bd-from-kg

JERDOG:

Oddly enough, that’s not true, at least as the term “objective” is used in moral philosophy.

Let’s say that I believe that the way to determine whether an act is right is to flip a coin. If it comes up heads the act is right; tails, it’s wrong. (Of course, I need a clear rule as to just what coin flip determines the rightness of a given act. This is just a detail; it can be resolved any way I please.) According to the terminology used in moral philosophy, mine is an objective moral theory. The rightness of an act is the same for everyone, and is independent of what anyone thinks or feels. That’s all that’s required to make a moral theory “objective”. (A subjective moral theory, on the other hand, makes the “rightness” of an act dependent on the mental disposition toward the act of some person or persons.)

Let’s take this a step further. Suppose that Smith believes that there’s an “oracle” on Mars that will tell anyone who asks whether a given act is right or wrong (and that it will always give the same answer for any given act.) According to his theory an act is right if the Martian Oracle says that it’s right, and wrong if it says it’s wrong.

You might protest that this isn’t really an “objective” moral theory since the Martian Oracle doesn’t exist; it’s a figment of Smith’s imagination. That’s true, but according to Smith’s theory it does exist, and its answer (for any given act) is the same for everyone, and independent of what anyone thinks or feels. that makes it an objective moral theory (albeit a manifestly false one).

Now in reality the methodology used by the typical religious person to determine whether God approves of a given act is highly subjective. But according to his moral theory a given act is right if God approves of it. Not whether he thinks God approves of it, but whether God really does approve of it. This is an objective moral theory: the rightness or wrongness of an act is the same for everyone, and is independent of what anyone thinks or feels. The fact (if it is a fact) that God doesn’t exist is irrelevant to the objectiveness” of his moral theory, just as the fact that the Martian Oracle doesn’t really exist is irrelevant to the “objectiveness” of Smith’s theory.

In fact, even atheistic moral philosophers consider “divine command” theory to be pretty much the paradigm for objective moral systems. There are few, if any, moral philosophers who would call such a moral system “subjective”. It could, of course, be said to be subjective in the sense that the rightness of an act depends on God’s will (which might be interpreted as how He “feels” about the act), but God is traditionally excluded from the “anyone” in “independent of what anyone thinks or feels” in the definition of an “objective moral theory”.

A “subjective” view, I gather, is a view that disagrees with yours.

I’m mystified by this subjective opinion and am skeptical that it could be correct.

But seriously, I don’t see what “skepticism” is doing in this company. Skeptics are looking for the objectively true answers to questions and are generally disdainful of mysticism.

Aye, there’s the rub. How can a proposed answer to a moral question be verified? It seems pretty obvious that this is impossible. For example, if I ask whether Smith ought to kill Jones for his money, you can point out all sorts of consequences that will ensue if he does and observe that you (and most other people, for that matter) would prefer the consequences of his not killing Jones. But how can this sort of thing provide us with an objective answer to the original question? If you say that “Most people find the consequences of X’s doing Y preferable to those of his doing Z” entails “X ought to do Y rather than Z”, you’re actually advancing a subjective moral theory. An objective theory would have to proceed along the lines of “I think action Y has a property of “ought-to-be-doneness” that action Z lacks, and I can demonstrate this by using my “oughtness-meter”. Let’s try it out. Yup, the oughtness-meter gives a higher reading for Y than for Z. Proof positive that X should do Y.” But of course there is no such thing as an oughtness-meter, because actions do not have an intrinsic property of ought-to-be-doneness. There is simply no measurement or observation that can objectively determine whether Y is the “right thing to do”.

You say:

But how can the answer to a moral question be “based on reality”? You can gather as many facts as you please about a proposed action, but they won’t answer the question “Should it be done?”. Moral questions are simply not factual questions; they are not questions about objective reality.

Alonzo Fyfe

From DRFSeven, The truth is, others grant us those rights; we don't automatically have them.

