I don’t see the problem. One can have unshakeable moral values they believe everyone should have while acknowledging those values may be a product of their upbringing and others’ lack of them the same.
What about the last part: “viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity?”
It’s the kind of thing professors say when they want to go viral on some fascist platform.
I believe abortion is moral. I believe people who disagree are morally monstrous. I can also understand that their beliefs on whether abortion is moral or not can be a product of their culture and upbringing. What am I missing? Why is this odd?
Your approach is an absolute approach. You see another culture doing something that’s monstrous and say hey that’s monstrous but I guess that’s how they were raised. In other words, your values are absolute.
When you say “abortion is moral,” do you mean that it is never immoral? As in, you literally can’t think of a situation where it would be wrong for a woman to get an abortion?
The only situations I can imagine where abortion would be immoral are extremely contrived scenarios that don’t happen in reality.
That’s very nieve. You can believe in a woman’s absolute right to choose while also acknowledging that sometimes people do heinous things.
I’m someone else, but yeah, I believe the right to bodily autonomy trumps quite literally every other right.
If the world’s smartest person’s survival depended on compromising my bodily autonomy for 5 seconds, I would be in my right to let that person die. If you forced it on me, I would be in my right to kill the world’s smartest person for violating my bodily autonomy.
And not just that, but I think the vast majority of people hold this opinion, but they’re either too dumb to realize it, or commit non-stop special pleading to deny it. I think that very basically, because to think bodily autonomy is NOT the ultimate right, is to think it acceptable to farm human organs as long as it’s for a sufficiently good reason.
So mother is in the 12th hour of labor, she can just morally request an abortion? What if the baby is crowning? How about before the cord is clamped or cut? What about the day before a C-section?
Not the person you responded to, but yes, that describes me.
I think you’re missing the significance of his phrase “entirely relative”.
In moral philosophy, cultural relativity holds that morals are not good or bad in themselves but only within their particular context. Strong moral relativists would hold the belief that it’s fine to murder children if that is a normal part of your culture.
I guess I’m parsing the statement as “understand it as a concept” when they mean “hold that position.”
Maybe the kids are right, and it’s just that the prof is too oldheaded to understand.
Don’t trust anyone over 30, man.
If all your morals are relative you can sign on to do some reprehensible shit when misinformed about a situation because relative to what you know killing another person might be righteous. That is generally not the best way to handle anything. If your baseline isn’t an unshakable one based in human empathy idk what you really ever stand for
do you not think that people can’t come to conclusions you would feel are terrible and still hold them as unshakable morals they derived from empathy? Do you think empathy is not subjective?
Whoa you just blew past majority of my comment and made up your own meaning to it. Also the double negative at the front is throwing me lol
Maybe you could re-read my comment which answers your questions
Your comment is that people can believe things are moral, that lead you to do horrible things, because relativistic morals make you susceptible to misinformation. You then say this isn’t a good operating procedure because of this susceptibility, thus your morals can be twisted to justify horrible things, like killing people out of a sense of righteousness. Then you say that if your moral baseline isn’t an unshakable belief, an axiom, based on empathy, you can’t understand what the person believes.
The first part is true. However, how you present that last two sentences make it look like you are saying this is not good, and that having adamant morals, founded on empathy, is your understanding of a moral standing, and a better way of operating than relativistic models, which can be manipulated by bad input, and produce bad output.
Would you say this is a correct interpretation?
Yeah, that’s because moral relativism is cool when you live in a free and decent society.
The irony is that you can afford to debate morality when society is moral and you’re not facing an onslaught of inhumanity in the form of fascism and unchecked greed that’s threatening any hope for a future.
But when shit hits the fan, morality becomes pretty fucking clear. And that’s what’s happening right now. Philosophical debates about morality are out the window when you’re facing an existential threat.
They used to be the case that just calling your political opponents evil was oversimplifying. But these days? They literally are just evil in the most cruel ways imaginable to the point where there’s nothing to debate, and people who do so are doing so in bad faith most of the time. I think that’s another dimension of the situation, a poorly moderate websites like Twitter make it so that people are constantly in a hostile environment where good faith cannot be assumed so you have to learn to operate in that kind of environment
I think the person replying to you actually just outlined the point the post made. You can frame all of these views for both sides, and could let two people on both side argue about who is actually trying to be cruel.
As much as I’d agree so much evil shit is going in, it’s a good point about how perceptions from others don’t change our own views lately and we aren’t even interested in discussing them. I also understand your point of there being no reason to try discussing them, but that’s the view the people on the other side have had for the past 9 years now, and that’s why we’re where we are. I’m not American but I truly wonder if there’s a way that people can capitulate to each other without having to start a civil war.
When the other side is doing stuff like Mass deportation ASMR videos you’re past the point where it’s a reasonable debate about the exact level of income tax or whatever. Actual cartoon villains wouldn’t dare behave this badly
I mean yeah, the democrats are violent, authoritarian, and and generally awful.
True. Just ask someone from Gaza
Yeah, things have hugely improved in Gaza since one of the most powerful countries in the world got rid of their “democrats” in government.
Ohnowaititstheopposite.
And the evil guys are yelling that the other side is evil, while the other side is too good to call anyone evil 😔
Even if all morality is subjective or inter-subjective I have some very strong opinions about tabs vs spaces
My heart goes out to those who suffer with poor editors where this is a problem. I do empathize with them. It’s important to love others and help. That’s the code for my life: love others. Except vim users. Straight to jail.
Tabs. F alignment for aesthetic purposes
Morality is, and always has been, built entirely upon empathy. Understanding how someone else feels and considering the greater implications beyond yourself is the fundamental building block to living a moral life. If you’re willing to condemn the world to your shitty code just because the tab key is quicker, you’re a selfish monster who deserves hyponichial splinters. See also: double spaces after a period.
My morality is built on furtherment of mankind technologically, with weights assigned to satisfaction and an aversion to harm. Here are some examples on how to apply this logically and without any emotion, empathy included:
- It’s kind of like not really believing in human rights but supporting them anyways because the people who oppose human rights are destructive and inefficient.
- Humans are animals. We must act according to our basic wants and needs in a way that maximizes our satisfaction, or else we are acting against our own nature. However, we must do this in a way that causes no harm, or we have failed as a collective species.
- Diversity is a must because exclusivity is a system which consistently fails every time is has ever been tested.
- The death penalty is taboo not because life is sacred but because one person deciding the importance of another’s life is intellectually bankrupt and only leads to a spiral of violence.
- All life is meaningless, full stop, which gives us the right to assign whatever meaning we like, and having more technology, with equal control over it by each individual person, gives us the collective power to make more choices.
I will not be taking any questions, meatbags
So, empathy like I said.
Why do you value the technological advancement of the human race? How do you determine what is advancement, and what is regression?
Why place emphasis on satisfaction and aversion to harm? How do you determine the relative levels of satisfaction and harm except through empathy?
The correct answer is to map tab to spaces in your IDE.
This is gonna get out of hand.
ANNNND
Fuck you, nuh uh
Morality is, and always has been, built entirely upon empathy. Understanding how someone else feels and considering the greater implications beyond yourself is the fundamental building block to living a moral life.
Stoning people to death for mixing fabrics was based on morality too.
Who did that? Jewish people who wore mixed fabrics were unclean and had to cleanse themselves. Who murdered people for that?
Oh no, my half remembered example of overly violent reactions to breaking moral traditions might not be literally accurate!
Did religions include extremely harsh punishments for breaking moral codes? Yes. That is the point even if the details aren’t exactly right.
You can hold to an ethical code while breaking your moral code. This seems to be an example of that, and my frustration with ethics codes of many professional societies/organizations. You can be entirely ethical yet still spend your life crating efficient life ending tools.
Nah, the probibitions against mixed fabrics, and who can be considered holy, and how to pray and to whom, all of those are edicts designed to exert control. It has nothing to do with morality.
People who use tabs are monsters
Vertical or horizontal tabs? And I don’t mean browser tabs.
<overly dramatic threat of violence here>
Tabs are the one true way! All those who blaspheme against the might tab will be regex’d into compliance.
