No bad faith assumed. I simply noticed you left him out for whatever reason, and I wanted people to see his side as well.
As to the rest, you see that if you define something clearly it is no longer a problem. The word “objective” is never defined clearly by the above folks that I have found (can’t speak for Rand, though), and if it is, it’s something like “universal,” which then becomes acceptable but no longer has the same force. You clearly state that you are deriving an ought from an ought, and that I completely agree with. There is nothing to be resolved here, except that too many people like to use wordplay in an apparent attempt to add extra force to their arguments. That is what I rail against in those threads, and I do stand behind the wordplay charge, though I do not claim that it is deliberate. Hoppe does this, too.
Really? Define “game” in such a way that there would be no problems figuring out if something is a game or not. If you can, was it necessary, or are we able to talk about games without your definition and get along ok?
The problem isn’t definitions, its that the whole explanation put forth by neo-aristotelians is foreign to the logical empiricist approach. You’re essentially talking to someone speaking a different language and asking them to define each word in terms of your language, instead of learning what the word means in their language.
(EDIT): “if you define something clearly it is no longer a problem” - You would never say something like this to a poet, because thats not what poetry is about. Are there problems in poetry that can’t be solved with definitions? Maybe ethics has similar problems?
If that is given to you for argument sake: anytime ethics crosses over to ontology, political science, social science, economics or whatever it has a lot of explaining to do. If ethics speaks of economics it must be an economic entity, fact, and reality within the scope of economic language.
I don’t know how much I subscribe to what I’m saying here, but it seems like there are ways of talking about these things (ontology, economics, etc.) that would suffer from the same problems as ethics does, but we don’t seem to care or notice because we understand the context (we know when something is art and treat it as such). We don’t demand that art speaks of economics economically, but that it only does it as art. Yet we demand ethics speaks of economics economically, ontology ontologically, and so on. We demand science, and when we don’t get it, we truncate ethics down to what can be said scientifically which ends up being only what we started with - economics, ontology, political science, etc.
or perhaps I could show the music score, play a simple melody on the piano, etc - there are many ways to communicate the relevant info.
Anytime I can insert science and you understand it as an accurate picture of things, it is doing its job. I probably couldn’t talk about electron shells when speaking of the practiced art of legal theory in a murder trial.
If one has a problem with ethics, it is it that it has not been shown or communicated in any relevant way, and if it has been communicated it thus far has always been able to be called something else (science, art, grammer, logic, legal theory etc).
Where I think I’m at with this is that on one hand, I’m pretty skeptical that ethics is even capable of standing on its own feet and still have something to say. I can grasp ethical theory on a formal level, but the minute it gets fleshed out with content, it becomes way too metaphysically heavy or ends up describing anthropology or economics.
On the other hand, it seems like thinkers have been too quick to let other topics speak on ethics’ behalf. I don’t see why ethics devolves into either nonsense or some discipline besides ethics, so I remain open that there is some way that it can avoid those paths. Is there something inherent in ethics that makes it unable to be relevant in its own way, or have we just not grasped it yet?
The word “game” is a good example of why not to use everyday terms when discussing things carefully. Define “game” clearly as I presume they do in game theory, and there is no problem. In any case, I was talking specifically about the terms of ethics. If they speak another language and want other people to care, the onus is on them to teach us what they mean by these terms.
I think this can be stated even more strongly: rights are solved problems, period. There is, in fact, no other sense of “rights” and the common practice of applying the word “rights” to dispensations of the Prince and to solved problems leads to unnecessary confusion and equivocation about the social order. The Prince does not grant rights, not because we have rights “from God” but because our rights are not in respect to any one individual, not even the Prince. Our rights are in respect to the social order itself.
Rights emerge from social order. The Prince can merely grant permits, certificates, conveyances, dispensations and indulgences. These are basically just formal promises (of varying reliability) of safe-conduct but they are not rights precisely because they can always be revoked at the Prince’s whim, no matter how vehemently or formally or solemnly he has promised not to do so.
Rights, on the other hand, are unalterable precisely because they are facts about the social order irrespective of how closely the social order approximates a natural order. People have rights in a black market under communist tyranny. If they did not, they would not engage in black market trade. Hence, natural order is a superfluous condition for rights (though one can easily argue that the quality and benefits of rights in a natural order are greater than in any alternative).