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If morality is essentially meaningless, then it wouldn't be possible to speak meaningfully about moral propositions, even in the subjective sense of the word. The relevant difference that I think is true in your case is the difference between the epistemological question and the ontological question:
That's notable for what it doesn't say. Non-cognitivists for instance say that we can't express 'true' right and wrong opinions (which is what you are saying? That's epistemological.). It doesn't say true right and wrong 'don't exist' (that's moral ontology).
Right. This was essentially Nietzsche's view as well. "There are no moral phenomenon, only a moral interpretation of a phenomenon." You seem to think it's a category error, almost akin to asking to wrong question. Colors are second-order properties that take place in the brain. 'Best' is a term relative to the individual you're asking. But just because that part of the answer is 'situationally dependent' doesn't mean 'color' doesn't exist. Color does, objectively, exist. We can even have discussions about the physics of color, and it's ontological properties. This would almost be like thinking just because someone can abuse mathematics to create logical paradoxes, that therefore proves that logic is illogical.
I'd be interested to know what your problems are with Contractarianism and Desirism, more specifically. Both have claims to moral objectivity.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contractarianism/
I am lost at the moment they say must. It is practically desirable, that consent arises from the governed. That is not the same as objectivity as I understand the term.
Contracts are good, as far as I'm concerned, if they allow for mutually positive trade or conflict resolution. But that begs the question as to what counts as positive, or why we prefer a resolution in that manner.
If the consent of the governed reduces strife, improves coordination and satisfaction, great, I'm all for it! But I don't see that as revealing more than a stable equilibrium or a glimpse at my moral leanings (and those of many others, given that democracy predominates).
https://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2012/07/desirism-and-objective-values.html?m=1
Choice quotes after a relatively quick read-
I am objecting to the ethicist way of defining objectivity. I can well say that there "objective" moral facts about me, such as that I have a philosophical prelidection for transhumanism, or of any set of entities, such as that it's objectively true that most mammals of significant intelligence have observable preferences for certain types of "fairness".
https://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2011/04/objectivity-science-and-morality.html?m=1
This followup post has confused me. I can only apologize, it's 4 am and I'm sleep deprived.
https://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2016/12/objectivity-of-value.html?m=1
My issue here is that he's claiming objectivity relative to well defined observer.
The innate subjectivity is being waved away, I wouldn't say disingenuously because he is quite clear about his definitions.
Why not? When I say that I prefer a state of affairs/world/ruleset over another, I am conveying useful information about my ethical preferences, and to the extent that human morality is evolutionarily conserved to a degree, it likely means something to you. But that is a matter of how compelling it is to my arbitrary morality, and that is the only factor of relevance that I recognize.
If I say that I prefer a world with 500 happy people to one with 500 people being tortured, that is a true moral statement about my preferences. It is likely also objectively true about me, in the sense that if you had good neuroimaging, you would find that the parts of brain lighting up when evaluating that claim are those associated with my understanding of truth instead of a lie or misdirection.
I am saying that right or wrong is fundamentally undefined without specifying an observer. If you do specify one, you can find statements they would class as being more correct or incorrect, true or false to them.
Can I say that something is right or wrong for me? Absolutely.
Can I even say that to you? Yes. But only because I think we have non-zero overlap in what normative claims we endorse, because we are both humans and share a common memeplex. If we have a fundamental values difference, I have no appeal to objectivity, only the vague hope that my stance is more compelling to you, for whatever reason. And vice-versa, of course.
The fact that we both consider something good or bad, is unavoidably a statement about us rather than something that can be extrapolated to any arbitrary conscious or intelligent entity.
Anyway, I apologise if I'm missing something obvious or an being less than clear, it's 4am and I'm dead tired. I'll check back tomorrow if think I've made an error or am not thinking straight.
Thank you greatly for such a comprehensive reply. It's much appreciated. I'll admit from the outset, I don't have a fully laid out view on morality that I'm 100% convinced by. Many of these issues aren't even clear in my own head, though I think something 'like' Fyfe style, desire utilitarianism is probably the best moral theory out there; and if that isn't true, I think Error Theory is probably the next most plausible exposition laid out.
