Sincere ? Subjective gibberish.
I’m still waiting for you to prove that…
Nir. I don’t know if you remember, but around when I first came here I used to think this way - conflating aesthetics with morality - remember that private chat we had about that? I have stories as to where that got picked up from and who the people are.
The ethical subjectivists can mischaracterize everything that I’ve said and bash me for it, and yet when I say something that I honestly (I’m allowed to use that word cause I’m from a different philosophical pursuit) think is their philosophical (?) position then they say I’m imposing upon them. It’s hypocritical. It’s a monopoly on they are allowed to impose, but I’m not allowed (though I don’t think I’m imposing). They can look at a painting and say how they feel about it, but I’m not allowed cause they told me I’m not allowed - authoritarian (?).
I have determined that this is the ultimate question, is all value subjective? Not most, but all. Certainly all value is subjective at the point of action, but afterwards we can discover we made a mistake in interpretation of value can’t we? Tell me your opinion of the following statement if you could: “All men decided that water has a value of 0, they do not quench their thirst, they all die. Therefore all men were mistaken, water has a value greater than 0.”
Lilburne: “We don’t need to be taught to feel revulsion toward murder, plunder, and enslavement; it has been stamped on our hearts by nature.”
So it’s been stamped on “our hearts” - by “nature” - none-the-less. It is therefore absolutely present. And it’s an objective statement for it’s “our” hearts, so I guess I don’t have a say subjectively speaking of course.
Lilburne: “Or you could try to convince him of the “objective” nature of morality.”
So it’s not stamped on “our” hearts. which one is it?
Lilburne: “As I’ve contended thus far, there is a moral code written in our hearts. This inherent moral code is only shoved aside when we enter conditions of extremity (known as “lifeboat situations”), in which circumstances have forced the human community to devolve into a war of all against all.”
How do you know this unless you’re being objective? You can speak how you feel about this, but then you go on to impose this so-called moral code in our hearts - our (our is a universal affirmative pertaining to we all have this moral code stamped on our hearts). And then you go on to speak about the “human community” - so - you’ve left your own subjective valuation and are speaking about every human (again that’s a universal affirmative). And then you went on to call statism a lie! How do you know the valuations of the others and the State/government? They feel it’s good or maybe they don’t feel it’s good. But you are imposing your valuation on them unless you have asked all people everywhere to affirm your own feelings about this and find out what is in our hearts. So which is it? Let’s hear what zefreak has to say about all this:
zefreak says: “The view that the NAP can be derived from nature and is hence binding on all rational people is a fiction. The rest of your post is just strawman.”
So Lilburne who self-professes to be an ethical subjectivist is strawmanning ethical subjectivism according to zefreak.[:^)]
Hi lil, i was pondering whether it would be all that fruitful for me to write more about this since, on reflection I was merely reporting a moral realist stance (in opposition to your moral anti-realism) by a rhetorical technique that I pitched at LS. so its not really a statement of anything new or advancing , its a different way to represent how i think about morality using different words from what i have written elsewhere.
some phrases:
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the cat is on the mat
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this object is valuable
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roses are beautiful.
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killing innocents is wrong
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we are both realists in the wide sense, in that you and i both admit that the external world admits of truth and that there are things called facts and falsehoods about them. the cat is on the mat, is not merely a subjective statement about what i think is on the mat,(although it is this as well) it is a proposition that claims a truth about the world. you and i might argue about it rationally to come to determinations (and the hope is our determinations are not false, but true)
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we both understand and use STV. objects aren’t objectively valuable, people subjectively value them. we can report objective facts about the valuations people are having or have had. (lots of people buy cars, so people have no demonstrated indifference to them, they admit of some value to them.. etc).
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I boldly guess that we similarly are subjectivist about beauty. that roses don’t admit of a quality of beauty independent of subjects. they merely posses qualities of type mentioned in (1) which people subjectively find beautiful or not. so objectivity is admitted through (1) and analogously by what we can do for (2) which is only to state truth about peoples valuing past or present, or we can absurdly speculate about their future valuings.
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now here is where we differ and it may be a problem at the limits of our language for us to hope to win each other over on this point. but i am a moral realist. so for me morality is like (1) and not like (2) or (3).
now look, people can try to influence peoples subjective values, by appeals and other methods, this is to me persuasion. persuasion is something different than rational argumentation. one may use reasons to pursuade but when one person (A) is telling someone (B) that (B) should recognise a painting to have a greater beauty than (B) has recognised before , one is persuading and not rationally arguing. they are not deciding a question of truth they are influencing judgements of subjective value.
holding to this, any discussions subjective moralists have with each others could not be described as rational argumentation since they are only involved in psychological persuasion, they are not about rational determination (implicitly of objective facts). this of course is not a problem for deniers of moral facts, but its a problem for me since i believe in the possibility of them. i know its not a problem for you since you have said you are interested in persuading others to be libertarian. it is beautiful for you. using moral language is a great technique for persuasion. agreed.
have you performed any analysis or introspection on moral language itself? to me it seems that moral language is implicitly universalising and claiming of objectivity. to deny the objectivity is to undermine its persuasiveness. If i followed you and was a moral anti-realist. holding only morality as a subset of my subjective valuations, and using the language of moral talk to persuade so as to influence people in their actions, i feel I would be using moral language in a hollow sense. just as if i admitted that valuation of goods was entirely subjective yet i set about using the peculiar and clumsly language of those philosophers who (wrongly) held objective theories of value (labour, intrinsic, whatever).
lol, now how are you going to persuade me out of my subjective preference for believing in objective morality ? [:P]
Yes, Lilburne’s position is close to moral realism, except that he doesn’t believe that moral reality can be apprehended using reason alone. Zefreak’s position is different as a far as I can tell - zefreak seems to be closer to amoralism.
