Friend

If cultures throughout history have shared some basic moral laws, does that make those moral laws objective? Is there criteria for a moral law to be objective or subjective?

Thanks

~ Friend ~

bd-from-kg

Friend:

I assume that by “objective” you mean “objectively true”. In that case, the short answer is “no”. The fact that a “moral law” has been shared by all cultures says nothing about whether it is objectively true. In fact, as has often been observed, many such “laws”, such as “Other things being equal. it’s wrong to kill a member of your own society” will necessarily be accepted by any society because otherwise it will fail to qualify as a society at all.

More generally, the fact that something has been accepted by all societies doesn’t make it objectively true. For example, for many centuries, (until the time of the ancient Greeks, apparently) it was believed by all societies that the Earth is flat and that the sun goes around it, but that didn’t make these things true. By definition, being objectively true means being true regardless of what anyone thinks or believes.

Nevertheless, the fact that something has been accepted as true by all societies is significant evidence that it's really true; it's just far from being conclusive. All such beliefs should continue to be questioned and examined; that's the job of skeptics. Skeptics try to ignore "received opinion" because accepting it as evidence would be incompatible with the skeptical function. So don't be surprised to see some folks here deny even that the fact that an opinion has always been universally held is evidence that it's true. This isn't so much wrong as a special meaning of "evidence" that is appropriate when one is playing the role of skeptic but inappropriate in other contexts.

If you’re referring to operational criteria (i.e., defined by the results of tests that can, at least in principle) be repeated by anyone who cares to), the answer is obviously “no”. However, it should be noted that the claim that this is a necessary condition for being “objectively true” (or meaningful, for that matter), which is the central doctrine of logical positivism, is quite controversial; there are a number of serious objections to it.

In any case, it’s not clear what it could mean to say that a moral law is objectively true. This is the most serious objection to moral objectivism. Also, the fact that many quite intelligent people of good will who have thought about the matter seriously for decades have come to different conclusions about what moral laws are true or valid is pretty good (but not conclusive) evidence that such things are not “self-evident” in any intelligible sense. So if there are “objectively true” moral laws, it’s not clear how they could be known given that there is no operational test and the correct answers seemingly cannot be determined by introspection.

However, in spite of all this, I don’t think that the situation is entirely bleak. I think that it may well be that there are moral principles to which every person would subscribe if he had enough knowledge and understanding and were sufficiently rational. Such principles would not be objectively true, but then I don’t think that statements of moral principles express propositions, so the question of “truth” doesn’t really even come up. But such principles could reasonably be described as “valid” or “universal” – or if you want to be technical, “universally intersubjective”. In my opinion, this is the closest thing to “objective” moral principles that is logically possible.

Kharakov

1) No

2) a. objective implies that moral law exists independently of the mind

b. subjective implies that moral law comes about through the mind's interpretation of events

jlowder

Umm, this <strong>isn't</strong> the most serious objection to moral objectivism. Moreover, it is quite clear among moral philosophers of all stripes what it at least <strong>means</strong> for moral principles to be objectively true:

Jeffery Jay Lowder

NialScorva

I think this topic would benefit all the fine people who read the Moral Foundations and Principles forum and generate high quality discussion there.

bd-from-kg

jlowder:

Well, no, this certainly is not at all clear to moral philosophers of all stripes. In fact, logical positivists and their successors deny explicitly that it means anything at all to say that a moral principle is objectively true. Many others who reject the positivist position admit that it could in principle mean something, but allow that, try as they might, they have been unable to discover any intelligible meaning. They might be wrong, but it would be absurd to deny that they do in fact say this. In fact, there’s nothing remotely like general agreement among objectivist moral philosophers as to what it means to say that a moral principle is objectively true. This is the central question dealt with by metaethics, and there is nothing approaching general agreement on the answer.

First off, this formulation has disputed by a great many moral objectivists, who deny that the truth of moral principles is a matter of natural fact. But even if we accept it provisionally, it hardly answers the question of what it means to say that a moral principle is objectively true. If I ask “What does it mean to say that quarks exist?”, the answer “It means that there is a truth of the matter determined by objective, natural fact” would not be very helpful; I would certainly not regard it as answering my question in any serious sense. I’d want to know what natural facts the truth of the statement “quarks exist” depends on. And I would certainly say that if two people gave entirely different accounts of what natural facts the truth of this statement depends on, they do not agree as to what it means.

Well, I’m not sure what it means to say that natural facts depend on physical facts. Isn’t physics the science that deals with the natural world as a whole? What would it mean to say that there is some aspect of the natural world that falls outside the purview of physics? What, then, is the difference between a natural fact and a physical fact, or a “truth at the level of physics”?

But more importantly, how can value judgments be determined by physical facts? Whatever physical facts you might adduce, it always seems to be meaningful to ask whether it is desirable that things are thus. And this would seem to imply that value judgments must be something other than disguised statements of physical facts. (This, of course, is the well-known is/ought dichotomy.)

