That nothing is good or bad. Indeed, there is no sense in which "truth" is better than falsity, no reason to prefer moral error theory in virtue of its truth, even if it is true.

It also means there is no sense in which rational inquiry is "good." Arguing in "bad faith" is not "bad," either. There is no reason to engage in conversation or to engage in it fairly.

Ultimately, there is no "good reason," to hold one belief over any other. We should do whatever we want, believe whatever we want. Knocking out practical reason (whose target is the Good), ends up giving you no reason to prefer the fruits of theoretical reason (whose target is Truth). Aesthetic reason, whose target is the Beautiful, is obviously demoted as well.

But then why do we want what we want? When we want something, when we act for its sake, we are pursuing some good. When we smoke a cigarette or have a sandwich, there is some good we seek to derive from there, same as when we help our elderly neighbor shovel snow. But if there is no "good," then these judgements ultimately stand on nothing. They are in error. Everything we do ends up being arbitrary, mechanically driven error.

People like to have moral nihilism without epistemic nihilism, but you cannot knock one leg of reason out and expect it to stand. And in turn since we pursue no determinant "good ends," human freedom vanished into pure potency, "the ability to choose anything," which in turn makes all choice ultimately arbitrary.

>>23618723
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/KarmaQ&A/Section0004.html

Basically no implications. I sincerely doubt anyone actually acts, contrary to their desires, based on some abstract notion of irreducible normaitivity. People act on their desires. Many of which involve the desire to not harm, hurt, or break social conventions.

Do I not steal because I believe there's some sort of platonic "moral fact" that stealing is morally wrong, or do I not steal because it's against the norms of my culture and there are potential punishments for being caught such as social shame etc, plus I don't want to steal from businesses because it harms them, plus it's scary to steal because you might get caught? It's the latter. I don't desire to steal, so I don't (well, actually I occasionally steal). Not because of some irreducibly normative stance-independent fact that it's wrong to steal and so I modify my behavior to align with this fact. Even typing this out you realize how stupid that is. People act on their desires. Most people have at least some altruistic desires, and by consequence society mostly functions.

But my main problem with error theory is its a thesis also about language use - that our moral statements purport to refer to moral truths. I think in very few cases outside the philosophy class this is even true. At most people refer to God's law. Most of the time moral statements are used instrumentally, in the emotivist or prescriptivist sense. At least that's been my impression. You use a moral statement to express an opinion about how bad you think something is, or how you think the world ought be, or command someone not to do something. Very few times I have even heard moral language used in the moral realist sense - as (attempting to) refer to irreducibly normative facts. I think this is mostly an artifical invention of the philosophy classroom. In everyday speak language is instrumental. It is "ready to hand", not "present to hand" as the moral philosopher thinks - divorcing moral statements from their contextual use then analyzing eg "murder is wrong" outside of the context its used in, by the speaker it's used by, and then analyzing the structure of the sentence and making up some gay theory about how the "wrong" in this sentence attempts to refer to an irreducibly normative fact. Why doesn't the philosopher just ask the fucking speaker what he means by it?

>>23618817
People don't do what they do because they are seeking some good? Then why do they act at all?

The divorce of practical and moral reason in the 20th century is a fantastical cope by moral nihilists who realized that claiming that "goodness" is groundless leads to them having to support very stupid claims like "Michael Jordan was a good basketball player" is a proposition with no truth value.

So they try to break out "moral good," as some sort of totally sui generis sort of good that sits outside normative measure. I have never seen a good argument for this repudiation of 2,400 years of thought outside of "well we have to assert this or else any appeal to 'pragmatism' becomes vacuous."

Yet moral good is obviously bound up in normative measure and the human good is bound up in the forms of human society.

At the same time, you see the asinine insistence that "socially constructed" arbitrary. As if norms being socially constructed means they are the sui generis products of human will, springing from the aether uncaused, without any relation to "how the world is." Mathematics is also a social practice. This doesn't make it arbitrary. Even baseball isn't arbitrary, the rules evolve based on the ends people seek in playing the game. People don't play games that aren't fun.

