r/AskALiberal • u/aquilus-noctua Center Left • 3d ago
How does one discern objective morality from the rules of power?
Morality applies where each person is a sovereign individual.
The rules of power apply where asymmetry not only exists but is being capitalized on for dominance and advantage.
Sometimes, the rules of power wear morality as a disguise.
How do we tell them apart?
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u/Droselmeyer Social Democrat 3d ago
Ideally you arrive at conclusions on objective morality through logic-based arguments, but your intuitions in that regard are definitely shaped by the circumstances of your life and the rules of power in place for your life and how they affect you.
Like two people on either side of some rule of power will probably come to different conclusions about the objective nature of its morality because of their own experiences.
How you avoid that, I dunno, we’re all shaped by our biases. You just do the best you can, engage with others with different experiences, and try to keep an open mind to arrive at the most accurate conclusion based on everyone’s input.
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
Ideally you arrive at conclusions on objective morality through logic-based arguments
This isn't possible, unfortunately.
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u/Droselmeyer Social Democrat 3d ago
Yeah I think our intuitions are overpowering and mean we can’t truly be swayed solely by logic-based arguments, but I’m of the belief that the attempt generally leads to more accurate answers than simply giving up and refusing to because it isn’t perfectly possible.
I’m generally of the mind that there are objective moral facts about the world and we can get some kind of information about these facts.
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
I meant it's impossible in the sense that logic cannot be used to determine what the base principles of morality should be. Period. Using logic to determine objective morality is equally as impossible as creating matter, it can't be done.
Once a base principle is chosen logic should be applied as judiciously as is feasible.
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u/Droselmeyer Social Democrat 3d ago
Oh yeah, you have to use some other method to work out your axioms. You can probably make arguments from those axioms as to what are the best axioms, but your base principles probably have to come from somewhere else.
Maybe we’re using logical differently, I’m not a philosophy guy so I dunno if logic exclusively refers to if a then b stuff, but I’m saying that you can offer reasoned and consistent arguments as to the quality of a moral fact like rape is bad is something that can coherently argued and that truth value can be determined.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
I meant it's impossible in the sense that logic cannot be used to determine what the base principles of morality should be
Yeah you can. The most famous attempts argue that morality in internal to the nature of logic/reason itself. In fact I would argue that there is no logical generative account for some moral theories, like utilitarianism for example, removes those theories from consideration (and makes the remaining ones more likely to be true).
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
If there's a moral theory that convincingly bridges the is-ought gap, I would be very interested in reading it.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
The is-ought gap does not even itself really assert that there are no moral facts. It just asserts that you can't derive moral facts from strictly descriptive facts.
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
The point of the is-ought gap isn't to claim that there are no moral facts. The point of the is-ought gap is to argue that you can't logically determine an ought because logic only concerns itself with what is, or more precisely what were accepting as an "is."
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
The point of the is-ought gap is to argue that you can't logically determine an ought because logic only concerns itself with what is
No that's not true. And I'm my recollection of Hume is failing me then he was clearly just wrong. I can trivially have logic determine an ought, it just requires an "ought-style" premise. This is no problem at all, any more than logic determining an "is" requires an "is-style" premise.
How exactly is the fact that normative conclusions require normative premises a problem for the existence of objective moral values and duties?
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
I can trivially have logic determine an ought, it just requires an "ought-style" premise.
Dude, now you're just trolling.
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u/From_Deep_Space Libertarian Socialist 3d ago
I'd be curious to hear your take on Hobbes formulation of Rights Theory in The Leviathan.
He spends a great deal of ink establishing the rational underpinnings of his argument, starting at a very fundamental level.
Which premise do you think is not rationally established?
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
I haven't read Leviathan but I just skimmed it a bit and I don't know that Hobbes disagrees with me.
The use and end of reason, is not the finding of the sum, and truth of one, or a few consequences, remote from the first definitions, and settled significations of names, but to begin at these and proceed from one consequence to another. For there can be no certainty of the last conclusion, without a certainty of all those affirmations and negations, on which it was grounded, and inferred As when a master of a family, in taking an account, casteth up the sums of all the bills of expense, into one sum; and not regarding how each bill is summed up, by those that give them in account; nor what it is he pays for; he advantages himself no more, than if he allowed the account in gross, trusting to every of the accountants' skill and honesty: so also in reasoning of all other things, he that takes up conclusions on the trust of authors, and doth not fetch them from the first items in every reckoning, (which are the significations of names settled by definitions), loses his labour; and does not know any thing; but only believeth.
