Subjective Morality?

[vulcanlogician]

Here is something that I've been thinking about throughout the moral philosophy/mathematics threads, but it relates to an idea I brought up early on:

One of the things the moral objectivist attempts to show is that moral skepticism is runaway skepticism. A few pages ago, bennyboy demonstrated precisely what I meant by "runaway skepticism" by postulating that a real person was just a complex of ideas and feelings. NOTHING in philosophy can defend against runaway skepticism. It leads directly to solipsism.

Unless you are comfortable being a solipsist, you are going to have to make at least one assumption somewhere along the line. Epistemological assumptions, coupled with empiricist philosophy, form the foundation of the physical sciences (the scientific method). You can't use the scientific method to discover the scientific method; the scientific method rests upon epistemological assumptions. Math makes assumptions as well. We try to be as accurate as possible with our assumptions when we select them. We try to select assumptions that are axiomatically true. But the fact is, every mode of knowledge relies upon assumptions.

All the moral objectivist is trying to argue is that moral philosophy is objective in the same way science is objective. If the criticisms that you level against moral objectivism contain a skepticism so robust that a similar level of skepticism would render the sciences incapable of producing truth statements, I'd call that runaway skepticism.