you need a far stronger argument than what you’ve presented here to establish that deontic modal contexts are extensional. consider one of the standard sorts of counterexamples to deontic extensionality. if, as a matter of fact about the actual world, “person who ate a prime number of green M&Ms” and “person who was murdered with an icepick to the forehead“ were coextensive, it would nonetheless be true both that (1) one is obligated to not murder someone with an icepick to the forehead and (2) one is NOT obligated to prevent someone from eating a prime number of green m&ms.
I think the example doesn't quite work as formulated.
It seems perfectly fine to say that (1) and (2) differ in truth value, because they are not coextensional. The action of killing someone with an ice pick and the action of eating a prime number of green m&ms do not have the same extension--only "the person who did (1)" and "the person who did (2)" do, and it seems clear that we can infer from "the person who did (1) acted wrongly" to "the person who did (2) acted wrongly."
But we can maybe change the example to be coextensional. Perhaps the only time someone was murdered on a sunday was by someone putting poisoned green M&Ms in their coffee--and this was also the only time anyone put M&Ms in anyone's coffee. It seems we should then be able to infer from "it is wrong to murder someone on a sunday" to "it is wrong to put M&Ms in someone's coffee," which seems equally wrong.
I was thinking about this a bit more and I think I get Pete’s point (maybe not though, don’t want to speak for him!)
You might think of actions as having an extension. If you do, then the extension of the action will (presumably) be the people who perform the action, or maybe the instances an action is performed. Either work for the example.
I guess I’m still not quite sure what the inference is supposed to be for your case. The extension of ‘murdering someone on a Sunday’ (the action?) is the same as the extension of ‘putting M&M’s in someone’s coffee.’ Is that right? And then the idea is that the extension of an action would be every occurrence of that action? Just want to make sure I get the idea.
Also, as an aside, I think there is a way to sidestep this issue. Anti-realists about obligation are *typically* anti-realists about axiology. Take the sentential operator “it is good that.” “It is good that” turns extensional sentences into extensional sentences. If “it is good that platypi live in New York” then “it is good that egg laying billed mammals live in New York.” “It is good that” is entirely unlike traditional examples of sentential operators which always transmute the relevant sentence into an intensional one, e.g. “it is necessary that.”
Obviously, on some moral theories, obligation and the good run perfectly together. Maybe this ends up being a problem for those views, but the point is that as far as anti-realism goes, you can run this critique with the axiological, sentential operator “it is good that” and avoid some of this fuzziness.
Take your example and suppose the murdered man is named Jon. Is it so strange to say “It is bad that someone murdered Jon” entails “It is bad that someone put green M&Ms in Jon’s coffee” if Jon was murdered by the M&Ms? I don’t think so. The M&Ms were poisoned! It was bad that he ate them! It would have been better if he hadn’t.
Anyway, I’m puzzling over how to deal with the obligation issue but I’m wondering if this axiological move just sidesteps the need for it.
You are talking here about an "it is good that..." operator, but axiological claims more typically take the form "it is good if..." While the former operator is plausibly extensional, the latter carries implications of necessity and thus is intensional.
Fair, but I think when we make axiological comparisons we’ll often say ‘so and so state is bad, such and such state is good, so such and such is better than so and so’ and the ‘is good’ and ‘is bad’ imply an ‘it is good that’ and ‘it is bad that’ sentential operator.
If we want to say "State A is better than state B", then at least one of those states must be counterfactual. I assume that in the general case, you wouldn't try to define the truth conditions for counterfactuals in purely extensional terms. If that's correct, why would restricting the domain of discourse to moral claims mean we can get away with a purely extensional analysis?
Right, so I was thinking that the extension of an action-term is every instance of the action. (Why would extensions of actions be the people who perform the action? Maybe there's something obvious I'm missing.) So "putting M&Ms in coffee" has the extension of every instance of someone putting M&Ms in someone's coffee (the grammar maybe gets a little weird here).
So the argument is that in the imagined world, the extension of "putting M&Ms in coffee" and "murdering on a sunday" are coextensional. So if "wrong" is extensional, then the truth values of "it's wrong to put M&Ms in coffee" and "it's wrong to murder someone on a Sunday" would be the same. But I don't think they are, even in that world.