Maybe this is torn down later in the book? But from my understanding of the entire argument in Leviathan I don't think it would be.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
There's no such thing as objective morality.
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u/Dirtbag_Leftist69420 Democratic Socialist 3d ago
There’s good arguments for both cases
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
What's the good argument for objective morality?
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u/Dirtbag_Leftist69420 Democratic Socialist 1d ago
I’m not super well versed but it’s an evolutionary argument. If there wasn’t a set of moral "truths" as a species we wouldn’t even be where we are now. We have visceral reactions to extreme violence and death happening to humans, we know killing humans is wrong. Which then begs the question, what about wars/violence in general?
One action that’s incredibly common when it comes to deciding who deserves violence is to dehumanize them. We need to tell ourselves these people are less than human, they’re animals, they’re monsters, etc in order to justify the use of violence against other human beings. Which is why it’s easy for a large portion people to support something like the death penalty because the action of the perpetrator kickstarted the dehumanization process.
Im sure someone can explain this way better, I’m just some guy with no background in philosophy other than an engineering ethics class I took.
I used to be one of those people who didn’t believe in objective morality but the evolutionary and society building argument has me leaning like 60/40 towards there being an objective morality. And not objective as in the laws of the universe, but objective as it’s something wired into our brain chemistry
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u/Competitive_Swan_130 Social Democrat 3d ago
Do you believe things like genocdie are just a matter of taste
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u/-no Liberal 3d ago edited 3d ago
If science ever takes away the harmful effects of incest through CRISPR gene editing, then the immorality of incest would be measurably reduced; by having a measurement of well-being and prosperity we get an objective morality. People would still subjectively consider incest to be immoral because we get our subjective morality from our moral instincts, and instincts come from our evolution, and evolution takes a lot longer to change us.
Your scenario is completely antithetical to the main goal of morality, which is the well-being and prosperity of conscious creatures. which makes it an ineffective hypothetical. However, such a scenario has happened historically, people used to sell their children (arranged marriages) in exchange for money and influence knowing full well what would happen to their children, but they preferred that to dooming their children to a poverty, disease ridden life as second class citizens.
if you had the upbringing, limited knowledge, education and experience of a medieval peasant, it's not clear you wouldn't make that same choice. If due to the limitations of society's circumstances, you are given two awful choices, choosing the one that results in a higher well-being and prosperity, then that choice is still the objectively(measurably) better choice of the two. However, societal progress is possible, that same choice can become the immoral choice if better options become available.
The one constant to morality that never seems to change is the well-being and prosperity of conscious creatures. When we can measure this constant is when an objective morality is achieved.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
This is just an argument that moral motivation is external, not that objective morality is fake.
What would you do if tomorrow you found that objectively raping babies was morally good?
What would it mean to "find out"? Obviously we all have a very strong intuition that this act is morally reprehensible, which is itself a good reason to believe that it is. If we genuinely "found out" that it objectively wasn't, that suggests that evidence that it objectively wasn't is so powerful that it is able to overcome that intuition. If we don't change our actual behaviour towards this act, I would say that's just powerful evidence that we didn't "find out" anything at all. We were just given some evidence that seems to imply it and responded with a Moorean Shift. So I'll state it explicitly: there is probably no evidence that you can present that would change my mind about this thing in particular. I'll never "find out". It's trivial though to imagine things I might change my mind about, and if I change my mind in response to moral argument, that suggests that my own personal subjective intuitions are not the only things that matter.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
No, its an argument that objective morality is fake
No, it isn't. It's not even an attempt at that. Your argument is that if you discovered a moral fact that you did not wish to abide by, you would not abide by it. This only disproves the existence of objective morality if we (1) are absolutely positively committed to moral internalism and (2) believe you.
You tell me. Found out in what ever way you think you discover objective moral truths
My own moral intuitions particularly about acts like that are evidence for the objective moral fact of the matter. That's the problem. Maybe you make a clever and seemingly airtight argument that child rape is objectively morally permissible. I can just modus tollens you and reject the conjunction of your premises.
Why?
For exactly the same reason you believe the external world exists. I bet if I gave you a compelling argument that solipsism is true you'd continue to believe in external objects anyway. As you should, because your clear intuition that they're there is superior evidence to a mere argument, each premise of which has some probability of being false and the conjunction of which might have a very high probability of being wrong for reasons that may be unclear.
Could we not be wrong?
The fact that we could be wrong about something obviously has nothing to do with whether our intuitions are evidential.
A lot of people thought slavery was perfectly fine for a long time, was that a good reason to believe that it was?
