01/27/2019

If one tries to defend desirism, one will soon encounter the objection that it is either circular, or it commits the advocate to an infinite regress. Why is it the case? Well, we start with the definition of "good" "good" = "is such as to fulfill the desires in question" A reminder on what it is to fulfill a desire. Desires are propositional attitudes that can be expressed in the form, "Agent desires that P". For example, "P" represents the proposition "Alonzo desires to post on the

01/13/2019

The thesis that I am interested in is an expressivist hypothesis: People use moral statements to express praise and condemnation. They do this to trigger the reward system in order to create rules of behavior in other people that will make "good" actions more common and "bad" actions less common. There is a family of theories called expressivism that holds that moral statements are expressions of the speaker's attitudes. Expressivist theories are typically classified as non-cognitivist

01/06/2019

If you have a moral theory that requires that a person get a PhD in philosophy and learn a technical moral language before they can decide whether it is morally wrong to rob a convenience store, you have a very poor moral theory. Morality is something that a vast majority of the population - even the least educated - indeed, everybody except young children and the most severely mentally impaired adults - should be able to participate in. In this way, morality is like language. If your theory of

12/27/2018

Introduction In this post, I try to convince you that I was wrong. In posts such as "The Central Problem of Morality - Solved" and "'I have a reason' versus 'there is a reason'", I have been criticizing the view that "There is a reason for you to do X" implies "You have a desire that would be fulfilled by doing X."  I owe it to you, the reader, to give this position the best defense I can provide. There are reasons why so many people believe it - it's not just something they picked at random

12/26/2018

Setting Up the Problem In the previous post, "The Central Problem of Morality", I claimed that I could solve The Central Problem of Morality by employing a distinction between "I have a reason to do something" and "There is a reason for me to do something." The central problem of morality as described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is built on a premise that states that "there is a reason for me to do something" implies "I have a desire that would be served by my doing it."

12/18/2018

Good Desires There are good and bad desires. In my last post I discussed what it takes for something to be good. X is good = X is such as to fulfill the desires in question. In that last post, I brought up the objection, "Doesn't this mean that torturing a child is good as long as somebody desires it?" The answer: No, because the desires of the person who desires to torture children are not the correct "desires in question". Of course, this brings up the question, "How do we determine the

01/27/2019

If one tries to defend desirism, one will soon encounter the objection that it is either circular, or it commits the advocate to an infinite regress. Why is it the case? Well, we start with the definition of "good" "good" = "is such as to fulfill the desires in question" A reminder on what it is to fulfill a desire. Desires are propositional attitudes that can be expressed in the form, "Agent desires that P". For example, "P" represents the proposition "Alonzo desires to post on the

01/19/2019

What are you saying when you say that somebody "should" or "ought" to do something? "Ought" here is applied to action, and tells us something about that action. Specifically, it relates the action to some set of ends or goals and identifies the action as the best way among the available alternatives to realize those goals. The term is actually ambiguous in that it does not identify any specific ends or goals. To identify the relevant ends, one has to pay attention to the context within which

01/13/2019

The thesis that I am interested in is an expressivist hypothesis: People use moral statements to express praise and condemnation. They do this to trigger the reward system in order to create rules of behavior in other people that will make "good" actions more common and "bad" actions less common. There is a family of theories called expressivism that holds that moral statements are expressions of the speaker's attitudes. Expressivist theories are typically classified as non-cognitivist