As I have learned today: “tabstospaces”: true
Can both points not be true? There will be local morals and social morals that differ from place to place with overarching morals that tend to be everywhere.
Not all morals or beliefs have to be unshakable or viewed as morally reprehensible for disagreement.
Unless they mean all their ethics are held that way in which case that’s just the whole asshole in a different deck chair joke.
Not all morals or beliefs have to be unshakable or viewed as morally reprehensible for disagreement.
The tweet suggests the sample group disagrees with this statement.
I think you’re expressing the general consensus: people get a lot of their morals from their environment, but there’s some stuff that’s universal/non-negotiable; and we should be able to find common ground with that.
At least, I think that’s the general consensus. I’ve gotten into trouble with that assumption though.
I’m sure both are true for some people, but I think the irony he’s pointing out is that this belief system recognizes that every individual/culture has different morals, while simultaneously treating individual/cultural differences as reprehensible.
Sounds like someone who was raised in an echo chamber. They recognize other chambers exist, but hate that they do. We’re back to tribalism.
Or someone with strong morals? I think LGBT people deserve to live. I understand that other people do not based on their own moral arguments. I would not want to associate with them. I don’t live in an echo chamber. I recognize and interact with people with different beliefs (even on LGBT issues), but there are certain moral beliefs that make me not desire to interact with people. Is that tribalism or my morality? If I don’t wanna hang out with nazis, I guess that’s tribalism and the outgroup is nazis? Should I stop living in an echo chamber and hang out with more nazis?
The concept of an echo chamber when used in this casual way is so reductive. “People hang out with other who and consume media that aligns with their beliefs”. That’s not inherently a bad thing. It becomes bad when they are unable to recognize other beliefs exist and unable to accept at least some of them as valid alternative perspectives.
The context is important - “morals” covers both “I think drinking is/isn’t an inherently morally irresponsible activity” and “I want to gas minorities”, and one of those has slightly higher stakes. You can understand the latter often happens because small town america might not have ever met minority groups, or somehow figures the small immigrant community with delicious food is “one of the few good ones” - that doesn’t make their “morals” any less reprehensible.
I think we agree/are saying the same thing? I’m saying that talking in absolutes about echo chambers being bad is reductive. To me, the important distinction between an actual echo chamber and being a normal person with beliefs and opinions, is the ability to recognize that sometimes others have different beliefs/opinions and that those may be equally valid. Like I said I’m anti nazi, but also that normal people (which I’m sometimes classified as) are able to accept some differences. So I’m not ok with nazis, but I think it’s ok to fast for lent if you want even if I don’t. So, we’re both saying context is important?
But the point is that, if you follow moral relativism (which the hypothetical students in the post do, as they insist morality is relative), then you must acquiesce that cultures which hate queer people are valid and acceptable, because doing otherwise would not be moral relativism. Or, take another example, slavery. Is it okay for any culture to practice slavery?
And if you don’t agree that it is valid and acceptable on a philosophical level, well, you can just follow a form moral universalism. Which is more appropriate if you do think some sets of morals are simply more ethical than others, such as, for example, not allowing slavery
It’s not so much about whether different moral standards exist or not, but more whether different standards for morals in and of themselves are acceptable/ethical.
The fact that they didn’t use “moral relativism” explicitly suggests to me that like most general philosophy classes, they are probably moral realists and the OP is just being cheeky about it, or legitimately for some reason completely unable to present moral realism as a subject of discussion.
I don’t agree with your characterization of moral universalism here, but regardless it’s clear that they are either bad at their job or posting for the memes because it’s literally their job to be able to establish what a cohesive view would be and why that is important, so it’s weird to act like clowning on their students for having a selfcontradictory view is anything but an admission of failure on their end.
If you agree that morals are relative and culturally constructed, then you shouldn’t reject differences in morals of others as immoral.
That’s basically just taking a position where you want to be able to change your mind on what’s “moral”, and expect everyone else to follow your opinion on it.
I said that some are but it seems cultures share a couple of them in common like not killing without cause. So in that system there are local morals and global/regional morals.
