I've been spending hours watching your videos. I may already be familiar with a concept, but your explanations are just so damn good that it doesn't matter. I still tend to either learn something new, or see a different perspective, or I at least get some joy and benefit out of your explanation. So... Thank You.
Professor: "We say things like, pecan pie is tasty, but there's some disagreement" Guy who is deathly allergic to tree nuts: "you're darn right there is!"
I think the main reason why scientific disagreements are much easier to settle is that you actually have a relatively small number of people who are very invested in the truth of the matter looking at the same evidence as each other. Whereas moral disagreements aren't really a continuous conversation between the same group of people having the same experiences, aware of everything that has been said on the topic and not everyone is as dedicated to finding the answers. Moral disagreement is more like different people having the same conversations rather than a single continuous conversation. Even if in a given time and place, the problem is as good as solved, the next generation is going to have a new evidence to deal with and limited awareness of the preceding evidence and arguments. The (potentially) infinite adjustment of moral principles is a nice way to solve the issue of different circumstances, but my first thought was to just go the virtue ethics route. Also, God is usually an uncreated creator and not a creature.
@@petardraganov3716 I think he’s trying to share a point of view. An objective fact, as he probably understands it. That precisely, and under his own logic, does not mean that you should believe or not believe something in particular
@@petardraganov3716 here is a possible escape from your dilemma: if your goal is to align your beliefs with the truth, then you should not believe in moral facts, because they do not exist. This avoids the dilemma by pushing the question back to “why should you align your beliefs with the truth?”. To this, I would say you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I want to.
Petar Draganov: You are correct, but scientific arguments and disagreements can be settled , albeit temporarily sometimes, by producing verifiable, plausible, and convincing scientific facts to support one's position. Moral disagreements are much more fluid, and their validity seems to matter to those who believe in them and wish that others would too. The latter often implies or connotes CONTROL, the former always connotes KNOLEDGE.
Moral relativism isn't the position that morals are situationally relative. It's the position that a rule is only a moral rule for certain people or groups irrespective of whether it's situational. You can just tack on the clause "if you're in a situation" to any moral rule everyone would consider universal and have a situationally contingent universal rule, a rule that's relative to a universal situation. Would this be a universal relative moral rule? If there's a sense in which it would be, there are at least two completely different meanings the statement is likely to have, so differentiating between "relative" and "situational" moral rules would go a long way toward preventing miscommunication.
@@Synerco In my experience, the people arguing for moral objectivism tend to say "We all agree torturing babies for fun is wrong, therefore moral objectivism is right" (why do they always include "for fun"?), as if that were a sufficient argument. And even beyond that, the basic argument seems to be "members of homo sapience seem to agree morally in some areas if you squint enough, *and* my religion says so, therefore moral objectivism". Which I find extremely unconvincing. Can anyone argue why we *should* assume there is something objective out there, beyond what I've mentioned already? Where's the evidence? And given that the alternative actually *has* decent evidence (as I laid out in another comment somewhere), I'm pretty convinced there is no such thing as objective morality.
@@dallassegno It's not the hinge, but it is a fairly strong hint, except for one flaw: it's about the morality of one's in-group, not in general. For example, while many do lie to themselves about acts that conflict with their personal morality, that's not universal.
The point that you didn't make is that there can be a million moral laws that are situational but that does refute the fact that you just need 1 to be universally true.
Exactly. If we define moral nihilism and moral absolutism as follows, where would moral relativism fall? Moral Absolutism = at least one moral principle cannot be destroyed by man. Moral Nihilism = every moral principle can be destroyed by man.
And more importantly, a law can be situational but still universal. If the fact a moral law is situational means it's relative, it could apply universally even if the situation it specifies can never occur. It's like how the statement "If the moon is made of green cheese, then the moon is made of green cheese" is a universal objective truth even though "The moon is made of green cheese" is false. When we say a moral law is relative, we don't mean "relative to the situation." We mean its very existence as a moral law is relative to a person or group. Otherwise, it would be extremely easy to come up with a universal "relative" moral law. "It's wrong to steal if you're in a situation" is a situationally contingent moral statement that applies universally. So, unless we're willing to redefine "relative" such that it's not antithetical to "universal," we shouldn't equate it with "situational" either.
It may be a bit of piling on… but science in general seems to be another example where there is persistent disagreement, but where there is objective facts. The scientific method by its nature is driven by perpetual disagreements but it arrives at agreed upon facts. The subjects and facts in focus just shift over time. The debate on the existence of tectonic plates ends and the disagreements what mechanisms drive plate movement begins. In a similar way, morality has perpetual disagreements on the whole, but on specific subjects a moral consensus has emerged that didn’t exist previously. Slavery, genocide, monarchy etc. were once considered perfectly moral by most people, but are now recognized for the evils they are. Perhaps a better comparison instead of tectonics vs. morality would be tectonics vs. moral question of slavery. Or Science as a whole vs morality as a whole. At any rate, just a thought. Love your videos!
The point is that in science there is no persistent disagreement *on one specific issue*. Of course science as a whole thrives because of disagreement.
Taste is actually a perfect analogy, because it can be divided into the completely subjective aspect of tastiness and more or less "locally objective" aspects of healthiness (e.g. product X is generally not tasty, but healthy, or product Y is usually tasty but unhealthy, product Z tastes awful and is generally unhealthy but will make wonderful medicine in some specific cases and at the right dose). There never will be a single "objectively good diet", but overall some quite stable optimisations will emerge (with diets that are both healthy and tasty). Add to that the fact that there are a ton of neurological studies that show how moral judgements are handled by processess very similar to physical disgust. Just like we evolved an ability to judge food as good/bad, so we evolved to judge behaviours. For me the relativisim/objective morality is a closed subject, though we can still debate/optimize what should be part of a "healthy moral diet", e.g. should a belief in one "objectivelly good diet" be part of it?
@@user-bt6td6ed5c no food is universally and unquestionably "good" - when not eaten in moderation anything can be unhealthy, and even the tastiest of foods have people that don't like them. I would compare OnlyFans to new artificially flavoured foods that taste awesome, but can be quite unhealthy. And I totally agree getting a "balanced" moral diet is a very difficult task, especially that any society has to incorporate some healthy level of generally unhealthy violence (to uphold laws and defend against threats).
I'm pretty late to the party. I like that you contrasted scientific disagreement with moral disagreement. It seems to me the difficulty with morality is it involves the interaction between two or more people. As such is is highly subjective. I think what one has to do is define a goal, in my case my the overriding moral principle is human wellbeing. Actions that increase it are moral ones that reduce it are immoral. The difficulty of course is not everyone has the same notion of what constitutes human well being.
Didn't you skip over the 'why' completely? Stealing is wrong, but here are some situations where that doesn't apply you say, but even that presupposes that I agree that stealing is wrong in the first place. It's the question of why something is inherently wrong that the moral objectivist has to answer, no?
Yes, you are pressing on an ethical question (e.g., which actions are right and wrong, and what makes then right or wrong?), whereas this video is mostly focused on a metaethical question (e.g., are there objective ethical facts in the first place?). For the purposes of this video I am assuming that, most of the time, things like killing, stealing, etc. are wrong. I think that is a reasonable assumption. But you are right that one of the central philosophical questions is: what makes the right actions right and the wrong actions wrong? There are different answers to that question. Utilitarians think that actions are right if they result in the greatest good for the greatest number. Deontologists think that actions are right if they don't violate any of the moral laws built into nature/reality. I discuss a bunch of this stuff in other videos on my channel. I am new to RUclips. Can I link to videos in a comment?
@@profjeffreykaplan I see what you are saying. I couldn't make sense from a skeptic perspective how you could discuss the objectivity of morality while you have presupposed a moral claim, since to my understanding they would say that all moral claims are unjustified. EDIT: Removed the question here since I realized that I was indeed having a brain fart. As for linking I'm not sure if the system allows it or not. Try it. And thank you for replying as well as uploading these videos. I will make sure to check out the rest of your channel. Keep it up!
It is wrong because you would not like to be robbed of your own belongings. 既不所欲勿施于人 don't do to others what you would not like others to do to you. As old as a Chinese philosopher.
@@karelvorster7414 Shouldn't it be more like, "Don't do unto others what they would not like you to do?" For example, a sadomachist could use the Golden Rule to go around smacking everyone just because he likes being smacked even if the others don't like being smacked. it never made much sense to me morally given how much people vary in terms of what they'd like done to them. The occassional oddball might even not mind or enjoy having his belongings stolen. Also what about cases when the other person wants something entirely different from you? For example, maybe a girl wants to receive flowers from a guy even though the guy never wants to receive flowers. The rule never seemed to properly account for how wildly different people's preferences are.
Another thing to note about the morality vs. taste comparison: If I disagree with you on morality, you can provide arguments that might change my conclusion, but if I disagree with you on taste, this is typically impossible. You can't argue me into thinking pickles taste good, but you could argue me into changing my mind about a moral issue like abortion. This seems to be a quite relevant difference between the persistent disagreements in morality and taste. Using arguments to change someone's mind doesn't make any sense if it's a subjective matter like taste, but we do it all the time for morality.
Can you point out the same distinction if we are talking about taste in art, for instance? I'd say it is definitely conceivable that one might be convinced that a once hated movie is actually pretty good. So the way that I would respond to this is by noting that a moral argument is supposed to present you with aspects that you may have missed on a given matter. The analogy would be that you may initially hate picles only from their visual appearance, but then be convinced that they are actually good after someone makes you taste them. There will surely be no way to make you change your mind after you are presented with every aspect of a given matter (e.g. after you tasted the picles), but then that should be expected in all views of morality.
@@EvilMatheusBandicoot That's a good point, but I think there are still a few reasons why it doesn't show that moral disagreements are analogous to disagreements about taste. For one, art quality is arguably a combination of subjective and objective things, rather than purely subjective. This is why some people will say things like, "This movie is terrible, but I like it anyway." That seems to be a statement that the movie is objectively bad, but that the viewer still derives subjective enjoyment from it. So, your ability to convince me that a piece of art is better or worse via argumentation might just reflect the fact that there are some measures of objective quality that I can change my assessment of. The second reason is that discussions about art often draw your attention to something you hadn't noticed about the art piece, which will change your experience of it in the future, thus affecting your subjective judgement of it. But I think you are wrong to say that moral disagreements are always of this sort. What fact about the situation do pro-life and pro-choice activists disagree on, for example? It seems that they both know what happens during an abortion, but they disagree on whether a fetus has the same moral status as a fully-formed human and whether its life is more important than the mother's right to choose. There don't seem to be any non-moral facts that resolve the matter. The same is true in pretty much every case where two people disagree on something because they hold different meta-ethical theories.
@@plasmaballin I don't believe there is anything which can objectively qualify art. I would say that those objective things that you allude to are in fact merely subjective things at which most people agree on (but that's perhaps too off topic). We don't know everything that happens during an abortion: we don't know, for instance, whether a "soul" is killed in the process of an abortion (I don't personally believe souls exist, but some people do and that would be an important fact to consider for those people). And even if we did know everything that happens _during the process_ , that wouldn't mean that we know everything _about_ abortion. The question of whether a fetus consisting of a single cell is an individual is independent of how the process of abortion takes place, and it is one of the most important questions on this matter, in my opinion. Philosophical arguments _are_ precisely suppose to draw your attention to something you hadn't noticed about the subject matter.
This implies our minds are mostly changed by persuasive arguments and not, say, by changes within ourselves over time; a position held by some psychology today. Children infamously dislike vegetables, but as adults some of us acquire a taste for them. Similarly, as life experiences and the passage of time may alter our taste for certain foods, who's to say the same doesn't occur to our views or morals? As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. As Morpheus says in the Matrix, I can only show you the door, you're the one that has to walk thru it.
