Roderick Long just linked to a post by another philosopher who deconstructed Danny and Vichy's discussion of moral fictionalism

Kind of an interesting read.

Haha it's Roman Pearah. He's a good guy, and very intelligent. I haven't read enough of Roderick's stuff to be able to completely understand how his objections are supposed to work, so I'll reserve comment until I've read the pieces Roman links in his critique. I'm definitely glad he decided to chime in, though; he tends to come from a different direction than I do, which makes for a great dialogue.

I haven't read enough of Roderick's stuff to be able to completely understand how his objections are supposed to work
Eudaemonia is simple bio-psycho nonsense, in my opinion. It seems like a category error to make those sorts of claims as products of deductive reasoning. It ignores subject variance, and takes up so many absurd positions it's hard to list them all.

Virtue ethics, at their best, are decent personal psychology. Usually, they're just some douchebag schilling his favourite brand of Duty.

the title of this thread would be so much funnier if there had been a comma after 'that'.






(hope I'm being grammatically correct here)
anyhoo, good work Danny! (and, secondarily, Vichy)

Here.

This is its first appearance, I'm sure, but "a spanking danny" really is a fantastic expression. It sounds like some kind of Irish slang. But rather than having it refer to a strapping young lad (which, itself, is an idiomatic expression), I think it should refer to a young philosopher who is horribly mistaken about meta-ethics

Spanking Danny simply will not stand. I'll leave it to you guys to determine what I mean by that statement.

Phlogiston, I'm not sure I agree with the normative relativism you seem to be led to here, but I do think that there is room for reasonable pluralism about ethics; this wouldn't be true if realism were correct.

I just go back to the classic illustration of the Hindus and the cows: most of the time when we disagree about ethics, it's because we disagree about the facts, and not the actual moral truths. If we believed that the immortal souls of our ancestors were within our cows, we might well feel similarly about killing them as the Hindus do. It's just that we don't believe that such a description of the nature of cows is true.

But I'm not sure that all moral disagreements are due to disagreements about facts, particularly when it comes to priority principles for weighing different ethical considerations. Reasonable pluralism seems like it works here.

This is all predicated, of course, on the idea that we allow ourselves to slip into the fiction of moralism. If we don't, I think things get much more confusing than it's worth, and we ultimately end up rebelling against ourselves. But I think I've beaten that horse to death enough, and I'd really sooner give this issue a rest.