The Objectivity of Morality

LOL. Good then, I’m happy to leave it now to the judges. I don’t recall you even saying more than a one-liner, and even in some places arguing against the argument that I presented as against my position. So, to the judges then.

EXACTLY RIGHT, if that’s all there is to deciding how you ought to act. This may surprise you, but some people think there are other factors present in deciding questions about how you ought to act. And ‘morality’ hasn’t become a “superfluous nothing”—that’s like calling someone a name after they beat you, just because they beat you. Yes, people want to do what’s enjoyable. And people want to be moral—no shit.

You’re just begging the question again. You haven’t demonstrated anything other than a moral ought, and the ought you thought was not moral—is one of the most famous and common oughts in the history of moral philosophy.

If this were boxing, I would not want to look at your face. I think we’re done here. You have a choice going forward, you can cling to some airy mystical conception you have of morality, that you seem to want to cling to, but aren’t sure what it is, but think it doesn’t exist… or you can shake your head and decide to use concepts in the way that they’re used in philosophy.

I’ll offer a judgement, but if I raise anything in it that you’d like to respond to, or help in anyway to put the two positions squarely against each other, I hope you’ll continue the discussion.

So, right off the bat, I’ll say that Flannel Jesus’s position seems the more likely of the two, but that isn’t in itself a commentary on the quality of the arguments. It’s inherently easier to argue that something doesn’t exist than that it does. I think FJ was right in the disagreement that came up recently: if you don’t know what a Jabberwock is, for all intents and purposes you don’t believe that it exists.

I thought Mo_ made some interesting points that attempted to reframe the question of morality in his favor, and Flannel Jesus didn’t seem to address this directly. Take this syllogism for instance:

Mo_ had said in the lead up to this debate something to the effect that his position was a practical one. This syllogism makes me understand that as an almost scientific understanding of objectivity: science is not truly objective, and there is plenty of room for questioning whether scientific objectivity is possible (solipsism is a hypothesis that doesn’t seem disprovable), but if Mo_ can prove that morality is as objective as science, while we might still have skeptical worries about its ultimate objectivity, most people will be satisfied. I don’t think FJ was responding to this framing, and I think he could reject that standard of objectivity on solid principle, but it would be interesting to hear the response.

FJ made good use of his position as ‘disprover’, by invoking the exceptions that can’t exist in a truly objective morality (although maybe they can in a scientifically objective morality). For instance, when Mo_ used the concrete example of pain, FJ pointed to masochists as a counter example. I didn’t find Mo_'s response about hockey here compelling, but not being a masochist I don’t really know. And when Mo_ says,

that seems sort of question begging: if we assume that there’s something intrinsically valuable, objective morality is let in the back door. FJ attacks this claim directly:

Again, this exhibits the strength of the “no it doesn’t” position in a debate like this. The point is, if there is nothing intrinsically valuable at rock bottom, do the arguments still work? I didn’t feel like this problem was well addressed. However, since Mo_'s proof of objective morality is scientific, top down, it may be that within that definition we can have a morality with a black box at the bottom the same way we can know that diamonds are made of carbon without having a good grasp of quarks.

One thing I found fascinating was that a couple very fundamental questions ended up being addressed only at the very end, and not in any great depth. What is morality, and is the existence of morality distinct from the existence of objective morality? The first question is obviously quite hard to answer, and the discussion here made clear that it is especially hard to answer in a meta-ethical sense, without espousing a particular moral philosophy. The second question seems particularly important here. The Jabberwock comparison is enlightening: FJ is taking the position that objective morality doesn’t exist because there is no meaningful or important definition of morality itself; if this had come out earlier in the debate I think the whole discussion might have gone differently (or maybe it would have just been shorter).

At this point, I think FJ has won the question, but Mo_ has had a better showing in the debate. The scope of FJ’s rebuttal is limited by what was necessary to refute Mo_'s arguments, but Mo_ presented some interesting ideas that FJ could have hit on. I also at times got the feeling that FJ was being too skeptical. It’s less interesting to say that objective morality doesn’t exist because nothing is objective. FJ didn’t go that far, but conceding more positions, or making ‘even if’ arguments to e.g. defeat objective morality ‘even if’ intrinsic value exists, would have made the position much stronger and would have made for a more interesting debate. In particular, accepting some minimal definition of morality (enough to know that e.g. both utilitarianism and deontology are moral positions) would have gotten us to more interesting ground. If, on the other hand, FJ found it necessary to reject as much as he did to make his point, I think that is itself a credit to Mo_.

