The AntiChris

99Percent

You appear to be saying that, if sufficiently honest and reasonable, all moral agents could determine the truth or falsity of any moral proposition and, because this is objective, they would all arrive at the same conclusion?

If all moral agents were as honest and reasonable as I am, then I'd agree.

However, evidence from the real world doesn't seem to support this view. In reality, people have a wide diversity of values and desires which will affect their reasoning no matter how honest they are.

Apologies if I've misrepresented your views.

Chris

dk

dk: - I can see that clearly now. I recommend you read some philosophical musing of and about Pythagorean, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Comte, Galton, Pascal, and Einstein.
dk: People comply with human laws for any number of reasons; some respect authority, some fear justice, some are good citizens etc… It is quite rational to respect authority, fear justice and be a good citizen. But when one Law contradicts another Law then no matter what a person does they violate the law, and objectively live lawlessly. At one end of the spectrum hucksters may steal from vulnerable people by following the letter of the law. At the other end of the scale the EPA often mandates a policy that NAFTA or OSHA strictly forbids, so no matter what a person does they are breaking one law or the other, hence live lawlessly.
dk: - Well rational means
In the bullet I presented a dilemma, First, an honest person tells the truth when a lie would serve him better; Second, a dishonest person tells a lie when the truth would serve him better. I noted that proportionalism, utilitarianism and relativism might conclude moral equivalency from the dilemma. However, then I explained the reason proportionalism, utilitarianism and relativism fail, and objective morality succeeds. Communication can only succeed with an honest exchange that culminates in understanding. If you ask me a question and I tell a lie, then the communication is doomed to fail. Objective self knowledge can only be acquired through by an honest (exchange) communication. Without self knowledge a person can’t possibly act in their own self interest.

Clearly I presented a reason you failed to understand, but I honestly can’t make sense of your response.
dk: Because reason enables people to participate in their destiny according to their own will. Morality constructs terms of good and bad from human nature to regulate conduct with reason. People behave morally to actualize their will with life’s potential, when people act immorally they disengage from life to make their will meaningless. The definition I’ve provided is very narrow, and doesn’t pertain to the corporal virtues. Clearly virtue can’t be regulated by reason because it requires volition, not coersion.

[ May 19, 2002: Message edited by: dk ]</p>

joedad

My wife remembers when her paternal grandmother died and her family received a few thousand bucks.

Being in third grade, she innocently asked her surviving maternal grandfather, "Grandpap, when you die are we gonna get any money?" Pretty innocent question coming from an eight year old who just experienced death for the first time. But the reaction from her parents was to scold and punish.

The point is the same as Koy's, namely, that we have clear evidence suggesting that there is no such animal as objective morality.
And that's exactly the point. Obviously in both Koy's case and my wife's, reactions to the same set of objective conditions were totally different, owing obviously to unique - subjective - experiences.

joe

vixstile

Perhaps I will. I still disagree that they are interdependent. You can have philosophy without physics, and you can definitely have physics without philosophy. A philosophy can be based on physics, but philosophy isn't dependent on physics

No rational reason= lacking a rational reason/reasoning. I don't know how to better put it

Terms like proportionalism, utilitarianism and relativism are meaningless to me. I have not read a single book or attended any course on the subject of philosophy. Please keep this in mind when replying to something I mite state. It would be more productive to explain a concept, opposed to just stating an ISM.

I can agree with most of this, but none of it requires morality to be objective.

dk

People suffer for all kinds of reasons, for example the legitimate suffering an athlete suffers doing 20 pushups. Then there’s the illegitimate suffering a person endures from envying their neighbor’s car.
I know a number of people that suffer terribly from envy, infidelity, guilt and hatred.
Liberty gives a person the right to wantonly wield power, even over the will of others. Is it your thesis that people should be deprived of liberty.

Alonzo Fyfe

What is your criterion of knowledge?

Some people insist on a criterion of knowledge that "we must be certain beyond all possibility of error."

But this is far too demanding. Think of medicine -- the doctor often cannot know beyond the possibility of error the cause of a patient's illness or whether delaying treatment until a few more tests are run will turn out well for the patient or not. Yet, the degree of certainty that doctors can obtain allows those who use them to generally (with some exceptions) live longer, healther lives.

Most of moral crimes we typically think of as certainly wrong -- murder, theft, rape, etc., fairly easily come out as wrong on this account.

Many of the moral issues that are a matter of debate would still be a matter of debate. Does capital punishment generally fulfill desires? Or does it thwart the desires of the person executed without any good effect?

Some moral issues presently under debate would be decided, because its wrongness can only be defended with some sort of intrinsic value theory, divine command theory, or subjectivism. By setting aside subjectivist claims that unjustifiably restrict the range of desires that are relevant to those (typically) of a single agent or assessor.

I have seen no argument for the moral wrongness of masturbation and homosexual activity, for example, that does not depend on intrinsic values, divine command, or the narrow, "my feelings on the matter are the only feelings of relevant and if it feels wrong to me it is wrong" assumptions within these three alternatives.

[ May 20, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

The AntiChris

Alonzo Fyfe

I'm no fan of "absolute certainty".

