As I understand it, an “objective moral truth” would be a morality that exists outside the human mind. In this view, a moral statement like “theft is wrong” has a truth independent of human belief, like “the moon orbits the Earth.”
In comments on a post by Brad Wilcox at Family Scholars Blog, I wrote:
Brad, I don’t believe in an Objective Moral Truth, partly because so many people who do believe in such things have acted in ways that seem to me to have been unkind and unjust.
In that thread, Schroeder responded:
However, when you say, “I don’t believe in an Objective Moral Truth, partly because so many people who do believe in such things have acted in ways that seem to me to have been unkind and unjust,” it strikes me as self-contradictory (at least by implication). If there is no Objective Moral Truth, how do you know that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust?
Brad Wilcox agreed with Schroeder, writing:
Barry – Based on what you blog about and the way you blog about it, I think you are strongly committed–in practice, if not always in theory–to objective truth and to a moral law that binds all of us. And that’s why you rely on thoughtful arguments, persuasive evidence, and a spirit of civility to engage others, including me, in an effort to find common ground for the common good.
This is all highly flattering (thanks, guys), but also bad logic.
If there is no Objective Moral Truth, how do I know that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust? I don’t “know” it, any more than I “know” that Peanuts is artistically a better comic strip than Hi & Lois. It’s my opinion that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust, all else held equal. That opinion – like my opinion of Peanuts – is informed by a great deal of thought and experience. It’s an opinion I’d be willing to argue for, and it’s an opinion that I think most other thoughtful people who have put time into thinking about morality (or about the relative artistic merits of American comic strips) will readily agree with.
But it’s still an opinion, and it is therefore not objectively true the way that “the moon orbits around the Earth” or “two plus two equals four” are objectively true.
Brad’s reasoning contains the same basic flaw. He is correct that someone could decide to use “thoughtful arguments, persuasive evidence, and a spirit of civility” [1. I blush! I blush!] “in an effort to find common ground for the common good” because one starts from the premise that there is a “moral law that binds all of us.” But his argument falsely assumes that a moral law binding all is the only premise that would lead us to value persuasive evidence, civility, etc.
In this case, my premise is that it’s preferable to treat people as I’d prefer to be treated. [2. We could develop that and make that more complex – For instance, if I know someone is hungry, do I give them a bacon sandwich, under the theory that I’d prefer a bacon sandwich? I’d say that it would be better to first determine their preferences (maybe they’re vegetarian, maybe they keep kosher, maybe they’re on a hunger strike, etc) before acting, under the theory that I’d prefer others to determine my preferences before trying to help me. And so on. Even the golden rule is complex in application. But for purposes of this post, I’m ignoring those complexities.] That premise is not, in my view, a universal, objective truth that exists outside of people’s minds. Indeed, I don’t think that it can exist independently of people’s minds; without people, there is no such thing as “prefer.” It’s merely an opinion I hold – and, obviously, an opinion that many people share with me. Because it’s a commonplace opinion, it can often provide common ground for discussion, which is useful.
But doesn’t the fact that the Golden Rule is so common, prove that it’s an Objective Moral Truth? I don’t think so. Objective Truths are not determined by opinion polls. Even if 99% of people believed that the Earth orbits the moon, for example, it would still not be true.
Nor is the existence of an independent Objective Moral Truth the only possible reason for a commonly shared belief. The Golden Rule arises fairly naturally from the human trait of empathy, which in turn may have come about through the amoral process of evolution.
Finally, let’s remember that although Schroeder and Brad believe that an Objective Moral Truth exists, they can’t demonstrate its existence to a skeptical observer. That makes their belief in Objective Moral Truth… just another opinion.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as objective “out-there” right and wrong, but I do think that there are some principles of action which you need to follow if you wish to attain any of your goals, no matter what those goals are. And I would argue that you can derive morals from those principles — particularly the one that says “Do not destroy your resources if you intend to keep enjoying them, and by the way the networks of trust relationships among the people around you count as a resource”. I argue all this here.
I actually like using sci-fi as an example to aid thinking about this – if there is a true, universal morality, it should hold for all sapient species, not just humans, regardless of evolutionary background. Sure, the Golden Rule is near-universal in humans, but would it be present in a world of sapient crocodiles? A civilization of hive insects? A giant fungus colony with a collective consciousness? Without actually meeting another sapient species, we have a sample size of 1, and are left unable to make meaningful inferences based on “universality”. I may as well say that, based on the sample size of my living room, the world is evenly divided in humans, frogs, turtles, and greyhounds. Awesome as such a world would be, it would be a mistake to take it as truth.
Maybe I’ve spent too much time looking into the eyes of the scaly, slimy, and spineless, but to simply assume that the human version of cognition and our version of morality are universal is to ignore the vast prevalence of minds, even on our own world, which are fundamentally alien to us.
IME, nothing makes you re-evaluate your perspective on the diversity of minds like being *watched*, truly scrutinized with genuine thought, by a species that doesn’t even have warm blood. (It also doesn’t help that the species in question will actively trick its keeper in order to attack them from behind).
I already noted this to you in person, but I find it really interesting that your two examples of an “objective thing” — “2+2 = 4” and “the moon orbiting the earth” — are totally different classes of “objective.”
2+2 = 4 is an abstraction. It doesn’t exist outside of mathematics, which is to say it doesn’t exist outside of pretty complicated brains. It has no real objective existence, it’s just the way that (some) human brains are wired. (Also some crow brains, some dolphin brains, some octopus brains, etc.) Now, mathematics of one sort or another seems to be, if not as culturally universal as language, at least widespread amongst human culture, but if there’s no humans around to do numerical abstractions there’s no mathematics at all.
The moon, on the other hand, is a physical object with a physical existence. Even if there was no life to observe it, it would still exist. It has genuine objective existence.
