I might not be right but it sounds like the “Eastern” philosophy that became popular in the West in the late 60’s early 70’s, more or less people saying “there is no right and wrong, man” referring to a part of Buddhist practice that holds there is no good or bad or action, only actions that increase karma and actions that decrease it, either in the individual or the community. Of course that’s just redefining the terms, the meaning stays the same. Hippies also used to say, “nothing is an accident, man…”. There was a classic Sat Nite Live skit of two people enjoying a sunny day when suddenly a cow falls out of the sky crushing one of them, the other looks up at the camera, “nothing is an accident, man…”
slowlearner: that, of course, would only work under a misunderstanding of Buddhism, which, in fact, has some very solid rules regarding “right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.”
ETA; an my word processor has options for “right justification,” too.
I’m not aware of any studies that would support either of those viewpoints.
My own speculation is that nature has hardwired most of us to not stray far from extreme moral imperatives that would put any society at risk of extinction. You would expect that killing a member of your own society without at least some justification given to the other members would be wrong in most societies. Survival of the genes isn’t something that changes. The more an imperative the moral is to survival; The less malleable it will be.
Objective morality arguments aren’t about convincing your hypothetical position. They concern the process of achieving goals once moral axioms are in place.
I know Harris and Dillahunty throw out “well-being” a lot, and, like I said, they don’t do the best job of explaining their positions (at least Dillahunty doesn’t on his Youtube channel; I have yet to read Harris’s book). Just consider that their starting axiom. You can replace it with whatever you want. I’m fairly confident that Harris’s objective morality isn’t telling you what to value. Now he may, in his book, try to appeal to other values you may have, like self-preservation, and argue that behaving in a way that is conducive to well-being helps achieve those values.
There is nothing wrong with society organizing in that way, and it is morally good, if it fits within your arbitrary moral axioms. Do you see the cycle? 
It’s inescapable.
I don’t know whether you’re a relativist or someone who believes in absolute truth (or neither?), but it seems like objective morality clicks with relativists a lot better than the latter. The belief of relativism is inherent within objective morality (as oxymoronic as that may sound).
I noticed you keep asking why you should value “X”. This sounds like someone searching for objective truth.
“You should follow the rules because that will lead to achieving the objectives that people want to achieve”
I don’t know that Harris would say that, and I wish I had read his book so I could answer your arguments better, but that statement would not logically follow from my understanding of objective morality. It would instead read as:
“You should follow the rules because that will lead to achieving the objectives that you want to achieve”
Of coarse, if you arbitrarily value your own well-being then you should follow societies objectives, since it would be in the best interest of your own well-being.
Objective morality is a process, not a set of values to be argued for.
I value X - isn’t what objective morality is trying to address
Y achieves X - part of what objective morality is arguing for
I, therefore, need to do Y to accomplish X - part of what objective morality is arguing for
I’ll end with Harris addressing the same basic concern you’re putting forth:
My argument isn’t that the abolition of slavery was universally perceived to be morally necessary, but rather that the historical abolitionists, or at least some of them, argued against the form of slavery that existed in their time on the basis of the sort of moral principles that I do think are universally applicable.
Historically, the institution of slavery referred to different things at different times - chattel slavery based on race is in fact a reasonably recent variety. In most ancient societies, slavery was based on misfortune, not race - being on the losing side in a war, or guilty of some crime - and so the focus of moral inquiry was more likely on treating them with some minimum of decency, rather than the existence of the classification of slavery per se. Much as we today are more concerned with the treatment of criminals as prisoners and POWs, rather than the existence of the categories of prisoners and POWs.
To my mind, without some sort of universal morality, it is difficult to argue against existing culture and laws. The fact that people within a culture can argue successfully that existing customs and laws are immoral and ought to change (even if, in point of fact requires appeal to some sort of morality that exists quite independently of those customs and laws: and to my mind, the legitimate source of that morality is empathy and the ethic of reciprocity.
Some evidence that this is true can be found in the near-universal existence of some formulation of the ethic of reciprocity cross-culturally.
