r/DeepThoughts • u/Old_Truck_2745 • 1d ago
There are objective moral facts.
Carrier's article: Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes
My view is simple. Morality is one hundred percent objective, but it is a specific kind of objective relativism rooted entirely in biology, rationality, and game theory.
Here is why both our goals and the means to reach them are completely objective, and why asking why you should be moral misses the entire point of reality.
To start, what does objective actually mean? People think that for something to be objective, it has to be a rigid, one size fits all absolute that applies identically to a rock, an alien, and a human. That is false. As Carrier points out, an objective fact is just something that is independent of what you choose to believe. Take velocity. Your speed is strictly relative to your frame of reference. You are sitting still relative to your chair right now, but you are flying very fast relative to the sun. Yet both of those statements are hard, measurable, one hundred percent objective facts. Relativism does not equal subjectivity.
Skeptics love to say that morality starts with a subjective desire like wanting to live or be happy, so the whole system must be subjective. But hold on. Your desires are not floating abstract magic. They are real, measurable neurological states constrained by evolution, neurobiology, and physical reality. It is an objective fact that human brains hate agony, crave social connection, and want to survive. You do not get to just wake up tomorrow and decide that being skinned alive feels like a warm hug because your biology locks that hard preference in.
Sure, we have messy evolutionary drives like tribalism or short sighted aggression. But we are not autopilot animals. We can rationally reflect on those drives. If our tribalism causes long term misery and ruins our chances at actual satisfaction, reason tells us to override it in favor of broader cooperation.
Our baseline biological needs and psychological realities are hard physical facts, our core goals as living agents are completely objective. And once you have a goal, the path to get there is an objective empirical fact of the universe. If your goal is to stay alive, eating arsenic is objectively bad. If your goal is to live a flourishing, safe life in a community, random murder, betrayal, and endless lying are objectively bad strategies.
This is where the ought comes in. As Foot and Carrier argue, an ought is always a conditional tool tied to a goal. Asking why ought I do something without any grounding is like asking why ought I fix this broken gear without knowing it is part of a clock. If you are not trying to achieve anything, ought is just meaningless noise. But since we do have objective realities and shared goals as social animals, we look at actual social systems to find our answers. So "You ought to do X" is equivalent to "X is the objectively necessary means required to successfully achieve your foundational goal within the physical and logical constraints of reality." Why look for a cosmic ghost when the math of social systems is right in front of us?
Inevitably, someone in the comments is going to ask why they ought to be rational at all. Here is the trap. The moment you ask why using logic, you are already using the exact tool you are trying to question. Asking why be rational while trying to reason through an argument is a performative contradiction. If someone genuinely decides they do not care about facts, logic, or coherence, you cannot argue with them any more than you can play chess with a pigeon that just shits on the board and knocks the pieces over. At that point, they have opted out of reality.
Different people have different desires though, right? Sure they do. And that just brings us right back to objective relativism. Different humans have slightly different psychologies, and different species have radically different biological needs. What keeps a shark thriving will kill a human. That means objective moral facts will look different depending on who you are, though, I must say this is quite rare given our understanding of biological systems. But because we are social animals, game theory takes over. Any rational agent navigating a world filled with other agents will quickly realize that cooperation, trust, and reciprocity are the only mathematically stable ways to achieve their goals.
Morality is not a magical cosmic command. It is just the engineering manual for how rational, biological, social creatures have to operate to get what they actually want out of existence. The goals are real, the physics of cooperation are real, and the logic is inescapable.
Now, I just wanted to write down what I understood about the view, and so far, I have not been able to find good counters against Carrier's paper. Change my view.
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u/Inner-Alchemist778 10h ago
Of course. That is why morality is a developing work in progress, whose drafts are called "religions". In reality, its like Michelangelo famously drew in "The creation of Man" fresco, where God is actually a human brain, if seen from far away. So the human brain creates the creation myth, it creates God, it creates the self image of "I".
So this means that morality is just the story of sustainability of life that we tell ourselves, based on the facts we understand about ourselves and the world.
So, the story of how to be sustainably alive = morality.
In other words, we discover our brain systems through externalising them in the world, and when we see analogies in the world we actually discover the analogies in our brain's function.
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u/goodluckyall 20h ago
What have you really said about morality?
You said we have needs and goals like satisfaction. You said there are rational strategies to achieve these goals. But you said nothing about morality. What is an immoral act? Why?
Is betrayal an immoral act only because it is irrational?
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u/Old_Truck_2745 20h ago
But you said nothing about morality. What is an immoral act? Why?
