>>823188Linguistic meaning is lexical, compositional, and contextual. It’s about what the words do in context, not simply how each word is defined. For example: compare “How do I kill a process?” vs “How do I kill a person?.” Both contain the same verb (kill), but carry radically different meanings. Thus, taking each word in isolation, choosing a neutral dictionary sense, and ignoring how the words function together in a phrase is misguided.
>>unpleasant>is it moralising to describe the taste of food as unpleasant?No, because it describes an affective reaction in that specific context. The context changes the word’s purpose. The phrase “unpleasant anti-civilization freaks” as a whole is a moral judgement; “unpleasant” only reinforces the overall framing. Of course, you can backpedal and claim you weren’t doing this, that “unpleasant” was simply expressing your own affective distaste, but then your argument ceases to be material analysis and collapses into subjectivity.
>>anti-civilization>statement of policy, not morality“Civilization” in polemics is often an evaluative concept in and of itself.
The marks of civilization—the writing, the cities, the state, etc.—reflect a particular ideal of human organization. This ideal often presupposes a moral vision along with it. Typically, to call a society civilized is to morally praise it; to call it uncivilized is to morally condemn it. Calling a group “anti-civilization” is often synonymous with calling them barbaric, destructive, enemies of social order, i.e., they are outside the bounds of civilization’s moral values.
>>freaks>"an unusual person", judges usualness rather than valueUsing the dictionary’s strict definition of a word as evidence that a word cannot have another meaning is fallacious. Nevertheless, what is considered “unusual” if it’s not relative to what’s considered “usual?” In the phrase’s context, it doesn’t merely say “unusual”; it marks someone as backwards and grotesque (anti-civilization) compared to the usual (civilization).
>>worst and awful>judgement of quality, partial synonym of unpleasantAgain, what is considered “quality” if it’s not compared to some type of standard? By what judgement?
>it is not moralising anti-marxism to say that a marketer might discover that immoral people prefer to buy israeli goods and moral people do not.That would absolutely be moralizing.
>you do not, personally, have to embrace this moral judgement as a moral judgement, it is simply data.This is self-defeating. If you don’t embrace the moral judgement, you can’t call it “immoral” and “moral” in the first place, as it simply becomes a descriptive correlation.
>"morality" here is an arbitrary personal trait like scottishnessOne is descriptive of a national/cultural/ethnic identity, the other is a normative evaluation. They are completely different things.
>such traits can be found, empirically, to correlate with other things. what you do, normatively, with that information is your own business.To find correlations with morality, you first have to decide what counts as moral and immoral. That decision is already normative.