uwot wrote:It's called democracy, Mr Can.
Actually, it's called "justification." You need to justify your confidence by reference to a universal truth that binds other people to accept your argument.
Immanuel Can wrote:But none of us -- not me, and not you -- has any authority to compel morality upon others.
That's right, Mr Can. That's why we have the law.
Hah. You've already admitted you don't think law= right, but you can't say why you believe it either. See below...
Immanuel Can wrote:You judge the law as "right": you must do so on the basis of a universal axiom, or you've got nothing.
That remains true. All you're saying is essentially, "I, uwot, like X," or "I, uwot, do not like Y." You're not capable of convincing anyone else they owe it to join you in your assessment. And you can't show that the laws you "like" are good ones.
I know enough about the philosophical history of ethics to know that there never has been a universal axiom that is ever likely to be universally accepted.
Universally moral does not imply
universally accepted. You've made a category error there, an unwarranted amphiboly.
Everybody realizes that a person may run afoul of a moral precept with which that person does not happen to agree. That's why we don't ask prisoners if they feel agreement about our sending them to jail if they've committed a crime. We recognize that their agreement is not the issue: the rightness/wrongness of their action is.
Your second fallacy is to think truth and consensus are related. That's easy to disprove. At one time in history, 100% of the world, including the best and brightest, all believed the world was flat. And every last one of them was wrong. If objective morality exists, it would not matter how many people decided they disagreed with it.
It is not necessary for people to accept that, for example, rape is wrong for rape to be wrong. It is objectively wrong. And if you say it's only subjectively wrong, then you are giving permission to every other person but yourself to do it. If that's a consequence you accept, then fine. If not, you've got a problem.
some of us can advocate pluralism and tolerance and support laws that promote those things.
Actually, I can, but logically you can't. You just don't know why you can't. "Advocate" has no meaning if you don't have any moral standards to defend. And you can't tell me why "pluralism" and "tolerance" ought to be values, because you insist they're subjective.
Meanwhile, by insisting that I
ought to believe in them, you've invoked yet another universal moral judgment. You should be more consistent: if moral judgments are all relative, nothing I can say to you can be 'wrong" or "bad" -- at least, not in any sense that a rational person is bound to accept.