Is morality objective or subjective?

[Immanuel Can]

Immanuel wrote: “Well, if they [moral beliefs, our morality, a culture’s moral system] are subjective and totally individual, then they have no force at all. Only one person even thinks they are "right" -- but because they are also totally "subjective," he is not correct with reference to any external or shared standard. In other words, such a person is a solipsist, and has no actual understanding of what the word "ethic" implies -- for any ethic is inevitably a guideline for relationships among people: it has no meaning at all, if used as an entirely individual term.

Moral beliefs are never exclusively personal, hence moral systems are not solipsistic systems, but shared systems.

No, many are not shared. And even when some of them cross over with other people's views, that fact has to be regarded by subjectivists as merely accidental. No universal, objective moral principle or principles govern which should overlap, and which should not.

Moreover, overlap is not a moral quality. There's nothing about saying, "Well, more than one person believes this" that turns that into a moral imperative or precept. Hamas seems to agree that tearing up civilians is a morally-virtuous act, even one of high relgious expression. Quite a number of them agree on that. It doesn't make it so.

Whether the various moral precepts overlap or not, they are all (according to subjectivism), not objectively right anyway. That's the problem with subjectivism. Every moral precept is simply contingent.

Solipsism becomes the only arbitrator. Whatever the individual likes is what the individual does. What the group does is morally irrelevant. It's merely practically inconvenient to the solipsist if they don't overlap.

[Lacewing]

Are you suggesting that 'the larger point' and 'the most important thing' is something based on your shallow perspective from your imagination, which you decided to drag me into for your lame, inaccurate analysis? Or did you actually have another idea for a point?

It’s hard, I know, to gain the self-consciousness to make ourselves the object of our analysis and not someone else; and it is challenging to make the effort to move from a micro-analysis to a macro-analysis, yet these endeavors broaden the conversation.

While I respect your offended opposition, Lacewing, the show must go on!

I am not offended. I think you're projecting your own short-comings and making up delusional stories and then congratulating yourself.

[Lacewing]

Lacewing because she too, in her strange way, holds to a contrarian absolutism.

What is the contrarian absolutism I hold to?

What does the term "contrarian absolutism" mean to you? Let's start there.

Let's start with you fucking off.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Solipsism becomes the only arbitrator. Whatever the individual likes is what the individual does. What the group does is morally irrelevant. It's merely practically inconvenient to the solipsist if they don't overlap.

No, in the varying cultural systems that we might study (Vedic, Chinese, etc) in order to get a sense of differences in morality, these are not determined solipsistically by "an individual". This is where the failure in your argument is located. They are determined by wide ranges of factors and these can be listed and understood. And they function generally and universally within those cultures.

Where I agree that *solipsism* can be discerned is in our modern cultures and as a result of our modern situation. There, an individual seems to have taken or been granted a power to decide *what is right* and *what is wrong* for that individual. For that individual it could all depend on what he *likes* or doesn't like. But even that individual still operates within a general system and is never completely rebellious to it.

These statements still stand therefore.

Alex Jacobi wrote: Your flaw of reasoning is here expressed. Moral beliefs are never exclusively personal, hence moral systems are not solipsistic systems, but shared systems.

To imply a contrived reasoning and to apply a priori the judgment of solipsism reveals your hand. You will say that even a widely culturally defined morality is solipsistic since, obviously, your view is that God gives unquestionable moral commands.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Let's get to a specific, to see why this is so. Democrats in the 19th Century southern United States owned slaves, preferred to own slaves, believed it was good to own slaves, and that their way of life was elegant, beautiful and worth preserving permanently. They had power to keep it in place. Republicans like Lincoln thought slavery was not beautiful, and that the south should free their slaves. They believed that would be beautiful. They had power to fight for that, but no certainty they would win if they did. The two sides felt so strongly about the issue that they went to war.

My question to you is this: which side was right, and how do you know? Both had strong hierarchies of value, they had power, they believed in beauty, and they were both absolutely convinced they were morally right to hold their positions.

Here you establish a type of *game*.

No one today could defend slavery, it is simply too hot of a topic. However, if the culture of slavery -- the exploitation of a primitive class by a culturally advanced class of people in a radically different and far more advanced cultural state -- is examined fairly, or in any case more fully, the system and its function and effect can be understood differently. It was certainly not wholly bad or evil. Most of those who were or are apologists for Southern culture offer arguments and pictures that describe a cultural relationship that had elements that *worked*. And not exlusively and obviously in a purely negative sense against those of African descent. It can therefore be compared to, say, American Anglo exploitation of rural Meso-Americans. Not slavery, obviously, but with some comparable elements.

