Subjective Morality?

[Belacqua]

we're asked if we think that moral propositions aim at truth.  If we think that they do, the differences between us can only be which facts we think they aim at, and how well we hit them.  

I've been following along on the thread, though not as diligently as some. I admire your explanations here, and would like to chime in with some reactions, if that's OK.

First, I think that there continues to be a disconnect on what different people think of when they think of moral facts. The model continues to be facts about the material world, and if we can't provide examples of material moral facts, then people aren't satisfied. They want something to be rooted in nature which isn't mental -- which is what they usually call "subjective." 

So for example, we are mostly comfortable with the idea that redness doesn't exist in the "outside world," but we perceive it mentally. This has its material correlate in that we can prove that light vibrating at certain frequencies gives people the perception of red. Physics can demonstrate this. I think that some people imagine goodness, or moral quality, as a mental reaction like color, but continue to want some physical correlate that physics can demonstrate. As if, for example, scientists could quantify some influence of an action which, when perceived, leads the mind to interpret it as good. And absent that, they are unwilling to grant goodness factual status. This is what they mean, I think, by the dreaded word "objective." 

One way around that might be to accept that the field of ethics, historically, has been the study of what contributes to human flourishing. So ethicists don't have to prove that human flourishing is good in some material, objective, abstract way. As if flourishing is an arbitrarily chosen goal and the whole field of ethics is undermined if they have no way of proving that flourishing is desirable. That would be like asking a chess strategist to prove that the goal of the game is to win. 

If we accept that ethics is the field which asks, "how best may we flourish?" then I think that the concept of moral facts becomes quite easy to accept. And this is demonstrable by pointing to some obvious cases. "If I cut the head off this healthy baby, is it likely to help him flourish?" That's such a blatant case that its facticity seems not in doubt. 

I don't know if you're a fan of Nietzsche at all, but this article helped me to think about the subject at hand:

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/nietzsch...ourishing/

Nietzsche puts himself in the category of ethicists who work on flourishing. They begin with biological or psychological knowledge derivable from empirical evidence, interpret how historical contingencies (like traditions of work or the family) manipulate these givens, and draw conclusions which they think are factual concerning how best to flourish. I find all of this very persuasive, and think that it settles a number of (in my view) irrelevant objections made by others. 

But you know more about all this than I do. 

Here's a bit from the interview I linked to above:

The general idea is that ethics aspires to provide a specification of what it is to live well, to flourish.  Now, that claim is complex and contestable in several ways.  For example, it’s possible to deny that ethics aims at a specification of human flourishing.  As Nietzsche points out, theistic ethical views typically deny this, taking service to God or some other end to be a higher and worthier pursuit than flourishing.  But suppose, like Nietzsche, we take these theistic views to be discredited.  And suppose, like Nietzsche, we look at ourselves and others, we look at culture, at history, and we wonder whether we could be in some way better than we are.  For Nietzsche I think these problems arose when he contrasted the urgency and vitality of Greek life with the bovine mediocrity of contemporary life.  They arose also when he contrasted the perceived meaningfulness and the stringent devotion that arose in religious contexts (think of the peasants laboring to construct cathedrals that wouldn’t be completed in their lifetime) with the anomie and open-endedness of contemporary life, the lack of overriding goals, the perceived inability to justify devotion to any particular goal.  All of this leads Nietzsche to want to make claims about human flourishing.  His texts are brimming with claims about health, power, flourishing, splendor, vitality, growth, and so forth.

But what are those notions?  What is health, or power, or flourishing?  To figure that out, we need to examine human psychology.  We need to ask what our deepest aims are, what we’re driven toward, what’s changeable in us and what’s fixed, what’s reinterpretable and what’s past our reach.  We need to examine how our conscious lives relate to what’s non-conscious, how our social and cultural judgments about value impact us, how our conceptual repertories and our languages affect what we see and do.  We need an accurate and unprejudiced moral psychology.  And that’s what Nietzsche aspires to give us.