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.
William:
Bullshit. When you say
…you are talking about what people know in reality.
When you say
…you are again talking about what people know in reality.
And when you say
…you are making an assertion about what sane people know in reality.
Why aren’t you brave enough to stand behind your claims?
Never mind — we already know the answer.
hotshoe, to William:
I like it. Snowflake J. Murray.
William:
Just like everyone else, Snowflake.
William,
Let’s say you wake up in the morning with a full bladder. You have a choice between getting up and walking to the bathroom vs. pissing the bed.
If you’re like most of us, you’ll make the effort to walk to the bathroom. Why? Because you know that in reality, the experience of pissing the bed is followed by the experience of lying in a disgusting wet bed that smells like piss. In reality, you don’t want to subject yourself and your wife to that experience, so in reality, you make the choice not to let ‘er rip.
If you employ your “mind powers” and try your level best to “manifest” a reality in which you can piss the bed while staying happy and dry, you will fail. Why? Because your mind powers are impotent to override reality.
In other words, all this posturing about how you don’t care about reality is just that — empty posturing.
William J. Murray,
Yeesh. It is not a logical requirement that the feelings we report as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ refer to an objective sense. Are you making a logical argument or one on reality? Because you seem to flip from one to the other as the mood takes you. You claim that YOUR argument doesn’t require that morality really be objective, yet when I make a parallel claim, out comes the “you can’t prove it!” card. Inconsistent much?
And even the most die-hard objectivist would not argue that EVERY behaviour that we would label ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is so labelled due to sensing such an external arbitration service. Dropping litter? Playing loud music at 2am? Invading foreign countries? Public healthcare free at source? Beginning sentences with ‘and’?
Your fundamental argument, for all the succeeding verbiage in the snipped post, is that a subjective morality is logically inconsistent because it boils down to something which we both agree does not accurately represent the experience. So for the subjective experience we report to not lead to that conclusion, morality must exist outside human heads. But it is not a necessary conclusion from your premises. Morality, the fundamental sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, doesn’t boil down to “because I feel like it” in that vague sense, as we both agree. Adding the word subjective (meaning only: does not exist outside human heads) does not change that.
I am a logically consistent moral subjectivist. How do you do? When I say “that is wrong”, I am merely following a linguistic convention, much as when I say “she is pretty” or “that is funny”. I am neither living nor acting as if morality is objective in your sense, nor do I consider whatever I feel like to be appropriately described as ‘moral’.
Allan Miller:
You are right.
In a debate about morality, is it not safe to assume that when one says “right” and “wrong”, they are talking about “moral” and “immoral” decisions?
No, it doesn’t. (1) We cannot act as if morality is subjective (unilateral moral interventions, moral obligations; moral responsibilities); (2) There’s no compelling reason to care about subjective morality. (3) Subjective morality reduces to principles we consider immoral. The experiential gap between moral sensations and everything else in the same proposed experiential category helps me achieve my argument goals by driving the so-called moral materialist to plead that moral sensations are not like everything else in the same category.
Why? Because they cannot stand for their moral sensations and actions to be correctly categorized as “because I feel like it” because they know that those sensations are far, far more that “just that”. That’s why it “grates” on them.
Logically, under materialism, that is all morality boils down to. Morals are inconsequential, trivial, personal and entirely subjective feelings, even if they are experienced as if they were something much, much more than that.
IOW, the logically-consistent moral subjectivist must agree that even though his/her moral sensations feel very deep and very profound and can be quite compelling, they are actually trivial, inconsequential, entirely subjective feelings that one can simply ignore if they so choose and desensitize themselves from if they wish. One can, if they wish, consider morality to be a kind of character flaw that only saddles them with useless guilt and needlessly constrains their behavior in ways that may not ultimately serve their best interests.
That’s not what it is in actual experience – that’s what we both agree about. Unfortunately for you, logically, that’s what it must boil down to categorically under moral subjectivism. Hence, your extreme cognitive dissonance while (1) insisting they factually exist in the subjective feeling category, and (2) simultaneously insisting that they are more than what that category allows. Logically speaking, they are categorically the same as one’s favorite flavor of ice cream. Nothing more, nothing less. (See my ice cream analogy above).
I never said that “whatever you feel like” would appropriately be labeled “morality”, which would make morality and “whatever you feel like” names for the same set. I said that moral feelings, under moral subjectivism, are a subset under the “whatever you personally, subjectively feel like” set of things, which are dichotomously distinct from the set of “sensory input from an assumed objective world commodity”. IOW, there are all sorts of subsets under the “because I feel like it” category; morality is – under moral subjectivism – one of those subsets.
