Nothing from a moral standpoint will ever make a rule "binding".
You don't really have a rule if you are only basing it on morals.
Morals are pretty much the explanation as to why we may or may not do something, the truly "binding" part are the consequences.
Then you're using the word "binding" in a different sense than the one the thread is about. A person who avoids committing murder because they fear a prison stint is not refraining because murder is morally wrong, but because they don't want the consequences.
It does! You just don't want to accept my answer.
Belief in religion, belief in the getting to heaven is a worthwhile goal and belief that following these rules will get them to heaven is what makes these rules binding. It has absolutely nothing to do with authority, which you are annoyingly fixated on.
If you're going to say that doesn't make it binding then you have to admit that you're being pedantic by giving a new definition to the word binding.
It feels like you're trying to stay one step ahead of everyone you're discussing this with by continuing to reframe what we're actually talking about.
I have edited this post to make it less rude.
I'm not introducing a new definition of "binding". Rather, I am using the ordinary sense that is implied by most moral claims.
Like I said, when someone says "murder is wrong", then what they mean typically isn't "murder is wrong if you personally want to go to heaven". They present the rule "murder is wrong" as something that a person ought not do, regardless of their individual goals.
And what you're describing is different. Under your structure, the rule depends on a prior goal (reaching heaven). If someone accepts that goal, then following the rules becomes a strategy for achieving it. But if someone doesn't care about heaven, then the rule loses its force for them under that framework, which makes the rule conditional on the goal, rather than binding in the stronger sense that moral claims are usually presented.
Self-interest is something that can explain why someone might follow a rule, but it makes the rule conditional.
If following the rule serves your interests, you follow it. If violating the rule serves your interests, you violate it.
Under that structure, moral rules are strategies rather than binding rules.
"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor."
That's a statement of a reciprocity rule. The question in the thread is not whether such rules have been formulated before, but what makes them binding in the first place.
If the answer is that they are binding because a god commands them, then the issue becomes what makes that command binding rather than merely asserted.
If the answer is that they are binding because reciprocity is a good thing, then the question is "what makes reciprocity itself binding?"
OP discovers moral relativism.
Nay; OP asks what makes a moral rule binding in the first place.
And "moral relativism" is, at most, a concession that no universal grounding is being supplied.
That is, if you just want to make the point that morality is relative, then you're confirming the problem I raised in the thread.
My point here was that the directed nature of the telos and the normative value are one and the same. The “goodness” of the flourishing heart is inseparable from the nature of the flourishing heart. The descriptive account of the heart is parallel to this claim. The nature of the heart (and its “goodness”) and its purpose would still exist without our recognition/description of it.
Yup, standard neo-Aristotelianism, telos and goodness are identical. In other words, a thing has a function (telos), fulfilling that function is good, therefore the normativity is already contained in the description.
The problem is that this kind of evaluation does not yet yield a moral obligation.
For instance, a knife that fails to cut is a bad knife relative to its function. But nothing morally wrong happens when someone uses a dull knife. The evaluation is about how well the object performs its function.
And the same issue happens when the argument is moved from organs to persons. Even if I grant that humans have a natural telos of flourishing, the claim that a person
ought to pursue that flourishing is an additional step. And my question in this thread (what makes that goal itself binding?) is exactly that step
Send me a DM and we can discuss this at a slower pace.
Just because this is a KF thread doesn't mean it's short lived. If we're still alive in 2 years and that's when I get a new reply notif, I'll reply to it.
As in, take all the time you need
