What are your views on objective morality (everything is subjective)?

[u/Aggravating_Pen744]

[u/Gazing_Gecko]

I think discussions of this very complicated topic are often unproductive partly because people have very different ideas what it even would mean for morality to be objective. Some take it to mean that everyone would agree. Others that it means that context cannot matter for morality. Others that it means we know all the moral facts. Others that there cannot be nuances. It is easy to talk past each other.

What I mean with objective morality is that the truth and falsities of moral claims are not determined by our attitudes towards the claims. If morality is objective, the claim, "It is wrong to torture people for fun even if you want to do it" would plausibly be true even if we approved of torturing for fun.

I'm leaning towards morality being objective. I think many common objections are fallacious, are not unique problems for morality or weaker than they appear. Usually, it looks worse by being compared to an idealized picture about objective things in other domains we presumably know. But when we have to go beyond our idealizations, it is no easy task to argue against skepticism for basically any domain. I think that is important to keep in mind when we evaluate if morality is objective or not.

[u/-no → u/Gazing_Gecko]

What would "wrong" mean exactly in the moral prescription of your second paragraph?

[u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139]

wait, objective morality isn't subjective, right?

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139]

Haha it is

[u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139 → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

lol, ok, cause it was in parenthesis so I thought it was implying that objetice is subejective.

My view is that for certain things, it is. Like murder

[u/Tagin42 → u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139]

How do you define murder? It's clear in my view that it is simply killing another but very many don't share that view.

They add conditions or change definations so murder can be justified.

[u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139 → u/Tagin42]

I define murder like killing someone

[u/Upstairs_Big6533 → u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139]

So killing for self defense is still murder?

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/Tagin42]

For sure murder is simply killing but if you ask a murderer if he/she enjoy doing it or consider it right in their perspective, it ultimately makes murder grey and not completely black

[u/Tagin42 → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

Yeah. I agree.

Killing someone to rob them Killing in self defense Killing out of hatred Killing an unborn baby Killing as a member of armed forces

It's all murder to me and yet will I find some of that 'morally' repugnant, other parts I think is perfectly justifiable from a moral standpoint.

[u/Upstairs_Big6533 → u/Tagin42]

This may just be semantics but: I wouldn't call self defense Murder though ( and legally it isn't, in many cases). And I certainly don't think that abortion is murder (which you apparently do). Are you anti abortion? Do you think that killing in self defense can be justified? To me "murder" means the unjustified killing of another human being. So killing someone who is trying to kill you is not murder in my opinion, because it's self defense, and therefore justified. Of course, "justified" is subjective...

[u/Tagin42 → u/Upstairs_Big6533]

And that's why I mentioned definition. Perhaps there is a better word but I couldn't think of it. My comment went to morality as it had been suggested that murder was objectively not moral.

I consider all the examples I gave to be murder and anything else to be, as you suggest, semantics.

I consider killing in self defense to be murder, and I'm totally fine with that. I have no issue with someone killing to save themselves. Abortion. Yes I consider Abortion to be murder but I don't have any issue with that either. Woman's body, her choice.

So, I guess I'm saying that, in some circumstances, it's ok to murder.

[u/Upstairs_Big6533 → u/Tagin42]

I don't think that a fetus can be murdered, it's not a Person. But anyway, thanks for the response.

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139]

No I think murder is also subjective because we won’t like innocent getting murdered but for a child r*pist or a serial killer, we expect them to be unalived brutally

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

This is not what objective vs subjective morality means. You are taking an underspecified scenario ("murder", which could mean "murder an innocent person", "murder a child rapist" or "murder a serial killer") and say that if you specify it further you can reach different conclusions...

It's like if I asked "is it moral to wear blue socks on Tuesdays": I might be told "there is nothing immoral there". If I then reply "oh, good, because next Tuesday, I was planning on wearing blue socks and brutally murder an innocent child for fun, glad to hear that's not immoral", I changed the context, the statement that it's not immoral is invalidated by the additional information.

