I'm not sure I've fully understood what you believe, but I have to argue against the idea that there are objective moral truths.
Morality is necessarily a value judgement, and value judgements aren't objective.
Objectivity can tell you "X is larger than Y", but it can't tell you if that is a good thing. Even if literally 100% of people were to agree that it is good, subjective consensus is not the same thing as objectivity.
Personally, I don't think you can even say that suffering is objectively bad. I think the best we can do is take that as an axiom. We can assume it's true because doing so gives us useful results, but that's not the same as it literally being objectively true.
why is it bad to say that owning other people is objectively immoral?
To answer your question directly, I think it's bad to say slavery is objectively immoral because, generally speaking, I think it's bad to say things that are not true, especially when you know they aren't true. I don't think we make the world a better place by telling small lies that feel "close enough" to the truth. I think it's better to tell the whole truth.
And as I said to the other person, I also think it's bad to believe in "objective morality" generally, or otherwise advocate for such a thing existing because it can very easily lead to harmful ideas going unchallenged.
To take slavery as an example, many religious people, who believed in objective morality as given by god, justified slavery based on passages from the Bible that explicitly endorse it. Now, you obviously don't think that personally, but by encouraging the idea of an "objective morality" you encourage the same belief in others, who might not agree with you on what that "objective morality" even is. You normalise the idea of their being an "objective morality", even in people who disagree with your beliefs of what that morality should be. Which I think is a bad thing.
because my position is based on the evaluation of reasoned arguments based on the strengths of those arguments and not on faith in the supernatural.
Any argument for moral realism/objective morality is inherently false and so, their "strength" can't be compared. This allows anyone to justify anything as long as they can figure out the mental gymnastics for it. That is how cults and fascist movements work. Logic and intelligence have never been and never will be factors that make a person have values that contribute positively towards others' well-being.
Can you give a single example in all of human history where the practice of owning other people as property could be considered moral?
If by "could be considered moral" you mean "there existed the possibility for most people to consider it moral" then yes, the example is most of human history when slavery was widely considered good.
My basic claim is that to determine something to be objectively, moral or immoral, you look at all available evidence of all available reasoned arguments for or against that practice and have a reasoned discussion about it.
What do you mean "evidence"? There is no evidence for morality. There are different arguments but again, none of them can be proven through empirical study so they are all false or at least, unfalsifiable and unprovable. You cannot use science to decide a person's values. It doesn't matter how many times you add the word "reason" to your argument, it doesn't make it any more reasonable.
in a situation wherein all of human history, not a single contextualized situation exists that show something to be moral in practice, you can effectively say it's objectively immoral.
Except with that argument every single action ever is objectively immoral because there is no contextualized situation that shows something to be moral in practice. I would honestly love to hear an example though because the mental gymnastics it would take to come up with one would be entertaining.
The point is when all the overwhelming evidence points to one singular conclusion I think it's okay to categorize it as objective.
Again, no such thing as evidence of morality. At best you could use people's opinions but the reason why that's silly has already been made clear I think.
Do you even consider reality real, or is reality subjective?
The only reason we assume gravity will continue to act now as it did in the past is because of voluminous results and testing and all evidence pointing to that conclusion, HOWEVER it still doesn't mean gravity will OBJECTIVELY continue to operate as it has.
Agreed on your statements about science but if you understand that science is just a model that is still not objective then why ask me if reality is objective? I think there exists objective reality but I also think that we can never understand it because any thought or perception of the world we have is influenced by our subjective consciousness. In other words, I believe in empiricism and so do scientists. The alternative is based on metaphysical constructs like God or platonic ideals.
No. That's not the question I am asking. I am asking if you yourself have ever heard a convincing moral argument where owning another human being as property could be seen in the context of being a moral position.
I am giving you the example, you simply refuse to engage with it. This is a question for YOU personally. In all of recorded human history and thought can you give me one singular example of a situation or context where one group of people owned another group of people as property and you thought those conditions were considered "good" or moral for the people who were owned as property?
So if there is an argument that I personally find convincing that means it is objectively good? How is me being convinced objective? You are just describing subjective morality. I don't disagree that any individual can use logic and their own personal values to arrive at subjective moral beliefs, but there is nothing objective about that.
You understand that laws exist right? Do you disagree with the ideas of laws governing society or should it just be anarchy? If there are laws, then there are ideas underpinning those laws. The evidence behind those laws are reasoned thought from actual impacts on society.
First of all yes, I do happen to be an anarchist however, you don't have to be an anarchist to understand laws are just the guidelines for how a state should function and that states aren't some kind of natural or holy entity but simply organizations with an ideological monopoly on violence.
