Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify/codify popular/common moral beliefs.
Even “murder is wrong” is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic “murder is wrong” stance.
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out “murder” for “killing” the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
It’s even worse than that. It floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder. It’s murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don’t even have a proper word for it, they just say “it’s not murder… IT’S WAR!” What a lazy non-argument. It doesn’t count because we’re doing murder Costco style, in bulk?
I mean yeah, it’s people killing people that don’t want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It’s more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.
As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn’t have the baggage of human murdered. Don’t want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they’re doing, or they won’t comply as reliably!
and this is exactly my point, the definition of the word generally points directly to it being killing in a fashion that is unlawful which rests on the applicable law in the context.
Nation state soldiers killing enemy combatants doesn’t fit this description in most circumstances.
(There are of course rules and exceptions etc etc)
I’m not arguing the morality, I’m arguing the factual definition and it’s the reason why i said the language causes it’s own issues.
floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder
Because it’s not. Murder is one sided. War, you are fighting. It’s not 1 sided. It’s killing, and can easily and is often morally reprehensible. But that does not make it murder. Civilian deaths are still murder in a war.
It’s not defanging language. Its using it as it is.
I would argue that’s because murder is generally understood to be tangential to state authority where state is defined as the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Killing for the state is war or exercising sovereignty or whatever the reason is, but it’s the state’s reason and it’s weird to call state sanctioned genocide murder even when you acknowledge it as evil and unlawful. Killing against state authority is revolutionary action and while inherently unlawful is also rarely seen as murder. So it makes sense that a state sactioning the killing of actors of another state isn’t seen as murder and instead has its own term for the whole tragic situation.
in fact, that “murder is wrong” in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like “morality is subjective” as though it’s an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
“Morality is subjective” is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.
Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.
Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.
If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.
And since we can’t point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn’t even matter if one theoretically exists because it’s inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn’t exist for us.
Both of us are following different moral standards, the “rules” in your head are not the same rules that I’m subjective to.
You’re morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.
A lot of what you said here is an implication of subjectivism, but not an argument for it. Subjectivism about morality is no more an implication of an empiricist worldview than subjectivism about the shape of the Earth.
What you’re suggesting here sounds a lot like the logical positivists’ position on ethics. The descriptive is falsifiable, the normative is not, so it must be subjective. The problem with that view is that we can’t draw neat lines between the normative and the descriptive. If I’m attempting to model the world descriptively, I’m still going to be guided by normative considerations about what constitutes a good model. Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative. Philosophy in general is not a discrete subject, separate from science. The two are continuous.
And we’ve known since Plato that God doesn’t play into it, one way or the other.
A lot of what you said here is an implication of subjectivism, but not an argument for it.
Of course? We’re trying to understand why these students in a classroom are so strongly subjective, not convert each other.
They were confused what their students meant by subjectivism and that they don’t think the students understand what they mean.
I’m putting into context why subjectivism is the defacto moral standard in an empirical society.
Subjectivism is like the null hypothesis, it’s the default. If you want to claim objectivism, you have to prove this objective realm exists… but it’s an unfalsifiable thing?
Subjectivism about morality is no more an implication of an empiricist worldview than subjectivism about the shape of the Earth.
I’m not sure what point you’re making. What implies what doesn’t really matter for truth.
I was making a point that since a lot of people are empiricists by default that implies they’d be subjectivists. That doesn’t mean I was saying they’re right.
What you’re suggesting here sounds a lot like the logical positivists’ position on ethics. The descriptive is falsifiable, the normative is not, so it must be subjective.
This isn’t what I’m suggesting, it’s what I’m observing. This is my theory for why society is so strongly subjectivist.
We both already agreed this isn’t an argument for or against, I’m putting in context why society thinks why it does.
I’ve made a few personal arguments below but this was more a starting point, there’s just too much criticism to preempt its better to wait and have that conversation and address it as its brought up.
The problem with that view is that we can’t draw neat lines between the normative and the descriptive. If I’m attempting to model the world descriptively, I’m still going to be guided by normative considerations about what constitutes a good model. Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative. Philosophy in general is not a discrete subject, separate from science. The two are continuous.
Can you elaborate on “Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative.”
I bring up the is-ought problem in an argument below as evidence of subjectivist. The “is” lives in the external world we collect empirical data on, the “ought” is unique to our brains and subject to our own experiences
I would like to understand what you mean before I disagree (I might not but I think i do)
My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There’s no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don’t believe that’s possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic. this is a big ol nothing-burger of a refutation, it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
Goals and priorities might differ a lot between an ant and a human but not so much between two humans. At least not enough to not get at least a few rules for behavior.
Just because its easy to get a bunch of humans to agree say murder is wrong, doesn’t mean you can call that objective.
