What could make morality objective?

[Veritas Aequitas]

.....

How can morality be primarily an individual affair, when it's primarily about how to treat other individuals. Your natural lack of empathy is showing.

The above point exposed the poster's ignorance.

The moral faculty within all humans is like the intelligence faculty.
The PRIMARY focus of intelligence is to develop one's own intelligence capacity and not to focus on or worry about the intelligence of others.

As such, the PRIMARY focus of morality is to self-develop one's moral competence and therefrom [secondarily] the moral competent person will treat other individuals morally.

And how can you take the blatantly evil moral stance that since no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others, in other words morality isn't objective, people therefore also can't decide to prefer a certain standpoint over others.

• Moral relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.
  https://iep.utm.edu/moral-re/

If one is a moral relativist, by definition one will respect the moral beliefs of others which are different from their own.
Any moral relativist refute this?

If there are any "abhorrent acts" arising from the morality of other moral beliefs, the moral relativists cannot do anything morally, but leave it to the laws of the land to deal with it, which is a political issue, not a moral issue.

[Veritas Aequitas]

.....

The best hope that humanity has left is to come together and agree on a certain moral standpoint, that will maximize the net welfare of humanity and the biosphere, while securing a sustainable future. Come together and agree on a morality that can be treated as it was kinda objective, but is of course fundamentally subjective in nature, and is also fundamentally based on pleasure and pain and empathy, conscience.

We will probably destroy the planet in 20-30 years, and the above approach is our best bet to stop it. But I still wouldn't give it more than 20-30% chance of succeeding, as there isn't enough time left to make any significant changes, and isn't enough international agreement to force such changes.

How can the best hope re MORALITY be materialized, manifested and acted upon unless the brains of individuals be rewired to act morally?
There is no way to naturally rewire [FOOLPROOF] the brains of all [if not the majority] humans immediately or even up to the next 50 years.
I believe it is possible to rewire the brains of future generations perhaps next 100 years to be highly moral competent; but we have to start at present [now] to set up the foundations.

To improve the moral competence of the majority of humans within the next 100 years we need objective facts to ground on thus to enable continuous improvements.
Thus we need fixed goals posts from objective morality and not the moving goals posts from moral relativism or no goal posts from moral nihilism.


But simply lying to people doesn't work in the 21st century anymore, people can just see that morality isn't fundamentally objective, and will know they are being deceived, and will most likely reject that approach. Not basing morality on.. well, morality, also doesn't work. In my opinon, VA's approach would just waste more decades and also create a lot more social chaos across the planet, which I'd say would decrease our long-term survival chances to below 10%.

The above views are based on ignorance and incompetence in effective problem solving techniques.

My approach [repeat] is the most effective;
To improve the moral competence of the majority of humans within the next 100 years we need objective facts to ground on thus to enable continuous improvements.
Thus we need fixed goals posts from objective morality and not the moving goals posts from moral relativism or no goal posts from moral nihilism.

So in my opinion, many people's gut reaction that pushing objective morality is a bad approach, is actually morally justified.

Ignorant philosophical gnat.
Suggest he should do more critical and reflective thinking.

[Veritas Aequitas]

....

As said, but now said slightly differently: I'm more concerned about the psychopaths who know they're not moral and don't care - whatever their PR teams might spew out.
If you think this means I think Islam OK, well, it doesn't.
If you think my concern about psychopaths means I am a big fan of objective morality, it doesn't.

I meant that Islam IS psychopathy towards non-Muslims, but Muslims living in Western countries especially in the US usually are civilized and well-adjusted.

I meant that yes right now the planet faces bigger problems, but that's also because Islam doesn't have the capability yet to destroy it.

Psychopaths [malignant] are dangerous but they are also 'chicken' in facing premature death.
As such, psychopaths in general are deterred by Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD] and will not likely press the 'RED BUTTON." Psychopaths-in-general are not a serious threats to humanity.

A Muslim as contracted to Allah is duty bound to comply with Allah's command 100% as stated within the holy texts.
The religion exhort Muslims to kill non-believers at the slightest threat to the religion where non-believing is itself a threat. [this is so evident]

Not all Muslims are 100% Muslim, i.e. they do not comply to the commands 100%, but even if 10% do, that is 150 million of them around the world.
Killing of non-believers because they are threat is heavily rewarded, if they martyr themselves then the reward is higher.
It is said 1% of humans are psychopaths, thus 15 million Muslim psychopaths duty bound to kill non-believers upon the slightest threat.