Your inability to agree to this demonstrates your logical inconsistency because you cannot agree that your morality essentially boils down to “because I feel like it”. The more you insist there is some categorical difference between a moral decision and any other “because I feel like it” decision, the more you demonstrate the power of that particular aspect of my argument.
However, one does moral things for the same categorical reason as they do anything else in that category; because they feel like it, because they can. While morality may feel different from, say, choices concerning our favorite foods, aesthetics, beauty, music, etc., under moral subjectivism we’d still make moral choices for the same essential, categorical reasons: because we feel like it, because we can – even if those feelings are more deeply felt and compulsive than anything else in the same category.
Your life is also inconsequential and trivial so why is it such a stretch to think that your morals might also be?
I almost agree with that. If you said “because we all feel like it” then I’d agree fully. Morality, as demonstrated by history, is malleable.
OMagain said:
Your moral willingness to go along with the group extends only so far as you agree with the group. If the group (society) is doing something you personally consider immoral, then if you personally feel like it, you will act in contradiction to the group. Therefore, morality boils down to “because I feel like it”.
You will go along with the group as long as you feel like it; you will act in contradiction if you feel like it.
Under materialism, it’s not a stretch at all. Morals are trivial and happenstance sensations, part of the delusion of self, along for the ride as matter and energy swirl about however they happen to interact under physical law and mechanical probability.
Once one realizes this, why worry about morality at all?
That’s right. And if I am able to convince enough people of what I feel is right, it becomes what they feel is right too. Our children will then consider that the way it has always been. This is news to you? Perhaps if you have never been able to convince another person of something this may be unfamiliar to you?
That’s right. And this is news to you? You also act in exactly the same manner. I don’t expect everyone in the same society to possesses exactly the same morals. Some things that people consider immoral I don’t, some things the opposite.
Just as pressure is an emergent property of the motions of gas molecules, what we are now can be considered a separate thing as to the underlying components. Just as you would not measure pressure by attempting to track the motions of individual molecules, I do not consider the items that emerge from lower levels to be worthless or meaningless when considered in relation to all the other items that have emerged. You are saying that just because it’s all dust it’s meaningless. Untrue. That my life, all life, is ultimately meaningless is irrelevant from my perspective of living that life. Did you worry about where you were before you were born? No, thought not.
We impose morality on the universe. When there are no more humans there will be no more human morality. I believe this to be the case. And I am fine with that.
There is no evidence whatsoever that even under theism you matter at all. In fact, if you happened to be of the wrong religion you matter so little you can be treated as a thing that can be owned or sacrificed, as the whim takes the priest. I wonder how many political enemies were chosen *by the gods* for sacrifice over the years.
The fact is that most people in history would have preferred to live “under materialism” where their lives might not have mattered long-term to living “under theism” where they are a slave to the whim of whoever is pretending to commune with the gods today.
In what way do you behave differently? Be precise…
Barry Arrington went on a rampage for a dozen threads regarding objective morality. When he was asked about slavery, he ran away. A wise move on his part.
Not as wise as not starting the discussion in the first place, but wise to know when one is beaten.
We can act as if morality exists only in human heads. That is acting as if morality is subjective in the terms laid out.
There is a compelling reason to care about things that make you feel bad or good. Do you not experience these sensations or something? What’s the compelling reason under objectivism? Torture? Karma? Fulfilling some Purpose?
Who’s ‘we’?
Oh, what a triumph, you debating ninja! I ‘plead’ what has never been denied. Morality is different from other things, just as the need to pee is different from the need to drink.
No, it ‘grates’ like any continued misrepresentation, or a continual buzzing sound. It’s the sloganizing itself, as much as the slogan, that irritates. Whatever: being ‘more than that’ is not a reason to regard the sensations as objective under your definition, nor does it uncover any logical inconsistency to subjectivism.
I submit that the objectivist (unless they are actually following a rule book) cannot help but act as if morality is subjective – “Because I Sense the Objective Better Than You (I Don’t Actually Need To, I Can Just Assume It’s Possible For The Sake Of My Argument, And Something About Consequences)”. OK, it needs work; I’m not really one for slogans.