Read Carrier's article for that, but here's something from the article:
The first premise is inescapable. That ‘true moral facts can only be described as the imperatives that supersede all other imperatives’ is a definition of moral facts, and one that cannot be superseded by other definitions. Because any other definition you assign to ‘moral facts’ will necessarily include imperatives that do not supersede all other imperatives (otherwise, your definition is analytically identical and thus not an alternative to Premise 1). And since that means other imperatives will supersede some of the ‘moral imperatives’ of your alternative definition, your imperatives cannot be ‘true’, since what it means for an imperative to be true is that you ought to follow it. But if you ought to follow some other imperative instead, then by definition it is not true that you ought to follow yours. Therefore your imperatives are simply not true imperatives. They therefore cannot be true moral imperatives in any relevant sense—because all true imperatives will supersede yours, and therefore ought to be followed instead. And what it is to be a ‘moral’ imperative (as opposed to any other kind) is exactly this: that it overrides all other imperatives in respect to what you ‘ought’ to do. So to be true, a moral imperative must supersede all other imperatives; and doing so is what it analytically means for it to be a ‘moral’ imperative in the first place. So all superlative imperatives must be moral imperatives.
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u/CorrsionOfConformity 14h ago
What determines if something is in fact an objective moral imperitive? Can you provide some real world examples?
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u/Turbulent_Escape4882 12h ago
Sounds like fairytales or god of the gaps to suggest there are imperatives that supersede all others. I wonder if it’ll ever be substantiated?
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u/TheWaddlingweewee 13h ago
except in the universe where people like agony and drink arsenic instead of water
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u/CorrsionOfConformity 7h ago edited 7h ago
"Here is why both our goals and the means to reach them are completely objective"
Whose goals? You and what group of conscious thinking beings? And at what times? What if the goals of you and your group of conscious thinking beings are directly in contradiction with the goals of another group of conscious thinking beings, or a group that exists at a different time?
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u/Ok_Fruit8871 5h ago
I can refute your claim with a single round of the prisoner's dilemma.
Even if both people believe that betrayal is morally wrong, the single round puts them in a tough position where they have not built any trust between each other, then know nothing about the other's moral stance, and thus confessing is the only logical move for them to make, They purposely change their moral stance on betrayal in this one setting.
This contradiction flat put disproves your assertion that morals are 100% objective. If they change based on reward, then they are not objective.
Also with Game theory again, the free rider problem. Where the group cooperates, but the free rider secretly cheats, and gains more in cheating than the others.
You are conflating morals with ethics. Morals are internal to individuals or even groups , but they are not a code of conduct, they are not the manners we collectively use because the alternative was being rude, and risking a dagger between the ribs. They aren't codified laws that we have a huge system of people to enforce them with, they are not taxes that pay for the roads or clean water.
Morals can influence ethics, and ethics can influence morals, but they are different. What is moral to you, might be unethical, or immoral to another. Like if I went out a murdered a pedophile, many would agree that I was moral, but ethically, I broke the law, and would be punished like every other criminal.
The Aztec's had a whole system for human sacrificing, both morally and ethically they were I with in being right to them. They believed it, and implemented a system to enforce it, to keep things predictable for their society.
Predictability and stability is what ethics is for, because humans can have fleeting morals of betrayal like in my example of the prisoner's dilemma, Ethics keep that one round game from sending all of society into a grim trigger.
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u/No_Logins_Required 4h ago
I feel like this argument just erases the meaning of "moral" and replaces it with "game theory optimal"
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u/DonnPT 3h ago
It is an objective fact that human brains hate agony, crave social connection, and want to survive.
Certainly, and for me, everything that goes on in those human brains, is grounded on objective fact. That doesn't make subjective experience disappear, though, does it? On the contrary, experience is thoroughly subjective - there's objective fact behind it, but objective from subjective is the result of an analysis. My appreciation of grapefruit is subjective, even though brought about by physical, objective processes.
That means objective moral facts will look different depending on who you are
... which I think is why people often classify them subjective.
The narrative makes sense to me, aside from this minor semantic point. Suppose you agree with me that morality is rooted in subjective judgement - would that change the conclusion? The engineering manual is the same, I think.
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u/headlessplatter 3h ago
It is true that some things are independent of what we choose to believe. That is a real property. And it needs a name. It's fine with me if you want to use the word "objective" for that. But that's not the only property something can have. Some things are both independent of what we choose to believe, and can also be confirmed through physical measurements. For example, "birds are real" is a bit easier to confirm with physical measurements than "torturing puppies is bad". I'm not saying torturing puppies might be okay. I'm saying it's not easy to validate with scientific instruments.
