In what seems like a proof of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, the “is morality objective or subjective” debates are playing out yet again at UD.
Here, in 60 seconds or less, is why theistic objective morality doesn’t get off the ground:
[Results not guaranteed. May vary with individual reading speed.]
1. For objective morality to have an impact, we need to a) know that it exists, b) know what it requires, and c) know that we have reliable access to it. We don’t know any of those things.
2. Lacking access to objective morality, all we have left is subjective morality — what each person thinks is right or wrong. This is just as true for the objectivist as it is for the subjectivist.
3. Even if God existed and we knew exactly what he expected of us, there would be no reason to regard his will as morally binding. His morality would be just as subjective as ours.
Even if there were traffic laws, and we knew exactly what they required, there would be no reason to regard them as binding. The view of the people who drew up the traffic laws would be just as subjective as ours.
Neil,
You missed a key word which I have inserted in bold:
What makes murder immoral is not that it violates the law. It’s that it violates our (presumably shared) subjective moral intuitions about killing people.
Keiths, try not getting your hackles up at Neil. My intuition is that Neil’s is pointing towards something valid, that if a god exists worthy of the name, it embodies the morally good as an essential part of its nature. Claiming that it’s “subjective” and therefore implying that’s the same as a limited and biased view (like a human view) is, well, a little shortsighted. To an omni being, morals are no more arbitrary and “subjective’ than the implacable force of gravity is. To an omni deity, morals would be just a factual description of how itself and the universe works. At that level of reality there would be no important difference between “morally binding” and “atomically binding”.
Well, not exactly like proscriptive traffic laws. After all, some traffic laws are arbitrary in reality. But that’s because we, the traffic-law makers, are flawed and sometimes arbitrary humans. Our limitations would not apply to the omni LawGiver being.
On the other hand, your item 3 is still true even if that god exists and we know for certain that it does exist. It cannot possibly communicate with any limited beings (like humans) all the specific details of its moral calculus. We would have to blindly obey a set of rules, without really understanding why. As any parent can tell you, that’s a horrible way to raise a human being. Fulfilled independent humans need something deeper than the “what to do, what not to do” book — we need the “why to do”. And that’s exactly what god cannot communicate to us.
We might not know everything but we already know enough to be sure that taking things on faith results in getting it scrambled and wrong eventually. So having to take that god’s morals on faith, without being able to totally understand it ourselves, is a guarantee that we’d get it wrong. We’d end up, at best, no better than we are now, having figured out some workable morals with our social-animal empathy. And at worst, we’d end up in the witch-burning theocracy that the christians are in the process of creating in Uganda right at this moment. Because, ya know, those murderers are absolutely certain that god told them, “suffer not a witch to live.”
For certain circular definitions of objective.
Objective it that which I believe is objective. If you disagree, you are not being objective.
Theocracy, or at least a state religion should be the best political system possible (of course if based on belief in the one true god). Why does is tend to produce jihads, crusades, forced conversions, witch-hunts, and auto-da-fés?
Piotr Gasiorowski,
When rhetoric fails …
” Lacking access to objective morality, all we have left is subjective morality — what each person thinks is right or wrong”
So Keith feels that whatever one feels, is right morally.
So to the rapist, and the baby murderer, their actions are moral.
Interesting philosophy Keiths.
phoodoo,
Possibly. But if so, this would still be the case under objectivism also. They probably aren’t to keith, nor are they to you. What extra insight does appending the label ‘objective’ give?
It’s neither objective nor subjective. It is, instead, contingent and arbitrary.
Not actually relevant.
My point is that there are good pragmatic reasons for having traffic laws and for having moral laws. Having laws makes for a more orderly society. While people might disagree with some of those laws, they will generally go along with them for the sake of having an orderly society. However, this depends on some degree of fairness (or perceived fairness) in the way that the laws are enforced.
Whether the laws come from a god or from a monarch, they have some pragmatic value if they help maintain a better society. So there’s a problem with your point 3.
But by what logic can Keiths say that a man who murders a baby is wrong? Because he doesn’t want to murder a baby?
It’s not evil to murder your enemies babies, according to the big man.
As I have pointed out to William and others at UD, objective morality could only exist if there were known, specific, repeatable, predictable, and consistent consequences to every given moral/immoral action. As this is not the case, objective morality cannot be true. The very fact that people can kill and rape babies with impunity in this life is sufficient to demolish the concept of absolute morality. The fact that other people are offended by such acts serves only to demonstrate some level of subjective moral agreement. It is in no way evidencefor any objective morality.
OMagain,
But is it evil to you? Or to Keiths? Why?
phoodoo,
What “logic” is there in believing that human ‘morals’ were created by and are judged by your chosen, imaginary, so-called ‘God’?