Sure. Other people can go down that road if they wish. Just as some objectivists might believe they deserve to be punished, decide they prefer to side with Satan, or respond to the voices that say “Kill Them All”. Does such an other-person argument wash with you? Nope, me either. I find what someone ‘might’ do under my premises to be totally irrelevant to what I do with ‘em, and says nothing as to their logical consistency.
OMagain said:
That subjectivist morality reduces down to “because I feel like it” is certainly not news to me, although it appears to be new to others who insist it is “something else”.
Allan Miller said:
No, we can’t.
Necessary consequences for both immoral and moral behavior.
You and me. If you don’t consider “because I feel like it, because I can” immoral principles, say so and my job here is done.
Already refuted. You only have two categories to choose from; if it’s “something other than” category “because I feel like it”, then there’s only one other category left, and I’ve made the case elsewhere about how, outside of morality, willingness to unilaterally intervene in the affairs of strangers, obligations and responsibilities only track with objectively existent commodities – unless, as I’ve said before, one is not sane or not behaving rationally.
We all act as if morality refers to an objectively existent commodity; however, due to a priori metaphysical commitments, the moral subjectivist insists it is something utterly contrary to their actual experience of it.
We also tend to act as if there are objective ruled of grammar and objective spellings and definitions of words. But there aren’t.
Language is a community practice, and it changes and evolves.
So does morality. It’s a community practice that changes over time.
I do. Your move. Tell me I’m a liar or you know better then me what’s going on in my head. I dare ya!
I don’t. The only person you can speak with any certainty about is yourself. Perhaps you act like that, I’m willing to take your word for it.
I guess I am not sane, according to you. What color badge would you like me to wear now that you have identified me as ‘other’?
I never agreed with you on that.
Stop fucking lying.
I don’t like using “subjective” and “objective” here. If “subjective” means “of or belonging to one’s own unique self-consciousness as embodied in time and space” — in the way that one’s own personal desires, sensations, or memories clearly are subjective! — than the rules of language — grammar, orthography, and semantics — are certainly not subjective! Does that mean that they are “objective”? Certainly not in the way that biological and physical facts are objective!
I could multiply the examples to underscore my point: the very dichotomy between “objective” and “subjective” is far too crude to do any really interesting and valuable philosophical work.
I do think that the parallel between language and morality is enormously important, because what is at stake here is normativity: the norms of linguistic expression and the norms of intentional action. But I do not think we can get any clarity out of the question, “are the norms subjective or objective?” Depending on what meanings are assigned to “subjective” and to “objective”, the answer to “are the norms subjective or objective?” can range from “both” to “neither”.
Among philosophers today, there’s a raging debate (well, as raging as anything can ever be among white upper-class professionals) about whether normativity is fundamentally social or biological. Myself and a few others are trying to resolve the debate by showing that there are two different kinds of normativity: social normativity and biological normativity.
These two interact in complicated ways: health is mostly a matter of biological normativity, but social normativity is not completely absent (consider the political rhetoric of “sickness” and “disease”, esp in fascism or eugenics), and I doubt the biological or physical dimension of normativity is ever absent — except perhaps in purely formal reasoning. Ethical conduct is somewhere on a continuum between physical health and correct formal reasoning.
Although it is true that
We would have to say a lot more about what “objectivity” means before we could say that the evolution of moral practices means that moral practices are not objective.
After all, our scientific theories are constantly changing! Does that mean that our scientific theories are not objective? Surely not! It means that our scientific theories are not absolute — they are provisional, fallible, and yet also corrigible. A moment’s reflection on this rather obvious fact yields the following: absolute does not mean objective; the contrary of absolute is relative, and the converse of objective is subjective, but since absolute does not mean objective, the contrary of absolute is not subjective and the contrary of subjective is absolute.
And that is why I disagree with everyone here — everyone here is assuming that they are must endorse subjectivism by virtue of rejecting absolutism, or that they must endorse absolutism by virtue of rejecting subjectivism. The problem is that the criticisms of subjectivism are perfectly right, and the criticisms of absolutism are also perfectly right. The arguments go back and forth ad nauseam precisely because each side is correct in its criticisms of the other, and there’s no awareness of a third way.
But there is a third way: once we recognize that there’s no contradiction in seeing that scientific theories are not absolute (because they are provisional, tentative, revisable, fallible, corrigible, etc.) and yet also objective (because they describe and explain features of reality-as-experienced), the way is wide open to exploring the possibility that moral practices can be objective without being absolute.