I think that universal morality falls into the category of 2+2 = 4: i.e. it’s an abstract system which is common across many human cultures, and some animal groups. For instance, every human culture has a concept of reciprocity. I’d say that reciprocity thus forms a universal human morality: even if not every human believes reciprocity to be moral or even understands the concept (just like not every human believes or understands 2 + 2 = 4), it is nonetheless a constant in the human experience and in human behavior.
You could say that this isn’t the same thing as a universal objective morality in a religious sense, but “universal for humans” is pretty much just “universal” when it comes to concepts like morality and ethics. Particularly if you are a religious person from a religion that believes we are created in a divine image.
yrs–
–Ben
P.S. The earth does orbit the moon, btw. Like all bodies in orbit, they mutually orbit each other.
Your right that their response to your argument is invalid. A legitimate critique of your argument would be to say that, even in the face of an objective moral standard, there are those who choose to ignore it.
That one can be debated as well, but at least it’s not wrong right out of the starting gate. Frankly, I agree that there’s no convincing evidence that an objective moral standard exists, but there are better-founded arguments to be made for it than the ones Wilcox and Schroeder offered here.
Of course there’s an Objective Moral Truth. And another one over there. And another one over there, and…
Arguments that start from that point aren’t even wrong.
Imo.
“It’s my opinion that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust, all else held equal. That opinion – like my opinion of Peanuts – is informed by a great deal of thought and experience. ”
A great deal of thought and experience about what?
Retreating to ‘opinion’ doesn’t help at all. You can have opinions about whether or not 2+2=4, but your opinion doesn’t change anything about the objective truth of the matter.
You go off track right at the beginning with your definition of objective moral truth. Morality is about human interactions (or if there are other sapient species, interactions between sapient creatures). Saying that morality is objective is saying that given a particularized set of circumstances with respect to how we treat each other, some actions are wrong, and others are right. Saying that morality is subjective means that given a particularized set of circumstances with respect to how we treat each other, no action is more wrong than any other–it all depends on the actor’s point of view.
I’ve read enough of your writing to know that you believe that certain actions are wrong. You don’t seem to have any problem saying that most of the time. And when you do, it is more of along the lines of an uncertainty principle (I can’t know the exact velocity and exact location of a particle) than of a belief that morality doesn’t exist.
So again, when you say “is informed by a great deal of thought and experience”, what do you think you are thinking about?
Also it feels like you’re getting muddled up with the fact that how people treat people exists because ‘treating people’ is a mental experience, with the idea of morality which is ‘judging whether or not a particular method of treating people is just’ is a mental experience.
Yes all objective facts are mediated through our minds. We can’t escape that. But that is true of 2+2=4 and the earth and moon orbiting. Just because thinking about things is an internal experience doesn’t mean that the things we are thinking about are wholly internal.
You may have led your correspondent into making an argument based on flimsy logic by opening with an argument based on flimsy logic. The fact that people who believe in objective moral truth behave in ways that don’t live up to their own claims about morality doesn’t falsify objective moral truth. It just means they’re stinkers.
But you are right. The fact that you have moral feeling – as demonstrated in your initial statement – comes nowhere near being evidence that objective moral truth exists. Your moral feeling is neither here nor there when it comes to demonstrating the existence of objective moral truth.
That’s pretty much the central problem with such discussions. People tend to argue for a strong version of morality because they feel their version so strongly. They need not be “moral” to feel their version of morality strongly. Ego and self aggrandizement serve at least as well to explain the feeling that there must be something universal behind one’s own moral feelings.
It’s one of those topics on which people end up talking past each other very quickly.
I’m undecided, and therefore quite interested in this discussion. If there is a non-theistic argument for objective moral truth, I’d like to hear it. Ben Lehman seems to make a go at it, but (sorry, Ben) I think he falls short when he includes in the concept of objective truth:
I would think that the concept of ‘objective truth’ would necessarily include “true whether large groups of humans agree about it nor not.” I mean, two rocks and two rocks makes four rocks even before humans develop words or concepts for “plus,” “equals,” or, “arithmetic.”
I think what I’d like to see is an argument for something like that … the idea that moral truth exists ‘out there’ in the world … that it’s not something humans invent or develop, but discover.
—Myca
How on Earth can you have a non-theist argument for ‘objective moral truth’?!
There clearly isn’t one that every single member of our species subscribes to. It’s trivially easy to design mental ‘morality’ experiments that split sane subjects down the middle, and even easier to shift the balance in one direction or another by manipulating the way our brains are hardwired to work (for example, loss aversion)
The only way that you can discard the above as proof that there ISN’T such a thing as objective moral truth, is by postulating something higher that human. The whole quest for objective truth is no different that the yearning for the existence of the Divine.
In short “What will those funny believers think of next?”
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As far as I am concerned, morality is like rights. It isn’t Divine in origin, and there’s nothing objective about it. It’s whatever serves the needs of society best, with society defined as a group as small or as large as necessary.
Well, Kant appealed to reason, rather than God. But yeah, that’s the question. There have been a few commenters who seemed flabbergasted that Amp wouldn’t believe in objective moral truth, and I’m asking if they’ve got a reason other than, “God said.”
There is an objectively true system by which heavenly bodies move through their orbits. That does not mean that every single member of our species subscribes to it. Indeed, it would be objectively true even if none subscribed to it.
—Myca
There is an objectively true system by which heavenly bodies move through their orbits. That does not mean that every single member of our species subscribes to it. Indeed, it would be objectively true even if none subscribed to it.
Yeah, sure, because heavenly bodies move along their orbits, and all that’s needed for that is heavenly bodies. And if any of them were moving in a way inconsistent with the theory, we would be looking for a new one, wouldn’t we?
