tronvillain

Well, that assumes that eating something is supposed to by analagous to committing murder, and perhaps they are but committing murder is simply easier to imagine than eating something. That is, one can imagine what it will be like to commit murder and so "taste" it indirectly, while it is almost impossible to imagine what broccoli tastes like without actually trying it. It is not clear that this implies morality is not like taste.

njhartsh

Okay! This is more like it. Thanks for posting, 99.

This is very new to me. Aren't there plenty of objectivists (to be honest, I thought it was all of them) who would argue that "more good," "less good," "more bad" and "less bad" do exist, but only based on an objective yardstick? That's the objectivism I'm familiar with. (Take height, for example--that's an objective measure, but it's not as if all people are simply "tall" or "short," with no in-between or indexicality. All I'm saying is that I don't think there's a contradiction between an objective measure and a "range o[f] relative values.")

Well, I suppose that whether other objectivists agree with you is not terribly relevant; I can't, of course, go ad numerum on you. You're a "black and white" objectivist--suits me.

I accept that I'm stating a moral comparison that you disagree with, but I'm not sure that that amounts to a "fallacy." I happen to doubt your belief that the entire normative universe is binary. I think shoplifting (or taking credit for someone else's bar tip? ) is bad, but genocide is worse.

It can indeed--and, lo and behold, there are in fact hedonists in the world.

To rebut subjectivism, you're going to need to show that it's contradictory or impossible, not that it allows for ugly subjective principles. The existence of moral conclusions that you and I find ugly is, unfortunately, a fact of life.

Really? And what is that "justified and plausible reason"?

I'm an abolitionist, so I suspect I'm going to be an easy sell on the wrongness of capital punishment--but I'd like to know what "justified and plausible reason" there is for that wrongness that doesn't depend entirely upon the thoughts, beliefs and desires of sentient beings.

Hardly! (I've debated the morality of capital punishment on this board more than once.) But I fail to see how any of those "moral issues" gets its normative content from anything but human minds.

The practice of capital punishment, sure. But moral perspectives on capital punishment always seem to me to stem from the minds of individual human beings--even when we're talking about something "grouped" like an opinion poll. I don't see how enforcing an individual moral decision upon a group makes it any less of an individual moral decision.

Furthermore, what happens when I serve a broccoli dinner to a tableful of George Bushes? "You'll eat it and like it!", I tell them. Does that "make the issue completely beyond individual taste"? (I would say no, for the same reason that executing a convict also fails to do that.)

Really? So if I was wondering whether I should kill myself, under some circumstances objective morality would have nothing to say on the matter?

What?!? Didn't you see where I wrote "personal will"? I'm not denying moral responsibility!

I'd say all three are contributing factors. Do you seriously disagree?

I guess I must have missed that trial in law school. If I'm ever defense counsel in a patricide, though, I'll keep it in mind.

This is actually your strongest argument, because it makes clear that I have defined subjectivism in such a way that it (analogously to "strong" rather than "weak" atheism) affirmatively denies the existence of objective moral standards.

I think it'd be best if I conceded this particular point: I probably can't disprove the existence of objective moral standards any more than I can disprove the existence of gods. So I'll take up "weak atheism" subjectivism instead: you and I agree, I think, that subjective moral standards (as you put it, values that are "on an individual basis") do exist. I am doubtful that there exists any other kind of moral standard, whereas you believe that a "mind-independent value" (in Alonzo Fyfe's terminology) does indeed exist.

So, in the immortal words of "weak" atheists everywhere: Show me the evidence. I lack a belief in the objective values you speak of; why should I adopt that belief?

- Nathan

njhartsh

Okay; I guess I can't say that that isn't fair game.

In that case, I suppose that I've been using "epistemology" and its derivatives differently than you and Alonzo Fyfe have--given that the crux of my comparison is the "mind-dependent" nature of both subjective ethics and subjective taste, not some subsequent discourse between minds that is a necessary foundation for subjective ethical decisionmaking.

Upon further review, it appears that there is a case to be made for a broader interpretation of "epistemology," such that Alonzo's theory does in fact differ from mine on "epistemological" grounds. Therefore touche.

But I continue to want to focus on "mind dependence" rather than other stages in Alonzo's theorized process. 99Percent and other objectivists (who, please note, are the ones who complain that subjectivism reduces ethics to "a matter of taste") have a very different kind of objection to (my account of) subjectivism than Alonzo does, and it's theirs that I'd like to call into question here.

