(May 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: While I agree with you that morality is objective, I don't understand how a person can have that stance if they don't believe in a Moral Law Giver (aka, a god(s) of some sort).

How does a law based on the opinion of one make it any less subjective than if it were the opinion of millions? Does it exist independent of feelings, reason or mind? If so, what function does a law giver provide - communication of transcendent truths? If that is the case, objective morality wouldn't depend on a law giver at all - and if it's not the case, you've just made and argument for subjectivity.

Alasdair Ham[edit Wrote:pid='1553119' dateline='1494880111']

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(May 15, 2017 at 4:09 pm)mh.brewer Wrote:  
If morals have grey areas then they are not objective/absolute.

Not true. Morals have objective grey areas... which means they're not absolute. But black and white are objectively on the same spectrum... the greys are objectively all in between.

If black=bad and white=good (to be a massive, massive racist for a second, lol) then the greatest possible misery for everyone=black... the greatest possible happiness for everyone=white.... and the greys are everything in-between.

Absolute morality would be to pretend there was nothing in between. Like there was black and white but no greys and there was heaven and hell but no Earth... that would be insane lol.

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Great, you've just described the set of all of the relative/subjective determinations between two objective end points. Congratulations.

Two points.

First, regarding free will.  The fact that our choice isn't free does not mean that others can have no influence on the determinants of choice.  If you reach for that last cookie and there is nothing preventing you, you will likely succeed.  You will choose that cookie.  If your mother tells you that if you take the last cookie, you will be grounded, her telling you that alters the conditions of your decision.  Getting angry at people, protesting, threats, the law, and many other human interactions alter the grounds of decision making.  To argue that because their will is not free that we shouldn't intervene is to ignore the ways in which we can shape the grounds of their decisions, and ultimately, their outcome.

Second, regarding morals.  That our moral sense is not anchored by objective moral values does not mean that our moral inclinations are without foundation.  Our feelings give us feedback on the world just as surely as our eyes and ears do.  A person who does not feel pain will likely die.  The body has a wisdom the reasoning mind lacks.  Johnathan Haidt postulates that our moral reasoning has five dimensions, or bases.  1) harm, 2) fairness, 3) authority, 4) loyalty/ingroup allegiance, and 5) purity or sacredness.   These five bases all matter objectively in the working out of functioning of a social group or species.  To suggest that morals being relative means they are just arbitrary is to ignore their foundation in our functioning as a society.  Those who care not for harming others will be detrimental to the functioning of the social group.  Those who disregard fairness, likewise.  Morality is a brain shortcut for caring for these values, which ultimately is caring about the well being of the group.  An individual on their own can decide not to care about the well being of the group, but that choice is not without consequences for our own.  We are evolved to care about our overall well-being as a group, and these 5 bases are merely the mechanism by which we implement that bias.  We are biased to be pro-survival, and likewise we are biased in favor of actions that preserve these properties.  Acting otherwise is an attack upon the group, and such attacks are not ignored by the group.  If you were the caretaker of a group, would you tolerate harm, unfairness, disobedience, disloyalty and defamation?  Do you really need anything more than the combined interest of the group to justify your actions?  Humans are a social species.  Our moral emotions are an artifact of that.  That doesn't mean they're arbitrary or meaningless.



I'm not saying I've got all the pieces right.  But we are evolved to have and act on emotions.  Our moral emotions have been shaped by the evolution of the group.  It is no less logical to act on these emotions than it is to tend to the pain in your foot.  Our emotions guide our survival.  We have evolved to the point where we can imagine that the group doesn't matter to us.  To imagine that we as individuals don't matter.  But our feelings betray us, in morals, and in life.

Even monkeys can evolve group protective emotions.

(May 15, 2017 at 6:16 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote:

(May 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: While I agree with you that morality is objective, I don't understand how a person can have that stance if they don't believe in a Moral Law Giver (aka, a god(s) of some sort).

How does a law based on the opinion of one make it any less subjective than if it were the opinion of millions? Does it exist independent of feelings, reason or mind? If so, what function does a law giver provide - communication of transcendent truths? If that is the case, objective morality wouldn't depend on a law giver at all - and if it's not the case, you've just made and argument for subjectivity.

I'm not sure I follow.

(May 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: But who's to say that making someone suffer is objectively wrong though? 

Because wrongness and suffering are the same thing.

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(May 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: While I agree with you that morality is objective, I don't understand how a person can have that stance if they don't believe in a Moral Law Giver (aka, a god(s) of some sort).

What I don't understand is why anyone would need a moral law giver. If something is objectively right and wrong then it doesn't matter what God thinks about it. Don't need God when you have goodness and if God is good then it has to be because he's good not because he's God.

(May 15, 2017 at 6:33 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote:

(May 15, 2017 at 6:16 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote: How does a law based on the opinion of one make it any less subjective than if it were the opinion of millions?   Does it exist independent of feelings, reason or mind?  If so, what function does a law giver provide - communication of transcendent truths?  If that is the case, objective morality wouldn't depend on a law giver at all - and if it's not the case, you've just made and argument for subjectivity.

I'm not sure I follow.

Ok, let me approach this from another tack. What does "objective" mean in the context you're using here.

My understanding is that it means "independent of opinion, reason, or mind". I suppose if you assert that your law giver has none of those qualities it works, however, I don't think a mindless automation is what theists have in mind.

Put more plainly, if the law is a product of a law giver's thought process, it is necessarily and tautologically subjective.

(May 15, 2017 at 6:21 pm)mh.brewer Wrote: Great, you've just described the set of all of the relative/subjective determinations between two objective end points. Congratulations.

Wow? I get congratulated for stating my opinions now?

Wikipedia Wrote:Searle has argued[48] that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective." In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science".[49] But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality".[50] His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

For those who think something can't be both subjective and objective in two different non-contradictory senses at the same time.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searl...bjectivity

(May 15, 2017 at 6:41 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote:

(May 15, 2017 at 6:33 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I'm not sure I follow.

Ok, let me approach this from another tack.  What does "objective" mean in the context you're using here.  

My understanding is that it means "independent of opinion, reason, or mind".  I suppose if you assert that your law giver has none of those qualities it works, however, I don't think a mindless automation is what theists have in mind.

Put more plainly, if the law is a product of a law giver's thought process, it is necessarily and tautologically subjective.

The difference between my opinion and God's "opinion" is that He's the one who created the world we live in and all of its Laws and how it works. We call it Natural Law. It's like me creating my own board game and designing how the game works and the rules that go with it. The rules of the game are integral to the way the entire game was designed to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law

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(May 15, 2017 at 6:35 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote:

(May 15, 2017 at 6:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: But who's to say that making someone suffer is objectively wrong though? 

Because wrongness and suffering are the same thing.

Says who though?

What if a child is suffering after the pain of getting a vaccine, why isn't that wrong?