I've never heard of any epistemology based on honesty. As I explained above...one can be completely honest and completely wrong.
That doesn't negate that honesty is the best policy for discussions trying to find the truth. Its more about how we come to know the truth. If they are completely honest and wrong then we can determine that because of the principle of honesty. We can't if we discard that principle as it would not matter.
True...and in many cultures, this wasn't the belief of anyone. We can also say that the people who believed the earth was at the center of the universe were completely honest and completely wrong.
Yes and thats why disagreement about morality is often about the facts surrounding that moral truth, not knowing the facts or truth rather than the moral truth of the matter itself.
If you think it describes some fact of reality....you're correct that it doesn't matter if anyone agrees.
Or disagrees for that matter.
No we don't. We didn't hold the Chinese accountable for the Uigher genocide. We didn't even hold our own government accountable for infringing upon our freedom of speech.
But we held them as being wrong. Just because we did not follow through with actually prosecuting them doesn't mean we did not think they were wrong.
True. I don't know how you would know this though. It seems like a strong assumption to make about someone without any evidence.
Some things are just wrong and we know this intuitively. Like abusing children. I think we can safely say thats wrong with having to get a test tube out.
Good or bad. Use good or bad when referring to morals so we don't confuse them with factual correctness.
Remember, we can describe behaviour in a factually correct manner without any moral judgements...
James shot David. That's something we can be factually right or wrong about without ever discussing the morality of the act.
But bothering to determine the facts in the first place is about morality. If it wasn't we would not bother finding the facts about whether James shot David.
But I understand what you mean. I think this example would be better explained as determining a right or wrong procedure perhaps. James got it wrong when he failed to follow the procedure.
Again, you haven't offered any method for proving a moral true.
It doesn't matter as I am talking about a category destinction and not the moral act itself. When it comes to morality we treat it as something that is either 'good or bad'. Like a binary that only has two options. Unlike say personal preferences or feelings which may vary person to person and culture to culture.
Reciprocity is another abstraction.
It doesn't matter if its an abstraction as its still a real measure of good and bad behaviour. Just like maths can be an abstraction. You could say these abstract principles are the method we determine morality like the abstract principles used to measure objective reality in the sciences.
Abstractions. Perhaps they think mob justice is a reciprocal method of establishing fairness when someone has disrespected another.
Well yeah at least they would be consistent lol. But we already know that mob mentality doesn't work. It actually causes more chaos. People looking over their backs. Based on this idea theres a never ending loop of kill or be killed. Bit like the IRA conflict. The point is we can easily show how it is self defeating.
The point of all moral norms is to allow people within the social group to work together. Even the mafia has to cooperate with each other to work together.
They may be norms but they are not moral norms. How can they cooperate when their own justice says they must seek revenge. Strange way of copoperating at the end of a gun. The idea of cooperating is to avoid conflict not create it. Look at the IRA and the tit for tat mentality. 30 years later after many inncoent deaths and mayham they finally began to cooperate.
Is my condemnation going to change the culture? No.
Is my condemnation necessary to convince you that I don't think they are morally good? I doubt it.
Are we engaged in some debate where I need to convince you that their behaviour is morally wrong? Seems unlikely.
How odd would it be that if out of the blue....in the middle of some conversation we were having....I just decided to share with you my personal views on child sex slavery?
Imagine we dropped you into a pashtun Afghani tribe...and they take you in and feed you because they have these moral norms about hospitality and strangers. My guess is that if they invite you to a gang rape of a child that night before driving out of the region and to the only airport in the nation the next morning....you'd probably just politely decline and not risk offending them so you can get yourself out of there alive.
Or would you spend the evening telling them how evil they are? How committed are you to that honesty principle? How about that justice principle? Seems pretty disrespectful to decline their gift....are you gonna partake?
Thats seems a strange analogy. None of this negates that them abusing kids is objectively wrong. Just because they think its OK doesn't make it OK. We have moral truths that say its wrong for good reason.
At present we have child sex trafficking in these 3rd world nations. But we don't think thats ok and a normal cultural practice that we should allow to go on. If it walks like a duck then its bad no matter what spin a culture puts on it. Just because condemnation doesn't make them change doesn't mean we should not try to stop the wrong. It doesn't somehow let us off the hook in having a responsibility to stop this wrong.
I think they bought into a viewpoint that simplifies morality to a factual good and bad and as the "oppressed"...they expected them to share their ideas of what is morally good.
Or that people are incapable of holding two conflicting positions at the same time. It could be that they are right about the Palestinians being oppressed is wrong. But theres a seperate issue that the Palestinians are also engaging in something immoral as well in oppressing gays. We can determine the moral truth of each situation.
Then theres the seperate question of whether people should support the rights of others even though they may have engaged in wrongs themselves. On that note I think we are all in the same boat. While the West trumpets the Human Rights of other nations it breaches human rights of their own people.
Of course there's a way to say it. You just did. You can't prove it though.
Yes we can. This is silly I think. The logical conclusion would be we can never say anything is right or wrong (nilhilism).
I'm open to any way you can think of.
We seem to agree that it doesn't matter if everyone agrees or disagrees....so I'll assume you won't try to prove it those ways.
I can't even think of a starting point for proving a moral fact so I'm interested to see you try.
I have gone into the many ways we can prove moral truths. Like in science its an accumulation of evdience that converge.
Like our innate moral sense that happen to line up with universal core morals found across culture and lived experience throughout our history LIke moral realism in that we live out these truths regardless of what we say, feel or like. Common sense, intuition.
Like with evolution (empathy and cooperation) which happens to align with the same morals as our sense and lived experience. Like religion Golden Rule, Human Rights, National Constitutions upholding these same moral principles.
The fingerprints of these moral truths are all over us, our history and existence.
The issue is that the West especially has fixated a particular kind of evdience, scientific materialism and reductionism and people can't see past this. As Hume says you can't get an 'ought from an is'. So we have to let go of this false dictonmy because its the wrong way to look at morality. Science is only one way of knowing and for morality its the wrong way in the end.
Again, you're the one insisting moral facts exist. This sounds like an admission that you won't be able to prove they exist as objective truths....like the earth circling the sun.
Thats becasue morality exists in a different way to the objective world. So why use the same method as science. But tell me how do we prove that the sun, earth and universe (an objective world) exists outside our minds. What scientific test can we use.
