does that help?
Yes, your post did help. Not to be taken in a sarcastic way, but it showed what problems you are having and so where the miscommunication lies.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but (1) describes what I take to be your position, while my position is more in agreement with (2).
You are wrong, but believe me I can see where what I said looks a lot like 1. The first thing you have to realize is that there is a difference between meta-ethics and ethics.
My meta-ethical position looks very close to 1, but it is not my ethical (moral) system. My moral system is like 2, but has a totally different base. You would be correct that I cannot argue against your moral system using my own (indeed that is what I am arguing), but I can argue against the validity of your moral system's meta ethical assumptions using a meta-ethical argument.
Before I unpack this let me say I was not exactly satisfied with the description of normative morality. It was a bit ethnocentric itself with lines like...
Those people who claim that there is a universal morality claim that it is a code of conduct that all rational persons would put forward for governing the behavior of all moral agents.
No one thinks it is morally justified to cheat, deceive, injure, or kill simply in order to gain sufficient money to take a fantastic vacation. In the vast majority of moral situations, given agreement on the facts, no one disagrees, but for this very reason, these situations are never discussed. Thus, the overwhelming agreement on most moral matters is often overlooked.
For a better, and certainly more concise, discussion, I would point to Wikipedia's entries on morality and ethics.
From
Ethics...
In analytic philosophy, ethics is traditionally divided into three fields: Metaethics, Normative ethics (including value theory and the theory of conduct) and applied ethics — which is seen to be derived, top-down, from normative and thus meta-ethics.
Metaethics is the investigation of the nature of ethical statements. It involves such questions as: Are ethical claims truth-apt, i.e., capable of being true or false, or are they, for example, expressions of emotion (see cognitivism and non-cognitivism)? If they are truth-apt, are they ever true? If they are ever true, what is the nature of the facts that they express? And are they ever true absolutely (see moral absolutism), or always only relative to some individual, society, or culture? (See moral relativism, cultural relativism.) Metaethics is one of the most important fields in philosophy.
Much of my criticisms were aimed at your assumptions, which as you see above are more metaethical in nature. For example you statement that all human interaction is guided by morality, is a metaethical conclusion. I am not assuming my moral system is correct in order to attack that assertion.
Universalizability as a criteria is also a meta ethical assumption, which I have attacked from outside my ethical system... dealing with concrete logic of meta-ethics as it moves to create an ethical system.
Normative ethics bridges the gap between metaethics and applied ethics. It is the attempt to arrive at practical moral standards that tell us right from wrong, and how to live moral lives. This may involve articulating the good habits that we should acquire, the duties that we should follow, or the consequences of our behavior on others.
I would sort of dispute the language here, but it is fair enough given the following break down (where you will see my own system categorized as "normative")...
One branch of normative ethics is theory of conduct; this is the study of right and wrong, of obligation and permissions, of duty, of what is above and beyond the call of duty, and of what is so wrong as to be evil. Theories of conduct propose standards of morality, or moral codes or rules. For example, the following would be the sort of rules that a theory of conduct would discuss...): "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
Another branch of normative ethics is theory of value; this looks at what things are deemed to be valuable. Suppose we have decided that certain things are intrinsically good, or are more valuable than other things that are also intrinsically good. Given this, the next big question is what would this imply about how we should live our lives?
Thus from the above you can see the two types of systems I was discussing and how things like the golden rule are not universal in concept, or acceptance. Some systems are not rules regarding action.
Descriptive morality (using the new definitions we are now looking at) is something more subtle...
Some philosophers rely on descriptive ethics and choices made and unchallenged by a society or culture to derive categories, which typically vary by context. This leads to situational ethics and situated ethics. These philosophers often view aesthetics and etiquette and arbitration as more fundamental, percolating 'bottom up' to imply, rather than explicitly state, theories of value or of conduct. In these views ethics is not derived from a top-down a priori "philosophy" (many would reject that word) but rather is strictly derived from observations of actual choices made in practice:
There is definitely a difference between descriptive and value (or virtue) ethics. I suppose my own my be straddling between the two, but is less contextual than purely descriptive systems require. That is I have a view of how to define a virtue, and while the context of an action may make it "just" or "unjust", the context will not change my definition of virtue... though as a subjectivist I can see how some societies WILL define a virtue differently based on context.