In a loose sense of terms, I can see what they're getting at in a way. If "legitimate" is taken to be a synonym for "consent," (as they specify) there is a mutually shared basis for agreement. But I was thinking more along the lines of the way Shelly Kagan defended the argument. I'm not asking you to fully watch the video, but only planting a flag there if your interest is gauged.
Right. You're saying that at bottom, reality is free of normativity. You're saying there are no morally "brute" facts. Morality is a sort of fickle convention, invented by human beings to govern their behavior. It seems strange though that this should be such a strong criticism, given that human beings are themselves the entire subject and focus of our moral reasoning, in relationship to ourselves and other beings. That's exactly what it is. But it seems like you're saying morality must go 'beyond' that in some sense; as if you're looking for a reason 'outside' of morality, to adopt the moral point of view. Because moral facts are about human beings, it's impossible to conceive of morality existing 'apart' from human beings. But I'll try and do as best as I can in the moment to make the distinction clear, as I see it.
No worries. I'll try and update any corrections you make.
I'll take this as the starting point from which I'll address the rest of your post.
Everything about us in the universe is only accessed through our subjective experience. But there's 'still' a difference between what's true of that experience, and what we can infer is true about the world from that experience. To go back to your earlier example about colors. Yes, colors only exist subjectively. There's no such thing as "red," out in the external world. It's a fictional product of the innerworkings of our brains; it exists to keep track of what 'does' exist in the external world. It's a lattice of atoms, arranged in a way that they absorb all the photos that vibrate at certain frequencies, and then reflect on the cone cells in our eyes that produce an electrical signal in the brain. That's what color is. Nowhere is there anything that is colored "red," redness is only ever experienced. Nothing exists that is red. But there is at least one objective fact about colors. Wherever a certain physical system exists, 'the experience of colors will exist'. It's an inseparable property of the system. And even if that wasn't true, "colors exist" is still an objective property of the world, because our experience of them is a part of the external world, whatever it happens to consist of.
If the question comes down to "what does it mean to be objective?" The distinction for most people lies between things being "subjective" (i.e. it's a matter of opinion) and "objective" (i.e. something independently observed). The distinction you're asking for is essentially separating what is 'opinion' from 'an opinion being true' in an objective sense. If I make an assertion of "fact" and say "nobody will buy this car," then really it only comes down to having uninformed beliefs about the world. What you're getting at is opinions that can't be false. If I say, "Katy Perry's music fucking sucks!," it could be making a claim to an objective fact, or it could fail to satisfy some mutually acceptable standard. The fact of her music 'at that moment' sucking, is a fact about how that person feels about her music. And that it sucks in that case, can't even 'be' false. It's like seeing the color red.
And yet, it's 'still' the case that there is objectively true fact of the world here. The way that they feel about the music will manifest itself in a physical arrangement, and state of their brain that can 'in principle', be observed by another party, without ever even having to ask them what they thought of the music. There's also objectively true properties of the music that once they are called to your attention, changes the opinion of it. Even then, their opinion still 'only' shifts in reaction to their own individual feelings and responses, and not on anything that’s true of the world apart from themselves and their personal idiosyncrasies. It could simply be the case that an individual hasn’t acquired the mental structures that will ever make that music pleasant to them. And we generally are okay with that.
All of this, I trust you agree with so far, because it's essentially what you're trying to draw my attention to. Now I'm going to shift your focus:
What’s actually at the heart of the issue when people make this objective/subjective distinction, is whether other people should feel obligated to agree with a judgment. If we accept that “this music sucks” is simply a description of how the agent feels, then we can all agree it is an objectively true fact of the world, that that is how that person feels. You and I don’t have to agree that we “should” to feel the same way. That requires an additional step of reasoning in the argument. It requires that “this music sucks” not be simply a description of how the agent feels. It has to be describing something else that other observers can agree is true.
And this is usually what people get hung up on when they argue over whether morality is objective or subjective. What they really mean is, whether they 'should' agree with a moral assertion or not. But then they will proceed to confuse that question, with the entirely 'different' question of whether their access to the objective truths of the world is mediated by and depends on subjective experience. But since 'all' objective truths are done that way through subjective experience, that question is totally moot in the first place. How you 'feel' is one thing. Whether that feeling corresponds to something you should really act upon is another thing entirely. Both are simultaneously objective and subjective facts of the world. If you experience the fear of a tiger trying to kill you, that's an objective fact about your brain. And the danger is only known to exist through your subjective experience of the world.
