The article doesn't provide anything to back the claim that moral opinions may be universally, non-subjectively true. The cartoonist example is deeply flawed. We're outraged because this event violated our deepest beliefs and values we hold dear, not because it violated some universal eternal moral law. We also know that there were people that weren't saddened by this event too.
This is the problem I have with many philosophers. In the whole text you cannot find a single strong logical evidence. Everything is just an opinion.
It is impossible to prove that e.g. "stealing from others" is universally "bad". It may not be a beneficial strategy in a game theory, or maybe some statistical analysis can show societies are better off with this rule, or just that people sleep better knowing that others can't steal. But neither of this is universally true for humanity in general, and there are examples in game theory were cheating actually is a winning strategy.
Yes I am guilty of moral relativism, that I am not alone in that is interesting, so the article is one I find interesting. But it is flawed, your example is apt and that's not the only one:
Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”
Him: “It’s a fact.”
Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”
Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”
Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”
The blank stare on his face said it all.
...
I also tend to stare blankly at people when I'm thinking "Duh" too. He could have done better than accept a blank stare as freedom to interpret whatever he wanted.
With a mathematical operator: Fact > Opinion, one is a higher form of truth.
What does it mean for something to be 'a higher form of truth'? More valuable, according to some appropriate standard? More useful, according to some appropriate standard?
The point of the article is not to prove that values are objective. Rather, the point is to undermine the fact/opinion distinction.
If moral sentiments were mere opinion, then there'd be no point to arguing over whether some action is right or wrong. When you tell me that you really like the taste of sushi, I don't argue with you - I just accept that that's your taste. But that we don't simply accept as 'taste' other's moral sentiments suggests that our own understanding of what is at stake is different.
People argue about tastes all the time. That tastes can't be argued over is what we tell ourselves, not what we actually do. Why else would we say "he has bad taste"?
I use taste just because it's the most widely-accepted instance where subjectivism applies. But, certainly, a substantial minority will hold that for certain kinds of tastes, objectivism holds. If you think there are meaningful disagreements about taste, that makes you an objectivist. In which case, you already agree that there are facts about these kinds of things.
I do accept other's moral sentiments as taste - maybe I'm some sort of sociopath? To hell with me. I see arguing over right and wrong as the mob enforcing its rule.
But the point is that, as a society, we don't treat moral sentiment as taste. For instance, when someone murders another person, we don't say: "Well, that person just likes murdering people. Who are we to disagree?!" Instead, we say they did something wrong, and we punish them.
If you're not prepared to give up all claims on how others should act, then you're not really a moral relativist. And the point of the author is that, as a society, we seem to have an inconsistent position.
If you're not prepared to give up all claims on how others should act, then you're not really a moral relativist.
I disagree completely. The claim might simply be based on might. We as a society are more numerous and stronger than the occasional murderer, and therefore we'll act on our moral taste and punish him.
I agree that people don't actually think like that, but that doesn't prove that moral facts exists, just that many people think they do.
It's not the punishment that's relevant, it's the claim, or the ability to judge behaviour by a moral standard. You can judge behaviour even if you're too small and weak to enact punishment.
But if you're a moral relativist, you can't judge at all — you can't say "that killing was wrong, it was murder". The best you can say was "that killing was morally wrong by my standards, but might well have been acceptable by his, therefore the discussion can go no further".
Relativism reduces morality to little more than a preference, and makes it as impossible to reason or debate about morality as it is to debate about whether you should like your eggs sunny side up. Very few are really moral relativists; the logical consequences of believing in it are usually too much for people to stomach.
(This doesn't mean moral facts exist, though! There are more options available than just moral relativism or moral objectivism, not that the article bothers thinking about any of them)
Sure you can judge - based on your own, subjective morality. "To me, that killing was wrong, it was murder". All you need is to acknowledge that other people will judge it differently, and that their judgment is just as objectively valid. And you can still judged them for judging so!
And it doesn't make it impossible to debate about morality - merely futile.
I don't see what's so difficult to accept in this, frankly.
> I don't see what's so difficult to accept in this, frankly.
Because you're stopping once you reach the conclusion you like and not seeing where it leads.
Debating about morality is a pre-requisite for, for example, coming to agreement on a community standard on a moral question of behaviour. And if it's futile to debate about morality, then of course it's futile to try to define a community standard on a moral question of behaviour.
Without consensus on standards of behaviour, communities and societies fall apart. People value communities and societies. Therefore people value being able to debate about morality.
You can argue about and agree upon a standard of behavior without it being a moral standard. In fact, I'd argue that's exactly what most laws are. When the CA road laws say that drivers must keep a 3-foot buffer from cyclists, is that a moral rule?
Now, it may be that you still need some moral axioms to build those standards upon, but you don't need to argue about them, merely to have enough people with a roughly similar pattern. The dissenters will just be made to comply by force.
Logic doesn't care if you agree or not, it just takes you to the conclusion anyway. And if that reveals you to have an incoherent position, so be it.
Also, you're not going to get far trying to define away moral aspects. _Why_ was the cycle law enacted? Presumably to reduce cyclist deaths. Why reduce those? You get to a moral question incredibly quickly from the most arcane law.
