I am not in your league (or Semjaazah’s), but have to ask - are you saying that there is an objective morality that exists independent of our species? If humans hadn’t evolved, is there still objectitve morality? Does the Golden Rule (or its equivalent) exist for who/whatever exists in the star systems of other galaxies? In the vastness of the universe, how can we elevate the human experience, human morality, to the level of objective reality? (I think these questions are all tantamount to the same thing - how can we dare say, or hope, that humans have any import or significance in the Universe. In the totality of existence, are we not irrelevant?)
This has got to be one of the best tennis matches I’ve ever watched.
I’m going to have to side with Semjaazah on this though. The point made that deeds carried out in the past that were considered morally good or at least not bad (child murder, human sacrifice, incest, arranged marriage, child exposure) or even divergent views today on whether acts are good or not (war vs pacifism) for me simply invalidate any argument that there is an intrinsic objective morality.
For that to exist you would in fact have to be able to find a goodness or evilness particle or wave or some such - it would be something that exists independently of human opinion and thought. Gravity doesn’t care whether we believe in it, it simply is, it is objective. Morality is by its definition subjective as it is created by people, and the experience and thinking of people is also by definition subjective.
Calling the principal of moral reciprocity the Golden Rule doesn’t make it an actual rule of the universe comparable with E=mc2, or 1+1=2. Wanting it to be objective doesn’t mean it is.
I’d imagine if you met an alien from Alpha Centurai, assuming that alien had something recognizable as an individual personality, morality for them would be similar as it is for us, assuming they are at a comparable level of civilization - in that (for example) they would frown upon killing others of their kind for kicks (as in the OP).
Okay - you’ve REALLY demonstrated you don’t know the difference between objective and subjective in that post.
Animals on our own PLANET don’t approach morality or ethics the way we do. Compare human behaviour and the notion of individuality against ants. An ant will unhesitatingly sacrifice itself for another ant, any ant, if it is part of its colony. It will not consider whether it is right or wrong, whether the other ant deserves to live more than it, it simply will do it, because ants have no sense of individuality and therefore can’t possibly conceive of something like personhood the way we can (despite the fact that they can create complex societies and engineering feats in their nests).
What if that extra terrestrial you mention is evolved from ants and thinks in a completely unified way with other members of its species? War would be more than simply looked down on, it would be a totally alien idea which they would not be able to understand. The notion of self-interest? Similarly they would have no concept of that. What you are describing as morality, and objective at that, is purely an expression of our own socialisation which has, in turn, sprung from our biological needs and setting. To think that this is shared, literally, universally by all other life is absurd.
If you hold to that, why not hold to the notion that other ideas that were once thought good - that the earth was flat, or that flies spontaneously generate from rotting things - invalidates the notion of there being an intrinsic scientific truth about these matters?
As for “war vs. pacifism”, I know no-one who holds “for war” - that is, who these days honestly holds the belief that war is a positive good, as in for examp[le fascism - and if they do, I’d say they were objectively wrong.
The way the issue is often framed is in whether such actions as war, and admitted evil, can be morally justified - for example, by the necessity of self-defence; also, if so, what warlike acts you can legitimately commit. Again, I think objectively correct answers can be found, and that is what “just war” theories are all about.
That’s a staw man. There is no necessity for a “morality particle”. Morality is inherent in the fact that there is a “someone”, other than “I”, capable of carrying on human thought. That’s a phyical, real fact - that other people exist and have a subjective life, just like you do.
Morality flows from the recognition of that fact. Because I know subjectively that some things are wrong when they happen to me, and because I know that others exist, I - as a thinking person - can reason that doing these sorts of things to others is wrong as well.
No “morality particles” necessary.
Conciousness exists in others whether or not we believe in it. Morality is simply a function of this fact.
And you, that you won’t read my posts fairly. Please note the caveat:
[Emphasis added]
After I say that, you counter with an example about ants? Tisk tisk.
The same problem arises I’ve been thinking of all along. It requires a leap of faith to go from ‘I do not like this being done to me, I do not enjoy it, it disadvantages me and I find it unpleasant’ to ‘there is a system of morality and this falls under the definition of bad’ to ‘ergo, to do so to other people is self-evidently bad because I don’t enjoy it when done to me’. You are welcome to believe this, it may even theoretically be a useful system if practised by everyone, however in no way is it logically necessary.