@@EvilMatheusBandicoot Yeah, I'm not really sure what to think of art quality. It's definitely mostly subjective, I just wonder if there are any parts that can be considered objective. I suppose you could explain statements like, "This movie is terrible, but I like it anyway," in a different way, though: The person making the statement is comparing two different subjective standards, one for whether or not the movie is "good", and one that is purely based on how much they enjoyed it. So I will grant you that point. It's true that some disagreements over contentious issues like abortion are disagreements over objective facts that might change someone's subjective assessment, but I think there are still plenty of disagreements that are purely over what is right, even when every detail of a situation is specified. For example, the violinist thought experiment is a pretty common argument when it comes to abortion, but it isn't an argument about whether a fetus has a soul or personhood - the violinist argument claims that, even if pro-life advocates are right that the fetus is a person, abortion is still permissible. So it seems perfectly possible for somebody to change their position on abortion on the basis of the argument, rather than a change in taste, without changing their opinion on any non-moral facts of the matter. Somebody might start out being pro-life and believing that the fetus is a person, but later hear the violinist argument and be convinced by it. This person would still believe that a fetus is a person, but they would now believe, on the basis of the argument, that it is okay to abort a fetus anyway. Also, I think that this counterargument only works when we are talking about a disagreement over a specific complicated issue like abortion, where there are both moral issues and non-moral questions in play. But there are also lots of moral disagreements about meta-ethics, where there are no situational factors at all involved, and people can still be convinced by arguments here. If moral arguments are really just about elucidating some aspect of the situation so that someone's personal tastes about it will change, then no one would ever be convinced to change their meta-ethics, since meta-ethics would be purely about personal taste.
Again, great presentation with delightful clarity. It might be that the question of god’s or gods’ existence is wrong like the question of set of sets that don’t contain themselves is wrong. The premise that all specifications of inclusion to a ‘set’ can define sets is wrong. Similarly, not all specifications of ‘entities‘ define entities of the kind whose existence can be queried. Therefore, the example you gave of a persistent disagreement but that an objective answer exists may be invalid.
I would ask clarity on what they mean by exist... I've heard God isn't real....what do you mean by real? Our subjective understanding of these things gathered from this specific universe which gauges what we believe is real, or exists? Anyway I'm not about to make this any longer than it needs to be.
@@jondoe8014 I’m not arguing about the existence or non-existence of God. I’m saying that, just like in set theory where not all specifications of a set are valid, similarly, not all specifications of entities are valid. This means that operations and reasonings that follow such specifications are invalid (no implications on truth either way).
Re: there was disagreement about plate tec(h?)tonics for only a decade or too. The observation that Africa and South America fitted together was mentioned by Bacon in Novum Organum (1620), and I don't think he was the first to notice it either. He had no conclusions to offer, he only said that this observation warranted further study. Same thing about the similarities between humans and apes.
The situational argument for moral relativism is less of an argument against the existence of moral objectivity and more of an argument against the validity of certain moral codes. This is because in a hypothetical moral code, distinctions could be made from situation to situation to outline what should be done. Morality is about what Should be done in every situation. The most ideal moral code would have an infinite supply of situations, but this is impossible. Sometimes the general rule might always apply, and sometimes specificity is required, but this issue of situational specificity seems to be more about the moral codes themselves rather than the idea of a moral code.
How does the landscape change if you take religion out of the picture? The persistence is largely because so many base their morality on ancient texts that are never updated.
I have often used the existence of objective morality as an argument against the idea that people (read the antebellum southerners) cannot be judged because they were living in a different milieu. But I simply cannot believe that situational ethics can justify the abject inhuman cruelty of slavery. Surely, this qualifies as an example of an objective morality. And what bothers me the most, is that Southerners, who are the most likely persons to make this argument are, as denizens of the Bible Belt, also the most likely to argue that the 10 commandments are objective moral truths.
Biblically endorsed slavery was almost indistinguishable from Antebellum Chattel Slavery *"Buy your slaves from the heathen nations that surround you"*
Just like taste, morality is subject to certain reliable tendencies. For example, if you eat food and get violently I’ll right after that, you’ll be likely to dislike the taste smell and appearance of that food. And if you’re raised in a community that eats food with a certain kind of spice or flavor, you’ll be much more likely to enjoy those flavors than a person who was raised in a community that doesn’t use those spices and flavors. If you are raised in a culture where binding women’s feet is common you are likely to consider foot binding beneficial and good, whereas if you have never seen foot binding, you are likely to consider it grotesque and abominable. If something very painful happens to you as a result of the actions of another, you are likely to come to the conclusion that that action was wrong, or even evil.
Different cultures having different customs and impressions of morals, does not mean that they aren't wrong. Obviously morality is influenced by cultures and events.
The difference between moral disagreement and scientific disagreement is that with science, there is always new information and new sources of information. Whereas with morality it boils down to, "Some actions I might take may cause some degree of distress to another being. At which degree of distress should I stop and why?" There will never be any new evidence regarding morality, just as there will never be any new evidence regarding God. The best we can hope for is a new perspective.
The fact there even is a moral dilemma to begin with, like the examples he stated in the video, is in itself evidence for moral objectivity. If morals were subjective, there wouldn’t exist such a strong and consistent verdict to adhere to one over the other (e.g.: break your promise to save other’s lives).
It's drivel, Kaplan is a fool, and worse he is idle an innocent of any kind of intellectual ability or accomplishment; talk about the blind leading the blind
The thing about taste is: there are objective facts, but they do not point to a precise, adequate taste, but to clusters of objective realities. You can't say lemons are objectively tasty, but you can say they are, objectively, sour. Therefore, it has an objective factor that makes it a part of a group, with saurkraut, yogurt and lime. And so it goes with morality: there are schools of morality that are individualistic or collectivist, utilitarian or formalist, secular or religious, etc. Those facts might not be useful to determine universal, good morality, but nevertheless they exist.
(my definitions - not „official“ ones) objective truth: „a statement that either stems directly from empirical evidence or is correctly derived from such“ source of moral evaluation: „(inter)subjective judgement“ from those two definition the impossibility of objective moral truths is immediately obvious
How about a moral law that says actions are moral if they increase the sum of contentment or happiness in all those they affect. Someone with plenty of water in a drought cannot complain on moral grounds if some of his is stolen by people who are seriously dehydrated. He may not be happy about it but those who stole from him and their dependents are. but where water is plentiful, the person stolen from can legitimately complain on moral grounds.
I honestly have no idea why people would even try and disprove moral objectivism. Unless someone comes up with some 'moral fact' that contradicts reality in some way then I can't see how it would even be possible. Likewise I can't see why people feel a need to try and prove it. Unless they can come up with some fact of reality which contradicts relativism, in all forms, then I can't see how they could do that either. Likewise even if such moral facts existed including some ought that we should follow them, and a reliable objective method for their determination, I can't see a reason why people necessarily would wish to actually do so, if they had more pressing alternate reasons to do otherwise. But fun for thinking about I guess :)
It may be an objective fact that everyone dislikes being robbed or lied to, and may let the perp off the hook in all the same special cases, so that everyone can agree that they like and dislike the same actions under the same circumstances, but this would no more make morality objective than if everyone agreed that blue was the best color or chocolate was the best ice cream flavor. The objectivity would only lie at the level of census taking, not at the level of the moral decision-making; that will always be subjective. The entire moral enterprise will always be foundationally subjective.
Disagree. Morals are intentions rather than outcomes. The situational differences using actions are not a moral argument, but an ethical one. Secondly, morals are about right and wrong on the scale of goodness and righteousness, not correct or incorrect, nor best vs worse. Considering a thirsty person vs the man with water. Stealing isn't a moral question but an ethical one. But if we extend it as though it is a moral argument, stealing is always wrong, but that doesn't mean letting yourself die is right either, nor is the man with water letting that man die also be moral. Him not giving water isn't ethical in the same way as true and untrue vs true and false. Immorality leads to the failure of morals, so regardless of the actions to be taken, the evaluation isn't is it moral to do something, but ethical and if you fail at what you think is moral, it is not because of morality, but immorality. Reason being that morals being intentions naturally carry no consequences. Only actions do. And objective morality doesn't mean objective fact either. The argument looks flawed to me.
@@furyberserk moral and ethical can be used interchangeably, really. Here’s one dictionary entry for “moral”: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical” But even if you want to distinguish them as you have done, my question is this: morals concern right and wrong intentions, but right and wrong according to whom or what? God? The universe? If it’s according to God and God is a person (a subject) then the foundation is still subjective, and I have to ask you why ought we do what God likes? If it’s the universe, and these moral laws are as unchanging as the physical laws of gravity and thermodynamics, then how is it humans can so easily defy moral laws but we can never defy the physical laws? It’s because these aren’t like objective/absolute/unchanging physical laws; morals are simply what the vast majority of people tend to agree upon regarding which intentions are good or bad, “right or wrong”, best or worst for the outcomes we tend to prefer.
@@bta1138If you agree that there is moral relativism then you could never say that a society where slavery is permitted is incorrect, you would have to concede that at some level there is some quirk in their situation or reasoning that permits them to uphold slavery and still claim to be moral. Further, just because a moral can be objectively absolute does not mean that it is binding like the laws of physics. In fact using the laws of physics is a little self defeating. For the longest time we could only conceive of geometry on flat planes, for only on flat planes do Euclid's principles, on which our geometry is based on, works. But then when we found out we were working with the curvature of planets and the warping nature of spacetime did we have to change the laws of physics. Hell even something as basic as the concept of time has been revised now to better fit our understanding of physics. Much in the same way we could continue on elucidating principles more and more exactly as new situations arise.
@@donttalkaboutmymomsyo Yes, what I am arguing is that you could never say that a society where slavery is permitted is "incorrect." I'm arguing that "incorrect" is a misuse of the term when it comes to morality. Incorrect (i.e. not true) means that it is either illogical (definitionally or axiomatically), or it doesn't comport with how we understand reality to function. For millennia, slavery was accepted throughout many societies. Certainly the slaves at that time (or I would assume most of them, at least the ones that were not merely indentured) didn't think slavery was moral, but they did not hold the dominant opinion at the time. We now have a different dominant collective opinion, that's all; mainly because our priorities have changed. No longer is life so short and brutish, where manpower still beats technology, and what matters most is hierarchical power structures and land wars (though I'd say we're still struggling with that as a species). Now people are the healthiest, safest, most free and most peaceful we've ever been, so we've come to realize that slavery is no longer a "necessary evil" as it may have been thought of back then. You and I think those people are barbaric. I guaran-damn-tee you that centuries from now, it will be "correct" for our descendants to say that plenty of things we don't mind so much now are barbaric. What do you mean when you say that a moral is "objectively absolute"? Absolute in what way? Objective in what way? Mathematics are invented by us. It's simply another "language" that we use to describe the universe to ourselves. Triangles (Euclidian or Non-Euclidian) are very simplistic abstractions that we conjure in our minds to talk to each other about what we see in nature, but there are no perfect simplistic triangles or circles "out there somewhere". The math happens (exists) entirely in our minds. Changing our models of the universe to better reflect an external reality is not the same thing as changing our minds about slavery over time. Yes, saying that "we all agree" that there is an external reality certainly *sounds* the same as saying "we all agree" that killing innocent people is wrong, but the actual consequences of both of those statements are wildly different. You and I can test over and over again and come to a reasonable conclusion that everyone else with similar cognitive abilities would agree that an objective external reality exists and continues to "obey" certain "rules". You and I cannot ever test over and over again and come to a reasonable conclusion that everyone else with similar cognitive abilities would agree that harming butterflies is "incorrect" or that not eating pork is a "rule" you must "obey". We're dumb humans who get fooled by our language and how sloppy it is. We use words like "rules" and "laws" and "obey" and "must" for many different scenarios that "appear" to be similar, but if you dig deep down, you'll see that the ways that they occur are not similar at all. We think morals are absolute because we feel so strongly about them, that they "must" be. But they are not. If there were no more humans, morality would no longer exist. But it doesn't matter that morality is ultimately subjective. It's not the same kind of subjectivity as "chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream". It's a preference that has deep roots in our evolution. Therefore it becomes more "intersubjective", like a preference for living rather than a preference for ice cream flavors.
