Is morality objective or subjective?

Should you think about your duty, or about the consequences of your actions? Or should you concentrate on becoming a good person?

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Atla
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Atla »

Skepdick wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 7:01 am
Atla wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 5:12 am Seriously, why is it so difficult to comprehend that
1. mind-dependence as in no absolute division, boundary between the mind and the external world, and
2. mind-dependence as in a literal dependence on the human mind
are two totally different things that shouldn't be conflated?

Someone explain this to me pls.
Because they aren't different things.

Sure, that's two ways of describing it, but the practical implication is identical.

Where's the boundary between my memories, and Aristotle's memories once I've read his writings?

No minds -> no experience
No experience -> no memory

So how would memories be acquired, exactly and how would they be transferred between humans if minds ceased to exist?

Insisting that X remains after minds disappear is an untestable and unfalsifiable prediction. It's not even wrong!
That didn't make a lick of sense. You sure you're not a chatbot or from a parallel universe?
Skepdick
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Skepdick »

Atla wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:27 pm That didn't make a lick of sense. You sure you're not a chatbot or from a parallel universe?
Maybe I am. Who knows?

Have I landed on a universe where humans are dumber than chatbots?
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Sculptor
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Sculptor »

Question:

Is morality objective or subjective?

Answer:

No it is not.
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Sculptor
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Sculptor »

Skepdick wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:50 pm
Atla wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 2:27 pm That didn't make a lick of sense. You sure you're not a chatbot or from a parallel universe?
Maybe I am. Who knows?

Have I landed on a universe where humans are dumber than chatbots?
You might well be.
I'd advise you to stay there and don't come here.
Skepdick
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Skepdick »

Sculptor wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 5:14 pm You might well be.
I'd advise you to stay there and don't come here.
If it pisses you off, then visiting is practically mandatory.
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Sculptor
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Sculptor »

Skepdick wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 5:17 pm
Sculptor wrote: Thu Jun 01, 2023 5:14 pm You might well be.
I'd advise you to stay there and don't come here.
If it pisses you off, then visiting is practically mandatory.
Yep. That statement is dumber than a chatbot.
Magnus Anderson
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Magnus Anderson »

Skepdick wrote: Wed May 31, 2023 7:16 pmTake these two sentences:

Here's a goat.
Here's a goat that exists.

What is the second sentence telling you about the goat over and above the first sentence? Absolutely nothing! It's a frivolous expression.
They are two different sentences that have one and the same meaning. In both sentences, you're pointing to one and the same portion of reality and saying that the contents of that portion of reality can be represented by the word "goat".
And I am most certainly not trying to tell you anything about reality, portions of it; or the goat occupying spacetime!
That's EXACTLY what you're doing.
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Skepdick »

Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 3:32 pm
And I am most certainly not trying to tell you anything about reality, portions of it; or the goat occupying spacetime!
That's EXACTLY what you're doing.
You are EXACTLY wrong.

It's not your place to determine what I am doing when I use my words.

What I'm saying is that there's a goat. All that nonsense about "reality", "spacetime" and whatnot is your bullshit.
Magnus Anderson
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Magnus Anderson »

Veritas Aequitas wrote: Wed May 31, 2023 5:24 amIn simple terms, when you claim that things in reality are absolutely independent of the human mind, there is an inevitable REALITY_GAP between you and the-thing-by-itself.
What do you mean by "reality gap"?
As such, how can you ever be certain that there is an independent reality out there and what you know of it, is what it should be?
I know there is a tree in my garden even when I am not looking at it because it's been there for years. Each time I looked inside my garden, it was there. If you don't trust me, you can sit in front of it and watch what happens for a while. See whether or not it disappears at times. I can assure you that it never does. In fact, wouldn't that be kind of strange? A tree suddenly disappearing and then suddenly reappearing? That's not how things work in reality, isn't it? In order for a tree to disappear, it has to be broken down into one or more pieces and then someone or something has to move those pieces to another place. It's quite a bit of a process. There is nothing sudden about it.

Here's the important bit:

To say that portion of space P was occupied by thing T at some point in time t is to say that if a man observed that portion of reality P in its entirety ( i.e. from all relevant angles and distances ) that he would have observed thing T.

