Subjective Morality?

[bennyboy]

Tada, you've just agreed with moral realism.

Tada, no I haven't. Moral realism depends on moral facts and values which are independent of personal feelings or ideas. I do not agree with that position, and hold the opposite position: that there ARE no moral facts or values which are independent of personal feelings or ideas.

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I don't think that's a fair characterization of many that feel that art has some objective basis, certainly not all.  It seems little more than a straw man you pulled out of your ass so that you could beg the question.  Regardless, the question is why you would say that there is nothing objectively artistic about say, a waterfall.  Your simply giving us your opinion is fine as far as it goes, but you have given us nothing but in this thread.  What are your reasons for believing, not that morals aren't objective, but that morals cannot refer to some objective fact.  I've given you the analogous case of numbers, and other than a clumsy attempt at a nominalist defense, you've avoided that subject as well.

I didn't say that art has no objective basis. I said that objects of artistic admiration are not themselves intrinsically artistic. Just as objects of moral thought are not intrinsically moral.

They are subjectively artistic, because a subjective agent looks at them, and has some kind of emotional response to them.

As for your question: ". . . why you would say that there is nothing objectively artistic about say, a waterfall." It's because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It's a subjective evaluation. Absent an evaluator, there can be no evaluation-- just a bunch of wave functions superimposed on the fabric of space-time.

You could do the same thing that's been done with morality in this thread-- make an arbitrary evaluation, and then point to objective measurements of it. If you are confident that anything derived from the Golden Ratio must have artistic value, for example, then you can snoop around for things derived from the Golden Ratio and marvel at how much art the world has created-- how much of the world is objectively beautiful! But, as with morality, you'll still have that meta-question: WHY should things be evaluated by that particular metric?

It's pretty simple to stand where I'm standing. All you have to do is ask "why?" Why ought one accept your particular oughts? If these are really objective mores, then one would simply need to point them out; but this is not, in fact, the case.

As for numbers-- I can point out numbers, and define them unambiguously: "Take away your pinkie and your thumb. . . that's three. Whenever you have the same number of something as this number of fingers, say 'three.'" And you can know that throughout history and cultures, little kids are growing up learning that this many fingers is called (whatever three is called in their language). Not so with morals.