But if you really, truly are just defining the word “moral,” then all you are doing is assigning a symbol (“moral”) to a concept (increasing human flourishing). You have not proven anything about that concept; you’ve just given it a new name. One has to wonder what the point is. After all, just as in the “God” example above, we already have a name for the concept of increasing human flourishing – we call it “increasing human flourishing.”
And if it feels like you’re doing more than just re-naming something, that’s probably because you haven’t sufficiently scrubbed the symbol “moral” clean of its other associations before you defined it. Typically, the word is used to refer to how people ought to behave, and you haven’t scrubbed away that implicit definition before adding a new one. So instead of setting a symbol equal to a concept (“moral” = increasing human flourishing), you have the sense that you have equated a concept with another concept (how people ought to behave = increasing human flourishing). That’s not a definition, it’s a claim, and it needs support.