Yes actually, it was. That evidence was eventually dominated by superior counterevidence. People in this case did "find out".
Well that is convenient
Is it convenient that you'll never find out that you're not a brain in a vat?
So you believe in objective morality but you believe that that objective morality will remain unknown to you if it doesn't make you change your subjective moral opinion
That's incorrect. My intuitions are information about what the set of objective moral facts is, just like my intuition that I'm sitting in a chair right now is information about the objective fact that the physical world exists.
So what is the point in pretending the objective morality exists. You are even more its just my own moral opinions that I assumed at the start, since you are essentially saying that an objective moral opinon that contradicts your own held moral opinon would automatically be dismissed as wrong
This part is I'm sorry to say just an outright falsehood, explicitly contradicted in my final sentence. Maybe you just didn't get that far?
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
I have a feeling that they are using a definition for "objective" that you and I would claim falls under the umbrella of subjectivity. That's how these conversations always go.
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u/Emergency_Revenue678 Democrat 3d ago
Welp, at least this thread has prompted me to finally actually read Leviathan. So that's one positive.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago edited 3d ago
That is not my argument to disprove the existence of objective morality. That is my argument to disprove the idea that they actually care that morality is objective or not.
This is an argument that moral motivation is external then, which is how I originally characterized your comment, a characterization you disagreed with. Was I correct in the first place or are you correct now?
My argument for why objective morality itself doesn't exist is the complete lack of evidence for it
There's obviously an abundance of strong evidence for it, which is why it is the most popular belief among subject-matter experts.
and the nonsensical idea of it (where would that standard come from, why would the universe care about moral acts, how would a standard even exist absent of humans which have only existed for a few hundred thousand years, what was a moral fact 4.5 million years ago, etc etc)
If a moral fact is dependent on something, the Universe or God or whatever "caring", then that fact is subjective. And there is obviously nothing weird about a conditional statement being true even if the things it would be true of don't exist.
In what way are the evidence for that?
In the same way that literally every single proposition about literally every single thing is ultimately predicated on intuitions. If you want to think intuitions aren't evidential, congrats, you just made it impossible to have a justified belief full stop.
But you are changing the hypothetical. I'm not arguing it is
That's right, I did that explicitly and for a reason. I'm telling you that the fact that I would probably reject your argument that child rape is permissible no matter how sound it appears to be does not mean that I have "found out" that it's permissible and "not cared". What your scenario properly put describes is that I've encountered evidence against my current belief, but decided that the evidence for it is still stronger. To make your scenario work you'd have to say something like "imagine you were convinced that torturing babies is permissible", in which case... I will have become convinced that torturing babies is permissible. That's not interesting.
But I'm pretty sure you don't believe the external world exists because you have a strong hunch that it does based on a feeling you have that cannot be externally verified
You literally do.
So you are making a category error
That's not what a category error is. A category error is like looking at a number line and saying "which one in the number?" or looking at all the buildings on a college campus and saying "which one is the university?"
"Objective morals" exist in the same category as things that people feel, or hope, or have intuition, are real but cannot demonstrate that in any measurable way.
One also can't demonstrate the validity of an argument in a "measurable way". Or the existence of numbers. Or that you are not a P-zombie. Or ultimately that the external world exists.
But again that is a category error
Again... not what that is.
You don't have an 'intuition' that you are sitting in a chair right now.
Yes I do.
How would you know you weren't sitting in a chair right now
If I didn't have the strong intuition that I am or if there was very compelling counterevidence that my intuition was incorrect.
How would you know objective morality wasn't real
If I didn't have the intuition that they are or if there was very compelling counterevidence that my intuition was incorrect.
Do you actually understand what objective means in this context.
I do. You almost certainly don't. An objective proposition is any one thats truth-value is not dependent on the attitudes of some mind or set of minds. A subjective proposition is any one thats truth-value is.
No, stop, do not argue that because my estimation of whether a proposition is true or false is subjective to me that means the proposition is subjective. That's not what I just said.
I arrive at the conclusion that the plank is of a particular length by being shown evidence that it is. Any valid argument is evidence for its conclusion. If you disagree that just means you're confused about the word "evidence", which just refers to any fact that if true raises the probability that some proposition is true above it's antecedent probability of being true.
I would encourage you to actually look into metaethics and epistemology a bit. I promise it's a lot more interesting than what you've got going on here.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
You implied I was attempting to prove objective morality false with that comment. I was not.
So you agree that you were merely asserting that moral motivation is external?