Mental states like pain and suffering are completely subjective feelings. They are just like the musical proposition. What causes you pain may be different from what causes someone else pain. They might have depression, or a body in a different condition, or a different past history that makes some things more painful than others, or maybe they just genetically have a different pain tolerance than you. But even though anyone’s pain and suffering is 100% subjective, it's all "just a feeling," and different from person to person, there is still an objectively true fact that something is causing them pain. And this doesn't even change if your ontology of the world includes the supernatural or not. Even if you're a divine command theorist, it's 'still' the case that pain is purely and only a “feeling” does not make it irrelevant to a third party’s moral judgment.
Just because the information about moral facts is always accessed subjectively doesn't argue that objective moral facts 'don’t exist'. Any more than it can argue that you shouldn’t fear a tiger running after you. That observation can only be subjective. But there's still an objective fact as to whether a tiger is actually running towards you, and whether you should fear that or not. Both are still objective facts of world.
Now to the next point, the opposite of objective in this case, doesn't at all mean that the facts are relative. That understanding is completely false, because even if every one of the endless “relativisms” people conjure up is true, it's 'still' the case that morality remains an objective fact. There can still be objectively true moral facts for each culture and individual. And situational relativism is no less objective. If I say that velocity is relative. It's relative to my car, it could be zero, when at the same time, relative to the road ahead, it’s sixty miles per hour. Yet both remain objectively true facts of the 'world itself'. And they remain true regardless of what I think, feel, or believe. As most moral systems would agree, whether it’s moral to kill depends on the situation (this is what I was gesturing at in my last post, e.g., homicide vs. self-defense), but that can itself be an objectively true fact of the world. Even in the abstract, it's true 'that': killing is okay in situation A but not in situation B. Because the systems physically differ (in the case of homicide and self-defense) and differ in objectively observable and measurable ways.
What everyone always worries about is that it sounds like we can just make up whatever morality we want. And therefore, there is no moral truth, maybe at best only moral agreement. Morals are just fictional norms that we live by, and of course we can simply invent anything we like. There is no sense in which one is 'better' than the other. That's what people get hung up on when they argue over whether morality is objective or relative. What they really mean is, whether someone else should agree with a moral assertion or not, or perhaps whether they're being a different person or living in a different culture can make them immune to condemnation or correction. But then they always confuse that question with asking the entirely different question of whether there is an objectively true fact about how that other person should behave, even if it’s different from how we should behave.
Take an example like traffic laws, which are obviously culturally relative. Like fictional norms, they're completely invented by each culture however they want. And yet, there is an objective fact of the matter that they realize. There are better and worse traffic systems, when measured by the standard they were invented for. And this remains so regardless of your opinions, feelings, or beliefs. A system in which there was no enforced rule as to which side of multilane roads to drive on would produce far more traffic collisions, and the universally recognized (and universally needed) goal of traffic laws is to facilitate transportation while minimizing collisions. Yes, in some cultures vehicles are expected to drive on the right and in others the left. Which is completely arbitrary. Yet it's an objectively true fact that everyone should drive on the same side of the road, whichever side that happens culturally to be, if they want to avoid traffic collisions. There's no objectively true fact that cars must drive on the right rather than the left to reduce collisions. There is however, an objectively true fact that cars must all drive on the right or on the left to reduce collisions. Even though it's culturally relative whether you drive on the right or the left, when you are in a culture that drives on the right, it is the case that you should drive on the right. Which side you should drive on is an objective fact of which cultural system you are traversing at the time. Moral relativism therefore has 'no' bearing on whether objective morals 'exist'. Objective morals 'might' exist and be relative, to the individual, culture, situation, or species.
I might have some bad news for you... this attempt is pretty bad. It gets basically no play in academic works, for good reason. It was a result of peak Internet Atheism, where the trend was that one of the biggest pain spots (places where Internet Atheists felt like they were getting crushed argumentatively) was morality. This led to a bunch of different offshoot directions. Most academically-credible was Joel Marks' desirism, but that version was explicitly anti-realist, TBH not really much of a contribution to the moral question beyond that of Mackie (he was trying to conjure up a slightly different descriptive theory of ethics, attempting to position it apart from morality). Another example would be whatever words you want to use to describe whatever the hell it is that Sam Harris went off to try doing.
