What would be the harm?

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't have a problem with objectivity. . . only with the idea that value is objective.

Why a value?  Is a value the only thing in all of existence that you think can't be objective..and can't objective how, objective as you see it, or objective as moral theorists are discussing it?

The rest is just filler, and me laughing at you, but figuring out the above would resolve this disagreement handily, like the example of the disagreement on the issue of a fire extinguishers value, lol.

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Either something has intrinsic value, or that value is assigned to it by a subjective agent.

Or both. ...or neither.   There may be some intrinsically worthless thing that no one subjectively values.  

No.  It's a way of describing an obvious circular argument in a way that I think will make the point salient to an atheist.  This is because atheists often refer to Biblical circularity as a major flaw in Christian argumentation.

What's obviously circular about grounding a value in an objective natural property?  
(or objective non natural property, if you prefer)

Does a corpse value oxygen?

Does it require oxygen?  Then..no.  

Does a rock?  

I'd say no again.

Does a guy sitting in his car trying to breath in as much carbon monoxide as he can, or a man with a rope around his neck?  How about a woman who walks into a room and sees her young toddler struggling with a plastic bag on his head?

Here again we see a creature for which oxygen is objectively value, that simply doesn't value that oxygen.  

We have here a collection of non-agents, and of subjective agents.  In none of these cases is the value of oxygen clearly resolved.

Hey, remember to add the humble aerobic life of the world for which oxygen is valuable despite their having no mind with which to produce a subjective evaluation!  In any case, that last bit of your statement was pigeon chess nonsense, and my answers to each question remains what they were from the outset.

As I said earlier, once a subjective agent has determined that it considers something of value, then there can be objective contributors to his thinking process.  If I decide that pain is harm, and harm is bad, then I can claim a broken leg to be an objective harm.  But to then say that broken legs are objectively bad is wrong-- it's just a projection of a subjective agent onto an objective state.

If you say so...?

Maybe the road to philosophical truth is to stab steak knives through your eyes and bash your head against a table top until you break through to the "other side"-- if you think so, then you may feel that's a good action.  Now, most of us have instincts that tell us this is counterproductive.  We view acts like that as deeply bad.
[/quoting]
Diving into your own absurdities, again, rather than addressing anything I;ve explained to you.

[quote]

And yet. . . it's all just states of matter, no?  Remember my previous definition of morality-- that it mediates among feelings, ideas and the objective environment, but that it is mainly predicated on feeling.

"Mainly" is not "entirely".........I could link a dictionary for that, if you;d like. 

Assuming you assume that steak knife philosophy is bad, do you have a rational reason for that, or is it because the idea of doing that seems abhorrent?  My prediction is that you'll go one step back, but not back to the root, which is where the issue of the roots of value must go in order to be valid.

I doubt that I'd have much success rationally arguing anything about philosophy with a person who wasn't making such a claim disingenuously.  

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[bennyboy]

I don't have a problem with objectivity. . . only with the idea that value is objective.

Why a value?  Is a value the only thing in all of existence that you think can't be objective..and can't objective how, objective as you see it, or objective as moral theorists are discussing it?

Mind can't be objective, nor anything which depends on it. That includes evaluations. It is true that a lack of oxygen will cause a body to malfunction and die. But unless there's somebody with the capacity to care, there's no value, positive or negative, in any of it.

[The Grand Nudger]

Well then that's that.  You're not discussing the same thing that moral theorists are.  

Now, might we expect you..like the neolithic hunter, if you could absorb the knowledge required to understand what they're talking about as he could absorb the knowledge of what a fire extinguisher does, to come to a rational agreement on the subject of our discussion?

[bennyboy]

Hey, remember to add the humble aerobic life of the world for which oxygen is valuable despite their having no mind with which to produce a subjective evaluation!  In any case, that last bit of your statement was pigeon chess nonsense, and my answers to each question remains what they were from the outset.