Regarding "it is good that", that seems like it might be extensional, yeah.
This is maybe just a reformulation of the point of your post, but: The problem for anti-realism/relativism seems to be that if you reduce moral talk to talk that is sensitive to modes of presentation like attitudes, then you can get contradictions. You can unknowingly talk about the same object under two modes of presentation, and think contradictory things of it.
To your last paragraph: yea, I basically think that moral facts *seem* to *in fact* follow a certain logical structure (typically extensional, closed under entailment, non-contradictory, etc etc). Candidate anti realist analyses just can’t support that said logical structure must hold, and therefore are revisionist from the jump about our moral beliefs, regardless of anything about content. Maybe realism is so wacky that you should ditch it anyway but I think this sets up a pretty clear asymmetry where anti-realists owe us a reason for why our beliefs about the logical structure of morality are wrong.
To your earlier point about the case: yea I think I don’t have anything great to say about this at the moment haha. I’ll have to think on it more. One thing to say is that maybe the ought operator is closed under substitution of *referring terms* e.g. names and definite descriptions but not predicates. That might be enough to block attitudinal reductions given the Bob Dylan/Robert Zimmerman examples.
Yes, the phrases “person who ate a prime number of green M&Ms” and “person who was murdered with an icepick to the forehead“ have people as extensions. Do you mean that the sentences "(1) one is obligated to not murder someone with an icepick to the forehead and (2) one is NOT obligated to prevent someone from eating a prime number of green m&ms." also have extensions be persons?
Or what is the principle connecting the fact that some person did A and did B and acted wrongly, to the fact that both of those actions are wrong, given that the moral context is extensional?
> If I approve of Bob Dylan playing rock music, it does not follow that I approve of Robert Zimmerman playing rock music.
Doesn't it? It seems to me that you approve that person playing rock music, even if you are unaware that it is the same person. Just as if you think that the music (the music played by Bob Dylan) is good, then you think that that music (which is played by Robert Zimmerman because he is Bob Dylan) is good, even if you're ignorant of the equivalence.
> If you asked me “Would you like to hear a Robert Zimmerman song?” I might reasonably, and emphatically, say no!
That's distinguishable from the first case. Instead of "S approves of X" it's "S would approve X when expressed as Y given their state of belief in Z". It's the extra insertions that cause the trouble.
I might hold an approving attitude towards music played by Robert Zimmerman, but I wouldn’t approve of Robert Zimmerman playing music.
I think its true, of Robert Zimmerman, that I approve of his playing music, but I think it’s false of me that I approve of Robert Zimmerman playing music, for basically the same reason that it’s true of Robert Zimmerman that I have beliefs about him, but false about me that I believe Robert Zimmerman Dylan plays rock music (supposing, obviously, that I don’t know that Robert Zimmerman is Bob Dylan).
I’m a bit confused by what you mean “that’s distinguishable from the first case,” the point is that this is clearly evidence I don’t hold an approving attitude towards Robert Zimmerman playing music. If someone came to me and asked if I would like Robert Zimmerman to play music at my house, and I said ‘definitely not!’ that’s a good reason to think I disprefer that.
Caveat: I'm new to these particular terms so apologies in advance for any misconceptions I may be harbouring and any resulting confusion.
The proposition "S approves person-named-P playing music for S" can be construed without any non-extensional terms as "S is agreeable to person-that-name-P-refers-to playing music for S".
Or it can be construed as "S approves S's-conception-of-person-named-P playing music for S".
The first connotation seems more natural to me, especially when it's looked at from an outside perspective and where it's a given that S does approve.
Likewise for say "Lois wants Superman to save her" where it's "Lois wants person-who-is-named-X to save her" versus "Lois wants to be saved by Lois'-conception-of-person-named-X". In the first, the proposition "Lois wants Clark Kent to save her" is also true (but she doesn't know it) and in the second the proposition is false.
I suppose I'm struggling to see why the anti-realist position should be stuck with the second type and how it's all meant to fit together.