Hahahaha... as a subjectivist I am a mete-ethically opposed to absolutism and so often behave as a descriptive ethicist. Yet I do feel, personally, that virtue ethics fits my world view and so I champion it and explore it for myself. I don't go so far as to say others SHOULD adopt it, but I like it and find it more natural to work with.
Wiki's
Descriptive Ethics page manages to muddy the waters a bit as it seems to have a conflict with the main ethics page on the nature of value ethics. Here are the important points...
Descriptive ethics deal with what the population actually believes to be right and wrong, and holds up as ideals or condemns or punishes in law or politics, as contrasted to normative ethics which deals with what the population should believe to be right and wrong, and such concepts as sin and evil. Society is usually balancing the two in some way, and sociology and social psychology are often concerned with the balance, and more clinical assessments and instruments to determine ethical attitudes.
Value theory can be either normative or descriptive but is usually descriptive.
That last sentence sets things back some. But not completely when one takes a look at the history of philosophy and where Virtue Ethics played a role, as well as how it has faded in use. As it fades it will look more like a descriptive system, that a normative one.
Here are quotes from Wiki's
Virtue Ethics page...
In philosophy, the phrase virtue ethics refers to ethical systems that focus primarily on what sort of person one should try to be. Thus, one of the aims of virtue ethics is to offer an account of the sort of characteristics a virtuous person has.
I think the second sentence is more accurate than the first, but I won't challenge it.
The methods of virtue ethics are in contrast to the dominant methods in ethical philosophy, which focus on actions.For example, both Kantian and utilitarian systems try to provide guiding principles for actions that allow a person to decide how to behave in any given situation.
Virtue ethics, by contrast, focuses on what makes a good person, rather than what makes a good action.
Like much of the Western tradition, virtue ethics seems to have originated in ancient Greek philosophy. Discussion of what were known as the Four Cardinal Virtues - prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance - can be found in Plato's Symposium
Actually I want to thank you as looking this stuff up has not only gotten me back into the "official" lingo associated with this stuff, but pointed me to Aristotle's virtue system. The Wiki entry discusses that as an example and I found it very helpful in contrasting it with mine as a form of solution to certain problems I was having. I was using a traditional version with virtue-vice with a "golden mean" reminder, but his contains vice-virtue-vice such that the golden mean is incorporated within the label range.
But back to the issue at hand, we can see above where it began and Wiki mentions some nonwestern virtue systems as well, but what became of it is more telling...
Although some enlightenment philosophers (e.g. Hume) continued to emphasize the virtues, with the ascendancy of utilitarianism and deontology, virtue ethics moved to the margins of western philosophy. The contemporary revival of virtue ethics is frequently traced to the philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe's 1958 essay, Modern Moral Philosophy and to Philippa Foot, who published a collection of essays in 1978 entitled Virtues and Vices.
It was utilitarianism (a teleological system) and deontological systems which have risen through the 1800's and indeed seem to be cresting again, which push virtue systems from the public eye.
My personal feeling is because those other systems give one the gratification of playing God and stating one's system is absolute, or SHOULD be followed.
I hope you have seen from these quotes that your original classification, which held your system separate from religious dogma based systems, was not accurate at all. Both of them are normative "conduct" systems. The fact that they have certain a priori meta ethical beliefs you do not share, does not make them less the same.
My position is that all normative systems fail as "true", though they may have "use", but even that cannot be appealed to as being "better". The only reason for telling others they "should" accept one's own system, or recognize it as objectively better, is an insecurity in one's position as a subjective entity. People want to believe they are capable of moral knowledge, and so construct fictional arguments to perpetuate that myth and so extend their comforting illusion.
This is a meta-ethical argument against moral systems, and particularly the meta-ethical stance of absolutism and the ability to compare systems as "better" or "worse" in some objective fashion.
If we want to discuss my personal enjoyment of the virtue system, how it is more natural (that is more fluid) to the human condition, or less part of the "self-delusion of righteousness in action" moral drama going on, we can discuss that, but we don't have to.
In the end I think my points have been made. Human action is clearly not based on moral systems, neither is there a particular set of agreed upon, or "objective", standards regarding morality. Your system is normative and of the same type ("conduct") as those of religious moralists, which differ from those like mine which are "value" systems. Value systems will seem immoral or amoral to conduct systems, yet they do function.
I hope my sticking with this has helped.
holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)
™ Version 4.2