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
If morality is subjective, you’d expect creatures with similar subjective experiences to agree with each other.
You’d expect one subjective blob of rules to conform to human biology/sociology and a separate blob of subjective rules to apply to antkind with no real way to interface between the two.
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it. knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”
the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us. the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.
this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it.
Sure, in the same way I have no knowledge of anything except “I think therefore I am”.
If you apply this level of skepticism it’s impossible to move beyind solipsism.
You’re free to apply that standard, I wouldn’t be able to prove knowledge beyond it and then all conversation stops here.
If you’ll at least grant me a mutual belief in the external world so we can probe it and collect empirical data we can “pretend” is knowledge then we can build up a more interesting philosophy beyond “I don’t believe anything exists at all but me”.
knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”
No, I follow it because out of utility I’d like a more useful philosophy than solipsism.
the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us.
What? That’s literally what you just argued? Now you’re trying to dispel it?
the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.
Why should I not respond “this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know real facts outside your perception you just strongly suspect it.”?
You just flipped your argument around 180 degrees?
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors. You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you. The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors.
Just human? I mean, sure do, but we’re leaving out a huge array of animals who also engage in rudimentary moral behavior.
You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you.
Of course, we evolved to be social animals did we not? What else would you expect but inate instinctual “rules” when they’d lead to a clearly fitter society.
The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Right, and just like the variation in genetic material this variation in inputs and outputs that we all have which are wholly unique to us as individuals and while remarkably similar to others raised in similar environments, also remarkably unique in subtle ways.
I agree this is the entire conversation. And the obviousness of this fact, that moral expression is subtly unique to each individual, is the ultimate answer to the question.
If you are raised in a subjectively different environment, then the rules you learn to behave by will be subjective to that environment.
“murder is wrong” is a moral absolute if you adopt the deontological viewpoint. It’s not if you adopt the teleological approach.
Discussing these things is literally what I learnt in the very short Ethics course I had in third year uni (while in France that sort of stuff was much much earlier during Philosophy class…)
Edit : and to be clear, I think absolute opinions are the province of the philosopher and the fanatic. Real life tends to be a bit more messy. But that’s why it’s important to sort of know what the options are and how difficult the choices can be (again, for real human beings who struggle with dilemmas ; fanatics tend to eachew all that and I’d say that’s how you can spot them).
Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify/codify popular/common moral beliefs.
Even “murder is wrong” is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic “murder is wrong” stance.
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out “murder” for “killing” the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
It’s even worse than that. It floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder. It’s murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don’t even have a proper word for it, they just say “it’s not murder… IT’S WAR!” What a lazy non-argument. It doesn’t count because we’re doing murder Costco style, in bulk?
I mean yeah, it’s people killing people that don’t want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It’s more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.
As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn’t have the baggage of human murdered. Don’t want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they’re doing, or they won’t comply as reliably!
and this is exactly my point, the definition of the word generally points directly to it being killing in a fashion that is unlawful which rests on the applicable law in the context.
Nation state soldiers killing enemy combatants doesn’t fit this description in most circumstances. (There are of course rules and exceptions etc etc)
I’m not arguing the morality, I’m arguing the factual definition and it’s the reason why i said the language causes it’s own issues.
Because it’s not. Murder is one sided. War, you are fighting. It’s not 1 sided. It’s killing, and can easily and is often morally reprehensible. But that does not make it murder. Civilian deaths are still murder in a war.
It’s not defanging language. Its using it as it is.
I would argue that’s because murder is generally understood to be tangential to state authority where state is defined as the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Killing for the state is war or exercising sovereignty or whatever the reason is, but it’s the state’s reason and it’s weird to call state sanctioned genocide murder even when you acknowledge it as evil and unlawful. Killing against state authority is revolutionary action and while inherently unlawful is also rarely seen as murder. So it makes sense that a state sactioning the killing of actors of another state isn’t seen as murder and instead has its own term for the whole tragic situation.
in fact, that “murder is wrong” in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like “morality is subjective” as though it’s an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
https://images.app.goo.gl/fBQbi2J5osxuFmvt7
I think “morality is subjective” is just something we hear apparently worldly people say all the time, and nobody really has any idea.
By the way, I have a PhD in ethics and wrote my dissertation on the objectivity/subjectivity of ethics. Long story short, we don’t know shit!
“Morality is subjective” is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.
Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.
Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.
If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.
And since we can’t point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn’t even matter if one theoretically exists because it’s inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn’t exist for us.
Both of us are following different moral standards, the “rules” in your head are not the same rules that I’m subjective to.
You’re morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.
A lot of what you said here is an implication of subjectivism, but not an argument for it. Subjectivism about morality is no more an implication of an empiricist worldview than subjectivism about the shape of the Earth.
