(March 7, 2017 at 7:22 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Right. That's the normal position. My position is that "value judgments" are in fact expressions of genetic predisposition, i.e. that the ideas serve the machinery underlying them, and that they are consistent enough across the population to be taken as an objective property of the human condition. You claim these are something like "culture subjective."
Because they are. What you describe is not objective morality, but consensus morality. This is not objective. It is still dependent on your opinion.
It just happens that humans are predisposed towards certain opinions. This is objective fact, but it does not make the basis for the value judgments being made any less subjective.
(March 7, 2017 at 7:22 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Maybe we can agree on something like this-- that the details of moral systems vary a lot and can be called subjective, but that the moral impulse is always rooted in the objective facts of human evolution. This explains why "morality" refers both to the moral ideas or systems, and also to the condition of being moral.
This is correct, but, again, it is important to note that "rooted in the objective facts of human evolution" is not equivalent to "are not subjective".
"Owl," said Rabbit shortly, "you and I have brains. The others have fluff. If there is any thinking to be done in this Forest - and when I say thinking I mean thinking - you and I must do it."
- A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
- A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner