I don’t think that science has disproven, nor even suggests, that it is unlikely that an Intelligent Designer was responsible for the world, and intended it to come into existence.
I don’t think that science has, nor even can, prove that divine and/or miraculous intervention is impossible.
I don’t think that the fact that we can make good predictive models of the world (and we can) in any way demonstrates that how the world has observedly panned out was not entirely foreseen and intended by some deity.
I think the world has properties that make it perfectly possible for an Intelligent Deity to “reach in” and tweak things to her liking – and that even if it didn’t, it would still be perfectly possible, given Omnipotence, just as a computer programmer can reach in and tweak the Matrix.
I don’t think that science falsifies the idea of an omnipotent,omniscient deity – at all.
I think that only rarely has this even been claimed by scientists, and, of those, most of them were claiming that science has falsified specific claims about a specific deity, not the idea in principle of a deity.
I do think that the world is such that IF there is an omnipotent, omniscient deity, EITHER that deity does not have human welfare as a high priority OR she has very different ideas about what constitutes human welfare from the ones that most people hold (and as are exemplified, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), OR she has deliberately chosen to let the laws of her created world play out according to her ordained rules, regardless of the effects of those laws on the welfare of human beings, perhaps trusting that we would value a comprehensible world more than one with major causal glitches. In my case, her trust was well-placed.
I do think that the evidence we have is far more consistent with the idea that life and its origins are the result of processes consistent with others we see acting in the world, and not a result of some extraordinary intervention or series of extraordinary interventions, regardless of any question as to whether a benign or otherwise deity designed those processes with the expectation that life would be a probable or inevitable result.
I don’t think that it follows that, were we to find incontrovertible evidence of a Intelligent Creator (for instance, an unambiguous message in English configured in a nebula in some remote region of space, or on the DNA of an ant encased in amber millions of years ago) that that would mandate us in any way to worship that designer. On the basis of her human rights record I’d be more inclined to summon her to The Hague.
I think that certain theological concepts regarding a benevolent deity useful, inspiring, entirely consistent with science, and may reflect reality.
I don’t myself, any more, believe in some external disembodied intelligent and volitional deity, simply because I am no longer persuaded that either intelligence or volition are possible in the absence of a material substrate. But I do understand why people think this is false, and that consciousness, intelligence and volition are impossible, even in principle, to account for in terms of material/energetic processes, and I also understand that, although I think, for reasons that satisfy myself, that they are mistaken, the case is not an easy one to articulate, not least because of the intrinsically reflexive nature of cogitating on cogitation.
I think that “free will” is an ultimately incoherent concept; I think that the question “do we have free will?” is ill-posed, and ultimately meaningless. I think the better question is: Do I have the ability to make informed choices for which I am morally responsible?” and I think the answer is clearly yes.
Anyone else want to unload?
Psychopathy is a dimension, not a category.
William,
True. What constitutes self-contradiction on your part is saying one thing, then saying the opposite.
We’re talking about your attempt to justify it as objective. Here you attempt to show that child torture is objectively wrong:
Less than 24 hours later, we have the following exchange:
keiths:
William:
That depends on your packed-in, assumed meaning of “in reality”. Perhaps you mean “provides no objectively observable difference in actual behavior.” – but, you are still making huge, unsupported assumptions, such as that the cascading effect of a fundamentally different kinds of beliefs about morality will not produce, on balance, vastly different behavioral results – regardless of whether or not what they refer to is true.
Let’s unpack that a little bit and see if it still floats. On the one hand, we have the belief that it is okay to simply force others to do as you wish because that is what you prefer. One can easily see how this will likely cascade down into behavioral patterns that increasingly treat others as nothing more than means to an end – one’s own personal preferences – reducing the sense of intrinsic value for human life and a loss of respect for any individual freedoms or supposed individual rights.
Now, let’s compare that to the belief that some thing are objectively right and wrong regardless of personal preferences, and that there are innate, necessary (inescapable) consequences for moral/immoral behavior. Further, let us include in that belief the realization that humans are fallible in interpreting those morals and, if improperly interpreted, could result in negative consequences for us (if we mistakenly, or misguidedly, commit immoral acts). Furthermore, let us postulate that because immoral behavior is available to us, the capacity for immoral behavior is a necessary aspect of god’s purpose.
