What? You think there is an objective morality? Kindly point to it, and do so without mentioning religion, as we all know that’s false.
I have a moral code, just like every other person. I’m not even sure it’s possible to be human and not gave one, after a few tears of development at least. Infants or those with severe brain damage may be exceptions.
This is a very weird thread, the one thing I didn’t expect to be attack for from a group of supposedly intelligent Liberal types would be knowing that morality, like all human experience, is subjective.
I said nothing of the sort. We can, and will, judge them by our standards. That doesn’t change the fact that our standards are no more objectively correct than any others, they are just the ones we choose to use.
We are not, of course, wrong to judge them - that would require us to have a moral standard that judgement is wrong, or not something societies should do. You know, like how the Bible says judgement is God’s alone…
Just a note to any Christians reading - remember your own religion teaches that you are no better than Hitler, and deserve to burn, unless you beg Jesus to save you. And yet I’m the one with fucked up morality :smack:
The Categorical Imperative relies on acting in the best interest of people as a whole, as well as the interest of the individual in front of you. Or, more accurately, as we are all flawed individuals with imperfect knowledge, acting on our honest belief as to what that best interest us. So, our actions, even with the best of intentions, will fall short as individuals and as a society.
That ignores the problem of even deciding what is in an individual’s best interest, let alone what to do when the interests of two or more people conflict. It’s those decisions that lead to societies having different moralities, and they could conflict even if they are all acting for what looks like, to them, the best interest if society.
It’s been about two decades since I studied Kant, so I’d need to do a lot of catching up to do a better analysis.
If that’s what you got out of your study of Kant, it was wrong.
From the second sentence of what I linked, obviously none of which you read: “Kant characterized the CI as an objective, rationally necessary and unconditional principle …”. If you still don’t get it, go to Section 4 to understand the meaning of “categorical”.
Sorry, but you’re wrong on all counts there, and frankly you sound like evangelists who insist that atheists must be bad people because if they don’t believe in God there’s nothing stopping them from killing and raping all the time.
What is the source of this objective morality? Can it be measured? What’s the standard SI unit for morality? How many kilobuddhas to an Imperial Jesus? Can I see it under a microscope? Is there a book somewhere or something that lists all of the things that are objectively, measurably, scientifically Good and Not Good? What about the parts of the world that adhere to codes we find abhorrent, like Saudi Arabia or North Korea? Why aren’t they adhering to the objective morality? How did the Holocaust even occur, if genocide is objectively wrong and everyone involved knew this? Why did things like slavery and child marriage exist for thousands of years if they’re objectively wrong?
The answer to this is simple - there is no objective morality. Morality, much like justice and law and ethics and etiquette, is an abstract - it’s something we made up, informally decided was a good idea, and put into practice. And that’s a process that’s happened multiple times in many cultures throughout the world, and it’s produced a panoply of different results.
Acknowledging that morality is a man-made concept does not mean shrugging your shoulders, saying “everything is permitted” and believing that it’s impossible to judge anyone as being wrong or their deeds as evil. (Evil is another subjective concept, but I digress.) Here in our society, we have decided that slavery is wrong. There are other places in the world where that is unfortunately not the case (I’m looking in your direction, Mauritania.) It’s certainly sad and tragic that that state of affairs is allowed to continue, and would that it were possible for more to be done to end it, but there’s no supreme authority I can appeal to to declare that it must end at once. I can say that I believe you are in the wrong, and present a rational argument as to why, but I can’t say that science has proven you wrong.
If you believe that something is wrong, you have the right to call it out, and in the end it’s going to be the marketplace of ideas (and the armies and soldiers that have the power to back up those ideas) that decide what kind of behavior is going to be accepted and what kind isn’t.
You don’t need a God or anything like that for objective morality. You don’t need anything measurable. All you need is an agreement that there are certain things that are wrong, even if the person doing them doesn’t agree they are wrong.
It doesn’t matter what a murderer says. Murder is wrong. That is objective. It doesn’t matter if someone thinks it’s okay to have sex with someone without their consent. Rape is wrong. Slavery is wrong. The Holocaust was wrong. Bigotry is wrong. Yes, people do those things. They are wrong.
Do you disagree? Do you say those things may not be wrong if someone subjectively believes they aren’t? I sure don’t, and I can’t think of any ethical person who thinks they are wrong.
That’s objective morality. It doesn’t depend on any lawgiver. Just the concept that there are at least some things that are always wrong. We slowly discover it over time. We do experiments to find out what ethics leave to the best outcomes and greatest happiness for all.
We may quibble on the finer details, but we do know these things are wrong. For everyone. That makes it objective.
Morality is real. We are just trying to discover it. There is not marketplace of ideas when it comes to morality, just attempts to determine what really is moral.
If not, then, there would be a universe where murdering another sapient creature is not wrong. But the underlying concepts for why that is wrong are rock solid. It is the objective morality.