The primary fault of moral objectivism is that it needlessly complicates things. Nothing logically necessitates there being a concept of morality and if there weren’t words to describe it, it wouldn’t exist. Positive and negative emotions would still exist, even if you couldn’t write about them - morality would not. Whether something is useful, and whether something is efficient and whether something elicits emotional responses are all valid criteria, but the conflation of these issues into an umbrella term ‘morality’ is both unnecessary and fallacious.
My moral subjectivity is justified because I believe I exist and hence ascribe my own value to the world. Objective morality requires God’s existence in my eyes.
Let’s imagine a world in two scenarios. In both scenarios, for the sake of argument, the universe extends no further than our solar system, and there is no other sentient life in the solar system.
Scenario 1: ‘God’ exists, he has designed everything that exists including humanity and has decided upon the moral value of all actions ever committed within the universe. God’s allowing us free will eventually ends in nuclear war and the extinction of all life. Even without any moral actors left to interact with the universe, objective morality still exists - that there is no-one left to act does not change ‘God’s’ unalterable will and decision that actions carry an inherent moral value.
Scenario 2: No ‘God’. Humans advance technologically and culturally to the point of globalisation and the spread of global culture helps develop a reciprocally accepted set of moral values. Unfortunately war breaks out as it often does, and a rogue ideological sect detonates nuclear weapons, killing everyone on earth. What happens to moral values without anyone to ascribe them? There is no ‘God’ whose decision on the objective moral value of all actions imbues them with their value. Do moral values disappear with humanity? Then they were never objective. Do they continue? How without anyone to percieve them? What gives these actions a moral charge without moral actors?
Before anyone accuses me of strawmanning, this is a thought experiment and I’d like to hear your opinions, or wherever you think it breaks down or is logically fallacious.
I just did a reply to your first post which the hamsters ate and I can’t be bothered to reproduce it.
Short version - you’re simply repeating yourself. That lots of people exist, have moral positions and agree on what they are don’t make them objective, that’s still subjective. No, you don’t need a morality particle and I wasn’t actually saying that that’s ALL you could have, but you would need to be able to explain morality in terms akin to mathematics or scientific theory, which are independent of human opinion and are there simple to be discovered and verified by us. Your point about it being “good” that the earth was flat makes absolutely no sense at all - scientific positions are not good or evil, they are correct or incorrect, and a lot of people thinking something that is incorrect is correct has no bearing on it.
Oh jeez…
FINE - the aliens from Alpha Centauri are advanced versions of mantises. They have a mating cycle and at the end of it the female will ritualistically kill and eat her sexual partner to nourish her and her young, hence in their society there is no such thing as a family or a father, simply a mating partner. Males hold a place in society whether their existence is clearly defined and they see themselves as a giver of life to the next generation, and their contact with it is not necessary or desirable. Females are the majority of the population and in therefore the backbone of society and government. Humans trying to argue with these aliens about concepts such as cannibalism and murder are met with retorts that their species has lived like this since before their pre-history, and they don’t see any reason to stop doing it now any more than humans seem to want to give up breast feeding babies even though we can now create perfectly acceptable milk substitute.
Who is right and who is wrong?
I think that ringing noise is the sound of the nail being hit on the head. Where else does this objective morality come from?
I wouldn’t worry about that too much. People on this forum accuse you of straw manning all the time no matter what you say. Presenting an analogy to demonstrate your point is a straw man, arguing with them is a straw man, correcting their facts is building a straw man - it feels like one big straw man on this board sometimes. :rolleyes:
This seems inescapable to me.
I suppose a moral system might exist objectively insofar as we, humans, can define a convenient system of “rules” that govern behaviour (and advance the species), i.e. in the same way that rules of baseball are objective. But that is hardly objective reality in the universal sense.
The problem is, you guys want to argue about a god-derived set of ethics - because that’s the argument you are used to, and one that is easy to ‘win’ (one has merely to note that other gods propose a different set of beliefs and there is no reason to choose between 'em).
I have no interest in gods, or in that argument, and it is not the argument I am making. If you would concentrate on the argument I am making, and cease dragging gods into it, the argument can progress. If not, find a religious believer to argue with.
The onus is on you, **Malthus **, to explain to us where this objective, intrinsic morality *does *comes from. You’re arguing there is one, the burden of proof is on you to prove it exists, not us to prove it doesn’t.
