Terrapin Station wrote: ↑October 14th, 2020, 9:39 am
Jack D Ripper wrote: ↑October 13th, 2020, 9:05 pm
When people talk of personal preferences, like preferring chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream, they do not generally reasonably expect agreement among most people. But when they say that they believe it is wrong to take a bunch of people who have not committed any crimes, and gas them in a manner that kills them, they do reasonably expect general agreement.
You write as if everyone were a subjectivist with regard to morals. Not everyone agrees with that, and even among those who do, there are many generally agreed upon matters, like the example above.
And doing that is not committing an argumentum ad populum. When I expect that most people do not believe that it is right to take a bunch of people who have not committed any crimes, and gas them in a manner that kills them, I am basing that on experience of dealing with people. The simple fact is, most of the people who I have spoken with on this type of thing agree. Furthermore, all of the reading I have done of other people doing research on this, or merely dealing with personal experience, also agree on this point.
You might as well tell me, that when I say person X is the most popular person, I am committing an argumentum ad populum. Of course, that is not the case at all, as what I am saying is that X is more popular than others, not that the person OUGHT to be more popular. Likewise, when I say that certain principles are generally accepted, that is a matter of fact. If I were to say that therefore they OUGHT to be generally accepted, then I would be committing a fallacy (unless I had something else to support that conclusion). But that is not what I am saying at all.
First, you're overlooking something that I said: "They're not going to mean that per consensus assessments the next door neighbor or Bob is a good person,
even though the consensus differs from their personal evaluation."
Now, the consensus might not differ from their person evaluation. But often it does.
This isn't a matter of the person having subjectivist versus objectivist views on the metaethics or the ontology of ethics. The above works just the same way regardless of their ontological views. If they're objectivists, they're going to give their personal evaluation
which they believe they happen to have right per how the world independently is, where the consensus has it wrong. If they're subjectivists, they're going to think that they simply feel differently than other folks. In either case, they're giving their personal evaluation, NOT a consensus evaluation that they might disagree with.
The argumentum ad populum occurs when we say that we're deferring to the popular view in something like a criticism of omnibenevolence,
because it's the popular view. (Remember the context of our comments.)
By the way, while not everyone is a subjectivist on metaethics, obviously, the subjectivists have right what the world is like. The objectivists are mistaken. There are no person/mind-independent moral stances.
After I was done with this site for the night, I regretted what I wrote almost immediately. Not because I thought it was wrong, but because it is unimportant to the task at hand. It does not matter, for the purposes of this discussion, what the correct view of ethics is. (And that would be better discussed in the ethics section of this site instead of the religion section of this site.)
What I should have stated is something like this:
You seem to be taking a straight up subjectivist approach to ethics. Thus, with:
1)
S says, "X is good."
where "S" is something that can make an affirmation, like a human, an alien being like those seen on science fiction shows (if such a being were real), a talking dog like Mr. Peabody (from the old
Rocky and Bullwinkle show, if he were real), an angel (If real), a god (if real), etc., and where X is anything that would make a meaningful sentence, like "freedom from pain", "torturing small children with flaming hot pincers", etc.
The straight subjectivist approach, based on 1 above, is to affirm:
2)
S likes X.
And that is the full significance of 1, on the subjectivist interpretation.
Now, what that means is that, if that view is correct, the statement "X is good" within 1 is not really about X, but is about S. It is about what S likes. So that the true subject of what is being said is S, which is more clearly indicated with 2, because with 2 the grammatical subject is what the statement is about.
Now, how this relates to the opening post is that with the statement:
3)
God is good.
That is supposed to be telling you something about God. But, on the subjectivist interpretation, it is not. It is telling you about whoever it is who says "God is good." In the opening post, the statement about God's goodness is supposed to be about God. If the idea of "goodness" as a property of a thing is wrong or incoherent, then the description in the opening post is wrong or incoherent. And if that is the case, then the God of the opening post simply does not exist, because nothing has that property of goodness that is being affirmed about God in that description.
So we don't even have to think about omnipotence or omniscience or about evil (which, of course, on the straight subjectivist interpretation, evil is also not a property of a thing, but a feeling about the thing, just like good). Because, on the subjectivist interpretation of "good", there is no God as described in the opening post because goodness is not a property of a thing.
If it is clearer, what is meant by "God is good" is:
4)
God has a property [of goodness].
When religious people tell you that "God is good", haven't you gotten the impression that they mean to be saying something about God, rather than just saying that they like God? That God being good is a selling point of the religion, that is supposed to make you like God, too, because of this property of "goodness" that God allegedly has? This is quite different from someone telling you that they like chocolate ice cream more than vanilla ice cream, because that is not something that is supposed to make you prefer chocolate, though someone might want you to try it, thinking that your tastes may be similar. Sometimes, of course, someone jokingly says that it is wrong to eat vanilla ice cream and that it is only right and proper to eat chocolate ice cream, often as a way of trying to emphasize their love of chocolate ice cream.
But we need not pursue that here; the point is, the description in the opening post is supposed to be about God, certainly not about how I feel about God. If goodness isn't a property of a thing, then the description is inaccurate, which is to say, no such thing exists.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence." - David Hume