You make various statements in your opening that require more nuance. For example, not all Southerners at any point were absolutely in pro of slavery. And there was a very strong endemic movement against the institution. Left to itself it could well have been resolved in an organic manner through a likely slower process of emancipation. To say "absolutely convinced they were morally right to hold their positions" is also false or misses the mark. Read Jefferson on his relationship to his own slaves.

Lincoln though very opposed to the notion of human slavery was an absolute racist. Not partial but absolute. So any mention of the man, and what he did, or what he believed, must include this detail.

What he likely *felt* was less that the institution of slavery should be ended -- and is the secessionists would have stopped seceding he said he would accept the institution -- was that a rival power in the South, and at the headwaters of the Mississippi, could not be tolerated by a powerful, industrializing North. The historical antipathy between the Southern section and the Northern section also requires nuance and care. It is generally speaking nowhere to be found.

The two sides felt so strongly about the issue that they went to war

.

The real causes of the war were in a range of things, and not just one. So your argument's premise is skewed. And moral conflicts are always more involved than a surface analysis reveals.

My question to you is this: which side was right, and how do you know?

You *know* for a range of different reasons, but not in any sense because the matter is cleared up through resorting to the Bible, and certainly not the OT. There is a whole range of reasons why slavery -- and other exploitive systems -- have now become popularly indefensible.

It could well happen again that some similar system could be instituted. Indeed slavery has in no sense been abolished at the world-level.

Now, if people widely and universally are exposed to the education through which slavery is presented as an "absolute evil", and if this becomes universal (to the world I mean) the result will be much the same as what it is for us now. There will be no way to see it in any *positive light* or as having any advantage at all.

[Immanuel Can]

Solipsism becomes the only arbitrator. Whatever the individual likes is what the individual does. What the group does is morally irrelevant. It's merely practically inconvenient to the solipsist if they don't overlap.

No, in the varying cultural systems that we might study (Vedic, Chinese, etc) in order to get a sense of differences in morality, these are not determined solipsistically by "an individual".

They're still arbitrary, though. Whatever a particular society decides is merely contingent...like every other fact in the Materialist world.

Where I agree that *solipsism* can be discerned is in our modern cultures and as a result of our modern situation. There, an individual seems to have taken or been granted a power to decide *what is right* and *what is wrong* for that individual. For that individual it could all depend on what he *likes* or doesn't like. But even that individual still operates within a general system and is never completely rebellious to it.

Well, to complain about solipsism, we'd have to know that solipsism was, in some objective sense, "wrong." And can a subjectivist say that?

I don't see how. He has to suppose that every personal value, and every social value is equally arbitrary, and none more actually deserving of being honoured than any other.

There's nothing about an agreement on something dumb or immoral that makes it smart or moral. That's called "bandwagon fallacy." So we don't have any way of saying, from a subjectivist view, that a person is either better or worse, morally, for obeying or ignoring what the rest of his/her society decides.

[Immanuel Can]

Let's get to a specific, to see why this is so. Democrats in the 19th Century southern United States owned slaves, preferred to own slaves, believed it was good to own slaves, and that their way of life was elegant, beautiful and worth preserving permanently. They had power to keep it in place. Republicans like Lincoln thought slavery was not beautiful, and that the south should free their slaves. They believed that would be beautiful. They had power to fight for that, but no certainty they would win if they did. The two sides felt so strongly about the issue that they went to war.

My question to you is this: which side was right, and how do you know? Both had strong hierarchies of value, they had power, they believed in beauty, and they were both absolutely convinced they were morally right to hold their positions.

Here you establish a type of *game*.

No "game." Just a historical question. We know it's true.

No one today could defend slavery, it is simply too hot of a topic.

That's verifiably false; lots of cultures still do. But even if it were true, that would add no light to the situation. Whether a topic is morally "hot" or not tells us nothing about which side is right.

[Slavery] was certainly not wholly bad or evil.

Defining "bad or evil" in what way?

Most of those who were or are apologists for Southern culture offer arguments and pictures that describe a cultural relationship that had elements that *worked*.

"Worked" for what?

If you don't specify the goal, and if the goal isn't known to be moral already, then whether it "worked" isn't informative of anything. What did it "work" for?

