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Objecting to objective morality
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It's divisibility is a matter of mathematics, not judgement.
Red is a commonly agreed human perception, reflecting light at 650nm is objective. Without the presence of an observer, "red" does not exist.
Only if there is someone to hear it, otherwise it's just a pressure wave.
Tall(er) and short(er) are relative measurements of size which hold true regardless of the presence of an observer.
But the baby is an intelligence that can experience the suffering and make a judgment about it even if it's at the most basic level of distinguishing between "ouch" and "not ouch".
You're arguing whether or not there would still be morality if there were no judges.
That's like arguing whether or not there would still be circles if there were no curves.
It's why the existence of God is so essential to most arguments of objective morality. He is the infallible, omnipresent judge of everything.
But I haven't seen anyone make that argument yet.
I was trying to ask that without bringing God into it. I'm not sure that's even possible.
I don't know what you mean by 'consensus' if not simply moral relativism by another name. I certainly do not agree that it as been established as anything (it has of course been asserted). I don't think it's even been well formulated.
From first principles, without there being something inherently good or bad about an action, belief or behaviour what basis is there to attempt to influence the consensus at all? Certainly, I do not think that you consider the apparent consensus in favour of rape culture to be a significant factor in its defense.
It's fairly clear that you aren't simply counting noses - after all, the comment about the logic being atrocious indicates that there are factors not based in simple head counts or culturally relative concerns which you actively appeal to.
You also completely failed to address my three criticisms of the demonstration of moral factors - firstly, it doesn't actually address the question insofar as objective has been used throughout the tread. Secondly, this is not unique to moral statements, there are no end of other facts which simply require a descriptive aperatus for us to communicate them. Thirdly, the argument that language obscures reality is a version of the GEM and is a bad argument.
However, all we are really doing is rehearsing a rather old problem in philosophy - what are abstract truths and relations of ideas. Is it meaningful to say they exist? Is the statement "the bus arrived at one o'clock" always true? Does it only become true after buses exist?
The practical upshot being this - propositions about the world, in general, are weird from an ontological perspective. We cannot be consistent in declaring objective morality a fiction without also declaring statements of fact about the world to be the same construction.
Likewise, we may never convince a Talibani seeker that their concerns are monstrous, but what does that demonstrate?
That doesn't remotely address the argument. That may or may not be true, but that doesn't change the logic of the fact that an inability to convince someone of something or the presence of disagreement does not demonstrate a lack of objective fact.
EDIT: it's also trivially simple to show that this is false. In that people who do not learn language still learn facts about the world. Such as, sharp things hurt, water is wet, things fall down and no end of other things.
It's a counter argument to the logic that had popped up a number of times throughout the thread. Not everyone has to be prosecuting an affirmative case all the time - at this point it's useful to clear the air of the unsound arguments
@poshniallo has already pointed out that @MrMister has already demolished this argument but pointing out that @Plato records @Socrates taking @Euthyphro apart on this very subject.
The existence of a supreme being does not guarantee anything of the sort - if morality is dependent on their judgements then rape could be good, if rape cannot be good then this fact does not rest on the judgements of the supreme being.
The point being, that's not required and it is not helpful.
Granting arguendo that your post modern claptrap is not claptrap.
That doesn't change the fact that the following argument is not a good one, the conclusion might well be true, but it doesn't follow and it is not the argument you are giving.
1. Someone believes proposition A
2. Someone else believes proposition B
3. Propositions A and B are mutually exclusive
4. Neither can convince the other of their preferred proposition
C. the truth of the propositions is thus relative to the subject.
Regarding your first point, I would to an extent, agree that most of the thread revolves around countering the bad arguments against moral realism. However, I don't think this needs to be the case, it is mostly an artifact of the way that the discussion has proceeded. I would also point out there are good reasons not to believe in God or unicorns, there are, as yet no good reasons presented to abandon moral realism (which by itself only really gets us to moral agnosticism).
