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[Morality] Subjectivity vs Objectivity
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Plus I already accounted for that exception.
Every suicide is diseased? That...is quite a claim.
Edit: I forgot to include that suicide can be generated by any disease that may cause delusional states. On occasion humans do willingly commit suicide in extremis, but these are either the choice to die with minimal suffering over dying after whatever suffering an enemy cares to inflict, or to protect others. None of these invalidate the general rule since they are exceptions that are easily taken into account.
To borrow your phrasing, I frankly have a hard time believing that you actually think that statement was true.
Edit: taken into account? How? You said that death is demonstrably and self-evidently worse than suffering. Either it is or it isn't. I give up. I'd like to debate the utility of utilitarianism or whether it is possible to formulate an objective value statement but this conversation appears pointless.
But maybe if people weren't such goddamned fools all the time that would be the case.
I do tend to think though that you're giving a bit too much credence to the notion people entertain that they could be wrong. It doesn't tend to be an animating idea.
What I'm getting at is that suicide does not disprove the inherent value in life, because it is an exception not the rule.
Living things, as a general rule, prefer life to death despite the fact that only death ends all suffering. That seems fairly empirically sound, but I welcome further constructive criticism.
The problem I have with this and the general idea of science finding some kind of morality, is that it never gets as far as making a case for why I should actually care what happens to other people.
Is it moral for a fascist dictator to kill lots and lots of people to maintain his position? The dictator may well say yes, he's doing what he feels is best for himself. Just because the other guy would prefer to be alive doesn't automatically mean it's logical the dictator should make sacrifices to make that happen.
I don't think we're on the same page in terms of the meaning of 'subjective' if you take all knowledge of the external world to be subjective. Usually, people call ethics subjective in an attempt to highlight what they take to be a difference between ethical claims like 'murder is wrong' and straightforwardly physical claims like 'the cat is on the mat.' But if you are saying that 'the cat is on the mat' is also subjective, then, well, I've lost track of the difference. Which is fine by me: maybe it means we agree after all. My contention has always been that whatever the differences between ethical and non-ethical truth, they are not such that they render the very idea of ethical facts impossible.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
I'll advocate that.
MrMister didn't write that.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
This is honestly the best thing I've read all day.
2) For a motivation to exist, there must be a state that is considered preferable by the creature to one or more of its other possible states.
3) Every creature is capable of holding at least two states - alive and dead.
4) Every living being on earth prefers happiness to suffering, and considers suffering something to avoid.
5) Thus, for every living being on earth, suffering is considered bad.
6) Every hypothetical living being that has a motivation is capable of suffering, with suffering equalling not reaching and/or maintaining its preferable state.
7) Ethics do not apply to non-creatures, since they are incapable of action.
8) Thus, since for every case where ethics apply suffering is considered bad, suffering is universally bad.
Note that under the above definition, a person that 'suffers' on purpose is not really suffering, since he prefers such a state - it is purposefully inflicted. Suffering is defined as failing to achieve that which you desire, thus leaving you in a state you think of as lesser, or being reduced to a lesser state from a preferable one.
Now...
1) I do not want to suffer.
2) If I inflict suffering on others, were my actions universalized, others would make me suffer.
3) Thus to avoid suffering, I should avoid inflicting suffering on those that did not inflict suffering on me.
One hole I spotted in this, however, is the possibility of a creature suffering more from avoiding inflicting suffering than from others inflicting suffering on it in order to get their goal. Aside from that, I do think this is a coherent argument for objective ethics.
1) Presuming ignorance or incompetence on the part of your interlocutors isn't really a productive means of expressing yourself. It's not an ad hominem, but it serves a similar purpose by diverting the discussion from an external matter to the mental contents or aptitude of the people involved. It's unnecessary and blatant personalization.
2) Your second paragraph is partially correct; moral relativism states observable fact. It tells us that we are mistaken when we think we are in possession of the one true morality. This is, as you note, observable fact.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
...but it can be supported within the context of moral relativism.
Wait, what?
I'm not sure what part of my provocative statement is shocking you the most.
In what sense is it an observable fact that moral relativism is true?
The source of our moral inclinations is culturally conditioned. This strongly implies that moral relativism is true. Notions of objective morality fail insofar as there's no identifiable source of objective morality, be it from gods, logic, evolution, or whatever.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
I'm not sure what this is in reference to. Are you disputing that our moral inclinations being formed via cultural conditioning implies that moral relativism is true, or...?
I am saying that a cultural influence on morality does not necessitate moral relativism.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
We should be clearer about what this means; first, cultures are not morally monolithic, and plenty of disagreement exists within societies, families, and so on. There were Southern Abolitionists and Mormon women who rejected polygamy. In what sense were their moral inclinations culturally conditioned, and how does that cast doubt on them?
But, perhaps more importantly, we are all quite generally products of culture (among other things) and yet we don't take that to universally undermine our beliefs. For instance, were I an 11th Century monk I likely would not have known that existence is not a predicate, because quantificational logic was not yet part of the established knowledge of my society. Does this mean that my knowledge now is suspect, because it is causally dependent on my not having been raised in certain sorts of ignorance? No, it does not. What is important here is not that culture influences belief, since that is a universal phenomenon, but rather whether the beliefs so influenced are of the type that are or could be true. And the phenomenon of cultural influence does nothing to show that they aren't.
I'm not sure I understand your "how does that cast doubt..." question. I can't speak to the individual histories of the odd exception, as I don't know them.
In general though, enormous variation is to be expected in a relativistic context. Were morals somehow objective, I think we should expect to see a lot more similarities across cultures beyond the common (and likely evolved) social conventions that prevent societies from imploding all the time.