You make various statements in your opening that require more nuance. For example, not all Southerners at any point were absolutely in pro of slavery.

You'd be hard-pressed to find one that wasn't, but surely there were a few. Again, so what? It doesn't tell us anything...except that perhaps it's the opposite of the argument that social agreements define what's right; because if they did, then slavery would have been right in the South, or in Arab countries, or in Communist ones.

But we think it's evil everwhere. Or...maybe I speak too soon...maybe you don't.

Lincoln though very opposed to the notion of human slavery was an absolute racist.

Practically everybody was. Practically everybody still is. Does that make it right? Or is it objectively wrong?

Not partial but absolute. So any mention of the man, and what he did, or what he believed, must include this detail.

The historical antipathy between the Southern section and the Northern section also requires nuance and care. It is generally speaking nowhere to be found.

Wow. You couldn't make a more wrong -- or obviously wrong -- statement.

Are you attempting to gaslight? It's not working.

The two sides felt so strongly about the issue that they went to war

.

The real causes of the war were in a range of things, and not just one.

True, trivially: but the key one was the question of whether states would be admitted to the Union on a slave-holding or non-slave-holding basis. That issue was by far the biggest. You've also completely ignored the rising moral objection to slavery through the Abolition movement in the North, particularly. And there's a ton of documentation for that.

My question to you is this: which side was right, and how do you know?

You *know* for a range of different reasons,

I didn't ask you how I know. I asked you how YOU know. I don't think you do, unless you want to appeal to moral objectivism.

[Alexis Jacobi]

They're still arbitrary, though. Whatever a particular society decides is merely contingent...like every other fact in the Materialist world.

According to a perspective that you hold to, any moral system that is not derived through biblical revelation — God’s word — is “arbitrary” and “contingent”.

But your perspective was determined through contingent processes. It is only held as ‘truth’ by believers. And it is a pillar in the general belief system.

I am inclined to the view that just as we are in a world, and worlding along, that all people in that state — human persons — likely have and will always have, to one degree or another, general shared experience, and somewhat general moral convictions. As in Henry’s sense.

I would even venture that similar values could well operate in other worlds.

But would they then be arbitrary in your sense? I do not accept that term. Nor should you.

[Alexis Jacobi]

“The historical antipathy between the Southern section and the Northern section also requires nuance and care. It is generally speaking nowhere to be found.”

The historical antipathy between the two sections had a long and prior history — decades. To understand that antipathy requires a careful and nuanced approach.

That perspective, that frame of mind, is scarce and generally speaking “nowhere to be found”. More especially among the Northerners who have been “indoctrinated” in the now-established civil religious view of the “righteous North”.

Sorry, I was receiving a complex transmission from a higher dimension when I wrote the first paragraph.

[Immanuel Can]

They're still arbitrary, though. Whatever a particular society decides is merely contingent...like every other fact in the Materialist world.

According to a perspective that you hold to, any moral system that is not derived through biblical revelation — God’s word — is “arbitrary” and “contingent”.

No, that's what subjectivism automatically entails...I think it's misguided. But it sure does explain why subjectivists cannot suggest a single moral precept they can make stick. They've got no basis.

[Immanuel Can]

That perspective, that frame of mind, is scarce and generally speaking “nowhere to be found”. More especially among the Northerners who have been “indoctrinated” in the now-established civil religious view of the “righteous North”.

What "perspective"? That slavery is wrong?

Do try to speak plainly. I'm finding your obvious obfuscation unimpressive, and it's entirely unhelpful to the cause of truth.

[iambiguous]

Again, this from me...

Click.

No, I am not in the least bit drawn and quartered [let alone hopelessly confused] regarding the preponderance of experiences in my life.

The either/or world is as applicable to me as to anyone else here.

On the other hand, for those of your ilk, value judgments themselves are no less a part of the either/or world.

Race, gender, sexual orientation, Jews and morality are all inherent manifestations of "biological imperatives".

Well, up in the philosophical and the ideological clouds, anyway.

Then straight back up into psycho-babble clouds...

Because that is your state, and also the position that you believe is authentically existentially and philosophically the right one (the only proper one) there is no real sense in engaging with you.

Whatever that means? How about we zero in on a particular context involving morality and discuss it...existentially?

But start with one definition. Can you name one action that you feel is noble? If only within conventional usage of the term.

