Is morality objective or subjective?

[Harbal]

I've explained why I think objective moral truth is an impossibility, and I am content with that.

Can somebody please, post a link to the post where Harbal explained it. Because I can't find it.

TIA

It is spread throughout the thread. I wouldn't bother looking if I were you, you won't agree with any of it. Look, if you want to go with objective morality, it's fine with me. Try not to enjoy yourself.

[Immanuel Can]

You have done what you usually do. You have replaced the situation I gave you with something completely different.

So you didn't mean to imply sex with somebody you're not married to? You meant something "completely different"? "Completely"?

What did you mean, then?

If two people, of either opposite or same sex, engage in sexual activity and are not married to each other, or ever intend to be married to each other, or even intend to see each other again, and have no conflicting emotion commitments to anyone else, then they are not doing anything morally wrong. That's what I mean.

That's what you mean. What was your question to me?

[Harbal]

So you didn't mean to imply sex with somebody you're not married to? You meant something "completely different"? "Completely"?

What did you mean, then?

If two people, of either opposite or same sex, engage in sexual activity and are not married to each other, or ever intend to be married to each other, or even intend to see each other again, and have no conflicting emotion commitments to anyone else, then they are not doing anything morally wrong. That's what I mean.

That's what you mean. What was your question to me?

What question?

[Immanuel Can]

If two people, of either opposite or same sex, engage in sexual activity and are not married to each other, or ever intend to be married to each other, or even intend to see each other again, and have no conflicting emotion commitments to anyone else, then they are not doing anything morally wrong. That's what I mean.

That's what you mean. What was your question to me?

What question?

Oh. You were just unilaterally declaring in favour of extramarital sexual congress? Why did you want to bring that up here?

[Harbal]

That's what you mean. What was your question to me?

What question?

Oh. You were just unilaterally declaring in favour of extramarital sexual congress? Why did you want to bring that up here?

That's just the way I am.

[phyllo]

That's problematic.

Killing Jews produced a decided advantage for Hitler. It gave him a scapegoat for all Germany's problems, and a rallying point for the resentment of the people. The gulags were a benefit to Stalin, and the Red Guard was a benefit to Mao. The war in Ukraine is a huge benefit to the uni-party in the US, which is getting rich off it, and to the cementing of dictatorship in both combatant countries...you get the problem, I'm sure.

The participants were the entire German nation. So I would say that persecuting and killing Jews was a negative. They would have done much better by not doing it.

Well, that's what you would say. So would I. But Hitler would not. The Nazis would not. And what about the other cases...for there are many more than I even listed, all showing that one can have "benefit" from something that, especially for others, might well be recognizable as a profound evil.

If you look at one person or some small group of people then you can see a benefit but it disappears when looking at society as a whole.

A thief benefits from stealing if looked at in isolation.

Well, there are more problems with that, of course. For human beings exist on all kinds of scales: individual, a couple, a family, a neighbourhood, a region, a nation, a continent, and globally. And they are grouped in different ways: by sex, by culture, by belief system, by age, by experience, by education, by wealth...

And at each of these levels, there is the potential for significant conflicts of interest. So if something benefits an individual, that's one level; but what if what benefits him doesn't benefit one of the other levels? Or what if one of those more numerically significant groups clashes with the benefit to another? What if, for example, saving a nation is enhance by banning a culture? Or what if benefit to a family comes into a clash with somebody's global plan for benefit? Or what if a thing benefits men, but fails to benefit women, or even entails some loss of benefit to them?

Really? In April 1945, Hitler and other Nazis would not say "That was a mistake" and " We could have handled this better"?

If you can't see a benefit for a society, then why would you adopt a morality?

[phyllo]

I've explained why I think objective moral truth is an impossibility, and I am content with that.

Can somebody please, post a link to the post where Harbal explained it. Because I can't find it.

TIA

It is spread throughout the thread. I wouldn't bother looking if I were you, you won't agree with any of it. Look, if you want to go with objective morality, it's fine with me. Try not to enjoy yourself.

Oh, it can't be summarized in a sentence, paragraph or post? That's too bad.

I don't know if I would agree because I have no idea what the reasoning involves.

[Harbal]

Can somebody please, post a link to the post where Harbal explained it. Because I can't find it.

TIA

It is spread throughout the thread. I wouldn't bother looking if I were you, you won't agree with any of it. Look, if you want to go with objective morality, it's fine with me. Try not to enjoy yourself.

Oh, it can't be summarized in a sentence, paragraph or post? That's too bad.

I don't know if I would agree because I have no idea what the reasoning involves.

I know what morality is, and I'm sure you do, and any difference between us is probably just a matter of terminology, so I don't think it matters much.

[phyllo]

I know what morality is, and I'm sure you do, and any difference between us is probably just a matter of terminology, so I don't think it matters much.

I know that morality involves a group of people.

So I don't see how everyone can have his own personal subjective morality. Which is what your statements seem to suggest. That's the part that I find baffling.

[Harbal]

I know what morality is, and I'm sure you do, and any difference between us is probably just a matter of terminology, so I don't think it matters much.

I know that morality involves a group of people.

So I don't see how everyone can have his own personal subjective morality. Which is what your statements seem to suggest. That's the part that I find baffling.