What you’re suggesting here sounds a lot like the logical positivists’ position on ethics. The descriptive is falsifiable, the normative is not, so it must be subjective. The problem with that view is that we can’t draw neat lines between the normative and the descriptive. If I’m attempting to model the world descriptively, I’m still going to be guided by normative considerations about what constitutes a good model. Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative. Philosophy in general is not a discrete subject, separate from science. The two are continuous.
And we’ve known since Plato that God doesn’t play into it, one way or the other.
Of course? We’re trying to understand why these students in a classroom are so strongly subjective, not convert each other.
They were confused what their students meant by subjectivism and that they don’t think the students understand what they mean.
I’m putting into context why subjectivism is the defacto moral standard in an empirical society.
Subjectivism is like the null hypothesis, it’s the default. If you want to claim objectivism, you have to prove this objective realm exists… but it’s an unfalsifiable thing?
I’m not sure what point you’re making. What implies what doesn’t really matter for truth.
I was making a point that since a lot of people are empiricists by default that implies they’d be subjectivists. That doesn’t mean I was saying they’re right.
This isn’t what I’m suggesting, it’s what I’m observing. This is my theory for why society is so strongly subjectivist.
We both already agreed this isn’t an argument for or against, I’m putting in context why society thinks why it does.
I’ve made a few personal arguments below but this was more a starting point, there’s just too much criticism to preempt its better to wait and have that conversation and address it as its brought up.
Can you elaborate on “Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative.”
I bring up the is-ought problem in an argument below as evidence of subjectivist. The “is” lives in the external world we collect empirical data on, the “ought” is unique to our brains and subject to our own experiences
I would like to understand what you mean before I disagree (I might not but I think i do)
My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There’s no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don’t believe that’s possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
How do you overcome the is-ought problem?
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic. this is a big ol nothing-burger of a refutation, it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
Okay so it’s clear you understand why I brought it up and that it’s true.
I don’t know why the rest of the comment is phrased so angrily but if you’re just saying I’m right I don’t know how to respond to it lol.
I wasn’t asking him to overcome it, I was astonished he would claim he could overcome it because it’s as obviously true as we both claim.
Not sure why I look silly if you keep telling me how absolutely right I am in all contexts lol
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
Goals and priorities might differ a lot between an ant and a human but not so much between two humans. At least not enough to not get at least a few rules for behavior.
Just because its easy to get a bunch of humans to agree say murder is wrong, doesn’t mean you can call that objective.
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
If morality is subjective, you’d expect creatures with similar subjective experiences to agree with each other.
You’d expect one subjective blob of rules to conform to human biology/sociology and a separate blob of subjective rules to apply to antkind with no real way to interface between the two.
and you base that expectation on what?
hopes and dreams?
this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it. knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”
the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us. the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.
I’m sorry, what?
Sure, in the same way I have no knowledge of anything except “I think therefore I am”.
If you apply this level of skepticism it’s impossible to move beyind solipsism.
You’re free to apply that standard, I wouldn’t be able to prove knowledge beyond it and then all conversation stops here.
If you’ll at least grant me a mutual belief in the external world so we can probe it and collect empirical data we can “pretend” is knowledge then we can build up a more interesting philosophy beyond “I don’t believe anything exists at all but me”.
No, I follow it because out of utility I’d like a more useful philosophy than solipsism.
What? That’s literally what you just argued? Now you’re trying to dispel it?
Why should I not respond “this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know real facts outside your perception you just strongly suspect it.”?
You just flipped your argument around 180 degrees?
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors. You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you. The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Just human? I mean, sure do, but we’re leaving out a huge array of animals who also engage in rudimentary moral behavior.
Of course, we evolved to be social animals did we not? What else would you expect but inate instinctual “rules” when they’d lead to a clearly fitter society.
Right, and just like the variation in genetic material this variation in inputs and outputs that we all have which are wholly unique to us as individuals and while remarkably similar to others raised in similar environments, also remarkably unique in subtle ways.
I agree this is the entire conversation. And the obviousness of this fact, that moral expression is subtly unique to each individual, is the ultimate answer to the question.
If you are raised in a subjectively different environment, then the rules you learn to behave by will be subjective to that environment.
“murder is wrong” is a moral absolute if you adopt the deontological viewpoint. It’s not if you adopt the teleological approach. Discussing these things is literally what I learnt in the very short Ethics course I had in third year uni (while in France that sort of stuff was much much earlier during Philosophy class…)
Edit : and to be clear, I think absolute opinions are the province of the philosopher and the fanatic. Real life tends to be a bit more messy. But that’s why it’s important to sort of know what the options are and how difficult the choices can be (again, for real human beings who struggle with dilemmas ; fanatics tend to eachew all that and I’d say that’s how you can spot them).