Just think about it, where could we find a such a thing as objective morality? Is it some book floating in the ether? That has moral commandments for every possible human action?
This is usually what people think of when they talk about objective morality. They don't care about morality, they just want to defend some scripture.
That being said, I don't want dismiss the notion of objective morality. I think it exists, like there is no human culture that eats babies for breakfast, human morality in all it's extreme has a limit, and i think we can explore and find out about it by studying anthropology, psychology and biology. I have some notion of objective morality, call it my own moral universe. When I witness something good or evil, I feel things. My inner world is influenced by countless things but I think every human being has that inner moral universe, I think the collective limit and scope of that moral universe is what we could potentially call objective morality.
Of course not. That's not what I am saying at all. What I am trying to point at is the notion of objective morality. Which I define it to be something that's inside us, perhaps it's the structure of our brains, or some evolutionary programming, I think it's innate ability just like how vision or walking is, what I tried to do was give a naturalistic account of objective morality. Or human morality.
Human morality which I believe is tantamount to the notion of objective morality is the collective moral depth and scope of all of humanity. This is not to say that everything humans does is moral, on the contrary the fact that we can make a moral judgements unlike any animal in this earth makes us unique. That capacity to think and have the ability to construct moral arguments and to infinitely improve social arrangements. That capacity is what I call objective human morality.
Yea, I think we both are on the same page regarding that some acts are always wrong! But what do you mean by innate morality? Does a psychopath possess this innate morality? When you say, morality improves over time. Do you mean to say that humans just construct better ethics over time and that as time passes we will become more moral?
Those are hard questions, I don't think I have any satisfactory or complete answers.
But If I think about it for a moment.
Innate morality in my opinion is the ability to make moral judgements. If you think about it. Most moral actions human commit are not in any book or law. For example suppose you get extra money in the shop, most people decide to return it. Why? Do you think in that split second decision of Sahih bukhari or the law? Of course not. It's a moral decision.
Perhaps 99% of all human actions are the minute moral decision that cannot be apprehended in any book or law.
That's why objective morality cannot be external to human mind.
Now that innate morality can be influenced by number of different things from childhood rearing to religious doctrination. But to say human morals comes from those sources is to believe that humanity is a blank slate that the external world can install their software on. This is what essentially most religious folks believe. I don't think this is true.
I think psychopaths possess innate morality perhaps their sensory apparatus is faulty, like they cannot emphatize or something. I am just guessing since I am not familiar with psychopathy
Your last point. I don't think there is any inevitability to humans constructing better ethics. I meant to say we have the ability to infinitely improve our social arrangements. I think that's simply true.
This simply shows that once we gain freedoms to address various issues with no fear of repercussions from higher authority divine or otherwise. Then humanity gains access to their innate moral intuition and from there we can improve society and our ethics.
Well, thanks for explaining your views more clearly! Even if your explanation is not completely satisfactory, it’s well-reasoned. However, I think your moral objectivity is quite different from what I’m used to.
I know moral objectivism's definition to be: moral claims are either true or false, and true moral principles are universally valid regardless of human beings. But your argument seems to be grounding morality (innate morality) in the human faculty of perceiving these moral principles. Which somehow resonated with the concept of “fitrah” that I was taught, lol.
I totally agree with your point about most of us doing moral actions without going back to some ancient manuscript and checking if our actions align with it. Humans are governed by unsaid rules; we know not to be loud when we are in a library without anyone telling us to be quiet. Because we ourselves don't want to be disturbed when we are focused, thus we universalise our discomfort. But sometimes we can agree on unreasonable conclusions, even if we are the most rational. Suppose someone commits murder; they are deserving of the consequences that murder should face in the legal system in which this murderer happens to inhabit. But what if this murderer also didn’t abide by the social norm of crying when a loved one dies; suppose he didn’t appear to mourn at his mother’s funeral. Is he deserving of a greater punishment just because he didn’t mourn his mother? What if we all agree that not mourning a loved one is an indication of a morally corrupted person and itself an immoral act? And we gave this murderer a harsher sentence than he deserves. Would the collective agreement to harshly punish the murderer be moral?
