Ethical foundations of the left

[Ken Hanly]

I am at a total loss. You must mean by "valid" something loose not the
technical sense of logic. What do you mean? Validity I understand as a
property of certain arguments and means that if the premises were true then
the conclusion would necessarily be true also. What does it mean to say the
a moral statement is valid? That there are good reasons for believing it
true? That it is true?
Certainly in ordinary usage "valid" sometimes is used as synonym for "true"
but your criticism of Justin for using "true" would imply that you have some
other meaning in mind. What is it?

    Insofar as what you say makes any sense to me it is something like this:
A moral statement is valid if there is a consensus about it. If we  reach
agreement. Or if those effected by it reach an agreement. And who gets to
decide who counts as being effected? And how do animals fit in? And if there
is no consensus then the principle is not valid? So the principle that no
person ought to held as a slave was not vaid and is not valid as long as one
person who might want to be a slaveowner does not agree?

      I assume you are claiming that we treat norms quite differently than
facts. We say both are true or false and that beliefs about facts and norms
are justified or not. We may disagree about norms more often than facts. I
dont really know. Some facts are easy to come to agreement about but so are
some norms. Is it really difficult to come to an agreement -in most
circumstances- that a person who is clearly innocent of a crime ought not to
be punished. Of course some utiltiarian theorists might claim that there are
sitautions in which innocents ought to be punished, but even those
philosophers would agree that prima facie you ought not to punish innocent
people. On the other hand it is difficult to come to agree about whether
genetically engineered seeds constitute a serious risk to people's health.

      Cheers, Ken Hanly

----- Original Message -----
From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 7:41 PM
Subject: Re: Ethical foundations of the left


> At 08:45 PM 7/23/01 +0000, you wrote:
>
> >I just haven't encountered any reasons I consider decisive to say that
> >moral statements aren't true or false.
>
> Valid or invalid are probably better terms to use than truth or false...it
> would be more appropriate to say that a moral principle holds as valid
> (under specific conditions) than simply to say that it is 'true.' We don't
> need any kind of ultimate justification here, only those effected by
> (through action or lack of action) the principle need reach an
agreement...
> There is substantial difference in the way we treat norms contra 'facts.'
>
> That the earth is round is 'true' regardless of whether or not people
> believe it, as long as the science holds up (I guess) - 'consensus' isn't
> really a criterion of 'truth' in the objectivating sense. However,
> consensus is relevant for validity... (and we only need to spell out the
> [objective] conditions under which a norm could be validated in order to
> articulate a critique of existing affairs).
>
> sorry, I'll be quiet for a while now,
> ken
>