Values can't be objective

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Values can’t be part of the objective world. Where does the word objective come from? Object. Our senses and our reason seem to be respresentations of objects and their physical properties. Values don’t represent/reflect anything in the world, instead, they’re merely responses to the world.

Let’s list some major properties of an apple. An apple is round, red, sweet, juicy, small and hard. Now of course, all these properties are in a sense relative. Round, in comparison to what? If things in general were a lot rounder, an apple wouldn’t seem so round. Hard, in comparison to what? In comparison to steel, an apple doesn’t seems so hard, in comparison to a sponge, it does. An apple wouldn’t seem so sweet if food in gernal was a lot sweeter. Is an apple good or bad? Humans tend to find apples good, Lions, not so much. Although, if somebody threw an apple at your head, that wouldn’t be very good, would it? All these properties we assign to apples like goodness, are dependant on the context it’s placed in. Taken out of it’s context, an apple is nothing, or at most, a potential something. So all of it’s properties are only coneivable within a certain context, including it’s supposed goodness.

Let’s deal with subjectivism. Back to the apples properties. Which one of these representations (I say representation, because we cannot percieve the apple without the medium of our senses and our reason. Reason organizes sense data to show relations between thing, which is essentially what an idea is) can actually be a part of the apple? Can roundness be part of the apple? I think so. An apple’s roudness seems to affect the way it interacts with other objects. You can’t roll a square object on the ground the way you can a round one. Can redness be part of an apple? Until recently, some scientists and philosophers didn’t think so, but according to modern optics, red is the way light reflects off of an object. Different colors mean different wave patterns, I think. Is sweetness a representation of a physical property inherent in an apple? Sure it is. Sweetness is a representation of the chemical sugar. Hardness is clearly a physical property, the harder something is, the more durable and resistant it is. See, all these properties appear to be representing something in the objective physical world. All of these properties affect the way the apple interacts with our bodies and other objects in a mechanistic, automatic way.

However, there is one property that is a little different than the others. Sweetness. The other properties seem more value free, don’t they? The other properties could work to your advantage depending on the circumstance, but sweetness seems inherently valuable for it’s own sake, doesn’t it? As I said before, sweetness represents sugar, sugar is a mechanistic, physical property of the world, capable of affecting other physical bodies. But what about the pleasant aspect of sugar? Can an objects pleasantness affect anything other than subjects? Do apples mechanistically gravitate towards other pleasant apples? A things pleasantness doesn’t seem to change the way it relates to objects. Only subjects are capable of finding things pleasant and desiring them. Sugar isn’t pleasant in and of itself. Pleasantness is something that subjects feel about objects. All these facts seem to indicate that a things pleasantness isn’t a part of the physical, objective world, but the mental, subjective world.

Yes, an objects properties are in some sense relative, in another sense absolute. A fat woman may be hard to lift for a weak man and easy to lift for a strong man, but harder to lift for them both, that’s absolute. If a woman is beautiful for one man, is she more beautful for all men? No. So beauty must be more relative and subjective than other properties.

Take two men and one woman for example. One man finds the woman beautiful, the other finds her ugly. If beauty and ugliness are objective properties of the physical world, how could she be both two things at once. It’s illogical to say that the woman is both beautiful and ugly at the same place and time, just as it would be illogical to say the woman is both heavier and lighter at the same place and time. Therefore, it must be the men who are reacting to the same properties in different ways. It has nothing to do with her body. Beauty is not a part of her body the way other things are like the way her weight and height. Beauty and Ugliness are in the minds of the beholder. Her body is the cause of two different effects. Their minds are designed to respond to her body differently. And because we’re all different, are brains are hardwired to value the same things differently.

There you have it. Aesthetics are relative and subjective. So are all values.

That being said, we’re all human, we’re all more or less the same. I’m sure the vast majority of us will be able to find some common values. If a lion were capable of articulating his values, I’m sure they’d be very different than our own.

2

You can’t separate the subjective and the objective other than in a thought experiment.

“If things in general were more round”?

What?

Also, some pretty smart guys have argued that there’s nothing subjective about taste.

I don’t agree with them either.

3

I disagree. I think values are projections onto the world, sense data is an imperfect reflection of the world.

