Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

NB: this is a live blog, in that I comment on a book while reading it. This need not be the last word. Blackburn tries to do two things. First, he wants to explain how “certain features of reality” are best thought of as “reflections of our subjective responses to a world which should not [...]

Emotivism seems to come with unpleasant mind-dependence of the rightness and wrongness of things which, it would appear, are more appropriately treated as objective. Now it is part of the definition of emotivism that X is wrong if and only if my expressed sentiment is “I disapprove of X” (and right if it is “I [...]

You know the stories in which humanity dies out and which describe the adventures of those few who remain? (The Day of the Triffids and Waterworld come to mind.) For example, it is an interesting question whether all the stuff on the shelves in stores right now in the city of Kent, OH can feed [...]

I say yes, for the following reasons.

Or, at least, some of them.

Are emotivists allowed to have reasons for their sentiments, or are their booing and hooraying merely spontaneous expressions of the perfectly arbitrary feelings they happen to feel at the moment of expression? Update. Yes, an emotivist can reason as follows: H![utilitarianism] murder is prohibited by rule utilitarianism Therefore, B![murder]

The main job of politicians and government officials of all kinds is to deceive the public. Therefore, do not bother listening to what they are saying. What they are saying is almost always a lie. Instead, watch what they do: what legislation they introduce, how they vote, whom they imprison and kill, whom they rip [...]

Supervenience of moral on natural properties is a kind of conceptual consistency. If a state of affairs a can be described by natural properties N and is evaluated morally as M, then any state of affairs b, if it is also described by N, must also be evaluated to M. In other words, supervenience is [...]

According to Miller, emotivism differs from (moral) subjectivism. When a subjectivist says: “Murder is wrong,” he might mean (a) “I hate/disapprove of murder.” It’s a proposition, a report of his own attitude. But when an emotivist says: “Murder is wrong,” he means: “Murder, boo!” which is not a proposition, has no truth value, and is [...]

Here is one argument that I think fails against emotivism. The claim is that an emotivist can make no sense of the following valid and reasonable deduction: (1) Murder is wrong. (2) If murder is wrong, then getting your little brother to murder people is wrong. Therefore: (3) Getting your little brother to murder people [...]

Isn’t it odd that Israel is pretty much the only nation in the world, whose neighbors deny it the right to exist?! I mean, rocks and trees have a “right to exist,” so why not Jews? Could it be because Jews think of themselves as special and privileged, and other people find that annoying? Look, [...]

Emotivism, it is argued, projects judgments onto the world, creating fictional, though taken seriously, properties. Thus, torturing the cat is not really wrong; the wrongness of this is “just a projection of our discomfiture or horror” or, in Hume’s words, “gilding and staining all natural objects with the colors borrowed from internal sentiment.” Now with [...]

Based on that, I suppose we have to learn in life not to kill the things we love and not to hate the things we help.

Suppose now that we don’t want to appeal to Zeus’ simplicity to prove its pure actuality. So, suppose that Zeus embodies in itself both act and potency; moreover it is the former or creator of everything that is not-Zeus. Is this situation possible? Clearly, if Zeus’ potentiality cannot be actualized, then it may as well [...]

We see in the world things with a mixture of actuality and potentiality. Things are what they are, and being a particular thing carries with it (1) the power to endure and to resist assaults by other things, as well as (2) various powers to influence other things. On the other hand, insofar as nothing [...]

A respondent commented that she “waited for Jesus to take away [her] bad thoughts. Never worked.” But neither the Catholic liturgy, nor prayer, nor good works are magical rites that will purify your soul. It’s simply not the case that taking communion will necessarily have positive psychological effects. It might but only for those people [...]

Moore argument, as interpreted by Miller, is that if “good” is identical to some naturalistic N, then the question “Is an x which is N also good?” will be vacuous. Of course it is, because it is part of the meaning of x’s being N that x is also at the same time good! But [...]

is one in which “all possible grades of existence will actually exist,” says James Chastek. “The universe will be a complete whole with nothing left out.” There is nothing to add, that is, in between plants and animals, animals and men, men and angels, angels and God, etc. In other words, if God were to [...]

The “moral law within,” though self-imposed, is neither arbitrary, so you must not bind yourself to nonsense, nor such as to make unbinding yourself costless.

The claim here is that moral judgments have no truth values but are rather imperatives or commands, such as “Do not kill!” or “Keep your promises!” Now forgive me if I am missing something, but while it’s true that commands are neither true nor false, they have instead a different property: they surely are either [...]