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.
>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.
No? We can test for things like object permanence by having person A secretly put an object in a box without telling person B what it is, and then person B checking the box later on while person A is not there and seeing what’s inside of it and seeing if their reports match.
Like many here, I find it hard to make sense of our strongest moral convictions, especially about things like torture or slavery, without concluding that some moral facts are objective.
To whom does “our” refer? Most people throughout history do not seem to have shared these intuitions. If “people intuit things as being good/right or bad/wrong” is evidence for their moral truth/falsity, then it seems clear that the positions with the most evidence supporting them are “it is wrong to torture or enslave the ingroup and right to torture and enslave the outgroup”
Can we say “this is wrong” in any meaningful way if morality is only expressive or constructed?
Yes, in the same way that we can make meaningful statements about the quality of art: either by expressing subjective opinions or by defining terms and discussing it in terms of those.
This is a deeply unconvincing post.
It just seems to be a brute intuition—one that I don’t share.
Indeed.
The central focus on “torturing babies” being objectively wrong (and the not particularly subtle hidden basis that this is all due to the existence of God) is particularly odd as a choice in this forum, which is disproportionately Jewish, where by halakhic law people are required by God to circumcise male babies (and is also just common among Americans in general).
The view that these statements are neither true nor false has unique linguistic problems. Proponents claim that moral sentences are like commands—they’re not even in the business of expressing propositions. If I say “shut the door,” or “go Dodgers,” that isn’t either true nor false. But because of that, it makes no sense to ask “go Dodgers?” or “is it true that shut the door?” Similarly, it makes no sense to say “if shut the door then shut the door now, shut the door, therefore, shut the door now.” But it does make sense to say things like “is abortion wrong?” or “if murder is wrong, then so is abortion.” This shows that moral statements are, at least in many cases, in the business of expressing propositions—asserting things supposed to be true or false.
I’m genuinely surprised that anyone continues to present the argument from grammar. The obvious implied part of those sentences if “I would prefer it if you” before “shut the door”. “Is it true that I would prefer it if you shut the door” makes obvious sense, as does “if I would prefer it if you shut the door then I would prefer it if you shut the door now, I would prefer it if you shut the door, therefore, I would prefer it if you shut the door now”. “Is abortion wrong?” becomes “do you prefer if people not abort?”, “if murder is wrong, then so is abortion” becomes “if you would prefer that people not murder, then I would prefer it if you also prefer people not abort”, et cetera.
These objections are both obvious and well known. Neglecting to address them speaks to the seriousness of this level of engagement with the counterarguments—a pattern I see consistently from proponents of moral realism.
Morality is Objective
The arguments presented in this essay are neither novel nor convincing and rely on intuitions the author holds that I do not and that the author does not justify
edit: I did not expect this aspect of my vote to become a comment
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.