[BM] I don't agree with you when you say moral values are not beliefs. When they state what you should do, that's just another way of saying they state how you believe you should act. It's a matter of semantics, and at any rate I do agree that it's probably not enormously relevant. Incidentally, are you claiming that beliefs express fact? That's patently false. The difference between a belief and a fact is that, whereas a person may hold both to be true, the former need not be objectively true. Person A believes there is a god. Person B believes there is no god. How can both their beliefs equal objective fact at the same time?

(BreadM) The moral force behind not murdering your extremely irritating (but presumably unthreatening) companion is that you yourself would not like to be kebabbed. That is an absolute but the example you give is easy to evaluate. Not everything is quite so straightforward.

BM] No I wouldn't say that at all. What I (think I am) saying is that there is not really, in my view, a moral imperative to obey a law simply because it is a law. I wouldn't kill someone by who was annoying for kebabs, even if I would never be found out, purely because of I suppose, the "moral reason" that you shouldn't kill people. As it so happens, there is no "practical" reason not to kill the annoying person [assuming that you aren't worried about being lonely or whatever], as the fact that there is to be no come back on it at all has removed the practical reason to not kill someone - because it is against the law and you may end up in the nick. What I think is that the moral obligations that a person feels rest pretty much the same irrespective of what laws exist or are being prepared or are being updated.
If a new law is brought in saying "You can't smoke in pubs" for example, I would not smoke in pubs because I was being asked not to by the Landlord, not because it was against the law. If I was in a pub where the landlord and all the customers were smoking, then I would smoke too. This actually happened in California a year or so ago - having slowly got used to not smoking in bars, I was in Lone Pine (nr Death Valley) and was about to light up at the bar. I stopped myself and said "Forgot I was ion California, sorry" and the barmaid laughed, pulled out an ashtray and said "This is Lone Pine, Honey".

[Darren] I don't think Bm was suggesting that beliefs were facts, more that they are ideas about what is. Ideas about what ought to be are a whole other class. I think it's overoptimistic to hope that any system of law will be an encoding of some sort of consistent moral philosophy. This is not least because there are usually contradictory premises even where the law is set out from first principles, leaving Supreme Courts to scratch their heads and deliver hung verdicts. The law represents just an accretive set of some morals some people had at some points in history (which is not to say it's arbitrary, just tremendously compromised by the practical realities of how it is made). My naive working assumption is usually that whoever made the law did so for the general benefit, so it's better to have obedience as the default position. There are also laws (such as speed limits) where an arbitrary line was drawn which could as easily have been drawn somewhere else (there's nothing intrinsically safer about 70mph over 71mph), but the benefit for all in drawing a line is that it gives a common framework, arbitrary though it may be, that enables drivers to make consistent calculations about risk and behaviour - so the law is worth obeying on a "what if everyone broke it?" sort of basis, I think. [Bm] I'm with you: no objective force for morals. One can easily chip away any moral principle (if you're willing to take an unpopular position) by questioning the source of its authority. You can chip away at facts in this way too, usually by resorting to that undergraduate nuclear option, the epistemological question, but it does strike me as harder.

(Projoy) It's an awful long time since I was an undergraduate, so what is The epistemological question? And, presuming you answer, how do you know that?

The epistomological question is "Ah, but how can you know anything?" and one usually sees it used when its invoker has lost the argument. :)

[Projoy] I doubt anybody really has a consistent moral philosophy. I certainly don't. I'm not entirely sure your view of laws is any different from mine. We just worded it differently. At any rate, I also agree there is no objective force for morals. Oh, and the loser in invoking The epistemological question is probably the highbrow equivalent of Godwin's Law.

I used to think that morality was no more than personal preference, delusionally experienced (as our perceptions usually are) as external to oneself. What else could moral statements be, since they are not demonstrable matters of fact? These days I'm not so sure, mainly due to personal experience that I don't think I can describe. A third possibility is that they are indemonstrable matters of fact, which is C.S. Lewis' position in "The Abolition of Man", which I mentioned here recently. They can be learned only by certain experiences, but the experience cannot be communicated. They cannot even be demonstrated to oneself, only lived by or not.

