How is a moral claim not a personal claim?
"Murders should be executed" is a moral claim, but it's not a personal one. "People who cut in line shouldn't be served" would be an example personal claim.
Morality is more than just reason.
Morality is the reasoning behind descriptive and prescriptive behaviors (driven by normative claims about behavior), and the systems thereof. All of ethics is driven by reason. Your personal moral compass may be driven by feelings that you can't provide reasons and make arguments for, however, but that's a different matter.
No point to inference rules when you ain't got nothin' to apply 'em on.
It's reasoning about behavior in reference to other reasoning agents (people), other living things, or the environment of the reasoning agent.
how do you rhyme that with
the former essentially says not to accept a claim unless you have a reason to whereas the latter essentially says to accept a claim unless you have a reason not to
You asked for a general maxim (or something that could be construed as one). That discussion was a response to claims of intent wrt to asceticism or ascetic behaviors. The maxim is basically, "assume people are honest, until proven otherwise." The point about accepting claims without justification was in regards all claims in general (moral, descriptive, normative, empirical etc.).
any phrase is meaningless to the uninitiated
I'm saying there's no such thing as a "subjective argument" in the philosophical sense. To speak more to you, that's like saying there's a "subjective proof" (of an unproven theorem). If you heard the phrase,"subjective proof," in the context of mathematics, you would see that also as just meaningless nonsense.
fundamentally reason and moral rectitude are indeed superphysical. However, indirectly we always look to the natural world for everything. It's all we got after all. Case in point, why do you think addition is defined the way it is? Because it's useful.
that's how I was using "physical" as well
Reasons gotta be undergirded by something (other than inference rules). What I'm saying is that those underpinnings are necessarily subjective in the case of morality.
That's like saying, "mathematical reasons have to be undergirded by something (other than the Peano, ZFC and all of the other axioms)."
It doesn't. That's why they work the way that they do. Reason without the inference rules of logic doesn't work. That
is its undergird.
the notion of moral rectitude is superphysical. However, ethics consists of assigning this superphysical attribute to actions which are most certainly not superphysical. In the same way that a triplet of apples can be assigned the superphysical attribute 3.
Moral justification occurs when trying to bridge the physical (actions) and the superphysical (moral rectitude). However, since there are no bridges to begin with, the very first bridge cannot itself be meaningfully justified. If we're willing to justify some initial bridges without argument (axioms) however, then we can use reason to justifiably explore the logical consequences of our axioms.
By your own reasoning, there is no bridge between the metaphysical number 3 and the triplet of apples. It's only the fact of observing reality that we can look at the apples and make a reference to the metaphysical numbers that we formally construct.
In the same vein, behaviors are observed, and we can make observations in reference to a metaphysical "good" and "bad" and assign values of "good" and "bad" (I'm sure you already intuitive know that assault and murder are both "bad" but murder is "more bad" than assault, without having to quantify it precisely in a formal system), not entirely like integers assigned to discrete objects, granted, but the process is the same. Some people have then gone a step further - with reason as the building blocks - and formalized systems of behavior that we know today in its many forms.
To continue to previous metaphor, the very first bridge is necessarily subjective, so any ethical argument can ultimately be traced back to subjectivity.
Moral arguments are still arguments that have reasoning (good or bad will depend on how the arguments are constructed).
I think there's a disconnect here, which is why you're hung up on this notion of subjectivity with regards to argumentation, specifically moral argumentation. You should read the seminal works of the philosophers who've built their ethical systems to get a better idea of how ethical arguments are not inherently subjective.
Unless our inference rules are God-given, the only reason we're using them as opposed to other inference rules is because of collective agreement, which is probably because they "work" when applied to the natural world (as opposed to bogus logic).
Yes, this is true in regards to theological systems of morality, but not secular ones.
I'm therefore not quite sure what you mean by "objectivity" here.
I meant reason itself. If you make a good argument for a proof, we don't say that the argument is subjective, because it stands on its own reasons. Likewise, if person A makes a good argument for X, we don't say that the argument is subjective. Person A may have made the argument, but the argument, too, stands on its own reasons. It just has their name on it.
Remember that I said "practice what you preach" ain't proper hypocrisy and you claimed it was? I was trying to find a counterexample to refute you.
If you're saying that it isn't, can you argue for why that is?
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