I don’t think acknowledging morals as relative to the culture they exist within exempts decrees of immorality. Relative to their culture, it is. Should they speak from the point of view of a culture that they don’t understand? I personally think it’s a sliding scale where, to the extent it harms other people, it needs to be viewed more objectively just, and where it doesn’t harm, it’s fine being a difference in opinion. The only downside to this is that sometimes you don’t know enough about a topic to know there are victims, and so your prescriptive thoughts can change very quickly about the morality of it. Perspective is important and should always be maximized to avoid this problem.
I wish I could have phrased it that well.
Noam Chomsky would like a word.
He’s a linguist who has his own issues with moral duality
I’ve been a College and University prof for the past 6 years. I’m in my young 40s, and I just don’t understand most of the people in their 20s. I get that we grew up in really different times, but I wouldn’t have thought there would be such a big clash between them and me. I teach about sound and music, and I simply cannot catch the interest of most of them, no matter what I try. To the point were I’m no sure I want to keep doing this. Maybe I’m already too old school for them but I wonder who will want to teach anymore…
Do a class about sounds of tiktok reels that will be a hit.
I actually do sometimes incorporates memes and stuff from tiktok and other social media in my classes.
That is the same sentiment my music teacher had 15 years ago and the same sentiment his music teacher did before that. I don’t think it’s illustrating the times as much as just that teaching is a tough and thankless job and most people aren’t interested in learning
I could get that at the grade school level, but at the university/college level those students are choosing the music classes. To be that disengaged for a course you picked is a bit different than a student who is forced to take a course.
That being said, if the course is a requirement that does change things a bit.
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree with this. I’ve always said to myself that I didn’t want to fall into this old-versus-young rhetoric, but I think the situation is different. The world and technologies are changing faster than our ability to integrate them. The world in which my father lived wasn’t that different from his father’s, and neither was mine. But young people, born into the digital age, have been the guinea pigs of social media and the gafam ecosystem, which seems to have radically altered their ability to concentrate (even watching a short film is a challenge), as well as their interest in learning. They see school, even higher education, as a constraint rather than an opportunity. I have the impression that they don’t see the point of learning when a Google search or ai answers everything, and that retaining things is useless. That’s my 2 cents…
I’ll chime in and say that math teachers have said similar things about calculators/graphing calculators for 25+ years. This is most definitely you getting “old”. It’s okay—it happens to all of us.
As far as attention span, that has been an equally common refrain—going back to people complaining that radio has reduced kids attention spans.
Interesting points. I don’t think calculators are equivalent to having the sum of humanity’s knowledge, AI, and infinite content in you pocket tho. There’s a limit to how much fun you can have with a calculator… The same goes for attention in class. Not so long ago, if the class bored you, you had to wait while scribbling in a notepad. Now you can doom scroll anywhere anytime. These kids have been test subjects for ipad, youtube content and smartphone,I don’t blame them, I blame capitalism who made them addicted to social media and their parents who didn’t protect them.
I also want to add that I have some great students, invested in their studies and super bright. It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
I’m pretty sure it’s always been the case that most students didn’t care, because they’re forced to be there. I don’t even remember being awake for the majority of precalc because first period is just too early in the day.
Maybe. But when you go study sound tech at college, I would have believe you would be interested to hear about sound stuff… Especially since the application process is pretty heavy and only half of the applicants get in.
Calculators, computers, either way the kids going to finish looking at BOOBS.
We all do.
It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
I teach chemistry at a college and I don’t think it’s any different than the past; it’s just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).
There’s tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it’s even shorter for teens and males in their early 20’s), and that’s remarkably consistent across generations. I don’t think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that’s fine. It’s just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.
Pretty much. I think a lot of the anger over phones is that it makes it real obvious when someone doesn’t care what you’re saying. You’re right that you used to look out into the classroom and couldn’t really tell who was focusing or zoned out
As someone who is young but old enough to remember when boredom was a thing let me tell you boredom sucked. There wasn’t really anything to it worth keeping. Yeah sometimes I go for a walk and have a think but that’s intentional. Being bored when you’re stuck in line or something is just painful and has no redeeming qualities
100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that’s more in the “I’m done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner” sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren’t careful.
