Subjective Morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

Good link.  It deserves mention that a faith based deontology and a secular deontology are fundamentally equivalent in their assumptions.  Both propose that we have obligations and that their fulfillment is necessary to and will produce human flourishing (conversely, that failure to fulfill those obligations will lead to suffering and pain).  So, while a believer may reject the notion that human flourishing is -the- goal, their metrics and assertions strongly suggest that it is at least -a- goal, or an intended end state of affairs.  It is, therefore, a relevant fact of the matter we're discussing.  

The current quality of their life and final disposition of their souls is commonly taken to be a comment on their having made themselves present before god and acted in accordance with his will, which is in service to the good.  Now, we may not agree with them on the whole god thing, or what their moral duties are...and we may point out that..if their god exists apart from their mind they've failed to demonstrate as much.....but do we disagree that fulfilling obligations which are necessary to and produce human flourishing are  -good- things?  

Probably not.  

Here's a fun q.  How would we explain the success of faith based deontology at producing whatever amount of flourishing they have..if there was nothing in that deontology that pointed to an objective truth with an upstream causal relationship to human flourishing?  How do we explain their success...as naturalists, if those facts (whatever they are) are not natural facts?

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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.
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Agreed.  And if we don't accept that premise?  What then?

-Then you can call the field fleeflarp instead of ethics and assess whether or not the field of fleeflarp is making objective statements about fleeflarp which are true.  

If it is, then there are fleeflarp facts, so..too..then, would there be moral facts, you've simply rejected the word, not the truth content to which it refers.