But for morality, you need sentients, right? And frankly, if you can accept a morality system that no sentient subscribes to as ‘the objective moral truth’, then I think the discussion is pointless, and will quote Paul:
And another one over there, and…
Myca:
Morality is a human concept, and we generally only apply it to humans (and, rarely, to domesticated or anthropomorphized animals: but this is generally considered to be childish.) Thus the “does this apply whether or not humans are there” is a garbage concept, with respect to morality.
To put it another way, language is a universal human experience (genuinely universal, way more universal than arithmetic.) We can say a lot of interesting and particular things about language which aren’t squishy and opinion based but, if there aren’t any humans, no human language. Language is a thing we can have objective discussions about.
Likewise, the appendix is a universal (ish) fact of human biology. If all appendix-bearing animals were dead appendices wouldn’t exist, physically, sure. This doesn’t mean that it’s subjective (and I don’t even know what subjective anatomy would be), it just means its part of the human experience.
Some aspects of human social and cultural structure (i.e. human morality and ethics), as well as human behavior, are similar to this: they’re part of the human experience, like it or not. Many aspects of human social structure are not universal; they’re local to particular cultures or social groups. Sorting which is which is difficult but anthropologists have made a decent go of it and it’s worth looking into their work (sadly it’s been over a decade for me so all I remember is like: “reciprocity” and “fear of death” and “infidelity.”)
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Separately, the problem w/ mathematics as a fundamental physical thing outside of the human experience is that it seems to really be a part of our brain structure that abstracts things. Two rocks plus two rocks isn’t “four rocks” in the absence of a counting intellect willing to equate all the rocks to each other. Rocks are, in physical reality, totally different objects from each other: different structure, different composition, different size, etc. No abstracting intellect, no counting.
Now, you could say that objects are interchangeable at a sub-atomic particle scale: that one proton is the same as the next proton and you’d (as far as we can tell) be right. But this is sort of a special pleading. Awareness of protons and electrons is pretty isolated, over the course of history, to the tiny subsection of a subsection of human cultures that live after 1900. Our arithmetic and counting is about abstract reasoning. That it happens to be physically true at a scale that doesn’t matter to us is a happy coincidence.
I don’t understand how one could reasonably claim an objective morality exists–or more accurately, that it can be identified as such absent a deity figure.
Even if an objective morality DID exist, we don’t know what it is. So the question would simply change from “is my subjective morality the best?” to “how closely am I adhering to objective morality, assuming that’s the best**?” Aaaand…. since nobody knows what objective morality IS or which set of subjective acts is the closest, it just becomes a semantic substitution. You know, the way that priests avoid saying “this is what I think” as opposed to “this is what god told me that you should do,” although they are the same thing.
**And even that is is assuming that people would actually care whether objective morality was a benefit. It’s obvious that people have widely diverging morals, and it clearly cannot be true that “objectively moral” = “moral in such a way that all people will agree.”
To me, at lot of this comes down to trying to respect, understand, nurture and celebrate life. (And no, I’m not against abortion.) Life wants to live and life is full of mutually beneficial, respectful interactions, which also includes death. To me that’s the starting point if humans don’t want to feel alien or alone on their home planet, as we shouldn’t. Culturally, what we see all around us is the antithesis of that celebration of life, which in turn ends up in an attempt at linear death through which no new life is born. Morality and ethics need to be compatible with life, and that’s pretty much the opposite of what this culture’s based on today.
Regarding objectivity, though I understand that 2+2=4 and the moon orbits around the earth, those are not universal truths and not necessarily good truths either. The abstraction required to have those beliefs may or may not be a good, life-affirming thing. Ben referred to the abstraction that mathematics requires, and to me it’s obvious that the abstraction science, mathematics and engineering is built upon has given us a culture of science that doesn’t respect life, but treats life as so much material to be counted, measured and manipulated. Agriculture, nuclear power, animal experiments, the examples are too many to count. If I had to choose, it would be better to see a rock, a rock, a rock and a rock than four rocks, especially if seeing those four rocks leads to seeing a cubic foot of gravel. Similarly, I’d much prefer people to see a tree, a tree, a tree and a tree than four trees, four stumps, X board feet of lumber, or so many dollars.
We are not alone on this planet. The mycelium living under our feet, in the soil, is sentient, physiologically surprisingly similar to us humans, and it makes choices that improve the land on which it lives, so that there can be more life year after year. Humans need to do that too, that’s what we all are here for. For myself, I see no need to presume that evolution is amoral, because life is not pain or torture, and the universe we live in is a fundamentally friendly place. Because culturally most people are unable to believe that, and seem to believe something of the opposite (witness porn culture, anyone?), we are in a such a big mess as a planet. The inability to believe the universe as a friendly place partly results from the philosophical, psychological and concrete astraction we live with (or rather what and whom we live without), as well as from the denial of our bodies and our experience. It also comes from generations and generations of incredible violence, starting as far back as the onset of agriculture and civilization, that we don’t seem to be able to cope with and metabolize. If evolution and the universe are thought of as amoral, it’s can be so much harder to construct internal soothing images that can help us heal, and healing is important.
PS. The even the appendix can be subjective in that doctors typically think of it as a useless and dangerous piece of gut that just waits to be inflamed. Much closer to reality, our appendices also help revive our gut flora if we happen to get diarrhea. My view of truth and reality does not exclude the possibility of appendicitis and a need for an operation–it’s the typical view of Western medicine that excludes any other but a potentially harmful purpose for that piece of our intestines.
Thank you, Mark. It’s truly comforting when I read a post like yours in support of something like the existence of ‘objective morality’. The insights people can achieve through belief never cease to amaze me.
“As far as I am concerned, morality is like rights. It isn’t Divine in origin, and there’s nothing objective about it. It’s whatever serves the needs of society best, with society defined as a group as small or as large as necessary.”
What is this “best” you talk about? What is “as necessary”? Normally I’d feel like an a-hole philosophy pedant for going so far down the “what do you mean” rabbit hole. But if you are explicitly arguing against even the idea of objective moral concepts, I don’t understand how you get to appeal to “needs of society best”. Especially if you want to leave open the ability to critize slavery, or apartheid, or mistreatment of women, or any of a number of nasty things.
And I want to be clear. I’m not attacking you as being pro slavery, or as wanting to subjugate women. I strongly suspect you are against many bad things. But slave owners had subjective views too. If all there is to morality is subjective views, you are in an even worse position than those who think there might be objective views but acknowledge dispute about what they are.
I also think that when you note the ability to create moral “problems” that people would disagree on, you aren’t proving what you think. We focus on edge cases because they are where the disagreements are. We don’t focus on the enormous similarities because they are enormously similar.
Nearly every society has a concept of murder being gravely wrong. There are edge case disagreements about when killing is justifiable. But focusing on them as an argument against objective moral truth deeply obscures the vast swath of agreement about murder being wrong. Same with theft. There may be disagreement about which things are “yours”. There may be various legal structures which convert “yours” to “mine”. But there really is a hugely and commonly shared understanding, cutting across almost every culture, that it is wrong to steal my things.
You are suggesting that because the border is imprecisely drawn, that there is no interior of the country. I don’t think that follows.
Sebastian H – let me ask you a question that seems glib but I mean it seriously.
If humanity were to go extinct, do you believe morality would still exist?
Morality is about the interaction between moral agents. Like all descriptions of interactions, they become irrelevant if the interacting parties are not present. So for example, if there aren’t two bodies with mass, it doesn’t make sense to talk about gravity. If there aren’t at least two bodies with electrical charge, it doesn’t make sense to talk about electromagnetic effects. Does that mean that gravity doesn’t exist when there aren’t objects with mass? I don’t know. The question is too deep for me.
I’d say morality is not interesting absent moral actors just as addition isn’t interesting in the presence of only one object.
Not really; they’re pretty much the same.
Perhaps a better way to look at it might be this:
If everyone in the world subjectively believed that slavery was moral, I’d bet you a million bucks that they would also (surprise!) claim that it was objectively moral.
If everyone in the world subjectively believed that slavery was amoral, I’d bet you a million bucks that they would also (surprise!) claim that it was objectively amoral.
Although there are infinite definitions of morality, and lots of strange applications of it… there appear to very very few people who deliberately violate their own moral code, especially if they believe it to be objectively correct. But that’s of no value, since we have no objective way to determine who is right.
Let me take the gravity observation a bit further.
Gravity is what we call the attraction between two masses that varies in intensity based on the mass involved and the distance between them. If you take the two masses out, gravity appears to vanish. It doesn’t seem to exist because it describes the relationship of two or more masses.
But gravity is an objective feature of our universe. Any time we see two masses, gravity appears to exist.
Similarly any time we see two moral agents, their interactions can be judged as moral or immoral in a way that can’t be done absent their existence.
This may seem circular, but it is no more circular than mass–the property that causes AND is defined by gravity. Mass is the stuff that causes gravitational interaction. Gravity is the interaction between various items of mass. Circular. But so far as we know, objectively true.
They actually have a fairly wide swath of exceptions ranging from war to police action to execution to honor killings to revenge to self defense to religious justification and so on. And that’s only for MODERN societies. If you start including all of humanity–which would be a requirement for objective morality, right?–then you start having less and less agreement.
The best that you can say is probably this: if you were to draw a Venn diagram of “killings which at least 75% of the society thinks are improper” across all modern societies, you’d probably end up with a nonzero overlap. Probably, but not definitely.
Although of course, that starts getting into what “improper” means, and what level of consistency you require to even classify it as “societal agreement.” In the days where might was right, it could easily be true that Weak Will would deny that Strong John should be able to kill him, but would freely believe that he has the right to kill Defenseless Doug if he chose. Do you count Weak Will in the “believes that it’s OK to kill weaker people” category? And so on.
I don’t agree with you. Even in non-modern societies if you drew a Venn diagram of killings that count as murders you’d get huge overlap. We focus on ‘honor killings’ or other disagreement cases because we are titilated by them, or because we think of them as proof of how ‘other’ the society is. That doesn’t make them the majority of murder cases where we would agree. (Not much mileage in that).
But that brings us back to the original topic. If there is no objective moral truth, how DO you know that it is bad to be unkind or unjust. And for that matter how DO you know what the heck unkind or unjust IS?
This is the issue, of course: we all agree that murder is bad but folks disagree about what constitutes murder (abortion, etc.) But I agree, lets move back to the OP:
I don’t.
I believe that it is bad to act in a way which i have defined as unkind or unjust. I don’t “know” that to the same degree that I “know” other things.
Well, I know that there’s isn’t any particular “unkind or unjust” absent agreement on their definitions. So I don’t know what it is, but the lack of knowledge doesn’t bother me.
I know how I define it (which often changes), and I come to conclusions about whether something is in one category or another (depending on circumstances and knowledge.) And I think my definitions are the best, of course, even as they change: if I found a superior morality then I’d adopt it.
> What is this “best” you talk about?
Survival. Comfort. The whole damn pyramid.
> What is “as necessary”?
Depends on whose morality you’re discussing.
A group of gypsies camping next to Strasbourg has a different idea of morality than the whole of Alsace, which has a different idea of morality than the rest of France (the latter was the subject of an article I just read) Neither of three ‘moralities’ is objective, and while I like one of them better than the others, I feel no need to claim that mine is objectively better. I like to believe that when it comes to enforcement, mine would be the one enforced, but that’s a matter of power, and the ability to project it.
> If all there is to morality is subjective views, you are in an even worse position than those who think there might be objective views but acknowledge dispute about what they are
Huh? Now that’s a jump of logic that I cannot begin to follow, and no, I am not being an asshole stuck on ‘worse’.