I’ll happily accept that you’re not arguing for a god(s) who create a morality, but how then do you explain the existence of such a thing? How do we discover what it is? Who is right in deciding what it is? We’ve already mentioned that different people at different times (including in the present) don’t agree on what is and isn’t morally right. You keep stating that “people” and “everyone” know what is wrong but then keep referencing moral positions that appear to be largely based in the 21st century western perspective.
If it’s not from a being outside of humanity, it must come from somewhere other than humanity otherwise you have to accept it’s subjective (even if it’s a collective subjectivity). If so, where?
I have been explaining, upthread. Now, I’ll just be repeating myself. It is wearisome enough simply pointing out ad nauseum the mis-statements of what I’ve already said - and you’ve made several above, including:
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that my position is an argument ad populum - i.e., “you keep stating that “people” and “everyone” know what is wrong …” (that’s not my position, either, any more than god-diddit); and
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that my position appears to be based on 21st century western perspectives (I said the exact opposite).
So, for the last time, the 20,000 feet summary:
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There is no necessity for an objective morality to “come” from anywhere. Morailty is not a set of laws, like the stone tablets handed down to Moses.
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Rather, morality is the inevitable consequence of the fact that we happen to be thinking, self-aware animals:
(a) the arising of self-awareness - that one consitutes an individual being, with one’s own inner life of thoughts and emotions;
(b) the reasonable inference that other beings like you have an inner life of their own; and
(c) just as you wish good for yourself, so do others.
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Morality is not a set of absolute rules to follow, but a principle of empathy for others. Thus, reasonable people can on occasion disagree about the exactly moral thing to do in a given set of cirumstances. Such disagreements do not “invaliidate” morality any more than the fact that scientists disagree about the exact processes of evolution “invalidate” evolutionary theory.
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However (and to get back to the OP), some cases are simply obvious; it is obvious, from the moral perspective, that raping and murdering a little girl for sexual kicks is morally wrong. In an absolute, not relative sense. Anyone who says it is not morally wrong is simply wrong.
See? No gods, no Moses, no “morality particles” necessary.
Further, this has nothing to do with particularist “Western morality” or “21st century morality”. These concepts were worked out long ago in cultures far removed from each other - which is part of the reason I happen to think they are universal.
As the Rabbi Hillel said in the 1st century CE (when challenged to recite the Torah while standing on one foot):
“What is hateful to thee, thou shalt not do unto thy neighbor. This is the whole of the Law, the rest is only commentary”
Was he really paraphrasing Confucius (c. 500 BC), who said:
“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself” ?
No, the ethic of reciprocity is not a Western, 21st century invention. It just so happens that, as society progresses, the ethic of reciprocity is better (but by no means perfectly) expressed in our laws and institutions than in earlier times.
So essentially its an objective justification for behaving in a certain way i.e not doing anything you don’t wish done to yourself. There is still nothing which makes this objective morality. You’ve rationalized a subjective morality with an objective maxim and declared this an objective morality.
What you haven’t done is proven that there is an objective inherent quality to actions that is called morality, as opposed to a subjective assessment of these actions based on your/our perception of their merits. For you to prove moral objectivism, you have to prove that the actions themselves have an inherent moral quality, rather than ‘we as individual humans do not agree with these actions’. Your argument essentially boils down to ‘the golden rule is a really really good way to live your life’, and you can’t simply conflate this with ‘this is proof of objective morality’.
If it doesn’t exist outside the subjective perceptions of human experience, it is not objective.
[Emphasis added]
So let me ask you a very simple, yes-no type question.
If some alien where to come and observe earth, would that alien be able to say in its report on our planet, on an objective and scientific basis, “humans are creatures with concious self-awareness, and fungi are not”?
Yes, or no?
I won’t get into your yes-no dichotomy because it’s a false dilemma (and furthermore self-awareness =/= sentience, sentience I think being what you’re aiming for).
What if by process of their evolution, they were more like extremely advanced fungi by comparison to any phylum present on earth, and lived in biologically connected communities that transmitted information to each-other via chemical scents or spores. What if their idea of morality revolved around the interconnectedness of living beings on a level so fundamental and biologically mutualistic (as opposed to zero-sum as human interaction often is) that altruism was no more than causing each of their population to benefit identically and at the same rate, with no net loss of resources?
