What could make morality objective?

[Veritas Aequitas]

Oh. My mistake. I thought there was an argument for moral objectivity, which must rely on a non-circular description of moral rightness and wrongness. 'X is morally right/wrong because...'

For example, 'Murder is morally wrong because...' Now, that's supposed to be a moral fact, so there's a factual reason why murder is morally wrong.

But, let's not hold our breath - because moral moral objectivists can't explain why murder is morally wrong.

Moral objectivism and realism is a fucking joke.

I keep telling you, your above views are grounded on an illusion.
PH's What is Fact is Illusory
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39577

Here is the factual 'what is fact';
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact

"This sentence contains words." accurately describes a linguistic fact [because the linguistic FSK said so], and
"The sun is a star" accurately describes an astronomical fact. [because the astronomical FSK said so] Further,
"Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States" and "Abraham Lincoln was assassinated" both accurately describe historical facts. [because the US legal FSK said so]
Generally speaking, facts are independent of belief and of knowledge and opinion.

Scientific facts [as the scientific FSK said so] are verified by repeatable careful observation or measurement by experiments or other means. ibid

Do you deny the above from WIKI with my added qualification of an FSK?

From the above, re Christian morality, "Killing of another human is immoral' is moral fact because the Christian moral FSK said so.
You cannot deny this based on 'what is fact' re the WIKI article above.

Because the above facts are conditioned upon a collective-of-subjects within a FSR-FSK, they are independent of individuals' belief and of knowledge and opinion, thus they are objective [as defined].

Therefore, you cannot deny in placing "Killing of another human is immoral' is moral fact from the Christian Moral FSK and is objective on the starting block of being factual and objective.

However, it is evident there are difference in the degrees of objectivity between the scientific FSK [the most objective] and the linguistic, astronomical and historical.

As I had explained, whilst "Killing of another human is immoral' the qualifies [for the starting block] as a moral fact and is objective, it failed to get off the starting block because the whole of the Christian FSK is grounded on an illusory God. Therefore its degree of objectivity is negligible, say 0.0000001/100.

Analogy:
It is like an athlete qualified for an Olympics 100 meters final but he failed to get off the starting block, thus disqualified - no rating. However, there is no denial the athlete is an Olympian athlete.

The Christian Moral FSK degree of objectivity is negligible due to its grounding on an illusion.
Moral FSKs that do ground their claims on verifiable and justifiable empirical evidences and has near equivalent objectivity to the scientific FSK, the moral facts will have higher degree of objectivity.
For example [among many] Hume's moral FSK grounded on sympathy [empathy] do have some reasonable degrees of objectivity because empathy* can be traced [in some degrees] to mirror neurons which are represented by its physical neural correlates.
* empathy is not an absolute correlation to morality but in some ways it does.

Since I have justified against your OP, there are moral facts and morality is objective.
Do you have any counter for the above?

[Skepdick]

So, which is it with you? How close to 100% certain are you that the Christian God does in fact exist? Or do you admit that one of the other denominations may actually be the real deal instead?

What a profoundly stupid question!

How close to 100% certain are you that Truth exists? Or do you admit that one of the other philosophical denomination is The Real Deal instead?
Which philosophy do you think closest to the mark and should amass a monopoly on Truth?

You are simply being impressed by alternative vocabularies/philosophies which speak about one and the same Truth.

Ironism

1. She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered;
2. She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts;
3. Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.
— Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73

I am 100% certain. Truth is there, everywhere, all around you. Waiting for you to exit Plato's cave.

What I am forever uncertain of is the human element necessary for the understanding of Truth.

[Peter Holmes]

Factual assertions - typically linguistic expressions - are true or false, given the way we use the signs in context.

Outside language, features of reality have no truth-value. They just are or were the case.

The truth is not out there any more than falsehood is.

Giving an abstract noun, such as truth, an initial capital - 'Truth' - makes no difference.