Individual freedom and individual rights – even to commit immoral acts – is something that is rationally arguable to be necessary for the divine purpose, or else they would not exist. Also, since the consequence to immoral behavior is assumed to be built in to the fabric of existence, there is no reason for humans to police immoral behavior per se. The immoral behavior will take care of itself, eventually.
Now, what kind of cascading effect will this kind of “objective morality” belief likely generate? Well, there simply is no way to interpret this as license to get others to do as you prefer because you can. How you “prefer” others behave is not actionable in moral terms at all, because it is not your job to stop anyone from performing immoral acts.
Additionally, it sets individual freedom and rights as something very important, and engenders a personal humility and carefulness about rendering any moral judgements at all, because you are indeed prone to error and there will be consequences for mistakes, whether anyone else notices or not.
It’s obvious that the two different kinds of beliefs will likely, in general, have noticeably different, practical, real-word effects, whether or not what they refer to is true.
Unless you are claiming that having a delusion will not noticeably alter your behavior and thus have real-world, significant impact due to cascading accumulations of choices under the influence of that delusion, what you are claiming here is nonsense. Whether or not what I believe is a delusion, the cascading effect of my choices under that delusion will significantly vary from those having an entirely different delusion, or from those that are not having a delusion at all.
Again, the practical question is not if morality actually refers to an objective commodity (something beyond the reach of our current knowledge), but whether or not we believe that it does, and what effect on our lives and on society and humanity those beliefs have, and are likely to have as they cascade down and through the world.
Citation needed.
Keiths:
You are inferring that the passage you quoted is an attempt at justification for my belief that morality is objective. This is an erroneous inference. I’ve already flatly stated that the reason I believe in an objective morality is because it helps me to enjoy life and be a good person, not because I consider it real or true.
Why on earth would I be attempting to justify the “objective existence” of something I’ve flatly stated there is not only no way to know if it objectively existent, but that I do not care whether it is objectively existent or not?
In that passage, I am describing the structure of my model of mind and certain aspects of it. It doesn’t require justification because I’m not trying to prove or convince anyone else it is true. The only “justification” I require is that the model works for the purposes I use it for.
Your incorrect inference has been corrected. I will ignore future posts predicated on that inference.
Therefore, the statement “they ought not do that” cannot be rationally made in anything other than an “objectively quantifiable” format, because it makes no sense in the “for me” format. “For me, they ought not do that” = “Their favorite flavor is, for me, vanilla”. It’s a nonsensical statement, not a valid one.
The statement “What they are doing is immoral”, when unpacked and applied from a subjectivist basis, is a nonsensical statement, only seemingly non-controversial because the abbreviated, packed-in terminology covers up an inherent self-contradiction. Adding “in my opinion” or “in my view” to the statement simply reiterates one half of the self-contradiction.
“In my opinion” either implies that your opinion is supported by reference to an objective quantification, or it is just personal preference without objective quantification.
So the unpacked version of that statement would be either “for me, what they are doing is, for me, not what they ought to do” (as if what they “ought to do” is service your preferences, making “your preferences” a de facto objective standard), or it reads “according to some objective quantification, they are not doing what, for me, they ought do” – which is a contradiction along with an implication that some objective standard involved in the judgement process.
This still doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t really address any of the commentary or criticism of your claims.
Even if we take your torturous articulation of her position, there simply isn’t a contradiction. Assume Sally is a pure subjectivist, and her opinion on murderers is what you wrote: “for me, what they are doing is, for me, not what they ought to do.” The second “for me” is either irrelevant or surplusage, since she’s evaluating their actions, not her own. “In my opinion, what they are doing is not what they ought to do.” She understands that they disagree with her, but she’s operating within her own moral context, not theirs.
Her “preference” is that [morally bad act] is wrong. It transgresses against her values, empathy, sense of tradition, or whatever underlies her subjective morality. She would agree that it’s wrong in her opinion, which is a clearer way of saying “for me” (since your words could be read in different ways), but that doesn’t make any difference. Once she believes [morally bad act] is wrong, she believes it. Nothing about the fact that it’s an opinion makes it logically inapplicable to people other than herself.