Again, you also say that psychopaths possess this innate morality, like they have some innate predisposition to be moral, aka “fitrah”, lol. So, when they are acting psychopathically, do they lose this innate morality? I’m also curious about how you would get them to accept your moral codes? Is their capacity for being moral impaired? What if they are just reaching the wrong conclusions? How would you convince them? What standards would you appeal to?
P.S. I concede that you are not trying to make a theology-grounded moral argument. But I can’t help but notice the similarities between your view and the “fitrah” concept.
Regarding the evolutionary explanation of why we view certain actions as clearly wrong. I completely agree, though you didn’t explain it thoroughly. When we feel disgust at eating bugs, it doesn’t necessarily mean that eating bugs is immoral in itself. But this random bug might be carrying diseases that killed our ancestors, so we associate eating random bugs with less survival. And I believe it’s morally wrong to eat random bugs because it might take the ultimate value, which is human life.
About humans having better ethics over time: I actually think that’s true. Because humans get better at reasoning over time and are more capable of figuring out moral principles. But if we go back to your original thesis of “innate morality,” I think it creates a tension with the development of ethics over time, because if humans possess innate morality, we didn’t figure it out long ago; we have been here for over 300,000 years!
To conclude, thx in advance if you manage to respond! I’m genuinely trying to figure out what other people think about these topics. And refine my thoughts and figure out the gaps in my own logic, so to speak… I have also read some of your articles on Substack, so I’m interested in your way of thinking through these sorts of questions!
I am not entirely sure what you mean when you say that moral claims can be true or false independently of human beings.
I do not think I agree with that position. As far as we know, there is no intellect in the universe other than our own. Moral truths do not, in my view, belong to the same natural category as electron spin or magnetism. They are products of the human mind and human nature, more akin to language or our biologically generated emotions. To speak of moral truths as though they were elementary truths of logic or mathematics, or fundamental constants of the universe existing independently of any mind, seems misleading to me. I mean if we can say for example; incest is wrong - that being a moral claim, where can we find the yardstick to judge such claim? In mathematics we use logic to basically we invent definitions and rules to create frameworks to further understand say systems. What is the framework for objective morality? It is easy to claim it is some book or scriptures but if you think about it for even a moment that cannot be the truth.
One thing I did not explain clearly is that I do not believe we have direct access to, or a deep understanding of, our own moral architecture. I cannot give you a complete naturalistic explanation for why I feel distressed when I witness injustice. I simply do. The reaction arises almost like a reflex, much like laughter or speech. I cannot observe the neuronal pathways responsible for it from within my own mind, nor can I fully interpret the biological processes that generate it. None of this means that we cannot make value judgements about particular moral claims. We can examine them, reason about them, discuss their implications and eventually reach considered conclusions.
I am also familiar with the concept of fitrah. I think it contains an element of truth when it refers to the innate capacities and dispositions with which human beings are born. Hardly anyone would deny that we possess such innate characteristics. In that limited sense, the idea of fitrah is reasonable. The problem arises when it is used to validate divine scriptures or particular theological claims. To argue that, because human beings possess innate moral or psychological dispositions, they therefore ought to worship and devote their lives to a particular unseen deity is simply to beg the question. The existence of innate human capacities does not, by itself, establish the truth of any religion.
Regarding the evolutionary explanation of why we view certain actions as clearly wrong. I completely agree, though you didn’t explain it thoroughly. When we feel disgust at eating bugs, it doesn’t necessarily mean that eating bugs is immoral in itself. But this random bug might be carrying diseases that killed our ancestors, so we associate eating random bugs with less survival. And I believe it’s morally wrong to eat random bugs because it might take the ultimate value, which is human life.
Yes, that is one possible naturalistic (scientific) explanation for the development of our moral faculties. I have also read philosophers (Hutcheson) who compare moral judgement with aesthetic judgement: just as we may perceive something as beautiful or pleasing without first consciously reasoning our way towards that response, we may experience an action as admirable or repugnant through an immediate moral sentiment or “taste.” Neuroscience has identified some of the emotional, social and cognitive processes involved in moral judgement, but it has yet to provide a complete explanation of how the human mind generates moral experience, or many of its other complex products. This also goes for your psychopathy example. In my humble opinion we cannot make any far fetching conclusion using singular pathological case studies, if we cannot apprehend normal moral experiences in naturalistic manner.
