Can You Define Natural Rights as a Meaningful Concept?

[Amanojack]

@Stephen

@"[thefreedictionary

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/emotivism)"]Emotivism: the theory that moral utterances do not have a truth value but express the feelings of the speaker, so that murder is wrong is equivalent to down with murder

@"[thefreedictionary

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/subjectivism)"]Subjectivism: the meta-ethical doctrine that there are no absolute moral values but that these are variable in the same way as taste is

@"[thefreedictionary

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/relativism)"]Relativism: A theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

@"[thefreedictionary

(http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/non-cognitivism)"]Non-cognitivism: the meta-ethical view that moral statements lack truth-value and do not assert propositions. A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that “moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world.”^[1] If moral statements cannot be true, and if one cannot know something that is not true, noncognitivism implies that moral knowledge is impossible

Thanks for posting these definitions.

@Stephen

To the extent that they are different, they are just soft variants of each other.

As for emotivism and non-cognitivism, they are both simplistic and easily disproven as far as universal application goes. Just find anyone who merely intends something different - something besides yay/boo or nonsense - by their moral statements and you’ve disproven both positions. Example: A person who says, “By ‘That’s wrong’ I mean ‘People around here don’t like that’.” Neither emotivism or non-cognitivism applies to such a person.

However, it is surely true that some people sometimes do merely mean “yay/boo” or something non-sensical when they use ethical wording. Or sometimes they mean multiple different things, including but not limited to implications of the legal, religious, consequentialist, group opinionist, or threatening sort. Hence my position on meta-ethics reflects the broad diversity of actual usage senses for these words in the English language at least.

@Stephen

If there is no civilized way of settling disputes according to fair rules, might makes right is the only social norm which prevails, since everybodies claims are just as good as anybody else’s.

What does this have to do with the foregoing?