Do you believe that your chosen, imaginary, so-called ‘God’ directs/guides human morals?
Do animals have ‘morals’?
Which came first, the invention of your chosen, imaginary, so-called ‘God’ (yhwh-yehoshua-holy-ghost), or what English speaking humans call ‘morals’?
Do you believe that only ‘good morals’ are ‘objective’?
Do you believe that your chosen, imaginary, so-called ‘God’ created (and directs/guides?) both ‘good morals’ and ‘bad morals’?
Robin,
Actually not really. First off, we know that virtually everyone who kills babies for pleasure, has some sort of either physical defect with their brain, or they have experienced some kind of severe mental trauma in their life. So they generally know their actions are wrong, but they can’t control them.
So it seems that we do indeed have an inherent sense of right and wrong (we know that even infants have this) that is overridden when something in the individual is destroyed. There could be zero cases of people without serious trauma who don’t know right from wrong-thus the case for objective morality is a strong one. We have it, and it only no longer exists when our brains become damaged. So those with such impulses can not be said to have an equally valid point of view towards morality.
Creodont2,
Well, do you agree with Keiths or not? I state that I believe their is a fundamental morality that exists as an independent, real entity.
Do you believe that the only thing we can call morality is what we feel like doing?
phoodoo,
No: because he doesn’t want the baby murdered. And neither do you. So …
Not directed to me, but no. I feel like making a sandwich. It is neither moral nor immoral to do so. There must be something else? Morality has the extra quality of approval/disapproval, and feelings of warmth or revulsion. It feels good to help someone in trouble, and we tend to approve of such things. It feels bad to harm someone, and we tend to disapprove. But if someone approves of baby-murder, or disapproves of kindness, telling them they are objectively wrong is not likely to cut the mustard. They can use the ‘sez you’ gambit against you just as easily as against me.
There’s a reason that these arguments are never settled. It’s that “objective or subjective” part. It’s a false dichotomy. There’s a continuum from what we describe as objective to what we describe as purely subjective. And morality is somewhere in the middle.
Our access to reality is, unavoidably, via our subjective experience of that reality. We use the term “objective” where there is a lot of agreement about what we experience. And we use “subjective” where there is less agreement. But there is a continuum of possibilities for how much we might agree. For moral question, there is a lot of agreement, but that agreement is not nearly as complete as it is for scientific questions.
And it’s derived from a god that instructs his chosen people to kill the babies of their enemy?
Is that accurate?
What about the previously common practice of child sacrifice? Did all the priests have something damaged in their brain? Seems unlikely…
What about the people who cut up and use albinos in magic potions? Are they all brain damaged?
I don’t think you’ve thought this through!
hotshoe:
Oh, my hackles aren’t up. I’m just responding to his point about moral laws and civil laws.
But we don’t know that our creator, if we have one, is “worthy of the name”.
In fact, if an omnipotent and omniscient God exists, we can be pretty sure that he/she/it is not morally good by our standards. As you yourself wrote a couple days ago:
hotshoe:
Not true. Even God can’t derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. His morality is subjective, just like ours. It’s just that he has more power to implement his vision.
That isn’t necessarily true. The fact that God might be beyond our understanding in some respects doesn’t imply that his morality is unfathomable. It could be quite simple.
In what way does that answer the question? Should we show compassion for the child murderer because he is making a moral choice for himself?
Neil,
Note your qualifier: “if they help maintain a better society.”
Better by whose standards? Ours.
The laws don’t become morally binding merely because they come from a god or a monarch. They’re only morally binding if we judge them to be in accord with our individual moralities.
Robin,
You think God could take a heinous act and render it moral simply by declining to punish it consistently?
phoodoo,
Because it’s wrong by my moral standards. This really isn’t that hard, phoodoo.
phoodoo:
This “subjective morality is just personal preference” canard is ludicrous.
I prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, but I don’t feel guilty when I eat vanilla, and I don’t think that vanilla-eaters should be punished or imprisoned.
We should show compassion for all people, however heinous their crimes. It seems to be the most logical way to go if your aim is to reduce reoffending. Otherwise, in what way are you better then a murderer if you murder the murderer? Now you have two murderers, except one is state sanctioned and the other is dead. Total number of murderers remains the same.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people
Would *you* show compassion for a child murderer phoodoo? Or would you rather they were executed for their crimes?
What does your objectve morality say?
phoodoo,
????
Let’s just remind ourselves of ‘the question’:
It was a direct answer to that question. It’s a perfectly valid reason why someone would say another’s actions are wrong: because they disapprove.