And your thinking that you can find a majority with "roughly similar pattern" without any need for debate is effectively saying "a majority will agree on fundamental moral axioms" and now you're nowhere near relativism. You might as well have posited the article's "moral facts", at this point.
If I roll five dice, and three of them hit on 3, does that mean that 3 is some special number?
Moral relativism doesn't imply that everyone's subjective moral are all and always incompatible with each other. As people's subjective moralities change this way and the other, clusters are bound to happen - those are the "majorities".
What I deny is that any of those are the one objective morality. It's just the latest sample from the RNG.
Tommorrow will bring new ones.
Again, it's not binary: you don't have to accept a moral objectivism just because you deny relativism.
I too deny that any of the axioms are the one objective morality (although the clusters of moral belief over time are nothing like you'd get from a RNG, and tomorrow broadly speaking does not bring new ones, but that's a digression).
Your position is relativist. And you asked why relativism was so hard to accept. Well, like I said way upthread, it's because if you take a relativist position to its conclusion, you generally end up somewhere people find hard to accept. (Or less politely, you end up somewhere dumb).
And this case is a perfect example. In this case, you've pretty quickly ended up having to argue that "laws can be/are built on moral axioms that come about by chance because random moral preference generation will result in coincidental clusters of agreement"
Which contradicts the observed facts of moral development, aside from all the other problems with it.
You could spend a lot of time trying to shore this up, or could just start again with a better foundation than moral relativism.
Interesting comment. I don't care where it leads, it's a personal thing.
I don't feel the need to hold a position that applies to everyone. Taking it to something I understand better, like coding standards. I could care less what people decide the rules are, they seem completely arbitrary to me. I'm happy to go with what's gone before, and if people want to fight about new ones I'll leave them to it.
But you accept that people can fight and decide what the rules are? That you can have a meaningful discussion about which coding standard is the best, and why, and reach a conclusion you all agree on?
Because metaethical moral relativism wouldn't accept that. It says you might as well have a discussion about which colour is the best and try to reach a conclusion everyone agrees on.
well you changed a word out there. the first question is you accept that people can fight. the second question is you can have a meaningful. i accept that people and can fight but i don't accept their discussion is meaningful and i don't accept that they can reach a conclusion i agree on.
i don't see how accepting that people can fight and decide on rules, means that i think there's any meaning in it and why that means i agree, disagree or care about the conclusion.
> It says you might as well have a discussion about which colour is the best and try to reach a conclusion everyone agrees on.
> i don't see how accepting that people can fight and decide on rules, means that i think there's any meaning in it and why that means i agree, disagree or care about the conclusion.
"Fight" is probably the misleading point. People can and will fight about meaningless things, yes. Perhaps "debate" would be better, because that implies meaning in the discussion.
I think you can reasonably debate, compare and judge coding styles -- "which is more readable?", "which aids understanding better?", etc -- in a way you can't reasonably debate "which is the best colour?".
There might be a confusion between a prescriptive and a descriptive stance of moral relativism.
You can be a moral relativist and take a pragmatic position that traditions or societal consensus are worth having without disappearing in a puff of logic.
> You can be a moral relativist and take a pragmatic position that traditions or societal consensus are worth having without disappearing in a puff of logic.
Not really, because if you believe the relativism you must believe that moral consensus can't be reached.
What you are saying is very close to "You can be a climate change denier and take the pragmatic position that we need to change our behaviour to stop the earth heating up"
I think you're talking about a very naive normative interpretation of moral relativism, the fundamental argument, as I understand it, is actually that societies do reach some form of moral consensus, but that this consensus has cultural and historical roots (and possible other contingent factors), it will vary and change over nations and time.
I won't throw a segfault if I take a descriptive moral relativistic position and simultaneously think that honour killings are wrong.
I am logical and well-read enough to realize that most of our Western courts have allowed honour killings but called them "crimes of passion"[1] and until not that long ago that could be a complete defence against a charge of murder. It is still an acceptable partial defence in some courts and some judges apparently advocate its return in others [2].
So by recognizing the moral relativism inherent in that situation, am I normatively obligated to think honour killings are A-OK? I don't think so, I am however apparently outside the moral consensus on that subject, so what do I know.
I think you're talking about the anthropological meaning of moral relativism (and we probably agree there). But the rest of us are talking about the philosophical sense. There's a very good overview of that here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/moral-re/
Among other things, one of the potential consequences of metaethical moral relativism is that you and I can't actually say anything meaningful to one another about honour killings beyond "I feel they are bad" or "I feel they are good".
Or to put this a slightly different way: your culture (apparently) thinks honour killings are OK. You disagree. On what grounds? If a moral statement is true relative only to the consensus belief of a culture, and your culture says honour killings are right, then you must necessarily be wrong to disagree. (See 4f in the link for more on that).
If you reject that, as it sounds like you possibly do, then you reject philosophical moral relativism. You can keep the anthropological one, though.
Obviously we disagree about what exactly that entails (at a glance, the article you cited seems to describe multiple modes of moral relativism, not all as logically muddled as the one you describe).
I'd be curious to know what grounds you would argue against a topic you find morally objectionable. What would you say are the proper foundations for moral axioms?
