Is morality objective or subjective?

[Immanuel Can]

You should look it up

Why? I know what it is. You said you don't know what it means.

Because it's you who doesn't know what it means.

Explain.

[Atla]

Why? I know what it is. You said you don't know what it means.

Because it's you who doesn't know what it means.

Explain.

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is sight, an ad hominem?

[Immanuel Can]

Hume's Guillotine, both is and ought are meanings,

Ummm...no, no, they're not. Sorry...that's just not so.
"Is" is an ontological claim. "Ought" is a moral claim. Both "mean" something, but "meaning" is a different type of claim, something we might call a "teleological" claim.

A claim of any sort is a meaning.

No, a claim HAS a meaning. It doesn't create meaningfulness, say, for life, or for an action.

Maybe you can clear this up for me: is it biology or consciousness that you think is the fundamental basis of reality? Are you a Materialist or an Idealist, perhaps? I can't tell: because you say both that "biology" is the basic thing, and that "experience" or "consciousness" is. Which one are you really trying to advocate as the primary thing?

Life is consciousness, consciousness is life.

Where does biology fit in, then?

One can only be an idealist, if apparent reality is as it is a subjective manifestation.

Well, since reality carries on regardless of what ideas one holds in one's head...as when falls off a cliff one did not know about, and still dies...then Idealism would be wrong.

[Immanuel Can]

Because it's you who doesn't know what it means.

Explain.

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is sight, an ad hominem?

Ah. I see your error.

You think "ad hominem" implies "untrue." But it does not. It implies, "Irrelevant anyway, even if true."

Let's say you're a man. And you say, "The sun came up this morning." And I say, "You're only saying that because you're a man."

I'm right...you are. It's no lie. But it's utterly irrelevant to what makes the sun go down or up...or seem to do so, anyway. It's ad hominem, because your sex has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of your claim.

So yes, calling a blind man "blind" is capable of being ad hominem, if the claim you made was itself about something unrelated, like, "The sun came up this morning." The fact that the man is blind does not have anything to do with the sun. Even his ability to know the sun came up has nothing to do with his blindness. He could actually be only guessing, having NO knowledge of the sun -- and his claim still has to be evaluated not based on his being blind, but on whether the sun did, in fact, come up.

[Immanuel Can]

I think we can at least agree that morals are evaluations.

Well, they are. But there's no way that the evaluations themselves cause or explain the origin of morality, because they "evaluate" something that exists already, and does not depend on the evaluation.

To imagine that evaluating causes morals to exist would be like imagining my thermometer causes the weather. Thermometers don't cause anything; they just take a reading on what it already is. They can be accurate or inaccurate, but the weather will be what it is, regardless of how accurate or inaccurate the thermometer's reading is.

That's a bad analogy. What is a moral issue for you, might not be one for me, but when it rains we both get wet.

If morality is objective, it won't matter whether you agree with me about it or not. If killing is actually wrong, your disbelief in it, or my belief in killing people, will not change the fact.

When an action is wrong, it's wrong. Human estimates can't make it right or wrong. They can only attempt to report correctly what its objective moral status is.

And this is why we can look at the beating of women in Saudi, or the raping of women in Pakistan, for example, and say, "That's wrong." It will still be wrong, even if the beater or rapist disagrees with us, and even if the woman in question has been sold the idea that she deserves beatings or rape.

Likewise, our moral evaluations do not cause anything.

Of course they cause something; they influence our behaviour.

Yes. But they do not cause things to happen, and they do not arrange their moral status. It's our actions, subsequent to, and in the presence of, our conscious moral evaluations that cause things to happen; and its the fact that what we aim do already has a moral status before we do it.

That pre-existing moral status is what our moral evaluations aim to describe. If that moral status didn't pre-exist them, we could not describe the moral status of a thing at all. There'd be nothing to describe...just as a thermometer cannot register a particular temperature other than from what is already around it.

Morality is just a set of invented rules, but rules that are based more on emotional sentiment than rational practicality.

Then they are delusions; and worse, they are tyrannical delusions, since they aren't based on our own rational practical advantage, but on somebody else's, some group's, emotional sentiments.

In my view of morality, I suppose society takes on the role of God.

Which society is the"god"? Muslim society? Western society? Chinese society? Yoruban society? You have a lot of very different, conflictual "gods" listed there. Why does any of us owe it to follow them?