An entirely new issue you’ve brought in here. Well, I certainly don’t think we should let him off, but I’d stop short of killing him by lethal injection. But either way my reasoning would not be related to how he viewed his actions. Subjectivism /=relativism.
What would you do to him? And how would you justify it to anyone, including him? What’s the view from Objective Morality Central?
Allan Miller,
Sorry, but I don’t really understand this Allan. I don’t like square dancing. So should I view people who like square dancing as being immoral, according to my likes?
In fact, Allan, Keiths position is that the majority should decide what is moral and what isn’t. So if the majority of people think being gay is immoral, then gays should be punished. Likewise if the majority thinks that blacks should have less rights than whites, or women, then this is how morality should be judged. And if the majority of Germans felt that Jews were evil and should be killed, well, then by definition they were acting morally.
phoodoo,
No, it isn’t. You just made that up.
Yet that seems to be exactly what happened if we look at history. The majority did decide. The majority wanted to enslave people of color. They were enslaved. The majority wanted to outlaw homosexuality. It was outlawed.
Now the majority want’s racial and equality in general regardless of your sexuality. And it’s happening.
If your “objective morality” really existed, why would anything ever change in these sorts of areas?
keiths,
Phoodoo has a nasty habit of saying things that are what he would like to be as fact.
phoodoo,
Dancing is considered immoral by some – particularly some objectivists – so indeed you might (joke in Rob Roy: why don’t Presbyterians like sex? Because it might lead to dancing ….). But liking or disliking something is not really within the ambit of morality per se. Morality is not ‘that which I like’, though one would tend to ‘like’ moral acts, along with many things on which morality has no bearing.
phoodoo,
I doubt that. But I’m not arguing keiths case anyway, but my own. The adjudication of a majority would not compel those in the minority to agree.
No, it really can’t be simple. Because: reality is complicated and contingent and intersectional, and a valid morality must be complicated and nuanced to match reality. Modern humanists are actually doing pretty well displaying a valid morality that covers more of the contingencies than scripture does (and christians hate our humanist morality, of course, because it denies them their supposed superiority) but we still have questions about morally grey areas because we just. Don’t. Know.
God could know the answers. An omni god by definition must know. But god can’t communicate that complete knowledge to any limited being; in order to see the whole picture and understand, we would have to be as gods ourselves. We would have to have unlimited vision to see all the nuances that go into the correct moral answer for some dilemmas. The answers aren’t going to fit on a single tablet that can be communicated to all people for all times.
Thou shalt not kill. Except when assassinating the corrupt leader of a banana republic will save the lives of thousands of his people.
We often frown at a one-for-one exchange, police killing one kidnapper in saving the life of one hostage; the police aren’t ever punished as if it were murder, but we generally think it “Not Good” and say that the police are supposed to keep the suspect alive to face trial and prison. Why? Why not have police execution for any person in the middle of committing a violent crime?
The trolley car thought experiments show that we also frown at a larger exchange, causing the death of one innocent person to save the lives of many other innocents stuck in the path. Why? Why not deliberately kill one to save many?
The very existence of these moral dilemmas is strong evidence that god’s morality (whether “subjective” or “objective”) cannot be “simple”. If it were simple, we really would have figured it out by now. Humans are perfect at simple. Everything you need to know you learned in kindergarden. Right?
But of course, that’s not really enough, because life isn’t really that simple after all.
edit blockquote
Morality really is that simple. What is not simple is figuring out the future.
If I do X, what happens? Morality has to be about consequences. For oneself, for others, or for future generations. That part is easy to understand. What is not easy is figuring out long term consequences.
I personally don’t think lifeboat and trolley car conundrums are very interesting. I’ve lived 70 years without encountering any such problem.
Wars and police and rescue work involve such questions, but when decisions are actually made, The only question we ask is whether the decider was acting selfishly or not. People decide for the few or for the many, and life goes on.Historians and political junkies love to second guess and view with hindsight, but ordinary people just move on.
Okay, I agree with this.
This is a rather dubious claim on the face of it. I’d love to see some AMA or APA articles that indicate such a fact. I mean, your opinion on the subject is interesting and all, but hardly authoritative or credible.
But even accepting your assertion for the sake of argument wouldn’t help you much since people killing kids for pleasure makes up only a portion of people who do kill children and who have killed children. There have beenmany cultures who put a portion of their new born population to death in order to protect food supplies, and there’s no indication such societies suffered collectively from some mental deficiency. Ditto for the natiobs who sacrificed offspring to appease their gods. The list of people who find and found no moral issues in killing off children goes far beyond the mentally ill and traumatized, so your rebuttal just doesn’t work.
