Another discussion of objective morality has broken out, so I thought I would provide a home for it.
579 thoughts on “objective morality, for the umpteenth time”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Well, I agree that a personal opinion about something is always subjective, but I don’t see categorizing something (applying the category “evil”) as interchangeable with an emotional assessment (“hating” something.) The two conditions are independent to me.
No, I really don’t. That someone believes or feels or…whatever…that something belongs in a specific category (in this case, the category “evil”) does not either make that assessment (or strong insistence) true or valid. But more so, stating a category applies to something is irrelevant. Unless everyone, everywhere experiences some moral entailment about the object consistently, repeatably, and predictably, it has no “object” quality.
Well, in principle I agree. The exception, though, is, in the case of categorization, unless the condition within that categorization is always true, it can’t be consistent or predictable, and thus cannot be objective.
Maybe. Maybe not. Assersers can be delusional or simply liars, even to themselves.
But the point of subjectivity isn’t it’s truth or falsehood, but about it’s universal entailment. If everyone, everywhere, doesn’t experience the same consequences for some behavior, what other measures for “objective” are there to assess?
keiths, to petrushka:
walto:
Good grief, walto. The people at NASA obviously cared. They lost a mission because of the incorrect conversion!
That’s part of the definition of objective as I understand it.
This is where you lose me, Walto. If a “truth” is not universally agreed to, it can’t be “objective” by definition. Not because it’s not universally agreed to, but because clearly not everyone has the same experience with whatever that “truth” is. It’s the universality of experience that makes something objective, not the “truthiness” of it.
walto:
…says walto, who made a huge fuss over fifth’s idiosyncratic use of the words “claim” and “assertion”.
Right. That’s what I’ve said, several hundred times.
I agree with that. There are a number of ways in which subjective judgments can be false.
I don’t agree with that. People experience lots of objective things differently, it seems to me. That something is green is objective, that it looks purple to me anyhow is subjective.
Kind of irrelevant response to what I was saying, no? Sure, It might be necessary, my (obvious) point was that it’s not sufficient.
walto,
No, it was directly relevant. You asked “Who cares?”, and I told you who. Conversions matter, and it matters whether they’re done correctly.
My position was precisely the same with him, actually. I (and everybody else here, actually) use “claim” thusly–and nobody has any idea what he means by it (incidentally, calling them “observations” doesn’t help at all). It’s simple: I use “objective” thusly, and have explained why I think that usage is preferable; it and it clearly makes no difference to your “but it’s all subjective” view–except, apparently. that you really like to say that morality is not objective–whatever that might mean. Perhaps this is because you’ve said that a lot, and don’t ever like to revise–even when it makes no difference to important points.
In sum, I suggest you simply append, “or…for those who insist on calling certain moral claims objective, it is at any rate the case that they can’t give a single good reason for believing any of them.”
The fussing about this usage is really a stupid of time. I certainly hope you have a deeper point to make, anyhow.
Ok now you’re really being ridiculous.
For myself, I find it important because historically, there have been all sorts of people and groups who have claimed morality is objective in order to lend weight and authority to their particular assessments (and ultimately, judgements and laws) of given behaviors or situations. All to enforce and control certain behaviors and situations. Many such assessments are now looked at as silly, so so how “objective” could they really have been?
To me, “objective” means something specific. It’s not vague at all; if something has a repeatable, consistent, and predictable outcome/entailment/consequence, it’s an objective phenomenon. Everything else is subjective. This is not to say that subjective things are unimportant…goodness no. I find Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse de la Lande to be the best wine ever created. That’s kind of important to me. Your mileage may very. Heck, you might not even like wine. Perfectly fine; doesn’t change my subjective assessment the importance to me of that personal enjoyment.
But let’s take a subject some people do find to be a moral one: homosexuality. Now, I can’t fathom how anyone could rationally argue that homosexuality is objectively immoral, but clearly there are those who do believe that.
To me, whether something is “right or wrong”/”good or bad” has to be subjective, simply because it’s clear that not everyone has the same experience with things people claim as “moral” situations.
I don’t mean “true” by “objective.” I distinguish “objective” from “subjective”, not from “false.” Judgments may be objective and false as I use these terms.
Not everybody has the same experience in any situations–moral or not. My color vision is worse than yours, e.g.
Of course, because in order to determine that “green” is “objective”, there has to be a specific accessible entailment for why you see the object as purple. If there’s no entailment of such, then the assessment of “green” is questionably “objective” and likely not so.
Objectiveness is not, at least to me, a condition that occurs in a vacuum. It’s dependent on the consistency, repeatability, and predictability of all entailments that surround a given condition.
Agreed. Subjective.
Do you believe that it’s objectively not immoral?
I don’t know what that means. What’s a specific accessible entailment? Was it not an objective claim when someone asserted that grass was green before anybody knew how color vision worked?
walto,
It was exactly the opposite. You scolded him for his idiosyncratic and non-standard usage, complaining that it made communication difficult. Now that the tables have turned, so has your position. It’s quite… convenient.
