We “can define” anything to mean anything else. That’s the nature of language.
That is also NOT the definition of good and evil.
If everyone cannot agree on the definition of a word, the word is meaningless. It does not describe a real thing, but rather a mental construct.
Hume’s account of definition uses a simple series of tests to determine cognitive content. Begin with a term. Ask what idea is annexed to it. If there is no such idea, then the term has no cognitive content, however prominently it figures in philosophy or theology. If there is an idea annexed to the term, and it is complex, break it down into the simple ideas that compose it, and trace them back to their original impressions. If the process fails at any point, the idea in question lacks cognitive content.
So your previous statement was that a specific (unstated) way of defining Good and Evil, while paired with our typical modern worldview implied that Good and Evil didn’t exist? I suppose you’re almost certainly correct if that’s the case, but I don’t find that to be a very interesting statement. The only other way I can interpret this is as a claim that there is exactly one definition of Good and Evil, and anyone who uses a different definition is wrong, but that strikes me as an utterly foolish position.
I wasn’t aware of Hume’s account of definition, but it strikes me as extremely straightforward.
We “can define” anything to mean anything else. That’s the nature of language.
That is also NOT the definition of good and evil.
If everyone cannot agree on the definition of a word, the word is meaningless. It does not describe a real thing, but rather a mental construct.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#HumeAccoDefi
Correct.
So your previous statement was that a specific (unstated) way of defining Good and Evil, while paired with our typical modern worldview implied that Good and Evil didn’t exist? I suppose you’re almost certainly correct if that’s the case, but I don’t find that to be a very interesting statement. The only other way I can interpret this is as a claim that there is exactly one definition of Good and Evil, and anyone who uses a different definition is wrong, but that strikes me as an utterly foolish position.
I wasn’t aware of Hume’s account of definition, but it strikes me as extremely straightforward.