An assertion that "it is immoral to.... " is not self-contradictory.
Moral statements are arbitrary, and so cannot contradict themselves.

An assertion that "it is incorrect to believe..." is ungrammatical.

On Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:35:56 GMT, Jim07D5 wrote:

tuwomit@johnkennard.com (JDK) said:

I have written and webbed a moralist tract, _The Uncivil War_, which
should be of some interest here.

It can be read and even downloaded (free, of course) at

http://www.johnkennard.com/Tuw/Tuwtp.html

It proves the existence or reality of morality, examines some
implications of that reality, both constructive and destructive, and
provides a test for evil, all in the hardly metaphorical context of
the war against responsibility and more.

It is a click-on-text-to-advance interface (and an index or
chapter/section-link-list is provided), and full-screen viewing is
recommended.

JDK

Here are three statements from the tract.

The assertion or proposition that it is wrong to believe that some
things are wrong is self-contradictory and therefore false.
If the assertion or proposition that some things are wrong was false,
then falsehood wouldn't be wrong.
Every moralist can proceed in the calm and settled assurance that
even if morality wasn't real it could hardly then be wrong to believe
and act as if it was.

I have two comments. Please take them as questions you might get from
an assistant who wants the tract to be accepted by a fairly well
educated public.

I've seen this notification about a dozen times, and he never replies to
followups-- probably wise, considering most of 'em.

I actually downloaded the .zip of this (which doesn't even have a
readme.txt, so you have to figure out on your own that Tuwtp.html is the
flippin' title page) and even installed a desktop shortcut using the
supplied icon and brooded over it all awhile back.

The book, if you can call it that, is small-- it's only about two thousand
words, but strung over about twenty- five "chapters" composed of a total of
about sixty sections, each on its own web- page, which is a pain (I doubt a
word- processor draft would total ten pages)-- which I guess is why the
author calls it a "tract". (I wonder why he didn't call it _Tractatus
Moralitatis_ or WeverTF the Latin would be?)

But I liked and agreed with it for the most part, and believe I see much of
what it's getting at, and think I can answer your second question, as well
as make some additional observations and criticisms, which I intended to do
a long time ago and forgot.

1. Under what system of logic is a self-contradictory statement false?
It is my understanding that such statements are considered incoherent
or incomprehensible. I think there is a problem saying that such
statements have a truth value (it is either true or untrue); the claim
that any self-contradictory statement has a truth value is itself
false.

You've stumped *me* with this one, although now I think about it I realize
I've encountered that viewpoint before (eg, the damned Godelians).

I'm pretty sure the logic texts that I've had have always held that any
sentence or statement or proposition which implies contradiction is false;
in other words, if A implies both B and not- B, then A is false.

And if that's the case, then shouldn't self- contradictory "sosops"
(neologism alert!) be the most economical examples of such falsehood?

I'm with the book on this one, but like I say didn't even realize it was an
issue until you brought it up.

2. It would be helpful if you would distinguish two senses of the word
"wrong". One of them is "incorrect" or "false", the other one of them
is "immoral". By bringing in the moralist at the third statement, it
appears that the latter sense is meant for all occurrences of the word
"wrong". But in what sense is "wrong" meant throughout these
statements?

Suppose I reword it as follows:

The assertion or proposition that it is incorrect to believe that
some things (propositions) are incorrect is self-contradictory and
therefore (is an) incorrect (belief).
If the assertion or proposition that some things are incorrect was
false, then (asserting a) falsehood wouldn't be (asserting an)
incorrect (proposition).
(But "falsehood" is "incorrect proposition".)
Every moralist can proceed in the calm and settled assurance that
even if morality wasn't real it could hardly then be (an incorrect
belief) to believe and act as if it was.

This wording does not seem to support the final statement about the
moralist.

I suspect that the author would maintain that the middle statement you
quote at the beginning of your post takes care of the distinction in point,
at least for practical moral or moral theoretical purposes (he doesn't seem
to be all that sophisticated), and that the last statement you quote is
self- evident-- if morality isn't real, then it can't be (morally) wrong to
believe in it and act as if it's real, nor can it be (morally) wrong to
believe and act on a falsehood like (in that case) morality being real.

(I also believe that that phrase "calm and settled assurance" comes from or
echoes a Christian catechism somewhere-- Anglican? *Somebody* is being a
little ironic here, I think . . . . And then there's that awful pun on the
very first page, which I hope was accidental.)

But there does seem to be a confusion or conflation of morality and a more
general what might be called "praxology" throughout the "tract", in other
words between morality which is concerned with good and evil and praxology
which is concerned with correct and incorrect, which presumably would
respectively include the former.

Part of the problem, I think, is that all but the last (four or five
single- sentence paragraph!) chapter of the book is more "metaethics" or
even "applied metaethics", not explicitly concerned with the central moral
question of the definition of right and wrong, good and evil.

And I think the "test for evil" in that last chapter is, while valid, too
limited, not as general as one can be; I believe, although I've not been
able to formulate my belief yet, that good and evil somehow map to truth
and falsehood respectively (G/e = T/F in action? something like that).

Finally, proving how much I must've brooded over the damned thing, and what
I most wanted to point out (and which I now realize I may not entirely
remember correctly), I worked out what the most complicated argument used
is, which IIRC goes something like "There could be no B if there was no A,
but B is real, and so A must be real, also", which, again IIRC, if you
reverse the predicate and subject in the first clause, you have an argument
in the form of the argument _modus ponens_ with the major premise replaced
by its contrapositive (!), which is actually a valid thing to do, going by
truth table, and even analysis using the binary algebra of _Laws of Form_
(I had no life then and don't have much of one now-- obviously).

God knows where he got that one-- I've never seen that form of argument
listed.