Is morality objective or subjective?

[Belinda]

Immanuel Can wrote:

But when you want to vacation in Majorca, but would have to steal the money from your employer in order to afford it, well, that's a moral matter.

That's my only point there.

Does God require that men are free to choose , or that men should abide by His ordinance?

[Belinda]

Immanuel Can wrote:

But when you want to vacation in Majorca, but would have to steal the money from your employer in order to afford it, well, that's a moral matter.

That's my only point there.

Does God require that men are free to choose , or that men should abide by His ordinance?

[Peter Holmes]

Immanuel Can

Thanks for your disquisition. As usual, you don't address the crucial question. And an appeal to popularity - that many or most people believe morality is objective - is, as I'm sure you'll agree on reflection, a fallacy.

Your claim that moral subjectivism must or is likely to lead to moral nihilism is unjustified. Why should the subjectivity of moral judgements mean that moral judgements are impossible? Your reasoning here is unsound.

So, I repeat the crucial question: what is it about a moral assertion, such as slavery is wrong, that makes it objective - a falsifiable factual claim - rather than a subjective value judgement?

I believe I know why you keep dodging this question. But I may be wrong. So I'll keep asking it until you provide an answer. And please, define your ontology to the tiniest detail if that helps you to answer the question.

[Immanuel Can]

Does God require that men are free to choose , or that men should abide by His ordinance?

As I said to Peter, choice is a sine qua non of morality.

If it were not so, then (just for an example) the mere fact that rape was wrong would also make it impossible. And if it were impossible, there would obviously not need to be any moral prohibition against rape, since it simply could not be done.

[Belinda]

Yes, but there is an alternative moral objectivism, an alternative to theism. That alternative is Humanism.

I know about Humanism very well, Belinda, whether we talk about first manifesto, second, third or whatever. Humanism offers only a gratuitous and unfounded claim about right and wrong. It lacks and anthropogeny that rationalizes with right and wrong. So even on its own term, and even if Theism didn't exist, Humanism would be a failure in that regard.

Given that, as the third manifesto puts it, "Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change." (Precept 2)

Why should something that is the result of an unguided, natural process be obligated to do or not do any actions in particular? If that's what human beings are, then the smart ones will realize that amorality makes sense -- not immorality, and not morality, but rather the selective behaving as "good" or "bad" without particular regard for either, but simply for pragmatic advantage of some kind. And that's what rationalizes perfectly with their anthropogeny, as stated above.

A philosopher who many if not most Humanists endorse is David Hume.I know as was for years a member of a local group.

In the Treatise Hume details the causes of the moral sentiments, in doing so explaining why agreeable and advantageous traits prove to be the ones that generate approval. He claims that the sentiments of moral approval and disapproval are caused by some of the operations of sympathy, which is not a feeling but rather a psychological mechanism that enables one person to receive by communication the sentiments of another (more or less what we would call empathy today).

Sympathy in general operates as follows. First, observation of the effects of another person's “affection” and its outward expressions in his “countenance and conversation” conveys the idea of his passion into my mind. So does observing the typical cause of a passion: if we contemplate the instruments laid out for another's surgery, even someone unknown to us, they evoke ideas in us of fear and pain. Now, we at all times possess a maximally vivid and forceful impression of ourselves. According to Hume's associationism, vivacity of one perception is automatically transferred to those others that are related to it by resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. The relations relevant here are primarily resemblance and contiguity. All human beings, regardless of their differences, are similar in bodily structure and in the types of passions they possess and their causes. The person I observe or consider may further resemble me in more specific shared features such as character or nationality. Because of the resemblance and my contiguity to the observed person, the idea of his passion is associated in my mind with my impression of myself, and acquires great vivacity from it. The sole difference between an idea and an impression is the degree of liveliness or vivacity each possesses. So great is this acquired vivacity that the idea of his passion in my mind becomes an impression, and I actually experience the passion. When I come to share in the affections of strangers, and feel pleasure because they are pleased, as I do when I experience an aesthetic enjoyment of a well-designed ship or fertile field that is not my own, that pleasure of mine can only be caused by sympathy (T 2.2.2–8, 3.3.1.7–8).

(Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy)
Please note that sympathy is a natural psychological mechanism.

[Immanuel Can]

And an appeal to popularity - that many or most people believe morality is objective - is, as I'm sure you'll agree on reflection, a fallacy.

It would be, if I offered it to say that I was right simply because numbers favoured me. To say that would be an ad populum fallacy, in fact.

But it was not an argument point, only an observation. And all that it shows is that far from subjective morality being something that everybody already knows or automatically believes, as your OP took for granted, there is a sizeable audience that needs still needs to you convince them. That's all.

Your claim that moral subjectivism must or is likely to lead to moral nihilism is unjustified. Why should the subjectivity of moral judgements mean that moral judgements are impossible? Your reasoning here is unsound.

Oh, that's very easy to show.

Subjectivism implies, as you have stated, that there is no such thing as a moral fact, that there is no element of reality to which it corresponds. Why we believe in any such morality remains a mystery (on that account). As Nietzsche well understood, a moral subjectivist who thinks his position through will simply end up "beyond good and evil," to use his terms. He will be a moral nihilist, inevitably. It's only those who "taxicab" their beliefs, not following them through to the end, but jumping out midway, that can continue to believe that morality is subjective but somehow also binding.

So, I repeat the crucial question: what is it about a moral assertion, such as slavery is wrong, that makes it objective - a falsifiable factual claim - rather than a subjective value judgement?

Not a thing, if anthropogenic narrative 1 is true. That's quite clear...not at all dodgy, I think you'll find.