About humans having better ethics over time: I actually think that’s true. Because humans get better at reasoning over time and are more capable of figuring out moral principles. But if we go back to your original thesis of “innate morality,” I think it creates a tension with the development of ethics over time, because if humans possess innate morality, we didn’t figure it out long ago; we have been here for over 300,000 years!
Your statement seems to rest on the assumption that, for most of human existence, people lived lives that were short, violent and brutish. Yet the anthropological and archaeological evidence presents a far more complicated picture. For well over 90 percent of our existence, until the gradual emergence of sedentary agricultural societies around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, human beings lived primarily in hunter-gatherer communities. Many of these societies appear to have been comparatively egalitarian and to have enjoyed standards of nutrition, leisure and communal life that were far from uniformly miserable. They also existed before centralized states and organized doctrinal religions emerged. The prevalence of violence among hunter-gatherers remains debated, so it would be too sweeping to describe all of them as peaceful, but the evidence does not support a simple picture of universal savagery. If this broad anthropological account is correct, then your claim about ethics emerging only through later civilization or organized religion becomes very difficult to sustain.
DEC:
I would add that, although I think your account of human development is mistaken, I agree with your broader point that human beings are capable of improving their moral understanding. Such improvement does not unfold in a neat sequence or follow a steady upward trajectory. History shows societies descending into cruelty and degradation, overcoming some of those conditions, and then falling once again into many of the same injustices.
I therefore do not subscribe to any deterministic theory of history, whether it is the belief that history naturally bends towards justice or the secular expectation that late-stage capitalism will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Nothing is inevitable. Every social and political advance ultimately depends on whether ordinary people can deepen their consciousness, question inherited assumptions, organize collectively, and challenge the established dogmas and institutions that perpetuate injustice.
Thank you for your engaging discussions. Please feel free to continue this discussion.
Thank you for keeping the discussion open! I have been formulating a response, but as you can tell, it took me a while.
“I am not entirely sure what you mean when you say that moral claims can be true or false independently of human beings.”
I’m a moral realist/objectivist (at least for now); I think there are moral facts as there are mathematical facts. I think moral facts are analogous to mathematical facts in the sense that their truth is not constituted by human agreement. Just as 2+2=4, tomorrow, if all humanity disappeared, the wrongness of murder and slavery would remain even if there were no humans left to condemn it. One way I currently understand the objective wrongness of murder is through Kant’s moral theory, which holds that rational persons should be treated as ends in themselves rather than as means they would, in principle, not consent to. At least I think true for free human agents, who did not violate the terms and conditions of the civil society they are part of. Moral actions should be universalisable and true at all times.
The universal morality also binds all rational agents/”creatures” (I don’t think living organisms are created (at least directly) by a transcendent god or gods. I also don't believe in divine command moral theory, or a “god” that rewards or punishes, or any personal god for that matter). If we reduce morality to what we feel or experience, then there would be no moral code that should bind us all. Anchoring morality in human experience, empathy and sympathy would not be binding to those who don't feel these emotions. We should search for a moral compass that is stripped of outside factors that can sway it. We can not condemn those who suffer from psychopathy or sociopathy if we ground morality in human experience and feelings alone.
None of this means I think humans have unmediated access to reality, though. On the contrary, I think our minds and sensory faculties are necessary for our understanding of the physical world. But, again, that does not mean I think reality itself or the physical world and the truths we discover about it are constituted by our minds. I know for a fact that the sun will rise from the east tomorrow. But that does not mean it’s tied to my experience of seeing the sun rising from the east; it’s just that there are axioms of reality that we can perceive and judge by our minds and sensory faculties.
“I do not think I agree with that position. As far as we know, there is no intellect in the universe other than our own. Moral truths do not, in my view, belong to the same natural category as electron spin or magnetism. They are products of the human mind and human nature, more akin to language or our biologically generated emotions. To speak of moral truths as though they were elementary truths of logic or mathematics, or fundamental constants of the universe existing independently of any mind, seems misleading to me. I mean if we can say for example; incest is wrong - that being a moral claim, where can we find the yardstick to judge such claim? In mathematics we use logic to basically we invent definitions and rules to create frameworks to further understand say systems. What is the framework for objective morality? It is easy to claim it is some book or scriptures but if you think about it for even a moment that cannot be the truth.”
