RE: Is morality objective or subjective?
March 20, 2017 at 9:58 am
(This post was last modified: March 20, 2017 at 10:19 am by Edwardo Piet.)
(March 19, 2017 at 2:17 pm)LastPoet Wrote: I love how we humans try to reason objective morality when to the date, we are the only ones able to do that such construction.
Most folks don't seem to understand what 'objective morality' means.
It doesn't necessarily mean absolute universal morality. It can be relative and non-universal and still be objective due to there being objective answers in principle to moral questions.
What makes zero sense to me is that the standard that most people expect objective morality to have to live up to is a standard that science doesn't even live up to. By that standard there's no such thing as 'objective science' either. And the objections I see about any definitions of objective morality not being 'truly objective' are objections they could be making about health. People could say "Oh that's not a TRULY objective definition of health. Who are you to say that eating poison every day isn't healthy? We could just as easily define health in a completely different way that is actually what most people consider unhealthy. I don't care if most people think that definition is retarded and the dictionary definitions are different... who are YOU to say that it's the one we should pick? Prove to me that your definition of health is objective. You can't. I can define it differently, it's an entirely subjective and arbitary definiton. We could just as easily use another word to refer to what we normally call health and when we say 'health' we could instead mean something entirely different."
Replace the word "health" with "morality" and the word "healthy" with "moral" and this is the same kind of silly shit people say about morality. Oh that definition isn't TRULY objective.
Newsflash, the definition doesn't have to be objective. No definitions of anything are objective. We make the definitions. We subjectively decide to use the word 'health' to refer to what we decide it to refer to and then AFTER we agree to define it that way THEN there are objective answers to what is and isn't healthy. The same applies to morality.
Going by the argument most people make against morality then no field of science is objective because it's possible for someone else to decide to define things differently.
Objectivity has absolutely nothing to do with universal agreements about definitions. I repeat. Objectivity has absolutely nothing to do with universal agreements about definitions.
People say oh that's not TRULY objective morality. Because people can disagree. But we could say the same about science.
Universal =/= objective. Absolute=/= objective. The fact that people place a completely different standards on 'objective morality' than on objective anything else makes no sense whatsoever.
(March 19, 2017 at 3:44 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: Because then morality would be something real that was actually created and actually exists in the universe, outside of ourselves and our own opinions. Meaning it's not just a human construct.
I'm not talking about objective values 'existing' though. What would that even mean? What form of 'existence' would these values take and even if they could 'exist' in an ontological sense as opposed to there being merely epistemically objective answers to moral questions -- then why would we even need God? And how exactly would we need God for them to 'exist'?