Sure--and one doesn't judge murder with one's tongue, either. Plus there's rarely any chewing involved, and one doesn't have to worry about fat content.

But please. There is an analog to trying a new food, and it's precisely what happens on this forum all the time--one hypothesizes. One considers, thinks, theorizes.

The sensory data of a taste and of a morally relevant experience do indeed enter the brain via different apparatuses. I submit, however, that this disparity fails to show that either taste or moral evaluations find their proximate cause in anything but the brain receiving said data.

- Nathan

99Percent

njhartsh: There is also an objective measure of value which is money. But moral acts are either wrong or right. Objectively (but not individually), you cannot say that a moral act is more good or less good or more bad or less bad. Its either wrong or right. For example, if you steal a million dollars or rape someone both are wrong. Its absurd to argue which one is worse or better, either way they are wrong. If you are pointed with a gun and asked what would you rather have - get raped or have your house pillaged you might be forced to decide but that is beyond the issue of whether any of these acts are good or bad. Both are bad and you would rather have not a gun being pointed at you.The universe is not binary, but existence and truth is. Either you exist or you don't. Either you are telling the truth or you are not. Genocide is considered by most to be worse than stealing a tip, but both are still objectively wrong. The fallacy is saying "well, stealing is not as bad as commiting genocide, so its still relatively a good act".But that doesn't deny that morals can exist in the absolute human sense. Just like concepts that don't exist concretely in their pure form, but they still exist objectively (and why we can communicate) in our human minds only.Because you view moral issues as only "tastes" or matter of opinion is why you get stuck. But if you can view morality with reason you can see that people can be persuaded to understand and accept the truth of objective morality, instead of having to force the issues like saying "You'll eat it and like it". It is not a surprising conclusion that subjectivist must resort to a system of force to fit their view on how societal morals must work.Objective morality would state that you have your own right to kill yourself as long as you have compelling and logical reasons to do so, ie, you are in a rational state of mind.But do you see that "personal will" is diametrically opposed to cultural conditioning and genetic drives? If you accept that our actions are based on the latter then you are denying moral responsibility because its stating that there is no free will and therefore no morality.This is interesting because you deny the existence of god(s) in an empirical way, ie you don't see, hear or feel a god, so they don't exist. This in the end is a rather agnostic stance since a non existence of a concrete thing cannot be proved. However I believe that strong atheism arises when you disprove the existence of god rationally. In other words, you logically conclude that a god or gods cannot exist because its concept is irrational (for example its omni-like attributes). This is the same way you prove objective morality exist. Empirically you cannot prove this because morals are humanly derived concepts like numbers that don't exist concretely. You will never find ten-ness or nine-ness or zero in the universe for example

Clutch

Just a quick clarification: Both by its advocates and especially its opponents, the thesis that morality is subjective is often taken just to amount to the thesis that morality is a matter of taste.

But these are very different claims, the former more general than the latter. Many phenomena are subjective in ways that are much more cognitively basic than mere preferences -- colours, for example, are in some sense subjective, but it is not a matter of taste that we see ripe tomatoes as red.

The prospects for explaining moral discourse as both subjective and truth-apt are much better when this is taken seriously. There seems to be a range of subjective phenomena, some much more "fixed" than others. Hence "A clear daytime sky is blue" seems more truth-apt than "Oysters are disgusting"; disagreements about the former are more reasonably characterized as some cognitive failure.

Morality, I think, is a subjective phenomenon far more like colour than like taste. Unlike colour judgements, though, morality is a hugely mixed bag, cognitively speaking; I think a hundred and one things are going on in moral perception, intuition and reasoning, that are not related by a whole lot more than the label "moral". This makes me very pessimistic about the prospects for any unified account of moral reasoning or behaviour.

njhartsh

You have asserted this numerous times, but I haven't seen you provide any support for it. I think it's entirely meaningful, not absurd, to say "Genocide is worse (more bad) than shoplifting." And I don't even think that contradicts objectivism.

Anyway, I don't think that that issue has anything to do with this thread. Frankly, I don't care; making objective morality into a black-or-white system rather than a yardstick with gradations doesn't bother me.

I don't understand what "absolute human sense" means. Are you conceding that morality doesn't exist outside of human minds? I would call that "subjectivism."

Hey--watch it with the ad hominems. That has no resemblance to what I said.

My "system of force" ("You'll eat it and like it!") was merely intended to be an analog to an executioner imposing death on a death-row inmate. The point was not that the Bushes were forced to agree with my taste (they weren't), but that my taste was imposed on them in the same manner that the death penalty is imposed on its victims. No one is being convinced of a moral (or taste) principle in either situation.