You trivialize moral opinions by equating it to ice cream preferences, but it’s a false comparison. Sally understands that other people have other opinions about both murder and ice cream–she’s a subjectivist. She feels no need to externalize her ice cream preferences because it’s a trivial question that doesn’t impinge on her values. Murder does, though; she feels that murder is wrong no matter who commits it, whereas she doesn’t feel there’s any harm to people eating ice cream she doesn’t like.
Once again, the simple logical thought process Sally goes through dismantles the false assumptions underlying your claims. For example:
A. I think life is good.
B. I think intentionally depriving anyone of life without is wrong.
C. (A) and (B) are probably products of my upbringing, education, and socialization.
D. Other people disagree with me about (B).
E. There is no arbiter to determine who’s right about (B).
F. (B) is therefore only a subjective opinion
Sally subjectively believes murder is wrong; the belief is subjective because even though I believe it applies to people other than herself, that belief is in and of itself subjective. Similarly, if I believe all people are beautiful, it’s a subjective opinion even though it applies to “all people.”
hotshoe,
I think that happens only when someone is being committed involuntarily. A psychopathy test might actually be used in that process, but you’re right to be dubious–it’s obviously not as simple as “flunk the test and get locked up.”
My understanding, which is secondhand since this is very far from the areas of law I’ve practiced, is that the court would rely heavily on the testimony of psychiatric (and other) experts. The experts might rely heavily on such a test. I know they have in the past, but I don’t know if it’s still used much.
I’m sure you are right. But I wasn’t suggesting we categorize people and incarcerate them or not accordingly. I was merely suggesting that, based on their acts (crimes committed) we can then decide whether perpetrators should subsequently kept apart from society. I’d leave to experts the questions of whether psychopathy is a disorder, whether it is treatable and whether psychopaths who have demonstrated their ability to commit murder could safely subsequently be let back into society. Ian Brady?
William,
The passage in question:
Boiled down:
1. “You” can’t imagine that child torture is morally good.
2. Things that you can’t imagine are objectively false.
3. Therefore, the idea that child torture is morally good is objectively false.
Sure looks like an attempt at justification to me. A poor attempt, which you probably regret making, but an attempt nonetheless.
Well, I think another example would be atheistic/communist regimes that don’t mind simply purging those who disagree, or put them in hard labor.
However, command or authority morality is also entirely open to the same kind of rampant abuse as moral subjectivism. IMO, only a carefully understood moral system based on believing that we are imperfectly, fallibly, subjectively interpreting an objectively existent, existential source of morality (that god cannot change), with necessary consequences (which relieves humans of the job of policing morality), provides the least fertile ground for widespread, cascading, systemic abuse of morality, alleviates much of what would otherwise be moral conflict, and IMO provides a safeguard against nihilism/totalitarianism by establishing a sound natural law basis for human rights and freedoms.
Has anyone else read Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature? I’m half way through and I’m finding it a most inspiring eye-opener.
I asked the library to get a copy. I’m first in line to read it if they do.
Lizzie,
I haven’t read it, and doubt I will anytime soon. My father read it and it confirmed a lot of assumptions he already has about the world. Some critical reviews can be found here and here.
THE FIRST GIFT
—being comprised of DNA and shared in the
first cell division, 3 to 4 billion years ago.
Take this. It’s part of me
and everything I know
about this emergent art
of getting by.
Since what I am survived
this long, this place,
my information may enable you
to live a little.
******************************
By Jean Lenski (1928-1994)
posted Christmas day 2013
Sorry, I can’t get the formatting correct; there are spaces between the verses in the original …
In a large enough universe,
even unlikely things can happen.
As unlikely as a tiny ball of star-soot
taking upon itself, one day,
to say aloud,
to one and all,
I am.
– David Brin
Sure, I’d agree Stalinist Russia is an equally strong example of the sort of ideological suppression that I abhor, especially the elevation of Trofim Lysenko that resulted in the starvation and death of millions of Ukrainians.
William:What morality refers to is the purpose for which god creates; god cannot switch or change the nature of it’s fundamental purpose. It is an intrinsic, fundamental characteristic of god.
Unless it is a contradiction, self-evidently He could, but how would you know either way, unless you had a way of knowing what God’s purpose is or was. Or even if God has a purpose at all comprehensible to your limited intellect.
God might create all sorts of different things that god prefers to fulfill or express that purpose, but God cannot change God’s purpose.
