Ben Shapiro vs Neil deGrasse Tyson: The WAR Over Transgender Issues

[Sheldon]

It's the dictionary's definition, not mine. I don't compile those, they reflect current common usage. 

You assumed your conclusion in your opening premise.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I was talking about the dictionary definition. It doesn't have circular reasoning or begging, which is good. The problem is that it is vague.

It seems clear enough, morality is defined as "principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour."

I think the definition of the word morality makes it unclear 

Makes what unclear? 

Sheldon:
I agree it is immoral, but this must ultimately rest on a subjective opinion, not an objective one, but please explain why you think this without ultimately resorting to a subjective opinion. I have tried and cannot, perhaps you can. I must say I am dubious.

Ferrocyanide

I already explained it but I will be happy to explain it again in the hopes that it becomes clear:
All humans have pain sensors. It is an objective fact. If you punch a person in the face, a signal is generated and it reaches the brain and the human feels pain. Are we an agreement that so far, all this is objective fact?
Pretty much all humans don’t like that. They will all want to have a rule that says “don’t punch people in the face because it causes pain” <===is this rule subjective?

Can you demonstrate objectively that causing pain is immoral? Otherwise as I said in that quote, you are ultimately resting your moral assertion on a subjective claim. 

There is no guidebook, no program that tells you what you must perform specifically to stop a rape in your particular scenario. It was entirely up to your abilities and circumstances. Out of many possibilities, for some reason, you chose punch in the face.

So subjectively immoral then, not objectively immoral, as I said. 

The rape part was objectively immoral. 

I disagree, but if you think you can demonstrate this without resorting to a subjective moral claim please do. 

It is similar to your rape case. A damage is occurring to person X. 

Yes but the claim that causing damage to someone or something is immoral, is a subjective claim, it is not objectively true. just try asking why something is immoral, and see if it does not ultimately rest on a subjective claim.

[Sheldon]

Why is it objectively wrong to kill someone?

It causes pain, it causes harm.

This is how the human body functions. It goes for other animals as well, as long as they have a brain and nervous system.
Humans are emotional machines. The same goes for other animals as well.


When you cut yourself or something infects you or an animal bites you, you sense pain.
This probably has served the purpose of helping the animal survive.

Our morality is layered on the above fact.
If we had no such emotions, then we would not have rules such as "don't kill your fellow man", "don't punch your fellow man", etc.

You would have no desire to survive.

All you have done is add more subjective claims, so now you need to demonstrate that it is objectively true, that causing pain or harm is immoral, can you do this without just adding more subjective claims? Appeals to emotion are subjective, not objective.

[The Grand Nudger]

This is a lot like people who say that the extinction of humans would be bad.  Or that the reverse, that humans flourishing would be good.  While the number of humans may increase or decrease, and that can be determined objectively, whether either is good or bad cannot be determined objectively.  But for some people, it is a base assumption that humans are good.  Thus any measures which objectively increase or decrease the prosperity of humans inherits the value judgment, and its vector, from this subjective assessment.  Thus they derive that human extinction is bad and that global warming is bad, refusing to ever consider whether or not the basis of such claims is sound.  This type of blindness is not particularly uncommon.  I'm sure I have a similar blindness regarding some things.  But blindness it is, nonetheless.

Generally speaking, people do not assign moral import or moral condemnation to things that lack moral agency.  So extinction is neither a good or bad thing until we have an extinctor, and that extinctor is a moral agent.  If humans go extinct, that's not bad.  Just something that happened.  If humans make themselves go extinct, different question, so..possibly, different answer.

One might even build a bridge between the two.  "Losing a finger is bad because it's harm -- it objectively diminishes me."  But why is diminishing you necessarily bad?  Where did that axiom come from.  If I diminished all humans by killing them, that would certainly be bad in the eyes of said humans, but the cows and chickens might rejoice.  One can ask the perennial question, Cui bono?  If it is a question of who loses and who gains, then it is going to be inherently subjective.  Objective reality cares not whether I do or do not lose a finger, whether I do or do not lose a life, whether the world does or does not lose a species.

Cui bono is an objective question.  There's a fact of who benefits, even as you're asking it of us.  If the cows and chickens rejoiced at you killing all the humans, and they were moral agents, that would be understandable..but still bad.  Like a terrorist that lost their whole family. Whether a thing benefits someone and whether that thing is good are distinct questions which we find real examples of in life and apprehend as such. We see people benefit from bad things. We can acknowledge that we ourselves benefit from bad things.