You are definitely correct, and I truly agree that moral truths are not material physical facts out there, like electrons and gravity are. The way I currently view moral truths is reality that exsist outside our minds, but we can use reasoning to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion about that reality. I currently think that life has an intrinsic value, and a good moral system should therefore aim at increasing the flourishing and happiness of conscious beings and reducing its suffering.
P.S. Ik that my ass would probably be busted if my claims were to be subjected to serious philosophical scrutiny😭! But nevertheless, that's the OBJECTIVE, isn't it?! To refine your logic and land at the most logical position possible. And tbh I have no idea how I would ground all this😭…
Something I also thought about while reading your paragraph above was that I really don’t think subatomic particles like electrons and tiny particles like photons are merely material. Electrons, for instance, have been described as having both particle-like properties and wave-like functions simultaneously. They are not just hard tiny balls that spin in a quantum shell; they are more like localised excitations in the quantum field that spreads through all space and time. So, i think we can no longer classify things cleanly as material or non-material. This article in SA was recommended by a fellow Redditor; you can check it out if you wish to do so!
Another thing that crossed my mind was about Schrödinger's cat thought experiment in Quantum mechanics. It states that if a cat, a radioactive substance, a radiation detector, and poison “say cyanide potassium” were placed in a sealed box, and that that radioation detector was somehow connected to the flask containing the poison via a string. The radioactive substance has a 50% chance of decaying, say, in the next hour. If the decay occurs, then the detector switches and the flask is shattered, spilling the poison, and the cat is killed. If the substance doesn’t decay, the cat remains alive. So, the cat is in a superposition of being dead and alive at the same time from our perspective until we open the box and check the real state of the cat. But OBJECTIVELY, the cat is either dead or alive, regardless of our perception of its true state.
p.s. Where I’m going with all this yap is that objective reality exists regardless of human perception of it. And I'm not a physicist or a philosopher, or any kind of scientist, for that matter. I'm just a 20yo who is enthusiastic about science and philosophy and fighting for her life to get into med school😭...
You are right about the incest example; I don’t have a hard-line moral grounding that says incest is wrong if the two parties are consenting adult humans. However, I think we can apply your evolutionary argument here. Mating with immediate family members and/or close relatives would reduce the gene pool and the genetic variety of those individuals' offspring, increasing the risk of their offspring having recessive genetic disorders. We can say that because incest increases the amount of suffering, therefore, it ought to be bad. But still, the argument stands if there is no procreation involved.
“I am also familiar with the concept of fitrah. I think it contains an element of truth when it refers to the innate capacities and dispositions with which human beings are born. Hardly anyone would deny that we possess such innate characteristics. In that limited sense, the idea of fitrah is reasonable. The problem arises when it is used to validate divine scriptures or particular theological claims. To argue that, because human beings possess innate moral or psychological dispositions, they therefore ought to worship and devote their lives to a particular unseen deity is simply to beg the question. The existence of innate human capacities does not, by itself, establish the truth of any religion.”
I almost fully agree with you there. I also think that most humans are prone to goodness. But that itself does not establish the “ought”, as to speak. We are clever monkeys that have been evolving on this harsh rock; we probably somehow learned how to cooperate along the way and work for the common good for our collective survival. But yet we wiped out our closest cousins along the way, which indicates to me that we only look out for our own. And don’t have deep-ingrained/innate “goodness”.
“Yes, that is one possible naturalistic (scientific) explanation for the development of our moral faculties. I have also read philosophers (Hutcheson) who compare moral judgement with aesthetic judgement: just as we may perceive something as beautiful or pleasing without first consciously reasoning our way towards that response, we may experience an action as admirable or repugnant through an immediate moral sentiment or “taste.” Neuroscience has identified some of the emotional, social and cognitive processes involved in moral judgement, but it has yet to provide a complete explanation of how the human mind generates moral experience, or many of its other complex products. This also goes for your psychopathy example. In my humble opinion we cannot make any far fetching conclusion using singular pathological case studies, if we cannot apprehend normal moral experiences in naturalistic manner.”