I’m not sure that tech is really changing all that fast. In the 1990s a good desktop computer had 40 MB of HDD space and 2 MB of RAM. In the 2000s the hard drives were already 1000x as big, and people had hundreds of MB of RAM. That’s a massive amount of change in just a decade. In the early 1990s nobody had heard of the Internet. By the 2000s it was everywhere.
Sure, these days a low-end phone has much higher specs than that. But, has the phone-using experience really changed much in the last decade? Even the last 2? Specs have gotten better, but it hasn’t really opened up new ways of using the device. Yes, in some ways things are still moving quickly, but it’s always been like that. Some things change rapidly, other things slow down.
I agree that people’s ability to concentrate has been affected. The fact that “attention” has been turned into a kind of currency means that people seem to have lost the ability to focus on one thing for an extended period. That’s something that’s unique to the last 1-2 decades. But, I don’t think people’s interest in learning has changed. It’s just that the traditional way of learning in a classroom is much harder if your attention span is shot. It was never easy, most classes were always boring, but people could get through it because they were still able to focus for extended periods.
School was also always a constraint for most people. People who could go to school for the love of learning rather than as a means to an end were always a lucky minority. If you were really lucky you got a teacher / prof / teaching assistant who could make things interesting. But, in most cases they droned through the required material and you tried to absorb it.
I agree that now that searching the Internet is easier, certain methods of learning / teaching are outdated and haven’t been adapted yet. Memorizing facts was always stupid, but at least when it took a while to look it up in a paper encyclopedia you could just vaguely see the value. But, these days it’s so obviously absurd – yet that’s still what a lot of teachers focus on. It’s not to blame the teachers though. They often don’t have the freedom to change the way they teach, especially today now that there are so many standardized tests. But, memorizing facts about history, for example, is just ridiculous in a world where looking up those facts even with a vague search like “french guy who tried to attack moscow” will take you right to Napoleon.
Some of the most useful classes I ever had were the ones that taught me to analyze and understand information. For example, a philosophy class on analyzing arguments and identifying logical fallacies has been incredibly useful, and only more useful in an age of misinformation and disinformation. Then there were engineering courses that taught how to estimate. Science courses that taught significant figures and error analysis is extremely important when you have calculators / programs that can spit out an answer to dozens of decimal places when the values you supply are approximate. These sorts of things are incredibly useful in a world where a magic machine can spit out an answer and you need to think about whether that answer is reasonable or not.
Looking at music, there’s so much that I’ve learned outside of school that I never learned in school. I stopped taking music classes at the end of high school, and wasn’t all that interested in music for a while. But, since then I’ve become more interested. And, there’s so much that’s not easy to learn just using the Internet. Like, trying to understand the circle of fifths, or the various musical modes, or how to spot certain pop/rock songs as using various 8 or 12 bar blues patterns. I’m lucky because I have a friend who has a PhD in musicology who is willing to chat with me about things I find interesting and want to know more about.
Anyhow, my main points is that I don’t think that kids today are really any different from any other kids throughout history with two main exceptions: their attention span and the immediacy of information on the Internet. Concentrating in school has always been extremely hard, but at least when I was young I hadn’t been trained from age 3 to doom scroll. That means that staying focused through a 1 hour class, which was a chore for me, is a near impossibility for a kid weaned on a smartphone or tablet. As for memorizing, even when I was young, memorizing facts seemed like a waste of time. But, these days it’s clearly ridiculous, but the approach to education hasn’t fully adapted yet. Really, kids in elementary school should be learning how to fact check, how to cross-verify, how to identify misinformation, etc. But, even if teachers know that, they’re boxed in.
Best of luck to you though, it’s good that at least you want to jam information into some brains.
For me personally, life stress and exhaustion are bigger focus inhibitors. I agree that school is largely obsolete and I don’t really blame kids for checking out
Nah, I’m early 30s, but grew up around 20th century media, competitive parents when it came to game shows, and a weird expectation to just know pub trivia.