Point taken. In my experience, advocates of objective morality, whether religious or non-religious, tend to be concerned with disputes over the process of achieving goals, rather than the possibility that people might disagree on the goals or even the moral axioms themselves. This, I think, is what drives reactions of “these people are crazy!” when someone blatantly violates conventional morality. There certainly could be mental health issues at play, but there is also a significant amount of unacknowledged variation in the world on societal goals and fundamental moral axioms.
Woah.
So following from this, is immorality when people share the same starting axioms but some take sub-optimal actions to accomplishing the goals that follow from them? If someone starts from different axioms than I do and subsequently identifies different goals that conflict with my society’s (like, say, a suicide bomber), can I call them immoral, or can I only say they are immoral if I conclude to some degree of certainty that their actions are not helpful in achieving their goal?
I think for the most part I behave like absolute truth exists, but I have yet to find intellectually satisfying arguments for defining what that truth is, at least when I’m confronted with people who don’t share my general worldview.
The reason I am repeating myself about why I should value “X” is not exactly because I am searching for objective truth. I think we’d agree that even if it was found, there would be nothing, outside of my own arbitrary wishes and desires, that would necessarily compel me to care. If I live my life choosing to believe and promote in young-earth creationism because I think there’s nothing more important than preserving the influence of a creationist church in society, I could certainly do that, and I could even use strategies to get enough support to “win” at least for a while. But regardless, evolution and the earth being older than 6000-1000 years would still be true. On the other hand, I don’t see how the same could be said for the truth of most of the (often conflicting) extant moral axioms, at least based on the evidence we have now.
I recognize now that all this is not in contradiction to what Harris and Dillahunty actually mean when they say objective morality, but these points would affect our framework for evaluating any moral system that is developed from using their reasoning.
[QUOTE]
“You should follow the rules because that will lead to achieving the objectives that people want to achieve”
I don’t know that Harris would say that, and I wish I had read his book so I could answer your arguments better, but that statement would not logically follow from my understanding of objective morality. It would instead read as:
“You should follow the rules because that will lead to achieving the objectives that you want to achieve”
Of coarse, if you arbitrarily value your own well-being then you should follow societies objectives, since it would be in the best interest of your own well-being.
Objective morality is a process, not a set of values to be argued for.
I value X - isn’t what objective morality is trying to address
Y achieves X - part of what objective morality is arguing for
I, therefore, need to do Y to accomplish X - part of what objective morality is arguing for
I’ll end with Harris addressing the same basic concern you’re putting forth:
[/QUOTE]Looking at objective morality this way, I agree it holds up, though I’m not sure how different but internally consistent moral systems that are based on different values could be compared.
Thank you for your replies; this is giving me a lot to think about.
I see. So would you argue that “historical abolitionists” includes both people who morally argued completely against slavery as a category, and also people who accepted slavery in some form but morally argued for better treatment of slaves, because they were both operating from general principles of empathy and reciprocity?
In practice I agree with this, but can’t we be proud of our arbitrary valuing of empathy and reciprocity?
I see a lot of taking for granted, and overlook also.
It’s just, like you mentioned, what can anyone say about the moral axioms? Christians can point to their absolute source of morality (I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of those arguments before). Harris’s relative/objective morality can’t point to anything. It’s a take it or leave it deal with respect to those starting axioms.
Good question.
I reason that if it’s overall progress towards the shared axioms, then I don’t see how that would be immoral even if it is sub-optimal. I’d say that would be moral, or at least a bit “bleh”. If it got in the way of achieving more optimal results then it would be immoral.
I think the biggest distinction there for what would be moral is between what is sub-optimal and detrimental towards results. We are probably always going to be sub-optimal at achieving results (at least until this transhumanism thing really kicks in).
This is where relativism comes into play. It all depends on your frame of reference.
From the reference point of your starting axioms; They failed to satisfy them, therefore, they were immoral.
From the reference point of their starting axioms; They succeeded to satisfy them, therefore, they were moral.
It’s all about frames of reference. If you choose to look at it from his starting axioms, then you can say he was moral. It would be like me, as an atheist, acknowledging that “Jesus is king” from the reference point of the bible. I can see it that way, but I don’t believe it.
This is why I said I believe that relativism is inherent within Harris’s objective morality (not other people’s “absolute” objective morality like you see with a lot of religious people). This is also why I hate Harris using the term “objective morality”.