I don't see how that analogy applies. With morals there is no standard that we can use to test, confirm, or correct when disagreements arise, unlike science-underwritten knowledge. There is no means of collecting and examining evidence to show or even suggest that we or anyone else are closer to the truth than we were at some other time in history.
There's a lot that I don't agree with in your POV that I think MrMr and others will address better than me. But one thing I do want to say: If you think human ethics aren't incredibly narrow, all across the globe, then you don't have enough imagination.
Where are the societies where the colour blue must be defended against touching oblongs? Where are the societies where non-consensual walking in a similar direction is a crime akin to rape? Which societies particularly decry crimes which share an initial phoneme with the day of the week they are committed on? Where are the societies who value the lives of bacteria over those of babies? Or who value one baby much more than one hundred?
My examples are absurd, and that's my point. All cultures have morality that others can get a grip on. Anthropology and sociology are not the cataloguing of grotesques. They are the exploration of similarity as well as difference.
Why do you say that?
Actually the position of the sun is in a way subjective because there is no absolute space grid in which in finds itself. We only know the position of the sun relative to everything around it. Much in the same way that there is no absolute moral grid, we only know morality by the things around us, if that makes any sense.
It would be difficult to prove conclusively the extent to which history could be any different if humans weren't so competitively exploitative, but we can witness a trend in which the centralization of control over vast resources (human and otherwise) is proven to be of arguable long term benefit despite obvious short term atrocity.
Colonization of the Americas seems like an excellent example. Two continents were supporting something like ten million people until the human tide exterminated the vast majority them in classically horrible fashion and started utilizing those resources to support a great many more. Rome might be another example.
They don't exist because they are less capable of maintaining themselves. Cultures with absurd taboos certainly exist (why can't Hindu people eat beef? why don't the Amish like blended fabrics or electricity? what's up with Hasidic Jews' hats?) because they don't really impact the survival rate of the society. If people couldn't walk in the same direction without consent, only punished murder on mondays, prefered bacteria over humans, or thought 1 baby was more important than 100 babies uniformly, those cultures would rapidly cease to exist. They can't carry on day-to-day in competition for resources with cultures who don't restrict themselves for the benefit of bacteria, make sure that the other 99 babies live to spread their culture, stop murders on the other 6 days of the week, and can mount an invasionary force without all the soldiers giving one another consent to march.
Whether objective moral facts exist or not it's pretty obvious that human value systems are not based on them, or at least aren't based entirely on them. It's okay to let a man starve on your doorstep while you throw away food, but it's not cool to take him a sandwich with no pants on.
MrMister, I don't think we disagree. I agree that there are value statements you can make which are universally true for all humanity and which are a good basis to build a moral framework on. My point of contention is that maybe the cat was actually on a stool and it just looked like he was on the mat behind him from your point of view. Either the statements are tied inextricably to things that humans want and things that are good for humans but are not necessarily universal to all sentient species, much less all species capable of taking actions in general, or they are so broad and vague as to be almost meaningless. If we define suffering as 'not moving toward your happy place' then sure, suffering is axiomatically bad. But what good does that do you? Everything can suffer, but what makes any particular person or thing not suffer is entirely down to that person or thing. If that doesn't lead to relativistic decisons then I'm not sure what would.
What you seem to be forgetting is that most cultural differences between groups of people are simply not relevant to any system of morality other than their own, and this in no way invalidates objective ethical system.
For example, let's say there is a culture that has as a moral requirement the feat of killing a full grown lion by hand prior to marriage. This is a relevant test of husband-worthiness, for their environment, but we can easily see that this is not a rule we can universalize, if only from the practical standpoint of having insufficient lions worldwide. So while we can say that this practice is morally required in their culture it should not be a moral requirement for anyone else, due to the riskiness and impracticality of hand-to-hand lion combat. We can simply apply reason and see that this practice has no bearing on any objective system of right and wrong and that this is really a moral code that cannot be objectively justified.
If they don't exist because they cause societies to disappear, that's an objective basis for morality.
If 'objective' means 'something that humans all agree is good' then yes.
If 'objective' means 'something that would be true if there were no humans around to ask about it' then no.
Okay so this may seem confusing and I hope you guys can help me distill it into something more. Basically I am trying to say that subjective and objective morality ultimately mean the same thing in a way.
Everybody being dead would be true in your second definition of objective.
Are you saying that, because you can conceive of an infinite number of examples of morality that humans don't have, that in fact we're all very similar? Yes, relative to one's imagination we are incredibly boring.
There are a limited number of societies, and they have--and have had--a tendency to dominate one another and coerce or socialize acceptance of the dominant form of morality. That said, there is an incredibly broad spectrum of variation among cultures.
Which was the motivation, I'm sure, behind the development of Ethical systems to begin with. When you have a system of ethics you basically can create a scale similar to a ruler or thermometer, that is based in observation and reason, in order assess law and moral codes, that anyone who has reason may also use to get the same result. You can use these "objective moral facts" to force human value systems to change through reason and reasoned argumentation. We do this all the time, even to this day, in order to improve human value systems.
Morals lead the trend, changes to law and culture follow.
Without Ethical standards and systems based in objective moral facts and the logical extensions thereof, you cannot even try to get human value systems to be based on it, and I don't think this invalidates objective morality in any way.
I'm not sure what this comment is directed toward. Is it my falsifiable claim that there is no means of collecting and examining evidence to show or even suggest that we or anyone else are closer to the truth blah blah blah?
It can pretty easily be argued that humans are not required in Ethical systems, only rational sentient beings.
Since Ethics purports to tell us how we should act it is only relvant to life, and really only relevant to interactions between sentient life. That does not make Ethical principles less objective however.