I think that is probably the principle flaw with contemporary philosophy. Namely that philosophy teachers (and enthusiasts) seem to know a lot about preceding philosophy (which I refer to as philosophology), but often inadequate amounts of scientific (and occasionally historical) knowledge that should be considered when applying philosophy.
@@Pengalen Yes, but it applies to many fields the same way. In particular scientists (I am a science teacher myself) these days do have a habit of making philosophical (eg metaphysical) claims which are outside their area of expertise. And sometimes it really shows. All of us humans need to get good at knowing when we are 'walking on thin ice' by reasoning based on potentially weak understanding. It's hard, because it's very hard to know what you don't know. But we can develop a bit of a feel for 'hmm, I don't feel comfortable with the level of detail I can go to on this subject' and Jeffrey seems to do a good job of that bit.
Yes, given that such consensus would for practical reasons be restricted to a select population. It's a big universe, after all, and even a perfect consensus within one species can't be said to be objective in any sense. It would at best perfectly represent the SUBJECTIVE views of that species.
No, it merely argues that if objective truth existed about it we should have a decent consensus of opinion. It fails at recognising we would need some way to know that objective truth. To take part of their example, if it is raining the ground is wet. This does not mean that if it is not raining the ground will not be wet, as there are other ways the ground can be wet. Likewise, objective truths offer a simple way to obtain consensus of opinion, but it is not the only way.
What I get from his explanation is that there are certain moral claims which no one questions because their truth seems self-evident due to their practicality having being proven time and again. Then there are relative claims that are true based on their specific characteristics like geographical area and(or) environment. My understanding is that those truths that people around the world follow even if they have not come into contact with each other would have the closest label to an objective truth seeing that it is not environment or idiosyncratic differences in one's culture that has contributed to their creation but something of a universal nature of the human experience. In short moral truth pertain to actions in the world, they concerned with what is the best course of action(which are within our control) in a given scenario, scientific facts or truths are concerned rather with the arbitrary nature of objects in nature(which we do not control). Which means moral truths are concerned with "liability" or "a blameworthy state of mind" not events beyond our control. Scientific truths matter because human beings are interested in acting in the world in order to bring about certain results, in order to do that it helps if you know what that world is made out of. Ultimately we seek knowledge so that we may act with more insight or wisdom, call it refinement.
I appreciate your valiant effort to steelman an argument which states that moral truths are not real for failing to unanimously win a popularity contest
I'm at 10:38 so if he addresses this later, I don't know yet There is a very obvious rebuttal to this: Morality is something we make, something we feel. Physics is something that has nothing to do with us. It was there before us and it will continue to be there after us. There are observable truths and only observable truths. We can debate about why things happen (theories, which is why they're called theories. But keep in mind that Gravity is a theory) but we can not debate about what is there and what is observable, because whether you are looking at this through a screen is not debatable. It is a truth that you would be delusional to debate But also: I think that even if there is even one person who disagrees with a moral theory (and there always will be, for everything) it is not objective. If you have to ignore (an) opinion(s) for your theory to ring true, your theory is fallible The statement "murder is wrong" depends on the assumption that a human life matters and that the consequences afflicted on those who cared about the victim also matter, but what happens when someone thinks life has no inherent value and that people's emotional pain and trials are a necessary part of life, a right of passage as one might say and should not be avoided. As much as you might disagree with this, it doesn't matter, because it is that person's foundation, and people's foundations are based on how people feel. The concept that emotional pain matters and is bad has just as much logic in it as the reverse. It doesn't have logic in it. It's just an emotional conclusion. There is nothing for you to logically disagree with You can't disregard it because it's too out there, too extreme, because that's not an argument. You can't disregard it because they're challenging basic principles, because who decided what basic principles are? If we are allowed to disagree on if a woman's body (and sometimes life) matters more than the parasite within her, why are we not able to disagree on if a human life has inherent value? And also just: Declaring basic, objective truths that we all agree on and then refusing to listen to people who disagree on those truths is just bad debate Just because a moral standing is rare does not mean it is wrong or inherently untrue. The very fact that the basis of morality is a foundation of emotions makes it subjective because emotions are subjective 42:48 It's number 1 that is fallible. Make an argument that morality is objective (that does not depend on the existence of a God or the validity of a religion. Until that is proven, it cannot be a basis for an argument in a scientific sphere) that is not based off of perceiving emotions or perceptions (such as the concept of value) as factual. I dare you
Just a disclaimer: I'm still interested in "objective" morality and even use a lot of the practices in my own life. I'm not here just to disagree and be like "lul all theories bad because morality subjective." I just also accept that my "objective" morality is subjective and is using an emotion based foundation. For example, I believe hurting people is bad (with few exceptions for like self defense and necessity, etc. and the exact perimeters of this is a thing but yeah) and I accept that I have no logical basis for that. I accepted that I don't like being hurt and thus don't want to see others hurt. I realize that if I were to not experience emotion, I would not necessarily think this. But I also think that's ok (and this isn't really a "have trouble seeing yourself in their shoes" situation. Just because we don't like being hurt, does that make it bad? Why? What makes our perspectives and wants mean anything or deserve any consideration? There's nothing that logically gives us any value or inherent respect to be heard. It's all emotional) However, even foundational beliefs that I couldn't even find an emotional reason for were ditched. Emotional beliefs that I could find human error in were ditched. My foundational emotional beliefs can give way to analysis, even if it's not purely logical analysis
Surely the dilemmas arise only because one is trying to denote 'true' or 'false' to morals whose impacts upon people are ultimately subjective. If nobody had any subjective feelings about anything, or ever felt pain or pleasure, there'd be no need for morality. The things that appear most morally 'true' are simply those things that have the most universal subjective effect. But that is not the same as an actual objective moral 'truth' that exists independently of that subjective experience.
@@howlrichard1028 Not deeply examined, but: A truly omnipotent and sovereign God sets the standards, the standards don't exist outside of an omnipotent and omniscient God. such a God can create any world, even ones that would be incoherent to a nominally sane human. There are arguments that (a) God works to produce this universe such that it is coherent to humans.
If you argue that there are no morals not based on maximizing pleasure or minimizing pain then the example of one moral that is not based on that shows weakness in the argument. And one that actually causes more pain and less pleasure would be counter to your argument. You could take a look at Kant's argument vs Utilitarian argument on what you should do in the case of a justice seeking mob against an innocent man scenario where you could protect the man from the mob who would then go on to cause harm to a town or frame the man and let the mob have there justice. Kant would argue that framing the man is never permitted, while Utilitarianism would argue to frame the man to minimize the pain. In the Kantian case the morals would cause you to actually maximize the pain experienced by the majority. On another point. The argument can be made that even without any gods, be they monotheistic or polythestic, that there are still objective morals. And those arguments are those being put forward, as you can see those arguments don't need a God for them to be true. The argument that the only reason people are moral is due to there being (a) god/gods could be seen as a concite that you those people who believe in a god are amoral and that they only act in a moral way due to the threat of punishment. That in and of itself would be seen as very jarring.
@@Randy14512 There are certainly moral judgements based on rational considerations, generally of what produces the most desirable outcome to the one making the decision. Ultimately it comes down to preference, even if the preference is relatively far removed from the immediate question. Deodontic ethics punts the grounding of particular ethic obligations. Utilitarianism fails to escape the ultimate endpoint that the greatest good for the greatest number is 'best', which is a choice of preference, or the greatest good produces the best situation for the decision maker, again a choice of preference. "The argument can be made that even without any gods, be they monotheistic or polythestic, that there are still objective morals. And those arguments are those being put forward, as you can see those arguments don't need a God for them to be true." I don't see those arguments as being proved or even compelling. "The argument that the only reason people are moral is due to there being (a) god/gods could be seen as a conceit that you those people who believe in a god are amoral and that they only act in a moral way due to the threat of punishment.". People who believe in an objectively existing moral standard may also simply want to be good in their own eyes regardless of reward or punishment, or that it produces the most desirable outcome and that itself is justification to follow the ethical code, regardless of rewards or punishments. Deodontics and Utilitarianism really don't depend on the existence of a god to enforce rewards and punishments. "That in and of itself would be seen as very jarring." And? What if it is seen as very jarring by one or more persons?
A lot of people agree on subjective things. Dogs have bad breath. Sunsets are beautiful. These things don't become objective truths because people agree on them.
The argument has to concern primarily: can subjective morals exist? is "objective" an essential property or "morality"; are all morals objective? The answer I argue for is that because of the fact subjective morals exist, objective morals can exist but morality itself or morals themselves cannot be defined as objective. Therefore objective is only potentially a non-essential property. A temporal and contextually-dependent/mitigated property. For instance, someone stealing a loaf of bread to prevent starvation of themselves or those also vulnerable, and someone stealing a luxury good, despite being able to consensually obtain such an item through a fair and equal exchange, are the exact same behaviour which we apply a system of morals to. There isn't a system of morals that would equate these actions because their contexts are changing the same core action of stealing into a different morality. If morality changes with differing circumstances, and objectivity means that regardless of circumstance, some things are always wrong to do, then morality itself cannot be defined as purely objective, at the bare minimum. At the totality of this analysis lies the claim that objective and moral are mutually exclusive terms which necessarily and definitively contradict. This is not what I argue however. I argue that objective morality definitely exists, but because of the nature of morality itself, can only exist under specific circumstances and in a limited capacity. Therefore it means that morality itself is mostly non-objective. What else comprises morality is for nearly everyone, a great mystery that still has yet to be solved. We can say that health is made up of blood pressure, liver function, brain activity and many other things. But even if we pinned down everything and made tables describing the precise objective measurements by which the sum total of a person's health can be assessed, we would still not have an absolute or perfect definition of health. Likewise, we can say that morality is found in compassion and not being impulsively cruel due to repressed emotional pain and many other things. But again the same problem emerges. No perfect definition is arrived at, even with all its properties accounted for, analysed and measured. Because in our minds we know, that a perfect definition of morality would imply that a person who does everything (that because of its borderline existence cannot be defined as necessarily immoral) but who consciously tries to get as close as possible to the line, is a good person by definition obtained from our perfect definition of morality. Even still, intuitively we know that the person who pokes and prods at the borderline of rules is an immoral person because they are trying to get away with, being as close to immorality as is acceptable and unpunishable, which is it itself necessarily immoral, but with a perfect definition of morality, would have to be defined as acceptably moral. With a perfect formula for how murder is justifiable, we enable murderers to get away with their crimes unpunished, and we cause more murders to occur. A perfect definition with no vagueness at all would very much so enable far more immoral acts to occur so long as they were falsely dressed up as moral acts. To extend the metaphor from health. In the same sense that a heart swells and shrinks, so does the boundary of what we consider to be, and what necessarily is and is not, moral. And like a heart is considered the emotional and preferential, so too, in part, is morality.
I take issue with the assertion that there are some moral claims that are so universally agreed upon that they can be held to be objectively true 'moral facts'. What level of general agreement is sufficient for them to fall into this category, and who gets to make that call? And even when you say something like 'almost everyone agrees that murder is wrong', you have to remember that different societies define 'murder' differently. For the vast majority of human history many people did not consider the killing of out-group people or certain subjugated classes of individuals (e.g. slaves, serfs) to be murder. Though there is inarguably less of that sort of thinking now, those sorts of sentiments are still broadly held in some places.
funny you mentioned string theory in that context - it (or some of its sub-theories) currently appears to be untestable, so might actually be a good candidate for becoming one of those long-lasting (or "very persistent") debates.... :D
In the free will as an illusion, it is irrelevant when it comes to deciding whether or not someone is responsible for their actions or not. If your TV stops working, you’re going to repair it or replace it. Nobody ever said “my tv stopped working, but its not the TVs fault. The TV doesn’t have free will, therefore, I will not take actions toward it.” Having or not having free will has nothing to do with responsibility. It’s important to be empathetic and understand that the person had a life and grew up from a baby to an adult, just like everyone else. If that person turns out to be dangerous for society, then free will or not free will is out of the question.
What you haven’t considered is that both must be linked in this paradoxical way. If there are no objective moral claims then being certain of moral skepticism suggests an objective moral claim in subjectivity. Hence, moral skepticism being wrong seems Gödel-like in disallowing an unequivocal consistency or completeness to this stance.
"murder is wrong" only seems important and useful to this discussion if you don't think about what the word "murder" means. Expand the terms and you get "Killing someone when it is wrong to kill them is wrong" ...and the weakness of that statement becomes obvious. For it to mean anything, you have to get into the specifics of under what circumstances killing is wrong and under what circumstances it can be justified and as soon as you try and do *that* all that seeming agreement you had evaporates. The other two go-tos for something safely considered "bad" are rape and theft, but you won't actually get very strong agreement on the universal wrongness of theft and probably no one will *admit* to you that they think rape is permissible the relevant statistics show that in practice there's no shortage of people who are kinda "meh" on that one. (And if you really need someone to admit it you only need to look in the right sort of cesspit.) And slavery? America couldn't even quite bring itself to outlaw slavery. You don't actually have these points of common agreement unless you use sloppy language. But I don't think this is the real argument against objective morality. I think the real argument against objective morality is "What are you even talking about?" Because the majority of people who claim to believe objective moral values exist can't tell me. It's not just that people disagree about what correct morals are. It goes so much deeper than that. It's that they can't say what it would actually mean for something to be objectively morally correct. What *is* an objective moral fact? How do we detect it? If we can't detect it, then in what sense does it even exist? This is not quite like God or unicorns, which more or less exist or don't exist regardless of our feelings on the matter, because it is a sort of declaration about our correct behaviour. What is a declaration no one can ever know about? What is the difference between an objective moral fact and an idea about morality that is very popular across time and cultures? What would it mean for something we commonly consider to be repugnant to be objectively morally true? If I disagree with some moral claim and then you could somehow prove to me it was "objectively" correct, why should I care? Why should I modify my behavior? If I shouldn't, then what's so objective about it? These are the sorts of questions a person could answer about a firm concept. It's not like God or a unicorn, where we can say what we mean by "God" or "unicorn" and proceed from there. There's no such thing as an objective moral fact for the same reason there's no such thing as Memretikal. For there to be any such thing, the phrase would have to actually refer to something.
I very much appreciated your logic here, especially around using murder as an objective moral fact is begging the question. The discussion of what is really a moral fact in the first place and how do we know always gets poisoned by religion. I think if you take that out of the equation as an answer, you will always end up at subjectivity. And the human condition is simply that we have to get comfortable with that answer.
The first problem with moral objectivism is that you are initially left with two choices: Either there are no moral absolutes that exist independent of people, in which case we make the best morals we can as we can, or there are moral absolutes but we don't know what they are exactly so we we make the best morals we can as we can. The belief of moral objectivism always falls into a practice of moral skepticism. The second and much larger problem with moral objectivism is this: There are moral absolutes that exist independent of people and you don't know what those are, but I do. Therefore, your behavior must conform to my understanding of those moral absolutes. No, I won't show them or prove them to you and yes, I will change the claims over time, but you must conform because I know and you don't.
