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

[Sheldon]

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.  It benefits the terrorist when his attack succeeds.  It benefits the chicken if we all die, conceptually, anyway..not really..they die if we die, lol.

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 is true even if yours is also true.

Well to be fair I've not seen you evade anything yet, or change the subject, in fact I was quite enjoying the debate. Though I am still not convinced that moral assertions don't ultimately always rest on subjective opinions of course. Not least because when I ask for people to offer objective moral claims, the claim nearly always would rely on another subjective claim. That is to say that while the claim X is immoral because it causes Y may be objectively true, insomuch that X can be demonstrated to cause Y, but if the claim Y is immoral is subjective then this suggests again that all moral assertions ultimately rest on subjective assertions. 

I will try to keep an open mind though. However I am off out, and will likely be unfit to debate much when I return, so will pick this up tomorrow if there is still interest.