The problem with Lilburne is that in his crusade against what he calls ehtical objectivists he is picking up allies which don’t really share his position.
“Innocent” is more like 2 and 3 than 1.
NirgrahamUK:
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By prior agreement, A pulls the plug on B’s life-maintaining equipment. A has killed an innocent.
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B mistakenly climbs through the window of the wrong house wherein A shoots B, believing B is a dangerous intruder. A has killed an innocent.
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A commits suicide to avoid being tortured. A has killed an innocent.
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A kills a cow for foot. A has killed an innocent.
Once you make enough qualifiers so that your moral rule is universal, you will be left with: wrong = wrong, or: killing an innocent = killing an innocent, etc.
Those subscribing to a subjectivist theoretical approach to morals and ethics may be doing so due to considerations such as this.
Adam
well, i think you just played semantic games with my examples.
1). yes. i didnt sufficiently qualify my statement that ‘killing innocents is wrong’. you cite a counterexample which i agree is not a crime. you know by how you derived your counteraxemple how you did this. you notice that the innocent might welcome death, might welcome being killed. might have agreed to be killed. i should have said murdered as that would implicitly contain the minor premise that the innocent did not desire to be killed.
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yes. bad B. immoral to murder people. whoops i thought he was someone else is a pyschological explanation not a moral defence.
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see 1)
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innocent moral agent, see 1)
wrong should equal wrong. if wrong equalled not wrong then you have more of a problem than if wrong does equal wrong.
I think moral reality being apprehended by intellect (reason) how human action is deliberate. It’s the crux of decision making in practical reason. Thus when somebody kills an innocent person, they can’t readily say my dog made me do it, unless somehow through honest investigation, the murderer was really hearing a dog which would classify such a person insane, unless of course there is a dog that can make a person kill somebody. It’s the crux of justice that each person has free-will, and insanity pleas, if justified, is a whole other deliberation and discourse.
A person has the ability to ponder ones own feelings, memories, conscience, theoreticals, principles, externals (such as trees, another person, see and know peace and war, etc…). Any one of these are objects since they are definable, in other words, they have boundaries that demarcate them as entities to be truly known. Peace isn’t war and war isn’t peace. They are distinct objects, thus, have definable boundaries. Does it get difficult to discover boundaries at times - of course. Does a person know everything - of course not. That would negate current science.
Universals* can be species of broader universal genera. All mammals are ____. That is universal cause all mammals are ____. Yet there is an even broader universal, a genus of a higher order called Animalia. So in this case all birds are not mammals, but all Animalia are ____. So in this instance birds and mammals are particulars and not universal of Animalia what would be universal of Animalia is they are all ___. Yet again a higher order of Animalia is Eukaryote so therefore what universally distinquishes animals “from bacteria and most protists” is that all Animalia, thus universally all Animalia are “eukaryotic and are multicellular {although see Myxozoa(which is another descriptive phylum of the Animalia kingdom)}”
Why even bring this up? Cause for some reason universals - that word - seems to scare people or turn them off - or pick you’re own description, feel free to do so.
[all those blanks, if you haven’t figured it out, can be filled by current scientific definitions that explain what all mammals are, what all Animalia are, etc…, thus, what each one of those universally are.]
- From link: “For example, suppose there are two chairs in a room, each of which is green. These two chairs both share the quality of greenness or the quality of being green. Metaphysicians call this quality that they share a “universal”, because it can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things.”
All value is subjective can mean different things…(I’m starting to sound like Anarcho-Mercantilist)
It can mean that all values are subjective experiences. Well, all human experience is in the end subjective and individual experience. “Subjective” here means related to a subject/individual/person - so a subjective judgment is a judgment uttered by someone, but not necessarily an arbitrary judgment unrelated in any way with things outside of the person(subject).
Take any individual who wants to preserve his life, but thinks water has no value. Is his judgment wrong ? Yes. Water has value for him, but he doesn’t know it.
Yet, I don’t see a direct connection between that sort of mistake, and moral problems, which involve people with different ideas/valuations of what is legitimate.
An individual may harm himself by making mistakes when assigning value. However that’s not a moral problem since the individual is ultimately harming only himself. The problems arise when an individual believes that aggression is a valuable means or end and harms others.
Well I brought it up because I was thinking that if a persons values and the correctness of those values was truly subjective, then also moral decisions must be. So I figured I should set out to try to find something objective about what a person values and whether they assign the correct value. Focusing on whether a person can choose or not is kind of misleading, because the more important thing is if they choose correctly or incorrectly. The most I could come up with for the water example is a conditional though: “if a person values life more than death than a person values water more than 0.”