Recapitulating the Moral Account

One of the criteria of a good argument or account of something, I have generally believed, is that we should be able to briefly and cogently state the case for it. If it's a good account it shouldn't get bound up in complexity, ambiguities and unclarity. We shouldn't need reams and reams of paper to say what we are talking about. Still, if the subject being accounted for were easily explained, there wouldn't be a need to say more, would there? So I'm torn between preferring simplicity and brevity, on the one hand, and acknowledging the need for complexity, occasioned by the difficulty of a longstanding issue, on the other. The possibility of giving a moral account strikes me as raising just this sort of problem.

The other day, following a link on Duncan Richter's blog, I ended up on a site discussing a moral issue. I weighed in with comments reflecting my own ongoing effort to say what moral valuing is and what reasons underlie it. One of the posters suggested I spell out my own view, since I was challenging his, and I decided to give it a go, even knowing how difficult it would be to say succinctly what I have come to think about the issue of how moral valuing works. (The full exchange can be found here: http://kazez.blogspot.com/2014/08/ethics-in-gaza.html)

In the meantime, here is a composite version of what I wrote there, representing still another iteration of the view I have been developing on this site concerning moral questions:

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