You are still imposing your view of value onto non-agents. Either simple organisms DO have a primitive consciousness, in which case their motivated behaviors might be said to represent evaluations of their environment, or they do not, in which case there's no value except that which we imbue through our world view.

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Well then that's that.  You're not discussing the same thing that moral theorists are.  

Now, might we expect you..like the neolithic hunter, if you could absorb the knowledge required to understand what they're talking about as he could absorb the knowledge of what a fire extinguisher does, to come to a rational agreement on the subject of our discussion?

You type a lot, but support very little.  Tell me, in your view, where do evaluations come from?  Are there evaluations without subjective agents?  Explain, since you seem to think so, by what mechanism anything could be said to have value if, for example, sentient life was wiped out?

[The Grand Nudger]

I'm usually the one telling people that things which aren't seen to be conscious might actually be....but here...I think you're just spouting off.

Well then that's that.  You're not discussing the same thing that moral theorists are.  

Now, might we expect you..like the neolithic hunter, if you could absorb the knowledge required to understand what they're talking about as he could absorb the knowledge of what a fire extinguisher does, to come to a rational agreement on the subject of our discussion?

You type a lot, but support very little.  Tell me, in your view, where do evaluations come from?  Are there evaluations without subjective agents?  Explain, since you seem to think so, by what mechanism anything could be said to have value if, for example, sentient life was wiped out?

LOLNOPE, we were right there at the ledge.  I'll ask again.  Do you think that if you understood what moral theorists are discussing when they talk about objectivity and subjectivity, mind dependence and mind independence, it might resolve some disagreement?

Or..resolve some confusion? Confusion, for example..in the fact that a moral realist will tell you that...no, as far as we're aware there is no evaluation in the absence of a mind or at least something capable of evaluation.

[bennyboy]

You've often acted like this these days, as though you're a caretaker of academia, and you are trying to gently guide me to a correct understanding of an issue.

Unless you are acting on behalf of "moral theorists" as a group, then I'll stick to expressing my own views, and you can stick to expressing yours.

[The Grand Nudger]

Your idea of subjectivity simply isn't the same as their idea of subjectivity.  "Anything that comes from a mind" is idiosyncratic.... to you.  

All of our propositions come from our mind.  That would make the proposition "Your af handle is bennyboy" subjective..because it came from my mind.  Can you see how puerile  this idea of subjectivity is?  

In contrast, what moral theorists are discussing, the question they're asking.... is that while all of our propositions come from our minds, at least some of them are true......could there be any moral propositions in that subset? Would it be possible to form a moral theory based in propositions which belong to that subset?  This is -why- your blanket objection, from your idiosyncratic notion of subjectivity, is irrelevant to what they're talking about.  For your objection to hold...for everything that comes from a mind to be meaningfully subjective with respect to their conjecture.....then minds would have to be literally incapable of forming any true propositions...including the proposition above.  That your af handle is bennyboy.  If your objection is valid.....that proposition cannot be true, because it came from a mind.  

Do you believe that to be the case?

Similarly, for your objection to hold...

The proposition "oxygen is valuable to all creatures dependent on oxygen" cannot be true.
The proposition "fire extinguishers are good for extinguishing fires" cannot be true.
The proposition "all things that come from a mind are subjective" cannot be true.

Your conjecture is not only flat out wrong with respect to what moral theorists are discussing, it's self defeating. While objective moral theories and objectivist value systems seek to ground themselves in something exterior to the mind, there's simply no requirement that they not -come- from a mind, or be possessed by a mind. That would be absurd. This is the value of harm, as realists see it, for forming such a system. Harm may be a broad category of properties, but they are not imagined properties. We recognize harm, we evaluate harm, we hold the concept of harm...with our minds, yes. Some of us care and some of us don't. However, even if there is no mind around to recognize it, evaluate it, or hold the concept..and regardless of whether or not we care or do not care, those things referred to as harm either have or havent been done. Something has or hasn't been harmed. This is meaningfully objective in every way that matters to moral theory.

