u/JohnMcCarty420

Alex denies the correspondence theory of truth in favor of the deflationary theory, and whenever I've heard his reasoning for this it's been this one specific argument. The premise is that whether you say "The sky is blue" or "It's true that the sky is blue", there is no difference in the meaning of the statement. And since you can remove the "it's true" part without changing the meaning, he concludes that truth must not be a very meaningful concept.

The thing is, while those two sentences do in fact mean the same thing, that's because the concept of truth was already implicitly involved in the statement "The sky is blue". Putting "it's true" at the beginning merely makes that more explicit in the wording, but doesn't change the underlying semantics at all and is ultimately redundant. The word "is" already contained the idea of it being true, and if you thought it was false then you would say "isn't" instead.

Once you take this into account, the conclusion doesn't actually follow. Nothing about these two sentences meaning the same thing indicates that the concept of truth is any less real, meaningful, or objective.

This was a long discussion that kind of went all over the place, but I'm going to focus in on what I consider to be the most key points and give my take on it as someone who aligns with Sam's perspective.

>Aren't we just talking about people's preferences?

Alex made this point repeatedly, and in a Q&A video after the fact he stated this as his main reason for not being convinced by Sam's argument. There's one thing Sam said that best captures why this is missing the mark: We can make objectively correct and incorrect statements about subjective experiences.

Alex seems to be misunderstanding where the goal posts are with regards to objective truth, and assuming that if we're talking about people's subjectivity that the truth value of those statements must be subjective, but that's not how it works. Alex and Sam agree that the feelings of beings are central to what morality is about, but Sam is saying that it's an objective fact whether a given being at a given point in time feels good or bad. It's also an objective fact whether something will cause them to feel good or bad, and these facts are independent of what a person stating them might feel or think about them.

>Moral statements equate to yay and boo, which do not contain any truth value.

Let's assume for a moment emotivism is correct about moral statements equating to yay and boo. While it's true linguistically that we don't respond to these words by saying "correct" or "incorrect", I honestly think there is a kind of slight of hand going on here, even if unintentionally. Because, while that is how they work as a linguistic construction, I don't think that's accurate to the underlying semantics. Saying yay expresses something, something like "I like that!" or "I approve of that!", which are both true or false statements about you.

So, the actual meaning of words like yay and boo does have truth value regardless of their status in our language, and it's the meaning that emotivism claims is equivalent with moral terminology. Of course, emotivism still entails that our personal feelings are the only thing we're stating with moral claims, which is very different from the picture Sam is painting, I just wanted to be clear that even emotivism can't claim to be devoid of any kind of truth.

>Why ought I care about the suffering of others?

Alex creates the hypothetical of a weapons manufacturer to get this point across, that there are at least possible instances of a person whose wellbeing runs contrary to the wellbeing of humanity as a whole. This is one place where I don't entirely agree with how Sam responded, because he kept trying to justify the idea that this person's life would in fact be worse as a result of being a morally bad actor. And while I do think there are lots of good reasons one can give as to why someone's life is likely to be worse, or at least could be better, if they behave in a morally bad way, I think Alex is right to point out that you can always control for the hypothetical in such a way that you can't argue for that anymore (such as adding that they're a sadist and whatnot).

The thing is, I don't think anything actually hinges on this point. It might matter slightly to our ability to convince people to be moral that there are highly specific fringe cases where a person will be personally better off doing the morally wrong thing, but it doesn't matter whatsoever to the claim Sam is making about objective moral truth. Because, the ability for someone to not care about something doesn't diminish its truth value. If I don't care at all about math, if I choose not to understand it or incorporate that understanding into my life, it is still just as objectively true to say that 2+2=4.

And under utilitarianism, "X is morally wrong" will still be objectively true or false regardless of whether that deters you from doing X or not, because we're arguing that the definition of "morally wrong" is what leads to worse experiences on the whole, and that includes a lot more than just you personally. Let's say X is good for you, so you do it, but it increases the average suffering in the world. X would still be morally wrong under a utilitarian definition of the words. If you are unable to be convinced to care about doing the morally right thing, that says nothing about the semantics of the phrase "morally right". The universe will never force you to care about anything.

Ought means that something will bring about a good outcome, but it holds different applications because there is always the question: Better outcome for who? If the word "ought" in Alex's question is referring to what will make his life specifically better, then that doesn't align with the moral application of ought under utilitarianism, and a utilitarian doesn't have to argue that someone ought to care about the suffering of others in that sense. If the "ought" is going to mean the utilitarian application (what will make lives better across all beings) then it becomes definitionally true that one ought to care about the suffering of others.

>Utilitarianism vs. Emotivism: Whose feelings are relevant to moral statements?

This is the final piece of the puzzle, they sort of danced around it but unfortunately its something they never truly addressed. The closest the discussion got was when Sam decided to put his views in emotivist terms and talk about which actions will lead to more "yums" or more "boos". What this highlights is that Alex and Sam's perspectives are the same in an important way, they agree that moral good and bad relate to people feeling good or bad. The key difference is simply: who?

Emotivism argues that if I say it's morally good to give to charity I'm effectively saying "Yay charity!" (which, as I covered earlier, carries the same meaning as "I like charity!"). So what makes it good is the positive effect on me when I see someone giving to charity or I think about the concept of charity. When defined this way, it is of course an opinion as it's all relative to the feelings of the speaker.

Utilitarianism argues that if I say it's morally good to give to charity, I'm claiming that giving to charity will increase the average wellbeing in the world (or decrease the average suffering). So what makes it good is that it has a positive effect on everyone who benefits from the charity. When defined this way, it's an objective fact that will be true or false regardless of what the speaker thinks or feels about it.

>What resolves this disagreement?

The important question this all comes down to is this: Which of these ways of defining moral language makes more sense? I would argue strongly that given the context in which we make moral statements, as well as the justification and purpose for them, the utilitarian one does. To demonstrate this, lets suppose someone asks you "Can lying ever be morally right?". What information are they more likely to be trying to get from you: The situations in which you would enjoy someone lying? Or the situations where lying would have more positive effects than negative ones for everyone affected by the lie? And which way would you be more likely to justify your answer?

To me it seems clear that those who are affected by the action are whose feelings matter to the morality of the action, not the feelings of whoever happens to be the speaker. But I would love to hear from opposing perspectives on this, emotivist or otherwise, if you think my reasoning has any errors. Thanks for reading.