Well, that was interesting. I don't think I'm particularly good at this stuff just yet, but I immediately saw a seriously bad leap in logic from saying something about "some" moral claims as in #2, to inferring in #3 that "all" moral claims are not objectively true. In other words, I don't think the argument as originally given was logically consistent at all, but rather obviously not so. It seems so much simpler just to change #1 to say, "Some moral claims are subject to (very) persistent disagreement," and then change #3 to say, "Therefore, some moral claims cannot be said to be objectively true." On the surface, at least, this sound far more logically consistent. I have a feeling someone's going to say that this doesn't serve the moral skeptics very well, though. 🤪
I caught that too. At about 1:56 "[If there is some disagreement] then there are no objective universal moral truths." That's a basic error in predicate logic. More plausibly, we're interested in knowing whether there could be ANY objective universal moral truths. Of course we'd first need to be rigorous about what we mean by "moral truth," and that is certainly part of the problem, if not the central problem. If there is significant disagreement on the way to establishing an objective DEFINITION, then we really can't hope to proceed further with our inquiry. What distinguishes a "moral truth" from an ordinary truth? Is it sufficient to say that it's what distinguishes an "ought" from an "is?" In that case, any idealization or description of Platonic form is a moral truth (a Platonic triangle is how triangles"ought" to be) whereas empirical statements of fact (triangular artifacts, though real, are only approximations) are ordinary truths. Mathematical proofs, under this definition, are ordinary truths, but axioms would be moral truths. This could be a critical distinction. Proofs can be observed, so they're like empirical facts. Axioms are granted, so clearly they represent an idealization. This isn't our usual sense of moral truth - it seems to be a much smaller set, for one thing - but it can be objectively assessed. And there's a further advantage in examining this smaller set, because if we can find ANY examples of objective moral truths from this smaller and perhaps more tractable set, our most essential work will be done. But look at what happens when we try. Such candidate "moral truths" as Platonic forms and axioms are not objective facts, they are granted. Some AGENT is doing the granting, and that makes them subjective. So it's a bit tricky to claim, with this sort of perfect rigor, that there are objective moral truths. That's not the end of it, of course. Maybe the distinction between "ought" and "is" doesn't quite capture what we mean. Or maybe we can just declare that it's good enough. For that matter, we could just declare that ordinary truths could also be moral truths. (I don't know if we could reach universal agreement on this, but it's worth looking at.) Now we can look for well-known objective truths, ordinary truths, that could also qualify as moral truths. We'll stay for now with "ought" because it's an easy test to administer. Euclid proved that √2 is an irrational number. OUGHT it to be rational instead? After all, integer ratios such as p/q are easy to work with? No, because it's a (proof-theoretic) fact that it's irrational. Oh, so we OUGHT to call it irrational, because it IS irrational. Yes, I grudgingly suppose. And we OUGHT not to misrepresent facts. Aha. So it's perhaps not just "ought" that distinguishes moral truth. There's also the need for agency and choice. But AGENCY is subjective. We can't include any of those moral truths in our list of candidates. And that may leave us with "ought" being invariably a synonym for "is," in other words nothing more than objective facts. The moral aspect has been extinguished. This is not an exhaustive analysis. But so far, the quest for some nonempty set of objective moral truths does not look at all promising. Wherever we look, these truths are either subjectively moral or objectively ordinary. It does seem intuitively obvious that agency and choice are critical for establishing a moral aspect to any truth. Unless all agents are in some respect objectively alike, we don't have even the possibility of a case.
This is a mathematical and logic statement basically stating that if there is an exception to a set that must be included in the set for it to exist than said set cannot exist.
@@gabrielpeterson2079 It's a property of SET THEORY, not of mathematics or logic. And while it holds in "naive" set theory, it's been resolved in ZFC. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_theory
@Dan Razzell I see set theory as a subset of math, which is a subset of logic and reasoning. With that said how can a set exist if something that should exist in that set can clearly not exist in that set?
@@starfishsystemscould this issue be then resolved if the Architect-Agent is a supposedly objective deity like a God? Or would any Agent ever have to also be a perfect being to act objectively?
A big difference between moral claims and scientific claims is that it is believed that in the case of scientific claims, there might someday be evidence that would resolve the matter. If string theory predicts that under such and such conditions, such and such will be observed, and we check and see that yes, it does, or no, it doesn't, then our belief in the correctness of string theory will go up or down (if not reach certainty). On the other hand, moral questions are not going to be resolved by observation. If they are resolved at all, it will be because the people favoring one answer turn out to have superior arguments than those favoring a different answer (or maybe just times and culture changes, so that we decide, collectively, that we no longer find one answer to be palatable). That's the big distinction between moral beliefs (or philosophical belief--other philosophical issues might be in the same boat here) and scientific truth. Holding the wrong scientific belief has consequences. Your planes crash, your medicines don't work, you fail to predict the weather, etc. But moral beliefs don't seem to have consequences in the same way. Of course, which moral beliefs you hold has consequences, but the truth of those beliefs don't have separate consequences, it seems to me.
Gödel incompleteness (there are two theorems) concerns the limits of provability within formal systems: that is, the conceptual or ideal world. Morality, as I understand it, concerns evaluating the effects of agency in the material world, and it has to be measured in terms of the material world. That's not to say that formal systems have nothing to tell us about the material world. Mathematics certainly informs science. But ultimately science has to be tested against the material world and not some (possibly more elegant) ideas about how things might be. Moral ideas will inevitably face a similar challenge. Some formal propositions are undecidable. But of course many are completely decidable, which means we can be sure of certain claims, for example the irrationality of √2. In cases such as this, we can be certain that we're certain. Now, what about moral propositions? Can ANY, even a single one, of these be formalized without some essential quality being lost? I think not. If they could, we would be working in the realm of optimization or decision theory or something of the sort, as a reliable proxy for moral agency. These tentative proxies can be useful in pushing for clarity in what we mean by, say, moral optimization. The Trolley Problem, for example, seems at first glance to be a simple optimization problem. But psychological test subjects don't agree. They're not very happy with optimization where moral concerns are engaged. They ARE happy with optimization on more morally neutral ground such as monetary reward. So we turn to decision theory and within it try to generate weighted values for various choices. It would be all right, under decision theory, for a yea decision to weigh differently than its inverse nay decision. Passively allowing many people to die might be subjectively preferable to actively allowing few people to die. But again, test subjects are not happy when shown this analysis either. They object to reducibility in any form, out of what I take to be genuine concern for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Now here's the thing about human morality. It DERIVES from the human condition. It doesn't DEFINE it. It's akin to some algorithm coming up with the perfect flavor. The algorithm may be extremely elegant, highly proof theoretic, and take every known human factor into account besides, and we could honestly expect that people SHOULD love it. But the only test that matters is whether in fact they do. That's a gap that can't be closed within the space of formal systems, and may not be amenable to consistent empirical laws either. The true answer may well be "it depends." We're products of natural selection, after all. Don't expect uniform reducibility. So Gödel doesn't really have anything to tell us here. I'm sorry to say this, I really am. But these are worlds apart.
@@starfishsystems I'm not particularly concerned with human moral conscious. I see no reason why objective morality would be determined by it. I take objective morality to be a formal system and thus I see Gödel's incompleteness as fully applicable. Under this lens, expecting morality to be provable, let alone easily provable, is rather absurd.
The incompleteness theorems don't say nothing can be proven at all in a formal system. They say not everything can be proven in a formal system. It's possible that the "things that cannot be proven" are extremely niche and/or not excessively important. Note that it also stipulates that there can't be any contradiction. If you allow unrestricted contradictions in your system, everything is provable (ex falso quodlibet). It is therefore not necessarily applicable to this video. It just means that there's a third value in any possible argument aside from "true" or "false"; "indeterminable", which is what the argument against objective morality is trying to show is the case here for all of morality. Keep in mind that "morality" could be considered a subsystem of a greater system, in which case Godel's theory wouldn't say anything meaningful about it.
@@GynxShinx Morality, as generally understood, concerns the effect of choices in the physical world and only the physical world. It therefore makes no sense to treat it purely as a formalism. Such an effort would be vacuous. The best that you might attempt would involve showing, empirically, that some formal model is plausibly correlated with the physical properties of morality (and note that these are not at all broadly agreed, given that we are still debating whether morality is subjective or objective) and then proceed to investigate conjectures suggested by that model. If you're aware of any significant work in this area, please share it.
"Modern Science" can be said to have originated with the first development of what we now call the "scientific method", which is widely attributed to Ibn al-Haytham in the early 11th Century.
This analysis is the kind of second or third order thinking that needs to be applied by the public to basically every political claim ever spoken, because many of them fail at that point, yet they are persistently believed by a lot of people. It seems like this kind of analysis itself (is this argument self defeating of the claim it is being put forth to support) should be a whole topic in philosophy itself, that should probably be a freshman topic. It didn't exist when I got my philosophy degree, so I'm betting it is not a widespread topic.
my perspective is that the fundamental requirement for objectivity, of any sort, is perfect and complete understanding of all relevant things. as to know something without any possibility of doubt, you must either be unreasonably confident in a potentially wrong idea, or you must have all relevant knowledge of and relating to a thing, which is at the very least unreasonably unlikely. but even worse, to be absolutely certain that no other information is relevant to a thing, you must fully understand *all* knowledge in general to rule out anything that might undermine your potentially justified certainty of a thing. so to be absolutely certain of anything, without any possibility that you could be wrong, you would have to be literally omniscient, and no human is omniscient as far as i can tell. an analogy of this issue would be knowing for sure that the code for a program you wrote is flawless without knowing all the ways your program could be used. you might have perfect knowledge of everything directly related to your program, but you might not know the exact environment of every computer that will ever run that program. to be sure that your program will never fail in any way, you would not only need to have perfect knowledge of every computer that currently exists, but you would need to have all knowledge relating to computers in general to make sure that no future computers could ever cause your program to fail TL;DR to have absolute certainty without absolute understanding seems like little more than absolute confidence, which can be demonstrated to be atleast inconsistent with anything akin to absolute understanding extra: though its reasonable to suggest that an omniscient being would either atleast be able to have objective morals, if not be forced to have objective morals as a part of their omniscience, you yourself would have to have omniscience to know for sure that this being truly is omniscient, in the same since that you need to know atleast as much about a subject as another person does to be sure that they are correct in their assertions about it. we cant be sure that a supposedly omniscient being truly is omniscient and isnt just sufficiently more intelligent than us that they can convince us that they're omniscient without actually being so. e.g. if i dont know enough about chess to be sure that someone isnt mistaken about how the knight moves, i would have no proper basis for disagreeing with them even if they were actually wrong. and if someone else pointed out the supposed mistake, i still couldnt know for sure if that other person is correct or not either. if you dont know, you dont know. even if someone else supposedly does know, you cant know for sure if they truly know, ya know?
What I get from his explanation is that there are certain moral claims which no one questions because their truth seems self-evident due to their practicality having being proven time and again. Then there are relative claims that are true based on their specific characteristics like geographical area and(or) environment. My understanding is that those truths that people around the world follow even if they have not come into contact with each other would have the closest label to an objective truth seeing that it is not environment or idiosyncratic differences in one's culture that has contributed to their creation but something of a universal nature of the human experience. In short moral truth pertain to actions in the world, they concerned with what is the best course of action(which are within our control) in a given scenario, scientific facts or truths are concerned rather with the arbitrary nature of objects in nature(which we do not control). Which means moral truths are concerned with "liability" or "a blameworthy state of mind" not events beyond our control. Scientific truths matter because human beings are interested in acting in the world in order to bring about certain results, in order to do that it helps if you know what that world is made out of. Ultimately we seek knowledge so that we may act with more insight or wisdom, call it refinement.
I had to add my reply from an earlier reply because I didn't want to type it all over again and wanted to use here for this reply. Now on to my reply. Omniscience and understanding are moot points. One does not have to understand the sun in order for the sun to have objective truth. The sun is shining is an example of an objective truth, whether you are blind or cannot feel it or you asleep matters not, understanding on the other hand is a subjective trait. Your understanding of a particular object of knowledge is based on your past experiences, your curiosity, your passions or interests and whether such knowledge exists in your culture like a library. What I understand about moral objective truths is that it is a truth which everyone is aware of whether they are conscious of it or not and those who are conscious of it and use it normally get farther ahead than those who remain ignorant of it. Objective truths do not require your allegiance in order to be true, for example you can disbelieve gravity all you want but if you jump off a cliff without a parachute you will fall to your death. Subjective moral truths on the other hand are truths that pertain to the particular region or culture from which you come from. For instance a culture living in the Arctic tundra and one on the equator wont place the same amount of value on clothing and shelter. In the one situation it could be perceived as a necessity and have an influence on life or death, on the other hand its a luxury. With regard to programs, there is no such thing as prefect code, all code has bugs. The precision of your code is based upon the quality of your tests. Which brings me to my next topic about the scientific method, a scientific truth is considered a truth if it cannot be disproved not because we are certain about it. This is the best we can get to, there are no scientific truths, there are theories which are yet to be unproven. It is similar to code, your code is as certain as the tests that are written to disprove it, if your code has a test it cannot pass then we say it has a bug. Once we start talking about absolute truth and things like that we are stepping into dangerous territory because we do not know what absolute certainty looks or feels like we cannot attest to its existence nor its character but if I build a bridge I can test whether its strong enough for 200 vehicles to travel on it at the same time or not. So this is my argument in a nutshell: premise 1: Objective Moral truths are concerned with the quality of actions in the world, the quality being either "good" or "bad". Scientific truths are concerned with the constitution of objects in the "real" world. One is within our control the other is not. premise 2: We cannot hold people liable for good or bad actions if they could not control themselves when the actions occurred, hence moral truths are concerned with human action ("thou shalt not murder")etc. premise 3: Actions tend to be goal oriented, an action can only be judged to be good or bad based on what it was trying to achieve and further that the actor did so voluntarily. premise 4: If we take the goal of human action to be the unleashing of one's fullest potential by continuously transforming oneself to the type of person who sacrifices current pleasures for future pay-offs then an act is wrong or right based on whether it achieves that outcome sustainably without infringing on the rights of others. That act would be known as an objective moral truth conclusion: There are certain human universals around the world regardless of culture such as marriage, funeral rights, illegality of murder due to the inherent nobility of each human life, treatment of the elderly, children and the disabled, we can draw an inference of the existence of such an objective moral code/truth.
On the other hand it is still possible for there to be an objective morality without us knowing what the right move is in a given scenario, the stipulation is that there *Is* an objective morality, not that we can always sus it out, how else woupd we make mistakes without evil intentions?
I think it'd be more interesting instead of just hypothesizing objective moral truths you can just get a bunch of diverse people from diverse groups then stress test this idea then you'll have the answer to what is an objective moral truth and that would help determine if they exist or not
This will only help you confirm DMR descriptive moral relativism. This won't prove if moral truths are objective because of human error and subsequent dogmatism
I hate the example "murder is wrong". Murder almost by definition is "bad killing" - trivially we all agree that bad things are bad. However we do not all agree with what is murder and what is not. Is abortion murder? Is the death penalty murder? Should we execute X group of people? There is no universal objective agreement on what murder is - rendering the example moot
It seems to me that the attack on moral skeptisism is done by self referencing the argument used by those who support it. This is a well known method used, for instance, by Alan Turing to solve David Hilbert's "Entscheidungsproblem" (decision problem).
Morality seems to be expressions of opinions in the minds of any particular multitude of individuals that agree on a concept of thought or behavior in which ignorance drives their thinking whether the thesis is true or false. Reason is called free will which allows you to change your mind or behavior at any time with or without Reason. Pride and ignorance Pride is ignorance boasting. ignorance is life’s greatest adversary and denial is ignorance’s strongest ally. An opinion is a deep seeded selfish desire to express one’s own ignorance. A desire so selfish that even ignorance wants to be alone. ignorance miss uses the power of persuasion by transforming little knowledge into as if it were a greater knowing. Pressing one’s nescience point of view by oneself over another person. A willful disregard for the limitation of one’s own reference, and ignoring the evidence to the contrary. Pride is ignorance boasting. G. B.- Garcia (cc)2019 ◦
Got me the first time I saw it too. The video is inverted in post. He's writing with his right hand so that he can read it. We would see it backwards except that it's horizontally inverted--which is why it appears to us that he's writing with his left hand. Good thing humans are symmetrical or this wouldn't work. 😂
Even the refutation Shafer-Landau provides is predicated on that slippery word 'objective'. Were both arguments structured around their validity as 'objective', they would fall by the same notion. However, neither objective moral truths nor, objective moral scepticism are 'objectively' true - these are ideational constructs. Moral scepticism is still the more accurate description of human moral values, because it does not require the label of 'objective'.
@@stueyapstuey4235 Objectively true just means stance-independently true. Arguably, some things are subjectively true like “strawberries are tasty”. The truth or falsity of moral realism is not like that.