What if they landed secretly, and observed all life on earth, and saw how we drained the earth of it’s resources, and indeed how we domestically sprayed their fungi-‘cousins’ with chemicals to kill them off. They might look at us as little monkey things running round babbling in our silly rudimentary sound language (nowhere near as advanced as their interconnected chemical communication, they’d say) and imagine us uncivilized, savage brutes with no idea of right or wrong, or at least a very skewed sense of right and wrong, one which fundamentally clashed with their own.
You can moan about 'I didn’t answer it with yes or no, but by no necessity did it have to be yes or no, and I’ve point out at length why. The point remains these aliens could take any form, and their society could imagine and invent any arbitrary system of morality. In order to prove yours as objective, you’d have to prove theirs as wrong. On the flip side to this, in case their altruism is still too similar to your idea of our own, imagine an alien race fundamentally similar to many of our reptiles - cannibalistic and directly competitive and individualistic and hence there is no sense of behaving morally to any other actor, or one similar to mantids in which even mating is a risk of being eaten.
My point has nothing to do with the inherent morality of humanity.
It had to do with your objection that if something doesn’t exist “… outside the subjective perceptions of human experience, it is not objective”. I take it that is the lynchpin of your critique.
The (I think rather obvious) point here is that capacity for self-awareness itself is something that doesn’t exist “”… outside the subjective perceptions of human experience". You cannot point to any particles of conciousness. If you ground up a human, you would not find a single atom of conciousness present. Nor is concousness necessarily the creation of any god (the Eve + apple story notwithstanding). It does not derive from some source external to humans, it is merely a capacity that humans, by reason no doubt of millenia of evolution, have developed, for better or worse. It is not something supernatural (again, talk of a “soul” notwithstanding), it is merely a product of the ways our neurons are wired.
So I ask again: if an alien (whether in the form of a giant fungi or not) were to investigate our Earth, perhaps abducting a few humans for the by-now-traditional anal probing (
), would they or would they not be able to report on an objective and scientific basis that humans are creatures with concious self-awareness, and (eathly) fungi are not?
It’s a simple question, really, that gets to the heart of the debate: in short, is it actually true that something that exists wholly within the realm of subjective human experience something that cannot have objective, verifiable existence? Does conciousness have objective verifiable existence?
I say that the fact that humans have concious self-awareness, and fungi don’t, is as objectively “true” as anything is. Hence, I say your argument holds no water.
You can’t conflate conciousness with morality. Concious perception that something is ‘moral’ in your own definition does not make it objectively so.
Furthermore, the point being that if these ‘beings’ were really like giant fungi, they may not have the same subjective view of what constitutes ‘conciousness’ ‘self-awareness’ ‘sentience’ that we do. They may examine the spores given off by earth fungi and think ‘this is like a rudimentary form of our communication, they display some kind of rudimentary intelligence’ and they may not value human examples of intelligence such as buildings, societies or language any more than we assume that birds are sentient because they make nests and sing (some form of language) or that ants are sentient because they live in massive altruistic colonies. What is in question is subjective human interpretations.
I do not doubt that you exist behind a computer somewhere, similar to how I do. This is my SUBJECTIVE belief, based on my interpretation and perception of the world. However, I can only OBJECTIVELY prove (and only to myself indeed) that I exist in some form or another - ‘cogito ergo sum’ - and cannot prove that everything else is not simply an invention of my mind. I do not subjectively believe this to be true, nor even subjectively believe it is possible for my mind to do so. I, and I assume you, simply accept a priori that we exist in a world populated by other actors, or moral agents as it may be to you. However this assumption, and all else based on it (such as morality) are SUBJECTIVE perceptions. Realise that in life we can prove very little of anything, with perhaps the exception of mathematics though some people call even this into question, to be objectively true, because all we possess to measure it is inherently flawed human perception.
So in short, I objectively know I have conciousness, but I cannot objectively know that the descriptors applied to it such as ‘human’ or ‘moral’ exist in any sense, nor can I know objectively whether anyone or anything besides myself exists. I accept a priori that other people do exist, but this is simply an subjective perceptual axiom, not an objective verifiable fact.
I’m not conflating the two at all. I am simply pointing out that the distinction you are drawing does not hold true for one thing (conciousness) and so is not true in general.
And with this, I simply disagree holus-bolus, as it would consign pretty well all of science and knowledge to the “subjective” pile and render the distinction between subjective and objective totally useless.
However, to work within your POV (though I disagree with it), I’d simply retort that morality is just as “objective” as every other science (save mathematics).