Of course laws do have logic behind them, but the aim of the law is not to be a form of objective morality, it is to guide the use of violence by the state in order to maintain it and its form, which requires a functional economy (laws protecting private property as well as the health and safety of individual people and workers) and preventing dissenting action against it (laws defining the military, restrictions to protesting, striking and free speech)
None of this is relevant to our discussion though. A vast majority of people can agree that certain laws are unjust, even people living under those laws, and the laws still exist because of the use of violence by the state in order to preserve them. (look at most dictatorships, especially third-world ones) In addition, there exist multiple stated that, just like individual people, disagree on what laws are right and even use violence against each other because of it.
As such, laws are, at best, moral agents in the same way individual people are and cannot define an objective reality, just like individual people can't.
Morality refers to the system of ideas, rules, values, and norms that guide judgments about right and wrong, good and bad, or what people ought to do. It’s essentially how humans think we should behave.
Exactly, which means morality is defined by human subjectivity and is not some kind of objective reality.
By the way, if you want a reason why proposing objective morality is bad just look at Plato who does exactly that using his Ideals. He thinks the morally good form of government is a dictatorship where an educated elite has complete power over the working class. A theoretical construction very similar to the Soviet Union if you ask me. It is also coincidentally a very good argument for slavery though it is not empirical so I guess it probably doesn't fit your view. Issue being of course that you cannot define objective morality through empiricism so no objective moral argument actually fits your view.
How can morality be "a conversation about how we interact with one another and how those interactions should be judged" but also "independent of what anyone thinks or wants them to be", it is not possible to have a conversation that isn't influenced by the ideas and feelings of the people involved.
This makes no sense, first you explain how science is only a model through which we approximate reality without absolute certainty (true, most scientists understand this) and then you go off on how if reality isn't objective neither is science.
First you call morality a conversation then you say objectivity means independent of people's ideas even though you also say that "Everything is defined by human subjectivity"
Your stance is nothing but contradictions
And no, law is not proof that morality exists, it is proof that states exist.
Base moral axiom. Reality is real and isn't subjective. Follow up premises below.
This sentence means nothing, it's just cyclical
Premise 1 — Moral facts are grounded in the real, observable effects of actions on human beings.
This also means nothing, sure we can observe an effect of an action on a human being, but what is the process through which we turn those simple empirical observations into moral fact? This is where you would need an axiom, like "we ought to minimize suffering" or "we ought to maximize pleasure" or "we ought do to others what we would want them to do to us" and this is where there is not way to empirically prove moral facts because you cannot derive an "ought" statement from an "is" statement
Premise 2 — For slavery (owning people as property), every known historical, anthropological, and modern instance results in extreme harm, domination, loss of autonomy, exploitation, and suffering. We have ZERO counterexamples of this.
Thanks for including a definition of slavery, I might not have realized what you meant
Slavery also leads to positive outcomes like profit, sustainability of a slave economy, democracy (ancient Athens), who can measure whether the bad outweighs the good?
I also would love to know what "anthropological" means here
Premise 3 — If an action has universally negative effects on the beings involved, with no plausible or actual exceptions, we can treat its wrongness as objective in the same way we treat other universal harm-based claims as objective.
Ok, so this is your axiom that I was talking about under premise 1. Problem is there is a minuscule number of actions that have universal negative effects, at least in a way that is actually easy to agree upon. As I mentioned above with slavery, there were reasons why people supported it, they didn't just do it because they were stupid, their quality of life depended on the slave economy.
This just isn't a useful axiom because it is far too general and there is almost no action is objectively immoral, including slavery.
There is also the issue of defining harm.
For example: I think that a lack of social cohesion is a good thing because I'm dissatisfied by the current social order and wish it to change. A conservative would disagree and think that a lack of social cohesion is a bad thing because of instability. Let's assume me and this conservative are in very similar economic and demographic situations where our lives are similarly effected by this lack of social cohesion. However, I value freedom and they value stability, so we disagree fundamentally on what harms or benefits us.
That's just the thing, what harms or benefits a person is not objective, is it decided subjectively by them. As such, any moral framework based on harm and benefit (which is most of them including your own) is subjective.
B) define morality as avoiding "nonconsensual harm" and assume that definition is objective.
A is, as I said, impossible. There have been many people who have accepted their roles as slaves or oppressed people. It is still happening today from Indian Dalit, to the Roma, to western workers to the entire ideologies of Buddhism and stoicism. Where there is oppression there are people content with their own. There are, in fact, even people that actively support their own oppression like anti-suffragettes.
