On this view, if some wacko called keiths (just to pick a name at random) perceives that it is the moral duty of all white teenage girls to spend 5 years in China prior to marriage torturing small children to death so as to discourage Chinese people from having children, there would be no illusion, no error, no mis-perception, no cognitive problem involved. Hmmm. An interesting view.

I only said there would be no illusion. I did not say no error or cognitive problem.

You can only have an illusion about objective things i.e. things that exist independently of the perceiver.

Nonsense. Lots of illusions are about things that don't exist at all, such as an oasis in a desert where there isn't one.

A clarification "“ when I say objective things I mean things that exist or not objectively. Perhaps I should have written "the type of things that can exist independently of the perceiver".

If the subject matter is subjective you can't have an illusion.
Tell that to the folks with phantom limb syndrome"”their pain is real par excellence, but not really 'in' their missing limb.

But they do not have an illusion that they are in pain or that it feels like pain from where the limb was. They really do have the pain and there is no way they could be under the illusion they were in pain but were not.

You're also failing to take account of the fact that the illusion may involve a mistake about the concept a sensation falls under. A person may experience menstruation, but not think of it as menstruation but as orgasm, and thus be under the illusion that they are no longer a virgin

But that is my whole point. It can only be an illusion because there is an objective thing "“ an orgasm "“ which they falsely believe they are perceiving.

I can't have the illusion my hand hurts or a woman is attractive (I might be under the illusion it is a woman when actually it is something else - but I can't have an illusion about her attractiveness because that is my subjective reaction).

You can have an illusion about her attractiveness"”that's what make-up is for.

You are right. Attractiveness is a bad example because it might a property of a woman or a property of a woman + makeup.

Again, you're confusing being an attractive woman"”being a woman with a set of objectively de facto attraction-causing properties (she receives upwards of 50,000 marriage proposals a week, say)"”-with being an attractive woman to you. Cf. Bridge having fascination-causing properties, and it being something that happens to fascinate you. The former property isn't relative to you while the latter is. And morality is like the former property, and not like the latter, in not being relative to you.

I am not confusing them. I meant the latter case. You are right that morality is similar to this latter case. It is not relative to me but it is relative to the reaction that most people will have to the game if they understand it. There is no additional objective property of the game "“ its fascination "“ over and above its observable features such as the rules and tactics. If a fan claims that bridge is fascinating (in the latter sense) they can recite various characteristics of the game to make their case. They may passionately believe that anyone who really gets to understand it will agree. But if someone disagrees and says that actually it is boring (in the latter sense) the definitive way to prove them wrong is not keep reciting the characteristics of bridge but to point the many people who know the game well and are fascinated.

You may be confusing a 19th century English novelist with a 20th century English philosopher, the latter's name being Austin. … So it's a cause for bemusement as to how you could possibly have imagined that Austin's work, …. might support your subjectivist view about morality over mine, given that he strongly advocated taking our uses of words at their face value, and given that moral terms are in fact used as if they most definitely state objective truths.

I am a fan of both Jane Austen and J.L. Austin and (despite the spelling error) I am unlikely to confuse them. I live 27 miles from Chawton where Jane Austen lived most of her life and 8 miles from Winchester where she is buried. J.L. Austin was very fashionable when I studied philosophy and I have kept my copy of Sense and Sensibilia these 35 years but rapidly mislaid my copy of Language, Truth and Logic. I am not aware that I have said he would support my subjectivist views. However, you may be interested in these quotes from Sense and Sensibilia

Consider the expressions "˜cricket ball', "˜cricket bat', "˜cricket pavilion', "˜cricket weather'. If someone did not know about cricket and were obsessed with the use of such "˜normal' words as "˜yellow', he might gaze at the ball, the bat, the building, the weather, trying to detect the "˜common quality' which (he assumes) is attributed to these things by the use of the prefix "˜cricket'. But no such quality meets his eye; and so perhaps he concludes that "˜cricket' must designate a non-natural quality, a quality to be detected not in the ordinary way but by intuition. If this story strikes you as too absurd, remember what philosophers have said about the word "˜good';

Or later

"˜Good' is the most general of a very large and diverse list of more specific words that share with it the general function of expressing commendation

He was a good Wittgensteinian and understood that the use of words is far more subtle and complex than simply referring to things.

I am not sure what a moral perception is - but if you equate it to conscience then I agree it is not subject to illusion. This is because it is subjective.

On this view, if some wacko called keiths (just to pick a name at random) perceives that it is the moral duty of all white teenage girls to spend 5 years in China prior to marriage torturing small children to death so as to discourage Chinese people from having children, there would be no illusion, no error, no mis-perception, no cognitive problem involved. Hmmm. An interesting view.