Clutch

It might be helpful to distinguish two sorts of subjective property: following Dennett, I'll call them "lovely" and "suspect".

Suspect subjective properties are those the correct predication of which requires some actual ongoing subjective state or act on someone's part. Hence the name; you're not a suspect unless someone suspects you.

Lovely subjective properties are those that can be correctly predicated on counterfactual or subjunctive conditional grounds, but still clearly implicate subjectivity. Hence it makes sense to think that Niagara Falls were lovely before anyone ever saw them; it's enough that the Falls were such that, had anyone seen 'em, they'd have thought 'em lovely.

Now, if moral properties are supposed to be objective in a sense that eschews even lovely subjective properties, then the question of their meaning is indeed a fraught and pressing one. The self-described moral objectivist owes an account of what it would be for a moral property or law to have a kind of normative force open to characterization in totally non-subjective terms. It's difficult to see what that could amount to, though.

jlowder

I may be mistaken, but I don't believe this is correct. I think there is a consensus that the idea of "moral objectivism" is meaningful; however, there are philosophers who believe it is false. For example, moral noncognitivists believe that moral propositions do not have a truth value, but even noncognitivists accept that the term "moral objectivism" is meaningful.


Can you please provide a quotation of a moral philosopher who says that moral objectivism is meaningless? I suspect you may be confusing what moral philosophers say about (allegedly objective) moral principles with what they say about moral objectivism itself. I am only aware of philosophers who callenge the meaningfulness of the former, not the latter.

</strong>

Huh? What moral philosophers have you been reading? Moral philosophers who are moral objectivists agree that to say moral principles are objective is to say that there is an objective fact of the matter. Moral objectivists do not agree on which properties moral properties supervene on (e.g., Paul Bloomfield says healthiness, Michael Martin promotes an Ideal Observer Theory, etc.), but that's a separate issue from the <strong>meaning</strong> of moral objectivism. The exact identity of (allegedly) objective moral properties is a subject that falls within the domain of normative ethics, not a metaethical view like moral objectivism.

Please name one.

You seem to be very confused about the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics. Moral objectivism is a position within metaethics. Moral objectivism simply entails the nature of moral properties: it says that moral properties are objective as opposed to subjective or inter-subjective. What you seem to want to know is the exact identity of moral properties given moral objectivism. Unfortunately, the identity of moral properties is not something that is addressed by meta-ethics. (We might say that meta-ethics is "too high-level" to specify something like that.) What you are asking for is an answer that can only be provided by a <strong>normative</strong> ethical theory (e.g., utilitarianism), NOT a metaethical theory.

I refer you to my detailed quotation of moral philosopher John Post at the bottom of page 3 on the "<a href="http://iidb.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=52&t=000345&p=3" target="_blank">Can Atheists Have Morals Thread?</a>". There I provide quotations from Post which explain how values are determined by physical facts.

Jeffery Jay Lowder

[ November 08, 2002: Message edited by: jlowder ]</p>

Clutch

JJL, maybe you could be a little clearer about your claim that nobody denies the meaningfulness of "moral objectivism". Do you mean that it is constituted out of two lexical items that are both meaningful, for instance? What does that have to do with bd-from-kg's point?

I understand bd-from-kg to be pointing out that according to many philosophers, it is not meaningful to say of "a [particular] moral principle [that it] is objectively true".

The non-cognitivists, and certainly the emotivist wing of them, are undeniable proof of his claim.

It is unclear to me what your complaint is, vis a vis some actual claim that bd has made.

[ November 08, 2002: Message edited by: Clutch ]</p>

bd-from-kg

Jlowder:

I hope to have time to answer your post in full tomorrow, but at the moment I just want to clear up a bit of sloppiness in my last post. When I said in the first paragraph that “there’s nothing remotely like general agreement among objectivist moral philosophers as to what it means to say that a moral principle is objectively true”, I didn’t have in mind different answers to the question of what natural property (if any) was being referred to. I was thinking of answers that are totally different in kind, such as (i) that the act is commanded by God, or approved by Him, or is in conformity with His nature, or (ii) that the act has some non-natural (but also not supernatural) property, or (iii) that it has some natural property. Later I insisted that “what it means for a moral principle to be objectively true” must include (for those who choose option (iii)) a specification of the particular natural property referred to. I agree that when the question is interpreted the first way it belongs to metaethics and when interpreted the second way it belongs to normative ethics. But the fact that no one (in my opinion) has been able to come up with a plausible candidate for the supposed property referred to is a pretty strong argument that there is no such property, and therefore that moral objectivism is false. Especially since, when one understands why the various candidates for the property in question don’t work, it seems clear that no other candidate is going to fare any better.

By the way, perhaps the most well-known exponent of option (ii) was G.E. Moore.