Is morality objective or subjective?

[Dontaskme]

So, no real answer. Just the usual pile of codswallop, nonsense and general horse manure.

So when you say ''If you can't forbid racism'' which you are you referring to here ? you, or some other you ?

You cannot be expected to answer to another you, you can only answer to your own you.

Not bothering with a response. Life is too short.

Life is not short, it is very very long, in fact it's infinitely long, it's eternal. But that life seems to be short for you, is just an error in your measuring capabilities, an error of judgement, if you like, that's all.

Don't get arsey just because I'm smarter than you, in that I am able to call out the errors of your feeble capacity to reason and think as a professional bona fide qualified genuine black belt zen master philosopher does.

Until you understand Nonduality IC...you will continue to have zero knowledge of how reality actually works, and your discourse will be full of codswallop, just manure for the horses and courses for horses, different strokes for different folks. Just different people are suited for different jobs or situations and what is fitting in one case may not be fitting in another. And all that jazz.

[Immanuel Can]

I have a comment: It's as barmy as the rest of your threads.

I have to agree with that comment; Harbal's graphic way of putting it is accurate.

Thank you for that. He's got me on ignore, so I don't think he sees my comments unless some good Samaritan quotes them.

I'm surprised I didn't get on his/her ignore. I kind of wish I were. Lucky you.

[Dontaskme]

Thank you for that. He's got me on ignore, so I don't think he sees my comments unless some good Samaritan quotes them.

Oh let him have his God. God obviously makes him feel like a special little shoeshine boy. He obviously values his own story of individual redemption. How could anyone possibly deny him that. Charity begins at home as they say. He's just God's little homeboy.

Always home with his homey. Just like everyone else is.

[Will Bouwman]

What do human beings do that makes them seem to practice a thing they call "morality" beyond expressing an emotional response to events?

Your sort of thinking is too shallow, narrow and perhaps dogmatically stuck to one fixed paradigm.

So tell me, what do human beings do that makes them seem to practice a thing they call "morality" beyond expressing an emotional response to events?

Morality is evidently part of human nature.

How is this evident morality demonstrated?

It is instinctual for any normal human being in not torturing and killing babies for pleasure without any emotional responses at all. It is just instinctual, natural and spontaneous. This is morality-proper.

So morality doesn't involve any intellectual nor emotional input from the actor. As long as they behave, zombie like, according to their instinctively activated inherent moral potential, they are sure to perform in a morally appropriate way. If however, they assume agency by employing reason or emotion to behaviour, they risk doing things that are not instinctive and are possibly immoral. I congratulate you on your morality.

[Will Bouwman]

I only learnt the term this morning, but it seems perfectly defensible. As someone whose opinion I respect, why shouldn't I be a non-cognitivist?

Because it's incoherent.

I was asking someone whose opinion I respect.

Here's the gist of it:

A noncognitivist denies the cognitivist claim that "moral judgments are capable of being objectively true, because they describe some feature of the world.

Lets suppose that moral claims do describe emotional responses. OK.

So the objective feature of the world being described; or expressed by moral claims (and therefore being objectively true) is my emotional state.

So moral claims are objectively true, because they describe subjective emotional states. Thanks for clearing that up.

[Will Bouwman]

...if you want to say that morality is no more than an "emotional response"...

I think it is demonstrably the case. I haven't studied ethics since I was an undergraduate, which I grant was a fairly cursory overview of Plato to Mackie, but off the top of my head took in Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche and no doubt others that don't spring to mind. These include some bright minds who could tidily put a syllogism together, and yet they all started with different propositions. I don't see any reason for this beyond emotional response.

...then the corollary is going to be that it's a trivial phenomenon that is not actually capable of approving or prohibiting anything.

That's why we have laws.

[Dontaskme]

I'm surprised I didn't get on his/her ignore. I kind of wish I were. Lucky you.

I'm surprised you didn't get on God's ignore list. There is no room in here for the two of you, but it seems you cannot ignore you. And that's why you cannot get on.

[Will Bouwman]

For my preference though, I just don't find this notion that moral claims express nothing at all except a certain form of approval or disapproval at all compelling...

Isn't that just an emotional response?

Off the top of my head, one other thing that I don't remember is any actual good arguments that were ever made for this non-cog thing.

That feels like the sort of complaint theists make about atheism. What is there for non-cognitivists to demonstrate?

It was all a marriage of convenience that sidestepped a couple of doodoos that Ayer and Carnap didn't want to tread in, but they really never made a compelling argument in favour of it.

Well if it's just a logical positivist thang, I'm happy to drop it ad hominem, but what were the particular doodoos?

My real take is that we try to make a working logical singular system of morality out of disparate parts that aren't really compatible to form a singular harmonious system out of.

Yeah. Bit like science.

[Immanuel Can]

...if you want to say that morality is no more than an "emotional response"...

I think it is demonstrably the case.

Oh? Can you "demonstrate" it, then? What's the line of reasoning to substantiate that?

It's got to be more than, "Well, moral judgments do come with emotions," because although that's obviously true, so does everything. So it's the "no more than" part that needs showing.

I haven't studied ethics since I was an undergraduate, which I grant was a fairly cursory overview of Plato to Mackie, but off the top of my head took in Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche and no doubt others that don't spring to mind. These include some bright minds who could tidily put a syllogism together, and yet they all started with different propositions. I don't see any reason for this beyond emotional response.

Well, Kant thought he was responding to the dictates of reason. Mill thought he was responding to the basic preference of people for pleasure over pain. Nietzsche thought that all ethics are just a 'fix' anyway. And Aristotle thought ethics were dependent on good character.