[Skepdick]

Factual assertions - typically linguistic expressions - are true or false, given the way we use the signs in context.

Is the above assertion true; or are you lying?

If it's true then what makes it true?

Outside language, features of reality have no truth-value.

Is the above assertion true; or are you lying?

If it's true then what makes it true?

The truth is not out there any more than falsehood is.

Is the above assertion true; or are you lying?

If it's true then what makes it true?

Giving an abstract noun, such as truth, an initial capital - 'Truth' - makes no difference.

Is the above assertion true; or are you lying?

If it's true then what makes it true?

[Immanuel Can]

Oh...well, where do you think Christians should go for philosophy? Or would you say that a person is only valuable as a philosopher if he or she is NOT a Christian? Or would you say that it's fine for him/her to be a Christian, so long as he/she doesn't really believe it, and doesn't use it to orient his/her philosophy?

I'm kind of intrigued to find out how you make sense of your position on that.

I think your primary interest here is the promotion of Christianity, and philosophy is just something you use to try to disguise that fact.

Interesting. So if somebody is frank and open about what he actually believes, and actually applies it to his sense of the universe, he's "disguising" something? And if he's a Christian, then he has to shelve that when he does philosophy, you think?

There is no rational argument to reconcile a belief in God with reality as we experience it,

Oh, that's clearly not the case. There is an abundance of such.

But this much is true: they are equivocal, in the sense that one can, if one is determined to do so, interpret them one way or the other. For example, many Christians, both laymen and scientists, see our existence as clear evidence of God; but others can invent progressivist views of how we came to be, and thus avoid that conclusion. Or there are slam-dunk rationales for the existence of God in things like mathematics itself, but one can avoid those merely by refusing to know about them.

So in the end, it's the disposition of the heart of the hearer that determines what he will hear as evidence. For somebody who's whole bent is to avoid the conclusion that God exists, there are plenty of ways to get that job done.

yet we all know he is there, do we?

Indeed so. For while there is no conscience, no inner witness all men have of Atheism, there is certainly one of God; and one of these things is morality itself. Why else do you think people are so keen to make morality out to be subjective? It's all about getting away from the God explanation.

Some people just prefer to spend their lives in futile shutting down of that awareness.

And what study or piece of research justifies that assertion?

This thread, for a start.

Well, that would be a sad and unethical way to look at life...to feel that one owed nobody anything, and had only one's own feelings as guide.

So you do actually think we owe each other something?

Absolutely. It could not be any other way, with moral objectivism. But the subjectivist, what does he owe anybody?

Morality isn't really even needed for such a situation. If my impulses line up with a good deed, where does morality come into play in my cognitions? But it's when my impulses incline me one way, but duty / principle / rightness incline me to something opposite that we find out if I have any moral fibre or not.

Since you have taken it upon yourself to redefine the word, morality, and introduced your own set of rules governing how it must be practiced, I am left in no position to disagree, am I?

You're misunderstanding. I'm not "redefining" anything. I'm analytically unpacking what morality always means. Even secular persons do not bother to apply moral language to situations in which no right / principle / duty is involved. For example, nobody gets praise for receiving his lottery winnings -- rather, we would be astonished if he did not accept them. And that's because his "achievement" of having cashed in his win is not, in our eyes, any kind of moral "achievement" at all.

But if he gave a substantial portion of his winnings to a charity, we might use moral words like "generous," "charitable," "kind," "unselfish," and so on to describe him. Because we don't expect such a person to do that, and we recognize that his gift impinges on his own well-being and runs contrary to the expected.

So with or without my view, it remains a universal truism that morality has to do with what happens when our own interests and those of others conflict in some fashion. Moral people are those who "give up" something, as we would say, to "do the right thing." And we don't have to be religious to see that obvious point, I think.

