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[Grek]

So, we've kinda been cluttering up Vector's newsrage topic with discussions of metaethics and logical formalisms. So here's a new thread to carry on those discussions out of the way and to field any assorted questions, musings and other discussions that the forum comes up with.

Not going to put any rules in the OP right away, since I trust anyone with a background in logical and ethics will be good enough to provide reasonable and articulate discussion. Please don't disappoint me in that regard.

Expect to see lots of longish lists of formal premises and conclusions in this thread, debate about the truth of certain premises and discussions of the validity of various conclusions. It shouldn't get down to name-calling or anything, since logic is pretty hard to get oppinionated about as long as you don't get too attached to a set of premises.

Any sort of format is welcome, but if people can't make out what you're saying because they're not familiar with your symbols or some other factor, it would be helpful if you could give a quick walkthrough or link to somewhere that does.

I'll also occasionally update the OP with links to explainations of terms people seem to commonly be using and anything else that seems especially important to have in a centralized location. Feel free to suggest things, by the way.

[Grek]

To get things rolling, here's a post
 from Vector's thread by Aqizzar, which I shall reply to:

The mathematician's answer would be that I am accepting X as a premise and, as such I do not need to justify it. The point of a premise is that it's something that we assume is true and them reason from there. If you disagree with premise X, then that's the end of any arguments from implication, as we cannot convince eachother if we start from different premises.

The more convincing answer would be to figure out what theory of morality the audience uses and then prove that premise X is valid inside the bounds of that theory. I had a longish post somewhere wherein I discussed a half dozen moral theories at length and described which ones would support premise X and which supported ~X, but I lost it somewhere and I'm not willing to retype it. Sad but true.

The short of it, though, is that Kantian Ethics, Libertinism and Preference Utilitarianism all (with a few cavets about not assuming any exotic definitions of harm involving homosexuality leading to an infinite divine punishment) support premise X, that Virtue Ethics is apathic towards Premise X vs. ~X and that the specific branches Divine Command Theory which most Christians use are very specific about Premise ~X being the case.