@@jacobsandys6265 I treasure the ‘just means’ in this comment - it is why nothing fails like philosophy! Morality is not a ‘thing’ in the ontological sense that a ‘tree’ for example is a ‘thing’. A morality exists as a set of terms within a framework of negotiations in a human culture, relating to behaviours and values. In that case alone one can comprehend how this kind of philosophical engagement is a form of category error. Morality cannot be properly assessed as a ‘stance independent’ phenomenon (ie objectively anything) unless you simultaneously remove all the cultural baggage that makes a given moral behaviour intelligible. What will remain, should one accomplish this, is an idealist formulation of mere semantics. This is why I disagree with the notion that ‘objective morality’ or ‘moral scepticism’ are valid binary choices here. They arise from a mis-presentation of the notion of morality which is to say they lack the acknowledgment that moralities are complex cultural contingencies. Your example of subjective truth, is likewise problematic - ‘strawberries are tasty’ is not the statement of a subjective truth, it is the statement of an affective value. It may be true to the speaker but that isn’t a truth at all. It is an acceptable iteration in an informal language game.
The difference between philosophers and scientists? Philosophers habitually armchair theorise using black and white deductive arguments, without appropriate reference to actual reality. In contrast, scientists propose a hypothesis and inductively, rigorously, test the extent to which it fits reality. So how would a scientist approach this assignment? He may take a hypothesis which has already been rigorously scientifically proven, such as the theory of evolution, and apply it to what we call morality. A natural outcome is the observation that social species gain an evolutionary survival/replication advantage by looking after members of their clan. i.e. by performing moral actions. So morality is then seen as an evolved and inherited tendency to care for others (aka performing moral actions). A test proving this hypothesis involves observing other social species (eg monkeys and dogs) in controlled conditions to establish whether they perform moral behaviours... which they do. So we share, with other social species, a TENDENCY to share, to an extent, moral behaviours. There is no proper/sufficient evidence proving that any uniform, objective morality exists.
The idea that there is widespread agreement that "murder is wrong" is not precisely true, because it is, after all, the central argument concerning abortion and capital punishment, and if there is anything that is true about our society, it is that people largely fall into two camps: one believes abortion is wrong and capital punishment is not wrong, and the other believes abortion is not wrong and capital punishment is wrong. There are comparatively few people who think both are wrong (Roman Catholics, for instance, are commonly hypocritical on these matters, saying one thing, but doing another), or both are not wrong. The disagreement lies in the definition of "murder" or "homicide", or alternatively, the disagreement really lies in the definition of what a "person" is. If you believe a zygote is a "person", then you are apt to believe abortion is a moral harm. If you believe that capital punishment does not constitute "homicide", then you are apt to believe that capital punishment is acceptable.
I think there might be a third path between moral objectivism and moral skepticism that preserves both... sort of. Or maybe it destroys both... sort of. The idea that the moral objectivist argues for is that there are some moral truths out there, but he doesn't seem to give any argument about how to FIND those moral truths. And there appears to be "very persistent disagreement" at least in what the correct method to find those moral truths might be. Utilitarianism, Kantian Deontology, and all of the videos you've done such a nice job in presenting don't seem to be arriving at anything like a "correct answer." It doesn't seem like we're going to get to the end of this stream of videos and Mr. Kaplan is going to say, "ok, so we've covered theory A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and the correct one was theory C. We've now reached the end of philosophy." So maybe the way forward for a moral skepticist is to say something like, "Ok, there MAY be moral objective truths out there in the Universe somewhere, but it appears as though there is no reliable way to determine what they are. That being the case, then there are no universal moral truths that are 'obtainable' (at least about certain moral claims)." So call this a modification of moral skepticism, then: "weak" moral skepticism. If there are moral truths somewhere out there in the universe, but no reliable universal way of determining what they are, then does it really matter if they "exist" in the logical sense?
This is similar to the agnostic position you very often find in religion. Where the theist says there is a god and his religion is true, and the hard atheist claims there is no god and his religion is false, the agnostic simply claims he isn't convinced of the truth of God. He might go further (don't know what the term for this is) and say that you cannot prove there is a God, even if there is one. The trouble, though, is that you're still making a knowledge claim. A knowledge claim about what one can know. You're not just saying that you don't know something (god, in this case). Nor are you saying that you, personally, cannot know it. You're saying *no one* can know it. And that's a bold claim. Do you know, everything everyone else knows? Maybe they know of a method to know God, that you aren't aware of. So you're biting off more than you can chew when you say no one can know something. Furthermore, if you admit you don't know something, then you really have nothing else substantively to say about the subject, by definition, because you don't know. Once you DO know something, then you can speak about what that something is. Point here is to say anything about objective morality existing or not existing, is incoherent if you admit you don't know anything of which you speak. Finally, I'll add something I see very few people bring up when it comes to objective morality. There's an implicit property of objective morality that's never stated, namely, that you're somehow subjectively bound to believe in it. It's a very strange property we don't assign to other facts about the world. If I said to you it's an objective fact that "the sun is hot", nothing about that fact forces you to believe in it. You could, if you so desired, reject it, and say "no the sun is in fact cold". You may be wrong, but so what? Humans can be wrong, often, in fact. Yet the moral objectivist will say that no no, you *cannot* disagree with objective morality. If you agree objective morality exists, then somehow you are logically, or spiritually, or metaphysically bound to follow that objective morality and adopt it as your own. It's a very strange claim, one that I obviously reject, but I very rarely hear people talk about it.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter I have this thing where I don't think morals are subjective or emotive or objective but something I call hypersubjective. Money, property, theft is hypersubjective. They don't exist exactly objectively. We agree together that you own your glasses. There is nothing about the glasses that makes them belong to anyone. And property almost feels more than an opinion, because it is more. It becomes hypersubjective. And if property exist, which i would say it does, then and only then is theft even possible. If stealing wasn't wrong, then stealing wouldn't even exist as a concept and neither would property. So if you think property exist, it follows that theft should not be common
@@Censeo you don't need to invent a new term, what you're describing is intersubjectivity. But nevermind the semantics. What you're suggesting is that things need to "exist" before we can have moral judgements about them, theft being wrong for example. That seems intuitive, except when we start to think deeper about this existence thing. For example, unicorns don't exist, but we can still meaningfully talk about unicorns. Whether it would be right or wrong to torture such a being, etc. Does us agreeing that it would be wrong to torture a unicorn, necessitate their existence? That seems silly. If unicorns did exist, they would be physical entities, that's why it is easier for us to understand they don't, as we don't see them. But pure concepts like money and property? They don't msnifest physically if they exist, they remain abstract. So in my opinion, it makes more sense to think of them as just that. Abstract, concepts, useful fictions. But they don't "exist" in a traditional sense, just because we can talk about them, and they don't need to exist for us to continue talking about them. As a sidenote, I also disagree that property implies you must think theft is wrong. That just doesn't follow. Sure, there are thieves who don't respect property rights, they might even say what they're doing is *right* because they are stealing from the rich or whatever. But then you have the thugs, the egotistical people who steal for self gain alone. They recognize that it isn't their property, and steal anyway. They might *even* recognize it is wrong, and steal anyway, but nothing about the mere existence of property, implies it musn't be stolen. You can't derive an ought from an is, remember. Finally, I'd like to remind you what subjective and objective means in philosophy. On the one end, subjective means the thing in question is entirely mind dependent for its existence. Another way of putting it is to say it is contingent on the *subject* On the other end of the scale, objective means the thing in question is entirely mind independent. If no subjects, or minds, existed, the thing in question would still be there. Its existence is contingent on the object alone. You're gonna have a really hard time wedging in a third category between the two, but you're welcome to try. What you'll most likely end up with is that the thing starts out being subjective, and transitions to being objective once a critical mass of people subjectively believe in the thing. But even under that understanding nothing is ever truly in an in-between state. I frankly don't know what that would entail.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter Ok, but if we argue that property doesn't exist then theft doesn't exist. The point is that theft is almost by definition discouraged.
@@CenseoIf you wanna define theft as definitionally an immoral / discouraged thing, okay, you're free to do that. But doesn't really help that much. You might as well tell me theft is immoral because God says so. Okay, but why should I care what your definiton, or God, says? If a theif defines it as a good thing to do, and suppose somehow, he is "objectively right" about his definition, are you now gonna think it's okay to steal? No, of course not. So it really doesn't solve any moral problems to try define your way out of it. It's a bit like trying to define your way into the existence of a unicorn. You can use the whole dictionary in your definition, it doesn't matter if I haven't observed a unicorn. We cannot define things into existence. I'd also like you to respond to my point that existence isn't really what matters here. We're just as well off being wrong about its existence. Suppose theft is not wrong by definition, and property doesn't actually exist, are you still going to think theft is wrong? Yes, you are. So it isn't actually what determines the wrongness.
"Persistent disagreement" just seems to mean statements that are unscientific and won't yield to evidence. String theory is often criticised on the basis that it has not made predictions that can be proven with evidence, and is therefore unscientific. That's why it's a persistent disagreement. Matters of taste like "coffee is good" are also not scientific claims that can be falsified with evidence. So, moral claims could also be in this class of claim that does not yield to evidence.
tend to judge philosophical viewpoints by their utility myself; it doesnt matter much whether morality exists outside the human mind or not. it matters whether it is useful. does a viewpoint help us live better lives? the only time i can think of when morality's objective or subjective reality matters is when you are arguing that it is given from a superior intelligence. but you are still able to argue with that intelligence. i would note that every serious religious i know argues with their god regularly
The argument mixes up two notions - universal and objective. They are not the same.there is no universal moral law. There are many moral laws and all of them are objective. But no the universal moral law. Mount Everest is objective but not universal as it exists only in one place.
Another interesting question about "very persistent disagreement" is HOW MUCH must there be to determine that a belief (i.e. as a belief in objective morality) is false? For example, while MOST of humanity has accepted for THOUSANDS OF YEARS that Earth is a globe, there have always been and continue to be those who INSIST that it is flat. That disagreement is VERY PERSISTENT by (I'd say) just about any definition of that term, but flat Earthers are a tiny (if vocal) minority, and not too many people would agree that this "very persistent disagreement" falsifies a globe Earth belief.
@@r.michaelburns112 True. I tend to think that with scientific facts we have means of demonstrating our claims to an acceptable level of reasonable doubt. With morality however, there’s too much room for individual subjectivity and value judgements to play a role for us to have any sort of objectivity
but hang on.. in the final argument (about moral skepticism being not objectively true), there is a contradiction that would break it apart; the first assumption present "moral skepticism" on equal footing as "moral claim", but the third point (the conclusion) assumes they must not be of the same type, in order for it to hold. if that hidden assumption is true (which is sensible IMO), these are not really of the same category, and "moral skepticism" should indeed be treated as a meta-theory, with different (superset?) errors and underlying axioms.
I wish philosophy had been taught, or emphasized enough to foster a potential interest, during the period of compulsory indoc... education & thus avoid discovery of the topic, or an interest in, midway+ through one's life 🧐
This is great and I see the reasoning here. I think it is unfortunate, however, that he uses the 'is there a god' example' of a persistent disagreement. He does specify something that often gets left out of the argument - definition of terms. There are literally hundreds of formal definitions of 'god' that often hold other definitions as invalid. And, most people have some personal definition on top of that - and still invalidate other definitions. Spinoza's 'god', for example, is vary different from the Evangelical versions. And Pascal's wager is stupid as he still loses his bet if he picks the wrong definition. However, the 'definition' he causally throws out there is easily defeated. A god cannot be all loving and all-powerful at the same time if he doesn't stop evil from happening. He can't have created everything if he didn't also create evil (see: Isaiah 45:7 for example.) If he COULD be all-loving AND all-powerful, then there is no objective moral truth - 'mysterious ways' doesn't cover that discrepancy. Also - skeptical means you need to be shown that something is true, not that you claim it isn't. A skeptic will acknowledge (agree) with a claim if it can be shown to be true. It seems to that someone who is skeptical that there is objective moral truth isn't saying there isn't, just saying that it hasn't been shown to be true. Given the null-hypothesis, it seems to be the more reasonable stance.
Wait, the issue here is that there is a major difference between applying this argument to morals and applying this argument to subjects of persistent disagreement like the question of whether God exists. In the case of the existence of God, the disagreement *can* be attributed to human error. If there is a fact of the matter over whether God exists, one party in the disagreement is making an error. So the same can be said of the question over whether there exists moral facts. This doesn’t show that moral skepticism defeats itself at all. Unless I misunderstood something here.
Not including a transcendent moral being makes it convenient to reduce objective morality to a consensus. However objective morality is explain without that being is never going to true since the participation of people in the defining process already makes it subjective by definition.
🤔 Hmm is your "opinion" with regards the "right" God subjective or objective?? Can we ground morality in "any" God or just the particular one YOU determined is the "right" one out of the many thousands man has invented ?? If your answer is the latter then in actuality its *YOU* and YOUR SUBJECTIVE OPINION that is determining morality dear. if your answer is the former, then asserting objectivity to any moral claim based upon a "God" becomes a completely vacuous useless concept 👍 The claim that theistic morality is somehow "objective" is ridiculous. Theists are merely substituting their own subjective moral standards with the morals standards of the god they subjectively determine represents the "correct objective" morality. 🙄🤔
The debate about the existence of God and free will is very easily explained by human error. That error is ignorance, but ignorance as a species. We do not have proof of his existence or non-existence. We are debating but without all the facts, because we do not yet have the facts
I think that many moral disputes revolve around the differences between free and slave mentality. The slave (clone soldier) has no morality of their own. Their morality is extrinsic. The arbitrary decrees of those in authority are their moral standard. Obedience to authority is the definition of good. The free man has an internal/intrinsic morality. The arbitrary decrees of those in authority are viewed as advice. Obedience to internal moral principles tempered by circumstances and tradition are the definition of good.
I fully agree. It cannot be moral if you were forced to do it because you didn't choose it, if you didn't choose it then it is not your action, it is compulsion or duress. This is also a reason why slavery is wrong, it robs the individual of free will and without free will one cannot be moral or virtuous. This is why God wants us to choose him freely because if he forces us the decision loses moral import because you are just a robot following orders
Kaplan fails at distinguishing if a thing is in itself morally wrong or it's wrong for other reasons. Murder is wrong not because it is wrong in itself but because no society would survive if anyone could kill any time for any reason any member of that society. However a society does decide that killing is right in order to defend itself ( AKA declaring war on an enemy threating its survival). So "murder is wrong" is not an absolute, universal objective moral law. It never was, and never will be.
The conclusion of this video is: that moral skepticism - which states that there is no objective morality- is itself not objectively true. This is a self-referential statement, in the same vain as: "this sentence is false", that is, if it's true, it must be false, and if it's false it must be true. So your whole exercise of two premises following by a conclusion is not valid as its conclusion is neither false or true.
And in German they'd probably use the word Kuchen, which refers to pretty much all baked goods that aren't bread. From cake to cookies, and perhaps even biscuits. Now the last one is the kind of stuff sailors lived off during long voyages, and could actually be a viable way to feed the people during a famine, if they were available. Though I do not know the context well enough to claim this is true over the more popular version.
"Murder is wrong" is subject to persistent disagreement because we don't agree what murder is. If in war a soldier intentionally kills someone from the opposing side is it murder? He volunteered to go to another country and encountered someone he likely wouldn't have met otherwise, and ended up killing that person. Is the war they're fighting necessary? Was killing that particular enemy soldier necessary? We don't agree on any of that.
I think that Relativists and Subjectivists should be placed in the Moral Objectivists category and not in Moral Skeptics because, they believe the individual or group will have moral beliefs and those beliefs are true, and those beliefs would have to include both that there are Objective Moral truths and that there are not making both equally valid and now thinking about it would place them in both and neither category at the same time. Maybe they should be called the live and let live moralists because it seems they allow for and against all moral principiles and they allow for and against interfering with others beliefs. Seems like a catch all principle to me.
Individuals have moral belief systems, not moral truths. collectively held (genuinely held by all individual of the group) moral belief systems are generated by political-social consensus. The collective moral belief system is no more true than any individual moral belief system. It is a set of choice which is ultimately based on preferences.