You’ve gotten a satisfying answer from people who do share your worldview?
Not getting a satisfying answer to what truth is is why I dropped that concept. Truth doesn’t make any sense to me outside of a frame of reference.
Yea, if people are willing to deny logic and science, then I’m sure they would have no problems denying moral truth. Especially since they use, to some extent, and benefit from science and logic on a daily basis.
No problem. Our exchange has helped me flesh everything out better.
This lurker appreciates the hell out of the conversation as well. Just, yanno, FYI.
Not really - I would argue that there was a group who rejected the chattel slavery that existed in their day, say at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, who were ‘abolitionists’; and that there were others, not exactly ‘abolitionists’ per se, who argued that slaves and other unfortunates be provided with at least a minimum of decent treatment, or were hotrrified when they were not.
In both cases, the people involved were judging the morality of their own laws and cultures - which either allowed chattel slavery, or allowed inhuman treatment of slaves and other disfavoured people.
How did they arrive at the conclusion that their own laws and customs were wrong?
To my mind, morality is a process, not a product; it isn’t found in adherence to a single set of laws or customs, but in a process, roughly analogous to that of science, of continually evaluating one’s prejudices, laws and customs against certain objective criteria of fairness and decency - and those criteria arise, basically, out of empathy and the ethic of reciprocity.
Unlike science, empathy and reciprocity are not “facts” that can be weighed or measured. This does not make them unreal or completely arbitrary or subjective, either. As was once said in another context (by Cremony of the Apaches, in point of fact): if you find someone who others claim ‘does not know the difference between right and wrong’, why go and wrong them - and see how they react. 
I agree, and my takeaway from this is that the major problems that would arise in societies that consciously organize themselves around (for example) a particular Christian moral system would be debates over the subsequent goal-seeking process, and the major problems that would arise in a society embracing the kind of ‘objective morality’ we’ve been discussing would be debates over the starting values.
I’m not sure if debates over process or debates over starting values yield more violence and chaos, historically. The distinction is usually blurred or taken for granted, as you say.
While I agree that all actions in practice are likely to be sub-optimal toward achieving ideal results, I think the distinction between sub-optimal and detrimental is further complicated by traditional tensions between individual rights and the goals of the state. Many social decisions on a larger level that are done to further the goals of a society, like on free trade, or on safety vs. freedom policies, often harm individuals to the point where they demand societally sub-optimal or even detrimental actions. This is true even when the goals of the society are abstractly agreed to (who doesn’t want economic growth? ). Since assumably the actions taken by a society as a whole will never line up with the interests of every single individual within it, any moral system that we come up with will have to say something concrete about when individuals should prioritize themselves and when they should prioritize the needs of society. Or in other words, how much immorality is the system willing to tolerate?
At the moment we (in the US at least) are kind of muddling through these debates. However, I don’t see any reason why proponents of objective morality could not, as their support grows, favor using the law to actively promote objective morality and ban objective immorality. For the greater good of course. Since the interests and values of different societies differ, we could even see a new Cold War, fought over the morality equivalent of planned economies and free markets.
I agree. I could even see how Harris’s objective morality could ask fellow travelers to go and “convert” others to its moral axioms, since presumably competing moral systems hurt it in achieving its goals. But recognizing moral relativism in abstract isn’t so practical. I can choose to judge some violent person based on whether he shares my frame of reference or not, or by his own frame of reference, sure. But if he’s bombing my cafe, I have to react to it in some way, and my reaction will reflect some judgment on his or my moral framework as a whole. And then I’m the jerk.
If something really is arbitrary, I think we have the freedom to define it, and since the definition we create is the only thing that can really be said to exist about it, it exists as an absolute truth. If in laying out a religious morality I choose to define God one way, and another person in contrast chooses to define God a different way, we aren’t operating from competing definitions of God, we are going from two unique definitions. We happen to label them by the same word, and this can have a lot of consequences, but our definitions are independent. They just exist as that, whole and unperturbed. If someone converts me, I am not changing my definition of God, I am moving to a new one.
So if people share my definitions of good, bad, moral etc., which I may have in turn picked up from others, then we can proceed in discussion from that. If they don’t, then I’m kind of stuck.