As such, when someone says that the tree in my garden did not exist at some point in time t when noone observed it, they are saying that, if someone observed the portion of reality it occupied at that point in time t, that they wouldn't have observed a tree.

Do you really believe that? I don't think so. I don't think there's a single anti-realist who does so. Yet, they call themselves anti-realists.
Kant is an idealist, i.e. Transcendental Idealist;
Plato was an idealist too. But he wasn't an anti-realist.
I am not sure how you can be a moral objectivist from the philosophical realist sense, perhaps it is based on intuition.
Can you explain.
I will do so in a lengthy response to Popeye.
Magnus Anderson
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Magnus Anderson »

Skepdick wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 3:36 pmYou are EXACTLY wrong.

It's not your place to determine what I am doing when I use my words.

What I'm saying is that there's a goat. All that nonsense about "reality", "spacetime" and whatnot is your bullshit.
People do not always understand the full implications of what they are saying. That's why they can be blind to their own contradictions.

There are really only two possibilities here:

1) You are not aware of the full implications of what you're saying

2) You are using English language in your own, idiosyncratic, way

I suspect it's ( 1 ).

In English language, the two expressions "There is a goat" and "There is a portion of reality that can be represented by the word goat" mean one and the same thing.
Skepdick
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Skepdick »

Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 5:10 pm
Skepdick wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 3:36 pmYou are EXACTLY wrong.

It's not your place to determine what I am doing when I use my words.

What I'm saying is that there's a goat. All that nonsense about "reality", "spacetime" and whatnot is your bullshit.
People do not always understand the full implications of what they are saying.
Except you, right?

You understand the full implications of what you are saying.
Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 5:10 pm That's why they can be blind to their own contradictions.
The issue at hand isn’t contradictions. It is frivolous expressions.

There is a goat. You see it. I see it. The end.

Whether it exists or not is metaphysical nonsense.
Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 5:10 pm There are really only two possibilities here:

1) You are not aware of the full implications of what you're saying

2) You are using English language in your own, idiosyncratic, way
So peculiar.

Why isn’t the third option on the table?

3) You aren’t aware of the implications of what you are saying.
Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 5:10 pm
I suspect it's ( 1 ).
I suspect it’s 3.
Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 5:10 pm In English language, the two expressions "There is a goat" and "There is a portion of reality that can be represented by the word goat" mean one and the same thing.
Literally nobody (except philosophers) speaks like that.

You must be using English in an idiosyncratic way.

If the two sentences are identical in meaning why do you need all the extra words to communicate zero additional meaning?
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Sculptor
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Sculptor »

Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 3:32 pm
Skepdick wrote: Wed May 31, 2023 7:16 pmTake these two sentences:

Here's a goat.
Here's a goat that exists.

What is the second sentence telling you about the goat over and above the first sentence? Absolutely nothing! It's a frivolous expression.
They are two different sentences that have one and the same meaning. In both sentences, you're pointing to one and the same portion of reality and saying that the contents of that portion of reality can be represented by the word "goat".
And I am most certainly not trying to tell you anything about reality, portions of it; or the goat occupying spacetime!
That's EXACTLY what you're doing.
It is perfectly possible that those sentences have two completely different meanings, depending on the context.

First might be to show a representation of a goat in a line drawing, and the second to point to a real goat in the yard.

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Sculptor
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Sculptor »

Magnus Anderson wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 5:10 pm In English language, the two expressions "There is a goat" and "There is a portion of reality that can be represented by the word goat" mean one and the same thing.
And that is wrong too..

"There is a goat" is ambiguous. It might suggest that somewhere anywhere such a thing as a goat exists. Or in answer to a question. What animal is ready? "There is a goat" has a new meaning. It might also be use to point to a specific animal that another has not seen. As in Oh look "there is a goat".

The second statement is making a philosophical point, that "there is a goat" simply does not convey at all.
Skepdick
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Skepdick »

Sculptor wrote: Fri Jun 02, 2023 6:59 pm "There is a goat" is ambiguous.
No it isn't. Not when accompanied by the finger-pointing at the fucking goat.

