this is my moral crusade

hi - idiot philosophical neophyte here. aren't you making an arbitrary linguistic choice yourself? so suppose i'm prescriptivist, can't i define "abortion is wrong" as "you have been Commanded to not have abortions" and the following statements are perfectly consistent?

You’re getting better at this

you guys are my target audience

Not to undermine the entire subject/object metaphysics here but what if the universe is made of preference itself and "better" and "worse" are always prior to conceptualization and "subject" and "object" are intellectualizations that happen far downstream of these basic motions

I'm unpersuaded by grammatical arguments against noncognitivism. It's taking the surface grammar of language too literally while ignoring the real expressive and pragmatic uses of language. NC is a theory of how language is actually used in everyday contexts.

non-cognitivism is actually used in way which implies a truth of the matter too. the distribution of types of uses of moral language is ultimately an empirical question, but non-cognitivism very clearly cannot account for a very large swath of actual moral language use

Why not? I do not recall any example of moral language where there is not an obvious expressivist interpretation.

i gave 2 examples where coherent moral sentences translate to giberish in an expressivist reading. here are 6 more. look up the Frege-Geach problem, one of the few examples of a knocdown argument in philosophy (in this case against Emotivism). only Quasi-realism survives-ish

Here are my expressivist interpretations. None of these seem difficult to explain (except for the one that no one actually says). Where am I going wrong here?

>if murder is wrong, then murdering bobby is wrong translates to >if boo murder, then boo murdering bobby this is gibberish since "boo murder" has no truth value and if-then statements need truth values. so semantically these are not the same thing and emotivism is a false theory of moral language you can try moving up a level and talking about assenting to logical statements in truth-table-like groupings, but not only are you no longer an emotivist now, and are a quasi realist instead, but now you've basically reintroduced external standards (truth table) for criteria which is realism in a trench coat

Practical reasoning exists. Expressivism debunked. You are actually just playing dumb.

you just outed yourself as not being able to follow the literature so this is the last time we’re interacting. try SEP or claude before speaking ignorance with confidence

i like this video but i think im still a non cognitivist (i think i havent heard of the term until u said it) but like its hume's is/ought distinction right? moral statements cant be deduced or induced like factual statements ppl talk abt wrong/nonsense things all the time!

what i was gesturing at in the video (the frege-geach or embedding problem) shows that whatever we express w moral statements (most of the time, it’s actually an empirical matter) seems to be at least purporting to be true statements. so with the is/ought distinction you’re probably a subjectivist instead

idk if im subjectivist or non cognitivist but it seems complicated bc i think moral statements are more confused in some way. like "this statement is false" isn't true or false, it's something else weird and confusing. (but secretly im sympathetic to realism w mega caveats)

people get caught up in the moral language part too often which is imo a waste of time. we very obviously use moral language in different ways (cognitive and non-cognitive) both across people and within people across time. the interesting question is the metaphysical one: realism

common response. non-cognitivism is a theory about how we use language. but it fails to capture how we actually, empirically, use this language. so it is a false theory. this does not mean we don't use emotional appeals, but that's just rhetoric

This is very silly. Just because people treat morality as if it has truth value does not mean it actually does. Completely vacuous argument.

I appreciate the effort and also the argument you just made here supports a crypto-prescriptivist position, ie, normative speech is a rortian word game to be won with appeals to morality, since Commands are rhetorically stronger when they can be attributed to a common belief in a higher thing, and not our personal preferences. ie, your correct points about how the language no longer makes sense when you make prescriptivism (or emotivism) open and explicit also explains why people don't make statements that way. All of your examples carry more sociopolitical force when they're reframed as claims about morality. Which is, of course, why people do this *at least* as often when doing dirt as when they are acting righteously. Commands (downstream of preferences and other feelings) obviously work better this way, because they permit us to dodge attribution for the imposition. Of course that doesn't imply moral realism is false (and I hold that it isn't) but it is a weak argument. I think a stronger argument would have to back away from linguistic sense --not what 'makes sense' to our verbal processing faculties (we know to be largely cope), but rather grounded in better measurements than "but then it wouldn't parse".

if i understand your point, this of why i think it’s either non-naturalists realism or nihilism. whether non-naturalism requires quietist metaphysics or platonic metaphysics i’m still unsure about

yeah, I'm not claiming to have a philosophically airtight account at all. I suppose that puts me in the quietist* camp in practice. but what I've noticed is that often it's extremely useful to take a moral judgement (which is pre-verbal / sensed in the body / not possible to convey directly, verbally), and --for communication and adjudication purposes-- frame the position yielded by the heart in nihilist amoral practical terms. I don't really see a way around this, because conscience grounds out in sensation backed (presumably) by prior beliefs. Our beliefs have variance, and so the judgements of our bodies. For instance, to some people holding a differing opinion from people in positions of authority feels deeply wrong. To others, not-so-much. Else, Jesus' take from Calvary need not have been: forgive them for they know not what they do. But it was: bro is not taking issue with their conscience, he's prescribing forgiveness precisely because their appraisal of right action was compromised by their ignorance. *you've read easily 100x more moral philosophy than I have, I'm looking up jargon on the fly to engage fwiw --I may get things wrong, of course, arbitrarily pedantic corrections welcome.

