Hello DT
I'd pretty much given up on this board - partly for pressure of work reasons, partly because the same old mutual incomprehension between the "sides" was becoming fruitless and dull (at least for me). I did have some hopes that you'd bring more intellectual rigour to the theistic position but when you so egregiously misrepresented what I'd said to you (about statements needing to be proven to be true or some such) I decided to step away.
I was just browsing though for old time's sake and noticed your last post here so thought I'd chip in.
Well you've framed honesty and distortion as if it’s all in line with your "own moral nature and values" but that's not what I'm talking about. Whether you accept OM or not there is one thing about morality that is undeniably external to you and your own values and reactions and that's how morality is practiced in human societies; ...the implicit assumptions, the way we make and apply judgements, the types of reference we make when we change our moral views, etc.
Well yes, much as music appreciation for example is practised in human societies with a large degree of consistency. Most (though not all) find harmonious sounds to be more pleasing than jarring ones, just as most (though not all) find TACTDJFF to be morally wrong.
The question of distortion I am talking about is not whether you feel you are being true to yourself but whether your theory of ‘morality as personal responses’ is true to moral discourse as it is practiced. It’s precisely because it isn’t...
In what way isn't it? We're all made of the same stuff, and it's hardly surprising therefore that our moral responses should show a high degree of consistency. I'm as likely to find torturing a baby to be morally wrong as would an Amazonian tribesman - these things have been embedded in the limbic system over millennia, as has for example our common response of disgust at the smell of rotting meat. We also though have pre-frontal cortexes that allow us to consider and reason our way to moral (and to music appreciation) conclusions when we want to, albeit often along culturally influenced lines.
..that leading atheist anti-realists Mackie called his theory of morality 'error theory'.
Then he's overreaching. "Error" implies a yardstick, an absolute against which to determine whether we are in fact in "error" - and that's begging the OM question.
Mackie, like you and other atheists here thought that it didn't make sense for materialists to believe in moral truth and yet he saw (like realists) that morality is full of assumptions of moral truth that non-cognitive theories, no matter how sophisticated simply can't account for. So he accepted that morality as we practice it was, in his words, "infested with error".
"Materialists" don't "believe in moral truth", at least not in the sense that you imply. Rather we "believe" in "moral true enoughs", which is a different thing that requires no appeal to OM or similar, for the same reason that you (presumably) think the late Beethoven quartets to be great art with no appeal to objectivity, to a universal standard for what "great" means.
This is the type of honesty I'm talking about, not whether you are true to your feelings, but that you like Mackie take an honest look at the features of moral practice I have talked about and recognise that if morality can't really be anything more than how we apply our personal responses in a social context then these features cannot be accounted for.
Yes they can. These features are entirely explicable in physiological and evolutionary terms.
Either the moral theory is wrong or the moral practice is distorted.
That's a false dichotomy - morality as practised is exactly what you'd expect to see if morality is in fact a combination of the innate and the reasoned, neither requiring the existence of OM. A thought experiment for you: imagine no OM, and instead morality practised according only to our "own moral nature and values": what differences would you expect to see from the practise of morality you currently observe?
All best.