But my suicide example was intended to test your earlier statement that "Objective moral ethics are derived from thinking out logical and reasonable explanations of why such actions that involve other humans are morally wrong or right."

Your newer statement reveals that you've moved the goalposts on me: suicide can sometimes not "involve other humans," which places it outside of what you said was the jurisdiction of your moral system. And yet you now state that your system would place limitations upon it.

I believe I've caught you in a contradiction.

Um--no, not always. One thing I have the will to do, sometimes, is eat when I feel hungry. In that case, my will, my inborn genetic drives and my cultural conditioning all point in the same direction. I have a very difficult time understanding the relationship you think those three forces present in the human mind.

I'm sorry, but I find this statement absurd. Do you seriously believe that you have absolute autonomy of the will, free from any desires or drives that evolution and/or society have instilled in you?

What in the world are you talking about? Your statement has nothing to do with the justification for my atheism. I am in fact a "weak" atheist; I have no idea what the foundation for your "you don't see" comment is.

This, from an iidb moderator?!?

I am an atheist, not an agnostic. (I guess I expected you would have more experience with the common nonbelievers' definitions of those terms. You should also check out the descriptions of "weak" and "strong" atheism on the site I've just linked to.)

It is not impossible to prove the non-existence of a "concrete thing."

Okay--that's called "noncognitivism." Presuming it's valid (and you seem to think it is), noncognitivism directly refutes your earlier comment about "the non-existence of a 'concrete thing.'"

Could you please explain how that works? I don't understand what you're saying here.

- Nathan

99Percent

njhartsh: It becomes absurd in reality because you rationalize your wrong actions. You walk into a hardware shop and decide to steal a screwdriver by saying: "well, at least I am not as bad as Stalin or Hitler, now they reaaally did commit moral attrocities, I am merely stealing an insignificant screwdriver". It is absurd, because you are still commiting an immoral act in the absolute sense. You deserve to be locked up and be put away from society's harm at equal par with Stalin and Hitler.Unfortunately we don't have non-human sentient beings by which we can establish concepts outside of the human realm, so we have to stick within this realm in our communications and I say it is absolute in the human realm because moral actions are human actions being human ourselves anyway. So yes, that is why I say in the absolute human sense because objective morality applies to all human beings capable of communicate and convey abstract concepts within ourselves. Note that abstract concepts are not concrete and only exist in our minds, but that doesn't deny their objective quality. Again I recur to mathematical concepts like the number zero - it doesn't exit concretely yet any rational human being can understand it perfectly. Likewise with truth and lies. Any rational being can understand and see perfectly when another human being is lying. By lying, a human commits the clearest example of an immoral act, and anyone who is capable of lying automatically becomes a moral being (he chooses to tell the truth or not, for example).Of course not, but you haven't looked all the way to the bottom of your "morals are a matter of taste" thesis. If the taste of broccoli is deliciously good, then Bush Sr when invited ought and must eat the broccoli you are serving. If he doesn't then something is wrong with him and he should be forced to eat it, even if you and maybe him don't understand what is going on (and why should you, if its all a matter of tastes and feeling - no thinking is required). Likewise with societal morals - incest feels wrong so anyone who commits it should be punished. Murder feels wrong so anyone commiting murder should be punished - forced into jail or even executed. Objective morality doesn't work that way. There are plausible and logical explanations why murder is wrong. Likewise, if you think that those who dislike broccoli simply as a matter of taste and everyone who dislikes broccoli has a right to dislike it (because it doesn't affect you anyway), then you are into the track of objective morality.I believe I have caught you in a contradiction Nope. There is the person who is going to commit suicide, the other person besides yourself. It is when dealing with other people when objective morality comes into place. Question is, is it your duty, your obligation to prevent another person from commiting suicide? Why or why not? And you must think the reason why, not just because it "feels" wrong, or because it cause suffering and stress, because that would be subjective morality.Of course not, most of our actions are automatic and unconscious. But when we become conscious, perceive the truth and think objectively we become moral being. For example my nature might be to kill my coworker who is going to be promoted instead of me, so in a drive of hate and anger I might do that. But instead I can think and go against this nature - I become moral, instead of an animal that follows its instincts, social pressures and genetic drives.

(I am not going to go into the discussion of how atheism is justiified now, I think that is going a bit off topic. Maybe later).

The AntiChris

This makes sense to me.

