How to argue with subjective moralists

[AntiTheist]

Betterave,

I am sorry to say that after reading your post twice I am no closer to figuring out what you are saying for most of it. You’re really all over the place, and it’s hard to grasp what arguments you are making. I’m going to try to respond to the parts that made sense, re-ordering for convenience. You’ll just have to better explain the rest.

*“Better” only has a meaning in a context, from a perspective *- right (that’s just banal): but there always is a context/perspective and that context/perspective is not originally found “inside our heads”, it is found in the real world (of which “inside our heads” is just a part).

No. The “context” for better is always a standard that comes from values, which are necessarily individual and subjective. That’s the “context” I’m referring to, not the specific situation.

The thing that makes “intellectual honesty” better to me, for example, is my desire to have an intelligent exchange of ideas. Outside of the context of my desires (inside the head), there’s nothing that makes it better than anything else.

But what is intellectual honesty anyway? Would we need to be intellectually honest to know the answer to that question?

You seem really confused on the point of “intellectual honesty.” I use that word as a label for certain kinds of thinking, including especially the ability to admit when one is incorrect about an assertion in the face of new evidence.

One does not need to be “intellectually honest” to define something, as the process of defining is just labeling. I could call “intellectual honesty” “willingtobewrong-ism” if I wanted to. How I label things is unrelated to the kind of thought process covered by “intellectual honesty.”

i.e., from **your **perspective, integrity is no better than lack of integrity, except, that is, relative to some ‘perspective’, which, again, happens to be yours, and which is itself (allegedly), qua perspective, a brute value-neutral psychological fact …and you expect to be taken seriously and to pass yourself off as intellectually honest when you make such claims?

Why wouldn’t people take me seriously? It all follows, logically. What exactly is your objection?

Are you trying to say that other people might not value intellectual honesty because they have different perspectives? It’s really hard to follow your train of thought here. Please advise.

If that is the objection you are trying to raise, I should point out that values don’t develop in a vacuum. Part of the reason I value intellectual honesty is that I was raised to value it in an intellectual culture that values it; my experiences of intelligent conversation have all relied on it, making it important for me to value it if I ever planned to engage in intelligent conversation.

I really don’t understand your objection, so I guess I’ll stop until I know more.

What if that doesn’t work? Would it be time for a new plan then maybe?

If literally nobody on the face of the earth took me seriously when I thought I was making sense? Then yeah, it would be time for me to take a good, long, hard look at myself and figure out what I’m doing that’s not working.

So what about intellectual honesty? Do you suppose someone could value intellectual honesty just so as to make people respect him; or would that not really be intellectually honest?

Of course someone could do that. How would that not “really” be intellectually honest? Your thinking either exhibits traits of being intellectually honest or it doesn’t. Your reasons for thinking in an intellectually honest way have nothing to do with whether the thinking actually is intellectually honest or not.

But what are the criteria we ought to use to make this evaluation of your true character, your intellectual honesty?

Whether the thinker is willing to change his or her mind in the face of new evidence. Just yesterday I admitted that something I was claiming was too strong when someone challenged it. I don’t feel like digging up the thread right now, but I could point to evidence if you like.

And I wouldn’t say that it’s my “true character” – I’d say that it’s a quality of the thinking that I represent in these discussions.

If some people like to rave for the sake of raving, let them - obviously such people just don’t care about intellectual honesty, and neither should we (except when we slip into the “I don’t like intellectual dishonesty” perspective, as we are prone to do from time to time).

What? When did I say that we “shouldn’t care about intellectual honesty”? I’m saying that someone who’s not interested in a rational discussion has no reason to care about it. It’s not “objectively better” than raving on a street corner – it’s better from the perspective of wanting to have an intelligent conversation. Those of us who value having an intelligent conversation will tend to value the kind of thinking we label “intellectually honest.”

 

[AntiTheist]

Hi Leela,

Yes, and by the same token, when I assert that slavery is evil, I also believe that anyone who has had the right experiences to be considered a competent judge would come to the same conclusion.

A lot of slave owners in the past would probably not have agreed. Heck, there were plenty of slaves who defended the idea of slavery as moral (that it saved the slaves from the savagery of their native country, that it gave them a chance to learn about Christianity, that most masters treat their slaves pretty well and give them a decent living, etc.) – there were even a few educated slaves who wrote poetry praising the institution of slavery.