It is a win-win all the way, even if they exterminate the human species [higher reward] they are guaranteed eternal life in paradise [with 72 virgins].
More countries are getting WMDs and will be easily in years to come, more easy with money, and Muslims are very very rich.

Moral Relativism and Moral Nihilism are not effective to deal with the above potential evil acts from Muslims and others.

Only Moral Realism [human-based moral FSK] with objective moral grounds is the only effective approach to resolve the above problems.

[Atla]

The above point exposed the poster's ignorance.

The moral faculty within all humans is like the intelligence faculty.
The PRIMARY focus of intelligence is to develop one's own intelligence capacity and not to focus on or worry about the intelligence of others.

As such, the PRIMARY focus of morality is to self-develop one's moral competence and therefrom [secondarily] the moral competent person will treat other individuals morally.

True but strawman

Moral relativism is the view that moral judgments are true or false only relative to some particular standpoint (for instance, that of a culture or a historical period) and that no standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.
https://iep.utm.edu/moral-re/
If one is a moral relativist, by definition one will respect the moral beliefs of others which are different from their own.
Any moral relativist refute this?

If there are any "abhorrent acts" arising from the morality of other moral beliefs, the moral relativists cannot do anything morally, but leave it to the laws of the land to deal with it, which is a political issue, not a moral issue.

You are making a morally evil claim, relativists / subjectvisists don't have to repsect other relativists / subjectivists.

How can the best hope re MORALITY be materialized, manifested and acted upon unless the brains of individuals be rewired to act morally?
There is no way to naturally rewire [FOOLPROOF] the brains of all [if not the majority] humans immediately or even up to the next 50 years.
I believe it is possible to rewire the brains of future generations perhaps next 100 years to be highly moral competent; but we have to start at present [now] to set up the foundations.

To improve the moral competence of the majority of humans within the next 100 years we need objective facts to ground on thus to enable continuous improvements.
Thus we need fixed goals posts from objective morality and not the moving goals posts from moral relativism or no goal posts from moral nihilism.

The above views are based on ignorance and incompetence in effective problem solving techniques.

My approach [repeat] is the most effective;
To improve the moral competence of the majority of humans within the next 100 years we need objective facts to ground on thus to enable continuous improvements.
Thus we need fixed goals posts from objective morality and not the moving goals posts from moral relativism or no goal posts from moral nihilism.
So in my opinion, many people's gut reaction that pushing objective morality is a bad approach, is actually morally justified.
Ignorant philosophical gnat.
Suggest he should do more critical and reflective thinking.

There are no objective moral facts, so then we can't do anything, philosophical gnat.
100 years sounds good for real progress but we probably only have 20-30 left, so your entire program is probably useless.

Psychopaths [malignant] are dangerous but they are also 'chicken' in facing premature death.
As such, psychopaths in general are deterred by Mutual Assured Destruction [MAD] and will not likely press the 'RED BUTTON." Psychopaths-in-general are not a serious threats to humanity.

A Muslim as contracted to Allah is duty bound to comply with Allah's command 100% as stated within the holy texts.
The religion exhort Muslims to kill non-believers at the slightest threat to the religion where non-believing is itself a threat. [this is so evident]

Not all Muslims are 100% Muslim, i.e. they do not comply to the commands 100%, but even if 10% do, that is 150 million of them around the world.
Killing of non-believers because they are threat is heavily rewarded, if they martyr themselves then the reward is higher.
It is said 1% of humans are psychopaths, thus 15 million Muslim psychopaths duty bound to kill non-believers upon the slightest threat.

It is a win-win all the way, even if they exterminate the human species [higher reward] they are guaranteed eternal life in paradise [with 72 virgins].
More countries are getting WMDs and will be easily in years to come, more easy with money, and Muslims are very very rich.

Moral Relativism and Moral Nihilism are not effective to deal with the above potential evil acts from Muslims and others.

Only Moral Realism [human-based moral FSK] with objective moral grounds is the only effective approach to resolve the above problems.

Muslims already made up their objective grounds, which is Allah's commands, while your program might convince some people, Muslims will probably just adopt their own version of it, giving even more justification for them to follow Allah's commands.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Muslims already made up their objective grounds, which is Allah's commands, while your program might convince some people, Muslims will probably just adopt their own version of it, giving even more justification for them to follow Allah's commands.