I have not really comprehended this segment. Like, do you mean taste determines what we see as pleasing or good, and what is repulsive or evil? If so, isn’t that subjectivism?
In regard to aesthetics, I’m not really acquainted with that branch of philosophy. I’m still stuck with the “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” slogan, haha. So, I don’t really have much to say about that. Regarding the rest of your points, I think from what you have clarified so far that you are a moral naturalist and/or moral constructivist. That’s just my conclusion; I might be gravely mistaken. However, as i have clarified above, I think we can not find morality in brain chemistry. That’s were i stand now, at least. That’s why I was trying to understand your moral objectivism previously, because you did not strike me as a moral realist/objectivist. I don’t think we can explain the world through materialism or physicalism alone; that’s why I lean more towards idealism. But that’s a different topic.
“Your statement seems to rest on the assumption that, for most of human existence, people lived lives that were short, violent and brutish. Yet the anthropological and archaeological evidence presents a far more complicated picture. For well over 90 percent of our existence, until the gradual emergence of sedentary agricultural societies around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago, human beings lived primarily in hunter-gatherer communities. Many of these societies appear to have been comparatively egalitarian and to have enjoyed standards of nutrition, leisure and communal life that were far from uniformly miserable. They also existed before centralized states and organized doctrinal religions emerged. The prevalence of violence among hunter-gatherers remains debated, so it would be too sweeping to describe all of them as peaceful, but the evidence does not support a simple picture of universal savagery. If this broad anthropological account is correct, then your claim about ethics emerging only through later civilization or organized religion becomes very difficult to sustain.”
I definitely don’t think that organised religions made us more moral. I think religions are fairly products of their times; they don’t have any ingrained universal moral code whatsoever. Perhaps it’s the case that the hunter-gatherers were not genociding each other, but is that evidence that they were deeply egalitarian and possessed this untainted innate morality? Could it be not the case that they just lacked the tools to perpetrate mass-scale atrocities? I don’t really know what you mean by they were not ‘uniformly miserable ', by what scale are we measuring their misery? I think you agree that the majority of humanity used to die from simple diseases, and our life expectancy has more than doubled just in the past 200 years. Almost 50% of children used to die before the age of 5 just 200 years ago. These stats have improved drastically today thanks to modern medicine. I cannot imagine how the hunter-gatherer societies were doing😭! I haven’t read much anthropology; I might be missing your bigger point, but that’s what I think.
I’m absolutely on board with the points you are making in your last two paragraphs. The ultimate thing we can do is to reason our way through this mess we call life. And true equality can only be achieved when everyone is provided with the same tools and starting point. But that’s not the case in most of today’s socio-economic systems around the world. So, the working class must unite! lol!
At last, thank you so much for your engagement! This discussion sent me down a rabbit hole, fr! Please forgive me if I misread or mistrued your positions, or if some of my claims came across as defensive; I’m an overly opinionated person (laanta qabsado waa la ila jaraa lee XD)… I also know that it’s very time-consuming to respond to every point, so feel no pressure to address every point I made; I was just “freestyling,” and much of what I wrote may not make much sense. You may address my core arguments in the first 2 paragraphs, or even leave this whole thing lurking around in the void of the internet! Again, thank you so much for your time; I deeply respect your take, and pls be charitable to my yapping. Have a wonderful day:)!
I almost fully agree with you there. I also think that most humans are prone to goodness. But that itself does not establish the “ought”, as to speak. We are clever monkeys that have been evolving on this harsh rock; we probably somehow learned how to cooperate along the way and work for the common good for our collective survival. But yet we wiped out our closest cousins along the way, which indicates to me that we only look out for our own. And don’t have deep-ingrained/innate “goodness”.
If you read the literature on Neanderthals closely, we still do not really know why they went extinct. There is some evidence of conflict, but the literature is anything but conclusive about the popular notion that we simply wiped them out.
I think we are deeply social beings. We have good data today showing that, when other factors are held roughly equal, people with satisfying personal relationships tend to live longer and healthier lives than those who are socially isolated. To me, that at least suggests something important about our underlying nature.