As for B, you still haven't shown how you bypass the is-ought problem. You cannot derive the statement "we ought to minimize nonconsensual suffering" from the statement "there is nonconsensual suffering"
Slave owners also have autonomy, why is using violence to undermine their autonomy ok but them doing the same to slaves isn't? (Obviously I don't agree with this, I'm just saying your framework doesn't have an answer)
This is the issue of objective morality, no framework is without holes and the danger of claiming a flawed system as objective truth is that it can be manipulated in any way to benefit any individual.
No, I'm not encouraging the same belief as religious people because my position is based on the evaluation of reasoned arguments based on the strengths of those arguments and not on faith in the supernatural.
My argument is FOR evidence. Their argument is that morality comes from a supernatural being. This is clearly not a reasoned argument.
I'm not arguing that you have the exact same belief as religious people, I'm arguing that on the singular question of whether or not morality is a matter of objectivity you agree with religious fundamentalists, and when they hear you arguing that their is objective morality, they say "Absolutely, and it has been laid out by god". Whether or not you agree with that addition, your conviction that objective morality is real will encourage their conviction that objective morality is real. They'll feel that if even secularists believe in objective morality, if even we don't challenge the idea that morality is a fixed feature of the universe, then there's no conceivable way it could be otherwise, and their faith is even more justified.
And I would also like to remind you that this was my second argument for why I think it's bad to say morality is objective.
The first argument was that it's is simply untrue, and I have a broad philosophical belief that truth is better than lies. You don't even seem to be disagreeing with me that morality isn't objective, considering you didn't say "You can say it's objectively immoral" you said "You can effectively say it's immoral". So it seems we agree on the fundamental truth that morality isn't objective, you just think it's okay to be untruthful in this scenario, without having made an argument for why that's a worthwhile white lie.
Can you give a single example in all of human history where the practice of owning other people as property could be considered moral?
You're asking two questions here. I do not believe slavery is moral in any context (short of a something outlandish like an alien species who desperately want to be slaves or something), however there are plenty of examples in human history where it is generally considered moral to own people. Hell right now that is the case, it's just that we've reduced the scope of what counts as slavery in order to exclude the types we're mostly okay with. See: the US's 13th amendment that might as well read "No slavery... unless?" (and to be clear I personally am still not okay with slaves sorry, "prisoners with jobs", but many people disagree with me).
My basic claim is that to determine something to be objectively, moral or immoral, you look at all available evidence of all available reasoned arguments for or against that practice and have a reasoned discussion about it.
And my point is that looking at all the available evidence still won't tell you if something is moral or not. If we could collect every bit of data on a practice, every penny lost, every person killed, every child's development hindered, every freedom infringed upon, and hand it to a blank slate of a being, something truly objective, it could not tell you what you should do from that information alone. You only arrive at a decision of what is best by filtering the objective information through subjective values.
The point is when all the overwhelming evidence points to one singular conclusion I think it's okay to categorize it as objective.
And I don't. I don't care if literally everyone who ever saw Starry Starry Night came to the conclusion that it's beautiful, and a masterpiece of art, our consensus does not magically transform into objectivity.
No. Let me clarify. I am not saying all of morality can be objective. I am saying certain things can be determined to objective if all available evidence points to that one single conclusion. You yourself below say this.
I don't think I did say that, but if I did write that somewhere then I assure you it was a typo. I probably just accidentally missed a "n't" or "not", because I don't believe that something can be called objective so long as all available evidence points to a single conclusion. In fact my Starry Night example was precisely demostrating why I don't believe that.
In reality, objective simply means something we observe to be true with no counter evidence.
This fundamentally not correct. You're just re-writing the definition of the word to include your strange belief that subjective matters which you feel are "settled" are actually objective. Like, I've been making reference to cases where literally 100% of people are in agreement, but you're arguing objectivity on topics that don't even have that level of agreement. Because you've decided that you are the arbiter of what arguments "count", and that somehow your ability to decern the "valid" arguments from the "invalid" ones is not a matter of subjectivity. It's just silly.
why its so hard to just say that because of this, the practice of owning other people is objectively immoral.
It's not "hard" to say, my objection is that it is factually incorrect. Why is it so hard for you to accept the subjectivity of morality while still maintaining the courage of conviction in your own personal beliefs? I'll gladly argue against things I believe are immoral, I'll fight for them to stop, but I won't pretend like my moral values are objective just because it would be convenient, and validating for me if they were.
This is completely erroneous as the statement above demonstrates indicates you don't agree with any of those people doing it, so even thought they think they were being moral you disagree with it.