I believe we can cut off the legs of theism so they don't have any thing to stand with;

It is Impossible for God to be Real
viewtopic.php?t=40229

Thus, when it is impossible for the Islamic God to be real, there is no real God for the Muslim to contract with, thus we remove the contractual bond for Muslims to kill non-believers.
All theists can take up some spirituality e.g. Buddhism and the like to deal with the inherent existential crisis.

[Iwannaplato]

You are making a morally evil claim, relativists / subjectvisists don't have to repsect other relativists / subjectivists.

No, you don't understand. You are not the expert on your own beliefs. He is.

[Skepdick]

No, you don't understand. You are not the expert on your own beliefs. He is.

Well, he does have a more objective viewpoint on you than you do.

[Peter Holmes]

Elsewhere (probably - I've lost track), IC and I have been discussing the validity and soundness of a theistic argument for moral objectivity. And so far I've been maintaining that non-moral premises can't entail moral conclusions - which puts Hume's is-ought barrier in logical terms.

But, on reflection, I think there's an exception to my claim, as follows.

P1 What Satan says is true.
P2 Satan says that homosexuality is not morally wrong.
C Therefore, (it's true that) homosexuality is not morally wrong.

Now, it seems to me that this argument is deductively valid: in any situation in which the premises are true (or taken to be true), the conclusion must be true (or taken to be true). So this is an example of non-moral premises entailing a moral conclusion.

Of course, IC substitutes 'God' for 'Satan' in the premises, and deletes 'not' in P2 and C. But that isn't the logical point. And the soundness of the argument - which refers to the truth of the premises - is a completely separate matter from its validity.

Does anyone interested in deduction have any thoughts about my analysis? I sort of hope I've got it wrong!

[FlashDangerpants]

Elsewhere (probably - I've lost track), IC and I have been discussing the validity and soundness of a theistic argument for moral objectivity. And so far I've been maintaining that non-moral premises can't entail moral conclusions - which puts Hume's is-ought barrier in logical terms.

But, on reflection, I think there's an exception to my claim, as follows.

P1 What Satan says is true.
P2 Satan says that homosexuality is not morally wrong.
C Therefore, (it's true that) homosexuality is not morally wrong.

Now, it seems to me that this argument is deductively valid: in any situation in which the premises are true (or taken to be true), the conclusion must be true (or taken to be true). So this is an example of non-moral premises entailing a moral conclusion.

Of course, IC substitutes 'God' for 'Satan' in the premises, and deletes 'not' in P2 and C. But that isn't the logical point. And the soundness of the argument - which refers to the truth of the premises - is a completely separate matter from its validity.

Does anyone interested in deduction have any thoughts about my analysis? I sort of hope I've got it wrong!

Truth be told your argument against the religious version of objective morality might be weaker than you think, although it would give me excellent fun if any of the local religious types tries to exploit that. But in general (this not a representation of any IC argument because he never actually explains his reasoning very well)

• P something... Moral properties [pertaining to, or of, or supervenient upon] judgments and situations do hold a form of existence outside of minds, and are queer (old timey philosophy queer which means extreme peculiarity, not similar in anyt way to the things we normally percieve as properties of something)

• Next P .... Queerness in this case places them beyond the scope of human enquiry (undetectable by human sense organs, undecidable by human minds, whatever, I don't really care, make something up).

• Another P .... God is blah blah blah... infinite, unbounded, not constrained by the same shit anyway.

C1 ... the only method by which humans can learn about genuine moral propoerties is via translation as provided in this instance by God.

With that in tow, you can spin whatever relgious argument you want. You can set up your next syllogism to be similar to the one you show and that works, is valid, and potentially can be sound too. But it's contingent on God stuff obviously which is one level of problem, and then on a description of God that is compatible with that, which might be a second level.....

... but worse, it requires a commitment that IC wouldn't dare make to moral error theory. Because it entails that any attempt humans make to describe moral truths with moral language are erroneous, and that the correct truths are beyond the scope of human language. That position would hold potentially difficult implications.

[Peter Holmes]

Elsewhere (probably - I've lost track), IC and I have been discussing the validity and soundness of a theistic argument for moral objectivity. And so far I've been maintaining that non-moral premises can't entail moral conclusions - which puts Hume's is-ought barrier in logical terms.

But, on reflection, I think there's an exception to my claim, as follows.