Chris

njhartsh

I have my doubts that that defense would hold up in court. The fact that offense A is less serious than offense B does not "rationalize" or justify offense A. I really don't understand what leads you to assert this.

I agree that stealing is wrong. I submit that it is less wrong than genocide. That does not "rationalize" stealing; it is merely a reasonable reaction to it.

I strongly disagree. I note that no justice system in the world (except, interestingly, certain varieties of theist eschatology) agrees with you.

In my state, the maximum sentence for theft of property or services worth $250 or less is " imprisonment for not more than 90 days or ... payment of a fine of not more than $700, or both." Minn. Stat. § 609.52, subd. 3(5) (2002). Any jail time for such an offense is presumed stayed. Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines IV, V. Therefore no necessary jail time at all!

Meanwhile, the mandatory sentence for first-degree murder is life in prison. Minn. Stat. § 609.185(a)(1) (2002).

So: is the Minnesota criminal code (which parallels, I'm confident, every single other one in the Western world in this particular respect) "objectively wrong," or is your comparison of Stalin to shoplifters based on your subjective reactions alone?

I still don't understand what that could mean. "Absolute in the human realm"? The whole point of differentiating "the human realm" from the rest of the universe is that we and our subjective senses are not "absolute."

As an initial matter, the ability of "any rational human being" to "understand" a system has nothing to do with its objectivity or subjectivity. (Any rational human being can understand Arnold Schoenberg's system of twelve-tone composition, but that doesn't make it objectively true.)

Mathematics is an entirely axiomatic system that has no inherently necessary connection to the objective world outside of the human mind. "Two plus two equals four" is true because we have arbitrarily declared it to be true, not because when you place two objects next to two other objects, you have four objects (that's just one of the many facts that make math useful). Mathematical axioms--unlike scientific laws, which are the results of a systematic process of understanding and describing the objective world--are things that humans have created out of whole cloth. Math is, indeed, foundationally subjective.

Math differs from morality in at least two respects that are relevant to this discussion: first, there is not a whit of disagreement about the basic axioms of math or the conclusions that can legitimately be inferred from them. There is no "individual math" under which 2 + 2 = 5. Second, many mathematical operations have very powerful applications: arithmetic, for example, tracks very accurately the results of (e.g.) adding objects to a collection, taking objects away from it and dividing the collection equally between parties. There exist vast realms of "pure math" that have no application to anything concrete at all; these are indeed consistent with the axioms that we have summarily declared to be true, but nevertheless the entire system rests upon arbitrary definitions that we have made up to suit ourselves. Math resembles objective systems only because no one disagrees on (for example) what "two," "plus," "equals" and "four" mean.

Moral philosophy, in contrast, is the subject of constant and cacophonous philosophical melees. There is nothing resembling broad agreement as to whether a (for example) utilitarian, Kantian or Aristotelian model of ethics is the proper one; there is nothing in morality like the unanimity that we have for "two," "plus," "equals" and so on.

I strongly disagree. I believe that in certain situations, lying can be considerably more moral than telling the truth.

You hear a hurried knock on your front door. You open it to find the married woman who lives in the house next to yours. She is visibly bruised, hobbling and clearly frightened out of her wits. "You've got to hide me," she frantically tells you, glancing hurriedly over her shoulder at her house. "My husband is trying to kill me, and I just escaped." You let her in, and she runs and hides in your basement.

Thirty seconds later, there is a booming knock at your door. You open it again to find the woman's husband, 6'10", 300 pounds, sweating, furious, and smacking a baseball bat against his open palm. "Have you seen where my goddamned wife went?" he asks you through clenched teeth.

I submit that anyone who does not lie to this man in this situation does not have a moral bone in his or her body. Thus lying is not "the clearest example of an immoral act"; sometimes it's not even immoral.

Fine--then tell me one. Explain to me the undeniable objective basis of morality you rely upon. I have found a large proportion of the moral statements you have made on this thread (e.g., genocide is morally equivalent to shoplifting; lying is always wrong) to be extremely questionable, so I think it would be edifying to see you prove them based on an impeccable objective standard.

You're running away from your earlier (since contradicted) jurisdictional statement. You claimed that "Objective moral ethics are derived from thinking out logical and reasonable explanations of why such actions that involve other humans are morally wrong or right."

I pointed out that I could contemplate suicide, which wouldn't necessarily involve "other humans." (I wrote: "So if I was wondering whether I should kill myself....")