Rather than say subjective vs objective, how about saying math-like vs statute-like?
I would say “law” but that sounds like laws of science, when i mean laws enacted to regulate humans.
Laws have similarities from time period to time period and from culture to culture, and they also have differences. they change, but slowly.
Language changes via informal rather than formal processes, and it shares that with language, except in France. Morality shares this mode of with language.
KN, I go back to something I said a while back, “Modern” nations have replaced received morality–divine command morality– with laws. Laws are imperfect, fallible, corruptible, but over time they can be modified and improved.
When I was growing up (in the place where I was growing up) there was a popular slogan that you can’t legislate morality. This was code language for maintaining Jim Crow laws. I am no genius, but I asked, isn’t that what all laws do?
If I had been anonymous on the internet, I might have added that the people who recited that slogan were announcing to the world that they intended to continue acting immorally. But for purely selfish reasons, I am averse to having my face bashed in.
petrushka,
That’s surely right, but for one small (or big?) caveat: we will need to have some kind of standard against which to evaluate laws as just or unjust. Plato pointed that out in Crito and in Republic; Thoreau reaffirmed it in “Civil Disobedience”, and Martin Luther King Jr. made it the central point in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:
It seems to me that this distinction between just and unjust laws is of paramount importance, so we shall need some way of explaining this distinction!
KN:
That isn’t my assumption at all, and I’d be surprised if others here are making it. There’s no reason that an objective morality need be absolute. For example, under divine command theory, God can command killing one day and condemn it the next, or allow some people to kill while forbidding it to others.
Which criticisms?
I agree that there can be just and unjust laws, but I disagree with any suggestion that there is any “math-like” authority by which to classify laws and morals. I think we will continue to muddle through without ever reaching the promised land.
I might add that I am not particularly happy with this condition. I have added it to death and taxes for my next rant against the injustice of reality.
Thanks for the review (I think). I have a miniscule book budget so I’m not sure whether to get A Natural History of Human Thinking now 🙁
I’m from Missouri!
Subjective: straightforward, it’s just me, then.
Absolute: no problem, Moses and his tablets. God-given.
Objective: easy to equivocate. From independent from human minds through to fair or consensus.
I don’t think that’s right, as a criticism of DCT. Firstly, the divine command theorist would say that God’s nature is eternal and unchanging, so God does not change His mind. Secondly, the divine command theorist would say that God is essentially and necessarily good.
The problem with DCT is, firstly, that it does not explain how we can know what God commands, or whether or not we are correctly interpreting the divine commandments, or who has the right authority to interpret the commandments. So it doesn’t actually resolve any ethical debates that we mere mortals have. Secondly, it insists that we must simply bite the bullet when it comes to divine commandments that seem to conflict with our ordinary ethical intuitions. (We see this in William Lane Craig, among others.)
If by “subjective” one were to mean “of or belonging to one’s own individual self-consciousness, autobiography, and unique embodied perspective in space and time”, then saying “morality is subjective” effectively destroys all morality. Here’s what I have in mind: if there’s no form or content to any moral judgments and experiences apart from one’s own one’s own individual self-consciousness (etc.), then there’s no distinction between what I ought to do and what I feel I ought to do. Hence there’s no distinction between my desires and my obligations, and that’s equivalent to not having any obligations at all — at most there would be a conflict between my first-order desires and my second-order desires, or between my short-term desires and my long-term desires.
Now, it is true that a properly-raised, ethically decent person will (generally speaking) align his or her obligations with his long-term, second-order desires — but the long-term, second-order desires do not constitute the obligations, which is what happens under subjectivism. The obligations are constituted by the norms of the community with regard to intentional action, and I acquire the requisite motivations for ethical conduct in the process of becoming a member of that community through enculturation and education (if all goes well).
In keeping with the language metaphor, I would suggest that there is a poetry and and art of morality.
When we pose moral conundrums, we tend to conjure up dire situations requiring choices between evils. I find this uninspiring and mostly useless.
Rather than wait for the vanishingly rare opportunity to choose between murdering one innocent person or allow a hundred to die, I think a poetic morality would involve spending time examining how such situations arise and how they might be avoided.
Two rather obvious situations involving lesser of two evils choices are war and abortion.
I know from the experiences of people I know that abortion is self punishing. No sane person would ever get pregnant in order to have an abortion. (Apparently there are a few insane people,)
War is a little different. There are people who enjoy reading about war, watching war movies, talking about war, even participating in it. There are too many of these people to call them insane, but I will call them not like me.