Bold assertion, God does not have free will? Of course unless you have a way of knowing what God’s purpose is to begin with, you would not be able to tell one way or the other.
Because of this, god cannot change the nature of what is good, god can only express the nature of what is good in various creations and projects.
You seem to be saying that good transends even God. How are the purpose of God and the nature of good linked?
The problem, William, is that you are immorally imposing your preference for saving a child from torture over the torturer’s preference for torture.
Thus, you are in exactly the same boat as a moral relativist. The only way out of your hypocrisy is IF (big if) your absolute morality really does exist and as a part of that absolute standard, there is an external arbiter who will enforce the absolute standard absolutely.
If a human has to step in at any point in your moral system to enforce any action or behavior, it’s just a subjective system.
This is, of course, silly William. Unless you have another way of ensuring orderly behavior for a stable society, at some point someone has to enforce a moral principle. That or an independent arbiter must, in a repeatable, predictable, and consistent manner. Otherwise there can be no such thing as morality at all.
Well the first review is by someone who hasn’t read it. I’m only half way through, so maybe he’ll blow his cred before the end. I’ve had to suspend disbelief a couple of times so far.
But I think he makes a lot of really excellent points about the cultural development of modern sensibilities, and possible factors that could have contributed to the relatively recent consensus at least in the rich democracies (perhaps apart from the US) against the death penalty, towards restorative rather than retributive justice, a social safety net, humane treatment of the mentally ill etc.
robin you are confusing morality with legality. A moral enforced, by the law or by power, it is not morality anymore, it is legality.
Not having read it, this will my last comment: I’m deeply skeptical of the thought that — given that we live in an age of mass incarceration, environmental destruction, massive proliferation of weapons and drugs and money, proliferation of “small” wars and extraordinary political corruption throughout the de-colonized world, domestic violence — the fact that Western Europe has mostly gotten its act together means that we are, as a species, becoming less violent.
I was born in the last year of a hot war, grew up in what seemed like an endless cold war was drafted into another hot war, lived to see the end of the cold war, saw my kids move to NYC just in time for 9/11. (They have both worked at Wall Street offices.) Now we have a new cold war going, or maybe a luke-warm war.
Still with all this going on, life is generally better than in previous centuries. Not better for the individual victims of violence, but statistically better.
Legality sucks, but its better than theistic morality.
In the last three centuries at least (probably more like the last 500), the greatest death and destruction has arisen from atheists regimes.
You mean like the Nazis who were responsible for over 60 million deaths in WW2. They were classic atheists which is why they had GOTT MIT UNS (“God is with us”) on their belt buckles.
You don’t understand the nature of the argument. I’m not making a case that we can know any of these things. This is a logical argument about the consequences of various premises and beliefs. It’s not an argument about whether or not those premises and beliefs can be proven or known to be true.
No Blas, though I can see where my statement might lead to that confusion.
What I’m trying to note is the fallacious implication of William’s “might makes right is hypocritical” claim. If William’s moral principles tell him he ought to interfere if a child is being tortured, then he is simply engaging in the same old “might makes right”. How could one argue otherwise? If a human has to intervene to at some point on behalf of an ought, the idea the ought is a product of an objective standard is question begging at best.
Leopold II of Belgium killed two to fifteen million Congolese in the early 20th century.. Not counting the beatings and mutilations.
I didn’t claim that an admitted “might makes right” moral subjectivist philosophy was hypocritical. In fact, I said exactly the opposite.
I’m perfectly happy granting that anyone who admits their “morality” is, essentially, “might makes right”, is both logically consistent with moral subjectivism and non-hypocritical.
You are confusing the sameness of the act with the different rational justifications for the act. Because two different belief structures might generate the same act in certain situations doesn’t mean that the two actors are in principle applying the same justification.
As I have argued, the two different premises/belief systems will most likely, in general and as a cascading effect, produce largely different practical outcomes, even if sometimes they may produce similar individual acts.
Under the might makes right (moral subjectivism, personal preference) version of “morality”, because I prefer it and because I can is all the moral justification I need to force anyone to do anything I want them to do.