Should the issue not be founded on an expectation that when you resolve the terms in the proposition, there is consistency among all of the possible higher-resolution propositions that flow from it? If so, I don't think it should turn on how hypothetical participants might respond to propositions if put to them directly, rather than what the propositions signify when resolved.
I'm not sure this really applies to my own view and I consider myself to be a subjectivist because I think moral sentences (at least sometimes) express propositions, some of those propositions are true, but they are not stance-independently true. However I think there are a lot of criticisms to be offered (yours among them) of subjectivist views that semantically reduce normative terms to descriptive ones, moral statements to statements about our own psychological states. Now sure, some people might want to say those psychological states themselves are normative and so we're not going non-normative when we talk about our preferences and desires and goals and so on—but putting that to the side. I think views that translate moral sentences this way suffer greatly when trying to account for moral disagreement (or normative disagreement in general). When you say "X is immoral" and I disagree, I'm not saying I think "You disapprove of X" is false. So, I think a subjectivist can take normative concepts as semantically irreducible to descriptive ones, treat normative terms as primitives, but still maintain that nothing in the world objectively satisfies such concepts (and stance-independently normative statements are all false if that's made explicit). So a take concept like "the best movie in the world," I would acknowledge there's no movie that's objectively "the best movie in the world," but there is a best movie relative to my stances and attitudes. And (with some more details I'll leave out here before this gets too long) I think this allows you to resolve a lot of issues. It gives you some baseline for a semantics that allows us to consider the same normative proposition and disagree about it. We can take a claim like "X is immoral" and both think about the same extensional propositional content, but such claims only have truth values relative to stances. I've messed around with the idea of having indexical truth predicates, I think that's promising. Anyways, thanks if you read this meandering reply 😂
> “X is good” is true, iff, the person who utters S approves of X.
If this is the analysis you're trying to refute, you can skip all the complicated stuff about extensionality — it trivially yields inconsistency the moment you have S1 saying "X is good" and S2 saying "X is not good."
Well, as an anti-realist, this where the the argument goes awry. "X is good" doesn't have a stance-independent truth value at all. It is only truth-apt relative to some particular stance.
"The person who utters S" matters insofar as this gives one important stance we might want to evaluate the truth relative to. But there's also the stance of the appraiser. My stance, for instance, if I'm the one appraising whether the sentence is true.
I think the argument goes awry because it equivocates between these two stances and treats the sentence as something that has a stance independent truth value when that is the question.
So, I don't think “The proposition expressed by the sentence ‘X is good’ is true, iff, the person who uttered the sentence prefers/desires X” is a plausible antirealist position, but it's close to one. The person expressing that proposition is being truthful iff the person prefers/desires X, in the sense that they are being honest, are not being deceptive, etc. It doesn't mean the sentence itself is true, because it doesn't have a truth value except relative to some stance. Relative to the stance of the speaker it is true, but that doesn't mean it is true simpliciter, and it doesn't mean that I have to appraise it as true, because for my appraisal my own stance is the relevant one.
Because moral statements are stance-dependent, that means they are not closed under co-extensional substitution of the kind discussed in the post. Suppose that Lex Luthor, a human chauvinist, thinks that it would be wrong to murder Clark Kent (because Kent is human, as far as he knows), but that it is not wrong to murder Superman (because Superman is an alien). Then, relative to Lex Luthor's stance, it *is* wrong to murder Clark Kent, and it *is not* wrong to murder Superman. Since you and I know that Clark Kent is co-extensional with Superman, then relative to your stance or mine this is inconsistent, and the two propositions must share the same moral appraisal. But relative to Luthor's stance, it is not inconsistent.
True haha, I was trying to give a quick example to make the point clear but that’s probably too quick. If I’m feeling less lazy I’ll try and cook up a better example (if you have an idea let me know!)
AFAIK the best candidates for an anti-realist semantics of moral language are quasi-realist theories (Gibbard, Blackburn, etc.). I don't know these theories well enough to say how they handle extensionality, but I suspect they would have an answer to the sort of questions you are raising here.
Good shout, I need to read Blackburn he keeps being recommended. As I mention in the post ethics is super not my area so I’m really poorly read on the formal stuff!