[Atla]

Explain.

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is sight, an ad hominem?

Ah. I see your error.

You think "ad hominem" implies "untrue." But it does not. It implies, "Irrelevant anyway, even if true."

Let's say you're a man. And you say, "The sun came up this morning." And I say, "You're only saying that because you're a man."

I'm right...you are. It's no lie. But it's utterly irrelevant to what makes the sun go down or up...or seem to do so, anyway. It's ad hominem, because your sex has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of your claim.

So yes, calling a blind man "blind" is capable of being ad hominem, if the claim you made was itself about something unrelated, like, "The sun came up this morning." The fact that the man is blind does not have anything to do with the sun. Even his ability to know the sun came up has nothing to do with his blindness. He could actually be only guessing, having NO knowledge of the sun -- and his claim still has to be evaluated not based on his being blind, but on whether the sun did, in fact, come up.

No you don't see the error. Did I ask

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is the everyday movement of the Sun, an ad hominem?

or did I ask

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is sight, an ad hominem?

[Harbal]

Well, they are. But there's no way that the evaluations themselves cause or explain the origin of morality, because they "evaluate" something that exists already, and does not depend on the evaluation.

To imagine that evaluating causes morals to exist would be like imagining my thermometer causes the weather. Thermometers don't cause anything; they just take a reading on what it already is. They can be accurate or inaccurate, but the weather will be what it is, regardless of how accurate or inaccurate the thermometer's reading is.

That's a bad analogy. What is a moral issue for you, might not be one for me, but when it rains we both get wet.

If morality is objective, it won't matter whether you agree with me about it or not. If killing is actually wrong, your disbelief in it, or my belief in killing people, will not change the fact.

When an action is wrong, it's wrong. Human estimates can't make it right or wrong. They can only attempt to report correctly what its objective moral status is.

I have said that the concepts of right and wrong only exist in the minds of human beings, so to me, an act would be wrong if it went against my empathetic feelings towards those it caused damage to. If we see someone being beaten up, it is impossible not to imagine what that would feel like for us, were we in their place, and it is because of that negative emotional response that we determine that act upon them to be wrong. That is how I seem to arrive at the conclusion that something is wrong. I assume that most other people make their moral judgements in the same way, but many instances of a subjective process do not make it objective; to think it did would be one of the fallacies you mentioned earlier.

So that, basically, is how I determine a given thing to be wrong. Will you tell me how you would determine something to be wrong?

And this is why we can look at the beating of women in Saudi, or the raping of women in Pakistan, for example, and say, "That's wrong." It will still be wrong, even if the beater or rapist disagrees with us, and even if the woman in question has been sold the idea that she deserves beatings or rape.

I think those things are appalling, and I thoroughly condemn them, so I agree that they are awful, but why do you say they are wrong? What do you mean by that, exactly?

Likewise, our moral evaluations do not cause anything.

Of course they cause something; they influence our behaviour.

Yes. But they do not cause things to happen, and they do not arrange their moral status. It's our actions, subsequent to, and in the presence of, our conscious moral evaluations that cause things to happen; and its the fact that what we aim do already has a moral status before we do it.

That pre-existing moral status is what our moral evaluations aim to describe. If that moral status didn't pre-exist them, we could not describe the moral status of a thing at all. There'd be nothing to describe...just as a thermometer cannot register a particular temperature other than from what is already around it.

I'm sorry, but I can't make anything of this. It just doesn't seem to correspond with what came before it. I'm sure the fault is mine, I'm not as good at this as you are.

Morality is just a set of invented rules, but rules that are based more on emotional sentiment than rational practicality.

Then they are delusions; and worse, they are tyrannical delusions, since they aren't based on our own rational practical advantage, but on somebody else's, some group's, emotional sentiments.

I'm not sure I would agree that they are delusional just because they are not based on the rationality of being personally beneficial. In evolutionary terms, these rules could be seen as socially beneficial, which ultimately does benefit us all at the personal level.

In my view of morality, I suppose society takes on the role of God.

Which society is the"god"?

Whichever society we happen to belong to. All societies that have morality significantly different to our own are false gods. You know, the same principle as actual religion.

Muslim society? Western society? Chinese society? Yoruban society? You have a lot of very different, conflictual "gods" listed there. Why does any of us owe it to follow them?