Took me a while to realise I’m the outlier and still am. Just the other day I was talking to some old colleagues and had to spend energy convincing them that the things they were talking about in the Simpsons are mostly movie or TV references and even then mostly just Kubrick, Hitchcock and a considerable amount of Steven King. They just have no idea how unoriginal most modern/contemporary media is. Not even in a bad way, just in an homage/artist replicatong the old masters etc.
But it’s really strange for a generation with the biggest access and connection to human culture is somehow just as bubbles/silod as ever.
I think this is less time-specific, and more just people not being terribly interested in learning.
For example, a professor who specialized in virology was explaining everything about how pathogens spillover between species, using a 2010s ebola outbreak as an example. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time because it was as fascinating as a true horror movie, and yet other students were totally zoned out on Facebook a few rows ahead of me. While the professor was talking about organs dissolving due to the disease and the fecal-oral (and other liquids) route of ebola, which wasn’t exactly a dry subject, lol.
Rinse and repeat for courses on macro/micro economics, mirror neurons, psychology classes on kink, even coding classes.
Either I’m fascinated by stuff most people find boring, or a lot of people just hate learning. I’m thinking it’s the latter, since this stuff encompassed a wide range of really interesting subjects from profs who were really excited about what they taught.
I miss them a lot, I used to corner various profs and TAs and ask them questions about time fluctuations around black holes, rare succulent growing tips in the plant growth center, and biotechnology. It was fun having access to such vibrant people :)
I don’t know, I might intellectually understand that morals are relative to a culture and that even our concept of universal human rights is an heritage of our colonial past and, on some level, trying to push our own values as the only morality that can exist. On a gut level though, I am entirely unable to consider that LGBT rights, gender equality or non-discrimination aren’t inherently moral.
I don’t think holding these two beliefs is weird, it’s a natural contradiction worth debating and that’s what I would expect from an ethics teacher
an heritage
Who pronounces it as 'eritage
I’m gonna guess French people
That’s so objectively morally reprehensible
Being Fr*nch is a choice. It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Oui-ve
That’s because there are 2 general schools of thought in ethics - relativism and absolutism. Relativism (the idea that morality is intrinsic to the person’s experience and understanding) is the one that seems to be the most talked about in general society. I believe in absolutism, the idea that there is a set of guidelines for moral behavior regardless of your experiences or past.
Your example (more formally known as the paradox of tolerance) is what convinces me that absolutism is the better school of thought
I can’t help but be struck at how cowardly ‘moral relativism’ seems. Yes, you could potentially offend or step on someone’s toes if you express moral outrage at the practice of childhood genital mutiliation, for example, but are you truly opposed if you are willing to contextualise said opposition? If you have a strong moral objection to something, then have a strong moral objection.
There are 8 billion people, and not all of them are going to or have to agree with you. There’s absolutely no need to play the chameleon to keep everyone happy.
If your moral objection to something isn’t universal, then it isn’t an objection.
Parallel: Teaching contemporary American literature to undergrads in 2019 was utterly bizarre because they hadn’t lived through 9/11. So much stuff went over their heads. There’s just a disconnect you’re always going to have because of lived experience and cultural changes. It’s your job, especially in a philosophy course, to orient them to differing schools of thought and go “oh, I didn’t think about it that way.” And correct them on Nietzsche, because they’re always fucking wrong about Nietzsche.
Gesundheit!
Excuse me I was told that anyone who says “people view disagreement as moral monstrosity” is actually a nazi.
The misunderstanding I see here is in the definition of “subjective”.
Subjective is often used interchangeably with opinion. And people can certainly have different opinions.
But the subjective that is meant is that morals don’t exist without a subject, aka a mind to comprehend them.
A rock exists whether or not a mind perceives the rock. The rock is objective. It is a physical object.
The idea that it is wrong to harm someone for being different is subjective. It is an idea. A thought. The thought does not exist without a mind.
So yes. Morals are all subjective. Morals do not exist in the physical world. Morals are not objects, they do not objectively exist. They exist within a subject. Morals subjectively exist.