Fyfe's attempt pretty much grabbed Marks' descriptive theory, but then pretty inexplicably tried just grafting utilitarianism onto it, and it basically doesn't make any sense. He swears that desires are the only reasons for action, because he thinks he has to have this strong rule to keep any sort of god from floating back into the picture... but then immediately introduces a "Golden Rule" (I don't want to look up his exact wording, but the 'do things that tend to fulfill desires' rule). This "Golden Rule" just comes from magic; moreover, it immediately breaks the idea that the only reasons for action are desires. For if no agent in the system desires the "Golden Rule", where does it come from? He can't take the Marks exit (which is not a "Golden Rule" at all, but instead positioned as simply a piece of practical advice for how one can vet their own desires and then go about achieving them). There really is just nothing to save it; it's self-contradictory, pretty quickly.
That it doesn't have majority representation in philosophical/academic journals is a pretty facile reason for discarding it, IMO. Central to Fyfe's thesis is the notion that beliefs plus desires result in intentional action, therein implying that desires are the only reasons for intentional action that exist. My totally unqualified and layman's understanding of neuroscience and more specifically some of the findings in moral psychology thus far, seem to lend support and credence to something like Fyfe's ultimate conclusion. I've seen no good evidence to the contrary. If you're aware of any substantial critiques of Fyfe or Desirism in particular, I'd love to see them. To me, this isn't it however.
I think you missed most of my comment.
No, I did read it. I was hoping for something a bit less conjectural and more technically given.
That's not conjectural at all. It's a specific claim that his specific formulation is self-contradictory. Easy question you can ask yourself: Is the "Golden Rule of Desirism" a desire? If no, then it is not a reason for action, by definition. If so, then simply consider a world where no entity holds that desire, and the entire force of the rule disappears.
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I appreciate you bearing with me!
It's almost 7 am, and I have gone from being delirious from lack of sleep to my body grudgingly acknowledging that circadian rhytms are mere suggestions. Whether the newfound sense of mental clarity that proceeds is warranted or not, you be the judge haha.
After doing my best to parse what you've said (quite clearly and lucidly, so any misunderstanding probably reflects more on me than you, it seems to me that your stance is that moral objectivity is not categorically ruled out by the fact that are our perceptions of morality are filtered through our subjective consciousness, whereas I prefer to begin from what might be called closer to Occam's Razor, in that I don't want to postulate the existence of more ontologies than strictly necessary.
Those aren't conflicting claims, as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong.
A more salient difference might be that even if objective morality somehow exists, I do not see any way to measure it or even recognize it were it to appear before me, which seems to make it a bit moot. What would such a hypothetical mechanism even be like? What might someone, in possession of objective morality, use to convince me of it beyond the fact I find it compelling, which I also accept as a valid means of assessing subjective morality, and hence can't be the sole criterion by which I decide if it's objective or subjective!
See, while I think it is both necessary and better for one's sanity to accept the world as it appears (accounting for concordance between one's sensory streams), it is entirely possible that my perception of a tiger approaching me is not proof of a "real" tiger. I could be hallucinating. I could be in a VR simulation. (Bayesian reasoning does rule out a "perfect" proof, namely one that raises your posterior probability to either 1 or 0, unless you started with it as an axiomatic prior, in which case you can never change your mind)
I have no principled way to rule that out, but I am also pragmatic enough to keep whistling, or in this case, run away while screaming my lungs out for help.
So while I choose to treat a vivid qualia of a tiger coming for my ass as objective reality, that is not conclusive. Just to make it doubly clear, I think objective reality probably exists, at some level, ignoring things like observer-dependency in QM (I understand, possibly erroneously, that the wave function is objective and unique, while the observed solutions are subject/observer dependent, though in this case a photon or a helium atom count as observers). Even if it doesn't, I consider it useful. Similarly, you won't find me doing anything particularly unethical by public opinion in my normal life, because while I think it's a social fiction, I find it a useful one, while simultaneously not conflating that as making it true.
In other words, I cannot disprove solipsism. But I can and do choose to act as if it's not the case. And so I will, until someone can convince me it's possible to do otherwise.
I find myself confused. Surely you see that in every instance here, there is necessarily an observer involved, who is the subject of any measurement?