A competent subjectivist objection to harm (for example) as at least one of the potential grounds for an objectivist system of moral value is categorically -not- that all things that come from a mind are subjective...but that it may be the case that at least some of the things we consider harmful -are- meaningfully subjective...which is a good criticism, and a criticism that any moral realist can accept and has no reason or need to deny. However, to make that one stick, one will need to refer to something more than mere disagreement...as mere disagreement does not make the item in question subjective any more than the item in question coming from a mind does. That two people (or two species..but..there's no need to go inter-species since two people are capable of disagreeing anyway) do not hold the same things to be harmful, to continue with the example... can be a simple matter of having the wrong information, or lack of information, as it was in the case of an instrumental good like a fire extinguisher. Even more fundamentally, and again as the case of that instrumental good shows...there wasn't actually a disagreement of value, though it seemed so at first. This..is -why- disagreement will not reduce some thing to subjectivity. These same observations apply to oxygen, and the case of the drowning man and the man intentionally trying to drown himself. When two people disagree....one of them may be wrong.

Can we dispense with the notions that all things that come from minds are meaningfully subjective, and that disagreement establishes a meaningful subjectivity, now..and have a discussion about what moral theorists are referring to? A discussion about whether or not some explicit thing is a poor foundation for an objectivist system on account of it's meaningful subjectivity...rather than on account of some hilarious disagreement that you have about the subject matter..which is wrong...?

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Your idea, for example, that morality is all about feelings..that's much better than this blanket subjectivism in principle, but the flaw in this is that it may in fact be the case that our feelings are..themselves, grounded in some external and true referent.  Not all of them, ofc.  We discussed the instance, earlier, of you seeing some poor kid getting stomped and that turning your guts.  Your emotional reaction appears to be based on the observation of some thing..it's not spinning it's wheels on account of itself.  One might wonder if whatever you observed, that turned your guts..that caused this emotional response, was a natural or non natural property of x, but that's not a subjectivists objection....and the mere presence of your feelings does not establish the subjectivity of whatever that observed x was...even if it does establish the subjectivity of you giving a shit about it. It may not turn my guts, maybe I hate the little fucker.

The question here, is whether or not whats being done to the kid is subjective or objective, regardless of the fact that you care and I don't. What is that thing, whats being done, what is it that you care about in this instance and I don't, what are we both observing that makes you sick and makes me laugh? Well....alot of realists well tell you...that -harm- is being done to that kid. Do you disagree. Is the kid getting stomped somehow -not- getting harmed?

The answer to the op question..where is the harm, seems to be -right there in front of both of us....... doesn't it?

[bennyboy]

Similarly, for your objection to hold...  

1. The proposition "oxygen is valuable to all creatures dependent on oxygen" cannot be true.
2. The proposition "fire extinguishers are good for extinguishing fires" cannot be true.
3. The proposition "all things that come from a mind are subjective" cannot be true.

Let the conflations of meaning begin, eh?  Not like I asked you to pin down what you meant.  Why don't you also add:

4.  The proposition "We can sell oxygen, so it is a good" cannot be true.
5.  The proposition "The value of the Korean won is about 1/1000th that of an American dollar" cannot be true.
6.  The proposition "There's a word spelled g-o-o--d" cannot  be true.

Your blanket statement I can match with the same accusation: If "good" is determined in terms of function (as in your first two points), then literally every state is "good" for something else except perhaps heat death of the Universe by total entropy, since every possible state of matter is a functional precursor to some other. In order to say any particular state is good or bad, which we must since anything objectively considered must have state in order to be observed as such, we must therefore find some way to bridge "is/ought."

My view is that we bridge this gap by a communication and subsequent negotiation about our feelings about things.  Seeing babies cry makes me feel bad, so I say, "I think we shouldn't poke the baby."  A few people nod assent, and a moral rule is born: "Don't poke babies."