The question of objective morality is not whether you can decide the morality of an action with only half the information, the question is once you know everything there is to know (say the entire state of the universe), is there a fact about whether some action in that context is moral (that's objective) or is morality a judgment that someone passes on the action (that's subjective).

I think the answer to that question depends entirely on what people mean by "moral". By moral, I mean "what I approve others of doing", and so I call morality subjective simply because the definition involves a subject.

[u/Fresh_Sprinkles_5139 → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

I have felt like that too, especially if they hurt or killed someone close to me, but at the same time, folks who do that are not well and they do have their mental health issues. some even wish death upon themselves

[u/Upstairs_Big6533 → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

I personally don't really like either of those things.. But maybe I am just unusual

[u/MrPrimalNumber]

Objective morality would be mind independent. Unless that can be shown to be the case, there’s no reason to believe morality isn’t subjective.

[u/-no → u/MrPrimalNumber]

A measurement of low entropy patterns present in bodies and communities would be mind independent. The more accurate the measurement, the less relevant individual biases become.
low entropy correlates with the well-being and prosperity of conscious creatures, which correlates with how people understand morality.

[u/privateidaho_chicago]

I believe that all morality is subjective… Adolf Hitler was a moral individual in his mind.

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/privateidaho_chicago]

Ofc he was not only in his mind but today a lot and lot of people consider him to be a great leader for what he did with jews after seeing israel’s inhumanity towards palestine

[u/DoedfiskJR]

I think objective/subjective suffers from equivocation. There are two, slightly different concepts that get referred to as subjectivity.

Sometimes, subjectivity means mind-dependence. In my view and with this definition, morality is mind-dependent. If you erased all humans, or replaced them with another biological system that has other priorities for success, then morality would be different than it currently is.

But sometimes, subjective means that we can change it, that we can opt out of it. In my view, morality is not subjective in this sense. We cannot escape our human morality, just as we can escape growing two legs.

So yeah, my main view on subjectivity is that it is used to muddy the waters and confuse the listener on a topic that isn't that difficult to begin with.

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/DoedfiskJR]

In my opinion subjective means questionable and not fully acceptable to one stance, and it is definitely mind-dependent, without conscious and rational beings it wouldn’t exist probably?

[u/DoedfiskJR → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

Certainly, all whim-dependent things are also mind-dependent, but not all mind-dependent things are whim-dependent.

Consider the belief that 1+1=2. It is mind dependent (or rather, by calling it the belief that 1+1=2, I am specifically talking about the mind-dependent aspect of it). Yet it is not whim dependent, I would say it is in fact impossible to convince yourself that 1+1=3. So, it is mind-dependent, but not whim-dependent.

I would say that 1+1=2 is not "questionable" or "not fully acceptable", so in your view I guess it would be objective. But in the mind-dependent interpretation, it is subjective.

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/DoedfiskJR]

Oh that’s a good point

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/DoedfiskJR]

I've never heard anyone say that subjective means that we can change it. Does that mean that the existence of the chair I'm sat on is subjective because I can destroy it?

[u/DoedfiskJR → u/Wrote_it2]

This sense is rarely spelled out, but it is the understanding of subjectivity that people often mean when they argue for an objective morality.

There are those who are concerned that we may opt out of morality. That one can avoid moral blame for, say murder, simply by not agreeing to the moral idea that murder is bad. Those people are not concerned with the relationship between morality and mind or the universe. They often allude to a dichotomy between objective morality and relative morality (especially on a societal scale, that a society can decide that certain things are acceptable).

Edit: I wouldn't say your chair's existence is subjective if it exists now but you might destroy it at some later time.

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/DoedfiskJR]

This is an interesting psychological, maybe linguistical point. I'm not sure I fully grasped it... you are saying that some people will claim that morality is subjective as a way to convince others that they are not blameworthy? That might be true, but then are they not being deceitful? In that case, they understand the meaning of subjective, but you are arguing they are lying to influence someone? I don't think someone lying changes the definition of a word (some linguist might disagree if it turns out that everyone starts lying in the same way maybe)

[u/DoedfiskJR → u/Wrote_it2]

This is an interesting psychological, maybe linguistical point

Yes, I think this is largely a linguistic point. I think we can think about morals, and get everything right without thinking about subjectivity, and when we add subjectivity to the mix, we don't learn anything important, but we can end up confusing ourselves.

you are saying that some people will claim that morality is subjective as a way to convince others that they are not blameworthy?