Come on, AJ, even you must grasp that "conventional usage" evolves over time historically, culturally and experientially in regard to our value judgments.

Isn't that why objectivists of your kind will, one way or another, come to embody the "psychology of objectivism": https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop ... 5&t=185296

The only thing that really changes -- God or No God -- is the particular "arrogant, autocratic and authoritarian" dogma that is clung to in order to anchor one's precious Self to the most comforting and consoling rendition of "one of us" vs. "one of them".

...and you "snip" out one fragment of it:

Race, gender, sexual orientation, Jews and morality are all inherent manifestations of "biological imperatives".

What is important to you about these things? They seem relevant because you bring them up time and again. Can you explain why?

Is there some specific question you have for me as one you define of an “ilk” different from your own? What?

Well, we can ask folks of color and women and homosexuals and Jews and liberals why the thinking of those like Satyr -- and yourself? -- is important to them.

My own main focus of course is moral and political and religious objectivism itself. The points I note above.

In particular, when the objectivists among us are in a position of power. When they can enforce their own dogmas. All the way up to the Holocaust? With Satyr, however, it just comes down to him "disappearing" those at KT who won't join his clique/claque.

That's why in regard to both of you, I am interested not in what you believe about "one of them" but what actual political policies you would pursue if you were in a position of power in any particular community.

The part you avoid [with me] like the plague because it's simply not abstract enough for you.

...yields this from him:

And I'll bet he thought that was really, really, really clever!

Clever? Not so much really. But illustrative. In that myth, which deeply informs Christianity (more perhaps Catholicism) Isis gathered all the fractured pieces of Osiris who had been torn asunder by Seth (who corresponds to the Christian Satan). She puts him back together again and what results from that is a child, Horus.

I take these symbols as being highly relevant, but more so when understood as psychological processes.

All you talk about, you nut! is how fractured and divided you are! How you cannot put yourself together because you are psychically divided. So you present to me a problem, and a serious one, and it requires not an intellectual but a psycho-spiritual resolution.

Sure — totally irrational! The last thing you’d ever bother to think about! I admit it.

But the symbols actually have a strange potency. They contain many levels of meaning.

The terrifying, solitary, psychopathological god Yahweh is a symbol of something that possessed us. We’ve been talking about this for months!

Restoration is what ultimately interests me. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass if you understand any of this or not.

Obviously, Yahweh requires the re-integration of the feminine element. These are things that have become salient for me as I deal with the topic that has dominated all of our concern for so long.

Of course, he doesn't give a "rat's ass" if his post has virtually nothing to do with mine.

Fortunately for him, however, those like IC here are ever and always eager to go up into the philosophical clouds and discuss God and religion with him apropos of nothing. Well, unless you count their definitions and their deductions.

[Will Bouwman]

I suppose that's fair...

You seem remarkably comfortable with a God who is more offended by people who don't believe in Him, than people who abuse children. I would find that very difficult to reconcile. How do you manage?

[Alexis Jacobi]

No, that's what subjectivism automatically entails...I think it's misguided. But it sure does explain why subjectivists cannot suggest a single moral precept they can make stick. They've got no basis.

There’s a time for everything under heaven. A time to annihilate with nuclear fires; a time to protest annihilation.

A time to free slaves and servants; and a time to renew their chains.

There is no ‘moral precept’ that can be made to stick universally.

Sometimes, acts that we would consider bad & evil result in great goods.

I think of sutras in political texts by the Rishis of old. That a kingdom might conquer territory and cause harm to the residents. But there are many benefits to those within the kingdom. Evils are, at times, necessary.

The Incas conquered territory of other tribes, then removed all the inhabitants, sending them to other areas in the imperium, so to sever the original inhabitants connection to their former land. An act we consider bad & evil but one with potential goodness, too.

Annihilation of entire populations appalls us, yet it has occurred constantly. Consider the destruction of Carthage. Bad times for the victims, good times for Rome.

There is no “moral center” in Mr Yahweh. Absolutely none. “He” does what he must.

There is a beginning of the hope for absolute moral values in the Christian philosophy. But it is unattainable really. An individual could come closer but it would involve tremendous renunciation. Hardly attainable even for a saint.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Do try to speak plainly. I'm finding your obvious obfuscation unimpressive, and it's entirely unhelpful to the cause of truth.

Be patient with yourself, Immanuel. You are on the verge of new and unfamiliar understanding. Go slowly. Keep on asking good questions.