Relativists and Subjectivists believe that there are no objective morals and instead they are subject to various things. So it would make no sense putting them in the objectivist category. The belief in objective moral truths is not itself a moral belief.
All creatures have a selfish instinct. Some creatures have a social (herd) instinct. This instinct tells us comply with the herd. The group as a unit decides what is best (moral) for the herd, not an individual. Most societies have arrived at similar conclusions such as “murder is wrong”. It is NOT some innate rule. Objective means “external”. Objective morals are morals written or given by others. To those creating the morals, they are subjective. To those following them, they are objective. However, the interpretation of those morals are subjective.
moral skepticism is not objectively true, it is also subject to human error. acting accordingly seems to be the logical way in order to reduce biases but this would be kind of a false sense of security.
Is the concept 'murder' or, 'abortion' an objective fact? Aren't they rather human cultural constructs? Prey animals kill in the wild as a matter of course. We don't consider this murder. It isn't that they kill for food that makes what they do not murder, otherwise human cannibals would not be committing murder, either. There is a human definition of a type of killing that classifies it as murder, but again, this is a cultural construct, not an objective (moral) fact.
@@KrisKringle2 I disagree. This perspective is more of a Birds Eye view of things rather than a close up examination. Not always so obvious when trying to deal with the immediate.
Child and human sacrifice have been around for thousands of years, so in some practice they were okay. Also martyrdom is revered in almost every society..
There were societies for thousands of years that practiced human sacrifice, so the idea that murder is universally repugnant has a counterexample. Also, almost everyone with clothing today has a hand in financing slavery since the textile business around the world is filled with it. So perhaps they are morally repugnant today locally, but the world at large or historically may be apathetic to it. So using these universal objective values are problematic as they have counterexamples today or historically. There are countless such examples from rape to historic mysogeny, today's misandry and more. In my opinion, Jewish values specifically engendered in the last 2000 years after the second exile has a lot to do with the influence of normative objective values on major topics such as these.
But if moral skepticism is not objective, that still doesnt deny the fact of it being subjective. Doesn't this just mean that we're back at the reality that some people believe morality is subjective while others believe morality is objective? This video said that the claim regarding the objectivity of moral skepticism is not a moral claim itself I guess, but this still doesnt give any direct proof for or against objective morality itself. I kind of relate to another comment on this video saying that they feel they "learned alot but gained no ground."
thinking about this more just made me realize that this is entirely paradoxical like in russell's paradox lmao. the argument proves that itself is not true which shows that it is true which shows that it isnt (etc). so all we're actually left with is purely that "this argument is no good" and no other conclusions that stem from that
i think im still half-misinterpreting it. assuming that you could still plug in moral skepticism, this argument just disproves its own conclusion while the logic that leads up to it is still plausible, so then now this just goes back to my first thoughts
This is an odd position for a moral skeptic to take anyway. The idea that disagreement entails that a proposition is not true is immediately dubious. I take the moral skeptic to simply be unconvinced about the assertion that there are objective moral facts due to lack of agreement, and therefore lack of evidence, in that way, supporting plausibility.
Well, (2) is just a logical fallacy, even that something is a likely explanation doesn't prove anything. What we can conclude from (1) is, that *if* there is an objective reality, there isn't any agreement on it. But even if there *were* agreement, that doesn't prove a thing. There was agreement on a lot of things among the majority of humanity that only in recent decades is considered wrong, so how can it have been objectively true or objectively moral, when it now isn't? And what from what we now consider moral will be judged immoral in the future? Even considering it an absolute moral truth that murder is morally wrong is problematic, when the concept of murder isn't agreed upon first. Some consider soldiers to be murderers, some consider them to be doing their duty when they shoot at enemies in a war. Some think it righteous to distinguish the world into believers and non-believers of some god or some ideology and slay the latter. But if there *is* an objective moral, then that should hold for any conceivable (and even inconceivalble) form of society, maybe of aliens, or whatever may become of humanity, which even might include beings for which murder isn't even a valid concept. Human morals are rooted in human nature and contemporary human societies. I'd hardly call that "universal".
Why do you mix moral claims with scientific claims in regards to objective truth? Scientific claims have a specific domain of validity, as their validity is subject to verification by peers and the current scientific paradigm, until better models are being created. Therefore scientific claims naturally subjected to disagreements and they should always be doubted (see any book about philosophy of science) However moral claims do not follow this pattern and no moral claim should be subjected to follow the pattern of scientific claims.
Murder is a bad example. Murder is the immoral killing of a person and therefore is immoral by definition, not by agreement. One man’s murder is another man’s execution.
I know many people who think that killing communist or criminals is a good thing. That questions the objectivity of the moral value on killing people in general.
The question whether something exists or not might be an objective fact but it does not confer objectivity to the content of that question. For instance, doe Mickey Mouse exist or not? The question is an objective fact, but its content, Mickey Mouse, is not.
String theory is not that old compared to say incest for which there is no consensus as to if it's wrong, how wrong or how much separation is required before it is no longer incest. In twenty years string theory will be no longer or will be true while incest will continue to be debated.
The Moral skeptic can attack premise 1. They can also use this argument in support of the logical error making moral skeptism best explained by human error, even more so if they put in an appeal to how human emotions seem to want there to be objective morality.
Morality seems self-evidently and hopelessly subjective to me no matter how much knowledge we gain. For example, suppose a select few of us gain omnipotent god-like powers along with omniscience. In that case, it's self-evident that there would be no remaining possible scientific disagreement among us about the nature of the universe since we now understand it perfectly and because science actually revolves around objectivity. However, consider moral/ethical values. Would we unanimously agree then -- now with superhuman foresight and powers, and the ability to foresee the rippling consequences of every possible action through time -- exactly what actions are moral/immoral? We would now be able to even see that moving a pebble may end up killing a hundred people, or that cutting down a tree might cause a person to cure cancer. We would now be able to foresee that if one person is allowed to be born, they'll grow up to become a criminal, while another person grows up to become a valued member of a community. I might favor a high-tech Star Trek universe with intergalactic space exploration. Another might favor a universe where humans live like natives once more in harmony with nature. Another might favor a world that has more engineers, while another might allow more engineers to die in favor of a world with more poets and artists. Another might favor a matriarchal society ruled by women. In spite of being omniscient and knowing everything there is to know about the universe, I doubt that knowledge would resolve our disagreements with respect to our moral disagreements (i.e., preferences for society and the universe). In fact, now that we've become all-knowing, we would probably have more reasons to disagree morally than ever before, not less. "Killing is wrong" would be an impractical moral statement with such godly foresight to even see that a rock on the ground would cause someone's death in the future from tripping on it; it simply becomes a question of whom we allow to die as opposed to whom we allow to live. Perfect knowledge doesn't resolve matters of taste; it might instead generally exacerbate disagreements as we would have an infinitely larger database of knowledge from which to form a much greater variety of tastes. If morality was objective, then we should be converging towards agreements the more knowledge we gain about the universe. Instead, I'm quite certain that we would diverge more with every profound leap of knowledge we gain (for example, suppose we developed tech that could allow us to predict from birth whether someone's future child is likely to become a productive citizen or not, and exactly how much or how little).
I'm not sure why all the effort about delineating human error. The first claim that moral claims are subject to very persistent disagreement that is not best explained by human error, doesn't need the last phrase because it is redundant. ALL disagreements are based in the assumption that one party is in error. So, the first premise change adds nothing to the argument making the whole argument fail.
As the premise is bad argument against bad position, I will say it simple. There is no objective moral truth. 1. You can never know morally best thing (Maximasing joy/happiness and minimasing pain/suffering is really bad moral framework.) 2. Because of that the morality is often localised to certain situation to have boundaries (Like thinking "as long as they tried to do what they through to be for best" or limiting consequenses because it is obvious that #1 is true.) but this simply makes morality relative.
The Qur'an makes the case for moral objectivity (per the New Testament, Psalms and Torah). This is both a persistent and testable reality; representing an additional argument against moral scepticism.
The argument is not valid. To make a general argument, the first claim has to be universal. So the statement would be "all moral claims have persistent disagreement" The second premise has to bring the second term, in this case "objectivity" So it would have to be something like: Something objective cannot be disagreed upon. Then you could come up with that conclusion. But it's not what happens. The first premise as you point out is not true. Some claims are generally accepted and most of them are in general. Of course immoral people will disagree, but that is not a case against morality, but the exception that proves the rule. The second is not built properly, it just repeats the first one. Basically it doubles down on the idea that for something to be "objective", it has to be accepted by complete consensus, which on the face of it is a ridiculous claim. There would be no laws if everybody agreed upon them, criminals always do and it's the whole point of the law. The only conclusion you could make from that if it was true, is that some moral claims are not objective, which everybody knows to be true, but then there is a caveat. They may not be true at first, but sometimes they become true after which they become custom and then sometimes law. A good example of this is eugenism. It was not considered bad at first, and in fact was considered good, which is why people wanted it. Then something happened and people generally agreed it was bad. Then now it is making a strong comeback again, but it's too late because now there are laws against it, so it is objective no matter how people try to spin it. Now they have to prove the laws are unjust, which is a lot harder to do. Any law that is written by the right authority is by definition objective, and that's the final argument against this type of thinking. What this do is reject laws which are official objective moralities, and the only argument is that some people disagree with them, which in no way takes out their legitimacy nor their power of coercion. Prisons are full of moral relativists and nobody cares about their opinion, and that is another objective "morality". There are secular laws but also religious laws, and like I said, customs are also important even if not codified. If everybody drives on the right side, it is objectively the right thing to do, and it's irrelevant that some other places it's the opposite. Something does not have to be universal to be objective. When you go work for a factory, they tell you how to do things and it's objectively how it has to be done, it's objective morality. It is irrelevant that if you were to work somewhere else, they would do it differently. It would just be another objective morality that happens to be different but works just as well or similar. Just because those two factories do things differently and have a different sets of behavior does not mean it is "subjective". They do it their way because it works for them, but more importantly for the relativist, everybody has to do it the same anyway. If you move from factory 1 to 2, you have to adapt, and it is objective for you, and is objective for those that came up with the rule. We have those problems with immigration. People move into other countries, don't learn the customs and the rules, claim it is different in their country, which is true but irrelevant, and then become activists to try and change the rules in the new country to the old one. It never occurs to them the reason they moved is because their own rules didn't work for them. What they want is a second chance to double down on their mistaken morality in the hope of having different results. It's pretty annoying, but shows another thing, which is that the relativists are pretty much all closet objectivists. They would secretly want their own personal opinion to be objective but it isn't, so they then claim all others are subjective and therefore equivalent and equal, but some animals are more equal than others, so their own should prevail. That's the real argument they try to make, and yes it's self-defeating. People simply don't follow bad stuff if it's bad for them and they can tell. The only way they will do it is if they cannot tell it is bad, which is the problem of the relativist. They can't tell the difference between good and bad, so assume all others have the same problem. It's simply not the case. Just the same, if you are clueless about beer making, it does not mean your opinion is equal to the one of experts. The whole argument is based on that false assumption that is not said but is implied.
All I have to say is this: feelings have absolutely nothing to do with morality. Most people think good feelings have something to do with morality. And also, all morality boils down to our ability to structure our lives and civilizations toward the support of objective truth as the primary motive above all other motives. Note that I did not say the achievement of objective truth-just the overriding motive as an ultimate priority. An INFORMATION priority. Everything good depends on truth, from love and problem-solving to peace and harmony. You cannot have or achieve all these good things without it. Not consensus, because it can definitely be based on feel-good ideas approximating truth without actual knowledge-like all world religions. Like fanatical ideas. Etc. Persistent disagreement only occurs in the blindness to the elephant, so to speak. Motivation is absolutely key. Most people don’t understand their own motives nor understand how evolutionary psychology can help them overcome it because they don’t have EITHER THE MOTIVES OR THE ABILITY TO DO SO. In sum, all human problems can be solved simply by being 2-3 standard deviations higher in objectivity and also in intelligence-especially with reading comprehension and openness.
"all morality boils down to our ability to structure our lives and civilizations toward the support of objective truth" What makes that moral? That's a choice, not an external fact that must be truth. What makes love objectively good? What makes peace objectively good? These always devolve into choices, preferences that have no objective existence.There's no grounding here.
"Murder is wrong" I know this sounds uncontroversial, but I certainly know people exists that claim that at least the murder of some people is the right thing to do, whether they are religious extremist or fascists. But just if you found an act that absolutely everyone agree that is unethical, that still doesn't make that a fact! We can all agree that you can't observe or measure objective morality, so how do you conclude something is true? Isn't arguing for objective morality similar to arguing for some god, in that any claim for objective morality can't be falsified?
If instead of calling it moral skepticism we call it moral relativism (opposed to objective morality) then the last example just confirms it. Moral relativism is true and false at the same time, because the relativity also applies to itself. I also disagree with some examples. The existence of God and string theory are not moral claims. Should we believe in God? Should we believe in string theory? Those are closer to moral claims. Morality, in a sense, does not care about truth, it cares about what is the right thing to do. What if advancements in string theory will lead to an even more powerful "string" bombs? What if your beliefs justify the suffering of ideological opponents? Morality cares about the outcome, not the underlying truth. Even if Kant refuses utilitarianism, it can't help but try to conceive some idea that will make the world better off. Because that's the right thing to do. We have conceived these thought experiments out of the blue, it is naive to think that out of our thinking can come out some absolute imperative. And this goes to show our desperate need for certainty, for something to hold on to, because if everything is just really relative than nothing matters at all.
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I love how you seem to never really know enough about the examples you give, while knowing all about the philosophy
They don't have quite the glory of the Grothendieck prime number 👀
I agree, and it’s quite charming
7:48 Charm and Strange. You have an amazing wealth of knowledge that isn’t in your chosen domain. I appreciate that immensely
charm and strange are somehow a good description of him too
I took two semesters of string theory and I don't know any more than what Jeff said...
I think that is probably the principle flaw with contemporary philosophy. Namely that philosophy teachers (and enthusiasts) seem to know a lot about preceding philosophy (which I refer to as philosophology), but often inadequate amounts of scientific (and occasionally historical) knowledge that should be considered when applying philosophy.
@@Pengalen Yes, but it applies to many fields the same way. In particular scientists (I am a science teacher myself) these days do have a habit of making philosophical (eg metaphysical) claims which are outside their area of expertise. And sometimes it really shows.
All of us humans need to get good at knowing when we are 'walking on thin ice' by reasoning based on potentially weak understanding. It's hard, because it's very hard to know what you don't know.
But we can develop a bit of a feel for 'hmm, I don't feel comfortable with the level of detail I can go to on this subject' and Jeffrey seems to do a good job of that bit.
Kaplan is merely a sloppy-minded babbler; he puts his mouth in word-salad mode and opens it
The argument seems to imply that persistent consensus of opinion, if it existed, would amount to objective truth.
That certainly is open to debate.
Yes, given that such consensus would for practical reasons be restricted to a select population.
It's a big universe, after all, and even a perfect consensus within one species can't be said to be objective in any sense. It would at best perfectly represent the SUBJECTIVE views of that species.
No, it doesn't. That's the _inverse,_ which doesn't logically follow.
No, it merely argues that if objective truth existed about it we should have a decent consensus of opinion. It fails at recognising we would need some way to know that objective truth.
To take part of their example, if it is raining the ground is wet. This does not mean that if it is not raining the ground will not be wet, as there are other ways the ground can be wet.
Likewise, objective truths offer a simple way to obtain consensus of opinion, but it is not the only way.
What I get from his explanation is that there are certain moral claims which no one questions because their truth seems self-evident due to their practicality having being proven time and again. Then there are relative claims that are true based on their specific characteristics like geographical area and(or) environment. My understanding is that those truths that people around the world follow even if they have not come into contact with each other would have the closest label to an objective truth seeing that it is not environment or idiosyncratic differences in one's culture that has contributed to their creation but something of a universal nature of the human experience.