Who gets to decide who is a “competent judge” of morals? In science, the standard for being a “competent judge” is fairly objective, as a competent judge merely has to be able to understand the material. In moral matters, lots of people who have a lot of knowledge about a situation will come to radically different conclusions due to their values.

The relativist will always have a problem since his assertion that there is no such thing as moral truth by his own standards is no better or worse than saying that there is such a thing as moral truth.

You’re confusing moral judgments with questions of accurately describing reality. It’s not “better” to say that there is no such thing as moral truth – it’s just a more accurate description of reality, and it’s “better” only in the context of my personal desire to live as much as possible in line with reality.

 

[mathematician]

if there are no objective morals, there simply are no morals at all. every proposed moral system is nothing but their opinion. its simply an attempt to make a universal or “objective” moral system that fits what they think should be the standard. (funny how it always looks like Christain morality, minus the ones that restrict fornication and homosexuality. i wonder why?).

There is the (true) story of an anthropologist who had bought into the notion that ideas of right and wrong were always culturally conditioned. She encountered one society where female genital mutilation was practised. Outraged, she wanted to tell them that what was being done was wrong, but then realised that, given her own presuppositions, she couldn’t.

Subsequently she was to write that Human Rights had to be the standard by which other cultures could be judged, but that, of course, begs the question: Where do human rights come from, and who is to say what they are? If the society she had been visiting was to draw up a list of Human Rights, they presumably wouldn’t include anything which precluded the mutilation of female genitalia.

For that matter, how do you say the Nazis were objectively evil? They presumably acted in perfect accord with their own notions of morality.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Well, a Hindu would disagree. He would say that it’s actually evil to eat a cow, and he would say that your moral intuition has been “tuned” wrongly. On what basis do we accept your judgment and reject his?

See my response to Betterave above. The Hindu is justified, but eating a cow is not in itself wrong.

So what about the action makes it objectively wrong?

You’re moving the conversation from moral epistemology to metaphysics, here, whether you realize it or not. The analogue, in scientific epistemology, would be the question: what about a physical law makes it universally applicable? But no scientist ever tries to answer this question; they are just in the business of ascertaining the laws themselves.

My claim is that we *perceive *moral truths. I need not make any claim about the ontological properties of moral truths, aside from their existence. The fact that you do not seem to perceive moral truths, perhaps, has an explanation. Blaise Pascal, for example, had this to say:

The reason, therefore, that some intuitive minds are not mathematical is that they cannot at all turn their attention to the principles of mathematics. But the reason that mathematicians are not intuitive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition where the principles do not allow of such arrangement. They are scarcely seen; they are felt rather than seen; there is the greatest difficulty in making them felt by those who do not of themselves perceive them. These principles are so fine and so numerous that a very delicate and very clear sense is needed to perceive them, and to judge rightly and justly when they are perceived, without for the most part being able to demonstrate them in order as in mathematics, because the principles are not known to us in the same way, and because it would be an endless matter to undertake it. We must see the matter at once, at one glance, and not by a process of reasoning, at least to a certain degree. And thus it is rare that mathematicians are intuitive and that men of intuition are mathematicians, because mathematicians wish to treat matters of intuition mathematically and make themselves ridiculous, wishing to begin with definitions and then with axioms, which is not the way to proceed in this kind of reasoning. Not that the mind does not do so, but it does it tacitly, naturally, and without technical rules; for the expression of it is beyond all men, and only a few can feel it.

Again, the judgment that it’s “wrong” is only in our heads – in the real world, it’s just something that happens. [In fact, there was a case pretty recently where a woman was being raped and bystanders just came up and apparently started participating in the rape; so it seems like not everyone has this “moral intuition” you speak of]

You seem to imply that people never do things that they think are wrong.

Tons. The fact that we have only encountered consciousness in connection with brains. The fact that altering brains alters consciousness. The fact that it doesn’t appear that there is such a thing as consciousness without a brain. Tons and tons and tons of evidence. Everything we’ve ever discovered about brains and consciousness suggests it.

All of this evidence begs the question. There is a difference between someone telling you “I am conscious” and *perceiving *that they are in fact conscious. The first example happens every day; the second example has never happened in the history of the world. We have no perception of other people’s mental states. We make the inference blind, and we make a similar inference about morality.

