Justin McBrayer: Why Our Children Don't Think There Are Moral Facts

link
   Forgot to post this back when everybody was talking about it.
   I don't necessarily agree with absolutely every detail in there, but most of it is right, and it's stuff we here at the institute gripe about every other week or so...including the conflation of truth with proof, and the weird fact/opinion distinction that someone is pumping into students everywhere. It's not that there's no difference between a fact and an opinion....it's rather that the distinction is presented as if it were exhaustive, thus covertly convincing students that there are not true/factual opinions/beliefs. Then, of course, this confusion is followed up by training students to always put moral and other normative beliefs on the "opinion" side...entailing that nothing moral can be true (or, somewhat less accurately, factual).
   What a mess. A lot of this at my own institution seems to originate in the speech communications department...but I'm not sure whether that can be generalized.