You were right to complain about fifth’s misuse of terms, and I am doing the same with regard to your idiosyncratic usages in this thread.
I’ll repeat this comment:
You didn’t reproduce my excerpt from that same IEP article. Hunh.
And you’re wrong about the situation with “objectivity” and “claim.” FMM offers no explanation of what he means by “claim” or “knowledge” when he says that everybody knows that God exists but he is making no claim. If he can explain what the hell he’s talking about, we can consider his usage odd, but we’d at least understand how to translate his idiom into something we could grok.
I’ve explained what I mean by “objective” and KN and I have both also explained why that usage is preferable to the mossy one you prefer.
So, yeah, you’re wrong, but intransigent. What else is new?
No argument here. I’m not equating “objective” with “true” in my example, but rather with “consistent”. If people’s experience with something changes over time or with regime change, to me it can’t be “objective”. Did being Jewish stop being objectively immoral simply because there are no longer any German Nazi government or is it still immoral? Is dancing closer than 2 inches objectively immoral? Or is it simply that dancing itself is objectively immoral? Sex before marriage? Sex that doesn’t lead to children? Stealing loaves of bread from the rich to feed the poor…?
The problem, for me, with the idea of “objective” morality is that no one can seem to agree on what the “objective” is.
You’re ignoring entailments again. Your color vision being “worse” than mine (whether that’s even true or valid is likely debatable, but I digress…) has a specific entailment. It is therefore an objective condition and thus has a direct objective impact on your assessment of objective color assessments. If two people are using two different tools to assess a situation, they may well come up with two different assessments. There’s no surprise there. The determination of objectivity comes from determining whether the different tool measures can be converted and aligned.
walto,
…says the guy who fussed about fifth’s usage on the other thread.
I obviously do, and I’ve been making it throughout the thread: objective morality doesn’t exist, and anyone who thinks otherwise is invited to respond to my challenge:
You’re still not getting this.
You have to try to find a way to distinguish whether something is a moral judgment from whether it is a legitimate or true moral judgment. Once you do that, you will see that none of those questions are relevant to the matter of whether what I am terming “objectivity” applies to the claims. Where they DO matter involves the epistemic question of what evidence anybody may have for the sex or stealing, or etc. prohibitions. The fact that people’s views have changed over time are certainly relevant to whether such claims are TRUE.
This substitution of repetitions of things people have repeatedly responded to for substantive remarks is really an approach that is more appropriate for a witch trial. As I said, if you can’t cut the shit, you’ll have to talk to yourself.
walto,
As to why the “fussing about this usage” matters, I’ve already explained that to you.
You are using a poor and nonstandard definition of objective morality. It’s already caused plenty of problems in this thread, and it’s now causing problems in your communications with Robin.
Second, even if your definition were correct, it doesn’t capture the issue under dispute. We already know that people make claims about objective morality; that’s a no-brainer. The interesting question is whether objective morality actually exists, and if so, what it says.
You want us to talk about walto-objective-morality, using your idiosyncratic definition. But we already know that walto-objective-morality exists. That’s trivial.
Why should we use your nonstandard definition, when the standard definition actually captures the issue under dispute?
A problem you guys seem to be having is mistaking “objective” for “absolute,” which happens to any of us.
Once a definition is provided, we can objectively judge if something fits the definition. So, the fact that morality as such changes doesn’t mean that what’s morally right or wrong cannot be objectively tested. It just means that it’s not absolute (as in it doesn’t stand on its own, it’s context/history/etc dependent, meaning it’s relative).
I think I’ll hide now.
walto,
You’re quite the drama queen. How many times have you already flounced in this thread?
Be a philosopher for a change, walto. Defend your position. Make your case. Respond to challenges, instead of whining about them and threatening to take your ball and go home.
ETA: And perhaps most important of all, acknowledge your errors instead of fighting to the death to deny them.
Entropy,
That’s a point I’ve made repeatedly in this thread.
What you’re missing is that the choice of the criterion is itself subjective, thus rendering the morality subjective.
You do that for a change and I’ll stay. I return, after “flouncing,” only because I hope (with so little reason), that maybe you’ll participate like an adult for a change. Alas, you can’t seem to do that with anybody who disagrees with you about anything. So, it’s up to you. Stop being a little prick, or you can talk to yourself.
I think this is the key point to walto’s argument.
It’s hard to see how I can be wrong when I say I hate plaid
but it’s easy to see how I can be wrong when I say plaid is evil.
The difference between objectivity and subjectivity is not universality or quantifiableity or the ability to test It’s simply the focus of the statement we are making.
“I hate plaid” is really about me “plaid is evil” is about the world that exists apart from me.
peace
Yet it doesn’t do that for length for some reason. As I said from the opening posts, you make objectivity a function of whether everybody agrees on something. But that’s a problematic use of “objective” for a number of reasons I’ve given above. One, that I may not have mentioned, is that it prevents anything that’s controversial in a science from being an objective matter. keiths said above that objective stuff is “universal” (before, natch, denying it).