Yeah. The arguments today against some Christians who benefit from medicines even though they deny key parts of biology that influence medicinal development (like evolution) kind of reminds me of Pagan Romans getting irritated at early Christians for benefiting from the Empire’s law and order but refusing to serve in the army. Even if people come around eventually, there’s still the question of how larger society should view them and handle them in the meantime.
Ah I see. My instinct is to say that small-r religion, as the process wherein people consider and assign meaning and importance to things and values, is what is responsible for expansions or contractions of the moral imagination. In the case of Gregory of Nyssa, he used Christian scripture (and that quote that he is criticizing, “I got slave girls and slaves” is from Ecclesiastes) to derive and order his starting values, and in the case of Sam Harris, he’s trying to argue from his definitions of well-being and happiness. But the process is the same.
Claiming some objective standards of fairness and decency is very useful to challenging normalized behavior, I agree. Many who were abused become abusers, former slaveowners would become slaves, etc. Just because a battered woman might keep going back to her abuser, insisting, “He really loves me!”, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t wronged, but unless we can claim an authority for what is “wronged” that supersedes her agency, keeping her away from her abuser becomes an arbitrary undertaking on our part.
The examples of many people who really do break negative cycles do seem to indicate some kind of natural inclinations toward empathy and reciprocity. But if, like them, we can see the way society is messed up around us and resolve to change things, is this us moving toward the objective standard of decency? Can we ever exceed that standard? If it possible to be more empathetic than that standard, is there an argument for doing so? Is it like pieces of flair?
Minor clarification:
[QUOTE=Me]
Ah I see. My instinct is to say that small-r religion, as the process wherein people consider and assign meaning and importance to things and values, is what is responsible for expansions or contractions of the moral imagination. In the case of Gregory of Nyssa, he used Christian scripture (and that quote that he is criticizing, “I got slave girls and slaves” is from Ecclesiastes) to derive and order his starting values, and in the case of Sam Harris, he’s trying to argue from his definitions of well-being and happiness. But the process is the same.
[/QUOTE]
In the bolded part, I should have said “he used *his reading of *Christian scripture”.
I’m a strong situationist because I believe in objective consequentialism. I think non-situationism is probably more attractive to cultural relativists.
That is, because I think the results of our actions can be judged good or evil, and that matters, I believe the right action (and it is not a subjective judgement at that point) depends on the situation.
(Note that a lot of actions sanctioned by “personal morality” and social norms are probably not all that important, and may objectively morally neutral in this analysis. I’m talking about things like poisoning your neighbor’s wells rather than things like cussing in a church.)
Non-situationist morality insists that the right action is the right action no matter the consequences. That seems to place “deontological” morality as a construct of dubious reality independent of real physical (or spiritual, whatever) consequences. I can see this appealing to a cultural relativist who doesn’t care about results, instead preferring to live by the dictates of his culture just because.
So, yeah, I roll my eyes when people confuse situationism with subjectivism.
Oh, and I would draw a distinction between objective (and more or less Platonic) good and subjective ideas of good. What we think of as good is no more the true good than our imagination of an atom is the true atom. That doesn’t mean there is no true good any more than there is no true atom.
Frustrating to many, I’m sure.
People often get confused on the distinction between subjective and arbitrary.
That morality and ethics are subjective is basically the majority view. Subjective but based on how humans (in general) are wired and a basic idea of, broadly, constructive versus destructive actions.
OTOH, the idea that morality is arbitrary and we just randomly choose things to be virtuous or condemned, has never really had much support. It’s primarily used as a straw man, e.g. in some religious groups’ description of atheists’ morality.
Strikes me that what you describe is not “subjective”, but “objective” - in the legal sense of the word.
It law, the term ‘The man on the Clapham omnibus’ is used (it means a hypothetical person of either sex who is reasonably intelligent but not in any way connected to the issue at hand, being asked for his or her opinion on that issue). This is the “objective standard”, used in negligence cases: Generally, the standard of care/foresight a person is expected to attain is an objective standard derived from what a hypothetical “reasonable person” would do under the same circumstances.
This is the hypothetical ‘reasonable person’, as in 'would a reasonable person, with no connection to a particular question of morality, find it good, bad or indifferent?"