[Darren] Projoy answered it for me really, but yes, I meant that beliefs are about propositions, which may be true or false. A proposition is the thing that, if it is true, is a fact. And I do think that moral views are not beliefs, because they are not about propositions. It may be linguistically acceptable to say "X is wrong" but I don't think that that expresses a real proposition, because it's not something that can really be true or false. It's a commonplace now that ought cannot be reduced to is, because there is something about a prescription that is not simply a factual statement - it is, in a sense, an order. Quite what that non-factual element is, though, is a matter of debate.
[Rosie] But what has what I would like got to do with it? On the contrary, one might say that my own desire to remain unkebabed is all the more reason to kebabify the other chap, for fear of his doing it to me first (since he finds me just as irritating as I do him, and no wonder). Of course, I don't know if you're supported St D's position as originally expressed that we are not morally obliged to do anything, or aiming to refute it.
[St D] So then in fact you do think we have moral obligations? I thought you meant that we don't at all - presumably you meant only with regard to obeying the law? In which case I apologise for misunderstanding you.
I almost simulposted with Raak, and it's funny because I think I'm increasingly drawn to the view he says he now doesn't share, which is odd because normally you'd think we'd be the other way around!

[Projoy] My rule of thumb is that when someone questions the possibility of knowing the truth of anything, there is some specific truth they are trying very hard to ignore.

[Bm] What view are you moving away from, if I may ask?

[BM] I understand your argument now. A belief is a proposition which must be objectively true or false, whereas a moral value is based on something subjective... I do see where you're coming from, but I'm still not entirely comfortable with it. It seems almost a logical positivist approach to belief - that something can only be a belief if its accuracy can be objectively determined. So what of the question of whether there is a god? Is there a way of determining if there is a god or not? If not, then belief in a god can't be a belief. If you disagree with this, why is it less acceptable for "X is wrong" to be a proposition than "there is a god"? If you agree with it, then is religion in general a set moral values rather than a set of beliefs?

I meant "a set of moral values" rather than "a set moral values" of course.

Ooh, it's getting gritty now...
[Raak] I didn't really have a view to move away from, to be honest. This is partly because I always found ethics by far the dullest area of philosophy and never formally did it. I suppose the view I'm moving away from is the view that there is any sense in which "X is right/wrong" is objectively true or even objectively anything. It may be possible for it to be objectively something, but I'm not sure what, and if it's not truth then I'm not really interested.
[Darren] Oh no, I'm no logical positivist, a position I think is pretty silly (for the uninitiated, this is the view that something can be true only if it can be shown to be true). I don't say that we can't know the truth value of ethical propositions, therefore they can't be true. Rather, I say that they are not propositions at all. They are not stating facts (or falsehoods) of any kind. Thus they differ from the proposition you give of "There is a God," which I certainly think (a) cannot be shown to be either true or false, but (b) is either true or false. That's an unverifiable proposition, but "X is wrong" isn't really a proposition at all, even though it looks like one. Part of the reason I think this is that I cannot imagine how a world in which "X is wrong" is true differs from a world in which "X is wrong" is false other than that one difference. But I think that if a proposition is true it must express something about actual things actually in the world - that is, facts are, as it were, parasitic upon things. So for "There is a God" to be true there would have to be an actual God, whilst for it to be false there would have to be none. But I don't know what kind of "thing" would have to be different for "X is false" to be a fact or a falsehood. Thus it's not merely that we don't know whether it's true or not, I don't think it means anything at all to say that it is true - that is, it's not the sort of thing that can be true. If you follow me.