Under the objective morality system I’ve outlined, “because I prefer it and because I can” are irrelevant considerations. I may prefer all sorts of behaviors from others, but mere preference is simply not moral authorization. Under relativism, there’s no compelling reason to put one’s life or safety at risk because it’s just a matter of personal preference. Under objective morality, in various situations one is obligated to act whether or not they are putting their comfort, standing in the community or personal safety at risk.
William:You don’t understand the nature of the argument. I’m not making a case that we can know any of these things. This is a logical argument about the consequences of various premises and beliefs.
I appreciate your patience,so you can’t know any of those properties of X, you are merely assuming them for the argument. So in practical terms,more my philosophical leanings, you are just moving subjectivity back one step. So while it is not might makes right, it is my assumption makes right .
But I don’t follow how it leads to that assumption being the only logically coherent assumption. Unless God operates in an illogical manner, His value as a moral arbiter seems His absolute reason, based on omniscience.
If one assumes that morality can be arrived at thru reason,then both assumptions rely on the same moral arbiter, human reason. One direct,one about what an assumed being would reason. Neither objective.
What am I missing?
I think Sam Harris makes a good case of how we should approach the subject of morality. His argument is as follows:
Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds—and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, fully constrained by the laws of the universe (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, questions of morality and values must have right and wrong answers that fall within the purview of science (in principle, if not in practice). Consequently, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.
If you disagree you can write an essay until February and if you actually manage to persuade Harris you’ll receive a nice $20000 :P.
That can’t be right.
Consider the parallel: in the near-future, the burgeoning field of neuro-aesthetics establishes which parts of the brain are correlated with different kinds of aesthetic experiences, and together with some cross-cultural comparisons and some intuitively plausible assumptions about hominid evolution, eventually a neuroaesthetic philosopher says:
At this point, however, a skeptic says, “umm, that’s great, but what can you tell us about art and beauty that we didn’t already know?”
Now, the neuroaesthetic philosopher can, presumably, offer either a first-order claim or a second-order claim. If she offers a second-order claim, she’ll say, “we now know why it is that we find some things aesthetically pleasurable and others not”. If she offers a first-order claim, she’ll say something like this, “thanks to neuroaesthetics, we now know that Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ is not really beautiful at all, and we were mistaken in thinking that it was”.
Now, if she offers the first-order claim — using neuroscience to challenge our received aesthetic judgments — the skeptic will press, “on what grounds, by what criteria, do you make that challenge?” And then the neuroaesthetic philosopher will have to use the vocabulary of aesthetic judgments herself. At that point it is not clear what additional benefit there is in having those judgments gussied up in the latest neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.
Whereas, if she offers the second claim, she’s offering us an explanation for how we have acquired the kinds of aesthetic preferences that we have, but surely such an explanation can do nothing at all to tell us what aesthetic preferences we ought to have. And so it can do nothing to resolve disagreements between competing aesthetic judgments.
In short: either neuroaesthetics is itself playing the same game of giving and asking for reasons about judgments of beauty and ugliness — in which case it doesn’t really add anything — or it adds something very interesting, namely a certain kind of causal-historical explanation, but that explanation doesn’t directly change how we play the game of giving and asking for reasons with regard to aesthetic judgments.
So my challenge for Harris would be two-fold: (1) what, if anything, has gone wrong in this analysis of neuroaesthetics? (2) if neuroscience would make no difference at all to aesthetics, why should we think it would make any difference at all to ethics?
My own take on morality starts with the assumption that most people share a common desire to avoid pain and premature death. This is not an axiom. Just an observation. A case where I take the plural of anecdote to be data.
Borrowing from Maslow, also assume that people share a common desire to achieve goals not directly associated with survival and pain avoidance. I would call these wants rather than needs, but the terminology is not important to me..
I think of morality as the attempt to maximize achievement and minimize pain.
My concept of morality is proactive and not simply a matter of not hurting others.
I have several motives for wanting to help others.
First, it seems the most rational way to contribute to a world in which my own health and happiness is maximized. Call this selfish rationalism.
Second, I have an abundance of empathy. I actually suffer when I see or read about other people suffering.
Third, I have children and a grandchild. I have no way of ensuring that they will inherit royal privileges or be wealthy or highly successful. I therefore wish to contribute to a society in which my unknowable descendants will have the best chance of being happy.