When you say, "I am not sure what a moral perception is", you may have a point. In fact, that may be the under-statement of the century.

You can only have an illusion about objective things i.e. things that exist independently of the perceiver.

Nonsense. Lots of illusions are about things that don't exist at all, such as an oasis in a desert where there isn't one.

If the subject matter is subjective you can't have an illusion.

Tell that to the folks with phantom limb syndrome—their pain is real par excellence, but not really 'in' their missing limb.

You're also failing to take account of the fact that the illusion may involve a mistake about the concept a sensation falls under. A person may experience menstruation, but not think of it as menstruation but as orgasm, and thus be under the illusion that they are no longer a virgin. Or to take an example from the entry on illusion at wikipedia:

In psychiatry and philosophy the term illusion refers to a specific form of sensory distortion. Unlike a hallucination, which is a sensory experience in the absence of a stimulus, an illusion describes a misinterpretation of a true sensation so it is perceived in a distorted manner. For example, hearing voices regardless of the environment would be a hallucination, whereas hearing voices in the sound of running water (or other auditory source) would be an illusion.

I can't have the illusion my hand hurts or a woman is attractive (I might be under the illusion it is a woman when actually it is something else - but I can't have an illusion about her attractiveness because that is my subjective reaction).

You can have an illusion about her attractiveness—that's what make-up is for.:mrgreen:

Again, you're confusing being an attractive woman—being a woman with a set of objectively de facto attraction-causing properties (she receives upwards of 50,000 marriage proposals a week, say)—-with being an attractive woman to you. Cf. Bridge having fascination-causing properties, and it being something that happens to fascinate you. The former property isn't relative to you while the latter is. And morality is like the former property, and not like the latter, in not being relative to you.

To anticipate a response - there is a difference between an illusion and a delusion (see J. L. Austen - Sense and Sensibilia). I can be deluded that something is wrong.

Or you can be just be deluded that it is the moral duty of all white teenage girls to spend 5 years in China prior to marriage torturing small children to death prior to marriage so as to discourage Chinese people from having children.

You may be confusing a 19th century English novelist with a 20th century English philosopher, the latter's name being Austin. And he is best known for criticising Ayer's sense-data version of anti-realism about physical objects on the basis that Ayer misunderstands how words are actually used. Ordinary terms such as 'table', 'tree', 'horse', etc, argues Austin, really do refer to tables, trees, and horses, and not to their associated subjective sense-data. So it's a cause for bemusement as to how you could possibly have imagined that Austin's work, the leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy and a follower of G. E. Moore (probably the best known realist and anti-naturalist about ethics of the 20th century), might support your subjectivist view about morality over mine, given that he strongly advocated taking our uses of words at their face value, and given that moral terms are in fact used as if they most definitely state objective truths. "Raping children is wrong" is not used as a basis for inferring merely that an utterer of that sentence personally prefers not to rape children, but that no-one, even wannabe child rapists, should rape children.

Incidentally, one measure of the braindead bizzonkerism one comes here to laugh at is that in a discussion about the relative epistemic merits of visual as against moral perception, an argument is advanced by the partisans favoring the former sort of perception, an argument which, if it tends to demonstrate anything, demonstrates the potentially illusory nature of the former sort, and not at all of the latter.

I am not sure what a moral perception is - but if you equate it to conscience then I agree it is not subject to illusion. This is because it is subjective. You can only have an illusion about objective things i.e. things that exist independently of the perceiver. If the subject matter is subjective you can't have an illusion. I can't have the illusion my hand hurts or a woman is attractive (I might be under the illusion it is a woman when actually it is something else - but I can't have an illusion about her attractiveness because that is my subjective reaction).

To anticipate a response - there is a difference between an illusion and a delusion (see J. L. Austen - Sense and Sensibilia). I can be deluded that something is wrong.

A more reasonable standard of demonstrability will involve the two things I relied on when arguing for the objective nature of the moral truth that genocide is immoral, namely reason and experience. But because this obviously destroys keiths' completely fanatical and utterly bizzonkerist devotion to the denial of objective morality since objective morality is, as most atheists recognize, incompatible with evolutionary materialism, and since keiths has an equally fanatical and utterly bizzonkerist devotion to evolutionary materialism, and since he will repeatedly and obtusely miss the point no matter how many times it's made, keiths being steadfastly impervious to rational argument and even to comprehension of anything that is threaty to his worldview, there is as much point to continuing to debate this subject with keiths as there is to debating with an enormous cowpie.