@@bta1138 must disagree, and on multiple fronts. First the notion that our ancestors held that slavery was a necessary evil is simply untrue, slavery was always wrong, just because there was a majority opinion on it by the ruling masses does not make it so. These people did not care about morals and ethics and when somebody did take an interest in them (like Las Casas) and did express their opinions(like Las Casas), they were ultimately shunned or shouted down (like Las Casas). There have been a number of attempts to justify (falsely) that slavery is okay, but the strongest at the tame were based in the most flawed attempts at anatomical and physiological categorization. Further, slavery did not end because it was no longer useful to the ruling class, but it was a decades long fight to get the rulers to admit to being wrong, this could be taken as an example of changing consensus to fit the relativistic view, however it fails to recognize that these countries which practiced slavery the most were at once deeply christian(which does not mingle with slavery despite bad bible interpretation) and both founded in the egalitarian principles of the enlightenment. It was always wrong, even by their standards. On to the next point. While mathematics was invented, that does not mean that it doesn't corelate rather well to our observable universe. In fact there are plenty of structures which are identical to our so called "made up" shapes. We find them in nature all the time, the hexagon is a shape which plays a big part in the existence of thousands of species of animals. Mathematics is simply a way to express what is going on in the world. While language is made up, the concepts it represents are definitely not, this is the same as saying that just because a sentence describing grass is made up that grass is also made up. There does not have to be language for something abstract like objective morals to exist, and yes they are contingent on humans existing, but they are binding because of the fact that we are sentient and self conscious beings, animals do not have the same burden. When I say objective morals I mean morals that are not relative to any single groups understanding of them. So for this express purpose does your example of questioning people if whether eating pork is right or wrong flawed, you are still supposing that consensus makes morality, it does not. And yes, in the future they will surely think many of our practises are wrong. Neither of these cases prove that eating meat or whatever was correct today, we just keep doing it for a number of reasons that rarely have anything to do with moral reasoning. I will be the first to say that eating meat is probably wrong, yet I still do it frequently for a multitude of different reasons. Also what are these final few sentences you have written? You'll have to elaborate plenty on that, its too big of a claim to leave it just like that.
16:00 about the stated example about the water. The law that is defined as objective morality is: "do not harm people." So drinking water in need from someone who has plenty of water is not doing harm so its moral justified from an objective perspective. But telling the truth to a murder that gonna harm someone, is not justified.
I'm not sure I agree with the argument based on persistence of debate, and the example of a longstanding debate about the existence of God despite there necessarily being either a fact that God exists or a fact that God doesn't exist, irrespective of our opinion in the debate. Couldn't you just as easily say this about the existence of objective morality? That there is either a fact that objective morality exists or a fact that objective morality doesn't exist, irrespective of our opinion in the debate. What makes this different? For the record, I'm not convinced that such a fact exists in either case (from my perspective, there's isn't one single longstanding, unchanging, global consensus of what the definition of God is), but even if we take there being a fact about the existence or nonexistence of God as a given, I'm curious as to how these can be contrasted for the counterargument in this video, to show that a longstanding debate =/= an absence of moral facts.
Our morality is predicated on sustaining the group, and not the well-being of the individual. All social animals exhibit some system of cooperation that makes group living possible. Our system is morality, which evolved along with our social nature. In a group the individual's survival, procreation opportunities, and quality of life are enhanced.
Not always in humans is that true as the group also causes mankind to war against other groups of mankind. Judging each other based on group properties instead of individual merit. All our most terrible human actions were done because of group ideology.
Psychology claims to be a science, but there are many competing schools, and, as well, rather embarrassingly, practitioners very often and famously can't agree on a diagnosis of individuals, when they each follow the DSM-5
While moral disagreements may seem persistent, there have been some moral disagreements that get resolved. We seem to have near global rejection of the permissibility of slavery now, while for many centuries slavery was disagreed about, and for many centuries before that, it was generally considered permissible.
So what if, in centuries to come, it becomes permissible again? Or at least what if there will be disagreement? That seems like a perfectly plausible scenario to me, even though I hope that it won't happen.
Someone could reply you that the meaning of slavery is relative. For example, you are forced to work in order to survive in a capitalist society. Since you are forced, why are you not considering yourself a slave?
@@TheFate23 You have always been forced to work in some sense to survive. If you just laid in tent and looked at the fire all the time during the stone age you wouldn't survive either. Incredibly absurd argument.
Work for yourself and your close group, not for strangers like under capitalism in which resources are not even distributed equally. Capitalism is unnatural and hated for this reason. @@brutosilversked
Kaplan's last attempt to have universal, objective laws fails as those have conditions - his example: stealing is wrong unless it's necessary for survival. The moment you attach a condition, it's no longer universal, and because the condition is subject to interpretation, it is no longer objective.
I wouldnt say thats a strong objection. Surely if it is wrong in every case in which some condition does not apply, it is objective. The better objection is, I think, that for every amendment to such a law in the attempt to make it objective, you can find a counterexample in which it does not apply.
@@nosteinnogate7305 I believe you are confusing between real and objective. For instance Michelangelo's statue of David is real, but not objective (objective = that which can exist independently of human existence). Morality is a creation of the human mind, meaning outside the human existence, it has no meaning. Lastly, if a moral law has conditions, it is no longer universal.
Morals are subjective. -"Bad or Evil" are simply what an organism sees as bad for their survival (+reproduction, well being). -To the antelope the lion is evil cus he is trying to kill it, to the lion the antelope running away is evil cus he will make the lion starve. To a human the bacteria giving him a disease are evil-bad, to the bacteria the human is evil trying to kill them. To tribe A the tribe B is evil, to tribe B the tribe A is evil. And so on. -Morals completely depend the person-animal's point of view. Aka on the individual life form. -We can try to generalize morals from what we think is bad for us and apply it to everyone else (what I don't want done to me, others don't want done to them). But that is still a projection of personal morals and not everyone agrees. But even if everyone would perfectly agree (like murder of men for example), it would still not make it objective, just agreed upon. Still the universe is fine whether the bad thing happens or not, nothing in nature really cares. Everything kills each other in nature. Morals are just the animal ego wanting to ensure it's survival. If a spider was smart enough to have morals, it would just as humans, decide that killing spiders, stealing from spiders is an immoral thing. * We are just survival machines - all life forms. The one and only thing that we look for is Power (all forms), so it ensures the propagation of our genes. You're welcome.
I agree 100%. Just to add one thing - I think the biggest problem with morals is our limited capability in predicting the influence of some action on our own "good" (survival/replication) as well as the survival of the group (which in turn can influence our own good, or those of our kin). What's good from the point of the individual, may not be the best for the group, and vice versa, a benefit for the group can come at the sacrifice of an individual. Taste is actually a perfect analogy, because it not we can divide it up into the completely subjective aspects (tastes good/bad) and more or less "locally objective" aspects of health (e.g. product X is generally not tasty, but healthy, or product Y is usually tasty but unhealthy). There never will be a single "objectively good diet", but overall some quite stable optimisations will emerge (with diets that are both healthy and tasty).
@@youcontrolfreakssuckit3784 Yeah Neitzche was kind of an a-hole sometimes. Some scholars called him a proto fascist and you can kinda see why, a society built upon the idea of will to power quickly gonna degenerate into a hell hole. What JP fanboys miss is that Nietzche thought god was an awful answer to this problem and was looking for a secular solution to it hoping we could come up with our own morals. And if you ask me individual rights always come before group rights cuz a group which literally has no conception of respect for the individual has no right to demand respect for itself in turn.
this is really myopic anthropomorphizing, there's no morals in nature, except monkeys and maybe some other advanced mammals, it's largely a human concept
The problem with the situational difference argument is that humans are creatures of habit and humans favor predictability. Moral claims relate to drive, the famous "ought". It's one of those cases where it ironically self-refutes. The most precious thing here is that all "truth" claims are calls for a drive towards truth, they come with an "ought" baked in.
I think he is confusing objective with absolute! Objective rules depend on objectivly measurable cicumstances - absolutes ones claim to be valid in all circumcstance.
The problem is that sense of taste is objective. We can measure how different molecules interact with tastebuds. Feces are objectively disgusting to most people's tastebuds. Hence, an emergent taste profile is developed in a population, where their tastes largely align with the utility of the food. Similarly, populations of people develop emergent moralities based on the aggregation of all their moral sentiments, which are also oriented around utility.
But it doesn't really matter that we can measure and observe reactions within our nerve system. That taste is undoubtedly individual matter of each of us. So our mouths with all it's nerves has to first exist to measure it, which is what makes it subjective. Objective morality assumes that it's a value that exists independently of us waiting to be discovered and we just disagree on what it actually is. Another thing that makes the analogy seem sort of disconnected is the difference in dependence of each property. Sure it's not something that I can perform out of a mere whim but it's certainly possible for me to form or redefine my morality by grabbing a book or watching a youtube playlist of a philosophy teacher. But no matter what I'll try to do to my food, there is absolutely nothing I can do to start liking fish food. I can't impact it's sort of "value" for my mouth because nature already decided it for me and it's permanent.
@@Reality-Distortion Nice points there, but I think I still disagree. The "independent" thing waiting to be discovered is the best game theoretic strategy for a population. Game theory is super complex, so it makes sense that no one knows how to apply it. But just like there are objectively "best" strategies in chess, there are objectively "best" strategies in the game of evolution. Just as instances of gravity are relative (the relationship between planets is relative to their masses), the laws of gravity are universally objective -- a guiding force that governs all instances. Similarly, game theory is the invisible objective law of morality that guides all cultural instantiations. The ability to learn morality seems like learning how to play chess. We are given the goal instinctively and we have to calculate how to play. And evolution gives us emotions that guide us. Often philosophers will present a moral conclusion that our moral intuitions will reject. Obviously, there are deeper evolutionary emotions that are resisting this type of moral learning - so it isn't completely flexible. I believe moral intuitions (emotions) evolve randomly, and the ones that have utility survive, hence the hand of evolutionary game theory is that gravitational pull over morality.
Does "The morally correct action is always dependent on the situation" apply in all situations? Would that be an objective truth proving relativism? Is there any situation where the morally correct action DOES NOT depend on the situation itself? If someone tells me a secret and I promised not to share it with anyone, the concept of stealing doesn't really apply. Does it? The morally right thing to do is necessarily dependent on the situation... "Don't kill your neighbor's chickens." "Ok, but does that mean I can't eat his ice cream?" "What?" Isn't everything everywhere only present because there are other things around it to contrast it to? We only know grass is green because the non-grass is a different color. If everything was green, how would we tell the visual difference between anything?
It depends on the situation AND your own moral intuitions. Therefore it is vital that we apprehend the world as it is and not in a subjective, hallucinatory way the way Schopenhauer and other Kantians claim in their theory of "ideas". On the basis of a correct apprehension of the situation and of the subject himself (or herself) unique moral intuitions arise in the subject. Jesus of Nazareth did not condemn the adulteress but we cannot generalize the rule that seems to be implied by his unique action of forgiveness in a linear way. If you believe that you cannot see the world objectively and have objective moral intuitions, that is true but individual intuitions and ideas, the only way out is obviously either through positive law or through opportunism guided by self-interest. Moral objective individualism is beautifully explained in the Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner, a work that is free of his later, questionable excursions into esoteric thinking.
Everything depends on the situation, so making that argument about morality is not distinctive. Given enough information about the situation, yes, one can make an objectively moral call.
The claim ‘moral laws do not apply to every situation’ isn’t a moral claim itself, it’s a claim ABOUT morality: moral relativism can only be true or false, it can’t be good or evil. Saying ‘if moral relativism is true then moral relativism’s truth value depends on the situation’ is like saying ‘if moral relativism is true, whether or not atoms exist is dependent on the situation’.
what you say at the end is obvious. why do these people with such shallow reasoning deserve credit or attention? it seems to me students need to learn how to think for themselves rather than be taught a canon made of arguments that are so full of holes.
I think a problem with the last part is that moral objectivism is not that there are objective moral laws that can be written out, but that there are objective moral truths. The stipulation that it has to be able to be written out as in a law book, is a stipulation that doesn't hold.
I feel your counterexample of the existence of god doesn't work. It is indeed a field of millennialong debate, but 'god exists' or 'god doesn't exist' are descriptive statements. They can be disproven or proven (in theory at least). I don't see how this applies to normative facts though. I sincerely hope you can come up with a field that's involved in normative matters where it would be mistaken to believe in objective facts, or where a dispute has in fact been settled (and i will also try to come up with such an example).
If someone manages to disproves "objective morality", then morality does not exist at all. "Subjective" or "relativistic" morality has no power to do anything, hence morality is useless unless it is objective. When someone uses the term "subjective morality" it sounds to me like a "triangle with 4 corners".
I'm confused. I looked up the definition of moral and determining how something tastes isn't questioning morality. How is this even an argument against objective morality which concerns with right and wrong? This sounds like a gaslight than an argument at all.
Doesn't hold up. The way you chose to word it the excistence and nature of god isn't a moral disagreement, its a scientific one. If there is a god (or not) and what its oppinions are would be facts. If we found god, that would be a scientific fact. If he had a oppinion on moralistic maters would be facts (even if the morality of those oppinons could be debated). After all the excistance and behaviours and preferences of a platepus aren't moralistic arguements either. As for defining moral laws more closely its pointless and irrelevant. Pointless because people have contradicting needs. The more it applies to one situation, the less it applies to another. A poor man might find a flexible moral law on stealing better, but a shop owner trying to support his family could prefer a stricter morality. And its irrelevant because there is no way to show one is better then the other in a objective manner.