You’ll need something beyond your opinion to actually rebut my point.
I didn’t mention anything about punishment; I used the word “consequence” specifically.
Objective understanding can only occur if a given phenomenon manifests in a repeatable, predictable, and consistent manner. In such a case, some aspect of said phenomenon can be observed and measured by a number of individuals who can then agree on the consistency of the results.
Any interaction with said phenomenon will invariably produce a specific consequence (or given result, if you prefer). Consequences are therefore intrinsically tied to objectivity.
Morality is about the future. About consequences.
From where i stand there are two obstacles to objective morality.
First is that we cannot predict the long range future, and every individual makes different forecasts.
The second is that (assuming a perfectly egalitarian and beneficent government) the good of the many will always run into conflict with the good of some individuals. Taxes are an obvious example, but let us assume everyone agrees to taxes. there are (or have been historically) wars and conscription, imminent domain, and various emergencies that inconvenience (or kill) individuals.
There are not and never will be, any completely satisfactory to these problems. You can beat yourself silly trying to square these circles, but you won’t succeed.
keiths:
hotshoe:
No, it could be quite simple, like
or
or
While you might not be satisfied with those simple moralities, God could be. Nothing requires him to have a complicated moral system.
Those are dilemmas for us. That doesn’t mean they have anything to do with God’s morality. Perhaps he doesn’t care at all about who dies, as long as no purple things are created.
petrushka,
No, consequentialism is just one form of morality. Deontology is non-consequentialist, and so is virtue ethics.
keiths:
Robin:
Sure you did. You wrote:
This is amazingly ironic. Phoodoo rejects a morality based on personal subjective experiences by appealing to his own subjective experiences about rape and baby murder.
Brilliant phoodoo, you’ve now proved with your response that keiths was right. Morality is based on personal, subjective experiences.
That seems like the beginning of the correct view. (Though I wonder how “our access to reality is via our subjective experience of reality” is consistent with your defense of direct perceptual realism of affordances — you were defending that view in another topic, yes?)
The whole contrast of “objective” and “subjective” is fraught with difficulties and gets tangled up with all sorts of other distinctions: public/private, absolute/relative, transcendent/immanent, rational/emotive . . . but these are all different distinctions, and it’s a further mess when we use epistemological categories to do metaphysical work (and conversely).
That said, I think Neil is on the right track when he suggests that one important dimension of the objective/subjective contrast is about degrees of freedom or constraint about choice of conceptual framework. In the sciences and mathematics, our choice of theory is highly constrained by experimentation, observation (in science) and proof (in mathematics). In poetry and art, there’s very little constraint. In ethics, there seems to be a good bit more constraint than in art, and a good bit less constraint than in physics or mathematics.
None of this stuff is as elegant and simple as dogmatists and True Believers need it to be.
True — though petrushka isn’t talking about consequentialism, but about the conceptual connection between morality and consequences. Both deontology and virtue ethics have ways of taking consequences into account.
In deontology, if I “always act according to that maxim that I could at the same time will to be a universal law,” I need to imagine what a world would be like in which everyone always acted according to my proposed maxim, and what the consequences would be for myself and for humanity in that imagined word. Only if that world is conceptually coherent and reasonably desirable can it be “willed”.
Virtue ethics is not consequentialist in the narrow sense, but moral worth gets assigned to our character in terms of what we habitually tend to do, and habit is a future-oriented, consequence-oriented concept. I count as patient or friendly in terms of what habits I cultivate, what I tend to do in various situations, and that involves the consequences of my actions as much as it does the actions themselves.
I’m not seeing a problem with that.
It is important that what we directly perceive is affordances, and not metaphysical facts. You’ll recall that I doubt the existence of metaphysical facts. Affordances are subjective. What affords me an opportunity may not be of any value to you.
I see it as all about behavior, and not at all about metaphysical truth (and I doubt the existence of that, too).
I very much agree with your penultimate paragraph (the one about constraints).
Kantian Naturalist:
There’s a bit of overlap among them, but moral philosophers have good reasons for distinguishing the three. In any case, what petrushka is talking about is pure consequentialism:
The consequences of X determine its morality.
KN:
Yes, but the important difference is that in deontology, it is the global consequences of the rule that are considered, while in consequentialism, it is the consequences of the individual act.
In the classic scenario, the Gestapo is at the door and Jews are hiding in the attic. Do you lie to the Gestapo? Consequentialists generally say yes, because the end justifies the means: the end of saving the Jews justifies the means of lying. Deontologists tend to say no, because the general rule takes precedence over the consequences in any particular case.
And it isn’t deontological in any narrow sense, either, so the standard trichotomy is justified.