McBell
Unbound
I agree.
Unfortunately each perso9n has their own "distinctiveness" to the term.
They may overlap, but since they are different from person to person, Morals are subjective.
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Are Objective Standards for Morals Superior in Practice to Subjective Standards for Morals?
- Thread starter Sunstone
- Start date
Unfortunately each perso9n has their own "distinctiveness" to the term.
They may overlap, but since they are different from person to person, Morals are subjective.
I get the sense that a conversation with you would be no fun, so I'm out. Find someone else to shout at.
How did you come to your conclusion? Did you just take a poll? Did you research the terms? Did you just make up what you wanted?
Can you show me how you do this with other fields where you respect the actual fields?
IF I were a betting man, I would wager all I had that you do not just make STUFF up to fields you respect the most nor would you do so to people that you respect the most.
McBell
Unbound
this very thread demonstrates it.
And you would lose your bet.
everyone has good and bad points.
My liking/respecting/loving someone doe snot blind me to their bad points.
I like/respect/love them despite their bad points.
I do not understand your fields question.
So you would say that slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries in the US was not truly immoral--some people did and some people didn't have those values about its wrongfulness.
In ancient Rome, boys (by the thousands, according to one commentator) born to slaves and the lower classes were taken and castrated in order to be used as sex toys. You would say that there is nothing really, truly wrong with that?
I wonder how something understood as truly subjective could, excepting gross distortion of the word, be construed as morality in any meaningful way. When pogroms and genocide are on the same moral footing as disaster relief and food banks, there should be some reconsideration of a position. When morality has been debased to mere preference and can be likened to color choice and musical inclination, what have you got?
To answer the question, obviously. A subjective morality has no philosophical basis for imposition and loses all ground for even judgement.
I've wondered exactly this also. You've articulated it in a way I wasn't able to.
McBell
Unbound
Morality being "understood" as objective does not make it objective.
The problem with your claims about objective morality is that there are only extremely subjective methods of discovering what it constitutes.
One person picks their interpretation of some bronze age warlord as the authority and somebody else picks their interpretation of a 7th century Arabic warlord and somebody else picks something else as an authority and. ...
It all comes down to humans picking their subjective way through the human situation.
Tom
The Golden Rule is about what is objectively right, and cannot pertain to only a particular individual. Notice how it doesn't make sense to interpret the Golden Rule as a rule that applies to only oneself but doesn't apply to anyone else.
What are you calling "extremely subjective methods"? Are mathematical facts obtained by these "extremely subjective methods"?
McBell
Unbound
The golden Rule is "objective" until you meet a masochist...
Or rapist...
No one here espousing nihilism ("subjectivism") or relativism has answered these questions. I wonder why?
No, obviously the Golden Rule does not depend on the nonexistence of rapists or masochists.
McBell
Unbound
except that it does in application,,, by the masochist
I don''t have a clue as to how that is supposed to make sense. Perhaps you could try to writing more than a sentence fragment.
Why don't you try answering the questions in #226?
There is an argument there about whence objectivity comes and the difference between moral objectivity and moral realism. That still doesn't address that a subjective morality is incoherent and useless. This is why very few people behave or believe in a way that is consistent with a subjective morality.
What claim(s) did I make about objective morality, other than it is better suited to applicability in life?
You're better than such a shallow display.
At a guess, addressing them requires facing the dissonance between how they think and behave and what they proclaim philosophically.
Yeah, something like that. A little reflection exposes that incoherence of "moral subjectivism" (whatever that is). If the "subjectivist" were to answer, "I believe that enslaving someone and castrating a child are wrong for me to do, but those are not objectively immoral acts," then the question is: Why are such acts wrong for that "subjectivist" to do? It's the same incoherence that people who espouse relativism express. It's exactly like saying, "I know the sun is not objectively triangular, but I believe it's triangular."
My apologies if I misunderstood something. I thought you'd claimed that objective morality exists and is known. Or at least can be known.
Morality is an abstract concept. It's like "technology". It gets better and more sophisticated (mostly) the more we work on it. That's why humanism is so much better than Leviticus.
Tom
The Golden Rule is a rule of thumb. It is nothing like a principle of objective morality. One of the justifications for the USA Christian slavers was that a lifetime of hard labor was a fair exchange for Christianization. If the slavers had been poor benighted n*gig*rs they would have wanted a chance to get to know Jesus and avoid Hell.
"Do unto others as you would have done to you" is an excruciatingly subjective method of determining morality, especially when religious stuff like afterlife gets blended into the mix.
Tom
Well, I do believe those things. I just didn't make any claims to that effect. Which is why I was somewhat confused about what you were addressing.
I'll say that learning, or perhaps discovering, morality involves both process and inspiration. I'd propose that we often by inspiration or instinct know that some actions are moral and others are repugnant. The process is why we have, by and large, more refined moral philosophies than previous generations. All right minded people today agree that torture, or child sex slavery as Nous pointed out, are abhorrent moral atrocities. That isn't a statement of preference or value, but a reflection of an underlying metaphysical truth about how the universe ought to be ordered. That is, an objective morality.