ruby sparks said:
It was already obvious that there were some significant issues with your reliance on colloquialisms, intuitions, analogies, approximations, everyday language, folk-psychology, subjectivity, 'how things seem', incomplete analyses and inadequate definitions, and so on, but that fundamentally incorrect statement about the standards we should be using takes the whole biscuit in one mouthful.
Your underlying approach to philosophical issues is deeply flawed.
You are confused by language. Whether an assertion is false or true can only be properly assessed by the meaning of the words in it. If you just change the meaning, you are talking about something else.
ruby sparks said:
Recap?
You can just do the first bit, the ways they are independent, to keep it short. Please try to keep it as short as possible. You don't need to elaborate too much initially. Short and sweet, if possible.
Okay; I will add more details to tackle your 'woo' charge as well. Consider the following statement:
P1: Any human being who tastes fresh cat feces, finds them disgusting, save for malfunctioning of the senses of smell or taste.
That is a general statement about human beings. It is independent of what each individual human believes, or even whether there are humans.
For example, suppose nearly all of the human population are killed by aliens. The survivors are indoctrinated by some alien experimenter who poses as the creator and whom they worship. It tells them that fresh cat feces are delicious to human taste. While none of them has tasted them, they have faith in the alien, so they all come to believe that any human being who tastes fresh cat feces, finds them delicious, save for malfunctioning of the senses of smell or taste. It turns out, of course, that their beliefs are false, and that P1 remains true, as it is not a statement about what some humans happen to believe.
Was P1 true a billion years ago? While that would be an odd question (which I tackle because of your similar questions in the moral case), the answer is 'yes', because it is not a time-dependent statement (or for that matter, space-dependent). In order for it to be false, there would have to be an exception, that is, a human being who tastes fresh cat feces, does not find them disgusting, and her senses of smell and taste are not malfunctioning. But that does not happen (in philosophy, one could say it is necessarily true). Note that this is not woo. Rather it is an analysis based on what an expression in English means, and logic.
Now, let us consider the following:
P2: Any human being who has cancer is ill.
P3: Any human being who has AIDS is ill.
P4: Any human being who has Tourette's Syndrome is ill.
P5: Any human being who tortures another for pleasure behaves immorally.
My position is that all of those statements are independent in the same sense P1 is. They are general statements about human beings, and they are neither time-dependent nor dependent on what some humans happen to believe. So, they are always true. In philosophical terminology, one could say they are necessarily true. This is not about woo.
Now, if you claim that P5 is different, I would ask why. But in any event, if we disagree, disagreeing with you is very different from positing woo. Just as I'm not suggesting woo for saying P1 is necessarily true, the same goes for P2-P5.
Now not all moral statements are like that. Some - most - are about a specific human being (e.g., Ted Bundy was a morally bad person). But they are also independent of what people believe. As explained in the other thread, moral badness was a property of Bundy's character. It would remain so even if everyone forgot about his existence. It does not depend on what other humans happen to feel, believe, etc. The same goes for facts such as 'Ted Bundy liked bananas' (if he did; else, the negation of that). In that sense, they are both independent.
ruby sparks said:
And, as I said, if possible, try to do it by talking about morality, not via analogies between morality and other things which may or may not be fully comparable.
I'm afraid that, while I do talk about morality (see P5 above), I will not give up the analogies that are relevant in the context and for the purposes at hand. For example, in order to highlight how what I am proposing has nothing to do with woo, I point out that it is the same I propose in ordinary cases (like P1) that have nothing to do with morality. I'm talking about language, not woo.
ruby sparks said:
If they are not fully comparable then different responses may not show any inconsistency or error, it may just be that the things analogised are different from each other in some ways.
It is not different responses. Rather, your responses use certain form of argumentation: you claim that morality is not independent because such-and-such. So, I point out that such-and-such holds for things that you believe are independent.
ruby sparks said:
And if the standard is everyday colloquial language then that's a huge and arbitrary limitation and one which will more or less automatically introduce, from the start, vagueness and imprecision.
That is not a huge arbitrary limitation, or an arbitrary limitation that is not huge, or a limitation at all. That is
what we are talking about. The terms we use in the different scenarios, including moral terms and those in the analogies, have meaning. The meaning is given by usage in colloquial English because that is the language in which we are speaking. If you choose to redefine the words, you are talking about something else. Depending on how you redefine it, the something else might be similar in some interesting respects to the object of our talk, or not. But either way, you're talking about something else.