Ben Shapiro vs Neil deGrasse Tyson: The WAR Over Transgender Issues

[The Grand Nudger]

This is a lot like people who say that the extinction of humans would be bad.  Or that the reverse, that humans flourishing would be good.  While the number of humans may increase or decrease, and that can be determined objectively, whether either is good or bad cannot be determined objectively.  But for some people, it is a base assumption that humans are good.  Thus any measures which objectively increase or decrease the prosperity of humans inherits the value judgment, and its vector, from this subjective assessment.  Thus they derive that human extinction is bad and that global warming is bad, refusing to ever consider whether or not the basis of such claims is sound.  This type of blindness is not particularly uncommon.  I'm sure I have a similar blindness regarding some things.  But blindness it is, nonetheless.

Generally speaking, people do not assign moral import or moral condemnation to things that lack moral agency.  So extinction is neither a good or bad thing until we have an extinctor, and that extinctor is a moral agent.  If humans go extinct, that's not bad.  Just something that happened.  If humans make themselves go extinct, different question, so..possibly, different answer.

One might even build a bridge between the two.  "Losing a finger is bad because it's harm -- it objectively diminishes me."  But why is diminishing you necessarily bad?  Where did that axiom come from.  If I diminished all humans by killing them, that would certainly be bad in the eyes of said humans, but the cows and chickens might rejoice.  One can ask the perennial question, Cui bono?  If it is a question of who loses and who gains, then it is going to be inherently subjective.  Objective reality cares not whether I do or do not lose a finger, whether I do or do not lose a life, whether the world does or does not lose a species.

Cui bono is an objective question.  There's a fact of who benefits, even as you're asking it of us.  If the cows and chickens rejoiced at you killing all the humans, and they were moral agents, that would be understandable..but still bad.  Like a terrorist that lost their whole family. Whether a thing benefits someone and whether that thing is good are distinct questions which we find real examples of in life and apprehend as such. We see people benefit from bad things. We can acknowledge that we ourselves benefit from bad things.

If the question is where some axiom came from, not specifically whether or not it's true..the answer is word. Like every other word. We name things. Where did the axiom that unhealthy things are bad-for-you come from? The same observation can be made with harm, even harm-as-subjectivist.

I can't help but add here that people who think humans dying would be good for our livestock are wrong in fact. The livestock depends on us for survival. Especially the cornish cross, our broiler breed. The poor thing makes meat, not good decisions. We did that to them..which I think is objectively morally bad, though incredibly practically useful, and directly to our (and very directly my own) benefit. The point of moral objectivity is not to declare the things we do, and the things that are expedient or useful for us individually or as a group, as The Good Stuff. The point is factual accuracy. Ask me about killing, as a confirmed killer, you'll find the same. Ask me about being a smarmy asshole, as a smarmy asshole enjoyer...

I suspect that any value judgment, that something is either good or bad is inherently subjective.  I think I've talked to Nudger about such before.  He just changes the subject or evades any question posed.  I suspect this is an artifact of a desire to prove oneself right, over and above a desire to know what's true, but that is mere speculative psychologizing, so I will not assert it as necessarily the case.

Come now, that my answers don't satisfy you is not the same thing as my not having given them, repeatedly, at length...objectively speaking.  I think that belief relies on such a trivial misunderstanding of the term that it's a meaningless belief which says nothing. Your idea that everything is subjective, is subjective, and I think everything isn't. In a subjectivist universe, my belief that moral objectivity is possible is true even if your belief that everything is subjective is also true. The truthmaking properties in such a universe are simply what a person believes- the fact of that itself, full stop. I don't believe we live in such a universe, and I don't believe our moral discussions and disagreements reflect such a moral system.

I think, as ever, that we're trying to say (or believe that we are saying) objectively true things when we make moral proclamations. That we often fail. That we often fail due to defects of subjectivity, relativity, and literal non reasons too. That's an us problem, not a truth problem. Broken calculators don't make math wrong. Inaccurate and sloppy use of terms terms doesn't make word wrong. The universe does not warp around our emotional duress. I don't think that problem is particularly operative when I say that harm and harm reduction or harm avoidance is a component of what we're talking about when we talk about morality - what that word means or entials...or that a person who's toe has been stepped on has not been harmed as much as a person who's been murdered. For all of our faults and defects, all of my own faults and defects, those are statements which seem to satisfy the criteria for true, and objectively so, and not just in the limited sense of metaethics, but fully. As in they purport to report a fact, it's a fact of the matter in question, and they do accurately report that fact.