Any Moral Relativists in the House?

[no one]

Morality is what I say is correct.
Immorality is what I say is incorrect.

[Mister Agenda]

The ultimate grounding of an objective moral system is the set of axioms (or values) it rests on. The values can't be proven, you have to accept them and if you don't you're philosophically justified in rejecting the entire system built on them, since by definition if they aren't valuble to you they aren't values at all as far as you're concerned, but if you do it's at least theoretically possible to build a coherent moral system on them. The more basic you can make the values, the more people the system will apply to. For instance you might start with something like 'people want to survive as long as living isn't too unpleasant', from that you can derive we ought to arrange things so people aren't killed when their lives aren't so miserable they'd rather be dead. There are no doubt a subset of people who wouldn't agree that people want to survive as long as living isn't too unpleasant, and you're never going to have a meeting of the minds on that unless you can persuade them to value something they currently find valueless. I still think it's reasonable to call a system based on an axiom over 99% of humans would accept as at least potentially objective (if the conclusions follow from the premises) and possibly widely applicable, though never absolute.

[Brian37]

Morality is what I say is correct.
Immorality is what I say is incorrect.

Morality is not static. Never has been, never will be. Hitler thought he was moral, American slavery was once thought moral. 

Pro lifers today, live in an impossible utopia, and they also think they are moral.

I think the best humans can do is to simply try not to physically harm others, and where disagrements occur, make physical conflict the last resort.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Morality is what I say is correct.
Immorality is what I say is incorrect.

Morality is not static. Never has been, never will be. Hitler thought he was moral, American slavery was once thought moral. 

Pro lifers today, live in an impossible utopia, and they also think they are moral.

I think the best humans can do is to simply try not to physically harm others, and where disagrements occur, make physical conflict the last resort.

But that takes too long. If I disagree with someone, I can either wait for us to work it out, or I can simply punch them in the mouth and get on with my day. I’ve got things to do, you know.

Boru

[no one]

Yeah but, if I am right (and I often am), how else will you learn unless I beat it into you?

[Angrboda]

[The Grand Nudger]

Morality is what I say is correct.
Immorality is what I say is incorrect.

Morality is not static. Never has been, never will be. Hitler thought he was moral, American slavery was once thought moral. 

Pro lifers today, live in an impossible utopia, and they also think they are moral.

...and...were they?

I think the best humans can do is to simply try not to physically harm others, and where disagrements occur, make physical conflict the last resort.

First resort, last resort - just for fun.  The best that humans can do is whatever their culture tells them is best.  This advice is no more or less moral by that measure than the three above.

[Brian37]

Your complaint about the seeming anti-realism of relativism seems similar in that you're not granting the full tenets of relativism and instead are importing a concept of "real morals" which is foreign to relativism and can't meaningfully be compared.  

-bit like objecting to the notion of a spherical earth - saying that it's incoherent for not accounting for the corners.

When we think that something is wrong, we have a tendency to want to tack on incoherent like a chaser.

---

Moral realism and moral relativism are essential the same thing - a realistic view of morality.

Boru

Exactly.  Descriptive moral relativism is a well established and easily demonstrable fact.  Moral realism simply posits that we're all doing it wrong when we very much do that.    

Not incoherent - babble and gibberish with no cogent angle to logically approach the problem from.  Wrong in point of fact, not the validity of the inference, but the soundness of the assertions.

---

I consider my views on morality to be of the non cognition type. Is it moral relativist? 

Relativism is a cognitivist moral theory.  Moral assertions are reduced to a true property of your ingroup rather than a pure expression of your emotional states (or some other similar aspect of an individual).  

Relativist moralities can be and often are openly hostile to the natural preferences or natural character of their adherents.  They can tell us that what we think is yuck is good, what we think is yum is bad.  That our misery is for our own good, our happiness to be avoided.  That we deserve harm or should expect to be harmed if we step out of bounds even through full on hominid bumblefuckery.

---

The blunt harsh reality is that evolution is about all life, including humans, and in evolution, evolution does not care if cruelty or compassion work. Just like lions will kill the cubs of rivals. 

Perhaps we misnamed ourselves?  Were not the doubly wise ape, we're the moralizing ape. 

Ultimately life finds a way to get to the next generation, by hook or crook. "Morality" and "ethics" still exist however, and life does have the capability of empathy, even if life includes selfish dominance. 

What do you think of the idea that morality is an expression of successful behaviors rooted in genetics?  Biological, rather than cultural relativism.  That we're apprehending something about ourselves and reproductive success, conflict/competition fitness....not something about a thing out in the world or even in our cultures.  That, broadly speaking, any organism with our genetics and in our situations will arrive at ideations about moral properties similar to our own?

I think life isn't either or. Unfortunatly both compassion and cruelty work. "Morality" to me is when life seeks cooperation and empathy. 

I am no fan of what I hear from religious idiots when they falsely accuse the sane of "might makes right", because they are not wrong, "might" can win, but that does not make it always moral.

[vulcanlogician]

double post

[vulcanlogician]

So what’s your problem?

My problem is this:

It is oft quoted that error theory (a brand of moral nihilism) is to morality what atheism is to a god or gods. Disbelief. To me, this position makes sense. What it wouldn't make sense to say is that belief in a god is true relevant to your culture. Either a god is real or it isn't. (I don't know is also a valid answer.)

So if you want to say morality is a fairy tale, fine. Maybe a "useful fiction" if you're feeling charitable. But that doesn't making it true relative to anything. That's why I think relativism is incoherent. That's what it does.

Maybe some never made that assumption about relativism (there are different articulations of it; I only offered one version of it... one I find incoherent). Or maybe they thought that cultural standards were a good metric by which to judge moral standards. That's what I'd like to discuss. I think if you're using cultural standards as a baseline, you're using something that contains as much fact as fiction.

I tried to say I appreciate this mode of thinking in an enterprise that is simply trying to find out "what some culture's beliefs are, fact and fiction alike." But when you want to discuss the claim of whether moral facts actually exist or not, such standards have no bearing on the matter.

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I'm reminded of discussions I've had surrounding the coherence theory of truth, that truth with a capital T consists in the internal consistency of a set of propositions.  One common argument against this is that you could have two systems that are equally coherent, but that disagree on some particular proposition.  That seems to be a contradiction.  The problem is that there is no "outside the systems" from which to compare the two -- you're simply creating a third combined system that isn't fully coherent.  That's not an allowed operation as there is no "outside the system."  Truth, in coherence theory, is a property that systems and propositions within systems have.  There is no outside perspective.  Suggesting an outside perspective is failing to grant the full set of premises of coherence theory and amounts to a bit of question begging.

Your complaint about the seeming anti-realism of relativism seems similar in that you're not granting the full tenets of relativism and instead are importing a concept of "real morals" which is foreign to relativism and can't meaningfully be compared.  Morals in relativism are a construct of society and within that society they have a real existence.

I can't help but be reminded of your suggestions about morals being real if they provide fruitful explanations in Neo's thread.  I have to wonder if you're willing to apply that to moral realism but not to moral relativism.

Anyway, just some initial thoughts.

Wow. That's a pretty damn good response.

Let me give it some thought.