Subjective Morality?

[bennyboy]

I can objectively say that, "X holds the moral position Y, based on (insert way of knowing/inferring that)." If you want to talk about the mechanics of mechanism, like brain function, then fine. You could locate the "morality genes," perhaps, and those would be objective. I'm fine with that, but I predicted that immediately upon entering this thread-- if you want to reduce reality to a physical monist world view, then discussion of morality means very little. In my view of things, the things you quoted are essentially an example of objectivists wrongly conflating a material monist world view with a dualist or idealist concept.

But this goes back to our old discussions about mind, na? In the essence, we're always going to be talking about the same issue: you will conflate the subjective and objective into physical mechanism, since the brain is presumably deterministic. And I will conflate all into the subjective, perhaps with a pragmatic dualism-- there's a thinking/feeling subject, and the objects or ideas which the subject contemplates.

Given this, our positions on morality are likely to be different, too, for the exact same reasons. You will measure things AROUND what I call morality, and say it's a measure of morality. X% of people believe Y, X brain region lights up when upsetting picture Y is shown to a test subject, and so on-- much like you insist that a particular frequency of light is "red," whereas I insist redness is purely experiential and has no meaningful objective existence.

For me, morality is predicated on subjective experience. If google decided we should/shouldn't do something, I wouldn't consider it morality, because google presumably doesn't have any subjective experience of insult, or violation, or any real understanding of loss.