I’m not a moral objectivist, but obviously you could say that stealing is always wrong, but sometimes necessary due to greater concerns. Dying of hunger is objectively worse than stealing, so one objective immorality is outweighed by another, not extinguished by it.
In what sense do you mean ‘necessary’? If you mean ‘morally necessary’ then it seems contradictory for an action to be both morally wrong and morally necessary
How is it "always" wrong if you just said that if you are starving it's not wrong? Stealing is therefore right, for example if you're starving to death.
Morality comes from 2 things: our innate human instincts and our culture. The innate instincts are universal to humans but are dependent upon in-group/out-group perceptions. There you go, dilemma solved.
Morality, as knowledge is concerned with Truth, is concerned with goodness, namely the Universal one. Considering this to be, what could be called theoretical Reason and practical one, one must conclude, that its principle is 'objective' in the Sense, that it underlies practice in general. To help us understand, we can Take the Analogy of knowledge to our aid. Knowledge, as concerned with Truth and Guided therefore by strict principles cannot be subjective or nothing. For it to be nothing would be contradictory, Like the Statement, that it is true, that there is No Truth, and that one knows that. But it cannot be subjective either, for it would be contradictory too, like the Statement, that it is both true, that i know about Something, that is is equally true and Not, as two subjects disagree, or only one with itself. Morality is therefore Neither a Matter of taste, Nor nothing. But as with opinion and believe too, the Moral opinions May very strongly, although the real difference has been shown to be much smaller then often posited. That steeling is wrong is No principle of morality, but rather a rule, or fact gained through deriving IT from the Moral principles. The principles need to be formal and Abstract, in Order to fullfill their objective universality. To give again an example of such a principle of that Nature, one may Look at the principle of non-contradiction in Logic, which is all-binding and Universal therefore. Over it, one cannot disagree meaningfully, and everyone seems to use it indeed all the time, as they think. But it does Not prevent Errors Made by us, but is therefore not affected by it itself, but is rather the necessary measure for Error Itself and overcoming it.
Demonstrating that mortality is situational is not an attack on objective morality. If we accept that the principle "stealing is wrong" is not true in some situations, we've done so by changing the physical context (objects), not the moral actors (subjects). We wouldn't argue that stealing is right for one person but wrong for another in the same situation, which would be more akin to the taste metaphor used. Jesus claims that the whole law of God can be contained in just two principles: "Love God completely" and "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." I wonder if these are anywhere near the objective center of morality.
We wouldnt say that the fact that something exists or not exists is a limit of language. If classical logic is true, is really is the case that something either exists or it does not.
Are you just having fun on the playground? Or do you "believe" that some form of comprehensive fully rationalizable, articulable, applicable, self-consistent, "grand unified theory of philosophy" is even possible? and is that just a belief? a feeling? A conviction? Don't they all tend to just end up in paradox?
@@richardbradley1532 Real organisms evolved. The word "creature" originally meant all of creation, but soon came to mean a created being. Of course it means an animal or monster in common use, but it still retains the older meaning in contexts where created beings are contrasted with God. (By the way, I'm an atheist. But I was also a philosophy major long ago, and if you're going to learn philosophy you have to read works where theism is argued for, and others where it's taken for granted.) Real organisms evolved, which means they're _technically_ not creatures.
To me, it's not that you can prove moral relativism correct... you can't prove a negative! But absent a compelling proof that objective morals DO exist, you are essentially forced to adopt this position as the agnostic view of morality. If you don't know, this is the assumption you use while you proceed forward until you DO know. Spoiler alert, you'll never know because moral relativism is probably correct, as the millennia of disagreement hints at, even if it doesn't prove it. 😜😁
You can prove a negative. There's a whole field in philosophy that does such a thing. Also note that "you can't prove a negative" is a negative claim and so is self-defeating if true
this pickle argument is a terrible example... one person's body chemistry, might be balanced in a way where pickles make they feel grossed out by a pickle, while a person with different body chemistry needs might feel like they crave it... and even the person who likes pickles doesn't want a pickle ALL the time... just not a great example -- we might be able to find an answer in physicalism as to why there's a disagreement... something OUTSIDE the parameters being considered
Exactly, so pickle tastiness is relative to a person’s body chemistry or even how long it’s been since they’ve had a pickle and not objectively true or false for everyone all the time
I doubt a religious person would define God as a 'creature'. That would implicitly acknowledge the absurdity in positing a creator to explain existence but not positing a higher order creator to explain the existence of God and so on.
Except that he’s being intentionally vague bc there are different god(s) and your is almost strictly a Western God. Also missing the point entirely by splitting this hair.
Not defining God as a creature and as an entity or whatever is equally not important as if we are speaking to a person who believes a specific creature (platypus) is god. To a person like me; these are equally ridiculous and lacking proof.
Relativism is a form of cherry-picking that begins by raising an absolutist claim such as : "Unless we all agree about everything to the last iota, there cannot be any objective moral standards." Unless we all agree on even the minutest detail, there cannot be agreement. What the relativist is telling us is that we should all be exactly the same at the same time and in the same respect. Failing that, there cannot be anything common between us (unless a dictator comes along and forces us all to conform, which seems to be the secret wish of a relativist). The smart thing to do is to see that the relativist makes absurd claims on reality and leave her to her fanciful world of ideas and not take up the challenge. But let us indulge her for the sake of philosophical fun. The truth is that relativists people are hopelessly confused about substance and accident. They cannot see the forest for the trees. They think each individual tree is the ecosystem. Now the truth is that all civilizations agree that murder is wrong or that stealing is bad. If they encouraged murder and plunder, they would sink so fast your head would spin. Now these very simple moral rules get adjusted according to place and time. Grammar rules are not rigid, they admit not only exceptions, but they get adjusted according to context. Linguists know this very well and common users of any language know it, too. Therefore the infinite superficial variation of custom and positive law is very easy to explain without discarding the Ten Commandments or the other known moral codes. We disagree about issues? that is normal and even desirable. True, living morality is not a given and needs to be found again and again. In this search, we have to consult both the positive law and our heart, that is, to add our own moral intuitions to the ready-made norms. And then we have to convince our fellow humans of what we have found through logos in the hope that they will share our vision, which is perfectly possible. The problem with the relativist is that he hates debate and more fundamentally any form of struggle or effort. He is both lazy and ultraconservative. Thus he will see disagreement and the ensuing exchange of arguments as a breach of his perfect moral repose or as a threat to his plans. From there he will either let anarchy develop or impose artificial agreement through censorship. Whatever his own interest dictates.
I would say subjectivism is more coherent alternative to objectivism. How, for example, do we divide our judgment of a moral action from the observation of the moral action objectively? We may see one person kill another. Clearly that fact must precede our assessment of that fact. That is, we must witness a killing or understand the notion of killing before we assess whether it could be “right” or “wrong” just as we must observe any alleged tangible object and then assess its attributes. But the assessment must follow the observing of the thing. If it is objective, then the thing we observe exists independently of our perceiving it. Thus whatever attributes it has, is has desire our feelings, impressions or otherwise. With morals, however, the labels “right” and “wrong” if they are to be applied objectively, must be perceived and analyzed in spite of any mental bias or state. Actions must be “right” or “wrong” as a matter of fact, not of judgment. That means “right” must always preside in killing in some circumstances, and “wrong” must preside in killing in other others. The problem is assessing when these qualities of “right” or “wrong” preside in killings of different kinds, or if even at all. That is the hill the objectivist must traverse. If they can’t show “rightness” in an action apart from their 1. Saying it 2. Feeling it or 3. Believing it, it is likely not objective at all. But just as we have senses to discern the physical world, which conveys the truth of physical objects, we must have a counterpart for morals in order to perceive “tightness” and “wrongness” in actions.
Everybody is cherry picking. Stop it. Also that's not moral relativism at all. Even if everyone agreed to the last iota, that doesn't make it morally objective. You seem to have a warped understanding objectivism. You also have a warped understanding of moral relativism as if it is making a claim about morality, when it isn't.
I think you can only really talk about moral objectivism, if you look at it from a utilitarian perspective. In other words, the more utility the more moral something is. Sure, it might in practice be impossible to know what option will generate most utility, but there is a factually right and a wrong answer. Of course we are left with the problem of defining utility. This is the hard part. Sam Harris defines it as imagining the worst suffering for the biggest amount of sentient beings, and anything less harmful is more moral. I tend to find this definition as very useful. Still, it does not really seem to capture all aspects of what morality is. I can't really define morality in any other way than 'the feeling that something is right or wrong'. For example, say that killing every first born child would generate more utility than keeping them alive. Would people still feel that is right? This phenomenon is often demonstrated with the 'trolley problem'. One could claim, that our moral intuitions change when we truly understand the utility of something. But, is that really true? Human beings are at the end of the day emotional beings. We have deeply rooted instincts and emotions that might not be susceptible to change. Thus, can we say something is moral if it's something that generates maximum utility but we inherently feel is wrong? One possible way to solve this dilemma is to account for the emotional suffering of acting against our moral intuitions when defining utility. It kind of solves the problem, but there is something circular about that argument that makes me uncomfortable.
It is simply asinine to speak of "moral" *facts*". what are called morals which squeaky does not define, are screamingly obviously matters of opinion. Forexample in England it is regarded as what some might call "immoral" to sleep in a bedroom withe windows closed while the exact opposite pertains in France, thus assuming you wish to call customs and practices morals(which squeaky does not define) , are in practice no more and no less than subjective temporary and relative reactions of the boss or emotional(like/dislike) function to which men(human beings/dreaming machines) are the abject slaves. Mathematical and physical what-is-and-cannot-be-diffferents, or facts by al means because they can be tested, but to speak of moral" what-is-and-cannot-be-diffferents, or facts is as absurd as speaking of green Wednesdays, or forgetful or irritable bread and butter. Consider what could*possibly be a moral fact. or a moral element or a moral ocean or a moral sum of two and two?All that good/evil, right/wrong. morality/ethics mumbo jumbo is pure undilute religion mumbo jumbo.
I've been spending hours watching your videos. I may already be familiar with a concept, but your explanations are just so damn good that it doesn't matter. I still tend to either learn something new, or see a different perspective, or I at least get some joy and benefit out of your explanation. So... Thank You.
Professor: "We say things like, pecan pie is tasty, but there's some disagreement"
Guy who is deathly allergic to tree nuts: "you're darn right there is!"
I've become addicted to your content and I don't see myself stopping my consumption anytime soon.
Wish you were a grad student at Berkeley still, you seem like you would be a great GSI lol
I think the main reason why scientific disagreements are much easier to settle is that you actually have a relatively small number of people who are very invested in the truth of the matter looking at the same evidence as each other. Whereas moral disagreements aren't really a continuous conversation between the same group of people having the same experiences, aware of everything that has been said on the topic and not everyone is as dedicated to finding the answers.
Moral disagreement is more like different people having the same conversations rather than a single continuous conversation. Even if in a given time and place, the problem is as good as solved, the next generation is going to have a new evidence to deal with and limited awareness of the preceding evidence and arguments.
The (potentially) infinite adjustment of moral principles is a nice way to solve the issue of different circumstances, but my first thought was to just go the virtue ethics route.
Also, God is usually an uncreated creator and not a creature.
Moral disagreements persist because "Moral Facts" are simply opinion and not based on evidence.
@@markrussell4682 So I should not believe in moral facts? Because that would be an objective moral norm. Or are you just sharing an opinion?
@@petardraganov3716 I think he’s trying to share a point of view. An objective fact, as he probably understands it. That precisely, and under his own logic, does not mean that you should believe or not believe something in particular
@@petardraganov3716 here is a possible escape from your dilemma: if your goal is to align your beliefs with the truth, then you should not believe in moral facts, because they do not exist. This avoids the dilemma by pushing the question back to “why should you align your beliefs with the truth?”. To this, I would say you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I want to.
Petar Draganov: You are correct, but scientific arguments and disagreements can be settled , albeit temporarily sometimes, by producing verifiable, plausible, and convincing scientific facts to support one's position. Moral disagreements are much more fluid, and their validity seems to matter to those who believe in them and wish that others would too. The latter often implies or connotes CONTROL, the former always connotes KNOLEDGE.
I've always been put off by philosophy in general, but your videos are refreshingly easy to absorb.
Philosophy can be, or seem, esoteric sometimes. But that's kinda the point.