No, the best explanation of moral intuitions is that they are the same as other intuitions – subjective feelings that depend on perspective.

Ummmm. Isn’t perceptual processing of the physical world a form of intuition? Aren’t our perceptual capacities prone to error, just like our intuitions about mathematics? Are you claiming that all scientific reasoning is “subjective feelings based on perspective”? Am I missing something?

And on what basis do you make that claim? Just cause you “feel” that way? What about serial killers who “feel” differently? What about people in favor of the death penalty who “feel” differently?

There are people who “feel” that the earth must be flat, or that the law of modus ponens is unreliable. Their intuitions, or their inferences, or both, are wrong. Arguments for moral relativity from factual disagreement don’t work.

 

[Oreoracle]

Relativism: the idea that any theory is as good as any other; the idea that the same proposition can be true relative to one conceptual scheme and false relative to another. This view conflates justification with truth.

I certainly wouldn’t agree to that definition. A key part of relativism is that ethical considerations are viewed as subjective. Subjective assessments such as those seen in ethics (value judgments) cannot, under any circumstances, have any truth value. Words such as “should,” “ought,” and “obligated to” simply correspond to nothing in the empirical world. Empirically, there’s no difference between an object you feel should exist (“an object that is good”) and one you feel shouldn’t exist (“an object that is evil”).

I would say that moral relativism is a combination of moral subjectivism paired with consequentialism–that is, a denial of absolutism, the belief that morality is governed by several strict prohibitions (Christian morality fits nicely into this category). Relativism is what one gets when they understand the difference between descriptive and prescriptive statements.

Moral nihilism: The view that there is no such thing as truth in ethics

Err…not really. That’s already covered by things like relativism, especially emotivism. True nihilists don’t exist. A nihilist is defined as someone who sees no value in ethics. In other words, they feel no compulsion to modify their behavior in order to accomodate others, and don’t feel that others are obligated to do so either. But since we all want the world to be a certain way, or, as Singer would say, we all prefer certain circumstances to others, no one can escape having some ethical opinion without damaging their brain or consciousness in some way.

Nihilism is one of the many epithets used to harass those with differing opinions. I’ve also noticed that some teens don the label because it’s the “cool” theory to adhere to, believe it or not.

Relativist: a epithet used to accuse someone of holding to moral relativism and denying the existence of truth. Pretty much no one takes this position (except for Oreoracle?), so it is merely an epithet for anyone who doubts a moral absolutist about his claim to have special knowledge of the Moral Law.

How did I take the position of denying truth? A moral relativist is simply someone who believes morality is subjective and that broad principles are preferable to strict rules, which is contrary to moral absolutism.

 

[Oreoracle]

I think honest-to-goodness relativists are becoming more common these days, Leela. Maybe it’s because we feed our children with the poisonous dogma that “everybody has a right to their opinion” and “nobody’s opinion is better than anybody else’s”.

Ironically, the belief in rights is a blatant contradiction to one’s adherence to moral subjectivism, and thus moral relativism. Rights are usually defined as objective, absolute rules, or rules that follow from objective values, and they seem to exist in large groups, or so the absolutists say. This would contradict moral relativism on many counts, would it not?

You know that I like talking with you Prodigal, but this comment of yours was just ignorant. I don’t know how else to describe it. You consistently fail to understand the crucial differences between prescriptions and descriptions, so it’s no wonder that you think us relativists are missing an obvious truth, just as the Church thinks. And like the Church, your opinion seems to escalate further when you become hot and bothered: at times, the evil relativists are intentionally avoiding the truth!!! Don’t be ridiculous.

If you want to put forth some effort in this discussion, could you answer the unanswered question I’ve directed to you on a number of occasions: When you look at a beautiful painting, do you think the painting is objectively beautiful, or that it is subjectively pleasing, and so you feel it is beautiful? If it’s objectively beautiful, how did you chance upon that knowledge? If it’s only subjectively pleasing, then why should we regard other powerful feelings, such as those pertaining to ethical considerations, as being any more objective, rational, etc., than aesthetic judgements?

Please answer, as your silence will speak for you if you don’t.

