Thanks for explaining your argument I had no idea it would so pitifully weak. I could put it all apart but will just focus on the weakest parts of your post.
Ohh good am I going to be faced with some brilliant insights and blinding arguments! Lets see then..
Factually incorrect there are countless examples where others morally condemn an act and meant 'I disapprove', is it moral to not pray five times a day, to smoke, to eat a lot of fatty foods, to scratch ones arse, to vote conservative. Every single action we take has a moral dimension to it.
Are you deliberately missing the point? It’s hard to believe seeing as I began the whole post by explaining that my objection to the sentence ‘I disapprove of IS burning people but accept that they don’t’ wasn’t that its false, but that it doesn’t express everything we want to say about morality, pointing out that morality has always about MORE than this such as involving judgements about the wrongness of the action including the fact that we blame them for their actions…..yet you respond to my point that morality involves more than just disapproving by giving examples of people disapproving…..It beggars belief therefore, that I have to point then the accepting the fact that morality does involves disapproval, does nothing to counter the criticism that morality involves more than JUST disapproval. Not starting well for you then, so far not so much as a failed counter argument from you as you missing the point entirely.
When I was a young adult I would have described myself as homophobic, empathy, an emotion, for homosexuals changed my view.
Empathy is a good example of how we can’t sharply separate facts and values. Empathy is not simply an emotion, it’s a capacity to feel or understand the emotions of others and then take them into account. Your example above is revealing more for what it didn’t say than what it did…it begs the question, when we use empathy to allow us insight into something (like how homosexuals feel) and change our views because of it we do so because the empathy helps us to recognise our older homophobic views had been mistaken. Empathy allows us to have insights into how other feel that we wouldn’t otherwise take into account and that therefore expand our understanding the world. How we think it feels to be the subject of homosexual prejudice or to love someone who is the same sex as you becomes a fact we take into account and it reveals to us that our older prejudiced perspective missed out this crucial fact about the situation. If we didn’t think the emotion gave us a better perspective we wouldn’t change our view – indeed we could have empathy for someone being sent to prison for a crime but still accept that it is the right thing to do despite our emotional affinity with how they may feel, so its not the emotion itself that drives the change but the wider understanding of the situation that it allows us to appreciate.
I never claimed moral judgements were just emotional responses. Moral judgements are a complex mix of emotions and reason. Love is a complex mix of emotion and reason. The mix of both is different but the analogy stands.
Good grief it gets worse…Love IS an emotion, that’s its definition! We can’t reason our way into loving someone and often love despite reason. If we feel love we love them and if we don’t we don’t that’s the beginning and end of it regardless of how we might subsequently want to invoke our emotional connections in reasoning about our actions involving people we love.
Anything we reason about can potentially involve emotion so saying ‘it’s a complex mix of emotions and reasons’ doesn’t tell us anything about that relationship. Luckily a few post back you affirmed that you accept the statement “what is morally right is determined by our instincts, opinions and emotions” so there is no point trying to back track now as your analogy collapses around you
Moral statements derive their force from emotions.
As a general statement that’s simply false. Morality CAN involve emotions but it can also be exercised dispassionately. Courts go out of their way to give dispassionate sentences to reflect the appropriate level of moral condemnation for crimes as defined in law. Luckily I haven’t had anything stolen for years and thinking of stealing evokes no emotion in me whatsoever, yet I can quite dispassionately accept that its wrong without having to empathise with a theft victim, just based on an appeal to the abstract fact that I think people’s rights to property should be respected. Indeed we often make judgements about what is right or wrong despite our emotions to the contra.
As we do sometimes with love.
When we pit rational standards of what to do against love it’s because love IS the emotion set against the rationality by contrast when we pit our emotions against the rational standards of what we think we morally should do it’s because morality IS the rational standard we are pitching emotion against!!!
Also noticed you missed out the next two points too.
I don't think your understand what an analogy is. Treating morality as an objective like 2+2=4 erodes the value of morality and just leaves us with a pale reflection of it.
Thankfully as I’ve already gone in to quite a bit of detail discussing the relationship of emotion and morality it should be clear to anyone that I don’t think morality works like abstract rules at all never mind anything analogous to a mathematical formula. Your attempt to use an analogy to capture what I think is unfortunately just as bad as your own analogy has turned out to be. Realist morality can account for morality exactly as we experience it, the fact that we praise or blame people for making right or wrong moral choices, the fact that we struggle to make the right decisions and discard our old views because they are mistaken when we gain new insights. Realism understands that facts and values are not distinct and that our rational conception of the world involves inseparable descriptive and evaluative judgements which will motivate and move the virtuous person to action.
After all your bluster and self-proclaimed ‘winning’ of the argument it turns out that every single response you have made above without exception has missed the mark. I would have thought as my arguments were apparently ‘pitifully weak’ that you might have been able to muster a viable defence against at least one of them, but apparently not.