If the question is where some axiom came from, not specifically whether or not it's true..the answer is word. Like every other word. We name things. Where did the axiom that unhealthy things are bad-for-you come from? The same observation can be made with harm, even harm-as-subjectivist.

I can't help but add here that people who think humans dying would be good for our livestock are wrong in fact. The livestock depends on us for survival. Especially the cornish cross, our broiler breed. The poor thing makes meat, not good decisions. We did that to them..which I think is objectively morally bad, though incredibly practically useful, and directly to our (and very directly my own) benefit. The point of moral objectivity is not to declare the things we do, and the things that are expedient or useful for us individually or as a group, as The Good Stuff. The point is factual accuracy. Ask me about killing, as a confirmed killer, you'll find the same. Ask me about being a smarmy asshole, as a smarmy asshole enjoyer...

I suspect that any value judgment, that something is either good or bad is inherently subjective.  I think I've talked to Nudger about such before.  He just changes the subject or evades any question posed.  I suspect this is an artifact of a desire to prove oneself right, over and above a desire to know what's true, but that is mere speculative psychologizing, so I will not assert it as necessarily the case.

Come now, that my answers don't satisfy you is not the same thing as my not having given them, repeatedly, at length...objectively speaking.  I think that belief relies on such a trivial misunderstanding of the term that it's a meaningless belief which says nothing. Your idea that everything is subjective, is subjective, and I think everything isn't. In a subjectivist universe, my belief that moral objectivity is possible is true even if your belief that everything is subjective is also true. The truthmaking properties in such a universe are simply what a person believes- the fact of that itself, full stop. I don't believe we live in such a universe, and I don't believe our moral discussions and disagreements reflect such a moral system.

I think, as ever, that we're trying to say (or believe that we are saying) objectively true things when we make moral proclamations. That we often fail. That we often fail due to defects of subjectivity, relativity, and literal non reasons too. That's an us problem, not a truth problem. Broken calculators don't make math wrong. Inaccurate and sloppy use of terms terms doesn't make word wrong. The universe does not warp around our emotional duress. I don't think that problem is particularly operative when I say that harm and harm reduction or harm avoidance is a component of what we're talking about when we talk about morality - what that word means or entials...or that a person who's toe has been stepped on has not been harmed as much as a person who's been murdered. For all of our faults and defects, all of my own faults and defects, those are statements which seem to satisfy the criteria for true, and objectively so, and not just in the limited sense of metaethics, but fully. As in they purport to report a fact, it's a fact of the matter in question, and they do accurately report that fact.

[Sheldon]

This is a lot like people who say that the extinction of humans would be bad.  Or that the reverse, that humans flourishing would be good.  While the number of humans may increase or decrease, and that can be determined objectively, whether either is good or bad cannot be determined objectively.  But for some people, it is a base assumption that humans are good.  Thus any measures which objectively increase or decrease the prosperity of humans inherits the value judgment, and its vector, from this subjective assessment.  Thus they derive that human extinction is bad and that global warming is bad, refusing to ever consider whether or not the basis of such claims is sound.  This type of blindness is not particularly uncommon.  I'm sure I have a similar blindness regarding some things.  But blindness it is, nonetheless.

Generally speaking, people do not assign moral import or moral condemnation to things that lack moral agency.  So extinction is neither a good or bad thing until we have an extinctor, and that extinctor is a moral agent.  If humans go extinct, that's not bad.  Just something that happened.  If humans make themselves go extinct, different question, so..possibly, different answer.

One might even build a bridge between the two.  "Losing a finger is bad because it's harm -- it objectively diminishes me."  But why is diminishing you necessarily bad?  Where did that axiom come from.  If I diminished all humans by killing them, that would certainly be bad in the eyes of said humans, but the cows and chickens might rejoice.  One can ask the perennial question, Cui bono?  If it is a question of who loses and who gains, then it is going to be inherently subjective.  Objective reality cares not whether I do or do not lose a finger, whether I do or do not lose a life, whether the world does or does not lose a species.

Cui bono is an objective question.  There's a fact of who benefits, even as you're asking it of us.  If the cows and chickens rejoiced at you killing all the humans, and they were moral agents, that would be understandable..but still bad.  Like a terrorist that lost their whole family.  It benefits the terrorist when his attack succeeds.  It benefits the chicken if we all die, conceptually, anyway..not really..they die if we die, lol.