There is a very good reason why we don't admire or criticize a lion for tearing apart a gazelle; it's just an animal acting on his impulses. He's doing what comes naturally. What talk of morality can be relevant? But if we see a person suffer great inconvenience, frustration, loss of resources, fear or threat to life, and so forth for doing "the right thing," (whatever we may conceive it to be) do we not suddenly find ourselves employing moral terms to describe it? And what other terms would be applicable, but those?

We do employ moral terms in such situations, which would be very difficult to explain had we not a sense of morality.

And we do. It's this thing I was talking about, "conscience." It's the same faculty that alerts us all to the existence of God...or at least it's one such faculty.

Why should a moral subjectivist be moral at all? Maybe that's the essential question here. He "feels" twinges of conscience, maybe; but in his worldview, he has to believe they are delusions, a sort of weird feeling of owing to others things that he actually does not owe. So why should a moral subjectivist follow these weird twinges, especially when they so often contradict other feelings he has...like maybe the desire to keep all of his lottery winnings?

[Immanuel Can]

...when I ask you to note the segments in the videos that demonstrate this, you basically come back with, "it's there."

Ah, I see...you're dissembling again.

If anyone looks back, he can see I quoted your very own words, showing that you claimed there was no scientific evidence of the existence of God. i refuted that, providing such evidence. And then you wanted to argue that none of the evidence should count as evidence.

But you don't want to be defeated on that. So now you want to deceive me, hoping I've forgotten the thread of our discussion, and cloud the issue as best you can? Well, that's a project in which I have no interest. If you don't like evidence, then carry on as you are; I can't "make" you believe anything you refuse to believe.

Happy trails.

[Skepdick]

Every claim of existence. By anybody. Anywhere comes with an implicit "IF" in the beginning.

IF spacetime exists <then the following consequences will be observed>
IF the big bang exists <then the following consequences will be observed>
IF God exist <then the following consequences will be observed>
IF global warming exists <then the following consequences will be observed>
IF evolution exists <then the following consequences will be observed>
IF gravity exists <then the following consequences will be observed>

IF
IF
IF

It's a computational statement.

Code: Select all

In [1]: if True: print("Philosophers are fucking idiots")
Philosophers are fucking idiots

[Harbal]

I think your primary interest here is the promotion of Christianity, and philosophy is just something you use to try to disguise that fact.

Interesting. So if somebody is frank and open about what he actually believes, and actually applies it to his sense of the universe, he's "disguising" something? And if he's a Christian, then he has to shelve that when he does philosophy, you think?

In the course of most philosophy arguments, your interlocutor doesn't tell you you are going to Hell if you don't see things the same as they do. Putting aside the absurdity of it, it is completely irrelevant.

There is no rational argument to reconcile a belief in God with reality as we experience it,

Oh, that's clearly not the case. There is an abundance of such.

It is clearly the case in my case.

So you do actually think we owe each other something?

Absolutely. It could not be any other way, with moral objectivism. But the subjectivist, what does he owe anybody?

How could you possibly know what reason any individual might have for thinking he owes moral consideration to others? All you are entitled to say is that without your belief in the objective source of morality, you would find no reason to treat other people morally.

]Since you have taken it upon yourself to redefine the word, morality, and introduced your own set of rules governing how it must be practiced, I am left in no position to disagree, am I?

You're misunderstanding. I'm not "redefining" anything. I'm analytically unpacking what morality always means.

Morality is about how we behave towards each other. If you want to divide morality into different categories, one of which necessarily includes God, that's fine, but God is not part of the standard definition of morality.

It's this thing I was talking about, "conscience." It's the same faculty that alerts us all to the existence of God...or at least it's one such faculty.

I have a conscience, but it doesn't even remotely suggest God to me.

Why should a moral subjectivist be moral at all? Maybe that's the essential question here.

No, the essential question is, why shouldn't he be? It is not for you to tell him what is or isn't a legitimate reason for behaving morally.

