Gertie wrote
I'll say again, I agree conscious experience brings meaning, purpose, value and everything that matters into the world. (Note - the 'absoluteness' of conscious experience needs further clarification as to what sense you claim it is absolute - ontologically irreducible, epistemologically directly known, or what?)
I disagree with your framing that the Is of the qualiative nature of conscious experience must therefore embody morality, be morality. My position is conscious experience only has to be the Is which justifies Oughts.
If you abandon the moral Is/Ought distinction then the lighter is acting immorally when it burns your finger just as the person using it. A coconut falling on your head, the kerb you trip over, the storm which makes you miserable, the covid virus, the taste of tomatoes you hate, etc - all immoral.
Well OK we can talk that way, but why? As an analysis of morality it seems pointless to me, and moreover misses the point, and we'd just have to create new words for Oughts, Moral Duties, Morally Right and Wrong choices and behaviour, to denote a different meaningful agency based moral distinction.
I wonder how amenable you would be to this:
Not new words. New significance. No one is abandoning the is/ought distinction. Is's are facts, ought's are normative. It is painfully important to remember that value is not an object, not something there to observe. As I said to GE Morton, value is simply what we come across when describing an ethical affair. It is an apriority found in the analysis of experience that is not logical but existential. You could say value is and is not an abstraction: It is an abstraction in that it is analytically abstracted from the existence of the self. This is, frankly, a critical matter, goes right to the core of the meaning of our being human. To acknowledge that the self has in its innermost center a meaning foundation that underwrites all of our affairs (for ethics is a name given to relations with others. Value is always already there FOR ethics to even arise) is to say that Existence itself, existence qua existence, is valuative (and hence, ethical, for value is the foundation of ethical possibility). It is valuative here, in this locality I call me, but I am an expression of what existence is. Now consider our entangled ethical affairs. These are to be seen as a stage upon which existence plays out its dramatic possibilities (so to speak) , for keep in mind, if it is not this, then you would have explain some separation of ontologies.
But, this would make all that is IN human existence absolute, after all, even the most insane fantasy "exists". This is where the contingency/absolute distinction plays its part: In existence, it is certainly true that one can produce imagined realities, and these realities must exist in the imagining, for imagining itself is ontologically inseparable from existence, and this is obvious: Homer's Odysseus may not have been a physical person, but imagined people in their being imagined exist. They are not nothing at all. Then: fantasies, call them contingencies, in the same manner that decontextualized out of the concept of a fantasy, Odysseus does exist, at least this is the premise of all narratives, to "suspend disbelief" as we say. Contingencies like fantasies and ordinary facts bound up in language's contexts cannot sring forth true propositions about the world as such; they cannot "say" what existence is doing for existence doesn't really have a context at all. It simply IS. If you want to find out what existence is "saying" (don't take this litterally) you would have discover IN existence something that is absolute, and since all that can be said is contingent (Wittgenstein's principle theme in the Tractatus) there is no possible proposition that can suffice.
Enter value. Wittgenstein, I have mentioned, takes value to be a nonsense term for exactly the reason stated above. But he by no means thought value itself was nonsense; indeed, he called it divinity (see his Culture and Value), the Good, that is, is divinity.
I leave this up to you to ponder, if you are still reading. I hope you see that IF moral realism is accepted, THEN we are in a very, very different world.
Hard to understand that as you sit and ponder, you are existence pondering itself? It is not familiar thinking, granted, and the way that it is stated here, it is only an iceberg's tip, for in the saying this, my words themselves are bound to contingency. I cannot "speak" the world, for language is a contextual system (see, if you are interested, Saussure's Semiotics. Then read Derrida's Chapter on Saussure in his Margins. Hard read, this latter, but it takes to this present issue). So, when I put ethics in language, I am not putting the world in language, and am bound to the same claims about contingency here. But: value-in-the-world "says" one thing very, very clearly: It tells us Do this; Don't do this (putting entirely aside how this gets entangled in the world's affairs). Of course, this is spoken and thus contingent. True, but the normativity dimension of ethics transcends the injunction itself. This needs to be stated again:
the normativity dimension of ethics transcends the injunction itself So, put the flame to your finger. Ask what IS this? as a geologist might ask observing a rock or mineral. This is the way of phenomenology.