In short moral truth pertain to actions in the world, they concerned with what is the best course of action(which are within our control) in a given scenario, scientific facts or truths are concerned rather with the arbitrary nature of objects in nature(which we do not control). Which means moral truths are concerned with "liability" or "a blameworthy state of mind" not events beyond our control. Scientific truths matter because human beings are interested in acting in the world in order to bring about certain results, in order to do that it helps if you know what that world is made out of.
Ultimately we seek knowledge so that we may act with more insight or wisdom, call it refinement.
@@jeffreyblack666That doesn't seem like a deductive argument then
I appreciate your valiant effort to steelman an argument which states that moral truths are not real for failing to unanimously win a popularity contest
Only objective moral truths, not moral truths in general.
You have completely misunderstood the argument when you put it like that
This guy is great at explaining, presenting and keeping things exciting about philosophical propositions.
Why do I get the feeling I learned alot but gained no ground haha
That's the best summary of philosophy I've yet read.
Welcome to philosophy
at least we ruled out an argument that doesn't quite work, progress is progress lmao
"Persistent disagreement" is the name of my new klezmer metal band.
Post a link
I love your work and the way you communicate ideas! Your enthusiasm is wondrous!
I'm at 10:38 so if he addresses this later, I don't know yet
There is a very obvious rebuttal to this: Morality is something we make, something we feel. Physics is something that has nothing to do with us. It was there before us and it will continue to be there after us. There are observable truths and only observable truths. We can debate about why things happen (theories, which is why they're called theories. But keep in mind that Gravity is a theory) but we can not debate about what is there and what is observable, because whether you are looking at this through a screen is not debatable. It is a truth that you would be delusional to debate
But also: I think that even if there is even one person who disagrees with a moral theory (and there always will be, for everything) it is not objective. If you have to ignore (an) opinion(s) for your theory to ring true, your theory is fallible
The statement "murder is wrong" depends on the assumption that a human life matters and that the consequences afflicted on those who cared about the victim also matter, but what happens when someone thinks life has no inherent value and that people's emotional pain and trials are a necessary part of life, a right of passage as one might say and should not be avoided. As much as you might disagree with this, it doesn't matter, because it is that person's foundation, and people's foundations are based on how people feel. The concept that emotional pain matters and is bad has just as much logic in it as the reverse. It doesn't have logic in it. It's just an emotional conclusion. There is nothing for you to logically disagree with
You can't disregard it because it's too out there, too extreme, because that's not an argument. You can't disregard it because they're challenging basic principles, because who decided what basic principles are? If we are allowed to disagree on if a woman's body (and sometimes life) matters more than the parasite within her, why are we not able to disagree on if a human life has inherent value? And also just: Declaring basic, objective truths that we all agree on and then refusing to listen to people who disagree on those truths is just bad debate
Just because a moral standing is rare does not mean it is wrong or inherently untrue. The very fact that the basis of morality is a foundation of emotions makes it subjective because emotions are subjective
42:48
It's number 1 that is fallible. Make an argument that morality is objective (that does not depend on the existence of a God or the validity of a religion. Until that is proven, it cannot be a basis for an argument in a scientific sphere) that is not based off of perceiving emotions or perceptions (such as the concept of value) as factual. I dare you
Just a disclaimer: I'm still interested in "objective" morality and even use a lot of the practices in my own life. I'm not here just to disagree and be like "lul all theories bad because morality subjective." I just also accept that my "objective" morality is subjective and is using an emotion based foundation.
For example, I believe hurting people is bad (with few exceptions for like self defense and necessity, etc. and the exact perimeters of this is a thing but yeah) and I accept that I have no logical basis for that. I accepted that I don't like being hurt and thus don't want to see others hurt. I realize that if I were to not experience emotion, I would not necessarily think this. But I also think that's ok (and this isn't really a "have trouble seeing yourself in their shoes" situation. Just because we don't like being hurt, does that make it bad? Why? What makes our perspectives and wants mean anything or deserve any consideration? There's nothing that logically gives us any value or inherent respect to be heard. It's all emotional)
However, even foundational beliefs that I couldn't even find an emotional reason for were ditched. Emotional beliefs that I could find human error in were ditched. My foundational emotional beliefs can give way to analysis, even if it's not purely logical analysis
Surely the dilemmas arise only because one is trying to denote 'true' or 'false' to morals whose impacts upon people are ultimately subjective. If nobody had any subjective feelings about anything, or ever felt pain or pleasure, there'd be no need for morality. The things that appear most morally 'true' are simply those things that have the most universal subjective effect. But that is not the same as an actual objective moral 'truth' that exists independently of that subjective experience.
This. If there is no God, there is no moral yardstick external to our own minds.
@@KrisKringle2 Even with a god that problem isn't solved. Eutiphro's dilemma.
@@howlrichard1028 Not deeply examined, but: A truly omnipotent and sovereign God sets the standards, the standards don't exist outside of an omnipotent and omniscient God. such a God can create any world, even ones that would be incoherent to a nominally sane human. There are arguments that (a) God works to produce this universe such that it is coherent to humans.
If you argue that there are no morals not based on maximizing pleasure or minimizing pain then the example of one moral that is not based on that shows weakness in the argument. And one that actually causes more pain and less pleasure would be counter to your argument. You could take a look at Kant's argument vs Utilitarian argument on what you should do in the case of a justice seeking mob against an innocent man scenario where you could protect the man from the mob who would then go on to cause harm to a town or frame the man and let the mob have there justice. Kant would argue that framing the man is never permitted, while Utilitarianism would argue to frame the man to minimize the pain. In the Kantian case the morals would cause you to actually maximize the pain experienced by the majority.
On another point.
The argument can be made that even without any gods, be they monotheistic or polythestic, that there are still objective morals. And those arguments are those being put forward, as you can see those arguments don't need a God for them to be true.
The argument that the only reason people are moral is due to there being (a) god/gods could be seen as a concite that you those people who believe in a god are amoral and that they only act in a moral way due to the threat of punishment. That in and of itself would be seen as very jarring.
@@Randy14512 There are certainly moral judgements based on rational considerations, generally of what produces the most desirable outcome to the one making the decision. Ultimately it comes down to preference, even if the preference is relatively far removed from the immediate question. Deodontic ethics punts the grounding of particular ethic obligations. Utilitarianism fails to escape the ultimate endpoint that the greatest good for the greatest number is 'best', which is a choice of preference, or the greatest good produces the best situation for the decision maker, again a choice of preference.
"The argument can be made that even without any gods, be they monotheistic or polythestic, that there are still objective morals. And those arguments are those being put forward, as you can see those arguments don't need a God for them to be true."
I don't see those arguments as being proved or even compelling.
"The argument that the only reason people are moral is due to there being (a) god/gods could be seen as a conceit that you those people who believe in a god are amoral and that they only act in a moral way due to the threat of punishment.".
People who believe in an objectively existing moral standard may also simply want to be good in their own eyes regardless of reward or punishment, or that it produces the most desirable outcome and that itself is justification to follow the ethical code, regardless of rewards or punishments. Deodontics and Utilitarianism really don't depend on the existence of a god to enforce rewards and punishments.
"That in and of itself would be seen as very jarring."
And? What if it is seen as very jarring by one or more persons?
A lot of people agree on subjective things. Dogs have bad breath. Sunsets are beautiful. These things don't become objective truths because people agree on them.
The argument has to concern primarily: can subjective morals exist? is "objective" an essential property or "morality"; are all morals objective? The answer I argue for is that because of the fact subjective morals exist, objective morals can exist but morality itself or morals themselves cannot be defined as objective. Therefore objective is only potentially a non-essential property. A temporal and contextually-dependent/mitigated property. For instance, someone stealing a loaf of bread to prevent starvation of themselves or those also vulnerable, and someone stealing a luxury good, despite being able to consensually obtain such an item through a fair and equal exchange, are the exact same behaviour which we apply a system of morals to. There isn't a system of morals that would equate these actions because their contexts are changing the same core action of stealing into a different morality. If morality changes with differing circumstances, and objectivity means that regardless of circumstance, some things are always wrong to do, then morality itself cannot be defined as purely objective, at the bare minimum. At the totality of this analysis lies the claim that objective and moral are mutually exclusive terms which necessarily and definitively contradict. This is not what I argue however. I argue that objective morality definitely exists, but because of the nature of morality itself, can only exist under specific circumstances and in a limited capacity. Therefore it means that morality itself is mostly non-objective. What else comprises morality is for nearly everyone, a great mystery that still has yet to be solved.
We can say that health is made up of blood pressure, liver function, brain activity and many other things. But even if we pinned down everything and made tables describing the precise objective measurements by which the sum total of a person's health can be assessed, we would still not have an absolute or perfect definition of health.
Likewise, we can say that morality is found in compassion and not being impulsively cruel due to repressed emotional pain and many other things. But again the same problem emerges. No perfect definition is arrived at, even with all its properties accounted for, analysed and measured. Because in our minds we know, that a perfect definition of morality would imply that a person who does everything (that because of its borderline existence cannot be defined as necessarily immoral) but who consciously tries to get as close as possible to the line, is a good person by definition obtained from our perfect definition of morality. Even still, intuitively we know that the person who pokes and prods at the borderline of rules is an immoral person because they are trying to get away with, being as close to immorality as is acceptable and unpunishable, which is it itself necessarily immoral, but with a perfect definition of morality, would have to be defined as acceptably moral. With a perfect formula for how murder is justifiable, we enable murderers to get away with their crimes unpunished, and we cause more murders to occur. A perfect definition with no vagueness at all would very much so enable far more immoral acts to occur so long as they were falsely dressed up as moral acts.
To extend the metaphor from health. In the same sense that a heart swells and shrinks, so does the boundary of what we consider to be, and what necessarily is and is not, moral. And like a heart is considered the emotional and preferential, so too, in part, is morality.
I take issue with the assertion that there are some moral claims that are so universally agreed upon that they can be held to be objectively true 'moral facts'. What level of general agreement is sufficient for them to fall into this category, and who gets to make that call?
And even when you say something like 'almost everyone agrees that murder is wrong', you have to remember that different societies define 'murder' differently. For the vast majority of human history many people did not consider the killing of out-group people or certain subjugated classes of individuals (e.g. slaves, serfs) to be murder. Though there is inarguably less of that sort of thinking now, those sorts of sentiments are still broadly held in some places.
Genius-level teaching. 🏆
funny you mentioned string theory in that context - it (or some of its sub-theories) currently appears to be untestable, so might actually be a good candidate for becoming one of those long-lasting (or "very persistent") debates.... :D
In the free will as an illusion, it is irrelevant when it comes to deciding whether or not someone is responsible for their actions or not. If your TV stops working, you’re going to repair it or replace it. Nobody ever said “my tv stopped working, but its not the TVs fault. The TV doesn’t have free will, therefore, I will not take actions toward it.”
Having or not having free will has nothing to do with responsibility. It’s important to be empathetic and understand that the person had a life and grew up from a baby to an adult, just like everyone else. If that person turns out to be dangerous for society, then free will or not free will is out of the question.
What you haven’t considered is that both must be linked in this paradoxical way. If there are no objective moral claims then being certain of moral skepticism suggests an objective moral claim in subjectivity. Hence, moral skepticism being wrong seems Gödel-like in disallowing an unequivocal consistency or completeness to this stance.
Moral norms are partly mental entities so the notion of objectivity does not aplly to them in the ordinary way as it applies to material things.
"murder is wrong" only seems important and useful to this discussion if you don't think about what the word "murder" means.
Expand the terms and you get "Killing someone when it is wrong to kill them is wrong" ...and the weakness of that statement becomes obvious.
For it to mean anything, you have to get into the specifics of under what circumstances killing is wrong and under what circumstances it can be justified and as soon as you try and do *that* all that seeming agreement you had evaporates.
The other two go-tos for something safely considered "bad" are rape and theft, but you won't actually get very strong agreement on the universal wrongness of theft and probably no one will *admit* to you that they think rape is permissible the relevant statistics show that in practice there's no shortage of people who are kinda "meh" on that one. (And if you really need someone to admit it you only need to look in the right sort of cesspit.)
And slavery? America couldn't even quite bring itself to outlaw slavery.
You don't actually have these points of common agreement unless you use sloppy language.
But I don't think this is the real argument against objective morality. I think the real argument against objective morality is "What are you even talking about?"
Because the majority of people who claim to believe objective moral values exist can't tell me.
It's not just that people disagree about what correct morals are. It goes so much deeper than that. It's that they can't say what it would actually mean for something to be objectively morally correct. What *is* an objective moral fact? How do we detect it? If we can't detect it, then in what sense does it even exist? This is not quite like God or unicorns, which more or less exist or don't exist regardless of our feelings on the matter, because it is a sort of declaration about our correct behaviour. What is a declaration no one can ever know about? What is the difference between an objective moral fact and an idea about morality that is very popular across time and cultures? What would it mean for something we commonly consider to be repugnant to be objectively morally true? If I disagree with some moral claim and then you could somehow prove to me it was "objectively" correct, why should I care? Why should I modify my behavior? If I shouldn't, then what's so objective about it?
These are the sorts of questions a person could answer about a firm concept. It's not like God or a unicorn, where we can say what we mean by "God" or "unicorn" and proceed from there.
There's no such thing as an objective moral fact for the same reason there's no such thing as Memretikal. For there to be any such thing, the phrase would have to actually refer to something.
I very much appreciated your logic here, especially around using murder as an objective moral fact is begging the question. The discussion of what is really a moral fact in the first place and how do we know always gets poisoned by religion. I think if you take that out of the equation as an answer, you will always end up at subjectivity. And the human condition is simply that we have to get comfortable with that answer.
The first problem with moral objectivism is that you are initially left with two choices: Either there are no moral absolutes that exist independent of people, in which case we make the best morals we can as we can, or there are moral absolutes but we don't know what they are exactly so we we make the best morals we can as we can. The belief of moral objectivism always falls into a practice of moral skepticism. The second and much larger problem with moral objectivism is this: There are moral absolutes that exist independent of people and you don't know what those are, but I do. Therefore, your behavior must conform to my understanding of those moral absolutes. No, I won't show them or prove them to you and yes, I will change the claims over time, but you must conform because I know and you don't.
Well, that was interesting. I don't think I'm particularly good at this stuff just yet, but I immediately saw a seriously bad leap in logic from saying something about "some" moral claims as in #2, to inferring in #3 that "all" moral claims are not objectively true. In other words, I don't think the argument as originally given was logically consistent at all, but rather obviously not so.
It seems so much simpler just to change #1 to say, "Some moral claims are subject to (very) persistent disagreement," and then change #3 to say, "Therefore, some moral claims cannot be said to be objectively true." On the surface, at least, this sound far more logically consistent. I have a feeling someone's going to say that this doesn't serve the moral skeptics very well, though. 🤪
I caught that too. At about 1:56 "[If there is some disagreement] then there are no objective universal moral truths."
That's a basic error in predicate logic.
More plausibly, we're interested in knowing whether there could be ANY objective universal moral truths. Of course we'd first need to be rigorous about what we mean by "moral truth," and that is certainly part of the problem, if not the central problem. If there is significant disagreement on the way to establishing an objective DEFINITION, then we really can't hope to proceed further with our inquiry.
What distinguishes a "moral truth" from an ordinary truth? Is it sufficient to say that it's what distinguishes an "ought" from an "is?" In that case, any idealization or description of Platonic form is a moral truth (a Platonic triangle is how triangles"ought" to be) whereas empirical statements of fact (triangular artifacts, though real, are only approximations) are ordinary truths.
Mathematical proofs, under this definition, are ordinary truths, but axioms would be moral truths. This could be a critical distinction. Proofs can be observed, so they're like empirical facts. Axioms are granted, so clearly they represent an idealization.
This isn't our usual sense of moral truth - it seems to be a much smaller set, for one thing - but it can be objectively assessed. And there's a further advantage in examining this smaller set, because if we can find ANY examples of objective moral truths from this smaller and perhaps more tractable set, our most essential work will be done.