Update: and to answer your question, I'm not sure I have good reasons beyond "I feel they are bad", I do aim for coherence and consistency even when I'm not confident that I have a solid logical foundation, but it's hard to feel committed to any particular consensus. For background, I was raised in two different countries with two different cultures and languages, my politics were diametrically opposite those of one of my grandfathers who I still loved, I never met the other because he was an abusive alcoholic that thankfully abandoned the family. I am a bit of a Camusian outsider I guess.
Moral relativism is not incompatible with not tolerating practices which you personally disagree with. You may simultaneously believe that morality is relative, and not have any particular regard for other systems of morality. You may enforce your system of morality on others simply because you can and because your morality, which you recognize as relative, permits such enforcement.
> "Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
Sir Charles James Napier may not have earnestly bought into cultural relativism, but the sentiment he expresses is not inherently incompatible with it.
You don't need to believe that your system is "correct" in some sort of universal way. You merely need to believe that your system will be best for your personal interests.
Moral relativism is incompatible with judgements that other's moral judgements are wrong. You can judge someone else's views as wrong while still tolerating them.
One other things:
> "You don't need to believe that your system is "correct" in some sort of universal way. You merely need to believe that your system will be best for your personal interests."
> "Moral relativism is incompatible with judgements that other's moral judgements are wrong."
Right or wrong have absolutely nothing to do with it. It can't, because without a universal morality any notion of universal "right" or "wrong" evaporates. This is about refusing to tolerate another culture not because "it is wrong" but rather because it is beneficial to you to do so.
Your problem here is that you seem to be assuming some sort of universal "respect the right of others to coexist" or "live and let live" morality, where you should not stamp out other cultures unless you have determined that they are "wrong". This sort of universal tolerance for other systems of morality does not exist. It really simply doesn't; history would be far less bloody if it did.
People that do not believe in universal morality are still very capable of acting only in their own best interests, at the expense of others. Egoism is not incompatible with moral relativism.
Under moral relativism, you can accept that other people have different moral tastes, just as you can accept that other people have different tastes for food. But you cannot accept that such tastes are subject to normative assessment, making them 'right' or 'wrong' in any meaningful way.
So a moral relativist can say something like "I dislike your approval of female genital mutilation", but this is not a claim about the rightness or wrongness of the approval of female genital mutilation. It is instead a claim about their own sentiments. This is just like saying "Well I don't like sushi" in response to a friend saying that they like sushi. You'r not saying that them liking sushi is wrong.
I don't see why. A person's morality, even if completely subjective, is still one frame of reference under which actions, thoughts, etc can be judged. Therefore, it's perfectly possible to judge the approval of female genital mutilation as wrong - just as long as I realize that the judgment is subjective.
Or to put it in another way, meta-ethical moral relativism doesn't require normative relativism.
While we can distinguish between first-order moral relativism and metaethical relativism, it's widely accepted that the former implies the latter.
So it's not uncontroversial to say that you can be an objectivist moral relativist. In any case, this discussion has been about metaethical relativism.
Well you picked a good one with murdering and the death penalty and so forth.
> If you're not prepared to give up all claims on how others should act, then you're not really a moral relativist.
My only claim extends as far as I can act or influence others to act to serve my own needs and wants. Am I not a moral relativist?
I'm not sure that the author is commenting on society, but young people who are morally relativistic. I think he badly misrepresents their argument and doesn't really make one of his own.
> "My only claim extends as far as I can act or influence others to act to serve my own needs and wants."
That egoism, not moral relativism.
I took it that the author was making the following point about our society: we teach them in school that things like "cheating is wrong" is mere opinion, and yet similar judgments like "tax-evasion is wrong" aren't treated as mere opinions when they grow up.
egoism sounds about right. i wonder are they mutually exclusive. reading wikipedia, i'd disagree with normative moral relativism and agree with meta-ethical/descriptive moral relativism. just because i'm an egoist doesn't mean i think everyone else is.
> and yet similar judgments like "tax-evasion is wrong" aren't treated as mere opinions when they grow up.
I don't see anything like that written in the article, where did you take that from?
There is no point debating without first accepting the existence of absolute, universal and objective moral truth. You can't claim that someone "is wrong" (in the objective sense) if "being wrong" is not something that can exist. When a subjectivist "debates", it can only be motivated by selfishness - never by truth.
Self-awareness is the only thing that matters. The system only exists to understand itself, as accurately as possible. That's what we also call "truth", and that's the most important thing. Really.
Truth is about convergence, as there exists only one truth. When a person lies, it increases entropy (that's not good). While there exists only one truth, there can exist infinitely many lies. You can't disprove truth, but you can disprove lies, if only through contradictions. Whenever a person lies, progress (proximity to truth) slows down. That's the definition of evil. Therefore, lying is objectively/universally/absolutely a bad thing.
It is not important whether a lie today could lead to a better outcome in the future. We can't accurately predict the future. We don't even know "when" the future is. It is therefore, impossible to evaluate whether something is good or not based on future events, as it can never be known.
This is at this point that you must realize that what matters is not the end, but the means. The means justifies the end, not the other way around. Failing to understand that hurts the universe.
Aim for efficiency. Aim for truth. You will find that these two things are just one. Only then will you be one with the universe.