Now you've decided that the moral decisionmaker and the person committing suicide are necessarily separate people--which, in any case of voluntary suicide, is obviously false. Everyone who has ever voluntarily attempted suicide has made a decision that suicide was the proper course of action; that decision very rarely "involve[s] other humans." But you would obviously consider the decision within the scope of morality nonetheless, which gainsays your jurisdictional statement.

You're probably correct that your rhetoric isn't contradictory; it's just confused.

No, that wasn't my question. You have oddly recast it to avoid the contradiction I demonstrated.

All of which directly concurs with my earlier statements about what goes into our moral decisionmaking. (There are "social pressures and genetic drives" that push people toward doing good things, too.)

I have drawn an analogy between subjectivism (as I am attempting to defend it) and "weak" atheism. Both the subjectivist and the "weak" atheist lack a belief in something that their opponents (the objectivist/the theist) affirmatively believe exists. The burden of proof is on the opponents to demonstrate that said affirmative beliefs are true.

Therefore I would like you to demonstrate for me the objective basis for your conclusion that lying is morally wrong. If there is no basis for your conclusion that doesn't stem entirely from the thoughts, beliefs and desires of human beings, then I'm afraid that your theory is subjective, not objective.

- Nathan

99Percent

njhartsh: First, my apologies for taking some time to respond. I sometimes pause a day or two to allow others to join the discussion.

I concede your point that it is not an "absurd" (my word) to discuss the relative wrongness of certain actions compared to others. Killing is certainly a worse offense than stealing. What I was trying to emphasize is that there is nor relative goodness in comparison to another bad act. You are correct. I got carried away. Objectivism does have a theory of justice.
Yes, our senses and perception of the universe cannot be absolute (we would have to gods for that). But our knowledge of reality within our human capability and communications is certainly true within ourselves as humans. In this regard, within the human framework, truth and reality is certainly absolute. For example if I see you stealing a tip from another customer and passing it as yours I can certainly remark to another fellow human "look at njhartsh take that dollar bill from another table and putting it on the one he was sitting at", my fellow human would agree that the action took place. So if my friend later asks you why did you and you reply that you didn't, he will know absolutely that you are lying, even though concepts such as "dollar", "table", "restaurant", etc are merely abstracts that are relative (for example in a broader sense dollar is just a piece of paper, and in the absolute sense "table" is just a bunch of molecules).Now its my turn to not understand. I think you are confusing subjectivity with abstractness. Are you saying that just because concepts are abstracts they aren't objectively true, even if they are universally recognized as true?Likewise with objective morality! There is no "individual morality" under which murder is right.Well, moral objectivist claim that a since objective morality is true, a political system is necessarily derived from it, and it is this application that makes it very powerful - it leads to a civilized and peaceful society.I would claim that its a matter of human evolution. More primitive societies didn't understand objective morality either because its less obvious or because they had more urgent things to do like barely surviving, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Besides we have the conglomerate of religions and mysticism that muddle up everything. Its taken us centuries for western civilization to reach to the secular state we are in and even then we still have millions of fundamentalists who want to takes us back. Modern philosophy has but 100 years free of religion to be able to reason out morality without god, its no wonder objective morality without god is so confusing, but again, that doesn't mean it isn't true.This is the typical "The jews in the attic, Nazis knocking at the door" argument for lying. Objectivism has covered this before. In the face of violence there is no morality because choices are gone or extremely limited, that is why human initiated violence is immoral in the first place. Note that in your example the person could be lying not because he cares about the woman, but because he is afraid of being beaten to a pulp by the husband with a bat.First let me state again that genocide is morally equivalent to shoplifting in the sense that they are both wrong. And lying is wrong when done without threat of violence and in free will. Murder is wrong because you initiate violence and you submit yourself to a living in a state of violence for the rest of your life (since your own life is fair game now). It is also wrong because you deny the productive qualities (or potential productive qualities) of the fellow rational human being, capable of producing human value of which you can trade with your own.

(I am not going into the suicide example because in the end we seem to agree that people have a right to commit suicide, its just a muddled discussion)Of course. Millions of people live perfectly moral lives by instinct and social pressures, without maybe even doing a conscious effort. But that doesn't deny the fact that objective morality also exists, and that some people act upon objective moral principles out of their own free will.Agreed, but what I was stating is that the proof in objective morality is based on rationality, not on empirical facts or consequences. You cannot expect me to pull out a physical object like the tablet of the ten commandments that "prove" objective morality exists. Like mathematical concepts, it solely derived from rational thought.Fundamentally, is reality entirely subjective? If not then there can be an objective basis for truth, otherwise we are just going around in circles.