(April 21, 2017 at 3:09 pm)Crunchy Wrote:(April 21, 2017 at 10:28 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I'm having trouble understanding how moral ambiguity can exist inside the framework of moral objectivity.
I’ll put it like this: The presence of ambiguity (being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness) is the result of complexity, not subjectivity.
As an analogy, you can consider chaos theory. A purely deterministic system becomes quickly unpredictable within a few steps. Like a game of pool. There is no way to predict where all the balls will end up after each break even though the system is 100% deterministic.
Even though we can agree what our basic objective needs are, it can quickly become very difficult to determine how to achieve these needs in a world of complexity.
I think what you are getting at is how do you weigh conflicting consequences, when an action is good for some and bad for others for example.
But I think this is not a question of subjectivity but rather complexity. Although moral questions are often very difficult to answer, and there are often many satisfactory answers to each one and sometimes no satisfactory answers, this still does not imbue the entire system with subjectivity. We can (and should) IMO use the principles of rational thought to eliminate the obviously bad answers to those questions. I realize that this is still no guarantee of universal agreement on moral questions.
I don’t see the issue of ambiguity as a deal breaker for moral objectivity. It does however mean that we may never all come to the same conclusions even if we have the same initial intentions. Like those pesky pool balls that end up all over the place even with the same staring conditions.
Well, we'll just disagree then, because it seems to me obvious that in complex matters, how people work their way through the thicket is precisely the cause of moral subjectivity, insofar as it is not terribly common for people to have identical experiences, and therefore identical values.
