What would be the harm?

[bennyboy]

The obvious fault is that you need a subjective agent who has feelings about things for the idea of value even to make sense.  Do you think that a rock values the soil around it?  Or that the sun values the Earth?

Why would that be a problem.  The mere presence of a subjective agent does not make some thing, itself, subjective.  Have you seriously considered the implications of this statement....if it were true.  

I'm in the presence of a subjective agent right now.....you.  Do you feel that I would be justified in disregarding everything you've said to me on account of that..or do you think that even though you;re a subjective agent, and even though i need you, for your thoughts...that some of them are true?  Specifically, those criticisms you've levied against notions of objectivity?

I don't have a problem with objectivity. . . only with the idea that value is objective.

I'm not worried about intrinsic value, at present.

Either something has intrinsic value, or that value is assigned to it by a subjective agent.

Calling something religious is a lazy way to admit that you don;t have an argument. 

No. It's a way of describing an obvious circular argument in a way that I think will make the point salient to an atheist. This is because atheists often refer to Biblical circularity as a major flaw in Christian argumentation.

You ask for a definition and then rule out a dictionary, lol.  Your position may be obvious to you..I get that, but..again....as moral theorists are discussing subjectivity and objectivity, the presence of a subjective agent is not enough to establish subjectivity.  That a subjective agent is making some claim is not enough to establish that the claim is subjective, either.

Does a corpse value oxygen? Does a rock? Does a guy sitting in his car in his garage trying to breathe in as much carbon monoxide as he can, or a man with a rope around his neck? How about a woman who walks into a room and sees her young toddler struggling with a plastic bag on his head?

We have here a collection of non-agents, and of subjective agents. In none of these cases is the value of oxygen clearly resolved. What we CAN do is predict that the mother will act as though oxygen is extremely valuable indeed, and the others not so much.

What they're looking for, is some mind independent fact referred to -by- that subjective agent.  So, for example..it is a fact that oxygen is valuable to anything that depends on oxygen, and that fire extinguishers are good-for putting out fires.  We are not imagining this, it's a true statement  (and, in this case, of natural properties).  Well being, like health, can be conceptualized as just such a metric.  It may not be the only metric for moral evaluation...it may be the wrong metric for moral evaluation (though..it;s a super difficult to assert this one)...it has problems.  The problem it doesn't have, is a problem of not being meaningfully objective.

As I said earlier, once a subjective agent has determined that it considers something of value, then there can be objective contributors to his thinking process. If I decide that pain is harm, and harm is bad, then I can claim a broken leg to be an objective harm. But to then say that broken legs are objectively bad is wrong-- it's just a projection of a subjective agent onto an objective state.

Maybe the road to philosophical truth is to stab steak knives through your eyes and bash your head against a table top until you break through to the "other side"-- if you think so, then you may feel that's a good action. Now, most of us have instincts that tell us this is counterproductive. We view acts like that as deeply bad.

And yet. . . it's all just states of matter, no? Remember my previous definition of morality-- that it mediates among feelings, ideas and the objective environment, but that it is mainly predicated on feeling.

Assuming you assume that steak knife philosophy is bad, do you have a rational reason for that, or is it because the idea of doing that seems abhorrent? My prediction is that you'll go one step back, but not back to the root, which is where the issue of the roots of value must go in order to be valid.