I'm not surprised you can't whistle Middle C; you'd need a head the size of a space hopper to do that. Do you mean an octave higher, or maybe even two? As to baroque pitch, I once heard Handel's Messiah sung to the accompaniment of old instruments, as it turned out. "Why are these buggers in D flat?", I was muttering until the penny dropped. Baroque pitch is about 3/4 of a semitone down on concert. (A = 422 or so).

What CdM said, first of all - it's this sort of discussion, as much the games, that keeps me coing back to the Morniverse. I do have a couple of questions- probably daft ones, but I'll lob them in anyway

Raak] If moral statements are propositions - objective truths like gravity or the earth being round - then shouldn't we as a species have discovered some of them by now? And how exact are they? Do you mean general statements like the Ten Commandments, or more specific ones? And if they are objective truths, then surely they admit no exceptions? Which is somewhat problematic - the proposition likely to get the greatest assent is probably "You shall not kill", but if pushed, most people would admit to believing some caveats to even that one (just wars, self-defence, etc).

Darren] There's a convention called Pantone numbers in printing, where you tell a printer the exact shade of green you want by quoting the Pantone number. Inside that convention, the statement that "1815 is green" is objectively true or false. That convention works because everyone who uses it agrees that the rule-set exists, and that the person or people who defined the rule-set have the right to do so. What I'd question about the idea that "1815 is green" in the wider world is - how do we know that the rule-set exists, and who made it?

Lastly (and without stopping this discussion) could I advance the moral proposition that CdM has won the current round of AVMA, and that he should tell us the answer and set another one?

[Irouléguy] Here is one account of the moral Way (although I think it leaves out a significant area, one's responsibility towards oneself). Does the law of gravity admit of exceptions? Yet iron ships float, planes fly, and Voyager is escaping the solar system, and for well-understood reasons. Anyone touting a verbal formula as the truth, whether in the scientific realm or the moral realm, has already fallen into error.

[Irouléguy] Even if an objective rule-set exists, it doesn't need a maker, unless you want to be creationist about it, or you want to take the view that all mappings are abstract constructs formed by the human mind, in which case there's no such thing as a natural rule-set, but nor does there have to be a single named maker as such things can be built up over time. At any rate, there is no need for "1815 is green" as a logical proposition to say anything about the wider world (the meaning and nature of which we could debate for many centuries), because, apart from the fact that we could be talking about all kinds of symbolism, the proposition in itself is a kind of proposed mapping between 1815ness and greenness. It doesn't have to be objectively true or false, but what we do have to be able to say is, if we had enough data, we could determine whether it was true or false. In other words, we don't need a rule-set, because the proposition itself, if true, implies the existence of one. If false, however, it says nothing about the existence or non-existence of a rule-set, although if there is no rule-set, the proposition is not a proposition because it cannot be true or false. In the same way, by saying "X is wrong" as a proposed mapping from the concept of X to the concept of wrongness, we don't necessarily say there *is* an objective mapping of actions to moral evaluations, but for "X is wrong" to be objectively true there must be such a mapping. However, just because we can't tell objectively at this stage whether such a rule-set may or may not exist, that doesn't mean that "X is wrong" stops being a proposition. I think Breadmaster's position, in this sense, is that such a rule-set is impossible and so by definition no proposition which purports to use it can have meaning, because it is neither true nor false, and therefore fails to qualify as a proposition. If it can be shown that there is definitively no rule-set, then I agree with Breadmaster that such things aren't propositions. I'm just not entirely convinced that such a rule-set is impossible, even if it is beyond human knowledge. How far this gets us into the question of morality I don't know!

Actually, I said above "There is no objective force for morals," so I've contradicted myself. OK. Let me put it like this, if there is no objective force for morals (as I clearly thought a couple of days ago!) then Breadmaster is correct and my arguments have fallen apart.

The funny thing is, this discussion has made me question in myself whether I really believe there is no such thing as objective morality, and I can't really say for certain one way or the other. Within the human world, I don't think there is anyone who has in themselves, or has determined in some other way, an objective sense or code of morality. So, I suppose I'll have to fall in line with Breadmaster's view that moral values are not logical propositions. Well done Bm! Certainly made me understand my reasoning a bit more.

[CdM] So having perfect pitch makes you Oriental! I always suspected this was the case! :)

[Raak] I understand that you're suggesting your personal insights into this come from experiences which you can't describe here, so you are rather hamstrung in terms of pursuing this hypothesis of objective morality, at least in this forum. But I am inclined to ask you some skeptical, pedantic questions, such as what a "moral universe" is, how you think the whole thing might work (in just the way you can't find here). If a moral intuiter steps out of the way of immoral actions because they perceive risk to themself (as in your car analogy), that is one thing (but implies self-interest being at the heart of morality, which would make it subjective, surely?); if a moral intuiter senses moral danger, what sort of process do you speculate might be going on in their heads that doesn't appear to go on in mine? Further, if you have some experience of this, maybe - without having to talk about the experience - you could tentatively specify an example of an objective moral rule...?

[Projoy] I knew someone was going to say that.

