“Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism”
After our recent ‘Death of Morality’ issue, Mitchell Silver replies to the amoralists.
He notes this as though these factors and others are merely incidental to the fact that someone has aligned himself with a set of “permissibility rules” that, as far as he is concerned, encompasses an objective morality.
Is that what he is arguing?
If so, it seems preposterous to me. What happens when your set of rules come into conflict with other sets of rules. What happens when new experiences prompt you or others to want the rules to be changed?
Yes, one can see rules of this sort – a single standard – being sustained in, say, an Amish community. One for all and all for one set of moral prescriptions established by “the elders”.
But how many of us live in that sort of community? Instead, given the interactions most of us engage in there is always the possibility of that which you construe to be permissible behaviors will be deemed as anything but by others.
But: what happens when these many perspectives are not able to arrive at the optimal perspective? Imagine, for example, taking his argument to those fiercely at odds in regard to conflicting goods that have rent our species now for thousands of years. Which perspectives will take precedence when it comes down to enacting actual laws in which certain behaviors are punished if engaged.
Let’s look at his example:
Okay, but in a world where religion is often more or less intertwined with political power, the respect you have for another’s “permissibility rules” may well be shunted aside. You are instead construed to be an infidel. The Other are only interested in sustaining the one true set of righteous behaviors. Their own.
Same with secular ideologies. In some cases moderation, negotiation and compromise are embraced based on the assumption that this is the least dysfunctional manner in which to reduce conflict among those who are most strongly invested in their own permissible behaviors. But this is basically predicated on the assumption that right makes might is just as unreasonable as might makes right.
And where in the world does objective morality fit in here?