I’d love to see more if you have more in you, otherwise, it’s been interesting to read. Thanks and well done to you both.

I’m ok with those results :slight_smile:

In retrospect, I would really have rather done it the way I originally suggested in the first thread. The idea that it’s a “debate” sort of makes it something to win, instead of an opportunity to actually learn something.

The way I suggested in the first thread naturally gives rise, I think, to an essential practice in philosophical conversation: it forces reducing abstract words into what the person really means by them. Instead of saying “morality exists,” for example, you just say what you mean: in this case, “people sometimes ask themselves what they should do, or if what they’re doing is ‘good’” And then we might have to reduce “good” as well.

Maybe we can make another non-debate thread, in which we can actually strive for clarity and agreement. One often finds that when the offending words are taboo’d, two parties agree on most things. For example, one person might say “The tree in the forest doesn’t make a sound if no one is around to hear,” and the other person might say, “The tree does make a sound, even if no one hears,” but when you taboo the word “sound” you find that they both agree that (a) compression waves in the air still happen regardless of anybody being present and (b) obviously those compression waves are not interpreted by any brains into an auditory experience, because no brain is there to do so. We might find similar agreements if we are able to coherently reduce the words under discussion.

If you look at FJ’s responses to the arguments in his second post—where he addressed the actual arguments—all you find is a one-line sentence, to each argument, denying some premise, (e.g., “P1 is false”). That’s not a refutation, that’s just a denial of a premise. If there’s some reason to think the premise false, it needs to be layed out. I think I’ve said plenty to render the premises initially plausible. You seem to recognize this when you say that I had a better showing in the debate, but somehow lost it. That strikes me as incoherent. I’m not sure what it is supposed to reveal but that you think one position is less true from the start, and thus harder to argue for. Typically that’s something to avoid for a judge; it’s like saying, “yes, your side presented the better evidence for your case, but I thought your case wrong moreso from the start, so you had further to go”.

This is patently false. If I am talking with someone who is talking about Juxtaglomerulars, Agammaglobulinemia, and Amazias----I have no idea what these are, but I have no reason to think they don’t exist simply because I don’t know what they’re supposed to refer to. And if I were to suppose they didn’t exist, I would be dead wrong.

What you want to ask is what they refer to. If you want to know what a moral fact is, it’s a fact about the world (including the kind of creature that you are) that gives you a reason to act one way rather than another. Take the example of pain. That an action causes pain is an objective fact about the world, and it often furnishes you with a reason not to act in a certain way. I took it to be quite straightforward. If some people like pain, then it doesn’t show that moral facts don’t exist, it shows that whether pain gives you a reason to avoid an action is non-universalizable. Personally, I think that’s false, but it’s tangential to the debate. Masochists get a sort of psychological pleasure that outweights any physical pain, and can’t be gotten without the physical pain. That doesn’t mean they like physical pain, and would pursue it even in the absence of the greater psychological pleasure. That both of you are standing here saying, “yo, pain is good” is incoherent. But even if you could make sense of that claim, then it would support my position—because it’s a fact about the world that gives you a reason to act one way rather than another.

There’s simply no strength in a “no it doesn’t” position unless you justify the denial. This isn’t an argument on a playground.

Morality is just defined by a set of questions to outline the topic that it is: E.g., “How should I act?”, “What is good and bad?”, “What is right and wrong?”. All I have to do is show you that there are objective facts that give you reasons to act one way rather than another. And if that’s the case, then I’ve won, unless FJ wants to claim that the fork example, the rape example, the throwing his child off the bridge example don’t actually give him any reasons to act one way rather than another, or unless he wants to argue that moral facts are subjective. If the latter, that’s fine—but then there’s a handful of arguments about that that he is yet to address at all. What FJ wants is someone to lay out particular criteria for answering moral questions, so that when they do, he can say that that is not what he means by morality. That’s tantamount to insisting on defining morality as something non-sensical in order to prove it’s non-sensical. If ordinary language matters at all, then that’s unjustified.