I have already addressed your second point (as have others) that being unable to convince someone of something isn't an argument against moral realism. However, I would further add that it is perfectly possible that there might be facts about the world which we are unable to discover (not that I think this is the case with moral facts). But we can also consider things like - is there a single largest prime number, or how does consciousness arise in the brain? These are things about which there are definite realities, however, we are unable to demonstrate them - this doesn't mean that any position one might take doesn't have a definitive truth value. There might be a single largest prime, the brain might function exactly like a big neural net. Or there might not be a single largest prime, the brain might function exactly like a Von Neumann computer. Eventually we may be able to discover the facts in this regard, we haven't yet, but there are still facts.
As for a positive argument for moral realism, I will give your very general one.
1. Questions of morality are ultimately questions about human flourishing.
2. There are facts about what makes people happy, healthy, sad or suffer.
3. There are facts about the capacities of humans to know and understand things.
We can therefore draw conclusions, informed and restricted by p3, regarding p1 based on the facts of p2.
So is your statement that everything is subjective therefore itself subjective and therefore false? So that the objective truth is that there is such a thing as objectivity?
You wouldn't be comfortable with that, right?
So what we can say is that the subjective/objective dichotomy, particularly with regard to the truth of a statement is a false one. Or a useless one. That we need other ways of talking about this.
And anyway, everything we know is not contained within the language. Everything we communicate, possibly. But not everything we know. Babies know fire burns when they touch it and flinch away, from birth basically. Babies are even able to do elementary maths, or know that logic is not being followed, at a very young age.
Now you can choose to define 'knowledge' as 'the stuff we get from language and can communicate' but that's, well, begging the question isn't it?
It's not as simple as 'words aren't stuff'.
The number of atoms in the universe is a fact, right? A number. But you can't measure it ever, can you? Because it's always changing and your measurement would affect the number, right? Heisenberg is connected to this too. Some facts are impossible to know.
So say it with me, everybody, 'just because something's difficult to know doesn't mean it's not a fact'!
And again!
Under a sympathetic reading you in fact agree with us - you think that moral questions and questions about the world are differentiable in the same fashion and "is it wrong to punch a baby?" can be answered just as readily as "is the moon made of cheese?".
Are you suggesting that their are different levels of objective existence? That an idea can exist independent of a thinker? That subjectivity and objectivity are somehow one and the same? That makes no sense to me.
The question at hand is not whether ideas are real. My ideas are very real. To me. Subjectively. Whether or not they correspond to things outside of me is the question of objectivity, and it's not something I can ever know because everything I see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is a construct. All I can do is choose to believe that my ideas are in correspondence with reality.
My ideas themselves, however, cannot logically exist without me and therefore cannot be objective.
As for God, the argument for his existence is crucial because it implies that "reality" exists only in His mind. In such a scenario, everything is subjective. Everything depends on the will of God and there is no reality but that which exists in His mind, where rape, torture, and genocide are only as good or evil as He believes them to be.
"Is the good good because it is loved by the Gods, or do the Gods love good because it is good?" MrMister's "demolition" of the first proposition is only to state that "it is hard to believe", which is a rejection, not a refutation. It is a scenario in which you reject the idea of genocide as a moral good only because you vehemently disagree; to which one might argue that you only disagree because your moral compass is in alignment with God's. Clearly there have been those in the past that disagreed with you, and the argument over GOD'S TRUE WILL(tm) is as old as time.
I'm not arguing that the argument is true or even helpful. What I am saying is that it's the best argument I've heard and I still don't agree with it.
You're using a rather idiosyncratic definition of objective vs subjective. The question of objectivity vs subjectivity is not that of existence* but rather correspondence with external reality. Whether or not you exist, the content of the proposition contained within some idea you might have may or may not be true by some external measure ("kicking puppies is wrong” or I own a computer”).
* I brought up existence and the strata of reality in propositions they might exist because people have an intuition that for morality to be objective it must have an eternal component and have always been the case. I wished to draw a parallel between that and the philosophy of language and logic which has been grappling with the problem and proposed various solotions for a long time. There's nothing unique about moral propositions in this regard.
