If you’re growing crops that need lots of water, and your next-door neighbour is growing different crops that will be damaged by more rain, is rain good or bad weather?
If you say good, with objective reasons (crop X needs more water) and he says bad with objective reasons (crop Y needs sunshine and dryness now), which of you are objectively right?
Or they have the same crops but different soils, drainage patterns.
Or they are each growing several crops, some of which need lots of water and others less. So trying to maximize profit and minimize loss.
Or based on many years of successful farming they still have a difference of opinion on what is ‘enough’.
Objectivey good for crops X, and objectively bad for crops Y. Farmer X is objectively right in his case, and farmer Y is objectively right in his case. How is this possible, you ask? Because nobody is making a universal declaration about whether rain is good or bad, at all times in all cases. That’s silly (–and attributing it to me is silly). Just as in morality, moral judgments are contextual. Particulars matter. I have never once argued that there were universal principles. Killing is wrong in some cases, and not wrong in others.
Objectivity, not universality.
phyllo, we’ve been through the above answer before, right? Comeon now…
No-one’s talking about for all time in all places, just this particular rainstorm. “A rainstorm now would be good” is true for one person and false for another - it’s not cognitive. So the killing of a particular person in a particular case can be good for some people, and bad for others (it’s not universal).
There we go, you’re a fully-fledged relativist; you perhaps got confused because you can be so while referring to objective facts.
It’s absolutely cognitive. Do you think you get to decide whether the rain is good for either crops X or crops Y? There is a fact of the matter, and you can be wrong about it. Gross misunderstanding.
And as I understand it, killing may be wrong in one culture and right in another. Morality is contextual. Is contextual the same thing as ‘relative’? That’s not a rhetorical question. In my view, the standards of right and wrong are the same for each case, they just draw different results about particular cases in different contexts. You could never have a relativist saying, “This is right because we say it is”. Is that not what relativism is?
This is how ambigui argues. He’ll bring up abortion and other issues, and then say something like, “Aha, your approach to morality cannot solve this complex moral problem. Aha, therefore your approach is wrong!”. And you can see how silly that is. We don’t reject the scientific method because it hasn’t cured some kinds of cancer.
You can’t keep begging the question like this. If you think there’s a difference, you need to explain exactly what it is. If you think an excellent character trait sometimes has terrible consequences, that needs to be explained.
A soldier can call an enemy soldier brave when he sees his intention to be for the better (in terms of consequences). Most likely though, the soldier is going to call him foolish. If the weather is drying out your crops, then it’s clearly bad weather for your crops.
Reference to objective criteria establishes objectivity. If you don’t think it does, then you think objectivity can never be established—because how else would it? If you define “ugly” as “tight and short”, then you have objectively proven something is ugly when you show that it is tight and short. Your beef is that the definition of “ugly” is a bad one. In the case of morality, you are certainly free to criticize some definition of ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’. And if you do, you surely have other criteria in mind. That said, I’m not sure why it’s open to you simply to state that there are no such criteria of terms—and simply include “culturally relative” in the definition.
This is rude. I responded in kind, as I always do.
Oh, we have been over the same points many, many times. And yet you still insist that relativists are pulling their values out of their asses.
Here you have a case where two farmers are using objective data and reaching different conclusions. Both of which are legitimate.
Relativism ,as I think of it, is conceptually tied to subjectivism. That may be wrong. But here’s why I think it: Cultures dont make up right and wrong. Individual people don’t make up right and wrong. If you think they do—you’re a relativist. However, if you think morality is contextual, non-universalizable, then you are an objectivist and contextualist… but not a relativist.
The farmer’s opinion doesn’t make water good for his crops. The culture’s opinion doesn’t make killing right. Etc…
Wake up and smell the objectivity…
A primer of sorts:
Mo’s argument always revolves around this crucial [and, in my view, sophistic] escape hatch. Every single possible circumstantial context has its own “objectivity”. If you note distinctions or “conflicting goods” then each moral agent has his or her own objective sense of reality to fall back on. It is always “up there” or “out there” or, if necessary, able to be deduced didactically.
And if it’s not here today it will be someday. And if you “prove” one then that means, eventually, they all can be proved.