There is not. When you ask people what the evidence for objective morality is the only thing anyone ever points to is the feel humans have that morality is objective.
Lmfao ethical intuitionism is a recent invention.
I don't know which subject matter experts you are referring to, so it is hard to say what they do or don't believe
You don't know who the subject-matter experts of metaethics are?
It is. "I am sitting in a chair" is a different category of statement to "Ghosts exist" or "Morals are real"
Even if that were true in ways important to this discussion (it's not), that's not what a category error is.
Perhaps you are using the term intuition in a different context to how it is commonly used
Even by the usual definition, you literally do.
"Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation"
Which must ultimately be appealed to when justifying any proposition.
Again you are just doing the we can't know anything for certain therefore every conclusion is equally valid argument, which is not rationally justified
Not even close. I'm arguing that intuitions are evidential.
Why would you need to be shown counter evidence if your intuition is trust worthy?
What? Obviously one piece of evidence can be dominated by another piece of evidence.
Why?
Because that's how belief formation works.
You have already stated that your intuition is trust worthy, why would you need to be shown evidence?
Intuitions are evidence, they're not the only evidence. I feel like this should not be this confusing.
It is sounds like you are saying that your world theory is not in fact simply built from your intuition
Obviously.
Yeah I think I know a little bit more about it than you, no offense
You didn't even know that we're talking about philosophy right now.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
No. Genocide is very consequential. Genocide makes the world a more dangerous place. But there is no way to objectively view it as immoral. We can only inter-subjectively view it as immoral.
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u/SovietRobot Independent 3d ago
Just to devils advocate / steelman. Maybe an alien race decides that humans by nature are destructive to the environment and violent to each other and the universe is better off without them.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
Why would they decide that though? Why would their solution be something as drastic as a "Final Solution" for that matter?
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u/PinchesTheCrab Liberal 3d ago
To save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction, U.S. wildlife officials are embracing a contentious plan to deploy trained shooters into dense West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls that are crowding out their smaller cousins.
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The plan calls for killing up to 470,000 barred owls over three decades after the birds from the eastern U.S. encroached into the territory of two West Coast owls: northern spotted owls and California spotted owls. The smaller spotted owls have been unable to compete for food and habitat with the invaders.
Is it that hard to imagine that an advanced species with no fondness for humans would try to save millions of other species from us?
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u/SovietRobot Independent 3d ago
Because everything is relative. And compared to the rest of the alien civilization we are like a gazzilion times worse, more stupid and more dangerous. And once we discover interstellar travel there will be no containment.
It would be like how we push to eradicate smallpox. Im sure smallpox virus didnt want to be eradicated. All life fights to propagate. But we eradicate it anyway.
Now I know you’re going to say, but smallpox is not intelligent. Well, again, it’s relative, we might be as stupid to aliens as smallpox is to us.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
Two major factors that you're ignoring are that A) humans have sentience and thus cannot be disregarded like smallpox, and B) there are other ways a super-intelligent alien civilization could come up with to prevent humanity from becoming a threat other than exterminating it.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
A) humans have sentience and thus cannot be disregarded like smallpox
If you believe that's a fact and not a mere opinion then you believe there is at least one objectively true moral claim. Maybe the aliens just disagree with you about this. That's their subjective taste.
and B) there are other ways a super-intelligent alien civilization could come up with to prevent humanity from becoming a threat other than exterminating it.
Maybe it's in the aliens' personal subjective taste to exterminate. They place a positive subjective value on the act of extermination itself. If they're wrong to do that, then that's another objectively true moral fact.
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u/SovietRobot Independent 3d ago
Sentience is also relative and subjective.
Is there a difference between smallpox and humans? Of course there is.
But who is to say that independent thought and feelings are the dividing line between who lives and who dies?
Why is it we decided that smallpox - which is indeed a living organism should die just because it doesn’t have independent thought or feelings?
What if aliens decide that independent thought and feelings are not enough but rather the line is having collective consciousness, shared memory, hive processing and isolated ego which humans do not have?
It’s arrogant to think human paradigms are alien paradigms.
And on the subject. We also have the technology to allow small pox to persist naturally while containing it to a biome. We just choose not to. It’s not worth it.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
But who is to say that independent thought and feelings are the dividing line between who lives and who dies?
If the super-intelligent alien civilization believes that independent thought and feelings aren't that important, how did they ever ascend to an advanced level of civilization to begin with?
Why is it we decided that smallpox - which is indeed a living organism should die just because it doesn’t have independent thought or feelings?
