I apologize for the delay. I had written almost an entire post and had to save it in a file because I was in a rush. After that, the computer broke down.
Humans marginally value autonomy over well-being. Humans ought to be provided with autonomy for small sacrifices in well-being. The first sentence would be a fact about human values. The second would be a statement about good and bad actions.
The second would be a moral statement. That's what you meant? And I'll add: the second statement does not logically follow from the first one.
The subject in this case is whomever made the prescriptive statement, not the subject of that prescriptive statement.
Grammatically, no.
Exactly. "A person says..."
These are statements which are made by people. Even though you are pretending that what we are talking about is "women shouldn't be forced to wear burqas" what we are really talking about is "Dani and Harris say women shouldn't be forced to wear burqas." It isn't a matter of forming a descriptive statement from a prescriptive statement. It's that you are attempting to form prescriptive statements by talking a descriptive statement and removing the subject.
Bolding mine.
So:
"Linda says that these are statements which are made by people".
It's your turn now:
"Dani says that Linda says that these are statements which are made by people".
Of course I know any statement is made by someone. I know you made the statement "These are statements which are made by people". Of course when you're describing someone else's statement, the person who made the former statement becomes the subject. So what? I'm giving examples of real statements. Statements such as "Women shouldn't be forced to wear burkas" exist.
Show me an example of a moral statement which doesn't start as a statement about human values from which you have stripped the subject.
"Women shouldn't be forced to wear burkas".
Before you are tempted of adding "Dani says", I'll add:
"Rome is the capital city of Italy".
Of course I'm saying this.
But this isn't relevant. We are not looking for a way to derive axioms or prescriptive statements from which to derive descriptive statements. We don't need axioms or prescriptive statements because descriptive statements can be derived from descriptive statements.
All along people have agreed that whether or not an action is good or bad depends upon human values. That is, the generally acceptable examples given were of the form "if I value the life of my friend, then I ought not to put poison into his drink." What we ought to do depends upon what "value" in placed into the equation. And it seems to have been generally agreed that we can describe what that value is. "John values the life of his friend." And so we can rationally derive statements about what John ought or ought not do.
I made a mistake when I switched from "prescriptive information" to "prescriptive statement" during our debate. The nature of a statement is directly related to its grammatical construction, and in this sense, it is clear that "John values the life of his friend" is a descriptive statement. The examples I've been giving so far work both as prescriptive information and prescriptive statements because they were based on its grammatical construction.
The fact though that John values the life of his friend means that he considers desirable that his friend stays alive. This is the piece of information which is prescriptive.
What do I really mean with this? That "John values the life of his friend" is a descriptive statement which includes some subjective (prescriptive in this case) information given by a subject. The value of his friend's life is given by John.
Where we diverge is that you seem to be claiming that it is not sufficient to derive the statements about what John ought to do from a description of his values.
I hope I clarified that. No, I'm not. But the description of John's values follows from some prescriptive information given by John, which is subjective (John's desire that his friend stays alive).
It is also necessary to go backwards and figure out a way to derive this description of his values from a prescriptive statement. But this is an entirely unnecessary and arbitrary claim. Since we can describe what it is that John values, we do not have to have a way to derive what it is that John values. We can simply measure it directly.
I understand that it's not necessary to derive his values from a prescriptive statement, but a prescriptive statement is useful. Subjects can give us prescriptive information (information about human values if you prefer to put it this way) in more ways than statements.
This is what I mean when I say that you are unnecessarily going back one step. The information which is important and necessary is the description of human values. And we have that information. There is no need to gather information (i.e. prescriptions or axioms), which has been rendered unnecessary.
But human values are subjective. Moral information is prescriptive information. We gather this information in order to make a description of human values.
It is an illusion that these statements you reference are prescriptive. They are really just descriptive statements from which you have stripped the subject.
Bolding mine.
Linda says that they are really just descriptive statements from which I have stripped the subject.
Now I added the subject to your statement: Linda. Do you like it better this way?
You seem to find nonsensical statements such as "Women shouldn't be forced to wear burkas". But the fact is that this statement is logically correct and makes sense. It is not a rational statement, but this is far from meaning it's nonsensical.
It is not rational because it doesn't describe reality. It is a moral statement.
