{"id":32,"date":"2005-11-09T01:10:00","date_gmt":"2005-11-09T07:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hugoholbling.org\/heterodoxia\/?p=32"},"modified":"2016-12-07T18:37:53","modified_gmt":"2016-12-08T00:37:53","slug":"why-ethical-judgments-are-nonsensical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/?p=32","title":{"rendered":"Why ethical judgments are nonsensical"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

This brief piece explains why all ethical judgments are essentially nonsense. Since ethical judgments are based on absolute standards, which themselves are independent of all other standards, they are neither rational nor irrational. Therefore ethics as the philosophy of morality is a useless passion, and does not have anything to do with truth or falsehood.<\/p>\n

A clever person may be tempted to ask whether any of the above true.<\/p>\n

No, these statements are issued from the Moebius strip of sense, of meaning, and frames the condition of the possibility of significance, which is at the same time also the condition of the impossibility of sense, and borders sense from nonsense, meaningfulness from meaninglessness.<\/p>\n

Ethical values, such as the meaning of life or happiness, are not empirical values but transcendental ones.<\/p>\n

It is easy to confuse absolute values with relative values, for the latter are “relative” to some other standard: i.e., utility which fulfills some purpose, or beauty which fulfills some aesthetical principle. Yet, all relative values are actually matters of fact in new clothes.<\/p>\n

Absolute values themselves resemble logical truths where the “truth” or “falsity” aren’t conditional, the same way how tautologies arre independent of what is the case. For something to be absolutely so, its truth or falsehood is unconditional, an absolutely valuable state.The reason why ethical judgments are nonsense, that they lack truth values, is because they are not statements that describe reality or some possible state of affairs. If it isn’t a statement describing a possible state of affairs, then it is neither true nor false. If a sentence is neither, then it is nonsense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This brief piece explains why all ethical judgments are essentially nonsense. Since ethical judgments are based on absolute standards, which themselves are independent of all other standards, they are neither rational nor irrational. Therefore ethics as the philosophy of morality is a useless passion, and does not have anything to do with truth or falsehood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[2],"tags":[100,333,126],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1Af2X-w","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1427,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/1427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hyperboreans.com\/heterodoxia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}