4

I can’t argue that sense data isn’t the world it represents, even though I may disagree. But what makes it imperfect?

5

To the OP - Agreed as well, to the extent that you can parse “objective” and “subjective” Your last few paragraphs concerning “common values” and “we’re all human” are approaching the notion of truth that is not “objective” in the sense that it is extra-mentally existing or maintained by a God or the universe, not “subjective” in that it is the beliefs limited to a single point of view, but “intersubjective”. Intersubjectivity arises when an internetwork of particular viewpoints in a social context are bound by common experience, genetics, psychology, culture, etc. such that while everyone may have different personal approaches to a value, the value is recognized by a common definition and generally agreed to by the members of the society. It is an emergent property of the operation of a social context, no less impregnably true than if it were something objective, for just as the society keeps us protected and alive than alone in the jungle, it also by its inherent workings yields certain rules to follow.

As societies become more integrated and homogenous, values become shared across them, creating a situation where values approach something akin to objectivity but never quite reach it. So values are not founded on the basis of their objective truth, they flourish and grow toward objective truth without ever quite reaching it.

6

Hallucinations, distortions; when a stick is placed in water, it appears bent. The stars you see when your dizzy. Dizziness. The fact that we only percieve the surface of things. The fact that sensory perception is finite. Your sensory organs can be damaged, and so on.

7

I couldn’t agree with you more. Just because values may be subjective and relative, doesn’t mean we can’t feel the same way about things. We’re all the same species. Are brains are all hardwired to respond to the world similarily. Small, primitive socieites tend to be more genetically and culturally uniform than large, civilized socieites. Thus, they tend to share the same aesthetic and moral values. Mercantilism, capitalism, industrialism and imperialism brought people who are racially and culturally disparate together for the first time in thousands of years. Liberalism was the natural outcome of such circumstances. We couldn’t force our values on others because far too many would not accept them. As people begin to interbreed and homogenize culturally, it may be easier to have a more authoritarian, collectivist society. That’s what I think the Catholic Church and the globalists who built Astana, Denver International Airport, the EU and the Georgia guidestones are counting on. Observe how the Pope prays with the leaders of other faiths, as if they were all worshiping the same God (maybe they do). It may not seem like it on the surface, but I think our leaders are conspiring to unite us with a one world religion and language. I’m not a christian by the way, but facts are facts.

We adopt other’s aesthetic and moral values for two reasons, one; peer preasure and fear of authority, two; because we think adopting our parents, or our teachers, or our philosophers aesthetic and moral values, though not our own, will serve our interests in the long run. I may be a lazy person, but I may take my hyperactive fathers advice and work harder in order to acquire a mate and produce offspring. So, although we can’t argue over how we ought to respond to the facts, we can argue over morally pertinent facts. I may not want to help my mother do the dishes because I’m tired, but if I realized how much more tired she was, I would help her. Someone may point out this fact to me, thus persuading me to help her. Moral and aesthetic subjectivity in no way shape or form negates the need to consider other peoples advice. Once we have all the facts, we’ll be able to make a decision that serves our interests in the long term.

For better or for worse, we seem to be gradually, incrementally moving from republics that forced a minimal morality on everyone (the few acts that nearly every race and culture agreed were abhorrent, murder, rape, etc) to a dictatorship that forces a maximal morality on everyone. As we become more racially and culturally homogenous, this will be more possible. It may be human nature to force our values on others. If the majority and/or the elite want to enforce their values on others, they may want to refrain from pushing people too hard, otherwise this could cause division and conflict.

There’s nothing wrong with the moral objectivist considering other people’s advice now and then, it may be in his best interest to do so, it may not, it depends on who he’s consulting and how much he needs the advice.

Myself, I’m not really into enforcing my values. I am into giving people advice however. Right now, I’m just objectively observing society to the best of my ability, without taking a stand on these issues.