Where I differ conceptually from most people is I do not think you can make a list of moral and immoral behaviors. I think morality is continually invented to fit situations. The consequences of any complex interaction cannot be foreseen. Literature is full of examples of unintended consequences and good intentions gone wrong. But we keep trying, and some of our efforts result in law and medicine and abundance of food.
I consider thing like torturing babies to be too trivial to engage serious discussion. I would prefer to talk about actions and situations that have complex outcomes.
Isn’t Harris’s (grossly simplified) argument as follows:
1. Increasing human flourishing is self-evidently the way to judge standards of morality.
2. Human flourishing can be measured objectively.
3. Therefore we can use science to judge which societies have the best standards of morality.
Applying this to beauty:
1. Increasing the amount of aesthetic pleasure in a society is self evidently a good thing.
2. We can measure aesthetic pleasure objectively and therefore we can measure the totality of the beauty of the artworks of a society by measuring the totality of the aesthetic pleasure. (edit: by definition, beauty is that which produces aesthetic pleasure).
3. Therefore we can determine which societies have better works of art by measuring the totality of their aesthetic pleasure.
(One could extend this to judge individual moral standards or individual works of art by comparing the totalities with all other things held equal).
A separate question: in your hypothetical society, suppose a neuroscientist showed a work of art to two people and observed their brain states before and after seeing the art. Would she be able to predict their spoken artistic judgements? Would she be able to answer whether or not they were having the same aesthetic experience (or I’ll settle for visual experience).
Appreciating art makes us happy and therefore improves our well-being. It’s irrelevant whether there’s an objective basis for what makes art good to the average human being. There’s no art we *should* appreciate (though there may be art that’s easier to understand why it’s appreciated), it only matters that we enjoy it.
Genital mutilation however causes needless suffering for just about any woman, therefor the practice ought to be greatly discouraged.
This doesn’t make any sense William. How can the outcomes of the two systems ever differ if the they both produce similar individual acts? Why would the outcome of “people ought not murder other people” ever be different for the two systems?
Is that not a form of utilitarianism?
If so, don’t you have to deal with some of the standard concerns, eg can the answer to a particular moral question be correct if it slightly decreases the pain and increases the achievement of almost everyone at the expense of incredible pain and intolerable underachievement for one person?
It seems you need some other principle regarding the fair treatment of all even if that decreases the overall pain/achievement measure..
There is also a technical problem, I guess, with have two dimensions: pain and achievement. How to you relate the two? What increase in achievement is equal to a decrease in pain?
But William, as I’ve pointed out, the objective moralist must rely on “might makes right” as well. How else does such a person justify engaging in what he feels he ought to do in any situation. Clearly, as you’ve demonstrated, the objective moralist cannot point to a specific list of actual third-party arbitrated moral principles – there are none! He can try, as you’ve claimed, to reason with his opponent to come to “an agreement of the heart” about what those absolute moral principles are, but as shown here, there are some of us who will never come to such an agreement. What then? You state your moral principles tell you that you must intervene, but that would simply be engaging in might to make right. How is that any different from the subjective moralist approach?
Purely in intellecual fun, and probably off topic, it struck me later that your analogy might be purer if it did not involve neursoscience .
Harris says human mental states are objectively readable from brain states, and the human mental state of flourishing is the morally relevant one.
So if we consider just paintings to represent art, the analogy would be aesthetic states are objectively readable from pigment states (colors, configurations, ….) and there is a “flourishing” aesthetic state which is the “beauty-relevant” one and which has its a scientifically-readable set of pigment states.
There would then be the analogous concerns to those with Harris’s view: why should such a flourishing state be the beauty-relevant one, can one really add the flourishing state of different paintings, etc.
But William, you may say this, but it’s irrelevant. “I prefer it” is, for all practical purposes, the exact same justification as, “the object moral principle tells me so”. How can you prove otherwise?
You may say there are no reasons for such people to take such risks, but certainly many moral relativists think that defending themselves and their loved ones is a perfectly good reason to take such a risk. And there is nothing irrational about that. An innate sense of self-preservation coupled with a little empathy makes for a number of reasons to act against behaviors that threaten our loved ones. A little more empathy and suddenly even defenseless unknown people or people of one’s own nationality and culture become “loved ones” and so on. No absolute moral standards are needed in such scenarios.