[Bm] (I assume that your last "X is false" was a misprint for "X is wrong"?) According to the view I am suggesting without necessarily being committed to, what would be different for "X is wrong" to be a fact or a falsehood would be that those with moral insight would agree that X was or was not wrong. That doesn't advance things much, but moves the question to "How does one acquire moral insight?" And also "How can people claiming different moral insights reach agreement on moral facts?"

I just want to correct "those with moral insight would agree" to "those with moral insight would see".

[Raak] Yes, the typesetters did me wrong. I think you're going to have to elaborate somewhat on your suggestion, though. If the sole difference between "X is wrong" being true and false is whether those with moral insight think it is, then that doesn't seem to me to be a very strong claim. Are you basically saying that things are right/wrong because most people (or most appropriate people) think so? But clearly this is quite different from normal propositions - for example, "Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system" isn't true or false by majority opinion, and neither is "There is a God." Normally we think of propositions being things that people recognise the truth or falsity of, rather than things that they determine the truth or falsity of. Alternatively, if you think that those with moral insight are in fact not determining rightness/wrongness but recognising it, then that begs the question on what grounds these people see that X is right or wrong. Do they just "see" it with Enlightenment-style infallible conscience, with no further explanation? This is quite apart from the problem you suggest yourself, which is how to recognise those with authentic moral insight, and how to deal with the problem of disagreement over morality.

[Raak] I know you're not fully taking the position that there are naturally some people with greater moral authority, but it's interesting to compare with the libertarian worldview which (without knowing much about it) I would have thought would rely on the idea that morality is personal and subjective.

As you say, it doesn't advance things much to suppose there are those with moral insight, since it's basically a deferral of the question about the source of any objective morality. For "God", read "the enlightened". You thus can't move on to asking "how does one acquire moral insight?" without committing to the belief that there is such a thing, so a leap of faith would seem to be required. Definitely not one I'm prepared to make based on my experiences.

[Bm] Moral propositions (in the view I'm setting out) aren't true by virtue of being believed, they are true objectively, and those able to see them believe because they see them. How do they do this? Well, how do you (for example) recognise the ordinary physical objects around you? There's no "how" involved that we can say anything useful about (at least not until non-invasive brain scanning technology improves in resolution by many orders of magnitude). The same for moral perception. How people get to be able to have moral perceptions is more answerable in the here and now: upbringing, spontaneous revelation, or learning from enlightened people.
[Projoy] If there is such a thing as moral authority at all, then some people will have more of it than others. I don't know where that "naturally" comes from: if it's an elite, it's one that anyone can join, the same as authority about temporal matters. There is indeed an act of faith involved: the faith that there are objective morals. But there is also an act of faith involved in the perception of physical truths. The main difference between the two is that most people's physical senses function at a high enough level that it is easy for all to agree on simple physical statements, while the same degree of consensus is lacking in the moral realm. One difference, at any rate. Another is that people are much more attached to their moral judgements than their physical ones.

Upbringing, spontaneous revelation, learning from enlightened people...or arriving at them by working them out oneself.

[Raak] True, there needn't be a "naturally" although of course in the case of perception of reality there are real reasons why some people are naturally better at intuitive perception of reality than others (a minor example is perfect pitch). We don't necessarily know the nuts 'n' bolts reasons for these differences but it is something we can say with some confidence based on the level of agreement about reality and different people's success at perceiving intuitively that which we can independently verify: I sing a note. JLE says it's A, I play an A on the piano and it corroborates his statement. But crucially his doing this does not allow me to learn perfect pitch from him. If accurate perception of some kind of objective morality is a higher order skill of this type, it's then a reasonable speculation there probably is a hierarchy of people's ability to perceive moral absolutes.

In the case of morality this strikes me as considerably wilder speculation than making the same statement about perfect pitch. This might be for anthropic reasons, of course, but if so your line of reasoning becomes rather depressing for those who don't sense an objective morality, since it suggests they are missing something big and are never going to perceive it! (Slartibartfast would say, "Oh, no, that's just paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.")