All there is to morality is subjective views. Some are more palatable to me than others, some are more likely to advance a society’s goals than others, and some of above mentioned goals may include moar Lebensraum.
Mine are better because they’re mine, and if I come across better ones, they’ll become mine as soon as I become convinced of their ‘betterness’. You will be surprised how very few people think that they are acting immorally. Scientists have studied the subject extensively.
> Normally I’d feel like an a-hole philosophy pedant for going so far down the “what do you mean” rabbit hole.
Once again, I do not see why you would. It’s perfectly fine to want to know what the other person is thinking when he expresses himself loosely.
> But if you are explicitly arguing against even the idea of objective moral concepts, I don’t understand how you get to appeal to “needs of society best”. Especially if you want to leave open the ability to critize slavery, or apartheid, or mistreatment of women, or any of a number of nasty things.
I feel I can criticize slavery without appealing to an objective moral concept. To listen to you, I must be spending my life paralyzed by doubt, because I have not had the Superior Moral Being tell me what’s wrong and what’s right.
Don’t you see the irony that the fact that gin-and-whiskey and you are discussing one of the more commonly agreed-on concepts, namely murder? Do you know how much harder it would be to agree on the second easiest – property? The morality of exploiting the labor of others? The morality of blaspheming? Hoo, boy…
If objective morality existed, it is a fact it would be foreign either to you OR to the large majority of Homo Sapiens who have walked the Earth. It was not that long ago, in historical terms, that beings accepted as divine by the leading civilization of the time wrote things like “The victor has the moral right to impose on the vanquished whatever conditions he desires.”
Almost every society defines murder as being wrong because murder is defined as legally (and morally) wrong killing. That every society thinks its definition of murder is correct and that murder is wrong is little more than a tautology.
Is infanticide morally wrong? There is no global cross cultural consensus.
Is slavery morally wrong? There is no global cross cultural consensus (certainly not a trans-temporal one).
Is it morally wrong to drive to work rather than taking public transit, when my driving to work contributes to a catastrophic climate change that will drown most of the country of Bangladesh? There is no global cross cultural consensus.
If you want to claim an objective and globally cross cultural morality, you have to go to more basic principles of the sort Ben mentions. You might be able to get killing people unnecessarily is wrong as a global principle, but unnecessarily is carrying a lot of weight there.
You might be able to get killing people unnecessarily is wrong as a global principle, but unnecessarily is carrying a lot of weight there.
Yeah, quite a bit of weight ;-)
While I am 100% percent behind not killing people unnecessarily, could you clarify it a bit for me? What makes it necessary?
Likely to kill other people?
Having killed other people illegally?
Having killed other people accidentally?
….
Being a witch?
Traveling without male relatives while female?
Driving while Black?
Trespassing while Asian?
Visiting a student in the wrong neighborhood?
….
Likely to affect my quality of life negatively?
Cut me off on the two ten East?
Carrying enough cash for a dozen hits?
I think it’s just as likely that there is an objective morality as it is that one color is objectively the best color.
Also, as my eaten as spam comment from the other day said, can there be an objective morality for life forms as disparate as humans, dogs, crows and squids? To say nothing of the possibility of other self-aware life forms far more different than us? Would objective morality cover both carnivores and herbivores? (It would if eating meat were objectively moral, I guess. If so, would herbivores conception of eating meat as immoral be objectively wrong?)
In the end, as g&w suggests, does it really matter if there is an objective morality if we have no way to know what it is?
This is a better-phrased version of what I was trying to explain.
People will admit to killing other people. That is a fact, not a judgment.
People will not admit to murdering other people, because most people believe that they were justified (self defense, authority, etc.) or excused (accident.) Murders are neither justifiable or excusable.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t invoke a Superior Moral Being telling anyone what is wrong or right.
But as for slavery, you’re pretty sure you can criticize it without appealing to ideas of objective morality. I’d kind of be surprised. I suspect you’ll fall back on rights, or the golden rule, or something about exploitation, or cruelty, all of which would smuggle the idea of objective morality in the back door. I.e. that it is good to respect rights, that how you’d like to be treated is important, that exploitation is bad, that cruelty is wrong.
I’m not sure what ‘criticize’ even means there. To me the word means, at the very least that you judge something could be better. But I don’t see how we get to various gradations of good when you don’t think good is an objectively meaningful concept.
Could you show me what that would look like? I’m not asking for the hard core philosophical treatise, but I’m having trouble picturing even the thumbnail sketch.
So I think that a problem that many of the ‘no objective morality’ folks are butting up against, is that in almost every single other context, when you talk about something being ‘objectively true,’ is it not sufficient to say that there is widespread agreement. In fact, part of the point of objective truth seems to be that it would remain being true even in the face of universal disagreement.
Where morality differs (if I’m understanding the argument correctly) is that it is an expression of human desires, reactions and impulses, and thus that the widespread agreement is the objective truth. It takes place in the human mind and nowhere else, so existence within the human mind is sufficient. Is that just about correct?
—Myca
I think there are some concepts being bunched together that might be clearer if separated. The unspoken reasoning behind a lot of appeals to “objective morality” is the idea that there’s some kind of universally compelling argument from first principles, that we could all come to agree on our ethics if we just sat down and worked from A=A or something like that.
This is unequivocally wrong. Our intuitions are built on top of our peculiarly-shaped minds in a very specific way; if our minds were different, our morals would be different, and we’d be explaining why it’s ethical to eat your siblings or whatnot. It’s easier to see that if you imagine non-human minds, because, apart from significant pathology (e.g., psychopathy), we humans are pretty much all working from the same page.