I suspect that any value judgment, that something is either good or bad is inherently subjective.  I think I've talked to Nudger about such before.  He just changes the subject or evades any question posed.  I suspect this is an artifact of a desire to prove oneself right, over and above a desire to know what's true, but that is mere speculative psychologizing, so I will not assert it as necessarily the case.

Come now, that my answers don't satisfy you is not the same thing as my not having given them, repeatedly, at length...objectively speaking.  I think that belief relies on such a trivial misunderstanding of the term that it's a meaningless belief which says nothing.  Your idea that everything is subjective, is subjective, and I think everything isn't.  In a subjectivist universe, my belief is true even if yours is also true.

Well to be fair I've not seen you evade anything yet, or change the subject, in fact I was quite enjoying the debate. Though I am still not convinced that moral assertions don't ultimately always rest on subjective opinions of course. Not least because when I ask for people to offer objective moral claims, the claim nearly always would rely on another subjective claim. That is to say that while the claim X is immoral because it causes Y may be objectively true, insomuch that X can be demonstrated to cause Y, but if the claim Y is immoral is subjective then this suggests again that all moral assertions ultimately rest on subjective assertions. 

I will try to keep an open mind though. However I am off out, and will likely be unfit to debate much when I return, so will pick this up tomorrow if there is still interest.

[Mister Agenda]

It occurs to me that if we do lack an objective standard, that doesn't prevent us from determining that a given action is morally worse or better than another. I don't need an objective standard of length to tell one piece of rope is longer than another. Torturing a healthy human baby to death is worse than cooing at it, and I'm prepared to die on that hill.

[The Grand Nudger]

The trouble you'll run into trying to argue for the assertion that all moral statements are subjective, at least when you're having that discussion with someone advocating for any form of analytical realism..is that there's no disqualifier to true statements you can offer of moral assertions that they cannot then apply to many or any of your other assertions to truth, including those ones you make in argument against realism. In any logical debate about morality, objectivism has a home field advantage, rightly or wrongly.




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[The Grand Nudger]

It occurs to me that if we do lack an objective standard, that doesn't prevent us from determining that a given action is morally worse or better than another. I don't need an objective standard of length to tell one piece of rope is longer than another. Torturing a healthy human baby to death is worse than cooing at it, and I'm prepared to die on that hill.

The length -is- the objective standard, in the comparison. If society had an official stick and it said that the (objectively shorter) one was "longer"...and the (objectively longer) one was "shorter"..then that would be the fact of the matter, regardless of the length of the ropes. Metarope Relativism.

[Mister Agenda]

It occurs to me that if we do lack an objective standard, that doesn't prevent us from determining that a given action is morally worse or better than another. I don't need an objective standard of length to tell one piece of rope is longer than another. Torturing a healthy human baby to death is worse than cooing at it, and I'm prepared to die on that hill.

The length -is- the objective standard, in the comparison.

But I don't need a standard for how long something has to be to be long...just one thing being longer than the other.

[The Grand Nudger]

Irrelevant to metarope relativism.

The answer to the question of which rope is longer has nothing to do with it's "length" as determined by your generally reliable eyes or any unit of so-called measure, and everything to do with what society has officially decreed with The Stick.

[The Grand Nudger]

I'll never get tired of looking for rosetta stones.

What most people would refer to as relative or subjective in these discussions are instances, in a metaethical sense, of failed objectivity. This is because we learn relativism and subjectivism as critical theories, complimentary to our academic or pragmatic or aspirational objectivity. People rarely just come out sand say x is bad because I say so. Or x is bad because my society says so. Or, for that matter, believe as much. They employ the semantics of objectivity, instead..which in and of itself opens them up to objective scrutiny. This just so happens to be the simplest and most bare bones answer to another question. Let's say that we stop bickering over the different categories of cognitivist moral truth statements and specific moral basis or predicates like harm as cogent or as possibilities. Why should we use the objectivists metrics instead of the subjectivists or the relativists, why should we use the harmists?

Well, they did. We do. If we stopped using those semantics, and corrected our moral assertions for their respective metaethical basis as positions..and not merely critical provisions, then there wouldn't be such an obvious reason to use the objectivist semantics. If moral realism were nothing else it would be the insistence that moral statements be true as stated, to be considered true as stated. Subjective and relative statements, as the terms are used casually, are not true as stated. They're stated objectively but true subjectively or relatively. This is not the same as "not true, but believed in by someone or many someone's". It refers to things that -are- true -because- those are the truth making properties of those metaethical claims or systems...and if they are, let's clearly state that instead.