There's a sentence on your screen.
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Re: Is morality objective or subjective?

Post by Magnus Anderson »

popeye1945 wrote: Sun May 28, 2023 6:56 pmThe physical world is utterly meaningless in the absence of a conscious subject, so, how on earth could morality be objective unless the conscious subject created it outside himself/herself? Let stop beating this horse, its dead. Morality is biological extension, an expression of humanity, the subjective meaning made objective in his outer world in behavioral norms, rules/laws, and institutions/churches/temples to make these subjective sentiments sacred, and to be used in the judgment of others.
In the ontological sense, the word "objective" means "existing independently of minds". To say that a thing exists independently of minds is to say that it would exist even if minds ceased to exist. The question of this thread, then, is "Would morality continue to exist if all minds ceased to exist?"

The first thing that needs to be done in order to answer that question is to understand what the word "morality" means.

The term "morality" means "the set of all laws that someone [ an individual, a group of people or everyone ] ought to obey in order to maximize their chances of attaining their highest goal".

If it actually meant something like "a set of beliefs about what is right and what is wrong held by someone", then morality would clearly be subjective, since beliefs exist within minds, and if something exists within a mind, removing all minds from existence would also remove that thing from existence. But is that what the word actually means?

Of course, you can use the word "morality" that way, and a lot of people already do, but in that case, you'd no longer have a word for what moral beliefs are attempting to represent. ( Every belief, if it is a proper belief, is attempting to represent a portion of reality. Moral beliefs are no exception. If there is no portion of reality that moral beliefs are describing, they are not beliefs, but something else. A belief is a proposition held to be true by someone, and every proposition, in order to be a proposition, must consist of two parts: the described and the description. Remove one of these parts and you no longer have a proposition. )

Morality isn't a set of beliefs. It is a set of laws. And it isn't a set of any kind of laws. Societal laws ( i.e. how societies behave, e.g. "When a resident of a modern day country kills someone, he goes to jail" ) and personal laws ( i.e. how individual people behave, e.g. "Peter never eats meat" ) are not moral laws. Moral laws are laws of the form "Under circusmtances C, the best decision for person P or group of people G is D."

Given that morality is a set of laws, we need to ask the following questions:

1) What is a law?

2) Do laws exist?

3) Are laws ontologically objective? Is their existence independent of minds? If minds ceased to exist, would laws continue to exist?

Let's answer these questions one by one.

WHAT IS A LAW?

A law is a limit on what is possible. It is that which forces a portion of reality to be certain way in some or all situations. If there are no laws, i.e. if no laws exist, it means that everything is possible in every situation. If there are laws, i.e. if some of them exist, it means that certain things aren't possible in certain situations.

The simplest example of a law is the law of identity, "A = A". That statement is saying that every thing is identical to itself in all situations. It's saying that there is a law that prohibits all things in all situations from not being identical to themselves.

Another example is the mathematical law captured by the statement "2 + 2 = 4". That statement is saying that every set consisting of two sets of two elements is a set consisting of four elements. It's saying that there is a law that prohibits all sets consisting of two sets of two elements from being sets of one element, sets of two elements, sets of three elements, sets of five elements, etc.

Another example of a law is the causal law that is "If you press the light switch at point in time t, the light bulb will turn on in less than a second". That statement is saying that there is a law that prohibits the light bulb from not turning on when you press the light switch at point in time t.

Finally, there are moral laws. Moral laws are laws of the form "Under circumstances C, the best decision for person P or group of people G is D". An example of a moral law is "The best decision for a man, every man, in every situation is to choose to do only what his mind unanimously agrees it's the best thing to do". ( I understand that most people don't define the term "morality" this broadly. Most use it narrowly, to refer to social morality, i.e. to what's the right way to treat other living beings. Keep in mind that I define it a bit differently, to mean what's the right thing to do in general. )

DO LAWS EXIST?

Given that a law is a limit on what's possible, it follows that, if there are things that aren't possible in some or all situations, then there are laws. And if there are laws, then they exist.

To say that laws do not exist is to say that there are no laws, i.e. that there are no limits on what is possible. That, in turn, means that everything is possible in every situation.

