I don't have statistics on how often people change their beliefs.
I seems sufficient to say that people do change their beliefs and that people search for objective truth and objective morality.
Introducing fuzzy qualifiers like "core" and "very" doesn't change anything.
Here's a news story about a guy who had a clearly significant change of heart when he went from being a ‘full-on bigot’ to fighting bathroom bans on behalf of his 16-year-old daughter. https://fortune.com/2024/04/11/meet-fat ... room-bans/ What explains his change of heart? in his own words: "When it was my child, it just flipped a switch".
Would we say that moral truth came and slapped him in the face or just that his personal perspective altered due to changed circumstances in his personal life? Probably the latter, right? Isn't something similar typically the case when people change their minds about moral details? Don't they more or less always describe their change of heart in terms of changed perspectives caused by some change in their own life?
Atla wrote: ↑Sun Apr 14, 2024 6:56 pm
Throughout history, it never even occured to 90%+ of people that morality could be anything other than objective. Such a concept, such a possibility didn't even exist for them. Wanting it / valuing it / searching for it, didn't enter the picture for them.
Those people lived in little mud villages where everyone just knew that everything their priest or imam told them was true and there was no need or right to ever doubt anything. Indoor toilets didn't enter the picture for them. Theior concerns were entirely parochial.
But you make a point. They had moral certainty even without resorting to any distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, because they had a whole set of moral beliefs that were impervious to doubt. That inubitable moral claim might be that once a man sold his 12 year old daughter to a neighbour then she became that man's property and her duties in the bedroom were those of a wife. But if you told them that was wrong, you would get dipped upside down in a river until you stopped saying evil things.
We often confuse these moral positions which we are unable to doubt with the product of objective observation. Is there a pressing subset of our moral beliefs that must not be doubted for fear of cognitive dissonance perhaps, and do we look to the concept of objectivity to enclose that set of beliefs in curtain walls?
Actually I'm not sure if you experience morality the same way most people do. To most people, morality isn't just unquestionably objective because the priest or imam preaches the truth, but because they experience morality as being part of the external world. Morality isn't inside, instead it's outside and everywhere, it's inherently part of the external world. That's the default psychology of morality. So they just follow what seems to be already there in the world. They perceive it, feel it, follow it. So those who question their objective morality are then often seen as simply insane.
The insight that morality is actually internal, is fairly new and makes people realize that all along they've been deceived by a psychological illusion, they were often living for that illusion. Many people simply can't live with this realization and will stick with the default objective morality forever.
(And of course a large part of history was and still is about the clash of these objective moralities)
The title asks "WHY search for moral objectivity?".
I told you.
And your response was that people don't change their beliefs and people don't want to change their beliefs.
Which seems to be clearly false.
Would we say that moral truth came and slapped him in the face or just that his personal perspective altered due to changed circumstances in his personal life? Probably the latter, right? Isn't something similar typically the case when people change their minds about moral details? Don't they more or less always describe their change of heart in terms of changed perspectives caused by some change in their own life?
What does that have to do with "moral objectivity" or "moral subjectivity"? Or searching for moral objectivity?