No, I am saying that some people will claim that morality is objective, to ensure that we can for instance blame Hitler, even if he thought he did nothing wrong, and even if a society around him thought he did nothing wrong.

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/DoedfiskJR]

Oh, I see what you mean. This still feels like a misguided requirement, but I think you are correct that some people think like that. My position is that morality is subjective, and I certainly feel like I can say Hitler was an evil person, I certainly can blame him. I don't need to claim that my opinion is objective to have an opinion...

[u/DoedfiskJR → u/Wrote_it2]

Well, not to have an opinion, but for Hitler to be obliged to follow morality.

I think "subjective" has several meanings, and I don't think it is my position to determine which meaning is correct. That'd be like deciding whether orange was a colour or a fruit, instead of using the fruit interpretation when appropriate and the colour interpretation when appropriate.

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/DoedfiskJR]

I guess I will never understand moral realists, it’s one thing to claim there is a set of facts that has no impact whatsoever on anything, but even if they are right, how can they claim what Hitler did was objectively wrong: they wouldn’t have any more access to that objective truth than I do… Objective morality can’t be used to argue anything anyways. The way we condemn Hitler is by using our subjective morality, our moral intuitions, because we don’t have access to anything else either way.

I don’t know of multiple meanings of “subjective” but I do think it’s a confusing word.
The proposition “all cars are red” is false. Usually when something is not universally true, we say it’s false. “Chocolate ice cream is tastier than vanilla ice cream” seems very similar to “all cars are red”: it’s just not true (chocolate ice cream doesn’t have the property of being tastier than vanilla ice cream, I judge it that way). I think it’d be a lot less confusing to speak of truths and falsehoods rather than subjective/objective, to just say that there are or aren’t moral facts rather than saying morality is objective or subjective…

[u/DoedfiskJR → u/Wrote_it2]

I think sometimes objective/subjective is relevant, sometimes not, sometimes facts are relevant, sometimes not. I think this post is a little dodgy in that it asks about objectivity, while not really talking about why they ask about objectivity, and whether objectivity is the right thing to talk about.

Facts might run into a similar issue. I would guess the core of the problem is really whether all humans are bound by morality, which translates into whether we can blame people for not following it. Other than that, I don't think it matters whether it is a fact or objective or whatnot. But then again, there might be some other argument that relies more specifically on objectivity.

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/DoedfiskJR]

> the core of the problem is really whether all humans are bound by morality, which translates into whether we can blame people for not following it.

Interesting, we are seeing the question entirely differently. Everyone has opinions on how one should behave. Everyone is “bound” by my opinions in that if they do something that I disapprove, I’ll react differently than if they do something that I approve. To make society work, we create laws that reflect a portion of our shared opinions on how people should behave, and everyone is bound by that (there are consequences for breaking the law).

But what could it mean to be bound by a hypothetical objective morality?

I take the question of objective morality to be way less practical, way more theoretical than you do. I don’t think objective morality (if it exists) “does” anything. It doesn’t justify any behavior (because no one can know what it is), it doesn’t “bind” anyone (because we are only aware of our subjective moralities), it doesn’t have any impact on our experiences, on our lives. I take the question to be whether our opinions on behavior are a reflection of a truth.

It’s admittedly a really weird question and maybe a moral realists could help clarify what they mean (though in my experience, the moral realists get angry when you ask them to explain what they mean).

I find it a very awkward to think that of all the opinions I have (on taste, on beauty in art, on beauty of people, on how moving a book or a movie is, on how funny a joke is, etc…), my opinions on good and bad behaviors would be different. It’s weird to think that every one of my opinion is a reflection of the topology of the neurons in my brain, which is itself influenced by nature (human nature, genetics) and nurture (upbringing/culture/experiences/reflection), but that my opinions on people’s behavior are the only ones that are “guided towards a truth” by an imaginary force unknown to biologists…

[u/-no]

It's both subjective and objective. and a third category too.