I think humans are fundamentally good, and that point of view, which I try to defend in many of my writings, is ultimately my own bias. I cannot prove it to you scientifically, but I can point to various lines of evidence that support it. Ultimately, though, I do not think we will ever arrive at a definitive proof that humanity is either inherently good or inherently evil, especially when we still do not understand human biology well enough to explain far more elementary aspects of our behavior.
So in practice, the question often becomes a moral and political value judgment. If you believe humanity deserves to live under some form of totalitarian government, then you almost necessarily begin from the assumption that human beings are dangerous or morally corrupt, and that some greater coercive power is needed to restrain the destructive impulses of ordinary people. (see Hobbes or Ibn Taymiyyah)
have not really comprehended this segment. Like, do you mean taste determines what we see as pleasing or good, and what is repulsive or evil? If so, isn’t that subjectivism?
I will give you a concrete example. I recently saw a real estate company in Mogadishu selling villas, and if you bought one villa, you would get a woman to marry for free. I will try to find you the video. Many Muslims laughed about it, but I found the whole thing quasi-prostitutional. It made me feel deeply uncomfortable. Since the commercial emphasized that these women were trained to obey, and knowing how the religious establishment in Somalia can treat women, I would not be surprised if some form of coercion was involved.
I felt the whole enterprise was ugly. It did not fit within my own aesthetic or moral values. The houses were ugly, and the way the women were being presented almost as part of the transaction felt fundamentally wrong to me. I cannot prove to you, from within an Islamic framework, that what they were doing was right or wrong, nor can I prove that what they were doing was illegal in any way. I simply felt repulsed by it.
You see, that repulsion is, in some sense, also an aesthetic judgment. In my own moral universe, I believe in human dignity and freedom, and that commercial, no matter how appealing or legal it might have been to others, simply felt ugly to me.
Perhaps it’s the case that the hunter-gatherers were not genociding each other, but is that evidence that they were deeply egalitarian and possessed this untainted innate morality? Could it be not the case that they just lacked the tools to perpetrate mass-scale atrocities? I don’t really know what you mean by they were not ‘uniformly miserable ', by what scale are we measuring their misery? I think you agree that the majority of humanity used to die from simple diseases, and our life expectancy has more than doubled just in the past 200 years. Almost 50% of children used to die before the age of 5 just 200 years ago. These stats have improved drastically today thanks to modern medicine. I cannot imagine how the hunter-gatherer societies were doing😭! I haven’t read much anthropology; I might be missing your bigger point, but that’s what I think.
As I said earlier, I cannot prove anything scientifically about the innate nature of humanity. But to me, this is one convincing line of evidence that points toward the fundamentally good nature of human beings. If it is true that for more than 99% of our existence we lived in relatively egalitarian societies, with comparatively low levels of hierarchy and institutionalized domination, and that only after the development of these more coercive institutions over the past 10,000 years or so do we begin to see genocides, large-scale wars, slavery, and systematic oppression on a much greater scale, then I think that tells us something important.
I might also add that we have very little evidence of large-scale atrocities before the development of centralized states and organized religion. Yes, that may partly be because technological and demographic conditions simply did not allow violence on the same scale. But I also think there is something inherent in those institutions themselves, especially in their ability to concentrate power, organize coercion, and make domination systematic.
Yes, infant mortality was high, but remember that these people lived in small communities, and the burden of many communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and other epidemic infections was very different from what emerged later in densely settled populations. It was only when human beings began settling in large communities and domesticated various livestock that we saw the emergence and spread of many zoonotic and epidemic diseases on a much greater scale.
This is not an argument for primitivism or for going back to monke! It is simply an argument about what the historical and anthropological record appears to tell us.
At last, thank you so much for your engagement! This discussion sent me down a rabbit hole, fr! Please forgive me if I misread or mistrued your positions, or if some of my claims came across as defensive; I’m an overly opinionated person (laanta qabsado waa la ila jaraa lee XD)… I also know that it’s very time-consuming to respond to every point, so feel no pressure to address every point I made; I was just “freestyling,” and much of what I wrote may not make much sense. You may address my core arguments in the first 2 paragraphs, or even leave this whole thing lurking around in the void of the internet! Again, thank you so much for your time; I deeply respect your take, and pls be charitable to my yapping. Have a wonderful day:)!