I do not believe that there are any natural rights, yet I do not think that the above account is correct either. Rather, talk of 'rights' is a type of short hand for propositions such as, "We would all be better off if people generally treated the lives of others as something sacred." Such a statement is true regardless of who believes it to be true, and it cannot automatically be made false simply because somebody does not wish to believe it or, in spite of it, does not actually hold that the lives of others are something sacred. None of this changes the objective fact that on the whole we would all be better off if people treated the lives of others as something sacred.


bd-from-kg: It's objective morality, not subjective morality, that has caused endless, pointless suffering throughout history.

Objective morality -- in the sense you are using it -- has not caused anything because it does not exist, and things that do not exist cannot have effects. False beliefs about things that do not exist, however, cause all sorts of problems. In this case, it is false beliefs that the pain and suffering one inflicts is serving some fictitious greater good that is the culprit.

Subjective morality -- at least the most common form of subjective morality, agent-subjectivism -- does in fact provide less protection against this pain and suffering than hard objectivism. Subjective morality says, "you can do all of the things that the hard objectivist would have you do, and the impositions that you do not like you can go ahead and ignore."

If we are talking about the consequences of the two belief sets in terms of pain and suffering, I think it is quite reasonable to believe that one is safer over all living in a community of hard objectivists than a community of agent-subjectivists.

Ultimately, however, I think that the best option would be to reject both of these and head for the society that accepts soft-objectivism.

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

I agree with your comments to DRFseven; in fact, I said pretty much the same thing in some earlier posts on this thread.

In fact, DRFseven is actually making a double mistake Legal “rights” are no more “tangible” or “real” than moral “rights”, so the contrast between them that he’s trying to make is just confused.

Well, sure, if you want to be pedantic. I doubt that anyone misunderstood my meaning.

First off, I doubt that agent-subjectivism is in fact the most common form of subjective morality. For one thing, it’s ridiculous. When someone says that what so-and-so is wrong, he practically never means that so-and-so considered it wrong. On the contrary, he’s practically always saying that so-and-so may have considered it right, but it wasn’t. What’s the last time you heard someone say anything like, “Oh, so you really believe that rape is OK? Well, then, I guess I was wrong in saying that you shouldn’t have raped my daughter. Of course if you think it was OK, it was OK. Sorry, my mistake.” Yet for an agent-subjectivist this would make perfect sense.

Second, I think that there are really very few moral subjectivists of any kind. Most people who call themselves subjectivists mean merely that moral claims are a matter of opinion. They don’t really mean that if so-and-so thinks that something is right (or wrong), that by definition makes it right (or wrong). And this is true even if the “so-and-so” in question is himself. When someone ponders whether capital punishment is wrong, for example, he is not pondering whether he currently approves of capital punishment; he’s deciding whether to approve of it in the future. And this cannot be decided by consulting one’s current attitude.

Finally, at worst agent subjectivism just gives people license to do what they were inclined to do anyway. Many versions of objectivism, by contrast, have managed to induce otherwise reasonable people into committing the most terrible atrocities – things that they would never had dreamed up on their own – things like slaughtering all of the Amelekites, burning women at the stake for “witchcraft” or for failing to wear a garment covering absolutely every inch of their bodies, stoning people to death for gathering sticks on Saturday, killing everyone who doesn’t subscribe to one’s own absurd belief system, or flying large planes into tall buildings.

Suit yourself. Of course I have no practical problem with some varieties of “hard objectivism” (I’d have no objection to living next to a John Stuart Mill-type utilitarian, for example). But unfortunately these inoffensive types are a small minority.

Anyway, I don’t think that most subjectivists (what few there are) really think of their subjectivism as giving them license to do whatever they please. Most subjectivists in practice have rather moderate, reasonable moral principles. They just don’t think that they don’t think that they’re “written in stone”. (Don’t get me wrong. I think subjectivism, in any form, is false. I just don’t think that its effects are particularly pernicious.)

Ideally, of course, one would want everyone (more or less) to subscribe to the true moral theory, which I believe is a form of noncognitivism. But that’s a subject for another thread.

DRFseven

But it IS correct. We don't automatically have rights; they have to be granted. Maybe, when you say people have rights, you mean "We would all be better off if....", but that's not what *I* mean. When I say people have rights, I mean they have been granted entitlements, such as legal ones.