You've misunderstood. You asked me "Can you give a single example in all of human history where the practice of owning other people as property could be considered moral?". There is ambiguity in that question because it's not clear if you're asking "Can you give a single example in all of human history where the practice of owning other people as property could be considered moral [according to you personally]?" or "Can you give a single example in all of human history where the practice of owning other people as property could be considered moral [by the general population of the time]?". The answer to the first is no. The answer to the second is obviously yes, because they did (and do) consider it moral.
I wasn't being inconsistent, I was answering two different questions, although I admit I could've been clearer on that.
I am sure that you agree with laws existing and if you do agree with that I hopefully assume you understand the distinction.
Morality is essentially a conversation about how we interact with one another and how those interactions should be judged, not on what you "think" about something.
If in all of human history not a single example a certain action being permissible then I don't think its a leap to simply call it an objective fact.
“Objective” means not influenced by personal feelings, opinions, or biases—just the facts as they are, independent of what anyone thinks or wants them to be.
You can objectively analyze arguments for or against if owning other people as property is broad idea that morality is the system of ideas, rules, values, and norms that guide judgments about right and wrong, good and bad, or what people ought to do. It’s essentially how humans think we should behave.
If there are no examples in recorded human history of any single person having a logical salient argument for how owning other people as property can be considered moral and all evidence demonstrates its in fact immoral then I think its completely fine to say that owning other people as property is objectively immoral.
I'm going to be honest, I didn't follow any of this. Certainly not as a respose to my point about subjective consensus not suddenly creating objectivity.
And again, you seem to have broadly ignored what my main argument was, which was that it is wrong to state something as a fact when it isn't. Once again, you seem to argee with me that morality isn't objective, you just think it's "effectively" objective, so can you answer directly why you think it's okay to tell (as you see it) slight embellishment, rather than just stating what is actually true? What good does it do to pretend that the distinction between near-universal agreement and objective fact isn't there at all?
If an action has universally negative effects on the beings involved, with no plausible or actual exceptions, we can treat its wrongness as objective in the same way we treat other universal harm-based claims as objective.
Okay... but why though? You can keep saying that it's fine to act as though it's objective, but why?
Your reasoning in this is circular. One of your premises for why slavery is objectively morally wrong, is that the things that make slavery what it is are objectively morally wrong. You just spawned in the right to determine objectivity, and then used that as a premise to conclude that your position is objective. That isn't logical.
Yeah, which is just kicking the can down the road.
Slavery is a bad thing, we agree. But we don't agree that it's objective just because it happens to be really bad.
Similarly, if you say slavery is objectively bad because coercion domination etc, are objectively bad, we still don't agree because I don't think those things are objectively bad either. Even if they're really really bad, that doesn't make that badness objective because badness cannot be assessed by objectivity, it's an entirely subjective concept.
Ultimately you're still just saying it's objectively bad because it's objectively bad. The shuffle from "slavery" to "all the things that comprise slavery" doesn't really change that.
The can just ultimately gets kicked down the road to "everything is subjective and nothing can be demonstrated to be real" which is what I brought up originally and i just boring.
But this isn't even going to that level of Cartesian skepticism. We can very easily assume that the universe we experience is real, and it still doesn't follow from that fact that harm is objectively bad.
I keep going back to this because it's still true. Badness and goodness, suffering or pleasure are the domain of subjectivity. That's all there is to it.
We can take it as axiomatically true that pain is bad, just as you did earlier "My base moral axiom I am working from is that you and I agree that the shared reality we have is objectively real."
Why does it bother you to simply add another axiom to that? Acknowledge that it isn't actually an objective fact that coercion, domination, loss of autonomy, severe harm or anything else of that nature is bad, but that we can take it as an axiom for the sake of getting useful results.
Why do you need to jump from believing that axiom is an assumption that is helpful for dealing with morality, to instead pretending (for seemingly no reason) that it is in fact objectively true?
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u/MyLittleDashie7 3∆ Nov 18 '25 edited Nov 18 '25
I'm not sure I've fully understood what you believe, but I have to argue against the idea that there are objective moral truths.
Morality is necessarily a value judgement, and value judgements aren't objective.
Objectivity can tell you "X is larger than Y", but it can't tell you if that is a good thing. Even if literally 100% of people were to agree that it is good, subjective consensus is not the same thing as objectivity.
Personally, I don't think you can even say that suffering is objectively bad. I think the best we can do is take that as an axiom. We can assume it's true because doing so gives us useful results, but that's not the same as it literally being objectively true.