 

[Oreoracle]

Oreo, it has been two weeks for me too - waiting for you to answer my questions. I appreciate your graciousness in the post following this one, but what you say here is quite silly and thoroughly ungracious and you have continued to avoid answering my direct question by which I was seeking to make this a well-ordered discussion free of equivocations, indeed, by which I was seeking to ensure that I understood your position (which, obviously, I recognize is different from mine) and that you understood mine.

Your question alone (the one you seem to be pushing about the the difference between moralizing and taste-testing) shows that you aren’t understanding what I’ve been saying. It’s a bit like somebody who’s been told that a guy is homosexual asking that guy whether he finds other men attractive–the person in question clearly didn’t understand even the preliminary concept of homosexuality. I’ve told you again and again that I see no difference between moralizing and taste-testing. The subjectivity of the matter doesn’t change just because we’re dealing with stronger preferences; preferences are preferences, strong or not.

But repeatedly avoiding/miscontruing a direct question, or carrying on as if no question was asked, is a form of dishonesty and I am describing your posts, not offering a playground insult, when I point this out.

I’m sorry, but the subjectivity of morality is one of those things that are easy to understand but hard to explain, especially if the people questioning it aren’t cooperative. I mean, it’s obvious to us that two plus two equals four, but how would you explain this to a child who disagrees? How do you explain to a stubborn child that mathematics is an abstract system devised by men for its utility; that numbers don’t exist, but are instead arbitrary values proposed for the sake of the system; that operations are the relationships between these arbitrary values, and that symbols that denote such operations consistently cause the act they are defined as causing in mathematical equations (because mathematics is simply a body of definitions from the start)? Sadly, simple things such as “two plus two equals four” don’t always have simple explanations, and your lack of cooperation makes a comparatively difficult task impossible.

 

[AntiTheist]

You’re moving the conversation from moral epistemology to metaphysics, here, whether you realize it or not.

Look, you’re the one claiming that morality is something more than a subjective value judgment. When I ask what makes an act “bad,” I’m asking how you know that it’s bad.

If morality is something more than a subjective value judgment, then there should be clear-cut objective criteria for determining whether an act is moral or not. Or are you arguing that it’s just a matter of “intuition”? *

If that’s the case, then different people obviously have different “intuitions” as to whether something is bad or not – how do you propose we distinguish between people who have “correct” intuitions or not?

Oreoracle:

When you look at a beautiful painting, do you think the painting is objectively beautiful, or that it is subjectively pleasing, and so you feel it is beautiful? If it’s objectively beautiful, how did you chance upon that knowledge? If it’s only subjectively pleasing, then why should we regard other powerful feelings, such as those pertaining to ethical considerations, as being any more objective, rational, etc., than aesthetic judgements?

This is an important question. It should be obvious that “beauty” is a subjective value judgment. Different people find different things beautiful, and opinions can wildly differ. Morality is a similar kind of subjective value judgment.*

 

[mathematician]

Look, you’re the one claiming that morality is something more than a subjective value judgment. When I ask what makes an act “bad,” I’m asking how you know that it’s bad.

Do you believe that the Nazis were objectively evil, or do you believe “Maybe they went a bit over the top, but that is just my opinion of course.” If the former, then you are betraying the fact that, in practice, you believe that there are objective moral values - no matter what your theoretical position.

It somebody was a true relativist, and really didn’t perceive genocide to be objectively evil, they would be considered a psychopath, and a candidate for a secure mental hospital - far too dangerous to let loose in the rest of society.

 

[Oreoracle]

Do you believe that the Nazis were objectively evil, or do you believe “Maybe they went a bit over the top, but that is just my opinion of course.” If the former, then you are betraying the fact that, in practice, you believe that there are objective moral values - no matter what your theoretical position.

It somebody was a true relativist, and really didn’t perceive genocide to be objectively evil, they would be considered a psychopath, and a candidate for a secure mental hospital - far too dangerous to let loose in the rest of society.

Ughhhh…It’s the same thing over and over again with you guys. I don’t feel that the Nazis were just a bit over the top, and I know that it’s not just my opinion that they weren’t. I know that an overwhelming number of people feel their methods were inhumane, malicious, and mostly unnecessary to achieve their professed ends.