Human nature, I suppose. And in anticipation of your response to that: It isn't my fault that human nature does not always seem to function in ways that seem rational.

[Immanuel Can]

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is sight, an ad hominem?

It could be. What is the relevance of the speaker's blindness to the truth or falsehood of what he claims?

If the topic were, "Are you blind?" then the man's blindness is relevant, but only to that question and no more.

If the topic is a "sight," that is, something being seen, like the sun coming up, and the man has said, "The sun came up today," then telling him, "You're wrong, because you're blind," would be ad hominem, even if he IS blind. He might well be blind, but the fact that he can't personally see the sun coming up does not determine whether or not the sun came up.

Got it?

[Immanuel Can]

That's a bad analogy. What is a moral issue for you, might not be one for me, but when it rains we both get wet.

If morality is objective, it won't matter whether you agree with me about it or not. If killing is actually wrong, your disbelief in it, or my belief in killing people, will not change the fact.

When an action is wrong, it's wrong. Human estimates can't make it right or wrong. They can only attempt to report correctly what its objective moral status is.

I have said that the concepts of right and wrong only exist in the minds of human beings,

Yes, I know: but if that's so, then the logical result is that there is no such thing as right and wrong, so morally thinking is firstly irrational and absurd (since it has no correspondence to anything in reality) and secondly inexplicable, since there's no obvious reason why creatures that have appeared in an objective reality as mere products of impersonal forces should mysteriously manage to generate "concepts" that have neither basis nor cause in reality.

Moreover, nobody is obligated to pay any attention to any such concepts, and smart people would disregard them entirely, recognizing them for what they are: the entirely arbitrary constructs of other louts and fools who are trying to tyrannize them by imposing rules that have no justification or basis in reality.

Rather like Nietzsche said.

so to me, an act would be wrong if it went against my empathetic feelings towards those it caused damage to.

Wait. You've just given "empathetic feelings" the status of adjudicating "wrongness." What gives "empathetic feelings" that status? Can you justify that claim?

Will you tell me how you would determine something to be wrong?

Do you mean, "how you, personally, would determine" it, or "what would actually make it" right or wrong?

And this is why we can look at the beating of women in Saudi, or the raping of women in Pakistan, for example, and say, "That's wrong." It will still be wrong, even if the beater or rapist disagrees with us, and even if the woman in question has been sold the idea that she deserves beatings or rape.

I think those things are appalling, and I thoroughly condemn them, so I agree that they are awful, but why do you say they are wrong? What do you mean by that, exactly?

I mean one ought not to do them, because they are contrary for the divine purposes for which such women were created. It's an insult to, and assault against, a person created by God, in the image and likeness of his own personhood.

Morality is just a set of invented rules, but rules that are based more on emotional sentiment than rational practicality.

Then they are delusions; and worse, they are tyrannical delusions, since they aren't based on our own rational practical advantage, but on somebody else's, some group's, emotional sentiments.

I'm not sure I would agree that they are delusional just because they are not based on the rationality of being personally beneficial.[/quote]
Then what are they based on? You've yourself characterized them as merely "sentiments" and "emotions" held by others...which is surely merely a contingent fact, and one not capable of imposing any duty on anybody else.

In my view of morality, I suppose society takes on the role of God.

Which society is the"god"?

Whichever society we happen to belong to. All societies that have morality significantly different to our own are false gods. You know, the same principle as actual religion.

No, that's not actually the same. At least when religions compete, they each appeal to the issue of truth. But your view relies instead on cultural imperialism...on the possibly-gratutious claim that one's own society is better, and even definitive of the right kind of society, for no other reason than that one happens to belong to it oneself.

So I ask, what about...

Muslim society? Western society? Chinese society? Yoruban society? You have a lot of very different, conflictual "gods" listed there. Why does any of us owe it to follow them?

Human nature, I suppose.

It's human nature to be a self-centered cultural snob, and insist that one's own society defines the right? Perhaps so: but I detect nothing that looks "moral" about that. It seems rather arbitrary, and very possibly prejudicial, or even ethnocentric or, if you'll forgive me for putting it this bluntly, even racist.

Everybody thinks his own society is right. Possibly so. But what do we mean when we say, "My society is right," since we have before said that there's no objectivity to "right"?