It’s all done with language. You insist the words mean what you say they do and you stick to it no matter what.
Is he just being ironic? I thought so at first but now I am basically convinced it is a psychological tell. He is fixated on objectivity the way others become fixated on God. As with Ayn Rand, objectivity is his religion.
It is that he believes what he believes that counts. And what he believes could, for all practical purposes, be anything.
It is actually quite fascinating how the human mind manages to invent this sort of pretzel logic.
Unless, of course, it’s not.
I think this is a particularly insightful observation. I never really thought of it like that. The irony! In his own way, Mo allows us to rationalize our reactions to all things by simply subsuming them in their own particular sense of being “objective”.
As long as we note a distinction between this and “universal truth” we are each able to carry around our own.
Thus, the “incommensurable” card can always be played to protect one’s own point of view.
Sort of like the manner in which nihilism works for me. I don’t have to say what I mean because I don’t really believe we can mean what we say. It’s just a point of view rooted in dasein.
Although I do make the crucial distinction between those things that are true for all daseins and those things that can never be more than just a personal prejudice.
How you are allowed to say some of things about me that you do, and get away with it, is beyond me. This quote, however, lifts my spirits.
Ultimately I don’t know why you’re here, participating in philosophy discussions—given what you believe. Yea yea, sure, you’ll go on about you’re waiting for an argument that makes you an objectivist. But I already gave you one, and you agreed with it—you asked some questions, and I made sure you understood it. You did. Morality is objective in the same way science is. And so presumably now you’re just dissatisfied for some reason that has nothing to do with the argument itself.
You repeat yourself so much it’s astounding. And then you rightly accuse others of ignoring it—because no one should have to respond to the same thing more than once.
Ultimately, I’ve tried my best to show you how morality can be objective… and to any reasonable person, I did. There’s no question that you can go on believing whatever you want, just as some lost gentleman can go on believing that he is the present King of France, referring you to his loyal subjects when say otherwise, and charging you with treason or heresy. Can you convince him otherwise? No. But why should you have to? And so… I ask… why should I have to say another word more? I mean, besides the fact that
I am a river.
I have never been anything other than frank here: I am an ironist. I am dasein. As, in my opinion, are you. There is being these things and knowing it or being these things and not knowing it.
What we mean to say is always a reflection of what we think we know about ourselves and others out in a particular world. But this is often very much at odds with what others think they know. And surely at odds with all that can be known. There is always an ironic gap here with respect to both identity and value judgments.
But not regarding other things like mathematics and the laws of physics. Or so it seems to me. The gaps here live and breathe irony because we assert particular things emphatically that we cannot possibly be certain about.
Why in the world would this lift your spirits though? It can truly devastate mine.
This is so over the top, it seems almost to writhe with irony. Are you being serious when you say things like this? Do you actually mean it? I don’t know. I can speculate that perhaps you do and then I feel compelled to explore what I construe to be the potential for danger in thinking like this: if morality is objective we should all live our lives accordingly.
Or be made to?
The important things are worth repeating. And only those who sense this about the points I raise keep reading them. But a new way of thinking about ourselves and the world around us can take a long time to finally sink in.
All I strive to do here is help others to recognize the crucial distinction between facts and personal opinions.
For example, I was just watching a documentary on the Shoemaker-Levy comet. Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy accummulated evidence enabling them to prognosticate with extraordinary precision the day that comet would collide with Jupiter. And Jupiter can at times be 575 million miles away from us!
Compare this with the utter lack of precision regarding the evidence used by ethicists in debating whether or not nations should allocate and spend billions of dollars for space exploration when there are so many more pressing problems right here on earth.
See the difference? The evidence collected by scientists allow them to make astounding calculations/predictions regarding either what is or is not true or what will or will not happen—calculations/predictions that are subject to rigorous peer review. And they will either be true or not true.
Yet there are folks who embrace or reject space exploration as a moral issue with just as much passion and sense of certainty.
They say what they think they mean and they mean what they think they say. Just like the scientists. But isn’t that rather…ironic?
Given, among other things, their track record to date?