But if they don’t need to be universally agreed to in order to be objective, then the move is to “well, moral claims just CAN’T be agreed to in the way that scientific claims can be, because they’re… uh….by definition subjective.”
Which, IIRC is #102.
Anyhow, this has all been said numerous times so……
Right. I suppose somebody might claim in response that they’re not objective because they can neither be true nor false, i.e., they’re strictly meaningless, if they don’t just say something like “I hate plaid.” But I haven’t heard that….yet. Instead, the claim seems to be that they’re meaningful, subjective, and false.
Which really makes no sense at all.
I would go a step farther than KN or walto and say that the statement “plaid is evil” will necessarily be either be true or false.
It can’t be both or neither
peace
walto,
I repeat:
As for your threatened flounces, they’re neither here nor there. The fact is that you can’t answer the challenge, or you would have done so already:
Why should I be expected to “answer” this “challenge”? I agree with it.
walto,
No, I don’t. Why are you making me repeat that?
fifthmonarchyman,
Yes, that goes farther than anything I would say.
Ok what does it mean?
Right, there is no reason why objective truth has to be knowable.
It’s certainly possible that I have no way of ever bridging the gap between my mind and the outside world. That possibility does not say anything about whether the world outside my mind exists.
peace
walto,
I didn’t ask you to answer it. I said that you can’t answer it (and neither can anyone else, as far as I can see):
Your earlier proposal for a system of objective morality failed, after all.
No, your objections, though repeated several hundred times, were poor.
No, it’s not “simply the focus of the statement we are making”, because then you’re decoupling objectivity from truth. That’s a mistake.
“Barack Obama has eight legs” is about an objectively existing entity, but it’s not an objective statement.
Why would I “answer” something I agree with? I mean, it’s kind of a platitude.
Of course it is. Even Robin would agree on that, I think. It’s objective and false. But I take it if you think it’s not objective, then in order for a claim to be objective on your view, it has to be true. What else?
“Barack Obama has eight legs” is also either true or false it can’t be both or neither
peace
A deterioration of the cone cells in your eye, fewer cones than average for humans, macular degeneration. Any sort of conditional difference between your eyes/perception is a specific accessible entailment.
Of course, because the greeness of grass has a bunch of entailments such as consistent color blending with other dyes.
walto:
This isn’t difficult, walto. When you say you “agree” with the challenge, you presumably mean that the challenge is valid. You’ve told us that you want to believe that morality is objective, but that you aren’t the guy to demonstrate that:
So my statement stands. You can’t answer the challenge, or you would have done so already.
fifth:
Correct. And in fact, it’s false. But it isn’t objective.
Here’s Wikipedia again:
Walto isn’t entitled to mandate his personal, idiosyncratic definition of “objective”, just as you aren’t entitled to mandate your idiosyncratic definitions of “claim” and “assertion”.
keiths:
walto:
You couldn’t answer them. That’s not surprising, because as you’ve told us:
Haha. Not because of YOUR lame criticisms. It’s a difficult subject, as your platitudinous “challenge” notes.
Clearly…
LOL! As if there were some legitimate way to even determine that there are such things as “legitimate or true moral judgement”.
Oh, I’m sure that’s true! Once I agree with your way of thinking, I’m sure I’ll agree with your way of thinking…
😉
No they aren’t. That fact that people’s view have changed actually indicates nothing about their truth or validity. It only indicates that people’s opinions on “moral subjects” changes over time.
Unless everyone’s “moral” experience with sex or stealing is repeatable, predictable, and consistent, there’s nothing morally objective about those concepts at all. Why? Because there is nothing to consistently evaluate.
Does everyone who masturbates go blind? See…THAT would be an entailment. A specific, consistent, repeatable, and predictable entailment. If such were the case, that would make a pretty good argument for it being objectively immoral to engage in masturbation (assuming (BIG assumption here) that someone could effectively show that there was some moral component to the masturbation/blindness interrelationship and not simply a direct physiological one.)
That last part, of course, is my primary reason for my skepticism with regards to any claim of moral…anything…really, but specifically moral objectiveness. I just don’t see any legitimate way to place any behavior or situation or phenomenon under a “moral” umbrella vs any other categorical umbrella. But that, I suppose, is a different topic of conversation.
No, one’s opinion on anything – homosexuality included – is subjective. Always. I don’t find that there is any legitimate, reasonable, or logical way of deducing anything about morality from homosexuality either, but that’s a separate issue.
Here are a few other things that article says:
I note that if “objective” means “true,” then to say something is “objectively true” doesn’t really make a ton of sense. That article is even more sketchy than the IEP one, in which we also both found paragraphs supporting our positions.
Anyhow, I asked what YOU think “objective” means. But if you want something that’s common parlance, here are all the adjectival definitions from dictionary.com
Those all seem better than “true” to me.