Yup, we all make decisions based on best available information.

Do all subjectivist theories "restrict the range of desires that are relevant to those (typically) of a single agent or assessor"?

In any event, is there really any fundamental difference in the moral reasoning of a subjectivist and an objectivist or is it merely a difference in language?

I doubt that subjectivists actively banish all thoughts of "external desires" when making moral judgements. For a subjectivist, wouldn't consideration of "external desires" be part of his personal belief system and therefore contribute to his practical ought?

At the moment, for me, the only significant disadvantage of subjectivism (or at least in some of its forms) is that in its apparent attempt to deny any moral consensus, it imposes rather bizarre (and, for me, unappealing) restrictions on the use of language in moral debate.

Chris

Alonzo Fyfe

There are countless types of subjectivist theories; belief subjectivism, desire subjectivism, agent subjectivism, assessor subjectivism, third-party subjectivism, cultural subjectivism.

And these are not all mutually exclusive categories. You can, for example, have agent-belief-subjectivism and agent-desire-subjectivism.

(Note: Many who defend subjectivism do so by equivocating among different types of subjectivism; handling objections against one type (e.g., agent subjectivism) by shifting to another type (e.g., assessor subjectivism) and then back again when assessor subjectivism comes under fire.)

What all forms of subjectivism have in common in that they consider only a limited set of desires as relevant in making moral evaluation -- those of the agent, assessor, third party, or culture. Insofar as they do so, their results are different than the results that would be obtained by an objective all-things-considered theory.

Typically, I focus on agent-subjectivism in my criticism of subjectivism because a large majority of subjectivists are agent-subjectivists. Many of the objections raised against agent-subjectivism apply to other forms of subjectivism with only minor modifications.


If we accept agent subjectivism, and an agent A cares about the well being of patient B, then B's desires will be relevant to A, and A will act to benefit B. But B only has moral significance (for A) to the degree that A cares about B.

But B has to be content with the fact that his moral worth (to A) is purely contingent. That if A were to have a change of heart and want to harm B, under agent subjectivism it becomes morally permissible for A to inflict that harm.

In short, B's well being is morally relevant only to the degree and only in the manner that A cares about B's well being.

The lack of a consensus is a consequence of their "some things considered" moral evaluations. If you were to take a list of numbers, for example, and sum up various subsets of numbers, with different subsets you will get different sums. And there is no way to make these different sums equal. This is the moral reasoning of subjectivists with their "some things considered" moral judgments.

Yet, this does not change the fact that there is a single objectively correct "all things considered" right answer.


Any restrictions on the use of language is purely artificial.

A common fallacy offered in defense of moral subjectivism is to confuse it with linguistic subjectivism.

Language is an invention. No natural law dictates how any word in a language must be used. Rather, words are assigned meaning by convention, with the hundreds of millions of speakers within a language constantly and continually renegotiating the terms of that language.

Some subjectivists see the subjectivity in the meaning of the word 'ought' (aided by the fact that we have both practical-ought and moral-ought, and that the definition is theory-laden) and conclude that morality is subjective.

They argue, "Everything you say about these all-things-considered judgments is true, yet you fail to provide any argument as to why I must call these conclusions 'moral-ought'. It is still quite open to me to call your conclusions by some other name, and use the term 'moral ought' over here (usually, in a way indistinguishable from practical-ought). Therefore, morality is subjetive."

But the argument is no more valid than the following.

"Everything you say about these subatomic particles is true, yet you fail to provide any argument as to why I must call these subatomic particles 'quarks'. It is still quite open to me to call these particles by some other name, and use the term 'quark' over here (say, as the name of a fictional barkeep on a deep space station). Therefore, subatomic physics is subjetive."

The subjectivist's fixation on language, then, is a symptom of the appearance that the subjectivity of language supports the subjectivity of morality. But it is merely an appearance.

[ May 20, 2002: Message edited by: Alonzo Fyfe ]</p>

Jamie_L

I'm surprised bd-from-kg's post got so few replies. It seems to me that his definitions of "objective" and "subjective" morality are vastly different from what everyone else seems to be talking about.

I tried to hit on this in another post, but it's been re-directed here.

Does anyone want to go back and read it (first page) and say if they agree with those definitions?

Jamie

bd-from-kg

Koyaanisqatsi:

Of course beliefs are often being formed – namely, beliefs that certain things are objective moral truths. If there are no objective moral truths, of course, all such beliefs are false, but they’re still beliefs. The point is that the fact that Smith believes that a given action is “right” and Jones believes that it’s “wrong” is not evidence that there is no objective truth of the matter.

There might not be any objective truth of the matter, but if you want to argue that there isn’t you need something better than the mere existence of disagreements.

But your only argument as to why it isn’t applicable is your unsupported claim that there are no objective moral truths.

Obviously it’s meaningless to say that an action is “correct” in the sense of being true or false. The question is whether it makes sense to say that it is objectively true or false (or if you prefer, correct or incorrect) that an act is morally wrong. Stating repeatedly that it doesn’t is not an argument.

None of your posts or examples has come remotely close to demonstrating anything of the sort.