People reasonably disagree about various questions which are matters of fact. Like the proper way to interpret quantum mechanics, or various theoretical areas of mathematics. The fact that people can reasonably disagree about these things does not in any way make them less matters of fact. We may not know what the answer is, but that doesn't mean that there isn't one.
And because you wanted an argument in favor of moral realism. Here we go, this is a fairly weak one, but compelling enough for this discussion so far.
1. We have intuitions and behaviors that display a belief in moral realism.
2. We have intuitions and behaviors that display a belief in moral anti-realism
3. We must be either moral realists or anti-realists
4. There are good reasons to believe that those intuitions that lead to moral anti-realism are incorrect.
5. There are not good reasons to believe that our intuitions that lead to moral realism are incorrect.
6. We ought to be moral realists.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
You have changed definitions to make yourself right. And it looks on the face of it like you are begging the question.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Oh, we could start with the fact that objective can be taken to be "independent of the thoughts of any particular person." So the fact that I am 6'2" is objective because no matter what the opinions of any particular person, that doesn't change how tall I am. Of course it's contigently true, as it's only a coincidence that I use the system of measurement that I do. This is contrasted with subjective, where something like whether or not mushrooms are good changes depending on the opinion of the particular subject.
You seemingly have defined objective as "independent of all possible thought." So that any truth that is capable of being thought by a person fails to be objective. Any statement made is one made in language, and since language apparently can't capture any objectivity (for some reason you haven't given), then every statement must be subjective.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
That's an idiosyncratic use of subjective vs objective as well. The observation that the the things worthy of moral consideration are subjects is not equivalent to "morality is therefore subjective", it is no contradiction to say "The beings worthy of moral concern are subjects and there are objective facts about the appropriate treatment of thereof".
I would also add that your radical subjectivity has only been asserted, not established. Is not directly relevant to the thread. And as @poshniallo has already pointed out - is diagonally self defeating.
It's cheeky but the zinger "there's never been a good argument for irrationality" is correct - the very foundation upon which a conclusion like "objectivity is unavailable to us" would be removed by its conclusion. Or to put it another way, you're sawing off the branch upon which you sit from under yourself.
The alternative argument is that you can bootstrap yourself out of it and into contradiction simply as well - if the truth of a proposition is relative to the perspective of the subject, then the truth of the proposition "objectivity is unavailable to us" is likewise relative to perspective. It certainly is not true from my perspective and this objectivity is available to me and by extension the rest of the world. As objectivity is available to us, the proposition is false.
I'm not sure anyone in general and certainly not LoserForHireX in particular was laboring under an impression to the contrary,
Objectivity and subjectivity are very much wrapped up in questions of existence. Subjective objects exist for a certainty. Objective objects are a dubious proposition. The key to TRUTH(tm) lies in the correspondence between the two and my position is that no such comparison can be made.
But even if it could, I do not understand how an opinion can be objectively verified.
:?
I would like the record to state that I don't know what an "objective object" is, but I do think that it sounds funny.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
You are right that our language is arbitrary. But the point is kind of trivial. Yes, babies are called babies and not plungordians. So what? Does that make it any less the case that when I say "there is a baby in the room" that I am stating a matter of fact that isn't dependent on whether or not anyone believes that there is a baby in the room. People that don't believe that there is a baby in the room simply fail to recognize the way that the world actually is.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I do get hung up on the strata question, but I have no qualms about recognizing the relativism underwriting most statements. I like to at least try to be consistent!
As far as I can tell, "objective morality", or "moral facts" is/are built on assumptions. Assuming utilitarianism, for example, there are objectively better or worse things to do in a given situation. I get hung up on saying that utilitarianism is "objectively correct", or pretty much anything else that approaches that kind of claim. Utilitarianism fits in neatly with a lot of our moral impulses, and we tend to justify things in utilitarian terms, I have no issues with these observations; I agree with them! They don't make utilitarianism "objective" though, except in a qualified sense: it's likely objectively true that we tend to justify things in utilitarian terms.
2+2=4 is not arbitrary nor subjective though our choice of graphemes ultimately was.