[Atla]

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is sight, an ad hominem?

It could be. What is the relevance of the speaker's blindness to the truth or falsehood of what he claims?

If the topic were, "Are you blind?" then the man's blindness is relevant, but only to that question and no more.

If the topic is a "sight," that is, something being seen, like the sun coming up, and the man has said, "The sun came up today," then telling him, "You're wrong, because you're blind," would be ad hominem, even if he IS blind. He might well be blind, but the fact that he can't personally see the sun coming up does not determine whether or not the sun came up.

Got it?

Did I ask

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is a sight, an ad hominem?

or did I ask

Is calling a blind person blind, when the topic is sight, an ad hominem?

[Veritas Aequitas]

I mean one ought not to do them, because they are contrary for the divine purposes for which such women were created. It's an insult to, and assault against, a person created by God, in the image and likeness of his own personhood.

You are not in a position to make your own personal judgment or interpretation of God's words as in the above case.

The principle is as Abrahamic theist you are contractually [covenantedly] bound to obey all God's commands in the Gospels [only] to the best of your abilities regardless of whether they are moral [as defined] or not.

Whatever is in the Gospel is objective but conditioned upon the theistic-Christian-FSK; this objectivity is of low degrees in contrast to the scientific FSK.

Not everything within the Gospels relate to morality.
However, the Gospels got it right with morality INTUITIVELY [by which ever group of humans who compiled the Gospels] with its pacifist maxim, i.e. love all including enemies, which mean no killing of humans which correspond to the natural moral element the 'ought-not-ness-to-kill-humans'.

Whilst Christianity got it right with morality, it is theistic-morality which is based on the threat of Hell; as such it is no difference from criminal laws that threatened with the death penalty for non-compliance.

Christianity's theistic morality [which is the most optimal moral model at present] is at best pseudo-morality not morality-proper as conditioned upon a human-based moral FSK.

What we need for the future are the secular human-based moral FSK grounded on objective scientific facts.

[Harbal]

If morality is objective, it won't matter whether you agree with me about it or not. If killing is actually wrong, your disbelief in it, or my belief in killing people, will not change the fact.

When an action is wrong, it's wrong. Human estimates can't make it right or wrong. They can only attempt to report correctly what its objective moral status is.

I have said that the concepts of right and wrong only exist in the minds of human beings,

Yes, I know: but if that's so, then the logical result is that there is no such thing as right and wrong, so morally thinking is firstly irrational and absurd (since it has no correspondence to anything in reality) and secondly inexplicable, since there's no obvious reason why creatures that have appeared in an objective reality as mere products of impersonal forces should mysteriously manage to generate "concepts" that have neither basis nor cause in reality.

Moreover, nobody is obligated to pay any attention to any such concepts, and smart people would disregard them entirely, recognizing them for what they are: the entirely arbitrary constructs of other louts and fools who are trying to tyrannize them by imposing rules that have no justification or basis in reality.

You keep bringing up rationality as an argument against subjective morality, and I keep saying that our moral responses are emotional, not logical. You might not agree, but I am certain that you understand what I mean. It isn't logical to say please and thank you, but most of us do it frequently. If someone hurts you, your natural response is to hurt them back, but what is rational about revenge?

Our conscience obligates us to follow our moral feelings, and the social pressure to conform to social standards of behaviour drives us to, at least, appear to behave in a certain moral way.

so to me, an act would be wrong if it went against my empathetic feelings towards those it caused damage to.

Wait. You've just given "empathetic feelings" the status of adjudicating "wrongness." What gives "empathetic feelings" that status? Can you justify that claim?

I did explain that further, but you didn't quote that bit, for some reason. It's more a case of empathy motivating our actions than adjudicating wrongness. I know what it feels like to be punched in the nose, so when I see someone else punched in the nose I can appreciate how it makes them feel. For some (illogical) reason, I am averse to seeing other people in situations I know to be unpleasant. If I saw a £5 note fall from someone's pocket, I would tell them they had dropped it, even though the rational thing would be to pick it up and keep it for myself. I would do that because I know how bad it feels to lose money, and I would want to prevent someone else from feeling it, if I could. I wouldn't be able to justify it rationally, but I would do it just the same; I think most people would, and for equally illogical reasons.

Will you tell me how you would determine something to be wrong?