But if we say that objectivity is established not by the irrelevance of subjectivity, but by its prescence, then we are no different than people who believe that theories are plausible merely because they are repeated by the sheep–I’m sorry, I mean the masses. Repetition doesn’t establish truth. It’s just as ridiculous to say that a sentiment is true because it happens to be strong and not regarded on the same level as less consequential opinions. You can be irritated by the Nazis, you can dislike them, you can hate them, you can even wish they were dead or that they be forced to endure torment, but that doesn’t make them “objectively evil” it just makes them objectively irritating, disliked, or hated.

So what have we learned?

1. Truth isn’t democratic.
2. Asking for someone to make a value judgment and acting as if that process was an objective assessment for the sake of your point is futile. If a feeling makes an opinion, then a strong feeling makes an opinion. It doesn’t matter what’s being evaluated so long as feelings are involved. Subjectivity breeds subjectivity.

 

[Oreoracle]

If that’s the case, then different people obviously have different “intuitions” as to whether something is bad or not – how do you propose we distinguish between people who have “correct” intuitions or not?

Hmm…I tried talking to him about this before. He was beginning to shy away from asserting that morality was objective, but he certainly was pressing for intersubjectivity; a common morality held by all, if you will, factual or not. Though he didn’t hold this as objective (it seems), he nonetheless considered it “true” which makes me think we’re on totally different wavelengths than these guys. Maybe we should ask for their definition of “truth” and how objectivity plays its part in the establishment of truth.

Anyway, when I pointed out that many “intuited” moral systems are fairly inconsistent, he dismissed the observation as irrelevant. I asked how we could tell the difference between correct intuitions and misconceptions, but still no dice. I really didn’t know what to do from there. Recently, he doesn’t seem too keen on responding to me. I’m trying to give him a chance with the painting question though.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Good to hear from you, Oreo. I’ll try to respond here this morning, before turkey swallows me up…

Recently, he doesn’t seem too keen on responding to me. I’m trying to give him a chance with the painting question though.

Quick comment – The fact that I don’t respond to a topic is not to be taken as avoidance. There are three or four conversations I haven’t gotten back to because I just don’t have time and I fail to “mark as unread” the subject titles in my email. I think I responded to that aesthetics comment, though. I’ll go check.

 

[mathematician]

Asking for someone to make a value judgment and acting as if that process was an objective assessment for the sake of your point is futile. If a feeling makes an opinion, then a strong feeling makes an opinion. It doesn’t matter what’s being evaluated so long as feelings are involved. Subjectivity breeds subjectivity.

What is the percentage of the human population which considers murder to be immoral? 99.9% maybe. A subjectivity which is almost species wide stops looking like subjectivity. Or else you have to stop believing it to be objectively true when you assert the sky to be blue. The idea such a statement is objectively true is, after all, based upon nothing more than the almost universal perception that the sky is blue.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Ironically, the belief in rights is a blatant contradiction to one’s adherence to moral subjectivism, and thus moral relativism. Rights are usually defined as objective, absolute rules, or rules that follow from objective values, and they seem to exist in large groups, or so the absolutists say. This would contradict moral relativism on many counts, would it not?

You misunderstood what I was saying, I think. When children are told continually that “everyone has a right to their opinion”, with the implication that nobody’s opinion is better than anybody else’s, they reach high school with the pernicious idea that all opinions are equal. I’m not saying that this is how you’ve reached your conclusion, however.

You know that I like talking with you Prodigal, but this comment of yours was just ignorant. I don’t know how else to describe it. You consistently fail to understand the crucial differences between prescriptions and descriptions, so it’s no wonder that you think us relativists are missing an obvious truth, just as the Church thinks. And like the Church, your opinion seems to escalate further when you become hot and bothered: at times, the evil relativists are intentionally avoiding the truth!!! Don’t be ridiculous.

I don’t see where I said “the evil relativists are intentionally avoiding the truth,” or even implied that. I think you’re reading too much into my statement.

If you want to put forth some effort in this discussion, could you answer the unanswered question I’ve directed to you on a number of occasions: When you look at a beautiful painting, do you think the painting is objectively beautiful, or that it is subjectively pleasing, and so you feel it is beautiful? If it’s objectively beautiful, how did you chance upon that knowledge? If it’s only subjectively pleasing, then why should we regard other powerful feelings, such as those pertaining to ethical considerations, as being any more objective, rational, etc., than aesthetic judgements?

Please answer, as your silence will speak for you if you don’t.