He "feels" twinges of conscience, maybe; but in his worldview, he has to believe they are delusions, a sort of weird feeling of owing to others things that he actually does not owe.

How can you say what he "has" to believe? What's to stop him believing whatever he likes?

So why should a moral subjectivist follow these weird twinges

You know how you sometimes get an unbearable itch in your foot, and even though you know there isn't anything actually wrong with your foot, you feel compelled to scratch it? Well it is quite similar to that. I mean, an itch is just a subjective sensation, isn't it? A delusion, to put in in your terms.

[Skepdick]

In the course of most philosophy arguments, your interlocutor doesn't tell you you are going to Hell if you don't see things the same as they do. Putting aside the absurdity of it, it is completely irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant in a Kantian sense at all. Kinda like a categorical imperatives.

Think of Hell as the place you arrive at by induction if everybody adopts your values/goals/beliefs; and you mode of being in the world becomes a broadly accepted social norm. Now, and in future generations.

Or you might call it the slippery slope fallacy, but if yo don't hve brakes for your dumb ideas - it's not a fallacy.

How can you say what he "has" to believe? What's to stop him believing whatever he likes?

If his moral conscience doesn't hit the brakes, society will. Eventually.

You can do that, of course - be wrong until you learn to be right; or until other people get tired of your shit.

[Skepdick]

Morality is about how we behave towards each other. If you want to divide morality into different categories, one of which necessarily includes God, that's fine, but God is not part of the standard definition of morality.

The symbols are so confisung, I imagine...

in logic we have True and False.

Definitions aside you can replace True with "morally desirable language" and False with "morally undesirable language".

And you can then work your way to construct the ideals for each one.

ONLY truth - God.
ONLY falsehood - Satan.

It's not that much work...

[Harbal]

In the course of most philosophy arguments, your interlocutor doesn't tell you you are going to Hell if you don't see things the same as they do. Putting aside the absurdity of it, it is completely irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant in a Kantian sense at all. Kinda like a categorical imperatives.

It is irrelevant to the argument of God's existence.

[Skepdick]

In the course of most philosophy arguments, your interlocutor doesn't tell you you are going to Hell if you don't see things the same as they do. Putting aside the absurdity of it, it is completely irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant in a Kantian sense at all. Kinda like a categorical imperatives.

It is irrelevant to the argument of God's existence.

Just do more induction. Till you get it.

[Harbal]

Morality is about how we behave towards each other. If you want to divide morality into different categories, one of which necessarily includes God, that's fine, but God is not part of the standard definition of morality.

The symbols are so confisung, I imagine...

in logic we have True and False.

Definitions aside you can replace True with "morally desirable language" and False with "morally undesirable language".

And you can then work your way to construct the ideals for each one.

ONLY truth - God.
ONLY falsehood - Satan.

It's not that much work...

My one and only simple point was that the standard definition of the word, "morality", does not include God:


morality

a personal or social set of standards for good or bad behavior and character, or the quality of being right and honest:

[Skepdick]

My one and only simple point was that the standard definition of the word, "morality", does not include God:


morality

a personal or social set of standards for good or bad behavior and character, or the quality of being right and honest:

And the ideals/personification for right/good/honest are what Christians call "God".
And the ideals/personification for wrong/bad/dishonest are what Christians call "Satan"

And they are ideals because if they aren't humans will get them mixed up.

But the Christians were mistaken in the uncorruptibility of ideals. So now they gotta decide whether to try untarnish the ideal or switch belief-systems.

I am thinking the latter is too much effort?

It's a bit like philosophers figuring out if the ideal of Truth's still worth protecting if bullshit artists ever hijack the term.
Or society figuring out if the term Morality is worth defending if it somehow gets hijacked for immoral purposes.

[Harbal]

It's not irrelevant in a Kantian sense at all. Kinda like a categorical imperatives.

It is irrelevant to the argument of God's existence.

Just do more induction. Till you get it.

Please shut up.