Now, the ‘Clapham omnibus’ is located in the context of a particular society in time and place - to get to a truly objective morality, one would have to locate this hypotheical person as being, potentially, from any time or place. And indeed, we’d have to strip him or her of their sex (as is already done), and even, of their species.
The question would then become - is there some minimum standard of reasonableness and decency, based on ‘how entities with conciousness are wired’, that is not dependent on one’s culture, location, sex, species, or any purely subjective factors?
I would argue that there is.
Those two things are not necessarily incompatible i.e. subjective in the everyday sense of the word may be equivalent to objective in a legal sense.
Well, this is trickier because your description here sounds more you are talking about ethics, and that can vary more between societies than morality.
But broadly, yes, it’s a hard-wired thing where we can agree on lots of principles even if there is some variation from person to person.
(And by hard-wired I don’t mean uniquely human. I’m sure any sentient species would have some notion of at least social versus anti-social behaviours, though their “average” behaviour may be at some other point on the spectrum to ours).
Both societies would debate over starting axioms. In your religious example; Christians would debate over reasoning axioms. They would share similar morals, but disagree on how to interpret scripture. Some may insist on a literal interpretation, while others would demand the Bible be read metaphorically. Some may trust science and logic to carry out their agenda; While other would believe that those axioms contradict scripture. Of coarse, Christianity doesn’t address all moral concerns, and there would still be debates over more nuanced moral issues (such as which system of government to use).
The moral objectivists would debate over starting moral axioms. This could be an interestingly diverse society made up of Christians, Muslims, Jews, utilitarians, deontologists, etc.
Harris’s answer to this is the moral landscape. By objectively analyzing the aggregate of moral values to achieve something that satisfies the average.
Society’s morals would always take precedent, always, over the individual relative to society. This is a kind of moral utilitarian approach as opposed to traditional utilitarianism valuing the greatest “well-being” or happiness. It would only be moral relative to the aggregate of society’s values. This is basically what democracies attempt to do already. We have certain inalienable rights, because most people agree with that axiom. These rights are suppose to protect us from a moral majority, but not the moral aggregate. If 51% of people want you dead without due process for an alleged crime, then that’s not suppose to happen, but the aggregate of that society will probably at least want you put through the legal system and punished if you’re found guilty, and that will satisfy most people.
The question is: If more people subscribed to objective morality; Would democracies become more efficient at achieving this moral average?
I think so. It de-emphasizes black-and-white understandings of morality, and allows individuals to compromise with each other in order to achieve a degree of what’s moral to them, instead of an outcome that leaves all parties unsatisfied.
There was more in your post that I found interesting and wanted to address, but I’m going to take a break from the discussion; At least for a while.
Eventually, though, once we handle the big stuff, people would start focusing on other things, and the scope of morally neutral things would shift or shrink. If we are unable to predict how that shakes out, we might end up accidentally normalizing behavior that we didn’t necessarily intend to. Like how setting rules for proper treatment of slaves contributed to normalizing slavery in many societies, leading it to being perpetuated.
Someone who prefers to live by the dictates of his culture might derive community, value and meaning from doing so, and that’s a worthwhile result for many even if achieving it might bring some downsides.
Could you expand on what you mean by “true good” a little bit, please? If all sentient life disappeared, there would still be atoms. In the same situation, would there still be true good?
If I am misunderstanding any of your terminology please correct me, thanks.
Morality being arbitrary does not mean that we are just randomly choosing things to be virtuous or condemned. It means starting from some foundational assumptions that we might be inclined toward for genetic/cultural reasons but are in any case ultimately arbitrary, and then working out and implementing a system. For those assumptions, This is the definition of arbitrary I am using, more or less. A decision that is “determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle”. General consensuses on moral axioms indicate that our whims and impulses are influenced to some extent by biology or (more likely) culture, they do not indicate that there is any value inherent in these consensuses outside of what we choose to assign them.
It’s like with languages. Languages are arbitrary first in that there is no reason for the thing I exchanged for a sandwich today to be called “money” rather than “dinero”. Languages change all the time but they are not really random, they have ordered systems with rules and people usually care about following them and having others follow them, even when understanding isn’t an issue.