But look at what happens when we try. Such candidate "moral truths" as Platonic forms and axioms are not objective facts, they are granted. Some AGENT is doing the granting, and that makes them subjective. So it's a bit tricky to claim, with this sort of perfect rigor, that there are objective moral truths.
That's not the end of it, of course. Maybe the distinction between "ought" and "is" doesn't quite capture what we mean. Or maybe we can just declare that it's good enough. For that matter, we could just declare that ordinary truths could also be moral truths. (I don't know if we could reach universal agreement on this, but it's worth looking at.) Now we can look for well-known objective truths, ordinary truths, that could also qualify as moral truths. We'll stay for now with "ought" because it's an easy test to administer.
Euclid proved that √2 is an irrational number. OUGHT it to be rational instead? After all, integer ratios such as p/q are easy to work with? No, because it's a (proof-theoretic) fact that it's irrational. Oh, so we OUGHT to call it irrational, because it IS irrational. Yes, I grudgingly suppose. And we OUGHT not to misrepresent facts.
Aha. So it's perhaps not just "ought" that distinguishes moral truth. There's also the need for agency and choice.
But AGENCY is subjective. We can't include any of those moral truths in our list of candidates. And that may leave us with "ought" being invariably a synonym for "is," in other words nothing more than objective facts. The moral aspect has been extinguished.
This is not an exhaustive analysis. But so far, the quest for some nonempty set of objective moral truths does not look at all promising. Wherever we look, these truths are either subjectively moral or objectively ordinary. It does seem intuitively obvious that agency and choice are critical for establishing a moral aspect to any truth. Unless all agents are in some respect objectively alike, we don't have even the possibility of a case.
This is a mathematical and logic statement basically stating that if there is an exception to a set that must be included in the set for it to exist than said set cannot exist.
@@gabrielpeterson2079
It's a property of SET THEORY, not of mathematics or logic. And while it holds in "naive" set theory, it's been resolved in ZFC.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_theory
@Dan Razzell I see set theory as a subset of math, which is a subset of logic and reasoning. With that said how can a set exist if something that should exist in that set can clearly not exist in that set?
@@starfishsystemscould this issue be then resolved if the Architect-Agent is a supposedly objective deity like a God? Or would any Agent ever have to also be a perfect being to act objectively?
A big difference between moral claims and scientific claims is that it is believed that in the case of scientific claims, there might someday be evidence that would resolve the matter. If string theory predicts that under such and such conditions, such and such will be observed, and we check and see that yes, it does, or no, it doesn't, then our belief in the correctness of string theory will go up or down (if not reach certainty). On the other hand, moral questions are not going to be resolved by observation. If they are resolved at all, it will be because the people favoring one answer turn out to have superior arguments than those favoring a different answer (or maybe just times and culture changes, so that we decide, collectively, that we no longer find one answer to be palatable).
That's the big distinction between moral beliefs (or philosophical belief--other philosophical issues might be in the same boat here) and scientific truth. Holding the wrong scientific belief has consequences. Your planes crash, your medicines don't work, you fail to predict the weather, etc. But moral beliefs don't seem to have consequences in the same way. Of course, which moral beliefs you hold has consequences, but the truth of those beliefs don't have separate consequences, it seems to me.
I'd be interested in what they have to say about Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Gödel incompleteness (there are two theorems) concerns the limits of provability within formal systems: that is, the conceptual or ideal world. Morality, as I understand it, concerns evaluating the effects of agency in the material world, and it has to be measured in terms of the material world.
That's not to say that formal systems have nothing to tell us about the material world. Mathematics certainly informs science. But ultimately science has to be tested against the material world and not some (possibly more elegant) ideas about how things might be. Moral ideas will inevitably face a similar challenge.
Some formal propositions are undecidable. But of course many are completely decidable, which means we can be sure of certain claims, for example the irrationality of √2. In cases such as this, we can be certain that we're certain.
Now, what about moral propositions? Can ANY, even a single one, of these be formalized without some essential quality being lost? I think not. If they could, we would be working in the realm of optimization or decision theory or something of the sort, as a reliable proxy for moral agency.
These tentative proxies can be useful in pushing for clarity in what we mean by, say, moral optimization. The Trolley Problem, for example, seems at first glance to be a simple optimization problem. But psychological test subjects don't agree. They're not very happy with optimization where moral concerns are engaged. They ARE happy with optimization on more morally neutral ground such as monetary reward.
So we turn to decision theory and within it try to generate weighted values for various choices. It would be all right, under decision theory, for a yea decision to weigh differently than its inverse nay decision. Passively allowing many people to die might be subjectively preferable to actively allowing few people to die. But again, test subjects are not happy when shown this analysis either. They object to reducibility in any form, out of what I take to be genuine concern for throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Now here's the thing about human morality. It DERIVES from the human condition. It doesn't DEFINE it. It's akin to some algorithm coming up with the perfect flavor. The algorithm may be extremely elegant, highly proof theoretic, and take every known human factor into account besides, and we could honestly expect that people SHOULD love it. But the only test that matters is whether in fact they do.
That's a gap that can't be closed within the space of formal systems, and may not be amenable to consistent empirical laws either. The true answer may well be "it depends." We're products of natural selection, after all. Don't expect uniform reducibility.
So Gödel doesn't really have anything to tell us here. I'm sorry to say this, I really am. But these are worlds apart.
@@starfishsystems I'm not particularly concerned with human moral conscious. I see no reason why objective morality would be determined by it. I take objective morality to be a formal system and thus I see Gödel's incompleteness as fully applicable. Under this lens, expecting morality to be provable, let alone easily provable, is rather absurd.
The incompleteness theorems don't say nothing can be proven at all in a formal system. They say not everything can be proven in a formal system. It's possible that the "things that cannot be proven" are extremely niche and/or not excessively important.
Note that it also stipulates that there can't be any contradiction. If you allow unrestricted contradictions in your system, everything is provable (ex falso quodlibet).
It is therefore not necessarily applicable to this video. It just means that there's a third value in any possible argument aside from "true" or "false"; "indeterminable", which is what the argument against objective morality is trying to show is the case here for all of morality.
Keep in mind that "morality" could be considered a subsystem of a greater system, in which case Godel's theory wouldn't say anything meaningful about it.
@@GynxShinx
Morality, as generally understood, concerns the effect of choices in the physical world and only the physical world.
It therefore makes no sense to treat it purely as a formalism. Such an effort would be vacuous.
The best that you might attempt would involve showing, empirically, that some formal model is plausibly correlated with the physical properties of morality (and note that these are not at all broadly agreed, given that we are still debating whether morality is subjective or objective) and then proceed to investigate conjectures suggested by that model.
If you're aware of any significant work in this area, please share it.
Fantastic, thank you!
"Modern Science" can be said to have originated with the first development of what we now call the "scientific method", which is widely attributed to Ibn al-Haytham in the early 11th Century.
This analysis is the kind of second or third order thinking that needs to be applied by the public to basically every political claim ever spoken, because many of them fail at that point, yet they are persistently believed by a lot of people. It seems like this kind of analysis itself (is this argument self defeating of the claim it is being put forth to support) should be a whole topic in philosophy itself, that should probably be a freshman topic. It didn't exist when I got my philosophy degree, so I'm betting it is not a widespread topic.
my perspective is that the fundamental requirement for objectivity, of any sort, is perfect and complete understanding of all relevant things. as to know something without any possibility of doubt, you must either be unreasonably confident in a potentially wrong idea, or you must have all relevant knowledge of and relating to a thing, which is at the very least unreasonably unlikely. but even worse, to be absolutely certain that no other information is relevant to a thing, you must fully understand *all* knowledge in general to rule out anything that might undermine your potentially justified certainty of a thing. so to be absolutely certain of anything, without any possibility that you could be wrong, you would have to be literally omniscient, and no human is omniscient as far as i can tell.
an analogy of this issue would be knowing for sure that the code for a program you wrote is flawless without knowing all the ways your program could be used. you might have perfect knowledge of everything directly related to your program, but you might not know the exact environment of every computer that will ever run that program. to be sure that your program will never fail in any way, you would not only need to have perfect knowledge of every computer that currently exists, but you would need to have all knowledge relating to computers in general to make sure that no future computers could ever cause your program to fail
TL;DR to have absolute certainty without absolute understanding seems like little more than absolute confidence, which can be demonstrated to be atleast inconsistent with anything akin to absolute understanding
extra: though its reasonable to suggest that an omniscient being would either atleast be able to have objective morals, if not be forced to have objective morals as a part of their omniscience, you yourself would have to have omniscience to know for sure that this being truly is omniscient, in the same since that you need to know atleast as much about a subject as another person does to be sure that they are correct in their assertions about it. we cant be sure that a supposedly omniscient being truly is omniscient and isnt just sufficiently more intelligent than us that they can convince us that they're omniscient without actually being so.
e.g. if i dont know enough about chess to be sure that someone isnt mistaken about how the knight moves, i would have no proper basis for disagreeing with them even if they were actually wrong. and if someone else pointed out the supposed mistake, i still couldnt know for sure if that other person is correct or not either. if you dont know, you dont know. even if someone else supposedly does know, you cant know for sure if they truly know, ya know?
What I get from his explanation is that there are certain moral claims which no one questions because their truth seems self-evident due to their practicality having being proven time and again. Then there are relative claims that are true based on their specific characteristics like geographical area and(or) environment. My understanding is that those truths that people around the world follow even if they have not come into contact with each other would have the closest label to an objective truth seeing that it is not environment or idiosyncratic differences in one's culture that has contributed to their creation but something of a universal nature of the human experience.
In short moral truth pertain to actions in the world, they concerned with what is the best course of action(which are within our control) in a given scenario, scientific facts or truths are concerned rather with the arbitrary nature of objects in nature(which we do not control). Which means moral truths are concerned with "liability" or "a blameworthy state of mind" not events beyond our control. Scientific truths matter because human beings are interested in acting in the world in order to bring about certain results, in order to do that it helps if you know what that world is made out of.
Ultimately we seek knowledge so that we may act with more insight or wisdom, call it refinement.
I had to add my reply from an earlier reply because I didn't want to type it all over again and wanted to use here for this reply. Now on to my reply. Omniscience and understanding are moot points. One does not have to understand the sun in order for the sun to have objective truth. The sun is shining is an example of an objective truth, whether you are blind or cannot feel it or you asleep matters not, understanding on the other hand is a subjective trait. Your understanding of a particular object of knowledge is based on your past experiences, your curiosity, your passions or interests and whether such knowledge exists in your culture like a library.
What I understand about moral objective truths is that it is a truth which everyone is aware of whether they are conscious of it or not and those who are conscious of it and use it normally get farther ahead than those who remain ignorant of it. Objective truths do not require your allegiance in order to be true, for example you can disbelieve gravity all you want but if you jump off a cliff without a parachute you will fall to your death.
Subjective moral truths on the other hand are truths that pertain to the particular region or culture from which you come from. For instance a culture living in the Arctic tundra and one on the equator wont place the same amount of value on clothing and shelter. In the one situation it could be perceived as a necessity and have an influence on life or death, on the other hand its a luxury.
With regard to programs, there is no such thing as prefect code, all code has bugs. The precision of your code is based upon the quality of your tests. Which brings me to my next topic about the scientific method, a scientific truth is considered a truth if it cannot be disproved not because we are certain about it. This is the best we can get to, there are no scientific truths, there are theories which are yet to be unproven. It is similar to code, your code is as certain as the tests that are written to disprove it, if your code has a test it cannot pass then we say it has a bug.
Once we start talking about absolute truth and things like that we are stepping into dangerous territory because we do not know what absolute certainty looks or feels like we cannot attest to its existence nor its character but if I build a bridge I can test whether its strong enough for 200 vehicles to travel on it at the same time or not. So this is my argument in a nutshell:
premise 1: Objective Moral truths are concerned with the quality of actions in the world, the quality being either "good" or "bad". Scientific truths are concerned with the constitution of objects in the "real" world. One is within our control the other is not.
premise 2: We cannot hold people liable for good or bad actions if they could not control themselves when the actions occurred, hence moral truths are concerned with human action ("thou shalt not murder")etc.
premise 3: Actions tend to be goal oriented, an action can only be judged to be good or bad based on what it was trying to achieve and further that the actor did so voluntarily.
premise 4: If we take the goal of human action to be the unleashing of one's fullest potential by continuously transforming oneself to the type of person who sacrifices current pleasures for future pay-offs then an act is wrong or right based on whether it achieves that outcome sustainably without infringing on the rights of others. That act would be known as an objective moral truth
conclusion: There are certain human universals around the world regardless of culture such as marriage, funeral rights, illegality of murder due to the inherent nobility of each human life, treatment of the elderly, children and the disabled, we can draw an inference of the existence of such an objective moral code/truth.
On the other hand it is still possible for there to be an objective morality without us knowing what the right move is in a given scenario, the stipulation is that there *Is* an objective morality, not that we can always sus it out, how else woupd we make mistakes without evil intentions?
I think it'd be more interesting instead of just hypothesizing objective moral truths you can just get a bunch of diverse people from diverse groups then stress test this idea then you'll have the answer to what is an objective moral truth and that would help determine if they exist or not
This will only help you confirm DMR descriptive moral relativism. This won't prove if moral truths are objective because of human error and subsequent dogmatism
I hate the example "murder is wrong".
Murder almost by definition is "bad killing" - trivially we all agree that bad things are bad.
However we do not all agree with what is murder and what is not.
Is abortion murder?
Is the death penalty murder?
Should we execute X group of people?
There is no universal objective agreement on what murder is - rendering the example moot
Whats the argument that moral objectivism is true?
It seems to me that the attack on moral skeptisism is done by self referencing the argument used by those who support it. This is a well known method used, for instance, by Alan Turing to solve David Hilbert's "Entscheidungsproblem" (decision problem).
Thanks for the video. It is so helpful and great
Morality seems to be expressions of opinions
in the minds of any particular multitude of individuals that agree on a concept of thought or behavior in which ignorance drives their thinking whether the thesis is true or false. Reason is called free will which allows you to change your mind or behavior at any time with or without Reason.
Pride and ignorance
Pride is ignorance boasting.
ignorance is life’s greatest adversary and denial is ignorance’s strongest ally.
An opinion is a deep seeded selfish desire to express one’s own ignorance. A desire so selfish that even ignorance wants to be alone.
ignorance miss uses the power of persuasion by transforming little knowledge into as if it were a greater knowing.
Pressing one’s nescience point of view by oneself over another person. A willful disregard for the limitation of one’s own reference, and ignoring the evidence to the contrary. Pride is ignorance boasting.
G. B.- Garcia (cc)2019
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Is he writing like in inverse? Or does he have some program that fixes it? It looks like he is writing on the opposite side of a glass wall
Got me the first time I saw it too. The video is inverted in post. He's writing with his right hand so that he can read it. We would see it backwards except that it's horizontally inverted--which is why it appears to us that he's writing with his left hand. Good thing humans are symmetrical or this wouldn't work. 😂
Love your content!
Even the refutation Shafer-Landau provides is predicated on that slippery word 'objective'. Were both arguments structured around their validity as 'objective', they would fall by the same notion. However, neither objective moral truths nor, objective moral scepticism are 'objectively' true - these are ideational constructs. Moral scepticism is still the more accurate description of human moral values, because it does not require the label of 'objective'.
Care to elaborate a little more I’m knew this and I think I agree with you somewhat just want to understand you better.
??? Either moral objectivism is objectively true or moral scepticism is objectively true. I don't see what your argument is.
@@jacobsandys6265 What is the status of 'objectively' in this claim. If a thing is 'true' why does it need the qualifier?
@@stueyapstuey4235 Objectively true just means stance-independently true. Arguably, some things are subjectively true like “strawberries are tasty”. The truth or falsity of moral realism is not like that.
@@jacobsandys6265 I treasure the ‘just means’ in this comment - it is why nothing fails like philosophy!
Morality is not a ‘thing’ in the ontological sense that a ‘tree’ for example is a ‘thing’. A morality exists as a set of terms within a framework of negotiations in a human culture, relating to behaviours and values. In that case alone one can comprehend how this kind of philosophical engagement is a form of category error.
