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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Moral properties such as goodness cannot be defined in wholly psychological, biological, or sociological terms.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.If goodness could be defined in empirical terms, then moral truths would be psychological, biological, or sociological truths discoverable by empirical research.
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    • 2.For any proposed empirical definition of goodness, it remains an open question whether the thing possessing that empirical property is actually good.
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    • 3.If a definition were correct, it would not be an open question whether the defined property applies — the question would be settled by the definition itself.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Any proposed reduction of 'good' to a natural property N permits coherent assertion of 'x is N but is x good?' without logical contradiction.
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    • 2.G.E. Moore's isolation test shows that if goodness were identical to pleasure, 'a world with only pleasure but no goodness' would be incoherent — yet it is not.
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    • 3.Logical non-contradiction under substitution is a necessary condition for genuine definitional identity, so goodness and any natural property remain distinct.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Normative authority — the capacity of moral facts to genuinely bind agents — cannot be derived from descriptive facts about psychology or biology alone without illicit ought-from-is inference.
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    • 2.Hume's is-ought gap establishes that no set of purely empirical premises entails a normative conclusion without a suppressed normative premise.
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    • 3.If goodness were wholly empirical, moral obligations would reduce to statistical or causal regularities, which lack the categorical binding force Kant and intuitionists alike recognize as constitutive of morality.
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