I did answer this when you asked before, although apparently not to your satisfaction. See forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=5882130&postcount=125.

The judgment that a painting is beautiful is a function of my psychology and the painting itself. Obviously, the form and content of the painting matter here. I do believe that there are certain objective qualities that create objective beauty, over and above all our ideas of beauty. Certainly, some ideas of beauty can be culturally defined, which affects people’s psychology: but these ideas are either emphases within the category of “actually beautiful” or (rarely) perverse ideas of beauty detached from form and content.

Beethoven is objectively more beautiful than Ozzy Osborne, for example.

If it’s objectively beautiful, how did you chance upon that knowledge?

The same way that we learn to make scientific inferences: by being taught. Surely, my education in aesthetics is imperfect, but hopefully not irreparably so. Just as a scientist teaches the amateur what sorts of inferences are valid and invalid in a given discipline, an English teacher (for example) educates about what sorts of inferences a person can make about objective beauty from evidence – although we don’t make it sound as dull as all that.

How did you chance upon the knowledge that the earth revolves around the sun? You surely don’t claim that you would have come to it without other people to help?

I will give you this much, as a difference: science is self-corrective, to a degree, at least after we have found the scientific method. Aesthetics are not self-corrective, but they rely upon people having insight. Insight proceeds from our inherent capacities, which are unequally possessed by different people. The problem is that we have this idea that “nobody is a better evaluater of beauty than anybody else” – we realize how perfectly bizarre it would be to say this about science.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Look, you’re the one claiming that morality is something more than a subjective value judgment. When I ask what makes an act “bad,” I’m asking how you know that it’s bad.

How do you know that a circle is round? It just looks that way, and nobody can convince you that it isn’t. It is a direct intuition. As soon as you know the meaning of the concepts involved, you can make it.

If morality is something more than a subjective value judgment, then there should be clear-cut objective criteria for determining whether an act is moral or not.

It’s just intuition, although our intuitions may be lacking. Consider the colorblind. Should a person who can’t distinguish green and blue claim that other people are talking nonsense? Of course not. In morality, a “moralblind” person can be taught to “see” moral realities. This is different from the conclusion that “there exist objective morals”, which is an inference derived from moral intuitions.

If that’s the case, then different people obviously have different “intuitions” as to whether something is bad or not – how do you propose we distinguish between people who have “correct” intuitions or not?

This is a problem in science or philosophy, too. Whose intuitions about causality are right? There’s no formula to decide. I believe that, in morality, we can look to certain principles that are powerfully persuasive, in the context of our own experience: the golden rule, for example, or the idea of certain prima facie duties. People who have intuitions that line up with rationally persuasive moral principles are probably perceiving rightly.

 

[mathematician]

Ughhhh…It’s the same thing over and over again with you guys. I don’t feel that the Nazis were just a bit over the top, and I know that it’s not just my opinion that they weren’t. I know that an overwhelming number of people feel their methods were inhumane, malicious, and mostly unnecessary to achieve their professed ends.

As a result of the financial crisis the British Government has run up an enormous budget deficit which will have to be cleared somehow. Of course one major area of Government spending is on care for the elderly and disabled. So perhaps we could start cutting the budget deficit by administering compulsory euthanasia to them. Of course, we are far more compassionate than the Nazis, so we won’t put them in concentration camps, or use them as slave labour, before killong them off. In fact, compassionate as we are, and unwilling to cause them any distress, we will not even warn them about what is on the way. We will merely administer a lethal injection in place of the flu jab they think they are getting.

Naturally the above scheme is bound to cause a major outrage when news of it leaks out, but, as one of the truly enlightened ones, you will have nothing to do with such sentimental nonsense. What is being proposed is merely a perfectly rational solution to a pressing problem.

Oh, but then you remember that you are due to turn seventy next month, and so you will be on the list for a lethal injection. Still, you tell yourself, there is no such thing as objective morality, and, as you have said previously, the program of compulsory euthanasia is a perfectly sensible solution to our current problems, so, if you are next to be euthanised, so be it.

Either there is a major dissociation between what you profess to believe and how you would actually behave in practice - and that is called intellectual dishonesty - or else you should be locked away in a mental hospital for the safety of the rest of us.

 

[AntiTheist]

Do you believe that the Nazis were objectively evil, or do you believe “Maybe they went a bit over the top, but that is just my opinion of course.”