"The fact that someone approves of X does not mean they will approve of some extensionally equivalent proposition X’."
When it comes to moral facts, might that condition be a symptom of someone with an incoherent (i.e. self-contradictory) moral framework, rather than a hard and fast rule pertaining to moral statements in general? In other words, can there indeed be people who approve of X, AND also any extensionally equivalent proposition?
It's a quality of desires/approval that they create intensional contexts. They do not form incoherence in turn - they are perfectly logically consistent.
For example, it may be that as a child I wanted to be Batman but it doesn't mean I want to be Bruce Wayne with his gritty background and see my parents dead, even though Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same.
Well the answer to that question depends on whether moral propositions are just statements of approval, desires, or preferences. If they are, then yes.
Well the Batman example I gave would be one if a particular species of moral anti-realism that takes moral language to be about those kinds of desire were true. But the issue is that, generally speaking, we take moral propositions to extend.
Like if all moral propositions are talking about desires then, according to younger me, being Batman is good (relative to my stance) - but being Bruce Wayne is bad, because I don't desire the death of my parents even though being Batman means, by extension, my parents' death.
I don't think, though, that moral propositions are *essentially* like this - but anti-realism seems to entail that all moral propositions are like this. They are not extensional.
To answer your other question: it might be the case that you think x and some co-extensional term y both share the same moral status, but not due to some extensional relation of x to y.
Right but until we can find a real world example applied to a specific moral issues, it remains a theoretical. The argument would be stronger if we could show it in practice. Batman vs Bruce Wayne is fictional and pertains to one's circumstances rather than one's actions per se.
What about a variant of the error-theory response you posit here, where all apparently stance-free moral propositions are seen as disguised expressions of beliefs? If such a position is tenable, I guess most occurrences of the statement "killing infants is wrong" would, when corrected, be true, albeit in non-extensional contexts.
you need a far stronger argument than what you’ve presented here to establish that deontic modal contexts are extensional. consider one of the standard sorts of counterexamples to deontic extensionality. if, as a matter of fact about the actual world, “person who ate a prime number of green M&Ms” and “person who was murdered with an icepick to the forehead“ were coextensive, it would nonetheless be true both that (1) one is obligated to not murder someone with an icepick to the forehead and (2) one is NOT obligated to prevent someone from eating a prime number of green m&ms.
I think the example doesn't quite work as formulated.
It seems perfectly fine to say that (1) and (2) differ in truth value, because they are not coextensional. The action of killing someone with an ice pick and the action of eating a prime number of green m&ms do not have the same extension--only "the person who did (1)" and "the person who did (2)" do, and it seems clear that we can infer from "the person who did (1) acted wrongly" to "the person who did (2) acted wrongly."
But we can maybe change the example to be coextensional. Perhaps the only time someone was murdered on a sunday was by someone putting poisoned green M&Ms in their coffee--and this was also the only time anyone put M&Ms in anyone's coffee. It seems we should then be able to infer from "it is wrong to murder someone on a sunday" to "it is wrong to put M&Ms in someone's coffee," which seems equally wrong.
I was thinking about this a bit more and I think I get Pete’s point (maybe not though, don’t want to speak for him!)
You might think of actions as having an extension. If you do, then the extension of the action will (presumably) be the people who perform the action, or maybe the instances an action is performed. Either work for the example.
I guess I’m still not quite sure what the inference is supposed to be for your case. The extension of ‘murdering someone on a Sunday’ (the action?) is the same as the extension of ‘putting M&M’s in someone’s coffee.’ Is that right? And then the idea is that the extension of an action would be every occurrence of that action? Just want to make sure I get the idea.
Also, as an aside, I think there is a way to sidestep this issue. Anti-realists about obligation are *typically* anti-realists about axiology. Take the sentential operator “it is good that.” “It is good that” turns extensional sentences into extensional sentences. If “it is good that platypi live in New York” then “it is good that egg laying billed mammals live in New York.” “It is good that” is entirely unlike traditional examples of sentential operators which always transmute the relevant sentence into an intensional one, e.g. “it is necessary that.”
