Objective morality as a proper basic belief

[Angrboda]

Our intentions in talking about something can be mistaken.  When people believed the earth was flat, they talked as if the world were flat.  Their intention was irrelevant to the fact.   Beyond that, all you've basically done is assert.  You know what would show that morality is objective?  An explanation of morality that can be demonstrated to be correct.  That is how we show that something is objective.  Do you have an explanation of morality that can be demonstrated to be correct?  I see you making a lot of assertions, but haven't seen anything like an explanation of how morals work.  Until you can do that, all you've got is an ipse dixit argument.

 

As soon as you label a moral act right or wrong, you are already admitting that OM exists. Right and wrong ONLY exist in relation to facts. They dont exist in relation to subjective items.

Seeing that I didn't use the words right or wrong, I'm not sure what it is you're responding to. It doesn't appear to be a response to anything I've written. Instead, it appears that you're just bleating out a prerehearsed talking point like some sort of idiotic robot. If you're not going to engage the subject of the debate, then don't bother me with your preformed little spiel. I've heard it before. You ignored the point about word usage not reflecting underlying reality, and made an explicit appeal to the notion that word usage determines underlying reality. What the fuck are you reading? It certainly isn't me. You have failed to engage on any point made in my paragraph. I note that you have evaded my call to provide a working explanation of morality. I can only take this to mean that you don't have one. In which case all you can do is state your conclusions and not the reasons behind them. That results in bare assertions and question begging. It doesn't get any more ipse dixit than that.

In your title you tentatively assert that morality being objective is a properly basic belief.  I take that to mean you are employing reformed epistemology as a foundation for your beliefs.  I reject reformed epistemology.  Any framework that asserts that something is true until it can be shown false is nothing but a wholesale falsehood.  In traditional foundationalism, a belief is basic if it is either self-evident or it is incorrigible.  The belief that morality is objective is neither of these things.

No response given. I take it your opinions about objective morality being a properly basic belief is just another one of your "talking points," a conclusion devoid of any real reasoning behind it.

For what it's worth, I'm not a subjectivist in the sense that you mean because I believe the foundation of our morals lies in evolution, not God.  But it does point out an important question about morality.  Does our metaphysics not alter what we view as moral and immoral.  A middle eastern woman is killed because of being an abomination to God.  To those who don't believe in God, this act itself is an abomination.  Can we ever have objective facts about metaphysics?

Evolution does not make morality objective. It is just an adaptation acquired to enhance the survival of species...not objective.

So morality cannot come from evolution. Morality also cannot come from God. That's two places that morality cannot come from. You were offered a chance to provide an explanation as to where morality did come from, but you deferred. I guess you don't know. Which makes the source of all these strident assertions and bold talking points something of a mystery.

You say that evolved morals are "just" an adaptation, that they are not therefore objective. I disagree. It is an objective fact that normal humans have five fingers on each hand. It is also an objective fact that certain features of our brains exist as part of normal human development. Just as it is an objective fact that our minds construct three dimensional vision out of stereoscopic two dimensional images. It is a fact that the mind constructs moral imperatives as a consequence of our evolutionary history. They are an invariant part of our mental landscape. That means they don't vary from person to person because of arbitrary or random conditions dependent on each mind. That is a more useful definition of the split between objective and subjective than on which side of the blood brain barrier the conditions lie. Morality is an objective fact of our mental existence because of our evolution. Those animals which felt an imperative to survive, survived. Those which didn't, didn't survive. That is how an ought is derived from an is. Likewise, imperatives useful to a social species are embedded in our mental landscape. To be human is to believe that fairness matters; harm matters; authority and loyalty matter; as does purity/cleanliness. These are facts of human existence. That they are computed by the brain does not mean that they are not objective with respect to the individual mind.

Perhaps, if I were to do your thinking for you, what you mean is that while evolution can evolve imperatives that have an objective character, these imperatives are not 'moral' in some well defined way. That I think is begging the question, asserting that imperatives of a moral character can only come from outside the brain. That is not a foregone conclusion. As noted, the moral features of our mental landscape are invariant across the species. Thus they form a viable candidate for a functionally objective foundation for morals. Their character as 'moral' imperatives is predetermined by our DNA. That character is as much a part of our biology as having five fingers is. It is not a mere preference that you have five fingers, nor is it as a mere preference that your moral opinions make themselves felt as they do.

Consider this quote by Michael Ruse

"What I want to argue is that there are no foundations to normative ethics. If you think that to be true a claim has to refer to some particular thing or things, my claim is that in an important sense, normative ethics is false… the claims of normative ethics are like the rules of a game. In baseball, it is true that after three strikes the batter is out; but this claim does not have any reference or correspondence in absolute reality.” (Michael Ruse:1995:248-9)

If you deny OM exists, then your moral claims have no " reference or correspondence in absolute reality".

This is begging the question again. I'll also note that I don't care much for analogies. Analogies take points that are known to be in common between two things, and use that fact to infer that unknown points are thus likely also in common between the two. This is a non sequitur. While it is true that the rules in baseball are determined by individual minds, this analogy is silent on the question of whether or not they are dependent in the same way as the rules of morality. As noted above, they are not, and so the analogy fails. Even without the above information, it's inconclusive whether the two situations are in fact similar in the desired respect. So I would suggest you drop the arguments from analogy and stick to providing actual reasoned responses.