Love the background music

Look forward to seeing the full series! That said, I feel like framing morality as decision theory is a bit of a slight of hand — IMO most ppl use “moral” to denote some ontologically binding issue, not just smart game playing

what if my emotivist translation is "really boo at boo abortion"?

I’d be curious to hear all the five of them - super interesting. One logical gap that I see is that you are saying “this statement is nonsensical” where the statement is nongramatical but still makes sense to people. I don’t have a horse in the race, just curto learn and think about what is true

You’re specifically forcing the translation to not have typical grammatical structure to help bolster your argument. Intellectually bankrupt tbh.

lazy response that misses the point. emotivist statements have 0 truth values, so any complex sentence that requires truth values (like a conditional) no longer make sense. this is well understood as a knock down argument against emotivism. look up frege geach before commenting

isn’t the fact that you cannot coherently translate statements incompatible with non-cognitivism (such as moral judgements being true or false) perfectly consistent with non-cognitivism?

Get this man in ORI, @DefenderOfBasic

bro is cooking

These arguments against non-cognitivism rely on the assumption that language or the normal way of using language makes sense. That's not a law of nature. Language may be structured based on assumptions that are wrong. Also, it's a little disingenuous to say that "I hope abortion isn't wrong" means "I hope not boo abortion" It may well mean "I hope people don't boo abortion", which is perfectly coherent.

cool video I'm not a philosopher so here's my armchair critique of your critique: "it is false that abortion is wrong" -> "it is false that boo abortion"

circular argument, non cognitivism says that socially constructed truths are real, and you’re dismissing it by saying that social truths aren’t objective statements. begging the question bro

good content, eager for part 2

As you've said before, we use moral language in inconsistent ways. This means none of these positions will "do it," because each will fail to capture some language habit we have. There's no lemma forcing realism because there are infinite varieties of these positions:

De-slopping TikTok one video at a time

the comment sections are so bad dog, so bad

analytic meta-ethics is something of a lovely success case in modern philosophy, very happy to see it getting memetically fit representations on the TL

what a nice thing to hear. philosophy gets a lot of flack but imo analytic philosophy has done an excellent job of mapping out the various answers to big questions and all their respective answers. doesn't get enough credit for that

How we speak about morality has no bearing on whether moral statements are propositional or not…. The only thing that can be true or false is if an agent holds a particular moral attitude

i think its very hard to empirically test how people actually use language because most people don't even know how they're using it. language is indeterminate

i agree that moral semantics is a waste of time given it’s ultimately a (largely untenable) empirical matter the issue is that some metaethical theories such as non-cognitive fully depend on a semantic thesis being true. to me it’s clear that moral statements’ meaning vary between emotive, realist, and subjectivist meanings inter and intra personally the real question is the metaphysical question of whether moral statements can be true, and if so, what grounds them

also just use LLMs to see why none of your arguments for moral realism neutrally compel one to accept it. your acceptance of it has arational elements. it's also disinformation that MR is the view that morality is 'real', stop spreading bad philosophy.

Every time you think that there is something that can't be explained by this, there is just hidden spectators of the act and the phrase is just interfacing with them "I hope that abortion isn't wrong" = "I hope they don't boo the abortion"

The only way to go over the Hume's guillotine is pain/pleasure signals that can't be re-interpreted as neutral information signals. But pain and pleasure is subjective. Therefore morality can only be subjective. The moment you try to extend morality beyond self you hit p-zombies

I’d make a substantive response but arguing against frege geach in 2026 is like playing ruy lopez at 2700 elo. Can’t wait for the 2 minute version of huemers companions in guilt in part 4 next week lol

wait until you hear what “true” or “false” are supposed to mean

I don't think you understand the Frege-Geach problem. The issue is not so much about the ability to embed statements - you can do that with any kind of statement, cognitiive or otherwise - but the validity of moral reasoning. Even so, Frege-Geach does not "tear apart" all NC.

First problem: It's asserted that your set of theories is comprehensive. This comprehensiveness is necessary for your argument to hold because it is a proof by elimination. It is not necessary for me to prove it is non-comprehensive—I can just question the asserted premise