Obviously, on some moral theories, obligation and the good run perfectly together. Maybe this ends up being a problem for those views, but the point is that as far as anti-realism goes, you can run this critique with the axiological, sentential operator “it is good that” and avoid some of this fuzziness.
Take your example and suppose the murdered man is named Jon. Is it so strange to say “It is bad that someone murdered Jon” entails “It is bad that someone put green M&Ms in Jon’s coffee” if Jon was murdered by the M&Ms? I don’t think so. The M&Ms were poisoned! It was bad that he ate them! It would have been better if he hadn’t.
Anyway, I’m puzzling over how to deal with the obligation issue but I’m wondering if this axiological move just sidesteps the need for it.
You are talking here about an "it is good that..." operator, but axiological claims more typically take the form "it is good if..." While the former operator is plausibly extensional, the latter carries implications of necessity and thus is intensional.
At least, that's how I see it.
Fair, but I think when we make axiological comparisons we’ll often say ‘so and so state is bad, such and such state is good, so such and such is better than so and so’ and the ‘is good’ and ‘is bad’ imply an ‘it is good that’ and ‘it is bad that’ sentential operator.
If we want to say "State A is better than state B", then at least one of those states must be counterfactual. I assume that in the general case, you wouldn't try to define the truth conditions for counterfactuals in purely extensional terms. If that's correct, why would restricting the domain of discourse to moral claims mean we can get away with a purely extensional analysis?
Right, so I was thinking that the extension of an action-term is every instance of the action. (Why would extensions of actions be the people who perform the action? Maybe there's something obvious I'm missing.) So "putting M&Ms in coffee" has the extension of every instance of someone putting M&Ms in someone's coffee (the grammar maybe gets a little weird here).
So the argument is that in the imagined world, the extension of "putting M&Ms in coffee" and "murdering on a sunday" are coextensional. So if "wrong" is extensional, then the truth values of "it's wrong to put M&Ms in coffee" and "it's wrong to murder someone on a Sunday" would be the same. But I don't think they are, even in that world.
Regarding "it is good that", that seems like it might be extensional, yeah.
This is maybe just a reformulation of the point of your post, but: The problem for anti-realism/relativism seems to be that if you reduce moral talk to talk that is sensitive to modes of presentation like attitudes, then you can get contradictions. You can unknowingly talk about the same object under two modes of presentation, and think contradictory things of it.
To your last paragraph: yea, I basically think that moral facts *seem* to *in fact* follow a certain logical structure (typically extensional, closed under entailment, non-contradictory, etc etc). Candidate anti realist analyses just can’t support that said logical structure must hold, and therefore are revisionist from the jump about our moral beliefs, regardless of anything about content. Maybe realism is so wacky that you should ditch it anyway but I think this sets up a pretty clear asymmetry where anti-realists owe us a reason for why our beliefs about the logical structure of morality are wrong.
To your earlier point about the case: yea I think I don’t have anything great to say about this at the moment haha. I’ll have to think on it more. One thing to say is that maybe the ought operator is closed under substitution of *referring terms* e.g. names and definite descriptions but not predicates. That might be enough to block attitudinal reductions given the Bob Dylan/Robert Zimmerman examples.
you misrepresented my example from the start. the extensions aren’t actions, they are sets of persons.
Ah okay nvm, saw your reply to ToB on the other thread. That clarifies things
Yes, the phrases “person who ate a prime number of green M&Ms” and “person who was murdered with an icepick to the forehead“ have people as extensions. Do you mean that the sentences "(1) one is obligated to not murder someone with an icepick to the forehead and (2) one is NOT obligated to prevent someone from eating a prime number of green m&ms." also have extensions be persons?
Or what is the principle connecting the fact that some person did A and did B and acted wrongly, to the fact that both of those actions are wrong, given that the moral context is extensional?
> If I approve of Bob Dylan playing rock music, it does not follow that I approve of Robert Zimmerman playing rock music.
Doesn't it? It seems to me that you approve that person playing rock music, even if you are unaware that it is the same person. Just as if you think that the music (the music played by Bob Dylan) is good, then you think that that music (which is played by Robert Zimmerman because he is Bob Dylan) is good, even if you're ignorant of the equivalence.
