RE: Hello, Anyone interested in a debate?
May 24, 2015 at 2:16 pm
(This post was last modified: May 24, 2015 at 2:21 pm by bennyboy.)
Awwww, you replied while I was still editing. I hope you and/or Jorg will go back a post and read that version instead. 
re: convergence of subjective views on objective truth
I think it's perfectly possible to have cultural or species bias. In the case of morality, this becomes instantly obvious if you try to see what other animals think about right or wrong in your efforts to remove species bias. Right away, then, it becomes obvious that all our moral ideas have a hidden context: "X is right in the context of people." The next question is this: do you brand people whose moral ideas differ from the average person's as animalistic and dysfunctional?
I think that's the Christian approach: they divide human feelings and ideas into two categories: those which we share with animals, and those which are unique only to humans. They then characterize a human life as the struggle to transcend the former and purify and magnify the latter. So the seven deadly sins could be seen as a list of those animal motivations which if allowed to run loose, will serve as an impediment to the full expression of those qualities which are uniquely human.
In short, you can coin morality in objective terms, but this requires a context-- and the choice of context is arbitrary and highly subjective. So there really can't be a big-M "Morality" out there somewhere for us to discover as we might discover say a black hole.
re: convergence of subjective views on objective truth
I think it's perfectly possible to have cultural or species bias. In the case of morality, this becomes instantly obvious if you try to see what other animals think about right or wrong in your efforts to remove species bias. Right away, then, it becomes obvious that all our moral ideas have a hidden context: "X is right in the context of people." The next question is this: do you brand people whose moral ideas differ from the average person's as animalistic and dysfunctional?
I think that's the Christian approach: they divide human feelings and ideas into two categories: those which we share with animals, and those which are unique only to humans. They then characterize a human life as the struggle to transcend the former and purify and magnify the latter. So the seven deadly sins could be seen as a list of those animal motivations which if allowed to run loose, will serve as an impediment to the full expression of those qualities which are uniquely human.
In short, you can coin morality in objective terms, but this requires a context-- and the choice of context is arbitrary and highly subjective. So there really can't be a big-M "Morality" out there somewhere for us to discover as we might discover say a black hole.