P1 What Satan says is true.
P2 Satan says that homosexuality is not morally wrong.
C Therefore, (it's true that) homosexuality is not morally wrong.

Now, it seems to me that this argument is deductively valid: in any situation in which the premises are true (or taken to be true), the conclusion must be true (or taken to be true). So this is an example of non-moral premises entailing a moral conclusion.

Of course, IC substitutes 'God' for 'Satan' in the premises, and deletes 'not' in P2 and C. But that isn't the logical point. And the soundness of the argument - which refers to the truth of the premises - is a completely separate matter from its validity.

Does anyone interested in deduction have any thoughts about my analysis? I sort of hope I've got it wrong!

Truth be told your argument against the religious version of objective morality might be weaker than you think, although it would give me excellent fun if any of the local religious types tries to exploit that. But in general (this not a representation of any IC argument because he never actually explains his reasoning very well)

• P something... Moral properties [pertaining to, or of, or supervenient upon] judgments and situations do hold a form of existence outside of minds, and are queer (old timey philosophy queer which means extreme peculiarity, not similar in anyt way to the things we normally percieve as properties of something)

• Next P .... Queerness in this case places them beyond the scope of human enquiry (undetectable by human sense organs, undecidable by human minds, whatever, I don't really care, make something up).

• Another P .... God is blah blah blah... infinite, unbounded, not constrained by the same shit anyway.

C1 ... the only method by which humans can learn about genuine moral propoerties is via translation as provided in this instance by God.

With that in tow, you can spin whatever relgious argument you want. You can set up your next syllogism to be similar to the one you show and that works, is valid, and potentially can be sound too. But it's contingent on God stuff obviously which is one level of problem, and then on a description of God that is compatible with that, which might be a second level.....

... but worse, it requires a commitment that IC wouldn't dare make to moral error theory. Because it entails that any attempt humans make to describe moral truths with moral language are erroneous, and that the correct truths are beyond the scope of human language. That position would hold potentially difficult implications.

Thanks, Flash. That's very interesting. I wonder if it can be boiled it down to a snappy syllogism. I'll give it a go and see what you think.

I'm not sure why you say 'potentially can be sound too'. That's true of any valid syllogism - you just need true premises. Which is the rub with supernaturalism.

I'm not down with moral error theory, cos it seems to entail the idea of moral truth - which is the issue. Are you keen on it?

PS

Nope, can't do it. As I see it, if you want to deduce (establish) the existence of moral facts/properties, you can't assume their existence in a premise. So their knowability or unknowability - their queerness - is irrelevant.

[Atla]

Muslims already made up their objective grounds, which is Allah's commands, while your program might convince some people, Muslims will probably just adopt their own version of it, giving even more justification for them to follow Allah's commands.

I believe we can cut off the legs of theism so they don't have any thing to stand with;

It is Impossible for God to be Real
viewtopic.php?t=40229

Thus, when it is impossible for the Islamic God to be real, there is no real God for the Muslim to contract with, thus we remove the contractual bond for Muslims to kill non-believers.
All theists can take up some spirituality e.g. Buddhism and the like to deal with the inherent existential crisis.

If you can't even convince Western atheists that you've proven the non-existence of God, what hope do you have of convincing faithful Muslims?

[FlashDangerpants]

I'm not down with moral error theory, cos it seems to entail the idea of moral truth - which is the issue. Are you keen on it?

I'm guessing we're in the same camp. Because there has been so much confusion about terminology here recently, I think maybe I'll lay it out in long form though...

The defining feature of generic non-cognitivism is that moral language is not cognitive in kind, scope or type. So the reason why non-cognitivists say that there is no moral fact can be summarised as there is no way for us to describe one, the words we use for moral description and definition aren't available for the task of describing real features of any part of the world beyond our personal judgments. This isn't the normal or most obvious way to describe that theory group, but it's accurate and it's relevant for this conversation.

A generic Moral Success Theorist must disagree of course with that basic principle above. He or she holds that moral language can be descriptive of the world beyond mere feels and squeals. They further hold that it describes potential truths about moral situations, events, judgments, or something like that. And finally they hold that some means is available for us to find at least some verifiable truth about some of those.

The generic Moral Error Theorsist agrees with the former that moral language is potentially truth-apt in scope. And that an attempt is being made when we speak of moral situations to describe true moral knowings at least some of the time. But they hold there is no basis for these knowings to be discovered to be true. And on that basis all moral claims are erroneous.