> If you asked me “Would you like to hear a Robert Zimmerman song?” I might reasonably, and emphatically, say no!
That's distinguishable from the first case. Instead of "S approves of X" it's "S would approve X when expressed as Y given their state of belief in Z". It's the extra insertions that cause the trouble.
I might hold an approving attitude towards music played by Robert Zimmerman, but I wouldn’t approve of Robert Zimmerman playing music.
I think its true, of Robert Zimmerman, that I approve of his playing music, but I think it’s false of me that I approve of Robert Zimmerman playing music, for basically the same reason that it’s true of Robert Zimmerman that I have beliefs about him, but false about me that I believe Robert Zimmerman Dylan plays rock music (supposing, obviously, that I don’t know that Robert Zimmerman is Bob Dylan).
I’m a bit confused by what you mean “that’s distinguishable from the first case,” the point is that this is clearly evidence I don’t hold an approving attitude towards Robert Zimmerman playing music. If someone came to me and asked if I would like Robert Zimmerman to play music at my house, and I said ‘definitely not!’ that’s a good reason to think I disprefer that.
Caveat: I'm new to these particular terms so apologies in advance for any misconceptions I may be harbouring and any resulting confusion.
The proposition "S approves person-named-P playing music for S" can be construed without any non-extensional terms as "S is agreeable to person-that-name-P-refers-to playing music for S".
Or it can be construed as "S approves S's-conception-of-person-named-P playing music for S".
The first connotation seems more natural to me, especially when it's looked at from an outside perspective and where it's a given that S does approve.
Likewise for say "Lois wants Superman to save her" where it's "Lois wants person-who-is-named-X to save her" versus "Lois wants to be saved by Lois'-conception-of-person-named-X". In the first, the proposition "Lois wants Clark Kent to save her" is also true (but she doesn't know it) and in the second the proposition is false.
I suppose I'm struggling to see why the anti-realist position should be stuck with the second type and how it's all meant to fit together.
Should the issue not be founded on an expectation that when you resolve the terms in the proposition, there is consistency among all of the possible higher-resolution propositions that flow from it? If so, I don't think it should turn on how hypothetical participants might respond to propositions if put to them directly, rather than what the propositions signify when resolved.
I'm not sure this really applies to my own view and I consider myself to be a subjectivist because I think moral sentences (at least sometimes) express propositions, some of those propositions are true, but they are not stance-independently true. However I think there are a lot of criticisms to be offered (yours among them) of subjectivist views that semantically reduce normative terms to descriptive ones, moral statements to statements about our own psychological states. Now sure, some people might want to say those psychological states themselves are normative and so we're not going non-normative when we talk about our preferences and desires and goals and so on—but putting that to the side. I think views that translate moral sentences this way suffer greatly when trying to account for moral disagreement (or normative disagreement in general). When you say "X is immoral" and I disagree, I'm not saying I think "You disapprove of X" is false. So, I think a subjectivist can take normative concepts as semantically irreducible to descriptive ones, treat normative terms as primitives, but still maintain that nothing in the world objectively satisfies such concepts (and stance-independently normative statements are all false if that's made explicit). So a take concept like "the best movie in the world," I would acknowledge there's no movie that's objectively "the best movie in the world," but there is a best movie relative to my stances and attitudes. And (with some more details I'll leave out here before this gets too long) I think this allows you to resolve a lot of issues. It gives you some baseline for a semantics that allows us to consider the same normative proposition and disagree about it. We can take a claim like "X is immoral" and both think about the same extensional propositional content, but such claims only have truth values relative to stances. I've messed around with the idea of having indexical truth predicates, I think that's promising. Anyways, thanks if you read this meandering reply 😂
> “X is good” is true, iff, the person who utters S approves of X.
If this is the analysis you're trying to refute, you can skip all the complicated stuff about extensionality — it trivially yields inconsistency the moment you have S1 saying "X is good" and S2 saying "X is not good."
Well, as an anti-realist, this where the the argument goes awry. "X is good" doesn't have a stance-independent truth value at all. It is only truth-apt relative to some particular stance.