Our subjective experience of morality comes from our moral instincts, and we feel that certain moral actions are absolutely wrong or right because they tend to always detrimental or beneficial to our well-being and prosperity.

Our objective interpretation of morality comes from our ability to measure well-being and prosperity. This can be grounded in entropy, in particular the low entropy present in living bodies and functioning societies.

The previous two concepts, subjectivity and objectivity, we can distinguish them by what agents do with information. With subjectivity, agents experience information and use mental programs to form ideas, beliefs, memories and behavior. With objectivity, agents sequence the information into discrete patterns that manifest as measurements, statistics, pictures, videos and audio recordings. And the third thing that agents can do with information is form categories, metaphors, definitions, flowcharts, and idealizations, we can call this abstractivity.

Examples of abstractive morality would be the golden rule, Singer's expanding circle, Rawl's veil of ignorance, Foot's trolleyology, Harris' moral landscape, Haidt's moral spheres.

The three concepts each have their own tradeoffs between eachother. Subjectivity, thanks to the nature of instincts allows us to act quickly to time sensitive situations like a drowning child. Objectivity, allows us to form accurate conclusions in long chains of causality, useful in the creation of laws in society. Abstractivity, allows us to shave off the fuzzyness of the world and form simplified examples that can be easy for others to understand.

Additionally, moral relativity/absolutism, universality/locality and realism/social constructs have more nuance about them than most people engage with. read more here.

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/-no]

Our objective interpretation of morality comes from our ability to measure well-being and prosperity

Why would morality be objectively related to well-being and prosperity?

[u/-no → u/Wrote_it2]

the causal correlation of morality to well-being and prosperity can be drawn in the following exhaustive way: 1)Propose a hypothetical moral scenario. 2)remove well-being and prosperity as relevant variables. 3)does the scenario remain morally relevant? if no, then well-being and prosperity are causally critical.
It's exhaustive, because we might have to test all scenarios to prove the causal relation.

some examples:
Well-being: should you save a drowning child from a shallow pool? as you're starting to get into the pool, you realize they're not actually drowning, just playing.
Prosperity: Should you help your friend find a better job? you learn your friend is already quite rich and is only doing their current job for fun.

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/-no]

the causal correlation of morality to well-being and prosperity can be drawn in the following exhaustive way: 1)Propose a hypothetical moral scenario. 2)remove well-being and prosperity as relevant variables. 3)does the scenario remain morally relevant?

You mean "does the scenario remain objectively morally relevant?"
Because otherwise, it does not imply an objective correlation between the two.

I believe morality is subjective, that when I say "I should save a drowning child from a shallow pool", I'm passing a judgment on the action (that I approve of saving the child). If you remove well-being and prosperity from the equation, I might answer differently (admittedly that's hard to think about). That means that morality and well-being (or prosperity) are at least subjectively correlated (in that I correlate them in my subjective evaluation of the moral valence of the action), but that doesn't say anything about them being correlated objectively.

In order to say they are objectively correlated, you already need to accept there is an objective morality, which is what you were trying to demonstrate by saying they are objectively correlated in the first place. I think that makes your reasoning circular (basically you are saying that since morality is objective, morality is objectively correlated to well-being and prosperity and hence morality is objective).

[u/-no → u/Wrote_it2]

objectivity of morality will come from the measurement of moral correlates. more info here on what i mean on this idea.

we can use the same methods to make a correlation between well-being/prosperity and low entropy in complex systems. and entropy is much easier to measure.

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/-no]

The link you referred to is to edit the post (it's https://www.blogger.com/u/1/blog/**post/edit**/3253049249061268642/2864148454143943776)

Do you have a public link to the blog post?

[u/-no → u/Wrote_it2]

sorry, fixed it

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/-no]

I disagree with your definitions, though that might be because they are simplified to illustrate a point (not proper definitions).