That does not mean that any set of morals is okay because it’s just an opinion, bro. Because it’s not just an opinion. Those subjective values effect objective reality.
I think this is a bit too simple. Suppose I say that moral badness, the property, is any action that causes people pain, in the same way the property of redness is the quality of surfaces that makes people experience the sensation of redness. If this were the case, morality (or at least moral badness) would absolutely not be a subjective property.
Whether morality is objective or subjective depends on what you think morality is about. If it’s about things that would exist even if we didn’t judge them to be the way they are, it’s objective. If it’s about things that wouldn’t exist unless we judge them to be the way they are, it’s subjective.
But suffering objectively exists. I know this. I experience this. It is an objectively immoral experience that exists in this reality that I am calling ‘suffering’.
That pretty much enough for moral objectivism for me on some level.
Do no harm, do only good. In that order.
The keyword there is experience.
You are a subject. Suffering isn’t an object, it’s a feeling. A concept.
Subjective doesn’t mean “not real”. It’s something that needs a subject to exist. The suffering, just like morals, do exist. They are real, they can be measured, they can be discussed, they have real effects.
What makes them subjective isn’t “well that’s like, just your opinion, man”, it’s the fact that without a subject to experience them, they would cease to exist.
To you I am subjective. But from where I am sitting it isn’t.
You have a physical presence in space. That’s objective. Emphasis on object. Something being objective doesn’t mean “this is a fact”, it means it has physical form.
The pain you feel is not an object. It’s an experience. Again, that does not translate to “that’s your opinion”. It is real, it simply is not a physical object.
Objective and Subjective are both real. They’re mind and matter, not opinions and facts.
Woah there buddy, I said suffering. Not Pain. Distinct difference that nullifies your point as it’s completely irrelevant, talking about something else sorry.
Alright. Is suffering an object?
Nobody used the word subjective. What are you on about?
So you legitimately don’t recognize the screenshot as being fundamentally based around the issues of subjectivity and objectivity?
I mean… what are you on about?
I think you should read more carefully in the future, but this time I’ll explain it to you: The OP used the word relative. The reply went into a discussion about how the word subjective has a narrow meaning in philosophy that isn’t the same as the common usage. The OP was not discussing subjectivity in the sense of the reply, nor did it use the word subjective.
Probably in relation to the use of ‘relative’, I guess a synonym for subjective?
(Edit) I thought is was an interesting comment btw
Yeah, I guess. Maybe they misread the OP. I agree that it was interesting, though completely irrelevant to the statement in the OP.
Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify popular morals.
“Murder is wrong” is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic “murder is wrong” stance.
People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like “morality is subjective” as though it’s an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
https://images.app.goo.gl/fBQbi2J5osxuFmvt7
I think “morality is subjective” is just something we hear apparently worldly people say all the time, and nobody really has any idea.
By the way, I have a PhD in ethics and wrote my dissertation on the objectivity/subjectivity of ethics. Long story short, we don’t know shit!
“Morality is subjective” is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.
Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.
Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.
If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.
And since we can’t point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn’t even matter if one theoretically exists because it’s inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn’t exist for us.
Both of us are following different moral standards, the “rules” in your head are not the same rules that I’m subjective to.
You’re morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.
A lot of what you said here is an implication of subjectivism, but not an argument for it. Subjectivism about morality is no more an implication of an empiricist worldview than subjectivism about the shape of the Earth.
What you’re suggesting here sounds a lot like the logical positivists’ position on ethics. The descriptive is falsifiable, the normative is not, so it must be subjective. The problem with that view is that we can’t draw neat lines between the normative and the descriptive. If I’m attempting to model the world descriptively, I’m still going to be guided by normative considerations about what constitutes a good model. Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative. Philosophy in general is not a discrete subject, separate from science. The two are continuous.
And we’ve known since Plato that God doesn’t play into it, one way or the other.
My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There’s no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
Goals and priorities might differ a lot between an ant and a human but not so much between two humans. At least not enough to not get at least a few rules for behavior.
Just because its easy to get a bunch of humans to agree say murder is wrong, doesn’t mean you can call that objective.
