No. Some facts are not morally neutral. Some facts are, themselves, morals.
That was quick and sharp
I agree with you. But could you give a concrete example of a fact which is itself moral? It would be interesting to see what you/we come up with.
No. Some facts are not morally neutral. Some facts are, themselves, morals.
That was quick and sharp
I agree with you. But could you give a concrete example of a fact which is itself moral? It would be interesting to see what you/we come up with.
As a comment: I think in one interpretation, "oughts" are pretty much just the same as whatever is consistent with the dictates of reasoning, so there's nothing but objectivity about "oughts" at all.
However, when it comes to common issues like whether killing innocents is something one ought not to do, many would say well, that depends on one's wishes really. This, I suspect, is why many prefer to separate morals from facts -- they may say it's a fact that so and so person opines against the slaughter of innocents, but it's not a fact whether it ought not to be done.
That I think is the challenge for those of us who do have sympathies with the objective morals/morals are facts direction -- that is, yes they're trivially facts if we simply say "you ought to X if reason dictates" but the question is DOES reason dictate, in cases we all probably hold emotionally important at least.
wolly.green said:'Feelings' and 'emotions' are irrelevant here.
However, as you yourself phrased, there's a wish involved: there's no inherent reason to avoid disease given independent of the wish. So in this example, the "if, then" statement is itself a fact, but the conditions of the "if" could easily be said to be satisfied or not based on someone's emotion.
wolly.green said:Ah not so fast. Yes the wish might be an emotional one, but there is no reason to think that the explanation itself is not objective.
The challenge, as I said, is how to ground statements like "you ought not to kill innocents" -- because in such cases, the wish to not kill them cannot be assumed to be true in all people.
wolly.green said:"why is it that we aught not kill innocents?". This question will always have an answer.
Well it would be great if there is, but basically the way I see it, reason could just as well falsify the conjecture that we ought not to kill innocents (and I don't just mean in cases like war, I mean, even in context of a serial killer who does it for pleasure)
Reason guarantees there's an objective fact of the matter (and that we try to get to it by criticism, like you say), but that fact might not be the one that one hoped is true
I myself DO tend towards there being a grounding for our common moral ideals, but just saying -- the Popper theory a priori seems to me to only guarantee that there is an objective truth, but in this case doesn't tell us which it is.
wolly.green said:Why should this be a problem? We can never be certain that our best explanations won't be refuted at some point in the future...
Well to that I say -- who said it's a problem for Popper's theory?
The only thing I hoped to convey is that grounding many of the moral statements we'd all like to remains basically as hard a problem as ever, because in those cases, our precise hope is to make claims that don't depend on individual personal wishes being one way or another.
And if we were to be honest, people like the OP actually are thinking of those types of statements when they say facts are morally neutral.
wolly.green said:Why should we want to ground morals in "statements we'd all like to remain"? Surely the truth matters more than what we "hope" to be the case?
But this leads to a kind of relativism