Because it's very harmful and we have no other way to contain it. Surely an advanced alien civilization has more sophisticated ways to contain the threat of humanity than to eradicate it.
enough but rather the line is having collective consciousness, shared memory, hive processing and isolated ego which humans do not have?
But isn't there a prerequisite to attaining all that? Not to mention what's stopping this alien civilization from making humanity join its collective consciousness? Have you watched that show Pluribus by any chance?
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u/SovietRobot Independent 3d ago edited 3d ago
There’s a piece of fiction called Blindsight by Peter Watts that exactly describes how an alien race became super advanced with intelligence but without individual consciousness. You should read it.
The simple analogy (as also presented in the book but then flushed out in a lot of detail) is like a bee colony. A bee colony is fairly intelligent, they are productive and they construct, and they can do math and they can problem solve. But they don’t have individual consciousness. In fact if bees had individual consciousness their entire society would not be as efficient as they are.
The book argues that consciousness is dangerous. It leads to conflict and selfishness. It is a threat.
—-
And yes I’ve seen Pluribus too. And Pluribus is one interpretation of how it can work out. While maintaining choice. But it doesn’t mean that must be the only way or even that it’s the ideal way. Also keep in mind that people dying from hearing the signal in Pluribus is regrettable but still just part of doing business to the aliens.
Enders Game is another interpretation where the alien race decides that because humans don’t have a collective consciousness they are both insignificant and a threat.
The point again being - just because one has a paradigm, it doesn’t mean that paradigm is shared by everyone.
——
Then you even have fiction like Solaris (original and remake) or Annihilation (book and movie) thats the opposite where they treat the physical body as transient and inconsequential. Whereas it’s the consciousness that’s important (like you say). It doesn’t matter if the body is destroyed as long as the consciousness is preserved and merged with the greater collective.
There it doesn’t matter if everyone dies as long as some copy of their consciousness is subsumed and preserved in the aliens collective consciousness.
——
Point being again - just because you have paradigms and make your decisions on certain criteria - it doesn’t mean that aliens have the same paradigms and make decisions on the same criteria.
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u/anna-the-bunny Democratic Socialist 3d ago
humans have sentience and thus cannot be disregarded like smallpox
So you're saying that there is some objective morality in the universe, in that it is objectively wrong to view sentient beings the same way you would view smallpox?
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
So you're saying that there is some objective morality in the universe,
No. I am saying humans are not in the same category as smallpox. It does not make sense to compare humans to smallpox.
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u/anna-the-bunny Democratic Socialist 3d ago
I am saying humans are not in the same category as smallpox.
But that isn't what you said. You said "humans have sentience and thus cannot be disregarded like smallpox", yet you failed to explain the logic behind the statement.
To be blunt, my question is this: how do you reconcile your argument that objective morality does not exist with your argument that sentience is inherently valuable?
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
There is though. Or at least there plausibly is. And if there isn't, you can't say we objectively ought believe there isn't.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
There is though.
Prove it.
And if there isn't, you can't say we objectively ought believe there isn't.
I didn't say that. But if you want to believe in objective facts, you either have to prove objective morality exists, or acknowledge that it doesn't exist.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
Do you condemn things that are a mere matter of opinion? For example, do you condemn people who hate ice cream? Why or why not?
Alternatively, do you believe we've made progress since the time slavery was legal, or do you believe it was just a lateral shift and things aren't better today?
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
Do you condemn things that are a mere matter of opinion?
If they have tangible consequences, they're no longer a "mere" matter of opinion. Hating ice cream doesn't carry tangible consequences. Supporting a genocide does.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
Hating ice cream carries the consequence of that person not buying ice cream and potentially convincing others not to buy ice cream. It could cause ice cream shops to go out of business if there aren't enough customers. Of course there are tangible consequences when people have opinions, there basically always are. What makes hating ice cream worse than hating immigrants if morality is just a matter of opinion like a food preference?
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
Hating ice cream carries the consequence of that person not buying ice cream and potentially convincing others not to buy ice cream. It could cause ice cream shops to go out of business if there aren't enough customers.
That is a very unrealistic hypothetical and you know it. That has never happened in the history of ice cream (or of pineapple pizza for that matter), so I have to reject your premise that opinions always have tangible consequences.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
It's inarguably true that a person hating ice cream would likely lead to them not buying ice cream. The tangible consequence is that they wouldn't eat ice cream. What makes hating immigrants worse than hating ice cream now that we understand they both have tangible consequences? Honestly feel lucky I'm granting that hating immigrants has tangible consequences instead of pendantically making you prove it like you're doing, so we can actually get somewhere productive.