Do you mean, "how you, personally, would determine" it, or "what would actually make it" right or wrong?

I mean how would/do you, IC, determine the wrongness of something? I have tried to explain how I arrive at an assessment of wrongness, please explain how you do it. You could give me your version of the £5 note scenario, above, if you like. That is more our everyday experience of morality in action than, say, situations where things like murder are involved.

I mean one ought not to do them, because they are contrary for the divine purposes for which such women were created. It's an insult to, and assault against, a person created by God, in the image and likeness of his own personhood.

But they are not contrary to your purpose, you didn't create them in your own image, so what rational reason do you have to care?

Whichever society we happen to belong to. All societies that have morality significantly different to our own are false gods. You know, the same principle as actual religion.

No, that's not actually the same. At least when religions compete, they each appeal to the issue of truth. But your view relies instead on cultural imperialism...on the possibly-gratutious claim that one's own society is better, and even definitive of the right kind of society, for no other reason than that one happens to belong to it oneself.

I don't want to trivialise morality, but our preferences regarding moral values come to us in much the same way as our preferences for the clothes we wear, and the food we eat. We take on the prevailing ones of our own society. That's much how it works with religion, too. And things aren't fixed: I can remember when homosexuality was considered to be a moral issue by the majority of people in my society, but now it seems to be a decreasing minority who view it as such. That has also been mirrored, to some extent, within the Church.

Human nature, I suppose.

It's human nature to be a self-centered cultural snob, and insist that one's own society defines the right? Perhaps so: but I detect nothing that looks "moral" about that. It seems rather arbitrary, and very possibly prejudicial, or even ethnocentric or, if you'll forgive me for putting it this bluntly, even racist.

Everybody thinks his own society is right. Possibly so. But what do we mean when we say, "My society is right," since we have before said that there's no objectivity to "right"?

Well I suppose it's a case of whether we are realistic and see morality as the biological artifact that it is, or whether we want to sublimate ourselves into agents of devine purpose.

[Harbal]

What we need for the future are the secular human-based moral FSK grounded on objective scientific facts.

Bonkers. Completely, utterly, stark raving effing bonkers.

[Iwannaplato]

You are not in a position to make your own personal judgment or interpretation of God's words as in the above case.

The principle is as Abrahamic theist you are contractually [covenantedly] bound to obey all God's commands in the Gospels [only] to the best of your abilities regardless of whether they are moral [as defined] or not.

A non-theist has no ground to tell a theist how they should carry out their religion.
A Christian could, for example, decide that the Bible is divinely inspired, but also imperfect. That human writers interpreted and misinterpreted via personal and cultural filters. And such a Christian then follows, for example, the spirit, as they see it, of Jesus' teachings,

You as a non-Christian, cannot then tell them that's not ok, that a real Christian must X.

You have a habit of acting like you are the authority when it comes to theism and so you can tell theists what they must believe and do.

That's irrational and you don't seem to notice how what you tell them they must do and believe suits your polemical purposes.

[Skepdick]

A non-theist has no ground to tell a theist how they should carry out their religion.

Just as soon as you tell me how to figure out whether I am a theist or a non-theist we can figure out who I can comandeer in carrying out their (non?)theism.

A Christian could, for example, decide that the Bible is divinely inspired, but also imperfect. That human writers interpreted and misinterpreted via personal and cultural filters. And such a Christian then follows, for example, the spirit, as they see it, of Jesus' teachings,

So if it turns out I am a Christian I can tell Christians they full of shit; and that they have misunderstood not merely the letter but the spirit of Jesus' teaching too?

You as a non-Christian, cannot then tell them that's not ok, that a real Christian must X.

As a real non-Christian or as a potential non-Christian? Because I am not sure how to determine my true identity.

Having completed the necessary rituals and obtained the membership paperwork for a number of religions It's difficult to figure out which one I belong to.

You have a habit of acting like you are the authority when it comes to theism and so you can tell theists what they must believe and do.

No shit Sherlock, that's how morality works.

I am very much in the habit of telling Christians and non-Christians alike that harming others is a rather despicable thing to do.

That's irrational and you don't seem to notice how what you tell them they must do and believe suits your polemical purposes.

If living out my moral beliefs is irrational then rationality is immoral.

So if I had to choose between morality and rationality - I guess I'll forgo rationality any day and twice on Sundays.