So, our ethics grew up along with us, but it exists separate from us. If you smack your head against a wall until you believe that pain is good or boredom is desirable, that doesn’t make those things true, it just makes you wrong. And in fact, if everyone in the world decided to engage in that kind of targeted head-smacking, they would still, all, be wrong. It’s just that nobody would know it.
It’s a fascinating subject, even though most of the time, when someone appeals to the idea of objective morality, they’re just trying to get a leg up on pushing their religious agenda, when, really, they’re just working off the same set of human-universal instincts you are.
(Also, aha! I thought I’d written about this recently. There’s a thread here where I went into some more detail, and pointed out someone confused enough that their belief in objective morality would make them do immoral things.)
“Our intuitions are built on top of our peculiarly-shaped minds in a very specific way; if our minds were different….”
This is equally true about everything we think about, including math and physics and neuroscience. You either believe that we can sometimes transcend that, and get at real truths, or you don’t believe we can ever get around that. If you believe that we can’t ever get around it, you might be correct, but then there is no point in arguing about the truth of anything–it just can’t be determined. So pretty much everyone acts as if we can, at least some of the time, get past our preconceived notions and get access to at least some amount of real truth.
Now if you want to be a radical skeptic and think we can’t, you can do that. But the argument doesn’t apply to just morality, it applies to ALL knowledge about everything.
Assuming this is serious:
Do you think a pile of horseshit is less appealing than the Mona Lisa? I do. But I also acknowledge that this isn’t objectively true everywhere (my dogs would differ.) that doesn’t make it less true.
There aren’t ACTUALLY any “universal human rights” or “god-given rights” or whatnot. People just give them those name tags, like they say that a candy bar is the “best thing on the planet,” for marketing purposes.
Take slavery. I dislike it; so do all the people who I know and respect. When i say “it’s bad” that’s all I mean.
I can distinguish gradations on my own!
What part can’t you picture? You can’t reach OBJECTIVE gradations of good because you can’t reach OBJECTIVE gradations of anything like that.
Sebastian H,
To the extent that our morals derive from the way our brains work cross culturally, we can discover what our objective morals are from cross cultural study of what our systems of morality objectively are (either our stated systems of morals, or our actual systems of enacted morals). If we could develop a model of the generation and enactment of morality that was capable of generating specific cultural moralities based on cultural history and the specific conditions of existence within those cultures, then we would have a model that would objectively describe all human morality. We could then plug in the cultural history and specific conditions of the Mongol Khanates and discover why polygamous marriage, slavery, mass slaughter of any city that resists invasion, and religious tolerance were the natural morality of the Khans.
I would guess that we currently stand in relation to such a system of knowledge as people in ancient Sumer stood to a system of physics.
I’m not clear if such a system would match what you are describing. It doesn’t seem to me that such a system of knowledge would be able to tell us whether slavery was right or wrong trans-culturally.
In any case, such a system certainly isn’t what we use to decide that slavery is wrong, and that slavery everywhere in the modern world should be abolished and suppressed. We don’t need a physics of morality to tells us what is moral for us, and we only need our own morality to tell us what portion of our own morality we should impose on others and what portion we should impose only on ourselves, and our morality does not need to be anything other than objectively our morality to serve that purpose.
Sebastian (no H),
Exactly. I could tell you my/our definition of necessary (maybe), but it would be only that. And I’m not sure that [no killing people unless necessary] is actually a universal human moral rule. IANAA[nthropologist].
I’m surprised that you think saying that slavery is wrong is the same as saying you don’t personally prefer slavery. But I guess I’ll have to accept that is what you really think. So what about people who personally prefer slavery? Do you have any argument for or against them? Or people who personally prefer female genital mutilation? You have a preference they don’t share. Why do you get to impose your personal preferences? Is there any reason anti abortion people shouldn’t be imposing their personal preferences?
Sorry I let myself get distracted. So are you saying you have no argument against slavery other than you personally dislike it? Or were you saying that you had one but just didn’t share it?
Why do you get to impose your personal preferences?
Better guns.
Sebastian: You’re missing a couple of steps between “universal” and “personal.” Steps like “cultural” and “social” and “subcultural.”
[Sebastian H] Why do you get to impose your personal preferences?
[Robert] Better guns.
And higher numbers, and better organization.
I also would like to think that we get these because our morality is moar better, but I know that the two are less closely related than they would have been if at least some of the Supreme Moral Beings were doing their job. At least they are doing a better job than they were a few centuries earlier.
[Ben Lehman] You’re missing a couple of steps between “universal” and “personal.” Steps like “cultural” and “social” and “subcultural.”
And you are ignorant of the existence of the letters D, F, G, H, K. etc… but you do not see me complaining, do you? On the other hand, I freely admit that I am missing all steps between subjective and objective, and that I lump “cultural” and “social” and “subcultural” into “subjective”, even though I can be persuaded to sort them according to the power wielded by the community in question.
But wait, didn’t I actually do so already in post 25? I guess I was not missing the steps between personal and universal after all.
[Sebastian H] So are you saying you have no argument against slavery other than you personally dislike it?
I have no argument that would be particularly effective on someone who benefits from slavery and has the power to ignore me.
I do have an argument, however weak, which goes “The benefits I could potentially get from slavery are outweighed by the negatives from my fear of becoming a slave, my dislike for those who benefit from slavery, the effort I would have to expend not to become a slave, the loss of creativity/productivity/interaction by slaves, the worry about the fate of slaves, etc, etc, etc…”
Fortunately for me, humans with power, at this point in time, seems to mostly agree that the negatives outweigh the positives, so slavery mostly stays in the shadows (sex-trafficking, indentured servants, horrible working conditions, prisoners, etc…)
So, while there’s nothing objective about ‘slavery is bad’, the very subjective ‘slavery makes me feel icky’ seems to work just fine, as long as it remains the norm amongst those with the better guns.
Sure, there are lots of arguments across a wide range of disciplines.