I know I may come across as irreverant at times, but as I get older, I’m becoming less and less strictly egoistic, hedonistic, mechanistic and extreme. I think we should work towards uniting all philosophies and finding common ground between opposing points of view, rather than desperately clinging to a single, narrow pov. We have to take into account a wide range of phenomenon and diverse view points if we wish to unite humanity with a global philosophy. It’s not easy, but I think it may be necessary and natural. One religion, one language, one philosophy, one culture, one race, it may happen. But I don’t necessarily like every policy the NWO is proposing. In the end, it may be wiser to balance authoritarianism, libertarianism, and various other political, ethical and metaphysical dichotomies rather than running the risk of alienating others and being unbalanced and simplistic in our viewpoint. I think every religion, philosophy and culture has pieces of the puzzle (some more than others) and it is our job to put them together correctly to complete the picture, rather than scattering them like the postmodernists are doing.

I absolutely deplore and detest they’re methods (false flag terror attacks, war, economic collapses) the NWO is using to bring this Hegelian sythesis about, but I like synthesis. Clearly, they’re not interested in serving the common good, but their lust for wealth and power. Well, that may be a lot to digest Rasava, but you seem like a thoughtful person, and I would love to hear your take on some of what I said. I know it may seem unlikely that such a Cryptocracy exists, but I urge you to think about what Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napolean, Hitler and now the United States Corporation has been trying to do. One world. Look at the offcial poster of the EU. Google EU poster.

8

Yeah but within that finite set of things that your sensory perception grasps, there is a great deal of unity amongst individual perceptions. Ignoring blind and deaf people, how do you account for that uniformity without some objectivity?
It doesn’t seem to work that, “because we view things through a lens, and lenses change the picture that we see from what’s there to something else”, that there can’t be objective value.
What if the distortion is uniform and predictable?
Inverse fourier transform?

9

Actually, I agree with you. I believe there is a degree of objectivity to sensory perception, however flawed. At the most, sense data merely represents the world, we should not take it for the world.

I believe values are more subjective for they seem to be projections and not reflections of reality. There’s nothing factual about them. They are merely a response to the objective world, they are not a part of the objective world. I don’t know if we can ever solve this problem to the satisfaction of everyone, but I’m doing my part.

10

Yeah they’re oughts and not is’s, but they do exist. And to do so, they must fit into an objective framework.

Maybe they’re motivated by subjective desires, or my subjective misinterpretations of reality, but in order to be, all things must be in some sense quantifiable, and inasmuch as that can be done to a thing, that thing is objective. But of course it’s a matter of degree. I mean, the statement, “ice cream is good”, simply isn’t true in all instances it might be uttered, BUT, it is truth bearing in that it provides informational content about a person’s disposition toward ice cream.

11

Yes, in that sense they’re “objective” (I would use the word factual). They factually exist within the subject’s mind, just like thoughts factually exist within peoples minds, not within the physical world, at least as far as I’m concerned. So it seems we’re in agreement on this issue.

12

It’s always semantics and definitions isn’t it?

Good thread BTW.

13

It often is.

Thanks for keeping it interesting.

14

I haven’t posted here in a while, and as it seems, it’s just me and you here for the most part, (or everyone else is asleep when I’m awake).

I started a thread in philosophy about whether scientific naturalism can exclude metaphysics.

You should check it out and give me a little feedback. I’m sort of doing a survey of what kinds of responses I’m going to run into when I post these questions to a group of people in the near future.

Also, I’m interested in how conclusions at the philosophical level regarding the kinds of knowledge we get from science and metaphysics relate to ethics.

How should we act if the uncertainty principle turns out to be true? (as if it could ever be shown)

Lots of going in circles, but good stuff.

15

Sounds interesing, I’ll be sure to check it out.

Speaking of sleep, I think it’s getting past my bedtime.

16

Yet the world as it is now has been created by people with values. Look at nuclear power - people are born with genetic mutations made possible by the values of people - surely that affects their sense data?

I think sense data are already infused with values, which isn’t to say they are objective in the sense of being unchanging givens. I need water to survive. This is true. It’s not necessary that all people value water, but it’s likely that most will, as people who don’t value water enough might not survive. Other types of beings might not value water in the same way as we do - but then I doubt they sense water in the same way. Or, as with fish, they value water for different reasons and experience water in vastly different ways than we do.

17

Right. Water isn’t inherently valuable, nor do I think there’s an objective, value property that supervenes the objective, water property, but most creatures end up valuing it anyway, out of necessity.

18

Yes, out of perceived necessity. It’s not necessary to survive of course - just to state the obvious. Don’t mind me, I do that sometimes - state the obvious.