Really? Self-sacrifice and penance are almost the basis of one the most popular moral theories in the world. Just go ask the closest Christian you might have.
> Self-sacrifice and penance are almost the basis of one the most popular moral theories in the world
You can't make those objective, though. That is my point. (It's not like I haven't actually heard of Christian morality before.)
Ultimately, the only thing that actually matters for any living organism is pleasure. Thus, only pleasure, ultimately, can be good or bad for an organism.
I mean "pleasure" in the broadest possible sense, but it's always either a physical sensation or an emotion.
Subjective things can only truly matter if they bring pleasure or cause pain. So my point is still correct. (We need a definition of subjective, though, so this probably isn't clear.)
It's true that someone could subjectively think, mistakenly, that something matters, which doesn't. So someone could be wrong about what matters. e.g. Someone could think that God's approval matters, when in reality, only pleasure and pain matter for their own sake.
I'm not saying that pleasure is obviously the only ultimate good; I'm saying that it is the only ultimate good.
And I would challenge someone to make an argument that duty is good, or, in fact, anything other than pleasure. It is pretty obvious that none of those arguments work.
Sure, gladly. But it's not so much an argument as a simple observation, plus refuting or ruling out out a bunch of false notions of the good that people have gotten used to. And since it's an observation you see across all living organisms, there isn't any one piece of evidence or one specific argument. It's just part of the nature of life. So I think what is warranted is not an argument, but an example.
Think about a simple organism. Something without complex reasoning about higher values. Say, a frog.
What is good for the frog? What is bad for the frog? Well, the only thing that can matter to you, if you have the consciousness of a frog, is getting pleasure and avoiding pain. When you eat a fly, you are doing it for that reason. When you drink water, you are doing it for that reason. And so on. I mean, frogs probably can't reason at that level---but if they could, that is how they would have to reason about it. Pleasure is inherently valued because of the way organisms are, biologically. It is the thing that evolution uses to reward the behavior that is "wanted" (i.e. that "wins" in a natural selection sense).
In other words, natural selection only works if organisms have a reason to act. For extremely simple things (e.g. single-celled organisms), there is no "mind" or "consciousness" in the organism that regulates behavior in any way. But for complex organisms, there needs to be a mind. And the pleasure/pain mechanism is the way that natural selection has for regulating behavior in the minds of conscious organisms.
Pleasure and pain just are inherently valuable---they are the only things that are inherently valuable. Because of the way biology works.
It's no different for humans, really. Besides physical sensations, humans also have emotions of pleasure and pain. They have moral value systems. When your moral values are satisfied, you get pleasure; when they aren't, you get pain. That is not to say, any moral system is equally valid. It isn't. The best moral system is the one that leads to the most pleasure. That is the one that is in harmony with biology and reality, not religion, social conformity, environmentalism, or anything else, but proving this statement is too much for a comment, so I'm just putting it here so you get the gist of where I am headed.
To get back to my main point--one way to see that pleasure is the only inherent value is to try to think of some reason for acting other than that. Ultimately, there never could be one---not a valid one. But pleasure always can be a good reason for acting.
Keep in mind I mean pleasure in the broadest sense---humans are long-range creatures, so I mean joy, rapture, happiness, contentment, fulfillment, and so on, plus all kinds of physical sensations (good food, sex, etc.). So I am not advocating range-of-the-moment hedonism, like, coke and hookers. I mean, yes, if that's a way to maximize your pleasure---but it isn't for any human being I know of.
Consider a fictional drug which stimulates the pleasure receptors in a frog's brain, but also reduced its fertility.
Consuming it is intensely pleasurable for the frog, but harmful to it both in an evolutionary sense, and for the frog species as a whole.
I can't see anyway to consider that "good".
Now consider the wide range of what humans consider pleasurable. A community of sadist may derive great pleasure from tormenting an animal. In your argument, that makes it "good" (Quote: "The best moral system is the one that leads to the most pleasure.")
I don't understand this sentence: I am not advocating range-of-the-moment hedonism, like, coke and hookers. I mean, yes, if that's a way to maximize your pleasure---but it isn't for any human being I know of.
Is your argument ignoring people who derive pleasure from harmful things because *you don't know anyone like that"? That seems a bit of a hole in your point of view.
Of course it's good. If the frog could engage in abstract reasoning, he would have no reason to care about evolution or reproductive success.
If you just substitute "human" for "frog", you can see it's true for us, too (and we can reason). You'd be badly mistaken to define good and bad by "repdroductive success." That would be committing the naturalistic fallacy.
The reason taking some kind of pleasure-drug goes against people's normal moral sentiments is because it's too much of a false hypothetical. A true pleasure drug would be very dangerous, so we wouldn't take it.
> Now consider the wide range of what humans consider pleasurable. A community of sadist may derive great pleasure from tormenting an animal. In your argument, that makes it "good"
That is not actaually an implication of my argument, because sadism is not going to lead to long-term, fulfilling happiness. There is no deductive argument I can offer for that; you just have to look at and observe human nature honestly to see it.
> Is your argument ignoring people who derive pleasure from harmful things because you don't know anyone like that"? That seems a bit of a hole in your point of view.