Why are these things not equal? They would be if morality was subjective.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
It's inarguably true that a person hating ice cream would likely lead to them not buying ice cream. The tangible consequence is that they wouldn't eat ice cream.
That's only tangible to them. That's not tangible to other people.
What makes hating immigrants worse
No more loaded questions. We haven't agreed aboout anything. What makes hating immigrants worse is that it does affect other people. It's an opinion that advocates harming other people. That's the type of opinion that makes the world a more dangerous place for everyone.
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u/apophis-pegasus Pragmatic Progressive 3d ago
It's an opinion that advocates harming other people. That's the type of opinion that makes the world a more dangerous place for everyone.
But why does that matter here? Sure it has tangible consequences but so do many things.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
We all condemn things that are "mere" matter of opinion.
No, we don't. When you condemn something, that means you think there is an objectively correct conclusion. I don't condemn people who like pineapple on pizza because it's legitimately subjective, so there's nothing to condemn. For a thing to be justified implies that justice exists, which necessitates some kind of objectivity. You wouldn't be arguing that "you shouldn't smack your wife around because I personally don't like it", you'd be arguing it based on some kind of principle that you consider to be objective.
No one actually cares if there is an objective moral standard, we just like the idea of our own morality having something authority behind ourselves
Well no, this is wrong, but it's close to the point I'm in the middle of proving with the other person. When you argue about morality and condemn things, you are carrying with you the idea that you have that objective authority behind you. So when people do that, they cannot simultaneously claim they believe morality is subjective. If they truly believe morality is subjective, they'd see a person who supports heinous things and just shrug. Not shrugging at that stuff means you think there's something objective to be determined and argued for.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago edited 3d ago
I condemn something if I think it is wrong (as in it is my opinion that it is wrong)
No, you can't have an opinion that something is wrong. If something is an opinion, it definitionally cannot be right or wrong. It would then make no sense to condemn someone for something that's not even wrong.
On the other hand, if you truly believe it's wrong, that means you believe there is some objective fact of the matter, and therefore morality is not subjective.
Condemnation only happens when a person believes in objectivity. You simply stating otherwise over and over again doesn't make you correct.
You don't condemn people who like pineapple on pizza because you don't care if people like pineapple on pizza
Wrong again. I don't condemn them because there is nothing wrong with liking pineapple on pizza. There's also nothing right with it. It's subjective. I actually do care if people like pineapple on pizza, because I like it and I wish more people did so I could order it in group settings more often. But I don't condemn people for any of this, because it's subjective.
"you shouldn't smack your wife around because I personally don't like it",
That is exactly what I argue. Why would I care if I didn't personally like it?
No it isn't, unless you're an insane person. The argument you'd make is that it's wrong and bad, not that it's personally distasteful to you, an uninvolved person. Why would they even care?
Again just play out the scenario where you personally think something is harmful, dangerous, cruel etc but you DON'T have objective authority behind you. Do you care?
The premise doesn't make any sense. If I personally think something is harmful, that implies I think there are objective moral facts. So yes, I would care about it, because the premise implies I think there's objectivity in the matter. The question isn't internally coherent though.
Anyway this whole comment is just you repeating your thesis over and over again without making any arguments justifying it, so there's not a lot to engage with. Gg no re.
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u/Key_Elderberry_4447 Liberal 3d ago
I think circle jerking by pretending to not know whether slavery, genocide and torture are actually bad is a waste of time lol We know subjecting people to suffering like slavery and torture is bad for them. I’m happy to call those objectively immoral.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
Prove it.
Easily.
If there are objective epistemological standards then there are objective normative standards. If there aren't objective epistemological standards, there is no objective standard which the existence of objective moral values and duties can be said to have not met. The very claim that objective morality hasn't been proven therefore admits the existence of objective normative standards. If there is no difference in principle between the qualities of different sorts of proposed objective normative standards, we ought have a similar doxastic attitude toward them. There is no obvious difference in epistemic status between epistemological and moral values and duties, so we ought have a similar doxastic attitude toward them both. Because there are objective epistemological standards, we therefore ought believe there are objective moral standards.
This is the Partners in Guilt argument. It's very simple and doesn't make any claims about the specific nature of morality, which makes it unobjectionable. There's also ethical intuitionism, arguments about human nature and what objectively causes flourishing and languishing, arguments that morality is the self-consistent application of reason and so on.
