[Raak] Whyever not? One mugger doesn't just mug one victim. They do it over and over again, as long as they don't get caught (that's probably the only practical limiting clause). There's also always the possibility they'll hit a minor jackpot, too, of someone who's carrying more than just "pocket money." I would imagine, for instance, that some of us going up to Rugby had a fair amount in cash. (As the guy collecting money for T-shirts, this is more than mere speculation!) Once they've got some money, there's no reason they couldn't invest their ill-gotten gains wisely, either, and make it grow a bit. True, I doubt most muggers are smart enough to know how to do that, but I don't think you can say it's inherently impossible to become rich through it.

[Raak] Oh, and I think you're also ignoring the way they tend to take other things the person has on them, such as credit cards, watches, jewellery, etc. The latter two probably aren't worth very much for most people (let's be honest, most people wear crap), but cards can lead to all kinds of nastily profitable shenanigans.

[Breadmaster] How about the sense of guilt? Doing something you know to be wrong makes you feel guilty. So, to put it another way, if something makes you feel guilty, it's something you feel to be immoral (this can be irrationally so, of course, insofar as any morality can be said to have a rational basis). Obviously, this isn't objective because different people feel guilt for different things.

[Darren] Ok, one can imagine how to make a lot of money at street crime, but I seriously doubt if anyone does. It's just not a real career option for anyone wanting to do more than just live hand to mouth.
[Bm] What is a "should"? What are commands? The moral person would no more thrust his hand into another's pocket than into a nest of vipers. Shoulds and commands are for those who lack insight and must be told what to do. I have not (yet) read Aristotle (is this the Nicomachean Ethics?), but morality as enlightened prudence sounds right to me.

You see - you can prove it, with one of these. You just need to know the wavelength of the light which will tell you where it is on teh spectrum which will (in most cases) be able to be proved to be a certain colour (except for those "No it's yellow" "no it's not it's orange" conversations.)

[st d] Whether you can prove it or not wasn't the point - it was whether you needed to prove it, or indeed whether you even needed to know a proof was possible.

of course - silly me.

[st d] Well done though.

Wow, this moves fast...
Raak] If by the case of Iraq you mean the resistance against the US/British occupation, then I'd agree that they are morally justified (without necessarily meaning that each and every one of the resitance's actions are morally justified). I suspect that's not what you mean though.
I think the core problem here is where you say "That is the key difference between empirical knowledge and moral knowledge: one is demonstrable and the other is not." If moral knowledge is not demonstrable in some way, then how do we learn it, other than by faith? And given that there are lots of possible belief systems, many of which disagree very strongly with each other, how do we distinguish between right and wrong belief systems?

Darren] I still don't see how you can know whether a proof is possible, without knowing how you are testing it.

[Irouléguy] I think we've moved slightly from rulesets to proofs... the thing is, I don't think you need to prove a mapping is anything other then a mapping. It could be totally arbitrary, with no proof possible, but as long as you had a consistent mapping from one category to another, or, as I said above, a subset of one to a subset of the other, then that's sufficient. A ruleset doesn't need to be grounded in the real world to be a ruleset. It can be entirely abstract, but as long as it doesn't contradict itself then that's good enough as far as the logical proposition is concerned.

[Irouléguy] Indeed it wasn't! This may be getting into the stuff of flame wars, but I had in mind (as you no doubt guessed) the removal of Saddam as the moral act, and cannot see any of the resistance "actions" (i.e. suicide bombing, suicide bombing, and suicide bombing) as moral acts, especially given that the resistance is coming from the Sunni minority whose goal is Islamic dictatorship. Which of their actions do you think are morally justified?
       How do we learn morality? Upbringing, practical experience, revelation, and reason applied to those. As someone once put it: "If you get it, it will be in spite of any method. You must have a method."