No, it's a turn of phrase. But I am making the point that the way I know what I know is by observing human beings. It is empirical.
Anyway, I didn't write my long comment (above) for you---I wrote it for someone who was asking a genuine question. Somebody who is instead just trying to defeat my argument can always go one step more fundamental until we cover all of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. I'm not going to do that on hacker news. You can go to philosophy books for that. People can certainly learn things from some of my comments, if they want to learn, but my comments are not very useful for debating/winning arguments, which is not what I am into. That said, I am happy to chat.
To put it more simply, yes, there are holes in my argument---because I am not going to wrie a philosophical treatise on here. You can fill the holes in yourself by thinking; it's left as an exercise for the reader. (However, there are not holes in the sense of fallacies or contradictions; that is not what I mean by "holes" here.)
That's a big "if", though. For others, stealing might increase one's pleasure. This decrease v. increase of pleasure about something is what's called an "opinion".
It's not objective if it changes based on who you ask and how you observe it.
> > It's not objective if it changes based on who you ask and how you observe it.
> Sure it is.
No, its not. "Objective" means, exactly, that its truth is not dependent on who you ask or how you observe; "subjective" is the word that describes claims that are dependent on those things.
If I get pleasure from doing X, that is an objective fact.
If I value Y, that is an objective fact.
Anyway, I'm not going to present a full epistemological theory of objectivity in the comments of HN. That would be futile. If you want to know about it, you can go research it. I don't mind chatting about it, I'm just pointing out that you can't expect too much from me here. Generally, the most I try to do in an online philosophical discussion is get people to think (when I disagree with them), not try to prove something. It's just not possible to prove much without, like, writing a book.
I think what javert meant is this:
The sentence "Goodness of stealing is directly proportional with the net pleasure." (positive net pleasure = good) is objective.
And the sentence "Badness of stealing is inversely proportional with the net pleasure" (negative net pleasure = bad) is equally objective.
These roughly convert to:
If stealing brings you pleasure it is good for you.
If stealing brings you pain it is bad for you.
If being stolen from brings you pleasure it is good for you.
If being stolen from brings you pain it is bad for you.
But to clarify for anyone wondering, I would also say that stealing is never pleasurable unless someone is severely fucked up, in which case overall their life is going to be unpleasurable (shitty) in general.
So it's not like my argument is an excuse to steal.
In fact, if I were to write it all out carefully, it would be the ultimate and most compelling justification for practically never stealing.
Contemporary academic philosophy is full of rigorous logic. Either you're ignorant of what actual academic philosophers do, or you can't recognize rigorous logic when you see it.
Sure, many academic philosophers produce good work, but as many popular articles of this nature are riddled with logical holes and give a poor impression of what philosophy is.
So universal human rights are not objectively good?
It's fairly easy to assert that some moral standards are objectively better.
Take slavery for example, society a practices it while society b does not. Which society gives a better environment for the whole of its people?
And the same thing can be extended to take your example, don't know why you've put in game theory into the mix, but in general people tend to live better lives where there is law and order rather than live a life under constant threat and having to be the biggest meanest SOB out there to feel safe.
Not to mention that when you live in a society in which your home and self can be raped and pillaged at any moment you tend to invest quite a bit of resources in protecting your own self.
While this can still be seen in society today e.g. Police forces, safes, guns etc. It's no where near the amount of resources that would be wasted if you would be living in the wild west.
While it might not be politically correct to think that you live in a society which is more moral and better than others, the truth is that if you live in the west you most likely live in one.
And and in fact he luxury of this life style is what allows you to live in that nice little bubble of political correctness.
I personally believe that moral equivalence (or relativism) leads to moral bankruptcy, and sadly too many people have gone under.
They promote the equivalence of the moral values of cultures with completely "different" moral values, values that sorry to say in many cases are objectively less "moral" than modern western values.
Cultures that if the roles would've been reversed would not only let them speak but would actively silence them.
And while i might agree that everything might be just an opinion as you would said, there just might be some opinions which are better than others.
I would like to live in a free and open society, a society that protects it's members and grants them as many rights as possible without hurting the rights of others and without devolving into anarchy.
I rather live in a society that does not practice slavery, where women are equals, and no one gives a fuck what is on your plate or who is in your bedroom.
And while you might think that a society that stones women for adultery and hangs homosexuals on construction cranes at the local square is just as moral correct as the one mentioned i would disagree.
And if you want to quantify that, just quantify the well being of its members, including the ones that would be stoned, hanged, or locked in prison for life for being of or attracted to the wrong sex or simply by promoting other ideas.
And yes there is a good reason why I've not continued to rebuttal on that "stealing from others" example you've given, because It's too simplistic and irrelevant. A society can be morally bankrupt and still practice law and order. And I'm pretty sure that you would not want to live in a society which either allows crime to be committed without consequences nor practices cruel and unusual punishment in some eye for an eye biblical fashion. Because as much as i would think that the guy who broke into my flat and got away with my TV deserves to pay for his crime (and get some help in the process) i don't think that a boy who stole a loaf of bread from the market should get his hand chopped off because the law says so.
Oh and of course this is all my opinion, but i think given the chance we know exactly in which society people would chose to live in.