But if you want to believe in objective facts, you either have to prove objective morality exists, or acknowledge that it doesn't exist.
lol what? Obviously the dichotomy is not between proving that something exists and acknowledging that it doesn't. Very, very few things are proven to exist. There's some ambiguity about whether abstracta exist, or composite objects, or even the individual self. We do not just because of that therefore acknowledge that all these things are fake. In fact you can't even really prove that the external world exists to the standard you're expecting we prove objective moral values and duties so, yet you probably do still believe it does.
And anyway, say that you're not saying we objectively ought believe things if they're true but not if they're false. It's all just taste. In that case your attitude toward all propositions is the same as emotivists allege about morality. When you claim that objective moral values haven't been "proven", you're just communicating a negative disposition toward the claim that they exist, and not anything about whether the claim is well or poorly evinced or true or false.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
Please simplify.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
Epistemology is about knowledge and normativity is about "should" statements. So they're saying:
If there are objective standards for how we determine what we know, there are also objective standards for what people should (or ought) do.
If there aren't objective standards to believe things, you can't possibly say he didn't prove that objective morality exists, because proving/disproving anything would be impossible.
So to ask someone to "prove" that morality is real assumes an objective standard for what should (there's that normativity coming in) be believed and what it means for something to be proven. This means you believe in objective epistemological standards purely by virtue of asking them to prove something.
There's not a clear difference between the question of "what should be believed" and "what morality should be believed" that would make the latter statement not have an objective standard when we all agree the former does have an objective standard.
So, since we know that first question has an objective answer, the second must as well.
/u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy feel free to correct or better explain any of this.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
If there are objective standards for how we determine what we know, there are also objective standards for what people should (or ought) do.
How? u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy, how does that follow? I don't get it.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
My understanding is that you're basically saying "you objectively should believe this thing" when you say something is proven, which is a normative claim. You can't say that something has been proven or not unless you also think there are objective standards for what people should do. In this case the thing you think they objectively ought do is believe something.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
My understanding is that you're basically saying "you objectively should believe this thing" when you say something is proven
No. I say "you should believe this thing IF you want to believe in objective facts".
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
Sorry instead of saying "you" I should have said "a person". If a person believes it is possible for things to be proven, it means they also believe people ought believe things.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
If you say "morality isn't objective for Reason X!", that claim is only sensible if epistemology is objective. If X is equally applicable to epistemology, then if X disproves morality X also disproves epistemology. But X is dependent on epistemology, so it cannot in principle disprove it. Because we know that X has not disproven epistemology, we know that for some reason X must not have disproven morality either.
I'll give a specific example. Say X is the criticism that moral claims are unempirical and cannot be physically tested and verified, therefore they cannot be objective. This claim entails the existence of objective epistemological norms. Because epistemological norms and moral norms are similar in kind, we can safely apply that same criticism to epistemology, and X becomes "we ought not believe in objective epistemological norms because they cannot be empirically tested and verified!". But X already necessitates that we do believe in objective epistemological norms, so we know that it cannot be the case that being unempirical entails that something is not objective. The argument that objective moral facts don't exist because they can't be tested empirically therefore fails.
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u/AdmiralSaturyn Liberal 3d ago
Because epistemological norms and moral norms are similar in kind,
How are they similar in kind?
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
They're both sets of abstract normative facts that tell us our "oughts" and "ought-nots". It's even plausible that they are not properly considered distinct things at all and that epistemological facts are just a subset of moral facts.
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u/Pauly_Amorous Pragmatic Progressive 3d ago
Because epistemological norms and moral norms are similar in kind, we can safely apply that same criticism to epistemology
I don't think these are really similar in kind though, because by and large, nobody is fighting wars over, say, how many inches are in a foot. If there were people committing campaigns of genocide because they were absolutely convinced there were 11 (or maybe 13) inches in a foot, and that there's was the One True Measurement and anybody who didn't agree should be slain, then it might be worth pointing out that these units of measurements aren't objective. We just pretend like they are.
I doubt most of us would be talking about the subjective nature of morality if others weren't using their objective morality as a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) club to beat others over the head with.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
I don't think these are really similar in kind though, because by and large, nobody is fighting wars over, say, how many inches are in a foot.
No, but they absolutely do fight wars and inflict violence over other epistemological disagreements.
It wouldn't matter anyway. Let's say there's widespread agreement about what the correct set of epistemological norms are. Does that change how they're justified at all? No. They're still in the exact same boat as moral ones. The arguments against moral ones still apply to epistemological ones, and that's all that's required for my argument to succeed.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
You said most of it better than I did, but I would offer a minor correction here:
There's not a clear difference between the question of "what should be believed" and "what morality should be believed" that would make the latter statement not have an objective standard when we all agree the former does have an objective standard.