One person may have moral values and opinions that do not coincide with another person's, or even coincide with the majority of people's. It's not all that complicated.

[phyllo]

I know what morality is, and I'm sure you do, and any difference between us is probably just a matter of terminology, so I don't think it matters much.

I know that morality involves a group of people.

So I don't see how everyone can have his own personal subjective morality. Which is what your statements seem to suggest. That's the part that I find baffling.

One person may have moral values and opinions that do not coincide with another person's, or even coincide with the majority of people's. It's not all that complicated.

Sure.

But what happens in a society when the people have different moral values. It becomes impossible to predict what any person will do or how they will respond to you. There is no standard ways of interacting. Essentially it's chaos.

And it's what might happen if some people stopped at red lights and others thought that it was optional. You would never know if it was safe to proceed on green because somebody might be choosing to run the red light. Instead of moving with confidence, people would be crawling through fearfully. The usefulness of the traffic lights would be gone.

[Immanuel Can]

What question?

Oh. You were just unilaterally declaring in favour of extramarital sexual congress? Why did you want to bring that up here?

That's just the way I am.

Since you weren't asking me for any reason, it seems rather gratuitous...and out of context...

[Immanuel Can]

The participants were the entire German nation. So I would say that persecuting and killing Jews was a negative. They would have done much better by not doing it.

Well, that's what you would say. So would I. But Hitler would not. The Nazis would not. And what about the other cases...for there are many more than I even listed, all showing that one can have "benefit" from something that, especially for others, might well be recognizable as a profound evil.

If you look at one person or some small group of people then you can see a benefit but it disappears when looking at society as a whole.

A thief benefits from stealing if looked at in isolation.

Well, there are more problems with that, of course. For human beings exist on all kinds of scales: individual, a couple, a family, a neighbourhood, a region, a nation, a continent, and globally. And they are grouped in different ways: by sex, by culture, by belief system, by age, by experience, by education, by wealth...

And at each of these levels, there is the potential for significant conflicts of interest. So if something benefits an individual, that's one level; but what if what benefits him doesn't benefit one of the other levels? Or what if one of those more numerically significant groups clashes with the benefit to another? What if, for example, saving a nation is enhance by banning a culture? Or what if benefit to a family comes into a clash with somebody's global plan for benefit? Or what if a thing benefits men, but fails to benefit women, or even entails some loss of benefit to them?

Really? In April 1945, Hitler and other Nazis would not say "That was a mistake" and " We could have handled this better"?

Again, there are a multitude of such cases. We don't need to get stuck on the little man with the toothbrush mustache. How about the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? That's an ethnicity against a whole nation. They have opposite goals. But I dare say you'll insist that the objective of one side is more moral than that of the other, and that the numerically superior side isn't the morally superior one, won't you?

[Harbal]

Oh. You were just unilaterally declaring in favour of extramarital sexual congress? Why did you want to bring that up here?

That's just the way I am.

Since you weren't asking me for any reason, it seems rather gratuitous...and out of context...

Asking you what?

[FlashDangerpants]

As far as I am concerned, "objectively moral", is a contradiction in terms.

Objectivity is the default position. Everything's objective.

My desires. Your desires. The fact that your desires conflict with my desires.
Objective facts everywhere.

There's no contradiction until you make up the notion of "subjectivity".

I have said all along that the terms, "objective" and "subjective", and the various interpretations of them, are what is causing the main problem here. But those terms are in the thread title, so I am just trying to work with them as best I can. And you are not helping.

The terms are quite harmless and fairly straight forward, the problem lies elsewhere. In reality it is the people unironically trying to have their own special version of what objectivity means who are continually muddying those waters.

If a piece of information, or some declaration, or some claim, is objective, you can check it for truth or falsehood by looking at something which is available for other people to also check. If a claim is subjective, you cannot check it against anything, and that subsequently brings into question whther it can have a truth value at all. But it's the external property that makes it the objective thing.

If the claim is that "Paris is further away from London than from San Francisco", we can check navigational charts, Google Earth, and the ticket office at St Pancras International train station, all of which sources will confirm that it is an objectively untrue claim. But if we choose to distrust those sources and do our own research, this is something that we can do. That is true because the distance between two objects is an objective thing, if I look at the distance between those two things, and you look at the distance between those two things, we are both looking at the same thing, give or take some quibbling about which bit of Paris to measure against which bit of San Francisco, and whether to measure round or through the globe etc.

If the claim is "Paris is better than San Francisco, but not as good as London", that is subjective. If I, a londoner who gets confused by all that green stuff beyond the M25, look at what I mean by the betterness of London, and you look at your Yorkshireman view of the 'betterness' of that same place, we are not looking at the same thing, nor could we ever under any circumstance do so. My aesthetic experiences are private and internal, so are yours, we cannot look at the same thing, so we cannot find any meaningful way to measure.

People here keep confusing magnitude for type and it's this slovenliness that gets them into a state of confusion. Phyllo is just the latest in a long line of them with VA at the front of the queue. The fact that everyone agrees that Paris is smelly cannot make it and objective fact, it just makes it a commonly held subjective belief. This is because the difference is of type, specifically the location of the properties under consideration.