What you are writing is exactly why I threw game theory into the mix. Game theory show strategies that given a certain set of rules are beneficial for the player or all players (for interesting example see Nash equilibrium). The example you have given in first paragraph, that forbidding slavery creates a better environment for the whole of it's people is exactly just that - showing one strategy to be more beneficial than the other. It's not showing that slavery is "objectively" wrong. I remember seeing a nature documentary where two species were explained to live in something that could be seen a master/slave symbiosis which benefited them both. (As a sidenote, I'm all against slavery and I do not accept causing harm to others no matter how beneficial it would be to myself).
You say that "people tend to live better lives" and "I would like to live in" etc. This is very subjective. As for quantifying wellbeing of members, we may ask if it's better for 100% of society to feel well, or is it better for 80% of society to feel fantastic and 20% miserable and in fear. It's again a matter of opinion and we can use mathematical concepts like game theory to better explain using formal methods why some moral values would be beneficial for us and other's not. That's why I threw it into the mix.
You also say that some opinions are better than others. This general statement is very dangerous and was used throughout the ages by proponents of slavery, racism etc. They definitely claim that their opinions are better than yours while you do otherwise. The thing is, some opinions are better to achieve certain goal given some set of circumstances, rules and participants. Acknowledging that opinions and moral values are not objectively right or wrong doesn't make us crazy to pursue those that we see as moving the society we live in in the direction we want.
The ignorance is much easier to process upon learning that the author works at an episcopal church and is on the committee of two "Societies of Christian Philosophers".
Hey! My eyes had just recovered! Stop that. To paraphrase, "In place of science, I present to you a digitally-leather-bound edition of the founding fathers (minus that Jefferson stuff about not being a Christian nation)! and a warning to not enter into serious argument with modern or post-modern thought and life. Best just to avoid winning that battle we always win (amongst ourselves) than to deal with the cognitive dissonance that we may all be desperately protecting the new version of that old Zeus stuff."
I sense a fear that many people don't know how to deal with the realization that their 5-8 year-olds, who have internalized "the golden rule" in a freedom-chasing culture, seem confused by their loving parents testing their openness to religious and/or social bigotry.
Where they see the loss of their sacred talisman, I see hope that our new generation is about to bring great levels of peace and joy to the world. I see the dawning of a bright future where people fluidly form communities instead of calcifying into tribes.
Not a single argument against moral relativism was put forth in this article. But they mentioned that there actually are moral facts ad nauseum without a reason.
"Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t."
Yes, yes, they are! Welcome to reality, a place where we can't even be sure it exists! I am proud of this educational system, teaching kids intellectual integrity and preventing them from accepting random statements as true facts just because someone repeats over and over again that they're true!
> I am proud of this educational system, teaching kids intellectual integrity and preventing them from accepting random statements as true facts just because someone repeats over and over again that they're true!
What about the teaching discussed in the article about there being no moral facts? Should kids accept this proposition just because the education system repeats it over and over again? The teaching itself is a statement with moral implications. Where is the proof for the statement itself?
> Welcome to reality, a place where we can't even be sure it exists!
This viewpoint also contains a truth claim. Taken to its logical conclusion, there would be no way to prove anything since it's all an illusion.
> Taken to its logical conclusion, there would be no way to prove anything since it's all an illusion.
Yep. And then you can either get to the island of the cogito and find you can't get off, or you end up shrugging and going with Shaw's great line about how skepticism is "logically impeccable, but psychologically impossible".
"All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
When I was a boy, if you wanted to talk philosophy you reasoned from first principles.
Apparently now you can just take whatever half-baked ideas you already have in your head, hold them as the truth, and wantonly criticize anyone or any system that slights those beliefs.
Also, we had to walk up hill both ways to school in the snow. /s
Turns out that living in a pluralistic, modern society makes it really hard to reason about moral truths when claimed moral facts are so tightly coupled to cultural baggage. I argue that from a practical perspective, our best bet is moral consensus.
> I argue that from a practical perspective, our best bet is moral consensus.
I took that as the point of the piece -- that there is no moral consensus. That even unalienable truths like, "All men are created equal" are being labelled as opinions and lumped in the same category as one's favorite color or sports team.
My takeaway was that OP genuinely believes there are moral absolutes that are not the subject of consensus, they just are. Consensus attempts to build something stable from a variety of (hopefully) evidenced opinions, but it's not necessarily linked to some objective, absolute reality. He's not criticizing a lack of moral consensus, he's saying that relying on consensus as opposed to absolutes encourages amoral behavior.
I would agree with the author that children shouldn't be only taught relativism, but I hope we can forgive a lack of nuance in 2nd-grade curricula. Having wiggle room and nuance in these conversations is part of how civilization has progressed, and that's stifled by the idea that all morality is derived from some semi-knowable perfect absolute reality.
I'd argue that "all men are created equal" is NOT an absolute moral truth, which is what I am sure you meant (unalienable means unable to be taken away). It's something I feel very strongly to be true, but it's something we have collectively agreed upon as a society. There are plenty of people who consider themselves to be moral people who don't feel that way.