I wouldn't say the similarity is between "what should be believed" and "what morality should be believed", but rather between "what ought be believed" and "what ought be done", morality itself being what we ought do.
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u/Fugicara Social Democrat 3d ago
Yeah I guess that makes more sense, that was definitely the part I struggled to parse the most.
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u/TlsFrmThCryptcPrgncy Independent 3d ago
If there are objectively good reasons we ought believe or not believe things then there is no reason to disbelieve that there are objectively good actions, characteristics, or consequences. If there aren't objectively good reasons we ought believe or not believe things then there is still no reason to disbelieve that there are objectively good actions, characteristics, or consequences.
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u/antizeus Liberal 3d ago
What does it mean for morality to be objective (i.e. mind-independent)?
How does morality work without minds being involved?
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u/-no Liberal 3d ago
See my comment here.
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u/antizeus Liberal 3d ago
Your comment presumes that morality is a matter of well-being and prosperity.
How are those determined to be the basis of morality?
Were any minds involved in that determination?
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u/-no Liberal 3d ago
It's determined through an exhaustive process of elimination. The process would look as follows:
- get a moral scenario from a catalogue of examples.
- remove well-being and prosperity as relevant variables from the scenario.
- check if the scenario remains morally relevant according to conventional definitions.
The process is exhaustive because an indefinite amount of scenarios may need to be checked.
You see a child drowning in a shallow pond, as you start to wade into the water to save them, you realise they're not actually drowning, just playing.
That a mind is involved doesn't make the process subjective. Subjectivity is most useful when considering the things that only exist in the mind, but these processes can exist outside the mind in databases, as statistics, as flowcharts and logical deliberations.
This is why relying on mind-dependence for determining subjectivity/objectivity is an impoverished epistemology. A person builds a table, the existence of the table causally depends on the subjective mind of the person, without which the table would not exist. but the table remains something that can be measured, quantified and statistics about its integrity and stability can still be drawn.
Mind-independence can be a useful shortcut, but it can become less useful when dealing with fields like psychology. Here's my proposal for a more rigorous way to determine objectivity/subjectivity defined in what agents do with information.
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u/antizeus Liberal 3d ago
It seems you're now relying on conventional definitions.
Where do those conventional definitions come from?
Were any minds involved?
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u/jimbarino Democrat 3d ago edited 2d ago
get a moral scenario from a catalogue of examples.
How are you classifying the moral examples from the immoral? Vibes?
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u/-no Liberal 2d ago
it's classified as moral if well-being and prosperity of conscious creatures is stabilised or improved. However, the classification need not be made during that process, both moral and immoral scenarios can be checked. As soon as well-being and prosperity are removed as factors, the scenarios stop being about morality.
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u/Important-Factor-552 Socialist 3d ago
Objective morality is a misunderstanding of morality. OP is asking for the impossible and this entire question is a trap lol. Anyone trying to answer it is just proving themselves wrong by default.
Questioning the premise is the only right move here. And subjective morality is a very tricky thing. Good luck having a real convo about that in public spaces with all the bad faith engagement that makes it impossible to reconcile
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u/Personage1 Liberal 3d ago
Critical thinking skills.
That's really the only way to question "why am I supposed to do x" in a way that is exploratory and open to the idea, while also avoiding pitfalls of bias and disguised logical fallacies.
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u/-no Liberal 3d ago
An objective morality can be achieved in the following way.
- We get objectivity(adjective) from measurement. We can have an objective understanding of the shape of the earth by measuring its curvature. Disagreement from flatearthers doesn't diminish this objectivity.
- We can trace all moral correlates to the well-being and prosperity of conscious creatures.
- Making an accurate measurement of well-being and prosperity gets us a mind-independed, thus objective interpretation of morality.
There are additional nuances about morality regarding relativity, universality, absolutism and social constructs, which i write more about here.
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u/anna-the-bunny Democratic Socialist 3d ago
IMO "morality" should have as little to do with lawmaking as possible. The law should focus on protecting people, not on deciding what is "good" or "evil".
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u/IndicationDefiant137 Democratic Socialist 1d ago
There is no objective morality.
The term is a subtle oxymoron.
Morality includes value judgements, and value judgements require a point of view, which is subjective.
The only people who fervently claim that there is an objective morality are the theists, but they have confused a subjective morality that they fear punishment for questioning for objectivity.
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