There is also another level of arbitrariness to language in that even though most people have a need, whether caused by biology or culture, to talk to others, they could still choose to try to not act on it. Or they could limit it in some way, like in ‘moments of silence’ or in libraries. A vow of silence would make many aspects of modern society difficult, and it would go against our hardwiring, but a person doing it because that is what he values is not ‘wrong’ in the same way that a person feeding lions only gatorade and pez because he wants to make them healthier is ‘wrong.’ This doesn’t mean we must let people do whatever they want, but it helps make our criticisms more accurate.
Right now many languages are going extinct. It’s not surprising, there isn’t much practical or societal benefit to keeping a language that is only spoken by 5000 people in a couple of remote valleys. On the contrary. The time spent maintaining that language could be devoted to many other pursuits, there would be more opportunities for kids raised in the dominant language, and there would be fewer misunderstandings. But I still regret this extinction. If I donated to a language preservation fund and people criticized me for it, I’d understand if they called me impractical. I would be much more indignant if they said I was immorally wasting my money.
I thought putting “major” would be enough to cover me but I guess not You’re right.
While people who subscribe to objective morality might be more willing to debate and compromise over how to reach shared goals (although in my experience, people who believe that their viewpoint is objectively true tend to be somewhat stubborn about it), I think that dealings with people who don’t share their moral axioms would not really see improvements. A group like the Amish are an interesting case to consider. On the one hand, they are small and pretty benign as a group. But they do take up a decent amount of land. They base their life on religion and their schools only go up to 8th grade, with the effect of perpetuating the community by making it harder to succeed outside. I’m not sure how the compromise the US has worked out with them would fare in an objective morality society. I’ll have to think about it more.
It’s all right. Thanks, I appreciated the discussion.
Mijin, I suddenly realize I may have totally misinterpreted your post, and my reply might be a non-sequitur, at least in tone. Apologies if this is the case!
Where are you getting that most people are moral subjectivists?
Subjectivity describes something that’s limited to the human experience. Most religious folk describe their morality as lying outside of the realm of human experience since God lies outside of human experience. In Christianity anything relating to God is moral, and anything absent of God is immoral. In Islam anything commanded by Allah is moral, and anything counter to his will is immoral. This is perhaps an oversimplification of the basis of morality found in every interpretation of the two religions that I’m aware of.
These two self-identified groups make up over half of the world’s population. I don’t know much about the other half (outside of agnostics), but I don’t see as many requirements for subjectivism in that half to be able to rival the objectivism in the first. This analysis is about the only thing I’m consciously basing my impression off of. I’d be interested in hearing a better argument.
arbitrary is useful for describing something not based on reason or a system.
or something that is unsupported.
This is how I am using the term when I say moral assumptions are arbitrary.
The relevant distinction is between arbitrary moral assumptions, and the non-arbitrary moral reasoning that follows (assuming one accepts logical reasoning).
If you are a moral subjectivist then any moral system you follow must be based on arbitrary moral assumptions. These are moral starting points to reason from and, thus, are not based on any reason or system. They are themselves the basis of a system of which to reason from. It would be a misnomer to call one of these entire moral systems arbitrary, however, since what logically follows from it’s assumptions are anything but arbitrary.
I’m not sure if you were remarking on calling basic assumptions arbitrary or entire moral systems, but there you have it.
Also, morality and ethics can be synonymous terms. It’s true that morality is usually used to describe biological social tendencies, but it can also be used as a philosophical term.
moral:
of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical
No, it’s not, because we’re not dealing with issues of taste. The analogy doesn’t work.
The point is that, if morality is subjective, there is no reason for me to punch you in face if I think it is right. If you wish to convince not to do so, you must appeal to something objective. You can’t just say that it’s all subjective, because then my morality, where I can punch you, is just as valid as yours.
Even if you appeal to a sense of self preservation, saying you will hurt me if I do so, you’re still appealing to an objective morality, namely “I should not do things that will result in me getting hurt.”
Morality has both subjective and objective components. You cannot say there is no objective morality, because then I can do whatever I want to you.
Morality is not just “what I should do,” but “What you should do,” too. And that requires some level of objectivity, some appeal to something beyond just opinions.