"The person who utters S" matters insofar as this gives one important stance we might want to evaluate the truth relative to. But there's also the stance of the appraiser. My stance, for instance, if I'm the one appraising whether the sentence is true.
I think the argument goes awry because it equivocates between these two stances and treats the sentence as something that has a stance independent truth value when that is the question.
So, I don't think “The proposition expressed by the sentence ‘X is good’ is true, iff, the person who uttered the sentence prefers/desires X” is a plausible antirealist position, but it's close to one. The person expressing that proposition is being truthful iff the person prefers/desires X, in the sense that they are being honest, are not being deceptive, etc. It doesn't mean the sentence itself is true, because it doesn't have a truth value except relative to some stance. Relative to the stance of the speaker it is true, but that doesn't mean it is true simpliciter, and it doesn't mean that I have to appraise it as true, because for my appraisal my own stance is the relevant one.
Because moral statements are stance-dependent, that means they are not closed under co-extensional substitution of the kind discussed in the post. Suppose that Lex Luthor, a human chauvinist, thinks that it would be wrong to murder Clark Kent (because Kent is human, as far as he knows), but that it is not wrong to murder Superman (because Superman is an alien). Then, relative to Lex Luthor's stance, it *is* wrong to murder Clark Kent, and it *is not* wrong to murder Superman. Since you and I know that Clark Kent is co-extensional with Superman, then relative to your stance or mine this is inconsistent, and the two propositions must share the same moral appraisal. But relative to Luthor's stance, it is not inconsistent.
True haha, I was trying to give a quick example to make the point clear but that’s probably too quick. If I’m feeling less lazy I’ll try and cook up a better example (if you have an idea let me know!)
AFAIK the best candidates for an anti-realist semantics of moral language are quasi-realist theories (Gibbard, Blackburn, etc.). I don't know these theories well enough to say how they handle extensionality, but I suspect they would have an answer to the sort of questions you are raising here.
Good shout, I need to read Blackburn he keeps being recommended. As I mention in the post ethics is super not my area so I’m really poorly read on the formal stuff!
"The fact that someone approves of X does not mean they will approve of some extensionally equivalent proposition X’."
When it comes to moral facts, might that condition be a symptom of someone with an incoherent (i.e. self-contradictory) moral framework, rather than a hard and fast rule pertaining to moral statements in general? In other words, can there indeed be people who approve of X, AND also any extensionally equivalent proposition?
It's a quality of desires/approval that they create intensional contexts. They do not form incoherence in turn - they are perfectly logically consistent.
For example, it may be that as a child I wanted to be Batman but it doesn't mean I want to be Bruce Wayne with his gritty background and see my parents dead, even though Bruce Wayne and Batman are the same.
Is there a real-world example of this occurring with moral propositions?
Well the answer to that question depends on whether moral propositions are just statements of approval, desires, or preferences. If they are, then yes.
So is there a specific case? So far we're talking theoretical. But can we find examples of people applying this in real life ethics?
Well the Batman example I gave would be one if a particular species of moral anti-realism that takes moral language to be about those kinds of desire were true. But the issue is that, generally speaking, we take moral propositions to extend.
Like if all moral propositions are talking about desires then, according to younger me, being Batman is good (relative to my stance) - but being Bruce Wayne is bad, because I don't desire the death of my parents even though being Batman means, by extension, my parents' death.
I don't think, though, that moral propositions are *essentially* like this - but anti-realism seems to entail that all moral propositions are like this. They are not extensional.
To answer your other question: it might be the case that you think x and some co-extensional term y both share the same moral status, but not due to some extensional relation of x to y.
Right but until we can find a real world example applied to a specific moral issues, it remains a theoretical. The argument would be stronger if we could show it in practice. Batman vs Bruce Wayne is fictional and pertains to one's circumstances rather than one's actions per se.
What about a variant of the error-theory response you posit here, where all apparently stance-free moral propositions are seen as disguised expressions of beliefs? If such a position is tenable, I guess most occurrences of the statement "killing infants is wrong" would, when corrected, be true, albeit in non-extensional contexts.