I think in my lifetime there has been progress in avoiding war. we seem to have countless conflicts, but these are what people of my generation called police actions. I would hope that my grandchildren live in a time when police action is more prevention and less killing.
Anticipating and preventing moral catastrophes is something I would call moral poetry. It is not just following rules. It is a creative activity. Proactive.
No link to hand but I read something recently where war over time was looked at and there seems to be an overall downward trend. Which is good. Whatever ‘good’ is in a nihilistic universe anyway! Eh! Eh!
“Better Angles of Our nature”?
keiths:
Alan:
I did show you. I’m not making that assumption, and judging from the rest of your comment, neither are you.
KN is jumping to conclusions when he writes:
keiths:
KN:
I’m not offering it as a criticism of DCT; I’m offering it as evidence that I’m not making the assumption that you attribute to everyone here:
KN:
Then you and William are in agreement on that point.
That’s right. In other words, morality is subjective — and that’s just as true for you and William as it is for the rest of us. Every moral decision you make is ultimately based on what you feel you ought, and ought not, to do.
As I said in the OP:
Objective morality (if it exists at all) has no impact on moral decisions. Subjective morality rules the roost.
petrushka,
You’re missing the point of the dilemmas. They aren’t intended as practical examples for us to follow. They’re thought experiments whose purpose is to unearth the deeper principles beneath our moral decisions.
Take the example you offered. A person who kills one to save a hundred is valuing consequences above rules. A person who refuses to kill the one person because she thinks that deliberate killing is never right is valuing the rule over the consequences.
petrushka,
It’s important to distinguish between the fascination with war and the desire for war.
William J. Murray,
Oh yippee, duelling assertions. OK, we can’t; I can. If I try to persuade someone their actions are ‘wrong’, I am not acting as if morality is adjudicated outside human heads. Really. How can I be?
Wave those arms, William! Wave ’em good! Necessary consequences? Necessary for what? Your argument? What are they? If one objectivist thinks blood transfusion is immoral, and another thinks withholding blood transfusion is immoral, how are these ‘necessary consequences’ apportioned between those opposing moralities?
I don’t think it immoral to respond to the subjective sensations of revulsion at doing harm or warmth at helping others. So if it pleases you to sloganise that as “because I feel like it, because I can”, then no, they aren’t immoral principles per se. It really depends on exactly what people ‘feel like’ doing – it’s the act not the principle. There is a particular character to acts we consider moral and immoral which does not apply to everything we ‘feel like’ doing – a sense of approval or disapproval, rather than just gratification. Which is why the reduction is rejected, just as a simplistic “Wrong is whatever the local Holy Book says is wrong” would be. Subjectivism boils down to internal assessments of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, not the definition of right and wrong as ‘whatever I do/do not feel like doing’.
There is no compelling reason to intervene under objective morality. Who made you its agent? If objective morality has ‘necessary consequences’, that is, and one does not simply choose to insert oneself as the Bringer of those Consequences – because ones feels like, and can, perhaps. Nor does objective existence bring with it obligation or responsibility. Why should I care more about what God/Natural Law thinks of my behaviour than what I and other people think? Other than that they may squash me like a bug, perhaps.
I also reject your dichotomy. I experience a continuum of ‘wrongs’, from strong revulsion to tut-tutting disapproval. I experience a similar range of things I ‘feel like’ doing. There is some overlap, but they are not congruent, and the boundaries are not sharply delineated.
Oh, the ‘prior metaphysical commitments’ card. Yawn and yawn. You have a prior metaphysical commitment which inclines you towards reifying the subjective sense, because it is ‘something else’ – it feels like an external restraint, so it IS an external restraint, praise the Lord. Except, that is, for the small matter of the identical senses of restraint felt by objectivists with opposing moral viewpoints.
Kantian Naturalist,
I think I’m more defending the idea that subjectivism is no less logically consistent than absolutism. I don’t reject absolutism out of hand, it simply rectifies none of the asserted shortcomings of subjectivism.
Alan Miller said:
That’s all I was trying to get you to agree to. I think that’s sufficient for any reasonable, open-minded person to pass judgement on the kind of morality you’re attempting to defend.
Allan Miller:
I’d be interested in reading how you would attempt to persuade someone that something they were doing is immoral. If you feel like it, use some example or make up a hypothetical situation and write how you would go about making your case.