Morality cannot be properly assessed as a ‘stance independent’ phenomenon (ie objectively anything) unless you simultaneously remove all the cultural baggage that makes a given moral behaviour intelligible. What will remain, should one accomplish this, is an idealist formulation of mere semantics. This is why I disagree with the notion that ‘objective morality’ or ‘moral scepticism’ are valid binary choices here. They arise from a mis-presentation of the notion of morality which is to say they lack the acknowledgment that moralities are complex cultural contingencies.
Your example of subjective truth, is likewise problematic - ‘strawberries are tasty’ is not the statement of a subjective truth, it is the statement of an affective value. It may be true to the speaker but that isn’t a truth at all. It is an acceptable iteration in an informal language game.
Excellent presentation!
Marie Antonette apparently didn’t say that. It was attributed to her decades after her death.
The difference between philosophers and scientists? Philosophers habitually armchair theorise using black and white deductive arguments, without appropriate reference to actual reality. In contrast, scientists propose a hypothesis and inductively, rigorously, test the extent to which it fits reality.
So how would a scientist approach this assignment? He may take a hypothesis which has already been rigorously scientifically proven, such as the theory of evolution, and apply it to what we call morality. A natural outcome is the observation that social species gain an evolutionary survival/replication advantage by looking after members of their clan. i.e. by performing moral actions. So morality is then seen as an evolved and inherited tendency to care for others (aka performing moral actions). A test proving this hypothesis involves observing other social species (eg monkeys and dogs) in controlled conditions to establish whether they perform moral behaviours... which they do.
So we share, with other social species, a TENDENCY to share, to an extent, moral behaviours. There is no proper/sufficient evidence proving that any uniform, objective morality exists.
The idea that there is widespread agreement that "murder is wrong" is not precisely true, because it is, after all, the central argument concerning abortion and capital punishment, and if there is anything that is true about our society, it is that people largely fall into two camps: one believes abortion is wrong and capital punishment is not wrong, and the other believes abortion is not wrong and capital punishment is wrong. There are comparatively few people who think both are wrong (Roman Catholics, for instance, are commonly hypocritical on these matters, saying one thing, but doing another), or both are not wrong. The disagreement lies in the definition of "murder" or "homicide", or alternatively, the disagreement really lies in the definition of what a "person" is. If you believe a zygote is a "person", then you are apt to believe abortion is a moral harm. If you believe that capital punishment does not constitute "homicide", then you are apt to believe that capital punishment is acceptable.
I think there might be a third path between moral objectivism and moral skepticism that preserves both... sort of. Or maybe it destroys both... sort of. The idea that the moral objectivist argues for is that there are some moral truths out there, but he doesn't seem to give any argument about how to FIND those moral truths. And there appears to be "very persistent disagreement" at least in what the correct method to find those moral truths might be. Utilitarianism, Kantian Deontology, and all of the videos you've done such a nice job in presenting don't seem to be arriving at anything like a "correct answer." It doesn't seem like we're going to get to the end of this stream of videos and Mr. Kaplan is going to say, "ok, so we've covered theory A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and the correct one was theory C. We've now reached the end of philosophy." So maybe the way forward for a moral skepticist is to say something like, "Ok, there MAY be moral objective truths out there in the Universe somewhere, but it appears as though there is no reliable way to determine what they are. That being the case, then there are no universal moral truths that are 'obtainable' (at least about certain moral claims)." So call this a modification of moral skepticism, then: "weak" moral skepticism. If there are moral truths somewhere out there in the universe, but no reliable universal way of determining what they are, then does it really matter if they "exist" in the logical sense?
This is similar to the agnostic position you very often find in religion. Where the theist says there is a god and his religion is true, and the hard atheist claims there is no god and his religion is false, the agnostic simply claims he isn't convinced of the truth of God. He might go further (don't know what the term for this is) and say that you cannot prove there is a God, even if there is one.
The trouble, though, is that you're still making a knowledge claim. A knowledge claim about what one can know. You're not just saying that you don't know something (god, in this case). Nor are you saying that you, personally, cannot know it. You're saying *no one* can know it. And that's a bold claim. Do you know, everything everyone else knows? Maybe they know of a method to know God, that you aren't aware of. So you're biting off more than you can chew when you say no one can know something.
Furthermore, if you admit you don't know something, then you really have nothing else substantively to say about the subject, by definition, because you don't know. Once you DO know something, then you can speak about what that something is. Point here is to say anything about objective morality existing or not existing, is incoherent if you admit you don't know anything of which you speak.
Finally, I'll add something I see very few people bring up when it comes to objective morality. There's an implicit property of objective morality that's never stated, namely, that you're somehow subjectively bound to believe in it. It's a very strange property we don't assign to other facts about the world. If I said to you it's an objective fact that "the sun is hot", nothing about that fact forces you to believe in it. You could, if you so desired, reject it, and say "no the sun is in fact cold". You may be wrong, but so what? Humans can be wrong, often, in fact.
Yet the moral objectivist will say that no no, you *cannot* disagree with objective morality. If you agree objective morality exists, then somehow you are logically, or spiritually, or metaphysically bound to follow that objective morality and adopt it as your own. It's a very strange claim, one that I obviously reject, but I very rarely hear people talk about it.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter I have this thing where I don't think morals are subjective or emotive or objective but something I call hypersubjective. Money, property, theft is hypersubjective. They don't exist exactly objectively. We agree together that you own your glasses. There is nothing about the glasses that makes them belong to anyone. And property almost feels more than an opinion, because it is more. It becomes hypersubjective. And if property exist, which i would say it does, then and only then is theft even possible. If stealing wasn't wrong, then stealing wouldn't even exist as a concept and neither would property. So if you think property exist, it follows that theft should not be common
@@Censeo you don't need to invent a new term, what you're describing is intersubjectivity. But nevermind the semantics.
What you're suggesting is that things need to "exist" before we can have moral judgements about them, theft being wrong for example. That seems intuitive, except when we start to think deeper about this existence thing. For example, unicorns don't exist, but we can still meaningfully talk about unicorns. Whether it would be right or wrong to torture such a being, etc. Does us agreeing that it would be wrong to torture a unicorn, necessitate their existence? That seems silly.
If unicorns did exist, they would be physical entities, that's why it is easier for us to understand they don't, as we don't see them. But pure concepts like money and property? They don't msnifest physically if they exist, they remain abstract. So in my opinion, it makes more sense to think of them as just that. Abstract, concepts, useful fictions. But they don't "exist" in a traditional sense, just because we can talk about them, and they don't need to exist for us to continue talking about them.
As a sidenote, I also disagree that property implies you must think theft is wrong. That just doesn't follow. Sure, there are thieves who don't respect property rights, they might even say what they're doing is *right* because they are stealing from the rich or whatever. But then you have the thugs, the egotistical people who steal for self gain alone. They recognize that it isn't their property, and steal anyway. They might *even* recognize it is wrong, and steal anyway, but nothing about the mere existence of property, implies it musn't be stolen. You can't derive an ought from an is, remember.
Finally, I'd like to remind you what subjective and objective means in philosophy. On the one end, subjective means the thing in question is entirely mind dependent for its existence. Another way of putting it is to say it is contingent on the *subject*
On the other end of the scale, objective means the thing in question is entirely mind independent. If no subjects, or minds, existed, the thing in question would still be there. Its existence is contingent on the object alone.
You're gonna have a really hard time wedging in a third category between the two, but you're welcome to try. What you'll most likely end up with is that the thing starts out being subjective, and transitions to being objective once a critical mass of people subjectively believe in the thing. But even under that understanding nothing is ever truly in an in-between state. I frankly don't know what that would entail.
@@Google_Censored_Commenter Ok, but if we argue that property doesn't exist then theft doesn't exist. The point is that theft is almost by definition discouraged.
@@CenseoIf you wanna define theft as definitionally an immoral / discouraged thing, okay, you're free to do that. But doesn't really help that much. You might as well tell me theft is immoral because God says so. Okay, but why should I care what your definiton, or God, says? If a theif defines it as a good thing to do, and suppose somehow, he is "objectively right" about his definition, are you now gonna think it's okay to steal? No, of course not. So it really doesn't solve any moral problems to try define your way out of it. It's a bit like trying to define your way into the existence of a unicorn. You can use the whole dictionary in your definition, it doesn't matter if I haven't observed a unicorn. We cannot define things into existence.
I'd also like you to respond to my point that existence isn't really what matters here. We're just as well off being wrong about its existence. Suppose theft is not wrong by definition, and property doesn't actually exist, are you still going to think theft is wrong? Yes, you are. So it isn't actually what determines the wrongness.
"Persistent disagreement" just seems to mean statements that are unscientific and won't yield to evidence. String theory is often criticised on the basis that it has not made predictions that can be proven with evidence, and is therefore unscientific. That's why it's a persistent disagreement. Matters of taste like "coffee is good" are also not scientific claims that can be falsified with evidence.
So, moral claims could also be in this class of claim that does not yield to evidence.
tend to judge philosophical viewpoints by their utility myself; it doesnt matter much whether morality exists outside the human mind or not. it matters whether it is useful. does a viewpoint help us live better lives?
the only time i can think of when morality's objective or subjective reality matters is when you are arguing that it is given from a superior intelligence. but you are still able to argue with that intelligence. i would note that every serious religious i know argues with their god regularly
Dammit!!! I am NOT a moral objectivist, but now I'm not quite so sure.
The argument mixes up two notions - universal and objective. They are not the same.there is no universal moral law. There are many moral laws and all of them are objective. But no the universal moral law.
Mount Everest is objective but not universal as it exists only in one place.
Another interesting question about "very persistent disagreement" is HOW MUCH must there be to determine that a belief (i.e. as a belief in objective morality) is false? For example, while MOST of humanity has accepted for THOUSANDS OF YEARS that Earth is a globe, there have always been and continue to be those who INSIST that it is flat. That disagreement is VERY PERSISTENT by (I'd say) just about any definition of that term, but flat Earthers are a tiny (if vocal) minority, and not too many people would agree that this "very persistent disagreement" falsifies a globe Earth belief.
This was the example that came to mind immediately as well. However, the claim that the earth is a globe is not a moral claim
@@aos8695 Granted, but if we are just talking about claims of objective truths, the question need not apply only to moral claims.
@@r.michaelburns112 True. I tend to think that with scientific facts we have means of demonstrating our claims to an acceptable level of reasonable doubt. With morality however, there’s too much room for individual subjectivity and value judgements to play a role for us to have any sort of objectivity
but hang on..
in the final argument (about moral skepticism being not objectively true), there is a contradiction that would break it apart; the first assumption present "moral skepticism" on equal footing as "moral claim", but the third point (the conclusion) assumes they must not be of the same type, in order for it to hold.
if that hidden assumption is true (which is sensible IMO), these are not really of the same category, and "moral skepticism" should indeed be treated as a meta-theory, with different (superset?) errors and underlying axioms.
I don’t use this argument in favor of moral relativism. Because even if morality is objective, external factors can lead to moral disagreement.
I don't know if I should be proud that I never considered very persistent disagreement to be a sign of no objectivity.
Excellent.
I wish philosophy had been taught, or emphasized enough to foster a potential interest, during the period of compulsory indoc... education & thus avoid discovery of the topic, or an interest in, midway+ through one's life 🧐
I love your videos
Thank you for making these amazing philosophy videos
Never heard that consensus was a part of the argument. Mostly consensus is considered as an outcome of the argument.
This is great and I see the reasoning here.
I think it is unfortunate, however, that he uses the 'is there a god' example' of a persistent disagreement. He does specify something that often gets left out of the argument - definition of terms. There are literally hundreds of formal definitions of 'god' that often hold other definitions as invalid. And, most people have some personal definition on top of that - and still invalidate other definitions. Spinoza's 'god', for example, is vary different from the Evangelical versions. And Pascal's wager is stupid as he still loses his bet if he picks the wrong definition. However, the 'definition' he causally throws out there is easily defeated. A god cannot be all loving and all-powerful at the same time if he doesn't stop evil from happening. He can't have created everything if he didn't also create evil (see: Isaiah 45:7 for example.) If he COULD be all-loving AND all-powerful, then there is no objective moral truth - 'mysterious ways' doesn't cover that discrepancy.
Also - skeptical means you need to be shown that something is true, not that you claim it isn't. A skeptic will acknowledge (agree) with a claim if it can be shown to be true. It seems to that someone who is skeptical that there is objective moral truth isn't saying there isn't, just saying that it hasn't been shown to be true. Given the null-hypothesis, it seems to be the more reasonable stance.
Wait, the issue here is that there is a major difference between applying this argument to morals and applying this argument to subjects of persistent disagreement like the question of whether God exists. In the case of the existence of God, the disagreement *can* be attributed to human error. If there is a fact of the matter over whether God exists, one party in the disagreement is making an error. So the same can be said of the question over whether there exists moral facts. This doesn’t show that moral skepticism defeats itself at all. Unless I misunderstood something here.
As a swiss german when i hear 'pickles' first thing i hear is 'pimple' (sounds the same). So let's discuss whether pimples taste good 😅
Not including a transcendent moral being makes it convenient to reduce objective morality to a consensus. However objective morality is explain without that being is never going to true since the participation of people in the defining process already makes it subjective by definition.
🤔 Hmm is your "opinion" with regards the "right" God subjective or objective?? Can we ground morality in "any" God or just the particular one YOU determined is the "right" one out of the many thousands man has invented ??
If your answer is the latter then in actuality its *YOU* and YOUR SUBJECTIVE OPINION that is determining morality dear. if your answer is the former, then asserting objectivity to any moral claim based upon a "God" becomes a completely vacuous useless concept 👍
The claim that theistic morality is somehow "objective" is ridiculous. Theists are merely substituting their own subjective moral standards with the morals standards of the god they subjectively determine represents the "correct objective" morality. 🙄🤔
I was really worked up about how flimsy the premises are, but then I remembered the point of the lesson is that this argument is bad.
Wait this is a course? I've just been casually watching these
The debate about the existence of God and free will is very easily explained by human error. That error is ignorance, but ignorance as a species. We do not have proof of his existence or non-existence. We are debating but without all the facts, because we do not yet have the facts
I think that many moral disputes revolve around the differences between free and slave mentality.
The slave (clone soldier) has no morality of their own. Their morality is extrinsic. The arbitrary decrees of those in authority are their moral standard. Obedience to authority is the definition of good.
The free man has an internal/intrinsic morality. The arbitrary decrees of those in authority are viewed as advice. Obedience to internal moral principles tempered by circumstances and tradition are the definition of good.
I fully agree. It cannot be moral if you were forced to do it because you didn't choose it, if you didn't choose it then it is not your action, it is compulsion or duress. This is also a reason why slavery is wrong, it robs the individual of free will and without free will one cannot be moral or virtuous. This is why God wants us to choose him freely because if he forces us the decision loses moral import because you are just a robot following orders
Kaplan fails at distinguishing if a thing is in itself morally wrong or it's wrong for other reasons. Murder is wrong not because it is wrong in itself but because no society would survive if anyone could kill any time for any reason any member of that society. However a society does decide that killing is right in order to defend itself ( AKA declaring war on an enemy threating its survival). So "murder is wrong" is not an absolute, universal objective moral law. It never was, and never will be.
The tastiness of pickles is an objective truth!
The conclusion of this video is: that moral skepticism - which states that there is no objective morality- is itself not objectively true. This is a self-referential statement, in the same vain as: "this sentence is false", that is, if it's true, it must be false, and if it's false it must be true. So your whole exercise of two premises following by a conclusion is not valid as its conclusion is neither false or true.
15:49 d) The grass has always been wet.
What about them all being objectively true, and the human error is seeing only partial truth?
29:13 Cake meant cake. But that story had previously been told of a German duchess, so it’s certainly not true.