What’s yours? It would help to compare them, perhaps.
My argument is that slavery is the same as the actually successful anti slavery campaigners–that slavery is morally wrong because it is objectively not right to treat people that way. I’m not sure who the prominent slavery is personally distasteful but there isn’t a right or wrong voice was, but they don’t appear to have made the same historical impact. But you knew that already. It was implicit in the conversation.
Sebastian [the not me one ;) ], I think you’re wrong to frame your fortunately for me paragraph the way you do. Fortunately for people who believe that slavery is wrong, their cause was pursued vigorously by people who thought it was a universal human wrong. I’m not even sure that NOW relying on the cost benefit analysis is enough to keep things safe if you exclude the enormous (to most people) moral negative of “it is very wrong” in favor of whatever your argument is (I’m still unclear on how it excludes universal moral concepts, you seem to allude to at least two in your explanation). Fortunately for you, there are a large enough number of people who think it is wrong that you don’t have to argue against it without having to appeal to universal moral principles. That is almost certainly a more accurate description.
And what do you mean by “objectively not right?” How do you determine what the objective standards are? How do you determine whether or not you are accurately following them?
Certainly, there are a lot of rational arguments which can be made against slavery, but at some point they all end up depending on a set of subjective underlying assumptions or values.
Wait a second… this isn’t what we’re discussing.
I don’t believe that there ARE objective moral principles. Those would have to exist either from some sort of “rule of the universe” or perhaps by the intervention of a deity.
Like most people, I believe that there SHOULD BE universally-accepted moral principles which guide humanity.
Like most people, I believe that those universally-accepted rules SHOULD include things like “no slavery!” and “no slaughtering kids for fun” and all sorts of other things.
Like most people, I use universal language in an attempt to get others to adopt my own moral belief system. I’d say “slavery is a violation of human rights,” even though I don’t actually think that objectively-set human rights exist. It’s just shorthand for saying “slavery is a violation of those rights which I believe that we should all consider to be rights of all humans and which I believe we should all collectively act to protect.”
And of course, like most people, I believe that the “should be” universal morality should be like MY universal morality, though I’m happily willing to concede that everyone else (a) has different moralities, and (b) feels like I do w/r/t giving theirs up.
So therefore I try to focus on finding overlap (“no slavery!”) where possible. But the use of universalist LANGUAGE doesn’t mean that I, or anyone else, is conceding universalist REALITY.
Hey, Sebastian and Sebastian H, would you two consider changing your names to something that used vivid, easy to remember terms, instead of what’s currently a fairly small difference?
For instance, if one of you was “Sebastian Dogowner,” and the other one was “Sebastian Wildredskies,” I think it would be a lot easier for folks not to mix you up. Those are just for example names.
Just a thought!
A tough question — whether or not humanity goes extinct.
I think that first sentence is exactly the wrong way to characterize the idea of moral truth. It gets you on the wrong track from the start. To say that X is a moral truth is just that. It’s saying that the proposition is true and that if someone says the proposition isn’t true, they are mistaken. Just as much as someone is mistaken if they claim that the proposition “2+2=4” is false. Always. No matter who says it. No matter when or where someone says it.
Numbers don’t need to exist in some independent Platonic realm of ideas for 2+2=4 to be true. Nor should we necessarily assume that moral propositions need to in order to be true.
I’ve always hated the use of the term “objective morality.” It implies that objective means real and binding while subjective means arbitrary or false. But that isn’t the case at all. Agony, for example, is a purely subjective state of consciousness. It exists only in the mind. But it’s none the less true that agony is, in and of itself, intrinsically undesirable.
Morality deals in subjective states. It’s about things that can have experiences. There are truths about subjective states of mind that are as binding and universally true as any mathematical proposition. When we dismiss the subjective from the start of the discussion we’re dooming ourselves to misunderstand the idea of moral facts—like someone looking all over the house for the glasses they were wearing all the while.
I agree that “objective” doesn’t mean “true” any more than subjective means “false”. And yet, I think there’s a clear sense in which we can talk of objective morals – it’s the same sense in which we can talk of an objective United States of America.
The USA is not a natural object, and it is not independent of its people. If there were no people around, there would be no USA. It is not eternal – certainly, it has not always existed, and for most of its existence, it had different borders. Likely, the borders will change further within our lifetimes (if, for example, Puerto Rico joins as a state). Nonetheless, the USA is an objective entity. It’s existence is not a matter of opinion, and its existence is the basis for a lot of rules and regulations that govern how people live.
Morality, in my eyes, is exactly the same. Its out there. It exists because people agree that it exists. Not all people agree on the same morality, just like not all people agree on the borders of countries, but still, morality is not subjective. I can’t deny that there are moral rules that govern my life, any more than I can deny that I needed a visa in order to study in an American university.
Of course, that’s not really what people are talking about when they call morality “objective” or “subjective”, despite some of the earlier discussion in the thread. “Objective morality” really is taken to mean “morality that comes from some non-human source” (be it God, the natural order of the universe, mathematical truths, or whatnot). And it’s normally advocated by people who believe that morality is unchanging. So in that sense, no, there is no “objective” morality, just like there is no objective political geography.
“So in that sense, no, there is no “objective” morality….”
Why do you think that? It seems to me that one can construct a pretty strong metaethical theory accounting for moral facts. Ideal observer theory is a strong candidate, in my opinion. As are theories based on the idea of intrinsic goods (something worth valuing for it’s own sake).
Well, I believe morals are created by humans as a result of human interaction. You can model morals, just like you can model other aspects of human behaviour, using all sorts of theoretical models. But I do believe that morality is an emergent property of humanity, not something with an independent existence (I am willing to revise this statement to make it an emergent property of intelligent life if and when I am presented with data about the morality of a non-human sentience).
