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Great marriage advice.
#51
RE: Great marriage advice.
(April 21, 2017 at 3:09 pm)Crunchy Wrote:
(April 21, 2017 at 10:28 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote: I'm having trouble understanding how moral ambiguity can exist inside the framework of moral objectivity.

I’ll put it like this: The presence of ambiguity (being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness) is the result of complexity, not subjectivity.
As an analogy, you can consider chaos theory. A purely deterministic system becomes quickly unpredictable within a few steps. Like a game of pool. There is no way to predict where all the balls will end up after each break even though the system is 100% deterministic.  

Even though we can agree what our basic objective needs are, it can quickly become very difficult to determine how to achieve these needs in a world of complexity.

I think what you are getting at is how do you weigh conflicting consequences, when an action is good for some and bad for others for example.
But I think this is not a question of subjectivity but rather complexity. Although moral questions are often very difficult to answer, and there are often many satisfactory answers to each one and sometimes no satisfactory answers, this still does not imbue the entire system with subjectivity.  We can (and should) IMO use the principles of rational thought to eliminate the obviously bad answers to those questions. I realize that this is still no guarantee of universal agreement on moral questions. 

I don’t see the issue of ambiguity as a deal breaker for moral objectivity. It does however mean that we may never all come to the same conclusions even if we have the same initial intentions. Like those pesky pool balls that end up all over the place even with the same staring conditions.

Well, we'll just disagree then, because it seems to me obvious that in complex matters, how people work their way through the thicket is precisely the cause of moral subjectivity, insofar as it is not terribly common for people to have identical experiences, and therefore identical values.

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#52
RE: Great marriage advice.
(April 21, 2017 at 3:09 pm)Crunchy Wrote: I’ll put it like this: The presence of ambiguity (being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness) is the result of complexity, not subjectivity.
As an analogy, you can consider chaos theory. A purely deterministic system becomes quickly unpredictable within a few steps. Like a game of pool. There is no way to predict where all the balls will end up after each break even though the system is 100% deterministic.  

Even though we can agree what our basic objective needs are, it can quickly become very difficult to determine how to achieve these needs in a world of complexity.

I think what you are getting at is how do you weigh conflicting consequences, when an action is good for some and bad for others for example.
But I think this is not a question of subjectivity but rather complexity. Although moral questions are often very difficult to answer, and there are often many satisfactory answers to each one and sometimes no satisfactory answers, this still does not imbue the entire system with subjectivity.  We can (and should) IMO use the principles of rational thought to eliminate the obviously bad answers to those questions. I realize that this is still no guarantee of universal agreement on moral questions. 

I don’t see the issue of ambiguity as a deal breaker for moral objectivity. It does however mean that we may never all come to the same conclusions even if we have the same initial intentions. Like those pesky pool balls that end up all over the place even with the same staring conditions.

That's quite the massive rationalization.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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#53
RE: Great marriage advice.
(April 21, 2017 at 8:52 pm)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:
(April 21, 2017 at 3:09 pm)Crunchy Wrote: I’ll put it like this: The presence of ambiguity (being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness) is the result of complexity, not subjectivity.
As an analogy, you can consider chaos theory. A purely deterministic system becomes quickly unpredictable within a few steps. Like a game of pool. There is no way to predict where all the balls will end up after each break even though the system is 100% deterministic.  

Even though we can agree what our basic objective needs are, it can quickly become very difficult to determine how to achieve these needs in a world of complexity.

I think what you are getting at is how do you weigh conflicting consequences, when an action is good for some and bad for others for example.
But I think this is not a question of subjectivity but rather complexity. Although moral questions are often very difficult to answer, and there are often many satisfactory answers to each one and sometimes no satisfactory answers, this still does not imbue the entire system with subjectivity.  We can (and should) IMO use the principles of rational thought to eliminate the obviously bad answers to those questions. I realize that this is still no guarantee of universal agreement on moral questions. 

I don’t see the issue of ambiguity as a deal breaker for moral objectivity. It does however mean that we may never all come to the same conclusions even if we have the same initial intentions. Like those pesky pool balls that end up all over the place even with the same staring conditions.

Well, we'll just disagree then, because it seems to me obvious that in complex matters, how people work their way through the thicket is precisely the cause of moral subjectivity, insofar as it is not terribly common for people to have identical experiences, and therefore identical values.

So would you consider a system to be in-deterministic if we are unable to predict the outcome? Science doesn’t think so. If it was very difficult to predict an outcome should we give up and label it unsolvable/subjective because it’s thorny and difficult?  And if we can’t find the exact correct solution can we not at least eliminate the obviously false solutions with rational thought? Is that not worth the effort? This seems to me to be the same reasoning. 

The fact that there is a thorny thicket does not prove that there is no possible rational solution to moral questions, and that we should therefore label the whole mess subjective and be done with it. It's a non sequiture. 

But sure, I've no problem with disagreement.
If god was real he wouldn't need middle men to explain his wants or do his bidding.
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