And, for fuck’s sake. An argument about the philosophy of ethics has nothing to do with this case. This case had someone we saw murder someone else. Steophan is arguing the inherently farcical idea that, because the jurors decided there was no murder, there was no murder.
He’s actually claiming an objective morality–the one defined by the law.
The problem with that remains that there are many evil regimes out there that made it the law to do some horrible things, so the idea that the law is necessarily right is untenable on its face.
I don’t need to argue objective or subjective morality at all to prove this type of thinking wrong.
It was just a disingenuous argument. And I should have realized that. Bricker is the one where there was an actual argument about the situation going on.
That’s not what “objective” means. Just because everyone, or a large subset of everyone, agrees on something, doesn’t make it objective. That just makes it popular. In order for it to be objective, it would have to have some independent basis in the scientific laws of the universe, such that an alien observer, with no inherent knowledge of our culture or our norms, would be able to compare our behavior to a fixed and measurable standard and determine how moral we are.
You’re not speaking in terms of logic. You’re speaking in terms of faith - I believe this is the right thing to do, and most of the people I like believe it too, so therefore it must be the right thing to do and anyone who disagrees must be wrong.
We wouldn’t need laws and courts and police if morality were objective and instinctual, because people of sound mind wouldn’t engage in wrong actions, and the mentally unbalanced people who do would be addressed medically rather than criminally. The fact that martial force is necessary to enforce moral behavior, and punish violation thereof, is proof enough that there’s no magical cricket whispering in everyone’s ear about what they should or shouldn’t do.
And most of the time, I would agree with you. Except that this was literally Steophan using “morality is subjective” in order to remain consistent that nazi genocide was “justice”.
What we have is a case where we saw a cop shoot and kill someone in a manner that on its face appears unjustified. I, for one, believe the killing was unjustified, but I wasn’t on the jury that was presented the full body of evidence and had to make the decision. Maybe the prosecution failed to present their argument as convincingly as they could have. Maybe there’s evidence above and beyond the video that I’m not aware of. Maybe they just plain believed the officer legitimately felt he was in danger and had the right to shoot. I can’t know and we’ll likely never know, but the system we’ve put in place states that the decision of the jury is final, and I find that system to be preferable to the alternatives.
What is law if not public morality backed by physical force? The people who make the laws generally believe they’re acting rightly and in accordance with the moral codes they subscribe to. We would not expect to see such deviations in a world where morality is fixed and universal.
Justice is the state that occurs when the law is properly applied and executed. From the perspective of the Nazis, they were certainly behaving justly. I would disagree with their assessment.
That is most definitely not what most people mean when they say “justice”. This is honestly a ´good test case - as as many people as you want, “does your definition of ‘justice’ include what happened to the jews in Nazi Germany?” and the only people who will say “yes” are neo-nazis who are 100% sure that you’re on their side and nobody else is listening, and also Steophan.
And yet, it is what justice is. If you lived in Saudi Arabia, it is likely that you believe that beheading is a just penalty for any number of offenses, and if pressed on the subject, you would likely insist that it is objectively just.
The Nazis, in all likelihood, believed their actions were just. I, personally, do not.
Then I don’t rightfully give a shit about whatever abstract concept you’re referring to when you say “justice”. I’ll have to come up with some other word, I guess.
Or, alternatively, I just keep using “justice” in the way most of the population would understand it, and ignore weirdos who insist on some other uncommon, bizarre definition that allows for things like the Nazi war crimes and beheading people for being witches being called “justice”.
This is where you stumble badly. Many of the Germans in late 1930’s did believe that what the Nazi party was doing was wrong, and many stood up against it. They were mostly killed or imprisoned for their efforts. Even members of the Nazi party were not all hard core believers in genocide.
There were moralists in 1930’s germany that said that genocide was wrong, forceful eugenics was wrong, that sterilization and relocation of the sick and disabled was wrong. It was not one monolithic belief.
Somewhere in that time and era, the memetic ancestor of your argument met that of ours in a coffee shop. Where our position was that the deportation of jews and other “undesirables” was immoral, and your position was that the deportation of jews and such was justice, because that’s what the law said, and because there is no objective morality. (and of course, after this conversation, because of what the law says is “justice” you would then turn in those making the moral argument for sedition.)
Justice is situational. The Holocaust we can all agree was unjust because it was mass murder. During the same time frame, British and American scientists and engineers developed a perfect cocktail of bombs that would maximize death and destruction in German and Japanese cities. Mass murder. We rightfully revile Nazis. Yet our own societies get a pass on mass murder.
We all agree that rape is wrong. Academic studies in Germany discovered that 1/3 of ALL German women in the path of the advancing Red Army were raped…and a sizeable number of Polish women. Were there any consequences for this brutality? Do we study this in our history/ethics classes? No…because the Soviets were on our side and its an inconvenient truth.
Morality is part of the social contract and contracts get renegotiated over time.