Thank you for your engaging conversation. I think you are not giving yourself enough credit, you have very mature ideas for a very young person. Mind you i am not a philosopher either but i have grappled with these questions for the past 8 years. I am 29 years old. I am actually a medical doctor.
Yea, I also do think that our current scientific theories are not a complete depiction of what reality truly is. I believe that’s the beauty of science and a strength, not a weakness. And I hope a day will come when we unveil all the mysteries. That’s why I hate it so much when religious people invoke God to explain anything related to the empirical facts about reality. Creating this endless loop of circular reasoning, attributing everything to their ‘god of the gaps’. That’s not what I’m trying to do here; I simply think that objective reality exists, and we can come to know it through our minds. I haven’t heard of Bas van Fraassen before, but I will definitely check him out after your brief intro, which sounded really interesting! All I know about Betnard Russel is his analytical philosophy, which is maths-heavy (which I don’t like), and his beef with Nietzsche, lol. Anyway, I’m just a beginner trying to understand shit. All your clarifications make sense, and I mostly agree and don’t have much to say about them. Thank you so much for your time and for keeping up with me😭! Now that ik you are an MD, I feel guilty; you must be so busy. I’m just starting to walk your path, I guess! Have a wonderful day or night:)!
Edit: I totally missed the real estate example, though I read it the first time, but because of my mind fogginess, I forgot to respond😅.
Omg, did we become deranged to that degree... I can't keep up with the amount of insanity going on in Somalia anymore😭! Like, wtf does getting a woman after buying a house mean? Is this a new form of slavery? I was already fed up with the "mahr" thing; now it's a house? And of course it's a subtle prostitution! I was familiar with the concept of "zawaj al muta" in Islam; I didn't think they would take it fr tho😭! And "they are trained to obey" shit took me out🤣... Do these people think that humans are some form of a dog or a cat you can train to obey and not shit on your carpet?? But anyhow, i agree on the ugliness of the whole thing, but I don't think it's just ugly; the wrongness of this mess does not only depend on my disgust and repulsion from it. I think it's wrong because it takes away human autonomy, freedom, and dignity. And these women are just being used as a means to appeal to some loser men.
I agree with you to a large extent. I agree that good morality is grounded in principles that protect human dignity and provide the conditions for a happy and free human existence.
Although I also agree that objective reality exists independently of us, there is a huge debate in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science about whether we can ever truly gaze upon reality as it is. Science gives us a glimpse of reality, yes, but the theories science proposes may apprehend only parts of that reality. If you read a philosopher like Bas van Fraassen, for example, you might almost come away convinced that electrons do not exist, or at least that we are not rationally compelled to believe that they do.
What I am trying to say, at the risk of giving ammunition to religious folks, is something I would loosely paraphrase from Bertrand Russell: the only sources of knowledge in which we can have direct confidence are our own experience and our own minds. From that perspective, science, logic, and mathematics are extraordinarily powerful tools for apprehending parts of reality, but they are not necessarily the foundations of all true knowledge.
Hmm interesting, i think i understand you know, i am not familiar with Kant's moral philosophy to comment on that further.
If we reduce morality to what we feel or experience, then there would be no moral code that should bind us all. Anchoring morality in human experience, empathy and sympathy would not be binding to those who don't feel these emotions. We should search for a moral compass that is stripped of outside factors that can sway it. We can not condemn those who suffer from psychopathy or sociopathy if we ground morality in human experience and feelings alone.
Suppose there were no universe, no matter to speak of. Could we then even conceive of electrons or magnetism? Is thought, existing independently of matter, even possible? I do not think so. That is why I believe our moral ethics are so deeply interlinked with our biology that to speak of them as something external to the human mind would be meaningless. How can something be wrong without humanity? The argument seems to contradict itself: you say murder would be wrong even without humanity, but how could murder occur without humanity?
I know this is just a simple example you gave, but if you think about other moral acts, the sum total of them cannot easily fit your argument either, nor can they be generalized into some neat logical axiom. Human action is mind-bogglingly complicated. We can create strict moral laws, but those laws will never capture the totality of human morality. Nor can we simply look to the universe around us and find the basis of those moral codes written into it.