From what you wrote, I suspect you join me in doubting one of the middle premises in that chain. I hold that the idea of moral fact is actually a categroy mistake, and we are misunderstanding moral language when we suppose that our moral claims are an attempt at a description of some factual reality. In many debates though, I would sacrifice this distinction and simply operate as an error theorist for the pruposes of whatever is being discussed at the time. If error theory is as good as my actual theory for the current thing I will just roll with the familiar.

But yeah, what I actually hold is that the specie of language games/activities that we collect together as morality (I consider it abundantly absurd to suppose there is this singlular morality thing out there) has no overlap with the category of activities and language games (in this context 'discourses' is the more common term than language games but broadly same deal imo) which we can consider verifiable or truith bearing or any of those terms, I don't need to care about specific theories of that sort. So I dispute the Error Theory at the premise about our language being an actual attempt to describe.

But I don't do so on the basis of a non-cog assumption that there is not 'potential' to truth-aptness in the language. moral discourses are for me similar in type to other cultural discourses, be they something serious about politics or something frivolous about shirts and pants, we use truth-apt sounding language in them all, but they aren't usually claims to uncover a higher truth and when they are, it is a category mistake not a subject for error theory in my view.

[Iwannaplato]

Muslims already made up their objective grounds, which is Allah's commands, while your program might convince some people, Muslims will probably just adopt their own version of it, giving even more justification for them to follow Allah's commands.

I believe we can cut off the legs of theism so they don't have any thing to stand with;

It is Impossible for God to be Real
viewtopic.php?t=40229

This would be very easy to test. Run that argument past some Muslims. If you have, link us to the results - there are plenty of places online where that link could be presented to Muslims and we would read the successful results.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Muslims already made up their objective grounds, which is Allah's commands, while your program might convince some people, Muslims will probably just adopt their own version of it, giving even more justification for them to follow Allah's commands.

I believe we can cut off the legs of theism so they don't have any thing to stand with;

It is Impossible for God to be Real
viewtopic.php?t=40229

Thus, when it is impossible for the Islamic God to be real, there is no real God for the Muslim to contract with, thus we remove the contractual bond for Muslims to kill non-believers.
All theists can take up some spirituality e.g. Buddhism and the like to deal with the inherent existential crisis.

If you can't even convince Western atheists that you've proven the non-existence of God, what hope do you have of convincing faithful Muslims?

At present, the argument against God is very loose which enable theists to eel their way out to soothe their cognitive dissonances.
The critical point is we must have a very solid no-holes argument.
Once we have that, we now have a great potential to convince all theists, i.e. almost everyone on Earth as access to the internet.

At the beginning we must have an alternative[s] to soothe the terrible pains of the cognitive dissonances arising from an inherent existential crisis.
We first has to convince everyone and Muslims [with no doubts] that the religion of Islam is inherent evil as reflected in their holy texts from God.
If a religion is inherently evil, the authorities has to ban it.
As an alternative, Muslims can convert to Christianity and others or be an atheist.

All theists believe their God is really real.
The next phase is to convince God is an illusion.
From there we will wean all theists from theism to the effective practices to deal with the terrible cognitive dissonance arising from an inherent unavoidable existential crisis.

[Veritas Aequitas]

...

I believe we can cut off the legs of theism so they don't have any thing to stand with;
It is Impossible for God to be Real
viewtopic.php?t=40229

This would be very easy to test. Run that argument past some Muslims. If you have, link us to the results - there are plenty of places online where that link could be presented to Muslims and we would read the successful results.

The above point is with reference to theism in general not specifically Muslims.
There are plenty of testimonials of those who had left theism for atheism on the basis that their God could not be real and various other reasons.
However, I have not come across any theist present the above argument like mine which has no holes for theists to eel out.

However, even if theists can be convinced by the rationale of the above argument, they will still cling to it even it their God is an illusion, i.e. a useful illusion.
One critical more is to propose non-theistic alternative that can soothe the inherent cognitive dissonances.

As for Muslims, the starting point is to show that their religion is inherent evil from sources of text from their own holy texts from their God.
This move will shift Muslims from their malignant religion to the benign religions like Christianity with its overriding pacifist maxim.

From there all theists should be convinced to shift to non-theism with practices that can soothe the inherent cognitive dissonances.

Without theism, there is a need for secular morality conditioned upon a human-based moral FSK, which is objective.