WJM,
Under relativism, there’s no compelling reason to put one’s life or safety at risk because it’s just a matter of personal preference.
Once again, the only way to get to this conclusion is to assume it as a given, despite obvious contradictory facts. People, including subjectivists, aren’t required to put their lives and safety before all other considerations. Even under your “it’s all just preferences” model, obviously some people will prefer certain principles and objectives over their own health and safety.
It couldn’t be more important and significant.
I don’t have to “prove” otherwise; anyone that can read and understand English can see that they are entirely different kinds of justifications. One is imperative; the other is not. One is obligatory; the other is not. One includes necessary consequences; the other does not. One can be ignored without penalty and change on a whim; the other cannot.
The only thing that I can imagine is the problem here is that you are operating under the ideological assumption that all views, beliefs, etc., in the end, are just matters of personal preference, and so any action produced by any belief or premise is, ultimately, just because of personal preference. Therefore, in your system, there is a de facto view that all things are done, no matter the justification or belief, because of personal preference.
I have no reason to argue against that perspective. I’m happy to leave that out here for everyone to see and examine on their own. ‘
His might isn’t making right, as in the subjectivist position, it is only to be used in the service of what is right. They are entirely different conceptual justifications.
I said, there’s no good reason for them to put their safety at risk – or the safety of their family at risk – when they’d prefer not to … such as, hiding jews from the Nazis. Why should I put my life, or my family’s life, in danger to save some Jews in Nazi Germany? Empathy? hmmm …. let’s look that over, after this:
Why should I listen to my empathy in the first place?
In our hypothetical scenario, under objective morality, morality is not “arrived at” by reason, but rather arbited by reason. Conscience is the sense by which we navigate the objective moral landscape; reason is what we use to arbit what our conscience finds there – to help us not misinterpret it. The landscape is not something god makes up arbitrarily; it is an intrinsic aspect of universal mind. God cannot change what is “good”.
Form the subjectivist perspective, morality is not arrived at by reason; the moral subjectivist can dispense with reason altogether. All they need is to do whatever they prefer, and they are by definition behaving morally.
You see, without any necessary (inescapable) consequence whatsoever, I can, under moral subjectivism, dispense with conscience and empathy altogether, and everything I do – no matter how cruel or self-serving or harmful to others – is as moral as what anyone else does.
I don’t really know why moral subjectivists bother using the term “morality” at all, except perhaps to emotionally manipulate others.
I log in every few days and read the last two or three comments of the first two or three threads before my time is gone and I have to leave. But it’s always fun what those comments make me think of.
I remember an episode of the original Star Trek series, “The Immunity Syndrome”, that is universally mocked by both fans and critics as the ‘Giant Space Amoeba’ episode. But there is a scene in it that some of Murray’s statements above brought to mind.
Spock had just experienced a mental shock when the crew of the Intrepid died to the predations of the aforementioned space amoeba. The captain sends him to sickbay. Run opening credits. The first scene after the credits proceeds thus:
[last two lines bolded by me]
Murray, if you really think I am incapable of weighing the difference of feelings between a person dying and a person wanting to kill without having the relative weights between the two implanted in me by your sky daddy through some imaginary mechanism then you really are a monster.
I don’t have to “prove” otherwise; anyone that can read and understand English can see that they are entirely different kinds of justifications. One is imperative; the other is not. One is obligatory; the other is not. One includes necessary consequences; the other does not. One can be ignored without penalty and change on a whim; the other cannot.
Another round of convenient but unsupported a priori assumptions. On what basis do you claim that subjectivists can change their moral principles on a whim?
His might isn’t making right, as in the subjectivist position, it is only to be used in the service of what is right. They are entirely different conceptual justifications.
I have not seen you advance even the shadow of an argument for the proposition that might makes right for a subjectivist; you say it often and with great conviction, but it’s another incoherent assumption. How does might make right for a subjectivist? Might affects only conduct, not moral principles.
Why should I put my life, or my family’s life, in danger to save some Jews in Nazi Germany?
Because people can, and empirically do, value certain objectives and principles over their own welfare. Even subjectivists, because nothing obligates them to pursue their own well-being over their own moral “preferences.”
When your assumptions utterly fail to describe the real world, and when you have such trouble drawing a line from them to your conclusions, you might consider whether they are mistaken.