Bentham seems to be stipulating that “morally correct” means “agrees with Bentham’s intuitions”. I think this because he consistently says that things “seem” that way to him, without taking into account how they seem to other people.
I don’t think Bentham is stipulating that. I think he’s treating intuitions as providing epistemic access to the moral facts. For comparison, it’d be a bit like arguing that trees exist because you can see them, and so can most other people. This wouldn’t be the same as saying that, as a matter of stipulation, for a tree to “exist” means that “it appears to exist to you personally.”
I’ll note: someone suggested elsewhere in this thread that some of the terms and ways I frame my objections to Bentham suggest I wouldn’t be fair to him. I’ll note that here I am defending Bentham against what I take to be an inaccurate characterization.
I think he’s treating intuitions as providing epistemic access to the moral facts
I think he’s treating his intuitions that way. He does not seem to be treating intuitions in general that way, since he doesn’t address things like how throughout most people have had the intuition that treating the outgroup poorly is morally good, nor how I have the intuition that it is immoral to claim access to moral facts.
Presumably he has an answer to that; I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest, but I am sympathetic to the concern you raise, which to me appears to be the systematic and longstanding variation in normative moral intuitions.
Another, related problem is variation in metaethical positions/”seemings.” Bentham makes all sorts of remarks about how things seem to him that only make sense if you’re a moral realist, but things don’t seem that way to me. If they seem any way at all, its the exact opposite.
I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest
That’s fair. I suppose that I was attempting to translate his statements into something that I could understand rather than taking them literally, as I should have.
>So your claim is that naturalists are just stipulating a particular meaning of their own for moral terms? Can you say why you think this?
In this instance, Bentham seems to be stipulating that “morally correct” means “agrees with Bentham’s intuitions”. I think this because he consistently says that things “seem” that way to him, without taking into account how they seem to other people.
I don’t think Bentham is stipulating that. I think he’s treating intuitions as providing epistemic access to the moral facts. For comparison, it’d be a bit like arguing that trees exist because you can see them, and so can most other people. This wouldn’t be the same as saying that, as a matter of stipulation, for a tree to “exist” means that “it appears to exist to you personally.”
I’ll note: someone suggested elsewhere in this thread that some of the terms and ways I frame my objections to Bentham suggest I wouldn’t be fair to him. I’ll note that here I am defending Bentham against what I take to be an inaccurate characterization.
I think he’s treating his intuitions that way. He does not seem to be treating intuitions in general that way, since he doesn’t address things like how throughout most people have had the intuition that treating the outgroup poorly is morally good, nor how I have the intuition that it is immoral to claim access to moral facts.
Presumably he has an answer to that; I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest, but I am sympathetic to the concern you raise, which to me appears to be the systematic and longstanding variation in normative moral intuitions.
Another, related problem is variation in metaethical positions/”seemings.” Bentham makes all sorts of remarks about how things seem to him that only make sense if you’re a moral realist, but things don’t seem that way to me. If they seem any way at all, its the exact opposite.
That’s fair. I suppose that I was attempting to translate his statements into something that I could understand rather than taking them literally, as I should have.