Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Nov 01, 2023 2:54 pm
Would it be fair to say that you recognise that moral subjectivity exists, but you assert that it is absolutely useless?
Well, let's run the list:
useless, self-contradicting, morally uninformative, incoherent...and
delusory, since what it represents is not genuinely anything that can reasonably be called "morality." And each one of those can be substantiated with an argument that, as I have already put forth, subjectivism can't deal with.
So I'd say that's a pretty good list...
But to your second question, as for the case for objective morality, I'm fine presenting one. But before I do, we need to do two things: one is to recognize the unavoidable about subjective morality -- so that people who remain doubtful of objectivism don't mentally slide back into that untenable position. So we need to burn that bad house to the ground, first. Secondly, we need to address the possibility that moral nihilism is reasonable; because people who have been deprived of the subjectivist delusion, but who refuse to consider objectivism, are bound to slide into moral nihilism if they can't return to the polyannish belief in moral subjectivism.
I think the problem that really needs to be addressed today is not that too many people are committed objectivists. And it's not even that too many people are thoroughgoing moral nihilists; it's that almost everybody has slid into a brainless moral subjectivism, which is a straw house that's already conceptually "on fire," and will not answer the moral needs the world has.
I'm not the only one to think the problem runs this way, either. Philosopher Allan Bloom famously wrote in his introduction to
The Closing of the American Mind this remarkable observation:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every
student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is
relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students'
reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the
proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling
into question 2 + 2 = 4 . These are things you don't think about. The
students' backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are
religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some
intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen;
some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and
in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral inten-
tion. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral
postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all
been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replace-
ment for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional
American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students
is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—a combi-
nation of disbelief and indignation: "Are you an absolutist?," the only
alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as "Are you a monar-
chist?" or "Do you really believe in witches?" This latter leads into the
indignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-
hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from
absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to open-
ness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education
for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness—
and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of
various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings
—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger.
The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad
in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars,
persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is
not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think
you are right at all.
The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something
with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point
out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right,
they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others?
If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them
think, such as, "If you had been a British administrator in India, would
you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the
funeral of a man who had died?," they either remain silent or reply that
the British should never have been there in the first place. It is not that
they know very much about other nations, or about their own. The
purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide
them with a moral virtue—openness.
In other words, knee-jerk, unthinking relativism and subjectivism is the ideology into which Western society is being indoctrinated. It's not Christianity, or Logical Positivism, or even mere Consumerism: it's subjectivism. And as the first genuine threat to moral reflection, subjectivism is the first brainless idol that must be torn down before any clear thought can return. I think that; but so does Allan Bloom. And we are quite different men.
What needs to be understood, as a preliminary, is that there is really no rational alternative to some form of objectivism, whether mine or somebody else's (a matter yet to be settled, of course). That has to happen first. Then we can weigh the different accounts of objectivism that are on offer, and arrive at something we might want to believe, something that makes sense, something that is functional for society, something that's not immediately self-contradictory, and something that's at least possibly true.
And why would we, as philosophers, want to do less?
