This in reply to Revenant Treshold in this thread, but I’d like to pick up the gauntlet for him. I wrote several paragraphs on why a utilitarian morality can be argued to be objective, and then the board ate it, so you have to trust me on this one: I’m right.
Seriously though, the main point was that feelings being subjective (although, I’d wager - objectively measurable) doesn’t make a morality based on feelings subjective. But right now I’m so pissed at the board for logging me out after all those paragraphs, I’ll just open up the debate and see where it goes first.
Sure, we can try to make objective measurements of subjective things (and 8 out of 10 cats agree); but so what? That doesn’t mean they’ll be the same next time we measure them, so the only thing that’s objective is the methodology, not the thing being studied.
In a way, that was another point of my lost opus, but I went with morals because that’s the term discussed in the previous thread.
My point was that we all want More Happiness. Even if we disguise our highest goal as servitude to god, a search for knowledge, etc., we want these things because they make us happy (our concievably, they make god happy, and we should prefer his happiness to ours, because he is capable of more happiness than we are). Even if different people are satisfied by different things, my argument is that objective ethics quite simply would advocate anything that leads towards this. The fact that these means are a matter of no small controverse doesn’t make it subjective. IMHO, that would be like saying evolution is a subjective truth.
The real cause of my grief is of course that I know this now, and I knew it then.
I think I can see where you are coming from, it sounds a bit like Utilitarianism, which ultimately grinds to a halt as it is very difficult doing a trade off between my happiness and your happiness.
One solution is ‘trading’ which works quite well, the best example is the Pareto Optimum Optimorum - Economists are nervous of value judgements, so that is their solution.
I’m a lot more interested in why we consider some things ‘wrong’, the basis of our basic values, and whether those values could actually be ‘objective’.
Now I’m going to chance it, and post without keeping a copy [:-)]
You haven’t really solved anything unless you can tell us exactly what Happiness is.
If it’s feeling good, then the ultimate moral act would be stimulate the pleasure centers in everyone’s brain so that we all sit around being happy until we starve to death (but are too blissed-out to care).
If it’s being “satisfied,” you invite the old question of whether it’s better to be Socrates unsatisfied or a pig satisfied.
I’m not really sure. Does negation of suffering automatically lead to happiness, or just apathy? And what does negation of happiness lead to? Anyway, I can’t concieve how all the wisdom in the world would do us any good if it made us suffer. In a way, I see happiness and suffering as the only “real” things in the universe (or perhaps, the only ones with real values), everything else being means. And when one of the two things that are real, by definition is desirable, and the other isn’t, utilitarism follows rather obviously.
You’re of course welcome to argue why it isn’t. I’d love to argue for happiness by itself, but I’m not really sure what reasoning I would be arguening against.
No, that’s the same. Socrates with pain centers in his brain activated, or pig with pleasure centers activated.
Ah, I’ve thought about this. Sitting around in a blissful haze until we starve to death would not be the ultimate moral act, because that would give us…what? A few days of fantastic happiness, before we all die. Compare that to the current, uhm, system, where there’s happiness and unhappiness, but each go on for a much longer time (plus, we can have kids, who also have the chance to be happy.
I think the second is preferable because alive and thinking, we can work on ways to increase our happiness. Be that a scientific breakthrough eliminating a disease, or a religious epiphany, there are chances for us to be happier. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to come up with some way to leave us all happier without making us incapable of thinking.
It’s best, of course, to be Socrates satisfied. But out of Socrates unsatisfied and a pig satisfied, only Soccy has the ability to change his situation, hopefully for the better, so I think i’d go with him.
But in all these examples, happiness is still the only thing with value by itself. I’m not arguing for short-term satisfaction, of course if all I wanted was watching TV and I did only that, it wouldn’t last long, but the point is if we can find a common ground in saying happiness/sorrow are the only things with value by themself, we could work out an objective ethic. There would still be differences in what people wanted, and much controversy over how to get it, but at least we wouldn’t be confused by giving things value as anything but a mean, or by thinking ethics are somehow undebatable and left up to everyone to decide for themselves.