In your long rants about the categorizations of those "moral theorist" guys, what you haven't done, so far as I can tell, is to show any way to create a bridge between "is" and "ought" without predicating that on feelings about things, or ideas about feelings about things.

What ought Julie and Mark due?  What does your magical rightness-in-the-ether that a functional personal will see, but a dysfunctional person will perhaps not see, dictate in this case?

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Your idea, for example, that morality is all about feelings..that's much better than this blanket subjectivism in principle, but the flaw in this is that it may in fact be the case that our feelings are..themselves, grounded in some external and true referent.

I've already said that our evaluations can be considered objective in that sense-- that they are an expression of our genetic reality. We could imagine a hypothetical series of states, interactions between genes and environmental states, going back probably even before the existence of DNA strands on Earth.

If you want, you can resolve it this way:

1. morality is a mediation among feelings, ideas and physical states

Then: "feelings are an expression of instinct, predicated on DNA, in turn predicated on physical states

2. Morality is therefore a mediation among physical states over various scales of time-- essentially it is a statistical comparator between those past states which allowed or harmed the persistence of the human species, with environmental considerations (including the behaviors of other humans) today.

But then, we come to the question-- ought we to give a shit about any of that? Ought we to shoot 50 people in a mall because we're unhappy, or ough we not to? Ought we encourage world leaders to engage in nuclear holocaust, or ought we not to?

[The Grand Nudger]

Similarly, for your objection to hold...  

1. The proposition "oxygen is valuable to all creatures dependent on oxygen" cannot be true.
2. The proposition "fire extinguishers are good for extinguishing fires" cannot be true.
3. The proposition "all things that come from a mind are subjective" cannot be true.

Let the conflations of meaning begin, eh?  Not like I asked you to pin down what you meant.  Why don't you also add:

4.  The proposition "We can sell oxygen, so it is a good" cannot be true.
5.  The proposition "The value of the Korean won is about 1/1000th that of an American dollar" cannot be true.
6.  The proposition "There's a word spelled g-o-o--d" cannot  be true.

I could, sure...I could add any proposition.   Since all propositions come from our minds, and by the rule of; anything that comes from a mind is subjective, all propositions are subjective..and so no proposition can be true.....including this proposition.

That's exactly the trouble with subjectivity as you've defined it, in objection to this or that objectivist value....even if it's no problem at all for what moral theorists are discussing.

Your idea, for example, that morality is all about feelings..that's much better than this blanket subjectivism in principle, but the flaw in this is that it may in fact be the case that our feelings are..themselves, grounded in some external and true referent.

I've already said that our evaluations can be considered objective in that sense-- that they are an expression of our genetic reality.  We could imagine a hypothetical series of states, interactions between genes and environmental states, going back probably even before the existence of DNA strands on Earth.

The only sense of objectivity with which moral theorists are concerned in the discussion between realism and subjectivism is mind independence, it doesn't have to be any expression of our genetic reality...or even a natural property...at all. It simply has to be something which is true regardless of the mind that apprehends it as such.

That's it, that's all.

There's no need to hop in a time machine and determine the status of some molecule at the moment of abiogenesis or earlier....that simply couldn't be any less relevant.

But then, we come to the question-- ought we to give a shit about any of that? Ought we to shoot 50 people in a mall because we're unhappy, or ough we not to? Ought we encourage world leaders to engage in nuclear holocaust, or ought we not to?

A question we've already answered, with the example of the fire extinguisher and the neolithic hunter. Yes, we ought to care about this and that, and any rational being could be made to understand why in reference to objective values...but that won't actually mean that they will. A moral failure..in the objectivists schema, is a rational failure.

[The Grand Nudger]

What ought Julie and Mark due?  What does your magical rightness-in-the-ether that a functional personal will see, but a dysfunctional person will perhaps not see, dictate in this case?

This...answered many pages ago.

As with the specific example, I can see no reason (after objections are removed) that it would be immoral for julie and mark to bump uglies.