I think the idea might be that you clearly put in a bit more effort. I was a bit lazy, but just had generally more agreeable points – I could have elucidated more, as I think he said, but even just lazily thrown out there, the points looked solid. You put a lot of back into it, but had less obviously agreeable points, and though you used a lot of words to defend them, they still never really had much philosophical stability, so to speak.

That’s my interpretation of his interpretation anyway.

You did a fine job of stating that you disagree, but never really why you disagree. Call it laziness if you want—I’ll give you benefit of the doubt.

Well, some of them were statements about me. Surely I’m more of an expert on me than you are. Surely I get to make unsupported claims about myself that you do not get to make. If you, for example, tell me that I like anal sex, and I say I do not, then without evidence from you my word is held above yours.
The rest of them were unsupported by you and not very likely in the first place, or clearly nonsequiturs, and I think our beloved judge saw that in the way that I did.

The args you called nonsequiturs were the 2 best args I provided for cultural relativism. Thats funny.

You know, I’ve been trying the whole time to figure out which arguments you keep on saying that about. You keep saying that I was arguing against some argument that was for relativism, but…man, I can’t find which one it was.

Here are the arguments I responded to:

Sounds like it’s for your objective morality

C sounds like it’s for your objective morality

Again

Obviously not for subjectivism here

Again

This argument you posted explicitly against cultural relativism, so it can’t be that one.

C is clearly not for relativism.

Again, clearly not for relativism.

I can’t find which argument you’re saying was for relativism that I argued against. I just went through each one, one by one. Nearly all of them explicitly had a conclusion that was the direct opposite of relativism.

Also, for the record, all of those ones I responded to were in blue. You said the blue was the stuff that I “needed to address”. I assumed that meant it was your arguments for your case, no?

I think you’re just pulling my leg. That, or you’re really very confused.

FJ, are you denying that the sum total of your response to each argument was roughly one line each, just stating that you disagreed with some premise, but not stating why? Because if you are, I’ll be happy to quote you. And if you’re not, then recognize that that’s no reason to agree with anything you’ve said.

The main area of discussion you wanted to focus on was about the distinction between prudence and morality. That’s fine, but those arguments work whether you think there’s an essential distinction or not.

You focused also on the case of masochism, and how that must be reason to think causing pain has nothing to do with morality, or something. That’s been addressed, and anyone can look at it. No masochist values pain, they value the psychological pleasure that only comes from physical pain. And if some masochist values pain----then that’s a subjective moral fact, and you can no longer claim not to know what a moral fact is.

You still seem to think moral facts must be something like facts with an offical stamp on them, a metaphysical name-tag, or a little halo around their molecules. And perhaps you think it’d be clever to pipe up and say there are no such things. Moral facts are ordinary everyday facts that furnish you with a reason to act one way rather than another. Do you want to throw your child off a bridge? You don’t, do you. That desire that you have is a fact----and it gives you a reason not to throw your child off a bridge, hence it is a moral fact. That’s very likely a subjective fact. But that’s fine—because you’re not even sure what a moral fact is. A moral fact is just a fact that gives you a reason to act one way or another. That an action causes pain—that’s a fact, it’s also a moral fact because it usually furnishes you with a reason not to commit that action. That’s moral fact. It’s really fucking simple. No, it doesn’t have a fucking metaphysical postcard on it… but what the fuck do you think we’re talking about?

Jesus Christ, I said what I was denying. You lost track of the conversation after 1 post?

Here, let me summarize it for you:
Mo: “The arguments you called non-sequiturs were actually for relativism, lol” (this is the second time you’ve said this)
Me: “No, they’re not. [lists arguments and explains why they’re certainly not for relativism].”
Mo: “Are you saying that you didn’t give one word responses?”

The fuck? I didn’t say ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING
about the length of my response. I said that they weren’t for relativism. It doesn’t take a doctorate in English Literature to figure out what my point was.

But, I think you’re smart enough to have known what my point was. You were just a bit too embarrassed to actually say, “Yes, sorry, you’re right, those weren’t arguments for relativism.”