And in German they'd probably use the word Kuchen, which refers to pretty much all baked goods that aren't bread. From cake to cookies, and perhaps even biscuits. Now the last one is the kind of stuff sailors lived off during long voyages, and could actually be a viable way to feed the people during a famine, if they were available. Though I do not know the context well enough to claim this is true over the more popular version.
"Murder is wrong" is subject to persistent disagreement because we don't agree what murder is. If in war a soldier intentionally kills someone from the opposing side is it murder? He volunteered to go to another country and encountered someone he likely wouldn't have met otherwise, and ended up killing that person. Is the war they're fighting necessary? Was killing that particular enemy soldier necessary? We don't agree on any of that.
I think that Relativists and Subjectivists should be placed in the Moral Objectivists category and not in Moral Skeptics because, they believe the individual or group will have moral beliefs and those beliefs are true, and those beliefs would have to include both that there are Objective Moral truths and that there are not making both equally valid and now thinking about it would place them in both and neither category at the same time. Maybe they should be called the live and let live moralists because it seems they allow for and against all moral principiles and they allow for and against interfering with others beliefs. Seems like a catch all principle to me.
Individuals have moral belief systems, not moral truths. collectively held (genuinely held by all individual of the group) moral belief systems are generated by political-social consensus. The collective moral belief system is no more true than any individual moral belief system. It is a set of choice which is ultimately based on preferences.
Relativists and Subjectivists believe that there are no objective morals and instead they are subject to various things.
So it would make no sense putting them in the objectivist category.
The belief in objective moral truths is not itself a moral belief.
All creatures have a selfish instinct. Some creatures have a social (herd) instinct. This instinct tells us comply with the herd. The group as a unit decides what is best (moral) for the herd, not an individual. Most societies have arrived at similar conclusions such as “murder is wrong”. It is NOT some innate rule.
Objective means “external”. Objective morals are morals written or given by others. To those creating the morals, they are subjective. To those following them, they are objective. However, the interpretation of those morals are subjective.
moral skepticism is not objectively true, it is also subject to human error. acting accordingly seems to be the logical way in order to reduce biases but this would be kind of a false sense of security.
Is the concept 'murder' or, 'abortion' an objective fact? Aren't they rather human cultural constructs? Prey animals kill in the wild as a matter of course. We don't consider this murder. It isn't that they kill for food that makes what they do not murder, otherwise human cannibals would not be committing murder, either. There is a human definition of a type of killing that classifies it as murder, but again, this is a cultural construct, not an objective (moral) fact.
🤔 interesting
@@merikijiya13 Rather, obvious.
@@KrisKringle2 I disagree. This perspective is more of a Birds Eye view of things rather than a close up examination. Not always so obvious when trying to deal with the immediate.
Child and human sacrifice have been around for thousands of years, so in some practice they were okay. Also martyrdom is revered in almost every society..
Why is murder wrong? I'm not sure that I agree concensus is a good measure that's just popularism not a objective argument
There were societies for thousands of years that practiced human sacrifice, so the idea that murder is universally repugnant has a counterexample. Also, almost everyone with clothing today has a hand in financing slavery since the textile business around the world is filled with it. So perhaps they are morally repugnant today locally, but the world at large or historically may be apathetic to it. So using these universal objective values are problematic as they have counterexamples today or historically. There are countless such examples from rape to historic mysogeny, today's misandry and more. In my opinion, Jewish values specifically engendered in the last 2000 years after the second exile has a lot to do with the influence of normative objective values on major topics such as these.
But if moral skepticism is not objective, that still doesnt deny the fact of it being subjective. Doesn't this just mean that we're back at the reality that some people believe morality is subjective while others believe morality is objective? This video said that the claim regarding the objectivity of moral skepticism is not a moral claim itself I guess, but this still doesnt give any direct proof for or against objective morality itself. I kind of relate to another comment on this video saying that they feel they "learned alot but gained no ground."
thinking about this more just made me realize that this is entirely paradoxical like in russell's paradox lmao. the argument proves that itself is not true which shows that it is true which shows that it isnt (etc). so all we're actually left with is purely that "this argument is no good" and no other conclusions that stem from that
wait, but if the metaethic of moral skepticism is not a moral claim, then that means that it cannot be applied to this argument in the first place??
i think im still half-misinterpreting it. assuming that you could still plug in moral skepticism, this argument just disproves its own conclusion while the logic that leads up to it is still plausible, so then now this just goes back to my first thoughts
This is an odd position for a moral skeptic to take anyway. The idea that disagreement entails that a proposition is not true is immediately dubious. I take the moral skeptic to simply be unconvinced about the assertion that there are objective moral facts due to lack of agreement, and therefore lack of evidence, in that way, supporting plausibility.
Well, (2) is just a logical fallacy, even that something is a likely explanation doesn't prove anything. What we can conclude from (1) is, that *if* there is an objective reality, there isn't any agreement on it. But even if there *were* agreement, that doesn't prove a thing. There was agreement on a lot of things among the majority of humanity that only in recent decades is considered wrong, so how can it have been objectively true or objectively moral, when it now isn't? And what from what we now consider moral will be judged immoral in the future?
Even considering it an absolute moral truth that murder is morally wrong is problematic, when the concept of murder isn't agreed upon first. Some consider soldiers to be murderers, some consider them to be doing their duty when they shoot at enemies in a war. Some think it righteous to distinguish the world into believers and non-believers of some god or some ideology and slay the latter.
But if there *is* an objective moral, then that should hold for any conceivable (and even inconceivalble) form of society, maybe of aliens, or whatever may become of humanity, which even might include beings for which murder isn't even a valid concept.
Human morals are rooted in human nature and contemporary human societies.
I'd hardly call that "universal".
Well said
Why do you mix moral claims with scientific claims in regards to objective truth? Scientific claims have a specific domain of validity, as their validity is subject to verification by peers and the current scientific paradigm, until better models are being created. Therefore scientific claims naturally subjected to disagreements and they should always be doubted (see any book about philosophy of science) However moral claims do not follow this pattern and no moral claim should be subjected to follow the pattern of scientific claims.
Murder is a bad example. Murder is the immoral killing of a person and therefore is immoral by definition, not by agreement. One man’s murder is another man’s execution.
I know many people who think that killing communist or criminals is a good thing. That questions the objectivity of the moral value on killing people in general.
Not that I know them, those would never be my friend, just clarifying.
The question whether something exists or not might be an objective fact but it does not confer objectivity to the content of that question. For instance, doe Mickey Mouse exist or not? The question is an objective fact, but its content, Mickey Mouse, is not.
Human error is objective in itself
Marie Antoinette (according to urban legend): "Let them eat cake."
Donald Trump (actually): "You need an ID to buy groceries."
The only way I can wrap my head around that is that he thinks a credit card and ID are the same thing.
String theory is not that old compared to say incest for which there is no consensus as to if it's wrong, how wrong or how much separation is required before it is no longer incest. In twenty years string theory will be no longer or will be true while incest will continue to be debated.
*_"String Theory";_** Is not a theory, it's a **_"scientific hypothesis"_** .*
To me, the premise 2 is false, even with everything added, thus, it doesn't work.
The Moral skeptic can attack premise 1.
They can also use this argument in support of the logical error making moral skeptism best explained by human error, even more so if they put in an appeal to how human emotions seem to want there to be objective morality.
Morality seems self-evidently and hopelessly subjective to me no matter how much knowledge we gain. For example, suppose a select few of us gain omnipotent god-like powers along with omniscience. In that case, it's self-evident that there would be no remaining possible scientific disagreement among us about the nature of the universe since we now understand it perfectly and because science actually revolves around objectivity.
However, consider moral/ethical values. Would we unanimously agree then -- now with superhuman foresight and powers, and the ability to foresee the rippling consequences of every possible action through time -- exactly what actions are moral/immoral? We would now be able to even see that moving a pebble may end up killing a hundred people, or that cutting down a tree might cause a person to cure cancer. We would now be able to foresee that if one person is allowed to be born, they'll grow up to become a criminal, while another person grows up to become a valued member of a community.
I might favor a high-tech Star Trek universe with intergalactic space exploration. Another might favor a universe where humans live like natives once more in harmony with nature. Another might favor a world that has more engineers, while another might allow more engineers to die in favor of a world with more poets and artists. Another might favor a matriarchal society ruled by women. In spite of being omniscient and knowing everything there is to know about the universe, I doubt that knowledge would resolve our disagreements with respect to our moral disagreements (i.e., preferences for society and the universe).
In fact, now that we've become all-knowing, we would probably have more reasons to disagree morally than ever before, not less. "Killing is wrong" would be an impractical moral statement with such godly foresight to even see that a rock on the ground would cause someone's death in the future from tripping on it; it simply becomes a question of whom we allow to die as opposed to whom we allow to live. Perfect knowledge doesn't resolve matters of taste; it might instead generally exacerbate disagreements as we would have an infinitely larger database of knowledge from which to form a much greater variety of tastes.
If morality was objective, then we should be converging towards agreements the more knowledge we gain about the universe. Instead, I'm quite certain that we would diverge more with every profound leap of knowledge we gain (for example, suppose we developed tech that could allow us to predict from birth whether someone's future child is likely to become a productive citizen or not, and exactly how much or how little).
30:50 I have the bias, that anyone, who doesn't write the correct amount of i's, probably doesn't understand what he's talking about :P
lol
That actually bugged me just a little.
modern science didn't begin with galileo or europeans for that matter. they are other ancient civilization of egypt and mesopotamia.
Objective morality is a really stupid thing to beleive in, but this argument is even stupider.
"Laissez les manges du brioche!"
Science started with Heraclitus, or thereabouts.
I'm not sure why all the effort about delineating human error. The first claim that moral claims are subject to very persistent disagreement that is not best explained by human error, doesn't need the last phrase because it is redundant. ALL disagreements are based in the assumption that one party is in error. So, the first premise change adds nothing to the argument making the whole argument fail.
As the premise is bad argument against bad position, I will say it simple. There is no objective moral truth.
1. You can never know morally best thing (Maximasing joy/happiness and minimasing pain/suffering is really bad moral framework.)
2. Because of that the morality is often localised to certain situation to have boundaries (Like thinking "as long as they tried to do what they through to be for best" or limiting consequenses because it is obvious that #1 is true.) but this simply makes morality relative.
the persistent problem better not work otherwise you could substitute just about anything from philosophy in there!
The Qur'an makes the case for moral objectivity (per the New Testament, Psalms and Torah). This is both a persistent and testable reality; representing an additional argument against moral scepticism.
The argument is not valid.
To make a general argument, the first claim has to be universal.
So the statement would be "all moral claims have persistent disagreement"
The second premise has to bring the second term, in this case "objectivity"
So it would have to be something like:
Something objective cannot be disagreed upon.
Then you could come up with that conclusion.
But it's not what happens. The first premise as you point out is not true. Some claims are generally accepted and most of them are in general. Of course immoral people will disagree, but that is not a case against morality, but the exception that proves the rule.
The second is not built properly, it just repeats the first one. Basically it doubles down on the idea that for something to be "objective", it has to be accepted by complete consensus, which on the face of it is a ridiculous claim. There would be no laws if everybody agreed upon them, criminals always do and it's the whole point of the law.
The only conclusion you could make from that if it was true, is that some moral claims are not objective, which everybody knows to be true, but then there is a caveat. They may not be true at first, but sometimes they become true after which they become custom and then sometimes law.
A good example of this is eugenism. It was not considered bad at first, and in fact was considered good, which is why people wanted it. Then something happened and people generally agreed it was bad. Then now it is making a strong comeback again, but it's too late because now there are laws against it, so it is objective no matter how people try to spin it. Now they have to prove the laws are unjust, which is a lot harder to do. Any law that is written by the right authority is by definition objective, and that's the final argument against this type of thinking. What this do is reject laws which are official objective moralities, and the only argument is that some people disagree with them, which in no way takes out their legitimacy nor their power of coercion. Prisons are full of moral relativists and nobody cares about their opinion, and that is another objective "morality".
There are secular laws but also religious laws, and like I said, customs are also important even if not codified. If everybody drives on the right side, it is objectively the right thing to do, and it's irrelevant that some other places it's the opposite. Something does not have to be universal to be objective. When you go work for a factory, they tell you how to do things and it's objectively how it has to be done, it's objective morality. It is irrelevant that if you were to work somewhere else, they would do it differently. It would just be another objective morality that happens to be different but works just as well or similar. Just because those two factories do things differently and have a different sets of behavior does not mean it is "subjective". They do it their way because it works for them, but more importantly for the relativist, everybody has to do it the same anyway. If you move from factory 1 to 2, you have to adapt, and it is objective for you, and is objective for those that came up with the rule.
We have those problems with immigration. People move into other countries, don't learn the customs and the rules, claim it is different in their country, which is true but irrelevant, and then become activists to try and change the rules in the new country to the old one. It never occurs to them the reason they moved is because their own rules didn't work for them. What they want is a second chance to double down on their mistaken morality in the hope of having different results. It's pretty annoying, but shows another thing, which is that the relativists are pretty much all closet objectivists. They would secretly want their own personal opinion to be objective but it isn't, so they then claim all others are subjective and therefore equivalent and equal, but some animals are more equal than others, so their own should prevail. That's the real argument they try to make, and yes it's self-defeating. People simply don't follow bad stuff if it's bad for them and they can tell. The only way they will do it is if they cannot tell it is bad, which is the problem of the relativist. They can't tell the difference between good and bad, so assume all others have the same problem. It's simply not the case.
Just the same, if you are clueless about beer making, it does not mean your opinion is equal to the one of experts. The whole argument is based on that false assumption that is not said but is implied.
All I have to say is this: feelings have absolutely nothing to do with morality. Most people think good feelings have something to do with morality. And also, all morality boils down to our ability to structure our lives and civilizations toward the support of objective truth as the primary motive above all other motives. Note that I did not say the achievement of objective truth-just the overriding motive as an ultimate priority. An INFORMATION priority. Everything good depends on truth, from love and problem-solving to peace and harmony. You cannot have or achieve all these good things without it. Not consensus, because it can definitely be based on feel-good ideas approximating truth without actual knowledge-like all world religions. Like fanatical ideas. Etc. Persistent disagreement only occurs in the blindness to the elephant, so to speak. Motivation is absolutely key. Most people don’t understand their own motives nor understand how evolutionary psychology can help them overcome it because they don’t have EITHER THE MOTIVES OR THE ABILITY TO DO SO.
In sum, all human problems can be solved simply by being 2-3 standard deviations higher in objectivity and also in intelligence-especially with reading comprehension and openness.
"all morality boils down to our ability to structure our lives and civilizations toward the support of objective truth" What makes that moral? That's a choice, not an external fact that must be truth. What makes love objectively good? What makes peace objectively good? These always devolve into choices, preferences that have no objective existence.There's no grounding here.
"Murder is wrong" I know this sounds uncontroversial, but I certainly know people exists that claim that at least the murder of some people is the right thing to do, whether they are religious extremist or fascists. But just if you found an act that absolutely everyone agree that is unethical, that still doesn't make that a fact! We can all agree that you can't observe or measure objective morality, so how do you conclude something is true? Isn't arguing for objective morality similar to arguing for some god, in that any claim for objective morality can't be falsified?
This is smart. He he
If instead of calling it moral skepticism we call it moral relativism (opposed to objective morality) then the last example just confirms it.
Moral relativism is true and false at the same time, because the relativity also applies to itself.
I also disagree with some examples. The existence of God and string theory are not moral claims.
Should we believe in God? Should we believe in string theory? Those are closer to moral claims.
Morality, in a sense, does not care about truth, it cares about what is the right thing to do.
What if advancements in string theory will lead to an even more powerful "string" bombs? What if your beliefs justify the suffering of ideological opponents?
Morality cares about the outcome, not the underlying truth. Even if Kant refuses utilitarianism, it can't help but try to conceive some idea that will make the world better off. Because that's the right thing to do.
We have conceived these thought experiments out of the blue, it is naive to think that out of our thinking can come out some absolute imperative. And this goes to show our desperate need for certainty, for something to hold on to, because if everything is just really relative than nothing matters at all.