Angra Mainyu
Veteran Member
That is unclear, because it depends on what you classify as 'nonmoral premises'. The following for example is valid:ruby sparks said:We agree that getting a moral conclusion from nonmoral premises is a formal fallacy and not valid.
P1: Ordinary human faculties reckon that it is immoral for a human being to rape another just for fun.
P2: If ordinary human faculties reckon that A, then very probably A.
C: Very probably, it is immoral for a human being to rape another just for fun.
Do you reckon that that contains also moral premises?
That does not follow. And here are two ways in which it does not follow:ruby sparks said:Therefore we agree there is an inherent is/ought problem, surely an important one to someone like you who values logic highly, at least sometimes.
First, even if I agree that getting a moral conclusion from nonmoral premises is a formal fallacy and not valid (which depends on what you call "nonmoral premises"; see example above), it is not the case that I agree that that is what people usually do. For all I know, maybe we are doing exactly the sort of argument as above, or rather the nonconscious version of it. In fact, I do think we are making an intuitive assessment as we make in nearly all cases.
Second, that I value logic highly does not mean that I think there is a problem if it happens to be the case that our daily probabilistic assessments commit a fallacy - and if that happens with moral assessments, it happens with all of those too.
In fact, under the hypothesis that it is a fallacy, my assessment is precisely that this fallacy is not at all a problem, as our usual scientific assessments are fine and incur it all the time, and in fact, even beyond science and in our daily lives, our usual assessments incur this fallacy if it happens at all, of which I am not convinced.
In short, I disagree that there is an is/ought problem. My position is that either we are not deriving moral conclusions from nonmoral premises (or if the premises in the argument above count as nonmoral, maybe we are, but that is not invalid), or we are but in this case the fallacy is not a problem.
No, it's not, because I am saying that the something else is not problematic and it is a fallacy if and only if the moral case is. And the something else is not problematic, but rather, what would be irrational would be to try not to make ordinary assessments like that, about the world around us, about what happened or will happen in either scientific or daily conditions, and the like.ruby sparks said:Whether something else, something different, is or isn't valid, is a fallacy, or is problematical in some other way, is another matter.
Whether they have mind-independent properties is irrelevant. The relevant question here is whether there is a problem due to a fallacy. My argument is that either there is no fallacy, or if there is, it is not a problem, and in fact, it would be irrational not to make it all the time.ruby sparks said:You are de facto not comparing like with like (first, you are comparing nonmoral issues to moral ones, and second, your analogous phenomena arguably and apparently have mind-independent properties, whereas morality arguably and apparently doesn't) so the analogies and comparisons you are using ultimately fail by your own preferred standards.
Nah, that was a brain failure this morning, when I saw it again I saw it was valid, and it now looks obviously valid. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention. Maybe it's because I'm ill and also not sleeping properly (due to being ill), or maybe it was just a brain fart. But the fact that I can see clearly that it is valid also indicates that whatever caused a temporary failure in my logical system at the moment, it's not something that is a general limitation (I usually deal with far more complex arguments, and yes, sometimes I make mistakes. But I correct them later, when checking.). For that matter, sometimes people are walking and just trip or stumble despite not being an obstacle. It happens, and speaks of the fallibility of the human walking ability, not of a general limitation to the capability of the system (which allows humans to even run for long distances).ruby sparks said:Also, it is interesting that you can't yet see that the prejudice argument above is valid. I would say that points up one of the limitations of a non-logical, often intuitive system (eg the human brain) trying to do logic.