Originally Posted by Xei
You haven't defined what a positive claim is. I have a feeling that either the concept is inconsistent, or else a proper definition trivialises the whole thing; but I'll let you respond of course.
To suggest an answer based on the examples you gave though, positive moral statements are all of the form "X is good" or "X is bad". 'Wrong' and 'permissible' are two antonyms. That is to say, synonyms. Contrariwise.
Is that true?
But then it seems that negative moral statements are of the form "X is not good", but then semantically this seems like it should be equivalent to "X is bad", which is a positive moral statement.
I am still trying to figure out what constitutes a positive moral claim myself. Because if it is just a statement which positively attributes a moral quality to some action or thing, then it seems that "that which is not good is bad" is a positive moral claim, being positive in that it is claiming something has the moral attribute of being bad, which under moral error theory would be false. So they are not logically synonymous, though intuition makes us think they are. Still waiting on someone from my uni to get back to me on this (what exactly constitutes a positive moral claim), was trying to see if anyone on Dreamviews had a clue.
I think moral error theory is awesome, so I'm trying to defend it by refuting an objection. Of course, I want to see if there's something wrong with my formulation. The only error I could see is that making positive moral claims about moral terms is somehow different than making positive moral claims about actions and non-moral things, but I can't see any relevant difference besides "one is a moral term and the other is not," and blasting my argument based on that difference alone would be a pretty unfounded blast, more like a squirt.
I also think that "killing babies is wrong" is false, but "I believe killing babies is wrong" is true, granted that is what I actually believe. When I add "I believe" to it, it paints moral claims as a desired state of affairs that I have. But saying "killing babies is wrong" universally, or in general, is false. I will probably make a thread on moral error theory and/or subjective relativism in general once I figure the positive moral claim thing out.
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