Subjective Morality?

[bennyboy]

Your account of numbers is one account from several which are not definitively proven.  So, that's a nice assertion, but it doesn't actually carry any water.

You believe that you can give examples of subjective morals because you believe that all morals are subjective -- a belief you haven't yet abetted.  For any specific moral that you can identify, you have no way of demonstrating that said moral is not objectively true.  So your claim that you can give examples of subjective morals is hollow and based on nothing more than your confidence in your belief that morals are subjective.  I'm not holding that morals are necessarily objective, only that they might be.  That carries essentially no burden of proof.  You, on the other hand, appear wedded to the idea that objective morals don't exist.  That's a claim that does carry a burden of proof, which you haven't met.  I haven't claimed that I can demonstrate that a specific moral is objective.  I presume your question is intending to imply that if I can't demonstrate an objective moral, that morals are then likely subjective.  But that is nothing more than an argument from ignorance, and carries no water.

Your belief in the subjectivity of morals seems lacking in evidence or sound argument.  Have you provided some that I've missed?

The problem with these kinds of debates is that the correctness of an answer is more likely to depend on semantics than on any particular truth beyond the semantics.  Morality is subjective if you define subjectivity as I do, and morals as I do.  It's objective if you define subjective or objective other than as I do, or define morality other than I do.

I'd say, though, that objective morals exist about as much as objective unicorns exist.  They might exist as brain patterns, or be encoded to some degree in DNA.

It's kind of like the God argument.  Given any particular description of God, and an assertion that such a God exists, I'm likely to claim gnostic atheism.  Given a general statement, "There's something we could reasonably call God," then I'm agnostic, or perhaps ignostic.

If someone states that objective morals may exist, I will take it much the same way.  I'm agnostic about that, unless someone can define very specifically what they mean by objective morals, and give a concrete enough example for me to put my finger on it.  Without this, then by default I tend toward subjectivism, because I consider mores to be ideas, and ideas for the most part to be subjective mental experiences.

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I want to to isolate this portion of your argument to show how wrong-headed this type of argument is. We can return to your other points later. But (if I accomplish anything) I'd like to convince you to stop taking this approach to criticizing moral objectivism.

[. . .]

So some ethicist in the future makes a moral judgement about grok-o-fecting. She says "Grok-o-fecting is morally wrong."

Surely a counterargument cannot be "since grok-o-fecting long predates humanity... feelings about grok-o-fecting must predate our ability to verbalize or to hold rational views about it." Because this simply isn't true. Furthermore, it has no bearing at all on the issue of whether the ethicist's judgement is an objective matter or a matter of opinion. It is a red herring that doesn't belong in the argument at all.

I hope my weird little sci fi yarn demonstrates how misguided it is to mention the evolutionary origins of feelings concerning a given action or behavior when discussing meta-ethics.

]
First of all, I demand you write at least a short story about this.

Second, we don't have specific feelings about Grok-o-fecting, but we do have evolved feelings against doing harm. Your ethicist is not against Grok-o-fecting for any reason but that she does not generally like the idea of people harming others. She feels bad about that idea.

In response to your other comment about "if nobody cared about rape, nothing would ever be said about it." Immanuel Kant had an odd answer to this thought experiment:

You answer the doorbell late at night. Upon opening your front door, you see a man covered in blood, holding an axe. He asks where your child's bedroom is, stating that he intends to chop your child up in to little bits.

Kant says that it would be wrong to lie to him about the location of your child's bedroom. (He says that remaining silent would be the most ethical course of action.)

Let's think about this for a moment. If you did lie to this person nobody would CARE. If this happened IRL, and you told the axe murderer your child was asleep in the local police station where he was thereafter arrested, nobody would say, "Hey man. You lied to that guy." In short, nobody would care at all. But even so, Kant still had something to say about it.

The idea that lying is wrong is not only a statement about objective morality, but seemingly about absolute morality. It reeks of religious dogma, methinks. That being said, some people get so fixated on particular religious ideas that they have strong feelings about them, and this (of course) affects their moral position.