I wonder how much Chris and I really disagree about moral argument. Probably not that much. But he's now re-framed what's at issue between us in such a way that the partisan of moral reasoning can be represented by the person who blankly asserts 'You are wrong and I am right' or calls his opponent names; whereas, Chris shows us, there are better ways to argue, ways that involve putting across various kinds of information relevant to whatever is in dispute.
Naturally, framed in this way moral reasoning, making a moral case for something, is close to worthless. But it's a prejudicial, and in fact false, presentation of the alternatives before us. Effective moral argument deploys moral categories together with facts about the world, empirical hypotheses, generalizations about cause and effect. But the moral categories are not redundant.
I shall take as an example the intellectual source that lies at the beginning of this discussion, the work of Karl Marx. Marx's Capital, whatever else it may be - and it's plenty else - is an extended indictment of capitalist society. Is this because Marx shouts 'wrong, wrong, wrong'? No, it's because the whole architecture of that work centres on Marx's effort to establish the unequal exchange of value between capitalist and labourer in the wage relation. This is conveyed along with much empirical material about the nature of that relation and its consequences; but at the same time Marx says in a thousand ways that there is something immoral about the relationship - he says it's a form of theft and usurpation, and obtained by what is in effect a social fraud, and that its results are pervasively inhumane. Moreover, the very notion of an inequality in the exchange of wages for living labour-power depends upon an underlying assumption about labour entitlement that makes no sense other than morally.
So Marx made a mistake, I claim, in denying the ethical content of his own work. But not because he exemplified the crude forms of argument Chris now refers to as illustrating what moral argument is. Rather because his major work doesn't make coherent sense if it is treated as some kind of value-free sociological treatise.
One other example. I think it is a cogent way of arguing against inequality to point to statistics on the effects of inequality on health and length of life. There is no disagreement between Chris and me in this respect. But suppose someone were to say: 'Well, so what? So, the poor don't live as long as the rich. Big deal.' There is no way you can meet this without being prepared to engage in argument about fundamental values.
