The Philochistos 1973 commemorative debate

Con has accused me of "misrepresenting" him (wouldn't "misunderstanding" be more charitable?), and it appears that he has misunderstood me as well. I wonder what the chances are of any voter understanding us both. Con claims that this debate is over what moral statements mean. His position apparently is that statements like, "Stalin is evil" mean "I don't like Stalin" and that statements like "Rape is wrong" mean "I don't like rape." But that is obviously not what we mean when we say somebody is evil or that such and such action is wrong. A person can like rape and still think it's wrong. To say that an action is wrong is to say that people ought not do that action, that people have an obligation to refrain from doing that action, etc. The topic of this debate is whether statements like that refer to a real moral law that people are actually obligated to obey or whether the supposed moral law only exists in our heads. If Con just wants to change the meaning of what "morality" refers to, then he's not even talking about the same thing. A desire is not the same thing as a moral imperative. Neither are feelings the same things are moral imperatives, and moral imperatives are not desire or feelings. The best Con can do is argue that we have moral beliefs that are CAUSED by our desires, feelings, or pragmatic needs, but to claim that our moral beliefs and statemetns are the same things as our desires, feelings, and pragmatic needs is obviously false because these words don't even carry the same meaning. When we say that somebody has violated some rule of decency, we don't mean simply that we don't like their action, that it makes us feel bad, or that it has a negative benefit to society. We mean that it's wrong, they ought not to have done it, and that they have violated some rule. Con hasn't even given us any evidence that moral beliefs stem from desires, feelings, or pragmatic needs. He has simply presented us with a scenario--a story. His "argument" is merely a string of assertions. Remember that Con's position is non-realism. That is, statements about morality don't correspond to anything real in the world but are only the lens through which we see the world. By characterizing his view as "non-realism," he is implicitly agreeing with what I am saying. While we can all agree that desires, motives, feelings, goals, etc., are things that strictly go on in the head, morals are things that, if they existed in the real world, would apply to us whether we had these desires, motives, feelings, goals, etc., or not. That's what it means for them to be "mind-independent." By calling his view "non-realism," Con is implicitly agreeing that our moral language refers to something outside of us, whether it is actually there or not. I simply affirm the obvious, and he denies the obvious. The reason he denies the obvious is because he can cook up a scenario in which the belief emerged in our heads without the corresponding reality outside of our heads. Since there is an imagined evolutionary scenario in which it's possible to get the beliefs without the reality, he thinks it's more parsimonious to just deny the reality. That is why I objected to his argument on the basis that it commits the genetic fallacy. He is essentially arguing that because our beliefs about morality emerged through a process of evolution that therefore the beliefs and perceptions do not correspond to anything real. In fact, our belief in a mind-independent realm of right and wrong is false. The mind-independent nature of morality is implicit in the very meaning of morality. Recall that I explained how the moral law is the law above the civil law. Morality is universally recognized in all times and in all places to be the standard by which all other rules, laws, and imperatives can be judged. It's what people appeal to when their governments are oppressive or when higher authorities abuse their power, etc. It's the law above all laws that cannot be trumped. So the very meaning of morality entails that it is mind-independent. By taking the non-reality position, Con is implicitly agreeing that this is what morality means. So what Con can argue is that our moral beliefs and perceptions do not correspond to anything real, but he cannot argue that morals mean something completely different. If he attributes some other meaning to morality (e.g. feelings, desires, goals, etc.), then he is no longer talking about morality at all. At best, he's only talking about or beliefs or perceptions ABOUT morality. If Con is correct in his unproven story that our moral beliefs were arrived at through a process of evolution, it would not follow that our beliefs about morality only exist in our head and do not correspond to any mind-independent reality. That is the genetic fallacy. If, as I said earlier, evolution tends to produce accurate beliefs (like our belief in the external world or our belief in the uniformity of nature), and if evolution produced a belief in real morals, then if it's true that our moral beliefs are the result of evolution, that is good reason to affirm moral realism, not to deny it. Denying moral realism undermines the reliability of the mechanism by which we came to percieve if, and if that mechanism is evolution, then that throws all of our beliefs into question, which is why Con's view is self-refuting. Con claims invoking God creates problems, but doesn't tell us what those problems are. If God is the supreme sovereign ruler of the universe, and if he imposes obligations on us, then it certainly does follows that there are real moral imperatives because that's what moral imperatives are--the law above all laws. The evidence that Jesus rose from the dead is that his movement, which was messianic, survived his death. No Jew would continue thinking Jesus was the messiah after being killed by the Romans unless they had really good reason to think he was still alive, and all of Jews.