Of course "I wish" statements cannot be made false by someone else disagreeing; I never implied as such.



Maybe so; maybe not. It can't be proven because "better off" is so ambiguous. "Better off" could mean "dead." However, this was certainly not what I was arguing, even though I personally happen to think it's true we would be "better off" (according to my definition of "better off") if we mostly granted equal rights.

DRFseven

No kidding? Legal rights aren't real? As if I thought so! I was distinguishing between legal and moral rights; not saying that one was real and one was not. They both describe behaviors we think others are entitled to (or not); it's just that legal rights are codified and made enforceable by governments. Since we don't really have moral police, there is usually no one to MAKE us grant someone's idea of moral rights unless they happen to fall under the auspices of the law.

And it's "she."

Alonzo Fyfe

Perhaps not your meaning, but I have a sense that people may misunderstood the implications. A debate about whether X causes Y or does not cause Y seems to assume the existence of X, and the argument focuses on irrelevancies (X's properties), rather than on the truly important question (X's existence).


I agree with this (and what follows), but it was not my concern.

On the level of THEORY, agent-subjectivism is very common. Many people are more than eager to assert that agent-subjectivism is the best THEORY of value and when they say 'values are subjective' they typically mean 'values are agent-subjective'.

And, yet, you are right, agent subjectivism fails to adequately describe the PRACTICE even of those people who assert that agent subjectivism is the best theory.

I have sometimes wondered if it is worthwhile to criticize agent-subjectivism, because even agent-subjectivists do not practice it. Yet, agent-subjectivist slogans still creep into their arguments, and weakens their ability to debate against the hard objectivists. They are going great guns on this perfectly wonderful argument when, suddenly, they throw one of these popular but ridiculous agent-subjective slogans into the mix, and shoot themselves in the foot.


And, yet, they were induced into committing these attrocities. If you can induce people into committing these fallacies under the fiction of objective values, I see no barrier to inducing people to committing these same attrocities under agent-subjectivism. Or, more accurately, I see nothing in agent-subjectivism to induce people NOT to commit these attrocities.

This is the criticism that hard objectivists correctly raise against it. And when they do, the agent-subjectivist (on the theory level, remember, not on the practice level) starts making his incoherent claims, allowing the objectivist to draw the wholly unwarranted conclusion that he is correct.

JERDOG

Property rights do not come from government. Government does not grant rights, they protect them. AKA the police in my stolen bike story.

I say again.
I am talking about moral rights, I have only talked about moral rights on this thread.

Objective morality based on reality is the only proper morality in philosophy that I have studied so far.

*sigh* *deep breath*

see above

I already explained to you how this exist. But.

You still haven't figured out that I'm talking about moral rights so I'm not surprised.

Yes the subjectivist always conduct themslves in such a proper manner over disagreements huh? <-----sarcasm

I beg to differ.

Alonzo Fyfe

On the first point, I believe you are guilty of a false dilemma. It is not the case that we automatically have rights (in the intrinsic-prescriptivity sense), AND it is not the the case that rights (in the relational-property sense) have to be granted.

Rather, we automatically have rights (in the relational property sense).

Your argument against these rights (e.g., a right to life) is that somebody can come along and kill me. Yet, this is a straw man. When people speak of rights they do not take these to be some sort of metaphysical phenomenon that can some how cause people not to commit murder or theft. Thus, the fact that people can commit murder and theft fail to prove that these rights do not exist.

What they are saying is that murder and theft is something that people generally ought not to be doing. The fact that people sometimes do these things is no evidence that they ought not to.

(The sense in which they ought not to do these things is a matter of dispute. Those who view rights as intrinsically prescriptive properties say that murder and theft contain and intrinsic ought-not-to-be-doneness. This, of course, is nonsense. Others who view rights as relationally prescriptive properties say that we will generally be better off if we can get people not to commit murder and theft. This makes a great deal of sense.


I am offering a theory that when people generally talk about rights, they are making a "we would generally be better off. . ." claim. I am talking neither about what you mean, or what I mean, but what english speakers in generally mean.