Those are thumbnail summaries of the obvious differences. But among those you list, I thik only Hume was fully committed to the idea that morality is nothing but an expression of emotion -- and his view has been roundly criticized by all sides, to the point that practically no ethicist, religious or secular, is a Humean-style emotivist anymore.

Emotion is simply too weak, variable and impotent a basis upon which to generate any ethics. It would basically allow anything and prohibit nothing, so long as somebody "had a feeling" about it.

...then the corollary is going to be that it's a trivial phenomenon that is not actually capable of approving or prohibiting anything.

That's why we have laws.

Laws are supposed to be reflective of ethics and responsive to ethics, though. Laws don't produce ethics. It's supposed to work the opposite way around: laws are supposed to formalize what is already ethically determined...but they always do so tentatively, since laws can go quite wrong.

You can tell that's true, because there have been plenty of unethical laws. The aparteid laws would be one example, or the Judenrein laws of the Third Reich, or the slave laws of the pre-bellum Southern States...some would say that the Supreme Court's elimination of Affirmative Action in colleges is unethical, or the dismissal of Roe v. Wade is unethical...but if ethics were simply consequences of what laws are in place, that could not be the case.

So neither side of these issues supposes that "Well, that's the law" answers the question of "What is ethical here?"

[Dontaskme]

Or do you just let them rage unchecked, because "they don't exist for me"?

Would checking someone else's action, change that action for them?
The action must have already happened, for you to even be able to speak of it as having happened. You cannot make someone else's action unhappen just because you don't like it, or preferred that action to have not happened the way it did.

Always read my replies and responses to you throughly, and maybe you will with a bit of lucky you, learn something you never thought of before, because trust me, you haven't thought of everything, well not yet anyway. As much as you would wish to know everything.

[Immanuel Can]

Always read my replies and responses to you throughly...

Maybe the day you make them worth it, I will. But clearly, that day is not today, as anybody can see. You're still just playing games, just as you said you do.

Not going to bother.

[Dontaskme]

Always read my replies and responses to you throughly...

Maybe the day you make them worth it, I will. But clearly, that day is not today, as anybody can see. You're still just playing games, just as you said you do.

Not going to bother.

And yet you prefer to grab what you believe is worth from rummaging through pages and pages of dead history that doesn't exist anymore, and is not reality in the here and now. You seem to have a love affair with the past, the dead history it seems is all that is of worth to you. While you pay no attention at all to the real worth that is alive right here and now.

You love to read dead and gone past history throughly don't you?

If you can't make your own worth right here and now, and do that for yourself without looking back to the past for it, you'll always be searching for worth in all the wrong places, especially rummaging through the pages of dead history that you have obviously come to rely so heavily on as being the only worth worth having.

You love to dismiss other people's words, and yet get all arsey when they dismiss yours.

You dismiss other peoples words quite effortlessly, always in favor of your own. That's only natural, so don't be surprised if no one else want's what you see as your worth either.

We all know you are invincible IC... you do not have to keep proving that to us. You self prove it over and over again to us, it's the only worth you are able to see. Well just so you are aware, we all get worth from the same place you do, namely, from the here and now, I mean where else is worth going to come from but from right here and now, and NOT from some place in the past that doesn't exist.

If you can recognise worth, then so can we all, or else how do you recognise it..you are not the only cog in the machine IC...as much as you like to think you are worthy of being.

[Immanuel Can]

Not bothering. Have a nice life.

[Dontaskme]

Not bothering.

You don't need to, all you need to do is just follow what is of worth to you, I only provide here what is my worth as well.

You are never obligated to look at my words, only persuaded to look at them, like your God does for you in his bible.

I prefer my own God too, namely me.

How strange of you to wish someone you cannot be bothered with to have a nice life. Seems like disingenuous small talk to me.

You are terrified to be wrong, and you will protect your right to be right to the death, we all know that, and is why whatever you say will not make anyone of us who replies to you go away, as much as you would dearly love that to happen.

[Will Bouwman]

...if you want to say that morality is no more than an "emotional response"...

I think it is demonstrably the case.

Oh? Can you "demonstrate" it, then? What's the line of reasoning to substantiate that?

Yours:

Well, Kant thought he was responding to the dictates of reason. Mill thought he was responding to the basic preference of people for pleasure over pain. Nietzsche thought that all ethics are just a 'fix' anyway. And Aristotle thought ethics were dependent on good character.

They were all capable thinkers, so it isn't the quality of their thought that separates them. Kant was a humdrum Prussian rationalist prior to Hume waking him from his 'dogmatic slumber', so yes, of course he felt he was responding to reason. Doesn't work. Mill, the 'manufactured genius' developed the utilitarianism of his father and Jeremy Bentham, whose body I used to walk passed almost daily. Mill hoped to develop the ethical calculus Bentham and others had initiated and turn ethics into a quantifiable, and therefore scientific endeavour. Doesn't work. Nietzsche thought Christian ethics, in particular, a fix. Given his concepts of slave morality and the Übermensch, it seems to me that Nietzsche took the view that historical inevitability (quite a theme 19th century German philosophy) was somehow morally basic - that the new fangled evolution should usurp personal interests, and that we, as a species, should be subservient to our development. Doesn't work. Aristotle, as was his wont, listed and categorised different characteristics according to his perception of virtue. Works for him.

...among those you list, I thik only Hume was fully committed to the idea that morality is nothing but an expression of emotion -- and his view has been roundly criticized by all sides, to the point that practically no ethicist, religious or secular, is a Humean-style emotivist anymore.

On what grounds has Hume been criticised? Who has shown him to be wrong?
Certainly there may be cultural and historical factors involved in judgement, but the primary distinction in ethics is between deontology and consequentialism, or was when I had my toes in the water. What do yo think makes one person believe in rules, and another in outcomes?