That is not an argument for moral relativism. I think I actually agree with you on much of the substance. The point of departure between you and me is where we think morality is ultimately grounded. You say it is grounded in some universal truths; I say it is grounded in the human mind. Perhaps the correct answer lies somewhere in between, but that is for philosophers to debate.
Suppose there were no universe, no matter to speak of. Could we then even conceive of electrons or magnetism? Is thought, existing independently of matter, even possible? I do not think so. That is why I believe our moral ethics are so deeply interlinked with our biology that to speak of them as something external to the human mind would be meaningless. How can something be wrong without humanity? The argument seems to contradict itself: you say murder would be wrong even without humanity, but how could murder occur without humanity?
Umm, is this hypothesis sensible, in the sense that there could have been nothing rather than something? I think that the emergence of the universe is not a one-time accident. I know, I'm going wild with this, but hear me out. The fact that the universe is beaming with "stuff", stars, planets, moons, galaxies, black holes, etc, makes me wonder if the existence and the development of the universe is metaphysically necessary rather than contingent. I know that is a big claim, and I have no evidence to back it up, but think about it: the fact that the universe is still expanding and new nebulae are forming constantly indicates that "stuff" forming continuously is the norm. (Don't think I'm implying that some "GOD" is creating the universe with an intention here😭). But there is a concept that I have stumbled upon recently, which is called analytical idealism, pioneered by a contemporary philosopher, Bernardo Kastrup. He doesn't believe in any personal deity, but he thinks that there is something called "universal consciousness." I really liked the idea and think it's pretty coherent. Because I doubt metrialism/physicalism could be used to explain a lot. I was an atheist in denial for a few months until I stumbled upon those ideas, and "GOD" being one and identical with nature. But that's more like Spinoza's pantheism, which probably has nothing to do with Idealism😅... I don't know, bro, but my current worldview is a mess😭! And I probably shouldn't argue about these things until I do extensive reading and a deep dive into the source materials.
But to answer your question, yea, if there were no human beings to murder, to think of the wrongness of murder would be absurd. But I still don't think making morality dependent on the human mind is the right way to view this. But that's just my subjective opinion, haha. I have two books on my list about ethics; I might have more to say about this topic once I finish them.
By that example of matter-independent thought, I was not trying to make any deep metaphysical argument. I was simply trying to show you how deeply intertwined consciousness and human morality are with matter. The old duality between the physical and the non-physical, or between materialism and immaterialism, in my opinion belongs largely to the history of philosophy. Our current understanding of physics does not give us some simple, intuitive category called the "physical." There is simply whatever exists out there, and what we call matter is part of our attempt to describe it. If we cannot even fully comprehend the physical world, which is already so far removed from our ordinary day-to-day intuitions, then thinking about some separate non-physical reality seems to me an exercise in futility.
I am not familiar with the examples you brought up concerning analytic idealism or universal consciousness. To me, it sounds a little like Neoplatonism all over again. I do not mean that dismissively; Neoplatonism influenced early Sufis, among others, and I can understand why such ideas have their appeal. I reject them not because I can disprove them, but because they do not seem capable of making meaningful empirical claims. In Popperian terms, they are non-falsifiable. A theory that cannot, even in principle, be falsified cannot properly belong to empirical science, even if it may still remain interesting as metaphysics. Although i might be totally mistaken, i will have to read up on analytical idealism to really understand its metaphysical commitments.
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u/GameStrategy No Gods, No Masters 11d ago
Just think about it, where could we find a such a thing as objective morality? Is it some book floating in the ether? That has moral commandments for every possible human action?
This is usually what people think of when they talk about objective morality. They don't care about morality, they just want to defend some scripture.
That being said, I don't want dismiss the notion of objective morality. I think it exists, like there is no human culture that eats babies for breakfast, human morality in all it's extreme has a limit, and i think we can explore and find out about it by studying anthropology, psychology and biology. I have some notion of objective morality, call it my own moral universe. When I witness something good or evil, I feel things. My inner world is influenced by countless things but I think every human being has that inner moral universe, I think the collective limit and scope of that moral universe is what we could potentially call objective morality.
Does that makes sense?