The right to a trial by jury, for example, is not something that exists merely because the Constitution says so. It is something that exists in the sense that 'we would all generally be better off if people were given a trial by jury' sense, and the amendment to that affect simply says, 'the government will respect and honor this pre-existing natural right.' Rights are not 'created' or 'granted' by governments, but 'honored' and 'respected' by governments.

There is a sense of the word 'right' that corresponds to your usage. But, when you substitute this usage for the usage that others have in mind, you commit the logical fallacy of equivocation -- changing the definition of a word in mid-argument.

In the case of internal equivocation, your arguments become invalid (because your conclusions do not relate to some of your premises). In the case of external equivocation your arguments become irrelevant (because you are having a private conversation about something that is completely different from what everybody else is talking about, and only think that your comments are relevant because you use words that sound like the words they are using).


Well, I never spoke of 'i wish' statements. I spoke of 'it will make us generally better off' statements. People may naturally wish for that which they believe will make them generally better off, but what they believe will make them generally better off and what will in fact make them generally better off are not the same. An uninformed person may well wish for something harmful.

Rights have to do with what will, in fact, make people generally better off. As such, rights-claims are a type of claim that is substantially independent of the person making it, and about which any particular person can be totally wrong.


'Better off' may be ambiguous, but I had only one of those meanings in mind in what I wrote.

'Better off' may, under certain circumstances, REFER TO being dead, but it does not MEAN being dead. The MEANING of 'better off' determines when it REFERS TO being dead and when it does not.

The sense that I am using the term 'better off' is specifically the sense that equates it to 'fulfill more of our desires'.

A person can be 'better off' dead (that is to say, 'better off' may REFER TO being dead), for example, if the person has a strong desire to be free from pain and death is the only way to fulfill that desire - and there are no sufficiently strong counter-weighing desires that give the person a reason to continue living.

It may sometimes be difficult to determine what will make us generally better off, but difficulty in determining something is no evidence that a right answer does not exist. It is difficult to determine the common skin color of a T-Rex, and yet in spite of this the skin color of the T-Rex does not change at whim.

Alonzo Fyfe

Well, to be my well known pendantic self, a just government pretects rights. An unjust government violates rights.


Well, 'objective' is ambiguous, and a lot hinges on what you mean by this.

One common definition of 'objective' is some sort of mind-independent intrinsic prescriptivity. If this is what you mean by 'objective', then you have a problem -- no such thing exists. You cannot point out a single physical event that is explained or predicted through the theory of intrinsic prescriptivity. These types of entities are like ghosts and ESP. They simply are not real.

In this, DRFSeven is correct. You have provided no argument. None of your premises support the existence of intrinsic prescriptivity. Indeed, most of your arguments are question-begging; you simply assume intrinsic prescriptivity in order to prove its existence. It is an easy road to take, but not intellectually satisfying.

If these rights do exist, explain to me what they are, how they work, and how I can perceive them (perhaps not directly, but at least through their effects).


There is another definition of 'objective' that says that the property is not made true purely by the speaker believing in or desiring its truth. The world is full of objective mind-dependent prescriptivity. If you want to have a morality that is relevant in the real world, that deals with things that exist, then it is advisable to focus on mind-dependent prescriptivity.

DRFseven

Show me, please. I say there is no way to show that we have rights and what these rights might be.



My argument shows that the concept is incoherent. If we automatically "come with" these rights, where are they? How do they manifest themselves? If people who enjoy NO rights have the same rights as people who enjoy many rights, what does this say about automatic rights that are not dependent on being granted?



That is simply an assumption by many. Many others assume something different. Because you call something that you think of "what people ought to be able to do" as rights doesn't mean that we HAVE automatic rights.



But you left out the people who think we will generally be better off if we can get people to commit murder and theft. This makes a great deal of sense to them; for instance, if people can be bombed to rid the world of some supposed evil influence, then people should have the right to murder. This is the sense in which I spoke of the ambiguousness of "being better off." Better off might mean anything. If there were a real state of being "better off" how would we know what it might be? Perhaps we are "better off" dead than alive, not because of suffering, etc., but just because maybe death is better than life. How could we say for sure? Perhaps "better off" means "when I am in power."

I have to go take kids places. More later.