Ian Murray wrote:
>
>
> =========
> If there's no moral order, betrayal, itself loaded with moral
> connotations, is meaningless.
>
When I wrote that sentence I already had in my mind these various responses to it!
:-)
This assumption that any word of approbation or approval is necessarily a moral proposition referring to a "moral order" is merely itself a manifestation of the power of moralism. But while Gordon (on lbo-talk) was probably being facetious in his references to god in his response, he should have been deadly serious. Any conception of a "moral order" (aside from principles of unity forged within ever-changing human relations -- Yoshie's history) any assertion of a "moral order" is either religious or incoherent. Rob refers to Kant, but this is silly. Russell said the last word here. Quoting Kant saying that reading Hume woke him from his dogmatic slumbers, Russell comments that Kant soon found ways to put himself back to sleep.
The logical positivists and their followers were perfectly correct in claiming that (pure) value propositions had no cognitive content. But they failed to realize that (pure) factual statements were just as empty.
Now someone responding to this post can generate one or more propositions which are "pure" statements of fact -- but those statements will have no existence independently of the post they appear in. And that post will be asserting a proposition (in which there is no separation of fact/value) about the importance for human understanding of the kind of pseudo-propositions ('purely factual propositions') which the real proposition (the post as a whole) incorporates.
The same with any "pure value" proposition which someone will offer as an example. Such pure propositions are never seriously offered except in a meta-discourse, a discourse about discourse about discourse. In the act of 'valuing' a particular person at a particular time under particular conditions as an 'end' in herself no one first lays down some purely factual proposition about her being a member of the species homo sapiens, then quotes Kant, then and so forth. Rob may deceive himself into thinking his Kantianism actually describes his methods of making judgment.
Carrol