I can assure you that literally everyone believes that we live in a world in which at least some of the things aren't possible. And if there are people who argue otherwise, which I'm sure there are, I can assure you that they are contradicting themselves.

The idea that laws exist is difficult to accept by some people. These tend to be people who think in terms of "If you can't touch something, it does not exist". They affirm the existence of nothing but physical objects. They have a tendency to bastardize highly abstract concepts by reducing them to the most similar concept they are familiar with. Pragmatists, for example, have done that with the concept of truth by reducing it to the concept of useful belief ( or to the concept of the limit of inquiry, as C. S. Peirce did. ) A number of physicists have done the same with the concept of past by reducing it to memories in the present. Others have done it by reducing the concept of time to "what clocks show". And so on. There are many examples. If you ask these people, laws either do not really exist, since they aren't physical objects, or they do, but they are not want we think they are, they are merely concepts inside our minds ( e.g. mental tools that we use to predict what's going to happen in the future. )

The fact of the matter is that the universe is not merely the sum of everything that was, everything that is and everything that will be. The universe does not merely refer to what is actual. It also refers to what is possible. And what is possible is determined by laws.

ARE LAWS ONTOLOGICALLY OBJECTIVE?

If minds ceased to exist, would laws continue to exist?

To answer that question, it's important to understand the difference between mutable and immutable things.

A mutable thing is a thing that can change. A thing that can change is a thing that can go through multiple stages of existence. The number of stages a mutable thing goes through is called its lifespan. A mutable thing, if it has a beginning, starts existing at one point in time, and if it has an end, it stops existing at another. Typically, a mutable thing occupies a portion of space at a single point in time at every stage of its existence. However, this is not a definitional requirement -- a mutable thing can occupy any number of moments at any stage of its existence. A mutable thing can exist in the same exact state at every stage of its existence, meaning, it does not have to change at all. But it has the capacity to do so. The state of a mutable thing at any stage of its existence, as well as its lifespan, can be determined, partially or completely, by other things. Physical objects, for example, are mutable things.

An immutable thing, on the other hand, is a thing that has no capacity for change at all. An immutable thing can exist at one or more points in time but it cannot go through more than one stage of its existence. The set of everything that was, that is and that will be is an example. That's the state of the universe at every single point in time. It's a thing that exists at more than one moment -- actually, at every single moment of existence -- but that goes through no more than one stage of its existence. The state of a physical object at a single point in time is another example. It's a thing that exists at a single point in time and a thing that goes through exactly one stage of its existence. The truth value of a proposition is yet another example. If a proposition is true on one day, it is true on all days. None of these things can change. As such, nothing can change them. If they exist, nothing can make them disappear from existence. They are, in a sense, permanent.

That said, if a law is an immutable law, it cannot cease to exist.

Are all laws immutable?

Absolutely not. There are mutable and immutable laws. Let me illustrate that with a very simple example.

Consider a universe that consists of exactly 3 points in time. At each point in time, nothing exists except for a light switch and a light bulb. At each point in time, the light switch can only be in one of the following two states: it can be "up" or it can be "down". Similarly, at each point in time, the light bulb can only be in one of the following two states: it can be "on" or it can be "off".

Let us say that the following laws apply:

1) Whenever the light switch is "up" at point in time 1, the light bulb is "on" at point in time 2.

2) Whenever the light switch is "down" at point in time 1, the light bulb is "off" at point in time 2.

3) Whenever the light switch is "up" at point in time 2, the light bulb is "off" at point in time 3,

4) Whenever the light switch is "down" at point in time 2, the light bulb is "on" at point in time 3.

The 4 laws that I just mentioned are immutable laws. They go through exactly one stage of their existence. They have no capacity to change. They are what they are.

However, if we said that 1) and 3) are two different stages of one and the same law, that law would be a mutable law. And in this particular case, it would be a law that changed ( since it went from "If up, then on" to "If up, then off". )

Are moral laws immutable laws?

A morality is a set of immutable laws, i.e. laws that cannot change. They either exist or they do not. If they exist, nothing can make them disappear from existence. Thus, if minds ceased to exist, moral laws would continue to exist.
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