Either that, or you really aren’t smart enough.

Listen, dude, if your reading comprehension skills are such that when I say “These arguments aren’t for relativism” you think I’m saying something about the lengths of my response… #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o #-o

You’re done.

When I look back, it’s hard to know what you were calling a non-sequitur. But you stated that you didn’t respond to some arguments that were clear non-sequiturs,

and the only two arguments you didn’t offer a thoughtless one-liner to were the relativism args. Apologies if I’m wrong about this.

There’s a few things in my last post you might really want to think about. Don’t be lazy.

I was only talking about the arguments that I quoted. The blue ones.

The two that I was calling nonsequiturs were the ones I responded to with “I don’t even need to say what’s wrong with this.” and then “Ditto”. I wasn’t talking about any argument I hadn’t quoted.

My alarm clock is ringing. That furnishes me with a reason to get up rather than stay in bed.
By the above description of what moral facts are, the ringing of my alarm clock is a moral fact.

I don’t think you’d have a very easy time finding someone who agrees that an alarm clock ringing is a moral fact.

And this has been a problem in your arguments: your definitions are so broad that they end up including a lot of things that they really shouldn’t include.

That your alarm clock is ringing is no reason to get up, any more than it is to shut it off and sleep. But if you have to go to work, to pay bills, to eat, to not suffer… then your alarm clock ringing is absolutely a fact about the world with relevance to how you ought to act.

The number of leaves on a tree could be a fact about the world that makes a difference to how you ought to act, in some bizarre hypothetical the particulars of which I’m not creative enough to imagine.

Are you having trouble getting over the fact that nobody is waving a wand or tapping their heals revealing a tiny halo over a particle? What you are doing is bullshit… “yo, explain to me what a moral fact is…” and then, “no, no, that’s totally not what it is, you’re wrong… but try again because I don’t know what a moral fact is… oh, but they also don’t exist”. You’ve gotta be shitting me.

I’m totally not shitting you. If it’s a fact that masturbating with my left hand feels better than masturbating with my right hand, then that furnishes me with a reason to masturbate one way rather than another. So then, by your definition of moral facts, the statement “masturbating with my left hand feels better than masturbating with my right hand”. I don’t think it’s incorrect to point out that such things being called “moral facts” is a gross debasing of the word “morality.” Basically everything can become a moral fact with such a paradigm.

Wake up—it’s not open to you to say that you don’t know what ‘morality’ means but also that such-and-such is a gross debasing of it. That’s a straightforward inconsistency. And even if it wasn’t, you’d be comically wrong… if you read anything in the history of moral philosophy, you’ll find the notion that pleasure (or “feeling good”) gives you a reason to act one way rather than another is a pretty common idea. --Probably the most common. Some people call it Utilitarianism, of one strip or another. Anything of the form: “X feels good” is likely a moral fact. And you’re just giggling like a school-girl because someone said the word “masturbating”, right?

I’m not sure why this thread is continuing. You haven’t given a single reason to think any of the arguments false. You’ve just denied something about them. Lemme say that again: You haven’t given a single reason to think any of the arguments false.

I am a river.

When I say that I don’t know what it means, what I’m actually doing is leaving it up to you to say what it means. That doesn’t, however, give you free reign to make up any ol’ meaning. When I’m arguing with a theist about the existence of God, I let them define god, but they’re not free to define it HOWEVER they want. They are free to define it within reasonable parameters, and one of those parameters is that it must at least vaguely correspond to popular usage. That’s why “Payless” isn’t a good definition of God.

Now, here’s an interesting fact about popular usage of morality, and the word “should” or “ought”:
You are liable, if you go out, to overhear someone saying “You should see such-and-such movie.” (or “You ought to see it,” less frequently)
So, one guy says, “I like superhero movies,” and the other guy says, “Oh, you should go see the new Batman.”
And then, what you can do, is you can poke your head in and say, “Oh, you think he’s morally obliged to go see the new Batman?”
Unless you’ve run into the biggest batman fan ever (and even then he’ll be being facetious, hyperbolic), the answer will pretty much always be, “No, of course I’m not saying that.”