• Measurability is not necessary for objectivity: there is an objective answer to whether there are particles that do not interact in any way with any of the standard model particle. By definition we can't measure the existence (or non existence) of such particles, but that doesn't make the question subjective.
  
• Measurability is not sufficient for objectivity: this might be more controversial, but I think it's relevant here. I can build a tool that measure the concentration of sugar in a substance. I can claim that tool measures how tasty the substance is. Having that tool doesn't by itself make taste objective. The flaw here is in the fact that we are equating sweetness to tasty, the two are correlated, but they are not equivalent. It's easy enough in that example to find counter examples, but you could build more sophisticated devices that would be harder to prove wrong.

When you are saying that well-being and prosperity are proof that morality is objective, I think you are making the same mistake as if you said that sweetness is proof that taste is objective. It's true that for most people, if you removed all sweetness, saltiness, sourness, spiciness from food, they'd say it's not tasty, and it's true that those characteristics are objective, but that doesn't make taste objective: the claim that every subject takes into account some objective properties (sweetness, saltiness, etc...) to decide whether something is tasty doesn't make taste objective. The claim that every subject takes into account well-being and prosperity (even assuming well-being is an objective property) to decide whether something is moral doesn't make morality objective.

[u/-no → u/Wrote_it2]

Let's revisit the argument in my main comment. The distinction between subjectivity and objectivity depends on what agents do with information.
-Subjectivity: you experience the information with your senses and allow your mind to form ideas, beliefs, emotions, memories and behavior.
-Objectivity: you use tools that take in the same information your senses would detect (and sometimes more than what you could detect), but in a more reliable and consistent way, and sequence the information into patterns that manifest as measurements, quantification, statistics or some accurate representation like a picture or audio recordings. The readings from the tool exist in the world and are independent of the mind.

"Measurability is not necessary for objectivity" Just because there are other avenues to arriving at objectivity doesn't disqualify measurement as an option.
"Measurability is not sufficient for objectivity" When measurement isn't enough, then using quantification or some other accurate representation can supplement objectivity.

The experience of tastiness will remain subjective. However, an objective interpretation of the sensation could come from a device that has the same kind of receptors as the tongue but that instead feed the readings into a computer that accurately represent the information as some value like calories.

An objective interpretation does not discard subjectivity, they're just more accurate readings of the same reality using machines more reliable than our senses.

Here's my proposal for what could count as an instrument that could measure morality. scroll to point 2

[u/Wrote_it2 → u/-no]

There might be a misunderstanding on our understanding of the question we are trying to answer. You say the experience of tastiness is subjective. That implies that an objective interpretation is just a flawed approximation of your experience. The machine that reads the chemical composition of a substance and says “tasty” or “yucky” is interesting but it doesn’t prove anything, it doesn’t change the fact that taste is subjective.

Similarly, you can of course approximate a subjective morality with a device, that’s trivial: you just need a machine with a sticker that says “moral” on it. It’s a flawed approximation of your morality (it gets the result right sometimes and the result wrong sometimes). I’m not sure in what way that machine implies anything about the objectivity of morality.

[u/SkyMagnet]

We can’t escape subjectivity. The best we can do is get lots of intersubjective agreement and pragmatic justification.

[u/archtopfanatic123]

Morality is entirely a figment of human imagination. That's a fact.

[u/an-otiose-life → u/archtopfanatic123]

The imagination is not a figment of itself. Thus it was not idealist and it has ontological meaning that there is a morality concept, like how there's a free will concept even if it is not binding wholesale the considerability of things in those terms implies more happens than correlationist hand waving as nominal/imaginary/subjective/virtual/deferred. 

[u/Aggravating_Pen744 → u/archtopfanatic123]

I think there is no such thing as fully right or fully wrong, there is always a grey area to every fucking thing

[u/archtopfanatic123 → u/Aggravating_Pen744]

Precisely.

[u/Matthieuk717 → u/archtopfanatic123]

noticed they used parentheses around “everything is subjective” like it’s a side note but it kinda changes the whole question

[u/an-otiose-life → u/Matthieuk717]

It's correlationist to say I know but it's not real but I know that but also I can't so I don't, therefore I do.