1:18 & 1:43 If nothing else, these lectures are a great argument for English spelling reform.
does the spelling matter if we understand or he gives a detailed description of the thing he wants to say?
The way I would boil this down is "we can say there are objective moral rules only if we phrase the rules to include moral relativism within them".
Moral relativism isn't the position that morals are situationally relative. It's the position that a rule is only a moral rule for certain people or groups irrespective of whether it's situational. You can just tack on the clause "if you're in a situation" to any moral rule everyone would consider universal and have a situationally contingent universal rule, a rule that's relative to a universal situation. Would this be a universal relative moral rule? If there's a sense in which it would be, there are at least two completely different meanings the statement is likely to have, so differentiating between "relative" and "situational" moral rules would go a long way toward preventing miscommunication.
@@Synerco In my experience, the people arguing for moral objectivism tend to say "We all agree torturing babies for fun is wrong, therefore moral objectivism is right" (why do they always include "for fun"?), as if that were a sufficient argument. And even beyond that, the basic argument seems to be "members of homo sapience seem to agree morally in some areas if you squint enough, *and* my religion says so, therefore moral objectivism". Which I find extremely unconvincing. Can anyone argue why we *should* assume there is something objective out there, beyond what I've mentioned already? Where's the evidence? And given that the alternative actually *has* decent evidence (as I laid out in another comment somewhere), I'm pretty convinced there is no such thing as objective morality.
Lying is the hinge on which all morality lies. If you have to lie about it, it's probably bad. Prove me wrong.
@@dallassegno It's not the hinge, but it is a fairly strong hint, except for one flaw: it's about the morality of one's in-group, not in general. For example, while many do lie to themselves about acts that conflict with their personal morality, that's not universal.
The point that you didn't make is that there can be a million moral laws that are situational but that does refute the fact that you just need 1 to be universally true.
Exactly. If we define moral nihilism and moral absolutism as follows, where would moral relativism fall?
Moral Absolutism = at least one moral principle cannot be destroyed by man.
Moral Nihilism = every moral principle can be destroyed by man.
And more importantly, a law can be situational but still universal. If the fact a moral law is situational means it's relative, it could apply universally even if the situation it specifies can never occur. It's like how the statement "If the moon is made of green cheese, then the moon is made of green cheese" is a universal objective truth even though "The moon is made of green cheese" is false. When we say a moral law is relative, we don't mean "relative to the situation." We mean its very existence as a moral law is relative to a person or group. Otherwise, it would be extremely easy to come up with a universal "relative" moral law. "It's wrong to steal if you're in a situation" is a situationally contingent moral statement that applies universally. So, unless we're willing to redefine "relative" such that it's not antithetical to "universal," we shouldn't equate it with "situational" either.
It may be a bit of piling on… but science in general seems to be another example where there is persistent disagreement, but where there is objective facts. The scientific method by its nature is driven by perpetual disagreements but it arrives at agreed upon facts. The subjects and facts in focus just shift over time. The debate on the existence of tectonic plates ends and the disagreements what mechanisms drive plate movement begins.
In a similar way, morality has perpetual disagreements on the whole, but on specific subjects a moral consensus has emerged that didn’t exist previously. Slavery, genocide, monarchy etc. were once considered perfectly moral by most people, but are now recognized for the evils they are.
Perhaps a better comparison instead of tectonics vs. morality would be tectonics vs. moral question of slavery. Or Science as a whole vs morality as a whole.
At any rate, just a thought. Love your videos!
The point is that in science there is no persistent disagreement *on one specific issue*. Of course science as a whole thrives because of disagreement.
Taste is actually a perfect analogy, because it can be divided into the completely subjective aspect of tastiness and more or less "locally objective" aspects of healthiness (e.g. product X is generally not tasty, but healthy, or product Y is usually tasty but unhealthy, product Z tastes awful and is generally unhealthy but will make wonderful medicine in some specific cases and at the right dose). There never will be a single "objectively good diet", but overall some quite stable optimisations will emerge (with diets that are both healthy and tasty).
Add to that the fact that there are a ton of neurological studies that show how moral judgements are handled by processess very similar to physical disgust. Just like we evolved an ability to judge food as good/bad, so we evolved to judge behaviours.
For me the relativisim/objective morality is a closed subject, though we can still debate/optimize what should be part of a "healthy moral diet", e.g. should a belief in one "objectivelly good diet" be part of it?
@@user-bt6td6ed5c no food is universally and unquestionably "good" - when not eaten in moderation anything can be unhealthy, and even the tastiest of foods have people that don't like them.
I would compare OnlyFans to new artificially flavoured foods that taste awesome, but can be quite unhealthy.
And I totally agree getting a "balanced" moral diet is a very difficult task, especially that any society has to incorporate some healthy level of generally unhealthy violence (to uphold laws and defend against threats).
I'm extremely impressed by his ability to write backwards
You know you can write normal and then mirror the video, right?
@@ibragimvisitaev6981 makes sense. Guess I need to step outta THAT box... sheesh. Thanks
Great explanation, specially after reading a Plato Stanford Encyclopedia's paper on thee subject. Thanks!
I'm pretty late to the party. I like that you contrasted scientific disagreement with moral disagreement. It seems to me the difficulty with morality is it involves the interaction between two or more people. As such is is highly subjective. I think what one has to do is define a goal, in my case my the overriding moral principle is human wellbeing. Actions that increase it are moral ones that reduce it are immoral. The difficulty of course is not everyone has the same notion of what constitutes human well being.
And the other problem would be when they conflict which would just start the problem all over again causing an argument in circles.
Didn't you skip over the 'why' completely? Stealing is wrong, but here are some situations where that doesn't apply you say, but even that presupposes that I agree that stealing is wrong in the first place. It's the question of why something is inherently wrong that the moral objectivist has to answer, no?
Yes, you are pressing on an ethical question (e.g., which actions are right and wrong, and what makes then right or wrong?), whereas this video is mostly focused on a metaethical question (e.g., are there objective ethical facts in the first place?). For the purposes of this video I am assuming that, most of the time, things like killing, stealing, etc. are wrong. I think that is a reasonable assumption. But you are right that one of the central philosophical questions is: what makes the right actions right and the wrong actions wrong? There are different answers to that question. Utilitarians think that actions are right if they result in the greatest good for the greatest number. Deontologists think that actions are right if they don't violate any of the moral laws built into nature/reality. I discuss a bunch of this stuff in other videos on my channel. I am new to RUclips. Can I link to videos in a comment?
@@profjeffreykaplan I see what you are saying. I couldn't make sense from a skeptic perspective how you could discuss the objectivity of morality while you have presupposed a moral claim, since to my understanding they would say that all moral claims are unjustified.
EDIT: Removed the question here since I realized that I was indeed having a brain fart.
As for linking I'm not sure if the system allows it or not. Try it.
And thank you for replying as well as uploading these videos. I will make sure to check out the rest of your channel. Keep it up!
It is wrong because you would not like to be robbed of your own belongings. 既不所欲勿施于人 don't do to others what you would not like others to do to you. As old as a Chinese philosopher.
@@karelvorster7414 I can get with this tbh
@@karelvorster7414 Shouldn't it be more like, "Don't do unto others what they would not like you to do?" For example, a sadomachist could use the Golden Rule to go around smacking everyone just because he likes being smacked even if the others don't like being smacked. it never made much sense to me morally given how much people vary in terms of what they'd like done to them. The occassional oddball might even not mind or enjoy having his belongings stolen.
Also what about cases when the other person wants something entirely different from you? For example, maybe a girl wants to receive flowers from a guy even though the guy never wants to receive flowers. The rule never seemed to properly account for how wildly different people's preferences are.
Another thing to note about the morality vs. taste comparison: If I disagree with you on morality, you can provide arguments that might change my conclusion, but if I disagree with you on taste, this is typically impossible. You can't argue me into thinking pickles taste good, but you could argue me into changing my mind about a moral issue like abortion. This seems to be a quite relevant difference between the persistent disagreements in morality and taste. Using arguments to change someone's mind doesn't make any sense if it's a subjective matter like taste, but we do it all the time for morality.
Can you point out the same distinction if we are talking about taste in art, for instance? I'd say it is definitely conceivable that one might be convinced that a once hated movie is actually pretty good.
So the way that I would respond to this is by noting that a moral argument is supposed to present you with aspects that you may have missed on a given matter. The analogy would be that you may initially hate picles only from their visual appearance, but then be convinced that they are actually good after someone makes you taste them.
There will surely be no way to make you change your mind after you are presented with every aspect of a given matter (e.g. after you tasted the picles), but then that should be expected in all views of morality.
@@EvilMatheusBandicoot That's a good point, but I think there are still a few reasons why it doesn't show that moral disagreements are analogous to disagreements about taste. For one, art quality is arguably a combination of subjective and objective things, rather than purely subjective. This is why some people will say things like, "This movie is terrible, but I like it anyway." That seems to be a statement that the movie is objectively bad, but that the viewer still derives subjective enjoyment from it. So, your ability to convince me that a piece of art is better or worse via argumentation might just reflect the fact that there are some measures of objective quality that I can change my assessment of.
The second reason is that discussions about art often draw your attention to something you hadn't noticed about the art piece, which will change your experience of it in the future, thus affecting your subjective judgement of it. But I think you are wrong to say that moral disagreements are always of this sort. What fact about the situation do pro-life and pro-choice activists disagree on, for example? It seems that they both know what happens during an abortion, but they disagree on whether a fetus has the same moral status as a fully-formed human and whether its life is more important than the mother's right to choose. There don't seem to be any non-moral facts that resolve the matter. The same is true in pretty much every case where two people disagree on something because they hold different meta-ethical theories.
@@plasmaballin I don't believe there is anything which can objectively qualify art. I would say that those objective things that you allude to are in fact merely subjective things at which most people agree on (but that's perhaps too off topic).
We don't know everything that happens during an abortion: we don't know, for instance, whether a "soul" is killed in the process of an abortion (I don't personally believe souls exist, but some people do and that would be an important fact to consider for those people). And even if we did know everything that happens _during the process_ , that wouldn't mean that we know everything _about_ abortion. The question of whether a fetus consisting of a single cell is an individual is independent of how the process of abortion takes place, and it is one of the most important questions on this matter, in my opinion. Philosophical arguments _are_ precisely suppose to draw your attention to something you hadn't noticed about the subject matter.
This implies our minds are mostly changed by persuasive arguments and not, say, by changes within ourselves over time; a position held by some psychology today. Children infamously dislike vegetables, but as adults some of us acquire a taste for them. Similarly, as life experiences and the passage of time may alter our taste for certain foods, who's to say the same doesn't occur to our views or morals?
As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. As Morpheus says in the Matrix, I can only show you the door, you're the one that has to walk thru it.
@@EvilMatheusBandicoot Yeah, I'm not really sure what to think of art quality. It's definitely mostly subjective, I just wonder if there are any parts that can be considered objective. I suppose you could explain statements like, "This movie is terrible, but I like it anyway," in a different way, though: The person making the statement is comparing two different subjective standards, one for whether or not the movie is "good", and one that is purely based on how much they enjoyed it. So I will grant you that point.
It's true that some disagreements over contentious issues like abortion are disagreements over objective facts that might change someone's subjective assessment, but I think there are still plenty of disagreements that are purely over what is right, even when every detail of a situation is specified. For example, the violinist thought experiment is a pretty common argument when it comes to abortion, but it isn't an argument about whether a fetus has a soul or personhood - the violinist argument claims that, even if pro-life advocates are right that the fetus is a person, abortion is still permissible. So it seems perfectly possible for somebody to change their position on abortion on the basis of the argument, rather than a change in taste, without changing their opinion on any non-moral facts of the matter. Somebody might start out being pro-life and believing that the fetus is a person, but later hear the violinist argument and be convinced by it. This person would still believe that a fetus is a person, but they would now believe, on the basis of the argument, that it is okay to abort a fetus anyway.
Also, I think that this counterargument only works when we are talking about a disagreement over a specific complicated issue like abortion, where there are both moral issues and non-moral questions in play. But there are also lots of moral disagreements about meta-ethics, where there are no situational factors at all involved, and people can still be convinced by arguments here. If moral arguments are really just about elucidating some aspect of the situation so that someone's personal tastes about it will change, then no one would ever be convinced to change their meta-ethics, since meta-ethics would be purely about personal taste.
Again, great presentation with delightful clarity.