As you have probably noticed, there is not exactly a consensus here as to what constitutes a “morality”, much less an “objective morality”. If you were to explain just what it is that you are claiming doesn’t exist, your position would be clearer. It might even be self-evidently correct.

99Percent:

I have no idea how you got from “X is subjective” to “X has nothing to do with objective morality”. You might as well say that a doctor should ignore the fact that I feel severe pain in my shoulder whenever I move my arm on the grounds that pain is “subjective” and therefore has nothing to do with my objective medical condition. And if the medical condition is that I have frequent headaches, the condition itself is subjective, yet it is objectively true that it exists.

Yes. And a rock has to survive in order for it to continue to be a rock. If I were in extreme agony I’d have to survive in order to continue to be in extreme agony. So what?

Here you lose me completely. To start with, it’s not at all clear what you mean by “important to us”.

One meaning could be simply that we have to do what’s necessary to stay alive in order to stay alive. This can hardly be denied, but it doesn’t follow that we ought to do what’s necessary to stay alive unless you start with the premise that would be “good” for us to stay alive.

Another meaning could be that all living things have an innate tendency to act in ways that tend to keep them alive. But that isn’t true of all living things; occasionally an individual with no such tendency will be produced. The only reason that there are few such individuals is that they normally fail to stay alive. This is called “natural selection”. This has no moral implications unless you start with the premise that we “ought” to cooperate with natural selection. That makes sense only if one believes that anything produced by natural selection is “good”, which in turn makes sense only if it is a special case of the more general principle that anything produced by natural processes is “good”. But in that case everything is “good”

On the other hand, if you mean that survival is important to us in the sense that we desire it strongly, this is only morally significant if you start with the premise that whatever we desire strongly is “good”. But we desire many other things besides survival; are all of them “good” simply by virtue of the fact that we desire them? And anyway, this contradicts your statement that subjective things like empathy and suffering (and presumably desires) have nothing to do with objective morality.

There are several problems with this. First, slavery does not deprive one of free will; in fact, it has nothing to do with free will. What it does is to prevent one from doing what one wants, which is quite a different matter. Everyone is prevented from doing what one wants every day in many ways. Almost every law prevents someone from doing what he wants. Are all laws therefore morally wrong?

Second, surely you’re not saying that what’s wrong with slavery is that it lowers productivity? That slavery would be fine if it increased the GNP? If so, I see no point in considering your “moral philosophy” any further.

No, that is not what’s immoral about it. When a policeman arrests a criminal by tackling him and putting handcuffs on him, he is forcefully subjugating the perp’s will to his own, but few of us would say that he is acting immorally. What’s wrong with slavery is that one man is unjustly subjugating another man’s will to his own; the slave (ordinarily) has done nothing to deserve being enslaved. But of course, “unjust” and “deserve” are moral terms. In the absence of any moral principles on the basis of which you can say that the slave owner acted unjustly or that the slave did not deserve to be deprived of his freedom, there is no way to reach the conclusion that slavery is objectively immoral.

Oh, please. Dying for one’s country is not especially good for one’s well being, but how does it follow that it isn’t good for one’s society? The heroes who died trying to save people in the WTC on 9/11 surely knew that running up the stairs of a burning building was not especially good for their well being. So were they acting antisocially? Or again, should we put everyone who works in the criminal justice system in the same category as slave owners because what they do is contrary to the well being of those who are punished?

vixstile:

It’s not clear what your point is here. Everyone knows that we can disobey moral laws, but this hardly proves that they’re not objective. We can disobey civil laws too, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t objectively exist. Again, I’m not saying that objective moral laws do exist, but simply that your logic is fallacious.

How is this irrational? I don’t agree with dk’s reasoning here, but it seems to me that you’re assuming that only acting in one’s self-interest is “rational”. I don’t see how one can reach this conclusion. Almost everyone has some impulses that move him to act in “selfish” ways and others that move him to act in more “altruistic” ways. How did you determine that the former are rational and the latter irrational?

This leads directly to the next point:

That depends on how you define “objectively immoral” and “rational”. At the moment I want to explore the second question, since it may shed some light on the first. Strictly speaking, no action is “irrational” in the sense of being contrary to logic. Only beliefs can properly be called irrational in this sense.

Nevertheless, actions often are called irrational. For example, rushing to the station on Sunday to catch a train that I know doesn’t run on Sunday would generally be called irrational. Thus before one can say that acting in a certain way is or is not “rational” one has to have a reasonably clear concept of what it means to call an action “irrational”.

Finally, I think that a point you’ve made several times is very important:

Alonzo Fyfe has argued at length on this and other threads that it doesn’t matter whether knowing that an action is morally wrong in an objective sense provides a reason or motive for not doing it. I think that this is untenable; it is essentially a repudiation of the very purpose and function of morality. However, I don’t want to argue this point yet again on this thread, since Alonzo has now abandoned such a discussion on two other threads.

I agree with you that if knowing that an action is “objectively morally wrong” provides no reason or motive for not doing it, it is meaningless to talk about an “objective morality”. But I don’t agree that knowing that an action is morally wrong does not provide a reason or motive for not doing it. This will perhaps become clearer in later posts.