I thought I’ve been pretty clear that morality doesn’t exist. What the Nazis did isn’t “objectively evil” – what they did is something that I don’t like, something that the vast, vast majority of people raised in my culture (who mostly share similar values with me) also don’t like. The Nazis probably had a different opinion – certainly, many of them thought that they were doing “good,” which shows you how useless the idea of “good” is. But I don’t particularly care about their opinions.

Prodigal_Son:

How do you know that a circle is round? It just looks that way, and nobody can convince you that it isn’t. It is a direct intuition. As soon as you know the meaning of the concepts involved, you can make it.

Well, here’s the problem with your position. You think that moral judgments are directly intuited from observations – but we have examples of different people intuiting different moral judgments about the same exact situations. You claim that some of these people have a defect in their perceptive faculties (that they are “moralblind”) – but how do you know that your intuition is the correct one? How do you then know that you yourself are not “moralblind”? Apparently, a moralblind person doesn’t know that he’s moralblind. So how do we go about distinguishing a “correct” moral intuition from an “incorrect” moral intuition? There must be a standard that we use to distinguish correct perceptions from incorrect perceptions. I’m curious what it is.

Beethoven is objectively more beautiful than Ozzy Osborne, for example.

I’m going to let Oreoracle continue this particular subthread discussion, but I’ll just point out that I know some metal fans who would seriously disagree (To be fair, I think that most of them would cite Led Zepp before Ozzy or Black Sabbath, but either way…). How do you propose to tell whose perceptions are “right” in this instance?

mathematician:

What is the percentage of the human population which considers murder to be immoral? 99.9% maybe. A subjectivity which is almost species wide stops looking like subjectivity.

So you’re saying that morality should be a function of the will of the majority? Are you sure about which side you’re arguing here?

Oh, and Happy Turkey Day, everyone.

 

[mathematician]

So you’re saying that morality should be a function of the will of the majority? Are you sure about which side you’re arguing here?

I am saying that the notion of murder as immoral is not just the majority view, it is something everybody knows to be wrong whether they like it or not. I am prepared to bet that when you read the latest news story about child abuse, and perhaps murder, you don’t just say, “Oh, what an interesting little story. Still, if they saw nothing wrong with torturing that kid, before throwing him downstairs, and then knifing him, I suppose there is nothing more to be said really.”

Either you are being dishonest, or you are a psychopath, but it has to be one or the other.

My money is on dishonesty, because you do not like the corollaries which flow from the existence of absolute moral standards.

 

[AntiTheist]

I am prepared to bet that when you read the latest news story about child abuse, and perhaps murder, you don’t just say, “Oh, what an interesting little story. Still, if they saw nothing wrong with torturing that kid, before throwing him downstairs, and then knifing him, I suppose there is nothing more to be said really.”

There’s some serious confusion here. I don’t think that morality is something objective, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have values that lead me to make value judgments about things.

When I hear about murder, I make a value judgment about it (“I don’t like it”), and because of my values, I favor living in a society where murder is outlawed.

But there’s nothing “evil” about murder – it’s just something I don’t like. People are fine with some kinds of murder: state-sponsered executions, wars, abortions, self-defense, and corporations weighing the cost of making a product safer against the cost of being sued for someone’s death. All of those are murder (And don’t use that weak, “But murder means ‘unjustified killing’” stuff – it just begs the question what “justified” means and lands us in the same situation with different words).

Now look, there might be a lot of agreement on something like murder, but there’s also a lot of grey area. Different people can look at the same situation and intuit different moral conclusions. In other areas, too: there are vegetarians, for example, who intuit that eating animals is “wrong.”

How do we tell who is right in these situations? We can’t just go by our own intuitive sense because we know that the intuitive sense can malfunction in people. There needs to be a standard for judging right from wrong. What is it?

I submit that there is none and that what we call “morality” is nothing more than value judgments – individual, subjective “intuitions” that do not point to some objective morality.

 

[Oreoracle]

Quick comment – The fact that I don’t respond to a topic is not to be taken as avoidance. There are three or four conversations I haven’t gotten back to because I just don’t have time and I fail to “mark as unread” the subject titles in my email. I think I responded to that aesthetics comment, though. I’ll go check.

Perhaps you did. If so, I apologize. It’s been quite a while since that discussion.