It might be that the question of god’s or gods’ existence is wrong like the question of set of sets that don’t contain themselves is wrong. The premise that all specifications of inclusion to a ‘set’ can define sets is wrong. Similarly, not all specifications of ‘entities‘ define entities of the kind whose existence can be queried.
Therefore, the example you gave of a persistent disagreement but that an objective answer exists may be invalid.
I would ask clarity on what they mean by exist...
I've heard God isn't real....what do you mean by real? Our subjective understanding of these things gathered from this specific universe which gauges what we believe is real, or exists?
Anyway I'm not about to make this any longer than it needs to be.
@@jondoe8014 I’m not arguing about the existence or non-existence of God. I’m saying that, just like in set theory where not all specifications of a set are valid, similarly, not all specifications of entities are valid. This means that operations and reasonings that follow such specifications are invalid (no implications on truth either way).
@@nabilfares555
I'm not arguing either. Just remarking upon how little we actually consider what it means to exist, and what is real. Lol
Very interesting perspectives.
Re: there was disagreement about plate tec(h?)tonics for only a decade or too. The observation that Africa and South America fitted together was mentioned by Bacon in Novum Organum (1620), and I don't think he was the first to notice it either. He had no conclusions to offer, he only said that this observation warranted further study. Same thing about the similarities between humans and apes.
This video is the answer to the question "why are legal agreement forms so long mind numbing" lol
The situational argument for moral relativism is less of an argument against the existence of moral objectivity and more of an argument against the validity of certain moral codes. This is because in a hypothetical moral code, distinctions could be made from situation to situation to outline what should be done. Morality is about what Should be done in every situation. The most ideal moral code would have an infinite supply of situations, but this is impossible. Sometimes the general rule might always apply, and sometimes specificity is required, but this issue of situational specificity seems to be more about the moral codes themselves rather than the idea of a moral code.
How does the landscape change if you take religion out of the picture? The persistence is largely because so many base their morality on ancient texts that are never updated.
I have often used the existence of objective morality as an argument against the idea that people (read the antebellum southerners) cannot be judged because they were living in a different milieu.
But I simply cannot believe that situational ethics can justify the abject inhuman cruelty of slavery. Surely, this qualifies as an example of an objective morality.
And what bothers me the most, is that Southerners, who are the most likely persons to make this argument are, as denizens of the Bible Belt, also the most likely to argue that the 10 commandments are objective moral truths.
Biblically endorsed slavery was almost indistinguishable from Antebellum Chattel Slavery *"Buy your slaves from the heathen nations that surround you"*
Just like taste, morality is subject to certain reliable tendencies. For example, if you eat food and get violently I’ll right after that, you’ll be likely to dislike the taste smell and appearance of that food. And if you’re raised in a community that eats food with a certain kind of spice or flavor, you’ll be much more likely to enjoy those flavors than a person who was raised in a community that doesn’t use those spices and flavors.
If you are raised in a culture where binding women’s feet is common you are likely to consider foot binding beneficial and good, whereas if you have never seen foot binding, you are likely to consider it grotesque and abominable.
If something very painful happens to you as a result of the actions of another, you are likely to come to the conclusion that that action was wrong, or even evil.
Different cultures having different customs and impressions of morals, does not mean that they aren't wrong. Obviously morality is influenced by cultures and events.
What are you calling morality?
That you have no idea you are about to demonstrate.
Wow are you writing backwards so well?
And left handed. And where did he find a man's shirt and jacket with the buttons on the wrong side?
Jeffrey. Are you conflating "objective" and "absolute"?
The difference between moral disagreement and scientific disagreement is that with science, there is always new information and new sources of information. Whereas with morality it boils down to, "Some actions I might take may cause some degree of distress to another being. At which degree of distress should I stop and why?" There will never be any new evidence regarding morality, just as there will never be any new evidence regarding God. The best we can hope for is a new perspective.
The fact there even is a moral dilemma to begin with, like the examples he stated in the video, is in itself evidence for moral objectivity.
If morals were subjective, there wouldn’t exist such a strong and consistent verdict to adhere to one over the other (e.g.: break your promise to save other’s lives).
Wanting something to be true isn't proof it is true. Fearing the consequences of something being false in no way suggests it's true.
💀groups having similar thoughts= thoughts must be true and objective
Thank you, this was very insightful.
It's drivel, Kaplan is a fool, and worse he is idle an innocent of any kind of intellectual ability or accomplishment; talk about the blind leading the blind
The thing about taste is: there are objective facts, but they do not point to a precise, adequate taste, but to clusters of objective realities.
You can't say lemons are objectively tasty, but you can say they are, objectively, sour. Therefore, it has an objective factor that makes it a part of a group, with saurkraut, yogurt and lime.
And so it goes with morality: there are schools of morality that are individualistic or collectivist, utilitarian or formalist, secular or religious, etc. Those facts might not be useful to determine universal, good morality, but nevertheless they exist.
Wow I was just writing an essay about morality and this video pops up in my recommended, I think I'm being spyed on.
(my definitions - not „official“ ones)
objective truth: „a statement that either stems directly from empirical evidence or is correctly derived from such“
source of moral evaluation: „(inter)subjective judgement“
from those two definition the impossibility of objective moral truths is immediately obvious
Would you say people should follow your idea of morality being subjective, because it is true?
Great video
How about a moral law that says actions are moral if they increase the sum of contentment or happiness in all those they affect. Someone with plenty of water in a drought cannot complain on moral grounds if some of his is stolen by people who are seriously dehydrated. He may not be happy about it but those who stole from him and their dependents are. but where water is plentiful, the person stolen from can legitimately complain on moral grounds.
That’s utilitarianism
@@forbidden-cyrillic-handlemost people would feel sad seeing another suffer
I honestly have no idea why people would even try and disprove moral objectivism. Unless someone comes up with some 'moral fact' that contradicts reality in some way then I can't see how it would even be possible. Likewise I can't see why people feel a need to try and prove it. Unless they can come up with some fact of reality which contradicts relativism, in all forms, then I can't see how they could do that either. Likewise even if such moral facts existed including some ought that we should follow them, and a reliable objective method for their determination, I can't see a reason why people necessarily would wish to actually do so, if they had more pressing alternate reasons to do otherwise. But fun for thinking about I guess :)
does that mean that the categorical imperative is not objectively moral. Kant made it sound like a fact.
How does something we cannot understand become an objective fact?
I dont think the categorical imperative itself can be moral or immoral. The CI generates objective moral laws (only if it is correct of course).
It may be an objective fact that everyone dislikes being robbed or lied to, and may let the perp off the hook in all the same special cases, so that everyone can agree that they like and dislike the same actions under the same circumstances, but this would no more make morality objective than if everyone agreed that blue was the best color or chocolate was the best ice cream flavor. The objectivity would only lie at the level of census taking, not at the level of the moral decision-making; that will always be subjective. The entire moral enterprise will always be foundationally subjective.
Disagree.
Morals are intentions rather than outcomes. The situational differences using actions are not a moral argument, but an ethical one. Secondly, morals are about right and wrong on the scale of goodness and righteousness, not correct or incorrect, nor best vs worse.
Considering a thirsty person vs the man with water. Stealing isn't a moral question but an ethical one. But if we extend it as though it is a moral argument, stealing is always wrong, but that doesn't mean letting yourself die is right either, nor is the man with water letting that man die also be moral. Him not giving water isn't ethical in the same way as true and untrue vs true and false. Immorality leads to the failure of morals, so regardless of the actions to be taken, the evaluation isn't is it moral to do something, but ethical and if you fail at what you think is moral, it is not because of morality, but immorality.
Reason being that morals being intentions naturally carry no consequences. Only actions do.
And objective morality doesn't mean objective fact either. The argument looks flawed to me.
@@furyberserk moral and ethical can be used interchangeably, really. Here’s one dictionary entry for “moral”: of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical”
But even if you want to distinguish them as you have done, my question is this: morals concern right and wrong intentions, but right and wrong according to whom or what? God? The universe? If it’s according to God and God is a person (a subject) then the foundation is still subjective, and I have to ask you why ought we do what God likes?
If it’s the universe, and these moral laws are as unchanging as the physical laws of gravity and thermodynamics, then how is it humans can so easily defy moral laws but we can never defy the physical laws? It’s because these aren’t like objective/absolute/unchanging physical laws; morals are simply what the vast majority of people tend to agree upon regarding which intentions are good or bad, “right or wrong”, best or worst for the outcomes we tend to prefer.
@@bta1138If you agree that there is moral relativism then you could never say that a society where slavery is permitted is incorrect, you would have to concede that at some level there is some quirk in their situation or reasoning that permits them to uphold slavery and still claim to be moral. Further, just because a moral can be objectively absolute does not mean that it is binding like the laws of physics. In fact using the laws of physics is a little self defeating. For the longest time we could only conceive of geometry on flat planes, for only on flat planes do Euclid's principles, on which our geometry is based on, works. But then when we found out we were working with the curvature of planets and the warping nature of spacetime did we have to change the laws of physics. Hell even something as basic as the concept of time has been revised now to better fit our understanding of physics. Much in the same way we could continue on elucidating principles more and more exactly as new situations arise.
@@donttalkaboutmymomsyo Yes, what I am arguing is that you could never say that a society where slavery is permitted is "incorrect." I'm arguing that "incorrect" is a misuse of the term when it comes to morality. Incorrect (i.e. not true) means that it is either illogical (definitionally or axiomatically), or it doesn't comport with how we understand reality to function. For millennia, slavery was accepted throughout many societies. Certainly the slaves at that time (or I would assume most of them, at least the ones that were not merely indentured) didn't think slavery was moral, but they did not hold the dominant opinion at the time. We now have a different dominant collective opinion, that's all; mainly because our priorities have changed. No longer is life so short and brutish, where manpower still beats technology, and what matters most is hierarchical power structures and land wars (though I'd say we're still struggling with that as a species). Now people are the healthiest, safest, most free and most peaceful we've ever been, so we've come to realize that slavery is no longer a "necessary evil" as it may have been thought of back then. You and I think those people are barbaric. I guaran-damn-tee you that centuries from now, it will be "correct" for our descendants to say that plenty of things we don't mind so much now are barbaric.
What do you mean when you say that a moral is "objectively absolute"? Absolute in what way? Objective in what way? Mathematics are invented by us. It's simply another "language" that we use to describe the universe to ourselves. Triangles (Euclidian or Non-Euclidian) are very simplistic abstractions that we conjure in our minds to talk to each other about what we see in nature, but there are no perfect simplistic triangles or circles "out there somewhere". The math happens (exists) entirely in our minds.
Changing our models of the universe to better reflect an external reality is not the same thing as changing our minds about slavery over time. Yes, saying that "we all agree" that there is an external reality certainly *sounds* the same as saying "we all agree" that killing innocent people is wrong, but the actual consequences of both of those statements are wildly different. You and I can test over and over again and come to a reasonable conclusion that everyone else with similar cognitive abilities would agree that an objective external reality exists and continues to "obey" certain "rules". You and I cannot ever test over and over again and come to a reasonable conclusion that everyone else with similar cognitive abilities would agree that harming butterflies is "incorrect" or that not eating pork is a "rule" you must "obey".
We're dumb humans who get fooled by our language and how sloppy it is. We use words like "rules" and "laws" and "obey" and "must" for many different scenarios that "appear" to be similar, but if you dig deep down, you'll see that the ways that they occur are not similar at all. We think morals are absolute because we feel so strongly about them, that they "must" be. But they are not. If there were no more humans, morality would no longer exist. But it doesn't matter that morality is ultimately subjective. It's not the same kind of subjectivity as "chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream". It's a preference that has deep roots in our evolution. Therefore it becomes more "intersubjective", like a preference for living rather than a preference for ice cream flavors.
