Comments Elsewhere

Medium: ‘“Moral facts” sound like something of an oxymoron.’

It’s only an oxymoron if you presuppose that the fact-value distinction to both real and unbridgeable. But a lof of philosophers don’t presuppose this anymore (and very few did, up until at least the mid-18th century). Note that appealing to the is-ought problem won’t help you out here: moral realists can accept the problem while denying that it’s equivalent to the fact-value distinction; the philosopher would just have to hold that modal statements using “ought” assert facts, but the facts they assert have at least some irreducible normative or teleological content. One such philosopher was Aristotle, who believed all of ethics to be founded in natural facts and also wrote the first known expression of the “is-ought” problem in the Nicomachean Ethics 1144a.

That said, I agree with you that David Irving shouldn’t be imprisoned just for being a dishonest sack of vomit. That’s a bad thing to be, but it’s not a crime.

Patrick, I’m inclined to agree with you about moral and non-moral facts of equal complexity when the facts are complex (I’m more confident in my knowledge of various facts about the Krebs cycle than I am in my knowledge of any number of thorny casuistical questions, for example.) But I’m not so sure about “simple” facts. “It’s wrong to burn a cat alive just for the fun of it” seems at least as certain to me — I am at least as confident of it — as I am “there’s a book on this table.” Of course, I’m completely confident in both beliefs, but I can at least imagine error-possibilities for the book-belief (possibilities which are outlandish, or simply idle, but at least coherent), whereas I cannot even imagine anything that would convince me that I’m wrong about sadistic cat-burning. The book-belief is certain beyond any reasonable doubt, but the cat-burning-belief is apodictically certain; I couldn’t give it up without simply giving up on morality as such.