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

[The Grand Nudger]

I was asking you if the moralizers use of the term immoral was equivalent to the round earthers use of the term flat. 

No, not equivalent, subjectivity / objectivity is a scale, not a binary condition. 

This is where we're talking past each other.  You're talking about the quality of the claim.  On a scale of true-false objective-subjective.  Metaethical theories and analytic semantics are propositions about kinds.  Within each of the cognitivist theories moral assertions can be more or less true.  The different terms refer to different referent contents.  

Though very little to see the consequences of leaving harm out of moral discourse. The expedient part is avoiding the consequences of leaving harm out of moral discourse. I also don't think it's possible, as it is likely hardwired in us by evolution, both stopping it (unnecessary) and using it (necessary). 

We also survive and thrive by harm, so there's always a compelling impulse and tendency to leave it out or leave bits of it out or leave bits of it so long as it's to those other people out.  When we know about it in the first place - our faculties here are limited.  

1, What makes them wrong if not lacking sufficient objective evidence, or being subjective? 

By being wrong-in-fact.  So, for example, if I express myself as informing you about a fact of some object like it's color, and I say it's green when it's red.  I'm talking about the thing, I'm making a valid color claim, and I'm wrong.  I'm likely colorblind.  A biological avenue for subjective errors in any claim of this kind.  Errors specific to some fact about the reporting subject in a cognitive process or claim.  

Well I think this is true for the subjective axioms we decide to base our morals on, I don't see any way around that. A perhaps more troubling thought, is that moral progress is not possible in any objective way. What would we be measuring it against? 

I have no way to answer that question or engage in any rational conversation about this subject or any other without referring to an underlying mountain of axioms.  

Flatness can objectively measured, as an apprentice I learned this the hard way, when asked to hand scrape a surface table. I don't know how to objectively measure moral claims, without subjective axioms. Just as we can objectively measure the physiological harm of crack use / addiction, so I still think this is a false equivalence. 

Corpseness can also be objectively measured.  Your units of measure are axiomatic.  The words you use to describe those units of measure, axiomatic.  The logic underlying any claim you make or argument you present...axiomatic.  

I agree, but those axioms vary, from person to person, place to place, across time, and cultures etc..

b-mine

This would be relativism.  If relativism is true subjectivism is false.   Meanwhile, the answer to 42x=126 varies from middle schooler to middle schooler.  I call this thing on the desk a cat and somebody else calls it gato.  We can add math and cats to the pile of subjective things.

I struggle here, as while I understand that metaethical relativism and subjectivism are two distinct philosophies, something can be both relative and subjective, so they overlap in some ways. As we discussed, the exclusion of moral absolutes for example. 

Not in a logically or descriptively true sense, no.  They are often mashed together, in practice, nevertheless....to moral realism this is a compounding error.  

Ethics is not a scientific discipline of course, though it can be studied as a subject of social-scientific study. 

Pour one out for the experts.  Their science isn't sciencey enough.  

I agree, but they are not equally subjective. 

There's no sense clawing back scorched earth, it's already burnt.  Suffice to say, the idea that all of those listed things and now more listed things are all subjective is not even a laymans understanding of subjectivity.  We can dispense entirely with academic philosophy on that point. It may be the metaethical reality but I feel like morality is the least of the casualties in question at this point.

I am not sure where anyone thinks I said this? I know what an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy is, and I try to avoid them. I am simply saying that when people make what they call objective moral claims, in my experience they rest ultimately on subjective axioms. The claims the world is flat and the world is not flat, may both be subjective, but they are not equally subjective, and for a reason. 

The list keeps growing.  It now includes the idea that a round earth is a subjective claim.  I have to ask, more or less subjective than the claim the earth is flat, and what possible metrics could we use to determine that which weren't also subjective in this way?

“variation in moral codes from one society to another and from one period to another, and also the differences in moral beliefs between groups and classes within a complex community… make it difficult to treat those judgments as apprehensions of objective truths” 

John Mackie
I am inclined to agree, and there are many others of course.

I agree as well, as an objectivist. Moral relativism is in error. The judgements of our societies are not the truth making properties of assertions. This has been much more simply put as might does not make right. As an objectivist, I think that the truth making properties of moral assertions are to be found in facts about the object of the assertion itself. Not the reporting subject or the reporting subjects society.