Logical Positivism is a philosophy derived from the teachings of David Hume that holds, in a nutshell, that propositions are either: empirical statements about the world, tautological statements whose truth or falsity depends entirely on the definitions of the words involved, or nonsense. One consequence of this system of belief is that it holds that moral statements, while very important, are not “true” or “false” in the same empirical sense that “my apple is red” or “Sir Walter Scott wrote Waverly” are. Rather, moral statements fall into the category of “persuasive defintions.” When I say that slavery is wrong, I’m not making a testable claim. There’s no way you can go out and look at and poke some slaves looking for their wrongness or rightness; you have to bring your own sense of rightness and wrongness to the table.<\/div>\n
I thought the quote at the bottom from A.J. Ayer – arguing that we never really argue about moral standards, but instead argue about facts – was particualrly interesting.<\/p>\n
This may seem, at first sight, to be a very paradoxical assertion. For we certainly do engage in disputes which are ordinarily regarded as disputes about questions of value. But, in all such cases, we find, if we consider the matter closely, that the dispute is not really about a question of value, but about a question of fact….we attempt to show that he is mistaken about the facts of the case. We argue that he has misconceived the agent’s motive: or that he has misjudged the effects of the action, or its probable effects in view of the agent’s knkowledge… or else we employ more general arguments about the effects which actions of a certain type tend to produce, or the qualities which are usually manifested in their performance. We do this in the hope that we have only to get our opponent to agree with us about the nature of the empirical facts for him to adopt the same moral attitude towards them as we do. And as the people with whom we argue have generally received the same moral education as ourselves, and live in the same social order, our expectation is usually justified. But if our opponent happens to have undergone a different process of moral “conditioning” from ourselves, so that, even when he acknowledges all the facts, he still disagrees with us about the moral value of the actions under discussion, then we abandon the attempt to convince him by argument. We say that it is impossible to argue with him because he has a distorted or underdeveloped moral sense. . . in short, we find that argument is possible on moral questions only if some system of values is presupposed.<\/div>\n
Go ahead and read the whole post<\/a>..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every once in a while, I’ll read a discussion of David Hume and think “that’s exactly right, I agree entirely. I should really make some time to read this Hume fellow.” Of course, I never do. Which brings me to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-and-admin-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}