If someone asks you how fast your car is going, if you say 60 mph and that this is an objective fact untethered from comparison to any other object, that is simply an incoherent statement.
Certainly. But the standards are themselves subjective preferences, even if they're convergent because of upstream factors.
Same as above.
For certain widely accepted reasons for should, but once again, I don't see that sufficient for universality. To quibble, what if my goals are less than civil? If I'm driving a truck-of-peace or a killdozer, I might very well want to do the very opposite. That is once again subjective.
I'm not sure I agree with the former statement, but my stance is that even if moral relativism doesn't have any bearings on the existence of objective morality, why at all should I assume the latter exists at all?
And for the final sentence, it seems to me weird to even use the word objective when you're acknowledging that it varies from entity to entity, and time/circumstance.
To draw an analogy from physics again, the laws of physics themselves can be said to be objectively true. They don't depend on the observer at all (or at least they don't if you consider a hypothetical GUT that works in the edge cases where the Standard Model breaks down). Those same objective laws say that something like velocity, or the energy of a system, is helplessly and unavoidably subjective, only meaningful when you define an observer in a particular frame of reference (and in the case of heat/entropy, even the information available to the observer, such as for Maxwell's Demon).
It seems to me that there is no reason, beyond yearning, for there to be an objective morality in the same sense that there exists an objective and universal set of laws of physics.
You seem to say it can't be ruled out. I say it is highly unlikely to be true, precisely because it can't be ruled in.
To circle all the way back:
But I'm doing the precise opposite of that! There are people who make that claim, I deny it. If they are correct in their claims of objective morality, I expect it to mean something stronger than merely describing a system of morality that even just happens to be maximally compelling to the maximum number of humans. I would go so far as to say that I don't see it as logically necessary for such a hypothetical objective ethics to even be palatable or understandable.
And further, my understanding of my own morality has implications for all sorts of other nonhuman entities, such as animals of less than human intelligence (I assign them negligible moral worth in general), hypothetical aliens, AI, be it the ones we have today or their superintelligent descendants and so on. A system of morality that only applies to humans is less than ideal for me, regardless of objectivity.
And AI is a big deal. Half the reason I care about ethics at all is because the question of what formulation we ought to put into superintelligent beings so as to maximize our values. Not necessarily my values, because I'm not that powerful, but there are obviously more egalitarian formulations of ethics that I consider more palatable.
Again, thank you for such a comprehensive reply! I'll address some of your points here and will have to digest and sit on the rest, before considering a reply. You've given me some juicy things to think about.
I think we largely agree on this. Epistemologically, I think this question remains open and debatable. But I also think that moral facts are empirically discoverable in principle and analyzable.
Hmm. I wasn't anticipating the introduction of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM to come into this. At a first pass, my only contribution is to say that it's becoming fairly well agreed upon that the CI is bunk pseudoscience, most of which is only taught to undergraduates due to lingering path dependencies and historical happenstances that took place during the development of physics. Most people these days prefer the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which does fully preserve a completely mechanistic, material, objective view of the external world.
Here you're simply talking about the hypothetical imperative. But all categorical imperatives ultimately reduce back down to the hypothetical imperative, and deontology ultimately reduces down to consequentialism. This sits at the heart of the example I was trying to provide at the bottom half of my last statement.
The unpacking of the rest of your response I will have to think about!
Hmm, if I gave you the impression I endorse the Copenhagen Interpretation, that was in error. While I obviously lack the physics background to make a conclusive judgement (and even physicists disagree on how to interpret the implications of the maths they all agree on), I lean towards the MWI myself.
When I talk about observations, I am vaguely gesturing at the fact that an observer within a particular world only appreciates a single sample from the universal wave function.
Mein gott, this is why I refuse to read traditional philosophical works, why use many words when few do? (Referring to the unnecessarily verbose and confusing way Kant went about saying that some goals/policies are simply downstream consequences of other goals and preferences). Even the naming scheme is awful, if you told someone there exists something called the hypothetical imperative (or the categorical one), you will just bamboozle them if they didn't already know what meant haha.
I do happen to agree with you, in that I, sincerely, if uncharitably, think that self-proclaimed Deontologists are Consequentialists in denial. Even the Categorical Imperatives are backed by what can be roughly described as rule utilitarianism, which may very well be the optimal strategy for a computationally-bounded utilitarian/consequentialist agent.
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