Subjective Morality?

[bennyboy]

You believe in the subjectivity of morals without being able to provide any justification for your belief, and when challenged to support your belief, you say that you're simply going to go on believing regardless of whether you can provide evidence for your belief, and you have the gall to liken me to someone holding a religious belief on faith alone?  You're a joke, benny.  Provide justification for your belief, or you're the one behaving like a religious nutjob who believes things without reason based on blind faith.  So unless I believe what you want me to believe, and  jump through the hoops you want me to jump through, regardless of whether they are relevant, you're going to consider me the irrational one?  You're an idiot, benny.  A clueless, fucking, idiot.

Hmmm. You seem to be tilting. Are you sure you want to keep on with this discussion?

I've given justification, and am perfectly happy to give more, for my belief that mores are rooted in feeling. One is the variance across individuals and populations (and over time); if moral realism is true, then we as a species are spectacularly incompetent at finding the truth.

And while lack of evidence for, or even a good example of, any objective moral truth, is not proof that objective morality is wrong, it leaves one to ask-- why would anybody formulate the idea that it is right? On what basis would someone believe in the objective truth of something that cannot be either directly observed or strongly inferred from what can be directly observed?

You can expect anything you like, whether those expectations matter or not is something else.  You privilege certain referents as facts because they are experienced phenomenologically in a different way than moral facts, something which has already been pointed out to you does not prove anything.  You can't demonstrate that morals are predicated on feelings, so you can't demonstrate that any better than you can demonstrate Zeus' cock, the difference is that you believe that morals being predicated upon feelings is an objective fact, one which happens to fail all the tests for an objective fact that you place upon the necessity of moral facts being objective, yet suddenly those things don't matter.  You're just engaged in special pleading.   You can't demonstrate that "observed" referents are any more or less objective than moral facts, you simply assume they are, without reason, in the one, and assume, again without reason, that they aren't in the second.

I can't prove anything about feelings at all, even that they exist. This isn't a problem for me, though, because I know first-hand feelings about offense, about guilt, about insult, about harm, and about their relationship with moral ideas. I assume other people have access to these feelings as well, but if they do not-- well, I'm pretty sure they do.

Or we can be agnostic as to whether or not morals are objective or subjective.  As already noted, the inability to produce a moral that satisfies you as to its objectivity doesn't lead to any conclusion, as that is an argument from ignorance.  However, belief that morals are predicated on feelings and subjective, as you do, without any actual ability to demonstrate that it is, is itself just a sprinkle of holy water away from a religious position.  You're an idiot, benny.  You accuse me, falsely, of the very thing that you yourself are guilty of, and think that I should be ashamed because you're a moron and a hypocrite.  Sorry Huggy, I mean, benny, I'm not.

I don't need to hang my belief on faith. When I think about things which are called moral issues, I have feelings about them. I believe that there are other people in existence, and that they likely have feelings about moral issues as well. If non-solipsism is "faith," then I have much bigger problems than my view on morality. I have to figure out why I'm hallucinating other people, and pretending that their opinions matter.