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
If morality is subjective, you’d expect creatures with similar subjective experiences to agree with each other.
You’d expect one subjective blob of rules to conform to human biology/sociology and a separate blob of subjective rules to apply to antkind with no real way to interface between the two.
and you base that expectation on what?
hopes and dreams?
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it. knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”
the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us. the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don’t believe that’s possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
How do you overcome the is-ought problem?
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic. this is a big ol nothing-burger of a refutation, it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic.
it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
Okay so it’s clear you understand why I brought it up and that it’s true.
I don’t know why the rest of the comment is phrased so angrily but if you’re just saying I’m right I don’t know how to respond to it lol.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
I wasn’t asking him to overcome it, I was astonished he would claim he could overcome it because it’s as obviously true as we both claim.
Not sure why I look silly if you keep telling me how absolutely right I am in all contexts lol
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors. You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you. The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors.
Just human? I mean, sure do, but we’re leaving out a huge array of animals who also engage in rudimentary moral behavior.
You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you.
Of course, we evolved to be social animals did we not? What else would you expect but inate instinctual “rules” when they’d lead to a clearly fitter society.
The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Right, and just like the variation in genetic material this variation in inputs and outputs that we all have which are wholly unique to us as individuals and while remarkably similar to others raised in similar environments, also remarkably unique in subtle ways.
I agree this is the entire conversation. And the obviousness of this fact, that moral expression is subtly unique to each individual, is the ultimate answer to the question.
If you are raised in a subjectively different environment, then the rules you learn to behave by will be subjective to that environment.
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out “murder” for “killing” the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
It’s even worse than that. It floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder. It’s murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don’t even have a proper word for it, they just say “it’s not murder… IT’S WAR!” What a lazy non-argument. It doesn’t count because we’re doing murder Costco style, in bulk?
I mean yeah, it’s people killing people that don’t want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It’s more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.
As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn’t have the baggage of human murdered. Don’t want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they’re doing, or they won’t comply as reliably!
floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder
Because it’s not. Murder is one sided. War, you are fighting. It’s not 1 sided. It’s killing, and can easily and is often morally reprehensible. But that does not make it murder. Civilian deaths are still murder in a war.
It’s not defanging language. Its using it as it is.
and this is exactly my point, the definition of the word generally points directly to it being killing in a fashion that is unlawful which rests on the applicable law in the context.
Nation state soldiers killing enemy combatants doesn’t fit this description in most circumstances. (There are of course rules and exceptions etc etc)
I’m not arguing the morality, I’m arguing the factual definition and it’s the reason why i said the language causes it’s own issues.
in fact, that “murder is wrong” in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
“murder is wrong” is a moral absolute if you adopt the deontological viewpoint. It’s not if you adopt the teleological approach. Discussing these things is literally what I learnt in the very short Ethics course I had in third year uni (while in France that sort of stuff was much much earlier during Philosophy class…)
Edit : and to be clear, I think absolute opinions are the province of the philosopher and the fanatic. Real life tends to be a bit more messy. But that’s why it’s important to sort of know what the options are and how difficult the choices can be (again, for real human beings who struggle with dilemmas ; fanatics tend to eachew all that and I’d say that’s how you can spot them).
This is basically how teaching secular ethics always is, though. Doesn’t seem special about 2025. People will always be overconfident in their beliefs, but it’s not necessarily a coincidence or even hypocrisy that they can hold both views at the same time.
You can believe that morality is a social construct while simultaneously advocating for society to construct better morals. Morality can be relative and opposing views on morality can still be perceived as monstrous relative to the audience’s morality.
But “constructing better morals” is by itself a non-relativist statement. How can you say there are “better morals” when you follow moral relativism, which states that there is no universal set of moral principles? In other words, that morals are not comparable with each-other?
It’s not the same thing as accepting that different cultures have different set of morals, but whether some things are simply more moral than others, or not. For example, saying that slavery is always bad, and should never be allowed, is an absolutist moral statement.
This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.
Now that is funny. Its funny because its true.