Since we’ve been talking, you have claimed that the word of a flying pink elephant on a teapot from the Planet Z is an unimpeachable reason to kick someone in the face. You have argued that a bowl of diarhea is just as inviting as a tuna nicoise, or at least you can’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t be. You have also argued that a wrinkled haggard old woman is more beautiful than Natalie Portman. This is just a short list of the sort of positions you have found your view to committed you to.
You point to science. Scientific truths. Nobody would disagree, right? Wrong—just wrong. There are people who think the earth is flat, that the sun revolves around the earth, that aids is God’s punishment, that the world was created in 7 days. They have their reasons. But they’re not equally reasonable.
You are not the present King of France. The disagreements about whether aids is a result of punishment no more is a problem for science than is our disagreement about whether the dog ought not have been treated that way. It’s no objection to me that I have been accused of high treason by the present King of France.
Do not misunderstand me, I am prepared to treat the present King of France in his nice purple robe with the highest respect. I will give him a loyal servant—a woman in a white robe. I will set him up in secure quarters with the finest soft padding as decoration on the walls. His throne will have a thin well-used mattress on a steel frame that somewhat resembles a hospital bed. And we will be so kind as to strap him down lest he fall out of it, at nighttime.
You might find yourself in a car. Cars are like philosophical outlooks. They take you places. If your car takes you to the front lines of a plan to break-out the King and return him to his former status in the palace… well then, time to stop letting the car drive itself.
Monie - the basic confusion remains, and it is in your equivocation of the word “objective”. “Objective phenomenon” is the term we use to describe an empirical object/event - that which we accept as existing whether any given person thinks so or not. it’s the label we use when we mean that. But when we use the word “objective claim”, we mean that the claim is about such an object/event. Any claim is “subjective” in the sense that it is made by something with a mind. No matter what the subject matter of the claim is. In “objective phenomenon”, “objective” describes the phenomenon. In “objective claim”, “objective” does not describe the claim - it describes the subject matter of the claim.
Moral rules, moral judgments, moral claims - they are all claims. All are made by things with minds - they are not “independent” of minds - they are the product of minds.
I do not use the subjective/objective dichotomy - unless forced to, which in this case i am.
As you know, that is not what makes a claim subjective. Nor are all claims subjective because they are made by a subject. I believe I’ve told you before about the distinction betwixt “subjective” and “subject-dependent”.
I guess the distinction got lost. Here’s a claim…
…I hope my position is clearer now than perhaps it must have been. Frankly, I don’t know why there’s such push back to being an objectivist. It’s not like we can’t still bicker about what’s right and wrong.
I can only allow others following this exchange to judge for themselves the extent to which Mo accurately reflects my point of view.
Here, in my view, you continue to equate reasons one might believe regarding Mary having or not having an abortion with the reasons one might believe regarding abortion being or not being moral.
If Mary did in fact have an abortion all the reasons in the world arguing she did not have one will not change this. Sure, you may well continue to believe she did not have one but there is ample empirical evidence “out in the world” to show that she did.
That in fact she did. If in fact she did.
But there are good reasons to argue that abortion is moral and good reasons to argue that abortion is immoral. Depending on your point of view.
And that has never changed.
All you can argue is that, maybe, perhaps, someday, science will be able to provide us with the only objective argument. But, as of now, science is not even able to argue definitively when the unborn become “human”.
Instead, like Harris, you create arguments the logic of which rests --sometimes more, sometimes less – on the assumptions you make regarding the meaning ascribed to the words used in the argument!
Again, the car metaphor I prefer is this one:
You are like the engineer who sets out to build the world’s fastest race car. You build the car and then, when folks stop by to see if in fact it is the world’s fastest race car, you bring them into the garage, gather them around the car and then proceed to read them the engineering manual.
Here we can just substitute “objective morality” for “world’s fastest race car”.
Same thing.
No shit! That’s a great metaphor!
Because someone would look at the car going fast… and say, “ppfffttt, I’ve seen faster” —and he would be the King of France in his purple robe accompanied by his servant the hospital maid.
But if I show them the science/engineering behind it… then I don’t fucking care what the King says.
Yup, you’re exactly right…
Yeah, Mo, and this is what you have failed to show.
Your Majesty,
What says you about the dog?