So, when you so broadly say, “Morality is the topic about how you ought to act,” and you refuse to actually narrow it down to a subset of statements about how you ought to act, then that tells me that you think any statement about what one should do or ought to do is a moral statement to you.

So how is it that all of these people are making statements about what other people ought to do / should do, but they’re convinced they’re not making moral statements? Oh, I know why, probably because the definitions you’re using are much to broad to even vaguely correspond to popular usage. It’s admittedly not as far off the mark as “Payless” for God, but it’s the same sort of mistake.

Yes, people have preferences. Yes, common usage of the word “should” leads one to conclude that statements like “You should do this because you’d like it” make sense. No, common usage of the word “morality” does NOT lead one to conclude that statements like “You’re morally obliged to do this because you’d like it” make sense. One may like raping children, adultery, swearing, pre-marital sex and taking drugs, and the people who say that those things are immoral wouldn’t say, “Oh, you like it, it must be ok then.” That’s just now what morality means.

Morality - the topic concerning how you ought to act.
moral fact - a fact about how you ought to act

Is this complicated or something?

If you’re “morally obliged” to do someting it means at least that it would be a serious moral error not to go to Batman. And no matter how much liking Batman gives a subjective moral reason to go see Batman—I’m not sure why you think it’s an obligation.

I won’t repeat myself again, after this. In english, there are differences of degree in some of our words that don’t mean essentially different things—this helps with clarity, meaning, etc. The difference between child and adult is a difference of degree, for example—degress of maturity, you could say. There’s no essential difference there, just one of degrees. And for communication, when we speak, we use the term best fitting what we mean. The difference between morality and prudence is also a difference of degree. And likewise, we use the word that best fits what we mean. That’s why calling Batman a moral whatever you said sounds odd. But you can’t keep saying, “I don’t know what morality is, but aha, that isn’t it!” …Especially when you’ve no reason to think it’s not, it’s how the term is used in the history of philosophy, and it fits with ordinary attitudes about oughtness.

Who do you continue to supposedly speak for? When people say, “You ought to do something”, and they mean something that matters, they absolutely do mean something moral. When they say, “You ought to do something”, and it’s a technical thing, like turning a screw one way rather than another, that’s just less in degree of significance, then they mean something prudent. This is a difference of degree, and the moment you admit of degrees of objectivity in ‘prudent’ matters, they’ll blend over to ‘moral’ ones.

This is the third time I have responded to this same point of yours. It’s probably best for you to come back to this post and read it over a few times.

There’s an entire preference-satisfaction brand of Utilitarianism… I mean, one central moral theory is just the theory that you should maximize the preference-satisfaction of as many people as possible. That’s a central moral theory. Whatever you think “common usage” is… stop inserting your bullshit view that a moral fact has to be on a postcard from god, or with a metaphysical sticker on it, stop inserting that into “common usage”, in order to say ridiculous things like, “nobody actually thinks you should minimize pain!”.

Ah, so morality is not just the topic about how you ought to act. As I said way earlier in the conversation, it’s more specific than that. It’s a subset of the topic of how you ought to act. So, just saying “it’s the topic of how you ought to act” is a bit misleading. It’s a specific subset of that topic, and you would describe that subset as the subset pertaining to things that really matter.

Preferences are subjective.
“What really matters” is subjective.
So, if there’s a scale of ought-questions, and on the left side of the scale is stuff that doesn’t matter that much, and on the right side of the scale is the stuff that matters, the left side is the prudential side and the right side is the moral side, yeah? And so, since what matters is subjective, the line between prudence and morality is subjective.

There sure is a lot of subjectivity in your objective morality.

When I say, “I like ice cream,” that’s an objective fact.
About my subjective opinion.
So, since your morality is just on the right side of the subjectively-determined scale of actions that, as you keep insisting, should be judged as good or bad based on their utility, hedonistic value, and other such subjective values…this morality of yours seems mostly subjective. It’s not any more objective than ice cream preferences.

So, if what you’re saying when you say morality is objective is just something along the lines of “We can say objective facts about peoples’ subjective preferences,” then yeah, obviously. Do you not have a more substantial form of objectivity in mind? Or is that really it?