If you can't even see how off-the-wall is the idea that the Adelson illusion even remotely favors the conclusion you draw, that merely confirms that you're much too stupid to be worth explaining your erroneous reasoning to yet again. And incidentally, it's a holiday weekend.

Zoskie,

If you can't answer my argument, just admit it. Don't make excuses.

Anyone else care to step in? Stunney? Brian? Todd?

And let's not forget the satisfaction of witnessing the discomfiture of blowhards like Stunney and Zoskie

Discomfiture? Keiths, you're confusing the fact that you are a deluded bore with the fantasy that you've discomfited anyone. If you can't even see how off-the-wall is the idea that the Adelson illusion even remotely favors the conclusion you draw, that merely confirms that you're much too stupid to be worth explaining your erroneous reasoning to yet again. And incidentally, it's a holiday weekend.

We may think that something is immoral if it leads to unhappiness, is unfair, and causes premature deaths, but that immorality is subjective. Where is the evidence that unhappiness, unfairness, and premature deaths are objectively wrong or evil?

Well, at least keiths has abandoned the objective = absolute argument. Here he refuses to grant the idea that human beings can determine what is 'right' or 'wrong' under the classification that only humans understand or care about. These classifications cannot be objective because keiths will not allow for such classification.

In which case he has utterly destroyed all anti-religious arguments appealing to 'natural evil'. Because by keiths' own reckoning, there can be no such thing. Now, I happen to agree on that, having argued many times that the sun, wind, rain, earth, carnivorous animals and gravity can't commit evil because these things have no moral agency. No choice. No responsibility.

Human beings are moral agents with choice and responsibility. That is why we can classify things as 'good' or 'evil'.

Mark Frank wrote:

…I am not proposing that humanity is under an illusion that such qualities exist but humaniy is mistaken. I am proposing that statements about right and wrong not like that. You don't determine their truth by observation but by making a case to change people's attitudes.

to which keiths replied:

But Stunney and Zoskie believe that statements about right and wrong are like that, which is why I have asked them repeatedly to justify their belief.

Statements about right and wrong are conceptual classifications of objective actions and/or conditions in the world that human beings are responsible for. Responsibility for actions entails responsibility for the consequences of actions. Your poor abused dog may not know or understand that your beatings are considered wrong by other human beings on moral grounds, and will not complain much as he dies by your hand. But if human beings catch you doing it, you will go to jail and have to defend yourself against charges of animal cruelty. Even though the dog never filed charges.

Conversely if your dog kills someone, the responsibility for his action is yours, not his. He'll probably be put down as a menace, but if there is criminal or civil culpability it falls onto you because YOU are a responsible moral agent. This isn't difficult to understand. If you lose your freedom or your assets, your loss - like your responsibility - is as objective as the loss of the person he killed.

mtraven: I don't really see how any of you can stand having this interminable and unproductive discussion.

Keiths: Part of it is that like Mark, I almost always come to understand my ideas a little better when I have to explain them to someone.

I actually find myself agreeing with Keiths and Mark about something.:shock: Explaining something seems to clarify thoughts unless of course you disagree with the explanation.

This is all sounds a bit academic, but if you don't hold on to the difference between subjective and uncertain then you are in danger of letting Stunney and Zoskie look plausible.

Not much danger of that.

In any case, I'm not sure why you think I'm not maintaining the distinction between 'subjective' and 'uncertain'. Ask me if genocide is immoral, and I'll answer yes. Ask me if I'm certain, and again I'll answer yes. Ask me if my morality is objective or subjective, and I'll say subjective.

Zoskie can provide evidence that genocide is wrong and make an overwhelming case based on the unhappiness it causes, its unfairness, the many premature deaths etc.

But if you think that such an argument is plausible, much less overwhelming, then you're repeating Zoskie's mistake. We may think that something is immoral if it leads to unhappiness, is unfair, and causes premature deaths, but that immorality is subjective. Where is the evidence that unhappiness, unfairness, and premature deaths are objectively wrong or evil?

You and I don't believe there is a quality of right or wrong out there independent of us.

Correct.

However, I am not proposing that humanity is under an illusion that such qualities exist but humaniy is mistaken.

But Stunney and Zoskie do believe that right and wrong exist, out there in the world, independent of us. You and I don't believe that. If we are correct, then they are mistaken.

I am proposing that statements about right and wrong not like that. You don't determine their truth by observation but by making a case to change people's attitudes.

But Stunney and Zoskie believe that statements about right and wrong are like that, which is why I have asked them repeatedly to justify their belief.