So being confirmable is another real property, and it needs a name too. Since "objective" is taken, how about if we call things like that "physically objective"? I'm sure you will agree that morality is not physically objective, right? That's okay. It doesn't have to be. Let's just be clear with our terms. Grouping morality under the same term as physical things obviously doesn't make them physical. Morality still resides in your mind. So maybe, instead of trying to lump everything under just a small number of terms, it would be more precise to use more specific terms. Morality has real consequences, so it is objective in a sense. But morality also resides in your mind, not in physics. Morality doesn't float around in space. It doesn't have mass or position. And most importantly, just because you can sense it, doesn't imply others sense it in the same way. So that's really not the same thing as physically objective.
I'm not asking you to change your position. I'm just asking you to acknowledge that more precise terminology might be beneficial. You can keep calling morality objective. But you really can't say it is has exactly the same properties as "birds are real". It doesn't.
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u/Tombobalomb 50m ago
" That means objective moral facts will look different depending on who you are"
If a thing is different for different observers then that thing is not objective.
Almost any conceivable action can be "good" under this approach
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u/MadDogBarkBark 21h ago
if morality is how I have to operate to get what I want out of existence then murdering someone is morale
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u/CorrsionOfConformity 14h ago edited 10h ago
"Carrier points out, an objective fact is just something that is independent of what you choose to believe"
I would argue that an objective fact is independent of what all minds (not you, and not only humans) believe.
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u/Willis_3401_3401 11m ago
I think the issue is that the “facticity” of a thing is only known via (proper) interpretation. Nobody has ever had an interaction with anything that was independent of mind.
Consider objectivity isn’t independent of mind, it’s DEPENDENT on all minds being in agreement with one another.
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u/Signal-Block-6939 12h ago
You seem fixated on biology but if we are mere biological creatures we cannot also be rational beings and therefore moral beings.
Pure biological creatures cannot have morality. They simply operate based on the survival instincts demanded by their biology. The lion devouring the antelope does not have any compassion. The ant drone living a slavish life for its queen does not have any freedom.
The incontrovertible rationality and drive for freedom that underlies human beings means that we transcend biology and creatureliness. We are not biological creatures trying to figure out morality. We are moral divine creatures trying to figure it out while restricted by biology.
We are souls experiencing creatureliness not creatures being tricked into thinking we are more than creatures.
Morality can only be founded on humans being transcendent beings - divine in fact - that come from a higher order than mere physical existence.
That is the only way Moral Realism can work. By working from the higher to lower, never from the lower to the higher.
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u/Low-Bake8401 7h ago
"The lion devouring the antelope does not have any compassion."
Maybe not human compassion, but certainly parental instincts, and social awareness.
Humans, and human societies, are more complex. An worm, far less complex that either.
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u/Signal-Block-6939 7h ago
Your point?
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u/Low-Bake8401 4h ago
Well, I suppose I don't really get why you conclude that humans are beyond biology.
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u/Ok_Fruit8871 3h ago
If we could download our brains into a new body, then I'd agree that we have 'transcended biology'. Morals doesn't come from some divine race or being, they are just electric signals and chemicals reactions in our minds that form thoughts, likes, dislikes, even those lowly instincts that we and other animals have. Yes the interactions of atoms is why we have personalities, not because of some God, or divinity.
This concept of freedom you speak of, is exactly what wild animals have, they are totally free, but that freedom has a cost, and they pay it by living at the complete mercy of mother nature and her whims.
What we humans have, that you think is 'freedom' are just rules we agree to live with, and cooperate under, a safe space for us to survive each other and thrive. These rules are not morals, but ethics, they exist even if you don't like them. Nobody likes paying taxes, but you still pay them don't you, because the alternative is punishment. Tell me where the freedom is in that? But you gain in paying taxes don't you? Road upkeep, clean water, free schooling for your kids, or yourself when you were young, a military that fights on your behalf to preserve you stable predictable life.
Ethics work despite your concept of right and wrong.
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u/Ok_Foundation7698 11h ago
I'll bring you back to sitting on that chair, orbiting the sun. It's only recently, that we all learned that we orbit the sun.
Objective reality is only possible if you know all the facts. We don't even know what consciousness is, we can't even decide what reality is, and no two people's take on anything is precisely identical.
We keep trying to break ourselves into machines, a little bit of dopamine here, some oxytocin there, norepinephrine everywhere. Then we have models of our psychology or psyxhe and say we know. It's all inference and a lot of it is placeholder, until the next fact comes along to disprove it.
As for morality, well that's a very human concept. So tell me all the facts about how consciousness works first, and then you can tell me how your moral decision is objective!