I think of more relevance is how *you* would go about doing such.
I have no such metaphysical commitment. Remember, I don’t care what reality actually is. When I “believe” a thing, that only means I’m acting as if it is true for as long as such behavior/thought patterns seem to benefit me.
As you say, it feels like something else – it feels like an external restraint. I notice that I also act like it is an external restraint or obligation/responsibility. The difference between you and I is that I don’t insist it is not what it appears to be based on prior ideological commitments. Nor do I insist that it is, in fact, what it feels like. I have only argued that (1) it isn’t logically sustainable (outside of what you have already agreed to, above) and (2) sane people cannot act as if it is actually subjective in nature.
What morality in reality actually is, is of no concern to me.
William J. Murray,
*** ie, Joe Not-an-Atheist!
So, the fact that I think one needs to apply a little more subtlety of thought than your attempted reduction to “because I feel like it” conveys, this is a problem for subjectivism?
Tell me, how did you determine that acting upon one’s moral sensations, as a moral principle, is immoral?
William J. Murray,
Typically, they would be causing harm to someone or something. So I might try appealing to the sense of empathy that I know we generally share. Or I might try the ‘how would you like it?’ approach. It might not work.
How would you intervene? Pick your own example.
I wouldn’t.
Alan Miller said:
So, basically, you’d use rhetoric or appeals to emotion which would work on you and within your particular moral structure, but which beg the question from outside of your subjective feelings and moral perspective (why is harming others wrong? and what difference does it make how I would like it?).
I don’t attempt to convince others of such things. If I’m not obligated to physically stop what they are doing, I don’t bother with it at all. I leave them to their own necessary consequences.
It’s a problem for those who recognize the immorality of unilaterally coercing what are categorically nothing more than personal, subjective feelings and views on others.
You are using the term “moral sensation” to make an erroneous equivalence between two categorically different things. You are equivocating.
A sensation can either be entirely subjective feeling, or it can be a subjectively-sensed and interpreted reaction to what is presumed to be data coming from an externally, objectively-generated source. Unilateral coercions of others based on the first kind of “moral sensation” is recognized by rational people as an immoral principle (because I feel like it, because I can); such interventions based on the second kind of “moral sensation” is recognized by sane people as a moral principle (because I sense the behavior is objectively wrong and I am obligated to do something about it).
But if you were to, as a thought experiment, how would you go about it?
How can anything be immoral in that circumstance? If it’s all personal and subjective, nothing is immoral.
And given that you yourself note you have no access to actual objective morality or that it might not even exist how do you know what you are attempting to coerce is not in fact in accordance with said morality?
So, not once in your life have you ever argued with someone over a moral issue?
Unlikely.
As far as I remember, I haven’t tried to convince someone that something is immoral or moral since adopting my natural law morality views. I think I may have made a case once that arguing for the subjective nature of morality was itself an immoral activity, but I certainly wasn’t trying to convince anyone of that. I also alluded to a short argument that homosexuality was as moral as heterosexualty, but I certainly wasn’t trying to convince anyone of that.
I’ll make all sorts of logical arguments for the sake of making those arguments – I enjoy it. But as I’ve said repeatedly, I make them for my own purposes, not in an actual attempt to convince others of anything. As I’ve said before, it is my view that free will individuals choose (at some level) what they believe – no amount of argument I bring can causally change their minds.
So you are uniquely free of ideological commitment? Well done, you. Nonetheless, it is somewhat unreasonable to lob that bomb in my direction, given the huge mass of objectivists who have very deep ideological commitments to some notion of cosmic justice relating to moral affairs.
It actually does not appear to be an external restraint to me; that is how I characterised the objectivist‘s rationalisation. I certainly feel some social moral constraints, and they are to some degree external – but they are not external to human heads. So I am not insisting it is not what it appears to be. It appears to be a conditioned genetic restraint towards empathic behaviours and away from hostile ones within particular circles. But I guess that’s just my prior commitment talking. Oh to be an empty vessel, free of all knowledge of the world!
1) You have failed to offer a formal statement of the ‘logical’ argument, suggesting to me that you just use the word because it adds weight to you assertions. Acting according to one’s own sense of right and wrong is ‘logically’ equivalent to acting according to what one perceives as the NML verdict on right and wrong.
2) If subjective = not resident as a non-human, external phenomenon, then that is precisely how people act all the time.
And yet you evidently care deeply about getting it ‘right’. How strange.