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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Russell's theory of how 'good' functions is radically incomplete

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Russell's theory can only account for cases where 'X is good' is used by itself to make an assertion
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    • 2.Russell's theory cannot account for the numerous cases where 'X is good' occurs unasserted as a component of a larger sentence
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    • 3.The sentence 'it is always good to contemplate beautiful works of art' cannot generally be construed as an optative when it occurs in an embedded context
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Russell's emotivist account of 'good' cannot explain the validity of mixed inference forms like Geach's 'If hurting people is bad, getting children to hurt people is bad'.
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    • 2.Valid inferences require that terms retain stable semantic content across both asserted and unasserted contexts, which Russell's optative rendering systematically destroys.
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    • 3.Geach's Frege-point demonstration that moral terms in conditionals cannot be mere expressions of attitude is a structural refutation, not merely an extensional counterexample.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Moral predicates embedded in propositional attitude reports like 'John believes that cruelty is bad' require truth-apt content that tracks what John believes, not the speaker's current pro-attitude.
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    • 2.Russell's theory entails that 'John believes cruelty is bad' would misreport John's mental state by substituting the speaker's optative for John's doxastic content.
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    • 3.Hare's recognition that prescriptivism must preserve logical entailments between moral sentences concedes precisely the inferential embedding problem Russell's theory cannot resolve.
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