@@bta1138 must disagree, and on multiple fronts. First the notion that our ancestors held that slavery was a necessary evil is simply untrue, slavery was always wrong, just because there was a majority opinion on it by the ruling masses does not make it so. These people did not care about morals and ethics and when somebody did take an interest in them (like Las Casas) and did express their opinions(like Las Casas), they were ultimately shunned or shouted down (like Las Casas). There have been a number of attempts to justify (falsely) that slavery is okay, but the strongest at the tame were based in the most flawed attempts at anatomical and physiological categorization. Further, slavery did not end because it was no longer useful to the ruling class, but it was a decades long fight to get the rulers to admit to being wrong, this could be taken as an example of changing consensus to fit the relativistic view, however it fails to recognize that these countries which practiced slavery the most were at once deeply christian(which does not mingle with slavery despite bad bible interpretation) and both founded in the egalitarian principles of the enlightenment. It was always wrong, even by their standards. On to the next point. While mathematics was invented, that does not mean that it doesn't corelate rather well to our observable universe. In fact there are plenty of structures which are identical to our so called "made up" shapes. We find them in nature all the time, the hexagon is a shape which plays a big part in the existence of thousands of species of animals. Mathematics is simply a way to express what is going on in the world. While language is made up, the concepts it represents are definitely not, this is the same as saying that just because a sentence describing grass is made up that grass is also made up. There does not have to be language for something abstract like objective morals to exist, and yes they are contingent on humans existing, but they are binding because of the fact that we are sentient and self conscious beings, animals do not have the same burden. When I say objective morals I mean morals that are not relative to any single groups understanding of them. So for this express purpose does your example of questioning people if whether eating pork is right or wrong flawed, you are still supposing that consensus makes morality, it does not. And yes, in the future they will surely think many of our practises are wrong. Neither of these cases prove that eating meat or whatever was correct today, we just keep doing it for a number of reasons that rarely have anything to do with moral reasoning. I will be the first to say that eating meat is probably wrong, yet I still do it frequently for a multitude of different reasons. Also what are these final few sentences you have written? You'll have to elaborate plenty on that, its too big of a claim to leave it just like that.
16:00 about the stated example about the water. The law that is defined as objective morality is: "do not harm people." So drinking water in need from someone who has plenty of water is not doing harm so its moral justified from an objective perspective. But telling the truth to a murder that gonna harm someone, is not justified.
What does possible argument mean? Either it is or it isn’t. A possible winning argument I would argue maybe. But what is winning and losing anyway?
Clear agreement?
Godel had a field day with this.
Isn't this just consequentialist VS non consequentialist. Or am I missing something?
I'm not sure I agree with the argument based on persistence of debate, and the example of a longstanding debate about the existence of God despite there necessarily being either a fact that God exists or a fact that God doesn't exist, irrespective of our opinion in the debate. Couldn't you just as easily say this about the existence of objective morality? That there is either a fact that objective morality exists or a fact that objective morality doesn't exist, irrespective of our opinion in the debate. What makes this different? For the record, I'm not convinced that such a fact exists in either case (from my perspective, there's isn't one single longstanding, unchanging, global consensus of what the definition of God is), but even if we take there being a fact about the existence or nonexistence of God as a given, I'm curious as to how these can be contrasted for the counterargument in this video, to show that a longstanding debate =/= an absence of moral facts.
Once you understand intersubjectivity it all starts to make sense.
What is that?
Our morality is predicated on sustaining the group, and not the well-being of the individual. All social animals exhibit some system of cooperation that makes group living possible. Our system is morality, which evolved along with our social nature. In a group the individual's survival, procreation opportunities, and quality of life are enhanced.
Not always in humans is that true as the group also causes mankind to war against other groups of mankind. Judging each other based on group properties instead of individual merit. All our most terrible human actions were done because of group ideology.
Psychology claims to be a science, but there are many competing schools, and, as well, rather embarrassingly, practitioners very often and famously can't agree on a diagnosis of individuals, when they each follow the DSM-5
While moral disagreements may seem persistent, there have been some moral disagreements that get resolved. We seem to have near global rejection of the permissibility of slavery now, while for many centuries slavery was disagreed about, and for many centuries before that, it was generally considered permissible.
So what if, in centuries to come, it becomes permissible again? Or at least what if there will be disagreement? That seems like a perfectly plausible scenario to me, even though I hope that it won't happen.
Someone could reply you that the meaning of slavery is relative. For example, you are forced to work in order to survive in a capitalist society. Since you are forced, why are you not considering yourself a slave?
@@TheFate23 You have always been forced to work in some sense to survive. If you just laid in tent and looked at the fire all the time during the stone age you wouldn't survive either. Incredibly absurd argument.
Work for yourself and your close group, not for strangers like under capitalism in which resources are not even distributed equally. Capitalism is unnatural and hated for this reason. @@brutosilversked
You didn't even touch on Hume's guillotine. That's a big thing to skip in a lecture on objective morality
Not really. Objective morality can exist without oughts. Therefore the is-ought problem does not necessarily arise.
Kaplan's last attempt to have universal, objective laws fails as those have conditions - his example: stealing is wrong unless it's necessary for survival. The moment you attach a condition, it's no longer universal, and because the condition is subject to interpretation, it is no longer objective.
I was just thinking that and got disappointed that he didn't touch on that at the end.
I wouldnt say thats a strong objection. Surely if it is wrong in every case in which some condition does not apply, it is objective.
The better objection is, I think, that for every amendment to such a law in the attempt to make it objective, you can find a counterexample in which it does not apply.
@@nosteinnogate7305 I believe you are confusing between real and objective. For instance Michelangelo's statue of David is real, but not objective (objective = that which can exist independently of human existence). Morality is a creation of the human mind, meaning outside the human existence, it has no meaning. Lastly, if a moral law has conditions, it is no longer universal.
What y'all think,how tall is he? I'd say 5.9
Morals are subjective.
-"Bad or Evil" are simply what an organism sees as bad for their survival (+reproduction, well being).
-To the antelope the lion is evil cus he is trying to kill it, to the lion the antelope running away is evil cus he will make the lion starve. To a human the bacteria giving him a disease are evil-bad, to the bacteria the human is evil trying to kill them. To tribe A the tribe B is evil, to tribe B the tribe A is evil. And so on.
-Morals completely depend the person-animal's point of view. Aka on the individual life form.
-We can try to generalize morals from what we think is bad for us and apply it to everyone else (what I don't want done to me, others don't want done to them). But that is still a projection of personal morals and not everyone agrees. But even if everyone would perfectly agree (like murder of men for example), it would still not make it objective, just agreed upon.
Still the universe is fine whether the bad thing happens or not, nothing in nature really cares. Everything kills each other in nature. Morals are just the animal ego wanting to ensure it's survival. If a spider was smart enough to have morals, it would just as humans, decide that killing spiders, stealing from spiders is an immoral thing.
*
We are just survival machines - all life forms. The one and only thing that we look for is Power (all forms), so it ensures the propagation of our genes.
You're welcome.
That is pretty close to frightening madness.
I agree 100%. Just to add one thing - I think the biggest problem with morals is our limited capability in predicting the influence of some action on our own "good" (survival/replication) as well as the survival of the group (which in turn can influence our own good, or those of our kin). What's good from the point of the individual, may not be the best for the group, and vice versa, a benefit for the group can come at the sacrifice of an individual.
Taste is actually a perfect analogy, because it not we can divide it up into the completely subjective aspects (tastes good/bad) and more or less "locally objective" aspects of health (e.g. product X is generally not tasty, but healthy, or product Y is usually tasty but unhealthy). There never will be a single "objectively good diet", but overall some quite stable optimisations will emerge (with diets that are both healthy and tasty).
@@youcontrolfreakssuckit3784 Yeah Neitzche was kind of an a-hole sometimes. Some scholars called him a proto fascist and you can kinda see why, a society built upon the idea of will to power quickly gonna degenerate into a hell hole. What JP fanboys miss is that Nietzche thought god was an awful answer to this problem and was looking for a secular solution to it hoping we could come up with our own morals. And if you ask me individual rights always come before group rights cuz a group which literally has no conception of respect for the individual has no right to demand respect for itself in turn.
this is really myopic anthropomorphizing, there's no morals in nature, except monkeys and maybe some other advanced mammals, it's largely a human concept
The problem with the situational difference argument is that humans are creatures of habit and humans favor predictability.
Moral claims relate to drive, the famous "ought".
It's one of those cases where it ironically self-refutes.
The most precious thing here is that all "truth" claims are calls for a drive towards truth, they come with an "ought" baked in.
I think he is confusing objective with absolute! Objective rules depend on objectivly measurable cicumstances - absolutes ones claim to be valid in all circumcstance.
Techtonic sounds like an 80s rave band
The problem is that sense of taste is objective. We can measure how different molecules interact with tastebuds. Feces are objectively disgusting to most people's tastebuds. Hence, an emergent taste profile is developed in a population, where their tastes largely align with the utility of the food. Similarly, populations of people develop emergent moralities based on the aggregation of all their moral sentiments, which are also oriented around utility.
More like utility is designed around morality, the a priori
But it doesn't really matter that we can measure and observe reactions within our nerve system. That taste is undoubtedly individual matter of each of us. So our mouths with all it's nerves has to first exist to measure it, which is what makes it subjective. Objective morality assumes that it's a value that exists independently of us waiting to be discovered and we just disagree on what it actually is.
Another thing that makes the analogy seem sort of disconnected is the difference in dependence of each property. Sure it's not something that I can perform out of a mere whim but it's certainly possible for me to form or redefine my morality by grabbing a book or watching a youtube playlist of a philosophy teacher. But no matter what I'll try to do to my food, there is absolutely nothing I can do to start liking fish food. I can't impact it's sort of "value" for my mouth because nature already decided it for me and it's permanent.
@@Reality-Distortion Nice points there, but I think I still disagree. The "independent" thing waiting to be discovered is the best game theoretic strategy for a population. Game theory is super complex, so it makes sense that no one knows how to apply it. But just like there are objectively "best" strategies in chess, there are objectively "best" strategies in the game of evolution.
Just as instances of gravity are relative (the relationship between planets is relative to their masses), the laws of gravity are universally objective -- a guiding force that governs all instances. Similarly, game theory is the invisible objective law of morality that guides all cultural instantiations.
The ability to learn morality seems like learning how to play chess. We are given the goal instinctively and we have to calculate how to play. And evolution gives us emotions that guide us. Often philosophers will present a moral conclusion that our moral intuitions will reject. Obviously, there are deeper evolutionary emotions that are resisting this type of moral learning - so it isn't completely flexible. I believe moral intuitions (emotions) evolve randomly, and the ones that have utility survive, hence the hand of evolutionary game theory is that gravitational pull over morality.
Does "The morally correct action is always dependent on the situation" apply in all situations? Would that be an objective truth proving relativism? Is there any situation where the morally correct action DOES NOT depend on the situation itself? If someone tells me a secret and I promised not to share it with anyone, the concept of stealing doesn't really apply. Does it? The morally right thing to do is necessarily dependent on the situation...
"Don't kill your neighbor's chickens."
"Ok, but does that mean I can't eat his ice cream?"
"What?"
Isn't everything everywhere only present because there are other things around it to contrast it to? We only know grass is green because the non-grass is a different color. If everything was green, how would we tell the visual difference between anything?
It depends on the situation AND your own moral intuitions. Therefore it is vital that we apprehend the world as it is and not in a subjective, hallucinatory way the way Schopenhauer and other Kantians claim in their theory of "ideas". On the basis of a correct apprehension of the situation and of the subject himself (or herself) unique moral intuitions arise in the subject. Jesus of Nazareth did not condemn the adulteress but we cannot generalize the rule that seems to be implied by his unique action of forgiveness in a linear way. If you believe that you cannot see the world objectively and have objective moral intuitions, that is true but individual intuitions and ideas, the only way out is obviously either through positive law or through opportunism guided by self-interest. Moral objective individualism is beautifully explained in the Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner, a work that is free of his later, questionable excursions into esoteric thinking.
Everything depends on the situation, so making that argument about morality is not distinctive. Given enough information about the situation, yes, one can make an objectively moral call.
The claim ‘moral laws do not apply to every situation’ isn’t a moral claim itself, it’s a claim ABOUT morality: moral relativism can only be true or false, it can’t be good or evil. Saying ‘if moral relativism is true then moral relativism’s truth value depends on the situation’ is like saying ‘if moral relativism is true, whether or not atoms exist is dependent on the situation’.
an objective fact: dont tell kaplan any secret.
what you say at the end is obvious. why do these people with such shallow reasoning deserve credit or attention? it seems to me students need to learn how to think for themselves rather than be taught a canon made of arguments that are so full of holes.
IDK why but this guy give me Jake Gyllenhaal vibe
I think a problem with the last part is that moral objectivism is not that there are objective moral laws that can be written out, but that there are objective moral truths.
The stipulation that it has to be able to be written out as in a law book, is a stipulation that doesn't hold.
I feel your counterexample of the existence of god doesn't work. It is indeed a field of millennialong debate, but 'god exists' or 'god doesn't exist' are descriptive statements. They can be disproven or proven (in theory at least). I don't see how this applies to normative facts though. I sincerely hope you can come up with a field that's involved in normative matters where it would be mistaken to believe in objective facts, or where a dispute has in fact been settled (and i will also try to come up with such an example).