Sorry, double post and there’s no way to delete posts anymore.
Why do you think that? It seems to me that one can construct a pretty strong metaethical theory accounting for moral facts.
Moral facts? You have moral facts more valid than “At time T, homo sapiens subset S agreed on X”?
I’d be curious to hear them.
I think the difficulty in answering questions like “is it right or wrong to eat animals?” or “are there cases in which the death penalty is justified?” makes it clear that any pretense of “objective moral truth” is just a fairly flimsy cover for the assertion “my way is the right way and you can’t convince me otherwise because my final fallback position is some combination of reification and begging the question.”
But those moral questions seem perfectly simple to answer, other than to Evil People, who will be those who disagree with me ;)
I take your point, but I also demur in part. I think there are many moral questions that can be answered by reference to an objective moral standard; I also think there are any number of definable objective moral standards. We don’t often think about those moral questions, at least not within a particular social group or entity that shares an objective standard, exactly because they are solved (at least by our standard). “Is it OK to shoot a mountain lion that’s about to eat my babies” isn’t a particularly interesting question, because outside of the lunatic fringe everyone has the same answer.
And of course, in the Mountain Lion-American community, “is it OK to go into the two-leg squishy people cave and take their meat babies to feed my cubs?” is equally non-controversial.
within a particular social group or entity that shares an objective standard
Well, of course objective moral standards exist, if we define “objective” as “shared by a particular social group”. But I tend to use the word “subjective” for this.
“Is it OK to shoot a mountain lion that’s about to eat my babies” isn’t a particularly interesting question, because outside of the lunatic fringe everyone has the same answer.
But the point is that how do we know that the people who struggle with this question or answer it in the negative are the “lunatic fringe” and not those who actually have the more accurate bead on morality? “Objective moral truth” does not mean “the morals held by the majority.” So answer: we don’t. For all we know, at some point in the future us “yes, shoot the damn thing”-ers will be the moral equivalent of the pro-slavery South, which as far as I’m concerned, is absolute proof that morality is relative and subjective, not objective at all.
No, subjective would mean that two ordinary people would look at the mountain lion and would not both come to the same conclusion from the logical and consistent rulebook. “Yeah, but this mountain lion is cute, and things that are cute are immune from shooting” – that’s subjective. “Animals who threaten children may be killed by an adult on the scene” is objective.
Objective means that the existing moral rule from anyone else’s point of view is susceptible to the reason of a non-mentally-broken person. Elusis shoots a mountain lion that was about to eat her baby; I can put myself in her position abstractly, see how the rule applies, see that she acted with moral correctness, even though I am not her and even if I have very little insight into her personality or nature. A rule of “unless it’s a cute mountain lion” moves the rule into the subjective realm, because I have no reasonable certitude as to what Elusis considers “cute”.
How do we know that the people who think that people who think you have to let mountain lions eat babies might be the morally correct ones, are crazy? Because they think that, ma’am. :)
More seriously, no, it is not majority rule. But when a system of rules is objective and susceptible to reason as above, then barring some very weird circumstance, it will generally be the sane majority of humanity who successfully perform the computations, rather than the minoritarian crazy fringe. “Objective moral truth” means the moral truth which is output by our consensus-derived system of group moral rules, operated objectively – our system says that the life of a human is generally more important than the life of an animal, and the life of a baby human is always more important than the life of an animal. We compute that there is a risk to the baby from the animal, we compute that the risk is non-trivial – we therefore lift the nominal sanction against casual killing to permit this death. Anybody who comes up with a different answer is running the program wrong, whether today or in five centuries – OR, they have a different consensus set of values. Maybe five centuries from now when there are fifty billion humans on every planet of the solar system, and there are only two mountain lions left, and nobody much likes your baby anyway, the premise about relative valuations of life change.
Of course morality itself is relative and subjective, and subject to change (particularly if material conditions change). But the system itself can be perfectly objective, or at least reasonably objective enough to deserve the title. The exact strength of the gravitational constant depends on where you are on the planet, and which planet, and its mass and the distribution of that mass, and a bunch of other cosmological data points – and your experience of that gravity will vary depending on your strength and mass and body type and movement modality – flight, swimming, walking – so the experience of gravity is subjective and relative.
But gravity is also totally objective; it exists, it can follow certain mathematical rules which are knowable in advance (susceptible to reason, if you take the parallel) and so on.
I think the difficulty comes in wanting objective to mean more than it actually means – something can be objective by being objective in just one way, or a few ways. It doesn’t have to be objective across all possible domains and every last dimension of experience.
“…the pro-slavery South, which as far as I’m concerned, is absolute proof that morality is relative and subjective, not objective at all.”
Absolute proof that morality is relative and subjective? And why should we not simply regard this as evidence that large numbers of people can be wrong about a moral issue? After all, we all know many examples from the past of millions holding the same mistaken opinion on other matters. Why not morality too?
I really should come back to these things more frequently.
Moral facts are different, I think. There’s a sort of rubber-meets-the-road point for other kinds of facts; either you’re building an accurate map of reality with your math and physics, or you’re not. (And if our minds were shaped differently, we wouldn’t care about accurate maps at all, but it would make us really bad at surviving.) Moral questions don’t reduce to that; they reduce to us pointing to some value and saying “this is important!”. So while you could be skeptical about the objective nature of everything, it’s a much lower bar to be skeptical about the objective nature of just morality.
Our values are complex and somewhat contradictory. I don’t think anyone can put their entire moral system into words, and even if they could, it would be enormous. We can look at how we judge some cases, and derive values from that. Check out Frankena’s list of things that people intrinsically value; it’s huge! Any big decision is going to involve balancing any of those, and so the answer to any ethical problem is going to essentially be, “it depends on the details”; any universal ethical rule is going to get you into terrible corner cases.
That was beautifully reasonable. Thank you.