But then you're headed down to Nihilism, if you follow that logic.

[Immanuel Can]

Please note that sympathy is a natural psychological mechanism.

Well, Hume blithely hoped Emotivism would prove to be the answer. But Hume had already shot himself in the foot on that one: there is no "ought from an is," (Hume's Gulloutine). Rationally, you can't explain any bridge that goes from the claim, "I feel sympathy" to the claim "I owe the object of my sympathy my help."

Some human beings -- not just psychopaths, but people with conditions like Aspergers Syndrome or autism -- can lack sympathy entirely: explain on a Humean account why that is morally wrong.

[Peter Holmes]

Immanuel Can wrote

Subjectivism implies, as you have stated, that there is no such thing as a moral fact, that there is no element of reality to which it corresponds. Why we believe in any such morality remains a mystery (on that account). As Nietzsche well understood, a moral subjectivist who thinks his position through will simply end up "beyond good and evil," to use his terms. He will be a moral nihilist, inevitably. It's only those who "taxicab" their beliefs, not following them through to the end, but jumping out midway, that can continue to believe that morality is subjective but somehow also binding.

Your persistence in making this unjustified claim is strange. Why we collectively hold to moral values and judgements is not a mystery at all.

So, I repeat the crucial question: what is it about a moral assertion, such as slavery is wrong, that makes it objective - a falsifiable factual claim - rather than a subjective value judgement?

Immanuel Can wrote

Not a thing, if anthropogenic narrative 1 is true. That's quite clear...not at all dodgy, I think you'll find.

But then you're headed down to Nihilism, if you follow that logic.

I hope that your evasion of the crucial question is as evident to everyone following this thread as it is to me. And, in the spirit of generosity, I refrain from concluding that there's even a hint of dishonesty here. Please answer the question, using your anthropogenic narrative 2.

[uwot]

I hope that your evasion of the crucial question is as evident to everyone following this thread as it is to me.

Have no fear. Anyone who has been here for long enough knows the pattern. Mr Can will persist with his fawning William Lane Craig impersonation until he realises he's not talking to an idiot; at which point he will give up, lurk in the shadow for a while and pounce on someone fresh when he thinks everyone has forgotten. Any day now, I reckon.

[Peter Holmes]

Thanks, uwot.

It does feel like conversing in a vacuum. Good to know we're not.

Blimey. Has no one ever got Mr Can to the sticking point where he has to admit he's wrong? Perhaps he's a teflon troll.

The power of a delusion - and of the ideological commitment that requires you to sustain it.

[uwot]

Blimey. Has no one ever got Mr Can to the sticking point where he has to admit he's wrong?

Many times. That's the point when he hides under the bridge again; has a think about it and in the absence of any critical challenge, convinces himself that he's right after all, and comes back with exactly the same nonsense that didn't fool anyone the last time.

The power of a delusion - and of the ideological commitment that requires you to sustain it.

Well yes. When you put it like that, it is something to wonder at.

[Walker]

“So, I repeat the crucial question: what is it about a moral assertion, such as slavery is wrong, that makes it objective - a falsifiable factual claim - rather than a subjective value judgement?”

Hello.

Although you directly addressed IC, to answer your question, what I see:

Slavery is the total control of another person’s life.

Life is all that can be known for certain.
Therefore, effect upon life is the objective standard for the morality of action.

For instance, with life as the objective standard for all acts, then we can say that act of taking life is objectively wrong.

This is why the taking of life is the ultimate punishment.
It is the absolute wrong.
You don’t punish someone by doing right to them.

This is why those who must take life, even when it’s sanctioned by the relative values of society, suffer terribly, because by objective morality they have done wrong, the body knows although the intellect may be obscured.

By the objective standard of life, by living we are all causally connected with the taking of life, in one way or another, so we are all objectively complicit in immorality.

Coming to grips with this realization, once it dawns in the noggin, may be deep and profound enough to require more than a glib reconciliation of shoulder-shrugging agnosticism.

[Peter Holmes]

Thanks again, uwot.

Wished I'd known I was a hamster in the Teflon Troll's wheel. Mind you, it's exercise both necessary and entertaining for hamsters.

Okay. We know that moral judgements don't make falsifiable factual claims, so that morality isn't objective, in any anthropogenic narrative. And that to maintain that it is is irrational - and motivated by the need to justify a strain of theism.

But what puzzles me is that moral subjectivism isn't at all incompatible with classical theism.

Oh, wait - there's another wheel spinning.

[Walker]

Because life is the objective measure, then the taking of life through slavery is wrong.

Why?

Because by the objective standard of life, slavery imposes arbitrary limitations to an otherwise full and natural life.

By the objective standard of life, slavery is not the ultimate immorality.
Murder is.

Theft of material goods is also wrong when measured against the objective standard of life, because what is stolen is the life-force that was required for another to acquire those material goods. This is why income redistribution is wrong.

From the objective, we can move to the metaphorical, and say that many things get murdered.

This could be also be known as spirit builder, or spirit crusher, if the tradition permits.

[Impenitent]

Because life is the objective measure, then the taking of life through slavery is wrong.

Why?

Because by the objective standard of life, slavery imposes arbitrary limitations to an otherwise full and natural life.

By the objective standard of life, slavery is not the ultimate immorality.
Murder is.

Theft of material goods is also wrong when measured against the objective standard of life, because what is stolen is the life-force that was required for another to acquire those material goods. This is why income redistribution is wrong.

From the objective, we can move to the metaphorical, and say that many things get murdered.

This could be also be known as spirit builder, or spirit crusher, if the tradition permits.

some humans have always been more human than others...

-Imp