Unalienable rights can be abused, but not taken away. If someone is murdered by a dictator for his opinions, that is wrong regardless of the legality of the action, the power imbalance in play, or the "personal morality" of the dictator. That is, the human right to life was violated.
> I'd argue that "all men are created equal" is NOT an absolute moral truth... There are plenty of people who consider themselves to be moral people who don't feel that way.
The 'absolute' isn't about unanimity. It's about truth regardless of disagreement. That's the way truth works. Some people think humans never visited the Moon. And they're wrong. As were the Boston bombers, as was Ariel Castro, as was Bernie Madoff.
We then had this conversation:
Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”
Him: “It’s a fact.”
Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”
Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”
Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”
What I meant was, his son's blank stare is exactly my reaction as a 30 year old adult --- I can't comprehend how this guy doesn't comprehend how stupid his questions are.
Could you please explain why you think this guy's questions are stupid? They seemed like good questions to me. His son's school's definitions of "fact" and "opinion" seem to not be mutually exclusive, which seems to contradict the implicit assumptions in the exercises assigned to the students.
Oh, I took the school's definition as mutually exclusive --- and I assumed the son did as well.
I didn't see how it was not --- and so the line of questioning seemed to be willfully ignorant of that mutual exclusivity.
We have "not ripe" and "ripe" apples.
Is this apple "ripe"?
But see this part of it here isn't ripe!
So it's both ripe and non ripe --- ergo, you were taught wrong to distinguish between ripe and not ripe!
I found myself nodding in agreement with the school and it's separation of values/morality/opinion from facts/truth.
It's all just words, lines we use to divide, but they seem to be drawing nice solid lines --- whilst the parental unit that wrote the article seems remarkably confused about the factualness of his own beliefs.
No, you just probably never thought about what "knowing" actually means. Put simply, he wasn't there when Washington was President so he can only believe that historical resources are telling the truth.
You have just successfully banished the word by stripping it of any legitimate usage.
Since it was quite a useful word that will undoubtedly be missed, why not being it back with a simple redefinition. We could redefine it as "close enough to true that only a philosopher would object". Then we could continue to use the word, despite the obnoxious objections of philosophers.
Epistemology may be all very neat and interesting, but in the real world there is little place for it. We frequently need to express ideas that may not necessarily be "philosophically pure", in order to get shit done in a timely manner. Think of the concept of "fact" as foma.
Of course I'm not nitpicking on every usage of the word, but I think it's everyone should at some point think about what knowing and reality actually is. It doesn't matter most of the time, but there are moments in history when someone wants to tell you that 2+2=5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_%2B_2_%3D_5
> "Of course I'm not nitpicking on every usage of the word"
It is great that you aren't. The issue is that the author of the article was nitpicking a non-controversial use of the word. His son's responses to him suggest to me that his son was sick of his philosophical shit and just wanted to deal with the world pragmatically. Most people have little patience for epistemology, and I find it hard to blame them.
Moral 'facts' require a universal standard of morality. It's hard to come up with a truly universal standard. The best answer I've seen is: Man's life.
"Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil." -Ayn Rand [1]
It progresses the discussion to there, by being a first principle of morality. From there, with a definition of rationality, "what is proper to the life a rational being" can be answered. For example, death is not proper to the life a rational being. From that follows certain things to avoid. Using this logic, those things would be morally wrong.
The author declines to demonstrate to the reader that there are moral facts.
He attempted reductiones ad absurdum fall completely flat, e.g.,
> If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged?
...As if nobody has ever been outraged on the basis of their opinions!
He also fails to even mention what a moral fact would consist of. He doesn't say whether he agrees with this definition:
> Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
But clearly if one takes this position, there are no moral facts. What would constitute moral proof?
My guess is that the author is crypto-monotheist. With a God around, you could say that a moral claim is God's will, and even if we can't prove it there is a fact of the matter. In a godless world, there is no basis on which a moral claim could be a fact.
> Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
That could be some positivist definition.
But in general a fact is something held or believed to be true, in that context it doesn't matter if it's self evident, deduced from other facts, known through experience, etc. Also that means some largely held facts can be just plain wrong.
The OP's mistake is to characterize all "moral facts" as simple binary answers. Cheating = bad. Killing = wrong. Those are too simple. That they are labeled opinion does not imply that there aren't any not-simple moral facts.
"Cheating undermines meritocracies and is therefor frowned upon by those in control of such."
I'd say that qualifies as a moral fact and most all would call it an accurate description of a state of affairs, a fact.
"All men are created equal" is not a fact, or even an opinion imho. It is a hope, a dream of people trying to describe an ideal state of affairs. That it isn't a "fact" doesn't mean that it cannot be something to believe in and strive for.
Your description of cheating presents facts, but there is nothing moral about them, except in that they are facts that explain why one group of people may prefer another group of people to accept something as a moral truth. (Which isn't what people generally mean when they asset the existence or nonexistence of "moral facts")
"All men are created equal", if we're talking about what Thomas Jefferson wrote, means all human beings are equally deserving of rights and possess equal worth. It does not refer to objective criteria like intelligence, beauty, strength, etc.
This is a popular far right talking point, fear or "moral relativism" and the ridiculous assertion that millions of kids are being indoctrinated into it by public schools. It's horse shit.
>Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.
Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake ...