Talk of "objective good," is normally question begging in a way people don't realize. They want "objective " to become a synonym for noumenal, and import their bad metaphysics in through the back door. Take a more sensible view of the objective, e.g. CS Peirce's view or the scholastic realists, and there is no contradiction here. The objective is always relational because non-subsistent being always exists in and is defined by a web of relations.

>>23618723
It isn’t though. J L Mackie worships satan.

>>23618885
Inb4
>"Basketball is a social construct. There can be no objective fact about who is a 'good player.' Lots of people don't like LeBron or Jordan and even say they weren't good."

Of course, throughout history lots of people disagreed about the source of infectious diseases. People still disagree with the germ theory of disease, go check out /sci/ or /x/. They also disagree about the shape of the Earth. Presumably, disagreement here doesn't entail there is no fact of the matter.

The fact is, people's ideas about "facts of the world," have probably changed MORE throughout history than moral norms. So if change over time or disagreement denotes a lack of truth, then this should apply to virtually all truth claims.

And yet facts about social practices can be objective. The rules of chess are objective for instance.

>>23618723
Ethical normativity does indeed seem queer, as Mackie says, but more primitive forms of normativity seem completly fine to me. Kantian ethics (also communicative ethics etc.) can be seen as an attempt to derive more substantial ethical commitments from this pre-ethical normativity. But it's a pluralistic/constructivistic view of morality. I am wondering if an ethical constructivist in this sense can be an error theorist. If so, then I don't think there are any particularily "destructive" consequences for our description of the world or ourselves.

>>23620237
>Ethical normativity does indeed seem queer

Does it? It's ubiquitous and similar to all sorts of other norms that shape our lives. It seems to me that it only seems "queer" because we in the West are raised in a culture that tells us to think it is queer. That is, our default ethics itself relies on the claim that morality is queer, and in turn uses its "groundlessness" to presuppose a sort of ethics where the freedom of the individual is maximized and the goal is to let everyone decide whatever they want as much as is possible without them stepping too much on others toes. It's a sort of bourgeois metaphysics where you can have any opinion you want so long as you don't think your opinions matters too much.

>>23618900
Does seem like Satan worship. Why can't they just accept they worship the king of lies and demons? Why do they need to come up with all this nonsense
Oh because it's more lies and the only thing they like more than lies is more lies especially mass produced for buys and sells, then you can package and distribute even more lies even further

>>23620346
based

>>23618737
Huh? Moral error theory doesn’t imply any of this. You seem to think that morals existing is a precondition for doing this, but that implies that morality has causal efficacy when it doesn’t. Our motivations have causal efficacy and those are conditioned by the world and genetics, not an abstract platonic realm of morals.
>>23618885
Your argument doesn’t work unless you define “good” as what people desire. Then technically some moral statements can be true at the time people are desiring them, but that isn’t the interpretation of moral statements that error theory criticizes. It also doesn’t really accomplish anything in regards to making morals stand on solid ground

>>23618723
Absolutely none.

>>23622260
> precondition for doing this
For doing anything*
Also the Neoplatonist defined desire in that way but their positing of the transcendent “good” as a result doesn’t work unless you think that abstract things have causal efficacy over particular things. It is always the individuals that cause the generals to even come into existence so any argument about the “good” causing people to do things is retarded

>>23618817
Hi Lance.

>>23618737
Without moral absolutes, we might turn towards a more existentialist view where meaning and value are constructed. This doesn't diminish our experiences or the reasons behind our actions; it just recontextualizes them. We will still pursue what feels "good" or "true" or "beautiful" to us personally or culturally, but these pursuits are correctly understood as subjective constructions.

Humans are inherently meaning-making creatures. We find or create reasons for our actions based on personal or societal narratives. Even in the absence of moral facts, we are compelled to action by desires, emotions, and social bonds.

The fact that it is all arbitrary "mechanical driven error", is ultimately an irrelevant factoid, unless your mechanical error chooses it as a compelling driver to action.

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>>23622459

Arbitrariness isn't freedom.

>>23622269
Lance would have wrote a series of 28 posts then made a 6 hour livestream about OPs question lol

You seen this one?:
https://www.lanceindependent.com/p/empty-arguments-and-pointless-formalism

A four line Twitter post gets a fucking dissertation in response LOL the guy is smart be he is a complete autist