Is it true that you made this video?
That’s not a moral fact or claim. Moral relativism only pertains to claims about the morality of actions
@@jonathanjernigan3865 does this video exist?
If someone manages to disproves "objective morality", then morality does not exist at all. "Subjective" or "relativistic" morality has no power to do anything, hence morality is useless unless it is objective. When someone uses the term "subjective morality" it sounds to me like a "triangle with 4 corners".
Va
God is not a creature by definition. Also, the platypus is not a sea creature. It's a fresh water mammal
I'm confused. I looked up the definition of moral and determining how something tastes isn't questioning morality. How is this even an argument against objective morality which concerns with right and wrong? This sounds like a gaslight than an argument at all.
Doesn't hold up. The way you chose to word it the excistence and nature of god isn't a moral disagreement, its a scientific one. If there is a god (or not) and what its oppinions are would be facts. If we found god, that would be a scientific fact. If he had a oppinion on moralistic maters would be facts (even if the morality of those oppinons could be debated). After all the excistance and behaviours and preferences of a platepus aren't moralistic arguements either.
As for defining moral laws more closely its pointless and irrelevant. Pointless because people have contradicting needs. The more it applies to one situation, the less it applies to another. A poor man might find a flexible moral law on stealing better, but a shop owner trying to support his family could prefer a stricter morality. And its irrelevant because there is no way to show one is better then the other in a objective manner.
I’m not a moral objectivist, but obviously you could say that stealing is always wrong, but sometimes necessary due to greater concerns. Dying of hunger is objectively worse than stealing, so one objective immorality is outweighed by another, not extinguished by it.
In what sense do you mean ‘necessary’? If you mean ‘morally necessary’ then it seems contradictory for an action to be both morally wrong and morally necessary
How is it "always" wrong if you just said that if you are starving it's not wrong? Stealing is therefore right, for example if you're starving to death.
Why could not God come in and out of existence?
Morality comes from 2 things: our innate human instincts and our culture. The innate instincts are universal to humans but are dependent upon in-group/out-group perceptions.
There you go, dilemma solved.
There's no such thing as "objective morality" as in "absolute morality".
Morality, as knowledge is concerned with Truth, is concerned with goodness, namely the Universal one. Considering this to be, what could be called theoretical Reason and practical one, one must conclude, that its principle is 'objective' in the Sense, that it underlies practice in general. To help us understand, we can Take the Analogy of knowledge to our aid. Knowledge, as concerned with Truth and Guided therefore by strict principles cannot be subjective or nothing. For it to be nothing would be contradictory, Like the Statement, that it is true, that there is No Truth, and that one knows that. But it cannot be subjective either, for it would be contradictory too, like the Statement, that it is both true, that i know about Something, that is is equally true and Not, as two subjects disagree, or only one with itself.
Morality is therefore Neither a Matter of taste, Nor nothing. But as with opinion and believe too, the Moral opinions May very strongly, although the real difference has been shown to be much smaller then often posited.
That steeling is wrong is No principle of morality, but rather a rule, or fact gained through deriving IT from the Moral principles. The principles need to be formal and Abstract, in Order to fullfill their objective universality. To give again an example of such a principle of that Nature, one may Look at the principle of non-contradiction in Logic, which is all-binding and Universal therefore. Over it, one cannot disagree meaningfully, and everyone seems to use it indeed all the time, as they think. But it does Not prevent Errors Made by us, but is therefore not affected by it itself, but is rather the necessary measure for Error Itself and overcoming it.
there can be no such things as a "creature" (created / creation) that is an all-knowing, all-powerful god
it infinitely defies the implication
Demonstrating that mortality is situational is not an attack on objective morality. If we accept that the principle "stealing is wrong" is not true in some situations, we've done so by changing the physical context (objects), not the moral actors (subjects). We wouldn't argue that stealing is right for one person but wrong for another in the same situation, which would be more akin to the taste metaphor used.
Jesus claims that the whole law of God can be contained in just two principles: "Love God completely" and "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." I wonder if these are anywhere near the objective center of morality.
what about breast milk ...dont all children agree that its tasty ?
Why does god have to exist or not exist? The limits of language don’t create reality.
We wouldnt say that the fact that something exists or not exists is a limit of language. If classical logic is true, is really is the case that something either exists or it does not.
Are you just having fun on the playground? Or do you "believe" that some form of comprehensive fully rationalizable, articulable, applicable, self-consistent, "grand unified theory of philosophy" is even possible?
and is that just a belief? a feeling? A conviction? Don't they all tend to just end up in paradox?
Jeffrey, why do you always use pickles as an example!!!! Do you have a pickle fetish?) Use another food. Celery. Pickles are gross!!!
God is not a creature. Creatures are created.
Also, there are no seafaring platypodes.
No, creatures evolved.
@@richardbradley1532 Real organisms evolved.
The word "creature" originally meant all of creation, but soon came to mean a created being. Of course it means an animal or monster in common use, but it still retains the older meaning in contexts where created beings are contrasted with God.
(By the way, I'm an atheist. But I was also a philosophy major long ago, and if you're going to learn philosophy you have to read works where theism is argued for, and others where it's taken for granted.)
Real organisms evolved, which means they're _technically_ not creatures.
@Dan Wylie-Sears so technically we are arguing about something that doesn't exist other than perhaps in the imagination?
This was too straightforward to be interesting
Something created the universe It was either aware of what it was doing or it was not it.
To me, it's not that you can prove moral relativism correct... you can't prove a negative! But absent a compelling proof that objective morals DO exist, you are essentially forced to adopt this position as the agnostic view of morality. If you don't know, this is the assumption you use while you proceed forward until you DO know. Spoiler alert, you'll never know because moral relativism is probably correct, as the millennia of disagreement hints at, even if it doesn't prove it. 😜😁
You can prove a negative. There's a whole field in philosophy that does such a thing. Also note that "you can't prove a negative" is a negative claim and so is self-defeating if true
@@Sui_Generis0 Maybe, but the burden is on the one making the positive claim.
Dude doesn't know what a platypus is 🤣
this pickle argument is a terrible example... one person's body chemistry, might be balanced in a way where pickles make they feel grossed out by a pickle, while a person with different body chemistry needs might feel like they crave it... and even the person who likes pickles doesn't want a pickle ALL the time...
just not a great example -- we might be able to find an answer in physicalism as to why there's a disagreement... something OUTSIDE the parameters being considered
Exactly, so pickle tastiness is relative to a person’s body chemistry or even how long it’s been since they’ve had a pickle and not objectively true or false for everyone all the time
Morality is still primarily objective
I doubt a religious person would define God as a 'creature'. That would implicitly acknowledge the absurdity in positing a creator to explain existence but not positing a higher order creator to explain the existence of God and so on.
Except that he’s being intentionally vague bc there are different god(s) and your is almost strictly a Western God. Also missing the point entirely by splitting this hair.
Not defining God as a creature and as an entity or whatever is equally not important as if we are speaking to a person who believes a specific creature (platypus) is god. To a person like me; these are equally ridiculous and lacking proof.
Relativism is a form of cherry-picking that begins by raising an absolutist claim such as : "Unless we all agree about everything to the last iota, there cannot be any objective moral standards." Unless we all agree on even the minutest detail, there cannot be agreement. What the relativist is telling us is that we should all be exactly the same at the same time and in the same respect. Failing that, there cannot be anything common between us (unless a dictator comes along and forces us all to conform, which seems to be the secret wish of a relativist). The smart thing to do is to see that the relativist makes absurd claims on reality and leave her to her fanciful world of ideas and not take up the challenge. But let us indulge her for the sake of philosophical fun. The truth is that relativists people are hopelessly confused about substance and accident. They cannot see the forest for the trees. They think each individual tree is the ecosystem. Now the truth is that all civilizations agree that murder is wrong or that stealing is bad. If they encouraged murder and plunder, they would sink so fast your head would spin. Now these very simple moral rules get adjusted according to place and time. Grammar rules are not rigid, they admit not only exceptions, but they get adjusted according to context. Linguists know this very well and common users of any language know it, too. Therefore the infinite superficial variation of custom and positive law is very easy to explain without discarding the Ten Commandments or the other known moral codes. We disagree about issues? that is normal and even desirable. True, living morality is not a given and needs to be found again and again. In this search, we have to consult both the positive law and our heart, that is, to add our own moral intuitions to the ready-made norms. And then we have to convince our fellow humans of what we have found through logos in the hope that they will share our vision, which is perfectly possible. The problem with the relativist is that he hates debate and more fundamentally any form of struggle or effort. He is both lazy and ultraconservative. Thus he will see disagreement and the ensuing exchange of arguments as a breach of his perfect moral repose or as a threat to his plans. From there he will either let anarchy develop or impose artificial agreement through censorship. Whatever his own interest dictates.
I would say subjectivism is more coherent alternative to objectivism. How, for example, do we divide our judgment of a moral action from the observation of the moral action objectively? We may see one person kill another. Clearly that fact must precede our assessment of that fact. That is, we must witness a killing or understand the notion of killing before we assess whether it could be “right” or “wrong” just as we must observe any alleged tangible object and then assess its attributes. But the assessment must follow the observing of the thing. If it is objective, then the thing we observe exists independently of our perceiving it. Thus whatever attributes it has, is has desire our feelings, impressions or otherwise. With morals, however, the labels “right” and “wrong” if they are to be applied objectively, must be perceived and analyzed in spite of any mental bias or state. Actions must be “right” or “wrong” as a matter of fact, not of judgment. That means “right” must always preside in killing in some circumstances, and “wrong” must preside in killing in other others. The problem is assessing when these qualities of “right” or “wrong” preside in killings of different kinds, or if even at all. That is the hill the objectivist must traverse. If they can’t show “rightness” in an action apart from their 1. Saying it 2. Feeling it or 3. Believing it, it is likely not objective at all. But just as we have senses to discern the physical world, which conveys the truth of physical objects, we must have a counterpart for morals in order to perceive “tightness” and “wrongness” in actions.
Where do objective moral facts exist and how do they interact with our brain?
Everybody is cherry picking. Stop it.
Also that's not moral relativism at all. Even if everyone agreed to the last iota, that doesn't make it morally objective. You seem to have a warped understanding objectivism.
You also have a warped understanding of moral relativism as if it is making a claim about morality, when it isn't.
You are confusing descriptive and normative ethics, like all ignorant people who illude themselves to refute relativism.
I think you can only really talk about moral objectivism, if you look at it from a utilitarian perspective. In other words, the more utility the more moral something is. Sure, it might in practice be impossible to know what option will generate most utility, but there is a factually right and a wrong answer. Of course we are left with the problem of defining utility. This is the hard part. Sam Harris defines it as imagining the worst suffering for the biggest amount of sentient beings, and anything less harmful is more moral. I tend to find this definition as very useful. Still, it does not really seem to capture all aspects of what morality is. I can't really define morality in any other way than 'the feeling that something is right or wrong'. For example, say that killing every first born child would generate more utility than keeping them alive. Would people still feel that is right? This phenomenon is often demonstrated with the 'trolley problem'. One could claim, that our moral intuitions change when we truly understand the utility of something. But, is that really true? Human beings are at the end of the day emotional beings. We have deeply rooted instincts and emotions that might not be susceptible to change. Thus, can we say something is moral if it's something that generates maximum utility but we inherently feel is wrong? One possible way to solve this dilemma is to account for the emotional suffering of acting against our moral intuitions when defining utility. It kind of solves the problem, but there is something circular about that argument that makes me uncomfortable.
It is simply asinine to speak of "moral" *facts*". what are called morals which squeaky does not define, are screamingly obviously matters of opinion.
Forexample in England it is regarded as what some might call "immoral" to sleep in a bedroom withe windows closed while the exact opposite pertains in France, thus assuming you wish to call customs and practices morals(which squeaky does not define) , are in practice no more and no less than subjective temporary and relative reactions of the boss or emotional(like/dislike) function to which men(human beings/dreaming machines) are the abject slaves. Mathematical and physical what-is-and-cannot-be-diffferents, or facts by al means because they can be tested, but to speak of moral" what-is-and-cannot-be-diffferents, or facts is as absurd as speaking of green Wednesdays, or forgetful or irritable bread and butter. Consider what could*possibly be a moral fact. or a moral element or a moral ocean or a moral sum of two and two?All that good/evil, right/wrong. morality/ethics mumbo jumbo is pure undilute religion mumbo jumbo.