Now I want to read your Sci Fi story…
Part of the reasons I chose dolphins and ants as examples: Individual ants are pretty much expendable and if you (fancifully) imagine a society that developed from ants, there might be no concept of individual property; no expectation of individual equality - and even if you treat the colony as the individual, war with neigbouring colonies can be just a completely normal part of everyday life (and it doesn’t matter if war destroys ants, because they are expendable); dolphins have very different ideas about sexual boundaries - and these are creatures that share a planet with us, and some of their DNA.
In the context of humans, sure, you could tell yourself that you are being objective when you observe that generally, humans don’t like pain, therefore it is wrong to inflict pain, but I think these are subjective judgments - they are scoped to humans (and not even really universal in that scope).
I’ve done neither; that was your weird example. You might as well be complaining that your smoke detector isn’t very good at detecting jelly. Use the appropriate tools for measuring the quanta you wish to measure. What are the tools for measuring morality?
Sorry, that was intended metaphorically, standing for the experience of pain and whatever underlying biological process is measured, such as, say, the firing of C-fibers.
The point was that measurement isn’t the only way to acquire knowledge, hence, that non-measurability doesn’t entail non-cognitivism. But I sense it’s probably best not to press on with this.
I don’t even disagree with this. What I question is whether the acquisition of knowledge via non-measurable methods can correctly be termed ‘objective’.
Whether a fact is objectively true or not doesn’t depend at all on whether we know it — it was objectively true, for example, that the earth orbits the sun at a time before there were any humans on the earth to know this or not know it — and, it follows, the objective truth of a fact that we do know doesn’t depend on the mechanism by which we came to know it.
The reliability of the methods we use may affect whether we know a fact to be true, or how reliably we can know it to be true. But they can’t affect whether it is objectively true or not.
I agree. I suppose that means we cannot ever completely rule out the objective existence of anything, even absurd things.
But that’s a bit like the argument ‘you can’t prove God doesn’t exist, somewhere’. It’s true, but it’s a banal truth that is almost always different from the supposed truth being argued when the statement is made.
“Objective morality might exist, we just can’t know for sure, therefore, please accept my version of morality along with my strenuous assurance that it is objective”
This is true. Equally, we can’t ever rule in the objective existence of anything, not even material objects. As already pointed out, the scientific method itself rests on a number of unprovable axioms, once of which is the objective reality of the empirically observable universe. Thus you can’t rely on the scientific method to prove the objective reality of any material object; any attempt to do so is necessarily circular.
The fact that we can’t empirically demonstrate the objective reality of abstractions is not an argument against their objective reality since, if we assume their objective reality, we still don’t expect to be able to observe them. Just as we can have no scientific basis for asserting the objective reality of abstract things, so we can have no scientific basis for rejecting it. This is a question on which science is necessarily silent.
And yet we manage to usefully discern between:
- There is a chair
- There is an invisible dragon in the chair
Heck, human societies on our own planet have (or have had) different views of the value of life (slavery and other inequalities, for example), and whilst they might have adhered to the notion:
They have had quite different values for the parameter ‘good reason’ (Leviticus 20, I’m looking at you).
In some places, on our own planet, right now, some humans consider it OK to cheat if you can get away with it; the onus for not being cheated rests on the potential victim.
Infanticide inflicted on one’s own species is not uncommon (filial cannibalism). Infanticide of one’s own offspring is less common, but sometimes occurs, due to circumstances.
I don’t believe objective morality exists, but if it does, perhaps a sentient individual causing undue severe pain/ torture leading to death on its own offspring would be one thing no outside observer would condone.
I don’t know how much pain crayfish experience, but they eat their own offspring alive. It’s a successful survival strategy; have a thousand kids, send them out to find food, eat some of them when they get fat - thus acquiring more material sustenance than you could have done on your own.
If we did manage to define some moral statement that the whole of humanity could get behind, it would only be because it’s convenient or otherwise desirable to that snapshot of the human race, at that moment in time.
I honestly don’t think there is or can be such a thing as a moral statement that all conceivable sentient entities could stand behind.
But then, all knowledge is ultimately rooted in non-empirical methods (all that I know, I know because of my subjective experience of something).
Also, I don’t see what the method of knowledge acquisition (a question of epistemology) implies about the nature of that knowledge’s object (a question of ontology). One is about the nature of the access, the other about the thing accessed, so to speak. It’s possible that anything objective is accessible by empirical means, but it’s not clear to me that this is the case; for one, mathematical entities seem an indication to the contrary, and as above, even those empirical means are presented to us only via the mediation of subjective experience.
So we’re in a position where nothing can be proven or disproven. This doesn’t make anyone’s argument worth listening to.
Just to be clear, I don’t believe filial cannibalism meets the criteria as an example of objective morality. It is a trait that evolved in some species, therefore it doesn’t apply as a universal.
Knowingly torturing one’s own offspring resulting in death, on the other hand, is not an evolved trait, and therefore may apply. I can’t imagine any intelligent lifeform condoning that.
I agree with this, if an objective reality does exist it would have likely been limited to family and a limited sized social group. Avoiding exile from a tribe I believe is an inherited trait. Still based on self-interest.
Neither can I, but I think that’s because of what humans happen to be.
You can define an ethical system based on a set of axioms, such as minimize harm, but what those axioms are is subjective. The religious sort of objective morality is claimed to be a property of the universe, usually through a deity who created and maintains the universe.
True but my point was that they still would have a basic concept of right and wrong that humans would be able to understand even if they did things we would find to be evil. As I said I highly doubt any civilization (alien or human) could ever form where absolutely anything was permissible all the time in every circumstance no matter what. I don’t think there’s any possible society where a bloodthirsty psychopath like Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez would be welcomed and their deviancies accepted and encouraged and if it did it would very quickly collapse and become anarchy.
True but I’m talking about societies and cultures as a whole, not individual people who are moral rule breakers. Rapists and murderers exist but that doesn’t mean our society generally approves of rape and murder.
and a deity has set the foundations of absolutes, so now it’s just a matter of faith or no faith.
Moral absolutes is not even in question. We’ve been passed it for 2,000 years. The only question
that humanity is left to struggle with is to believe or not to believe (faith).
So am I. I’m certain that there is significant bias in the reporting of social conventions in China relating to honesty and integrity being, or not being, a virtue, but I am fairly sure there is some difference in how the lines are drawn.
Neither do I, I’m not talking about a society where evil is tolerated and welcomed; I’m talking about one where the things we consider to fall into categories such as ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘right’, ‘wrong’ are defined differently, perhaps in ways that we would find quite disturbing; you’ve only got to look back at our own history on this planet; it used to be accepted for humans to own other humans. It used to be accepted that people would suffer capital punishment for transgressions that seem pretty insignificant to our modern perspective - yet, to the people at the time, those things were just completely normal.