[Darren] Yayy! Thank you. By the way, I inexplicably can't access this page (alone of all in the Morniverse) from work any more, it seems, which is why I fell silent. Bear in mind that even moral statements are not propositions, it does not necessarily follow that they are not universally applicable. "Don't murder!" could be normative for everyone even though it does not express an objective fact. Perhaps there could be "objective commands". But what those could be, and how they could be, I don't know, and explaining them is a task for someone else.
[Raak] You surely know that your gravity analogy doesn't apply! Floating ships and space probes aren't "breaking" the law of gravity any more than I am when I hold my leg in the air before taking a step. Rather, the law of gravity is simply one of many physical laws which are inter-related, or interact. But that's beside the point. More to the point is that even the list you link to contains much that is arguable. I, for example, don't set much stock by "duties to ancestors" even though the average Confucian might regard it as a central moral imperative. There is nothing that has been universally accepted as a moral imperative, and even if there were, it wouldn't prove anything other than that people all thought it was right. The most such things can show is that human beings have evolved - either biologically or socially - to think that certain things are right or wrong, presumably because those who didn't think this didn't develop stable societies. Thus most people think that murder is wrong because if they didn't they wouldn't have survived. We can therefore explain moral imperatives - or at least their basic outlines - quite adequately in a historical or evolutionary way, without needing to posit that moral views express some kind of "truth" about the world. And the sorts of questions that Projoy asks indicate that there are big problems with the view that they do. After all, there are many people who think that there are moral facts, but no-one seems able to agree what they are. Is abortion a fundamental right or is it one of the blackest crimes there is? The fact that people disagree doesn't prove that there isn't a matter of fact at dispute, of course, but it does raise the question - how, even in principle, could the dispute be settled? What "evidence" (even if in practice it could not be collected) would prove it one way or the other?
Another point that might be relevant - the Tao website states that "For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it." Well, I'm afraid I don't perceive its rationality. I may perceive its utility or practical application. But David Hume pointed out that morality isn't to do with rationality, and vice versa - he said something like "There is nothing irrational about my preferring the destruction of the entire universe to the scratching of my finger," and he was right - such a preference may be morally wrong in whatever sense you have of the word, or it may be highly unuseful, but it's not, strictly speaking, irrational.

[Projoy] Self-interest is at work in stepping out of the path of a car, but that doesn't make it subjective in any useful sense. Everyone will step out of the way of that car, except only children who have not yet learned that it is dangerous, the drug-addled, and the suicidally depressed. This is only subjective to the degree that every thought we have is subjective. What is objective is that the car will kill you if you don't get out of the way. Opinions and wishes are irrelevant. Reality is like the Terminator: you can't reason with it, you can't argue with it. You only have power to choose your actions, not their consequences.
       (Repeat earlier caveat that I'm taking this horse out for a ride to test its legs.)
       Thus it is with morality. The enlightened do good and avoid evil, because, from their point of view, the first person that good acts benefit and evil acts harm is oneself, consequences as undeniable as traffic. It applies to everything from not mugging old ladies for their pension money to getting out of bed in the morning. The idea has a long pedigree, e.g. Socrates and the Buddhist canon (and in a debased form in the Religions Of The Book, where all the consequences are deferred to a supposed later life, despite the statement by one of their prophets that "the kingdom of heaven is within you"). It doesn't give instant answers to all questions, any more than the laws of physics will immediately tell you how to build a kilometer-tall skyscraper.

[Bm] You give two arguments that undercut each other: that there are no universally accepted moral principles, and that universally accepted moral principles arise for evolutionary reasons. You can't have it both ways, but I'll ride this horse over both of them anyway.
       No scientific truth is universally accepted either, if you define "universally" narrowly enough. There are, nonetheless, substantial areas of agreement on moral issues that can be found throughout all civilisations. That doesn't prove they are true (as Lewis himself says), merely that they exist. Perceiving their truth is a separate matter.
       I could take the evolutionary explanation as evidence on my side -- the consequences of right and wrong action are exactly your presumed evolutionary pressures. Not getting run over is also evolutionarily adaptive, but that does not mean that personal decisions and the laws of physics have nothing to do with it.
       How do you perceive the utility of the Way? If it is useful to follow the Way, what is it useful for? And what in turn is that useful for? Utility offers no foundation. Likewise rationality. Look hard enough, and all attempts to find foundations lead only to an infinite regress. Ideas can only justify ideas in terms of other ideas. Morality is about actions, and actions cannot be deduced from thoughts, any more than an ought from an is.
       Hume also claimed not to see causation, but he wouldn't have survived to write his books if he hadn't dodged horse-drawn carts now and then.

[Raak] Maybe Hume was just very, very lucky.

[Raak] Your supposition that evil acts harm the doer is where it all falls down for me. Sort of repeating Bm's point, but a car will run people down according to the laws of physics, which can be reliably shown to operate universally (at least as far as we can observe), but mugging someone for their pension cannot be shown universally to have negative effects for the individual (unless you start invoking some unknowable afterlife or karma or whatever). In other words, some people get away with breaking moral rules, in just the way that a car can't get away with braking the rules of physics in order to save a life. There is merely a certain probability that a system of law exists that will make mugging disadvantageous to the perpetrator. This is not 100% (in fact taking human history as a whole, I'm tempted to speculate it is less than 50%). Is there any real evidence whatsoever to the contrary?

You might come back with the argument that the fact people get away with breaking moral rules is irrelevant to the truth of those rules, but if so then the truth of those rules is irrelevant to us if we are searching for objective standards, since the rules cannot be shown to have reliable consequences, and therefore do not admit of predictions.

I also think that rational suicide is a very interesting example in the objective/subjective debate, because it's always struck me as a very interesting example of higher-order thinking successfully overruling all the lower-order evolutionary thinking with which we come pre-installed. If our sense of objective morality rests on self-preservation, why would it admit of contradiction in this way?