Two decades ago, when I was in elementary school, we were taught pretty much the exact same thing. If someone states something is a fact, demand proof.
And for children, this is good enough. When they grow up to be pedantic associate professors of philisophy, they may feel free to expand on the above definitions.
Sure, it’s a mistake to treat facts and beliefs as disjoint. But moral relativism is the only honest position—we do not know what’s morally right, nor do we know whether right things even exist, nor can we necessarily prove these things even though we believe them. So we pragmatically follow evidence and try to treat people decently in an ad-hoc fashion.
More to the point, if a teacher teaches kids any specific absolute moral system, many of their parents will be upset with it. So the school system only allows teachers to teach what is essentially agnosticism—the absence of a moral position.
The examples from the article can all be dismissed by simple descriptivism:
> If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged?
A person can be outraged for any reason they want. It happens that this kind of thing outrages a lot of people.
> If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity?
We can, and do, do so arbitrarily. It happens that a lot of people agree on what “crimes against humanity” entail.
> If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?
Humans are occasionally altruistic for some reason.
Isn’t it more interesting to investigate the reasons for why so many humans believe these things than to endlessly conduct the same debates about truth, provability, and knowledge?
None of the examples come close to moral fact. (The author wasn't claiming they all were moral fact, but he suggests without being specific that at least some of them ought to be.)
— Copying homework assignments is wrong.
A situational ethic.
— Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.
A situational ethic.
— All men are created equal.
Objectively false.
— It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism.
Too vague to be either fact or opinion.
— It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol.
A situational ethic.
— Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.
"Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat."
I don't think this is an example of something that was ever "proved".
Nevertheless, I feel like the author's grasping for straws in his unwillingness to admit that morality is subjective and situational. He's done nothing to prove that moral values can or should be considered "facts" instead of (or in addition to, as he's advocating) opinions.
I think if you could show that certain morals were genetic and present in the majority, rather than learned, you'd have a basis for calling those moral facts for humans.
I think you would quickly have to conclude that rape, murder, sexism and racism are genetic facts about humans; they're shared with the other animals we're descended from, and they've been part of our history forever. I think if we held this definition, morality would not be very useful as a concept.
Here's an old debate between (professor) Peter Singer and (judge) Richard Posner, where Posner holds this claim that morality is based on these "tenacious moral intuitions" and Singer argues against him: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dialogues/fe...
Ability to perform an action doesn't impact on its morality.
I would guess that empathy is genetic, and so a moral fact might be that causing undeserved pain to someone with whom you can empathise with is wrong. "Undeserved" of course is wooly at the point of expression.
Fear of death I'd guess to also be genetic, so another moral fact might be that suicide outside of an overriding other moral purpose being wrong might constitute "moral fact", although like the last example, its expression is clouded by other non-fact morals that come in to play.
Incest taboo seems to be genetically expressed too, so you can probably include that.
It sounds like you're cherry-picking which moral instincts you believe to be genetic, ignoring the ones you don't approve of. Why include empathy but not racism?
I don't think the author of this would accept this as a fact. There could be things that intellectually we can generally agree are bad that humans might be genetically predisposed to being ok with (e.g. I don't think it would be extremely surprising if humans are predisposed towards certain forms of murder or sexual assault).
"It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on."
What if we say "cheating is not allowed". Can we blame them then?
The likelihood that human definition of life DOESN'T exist elsewhere in the universe is infinitesimally small. That's not make it a fact that life DOES exist. We just shouldn't be surprised when they arrive to probe the OP.
The most plausible definition I can think of involves stating your metaethics (e.g. utilitarianism) and then showing evidence that there is a reliably-reached conclusion for a claim under those ethics.
Like, I don't know: "Under utilitarianism, if you are comparatively rich, it is wrong not to attempt to relieve the suffering of people in extreme poverty, because you can do so very cheaply in comparison to the happiness gain you could cause for other people as rich as you". I'd say that's a moral fact.
They're things that seem to exist for people who believe in absolute morality stemming from a higher power. Let's just ignore the problem that no two people who believe in absolute morality can seem to exactly agree on what is absolutely moral and what isn't.
I mean they are facts in that most everyone agrees on them, which is one usage of the word "fact". But they're not facts in the same way as "the sun will rise tomorrow" or "2 + 2 = 4" (which those statements themselves are two different types of fact also!).
No, facts are facts even if no one can prove it. It's just that if you can't prove it, you can't know if a certain claim (like "the sun rose today") is actually a fact or not.
I think what icebraining was trying to say is:
A fact is not a opinion that is proven to be true.
A fact is a opinion that is true and can be proven to be true even if we don't yet know how. In which case we simply don't yet know that said opinion is a fact.
I'm not sure if this definition is correct but I'm fairly certain this is what icebraining meant.
This is the problem I have with many philosophers. In the whole text you cannot find a single strong logical evidence. Everything is just an opinion.
It is impossible to prove that e.g. "stealing from others" is universally "bad". It may not be a beneficial strategy in a game theory, or maybe some statistical analysis can show societies are better off with this rule, or just that people sleep better knowing that others can't steal. But neither of this is universally true for humanity in general, and there are examples in game theory were cheating actually is a winning strategy.