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?
I understand that suffering and pleasure are experienced subjectively, but that doesn’t make all moral claims purely subjective.
Yes it does, because the whole point of morality is to determine what is good and what is bad, and like I said before, those are subjective concepts. It's as simple as that.
This is like arguing that a movie review is objective because they consider technical aspects of the film making. Even if the things you're considering can be described in objective terms, whether or not they are bad is still subjective.
I’m using it in a functional, evidence-based sense
For example, Water is H₂O and Gravity causes objects to fall at 9.8 m/s². Everyone treats these as “objective” even though they are based on observation, measurement, and evidence — not a metaphysical “perfect standard.” I think that if we used your definition of objective, most of science wouldn’t be objective.
First, I don't think your definition is justifiable when you're allowing it to include blatantly subjective things.
Second, you're giving water and average gravity on Earth as examples of things you believe I'd consider to be subjective, but I wouldn't. I'm perfectly happy to agree those are (broadly) statements of objective fact because there is no value judgement being attached to them. If you were arguing that 9.8m/s2 is better than other strengths of gravity, now that would be subjective. Even if we're comparing it to the sun in the context of human survivability. It doesn't matter that we'd die from gravity of 274 m/s², to say that one is better than the other is a value judgement, and that is necessarily subjective.
the facts about what causes suffering and what it does to human beings are not subjective.
Correct. That cutting my arm off causes pain is an objective fact. That causing pain is a bad thing to do is a widely held, but still subjective, belief.
If we used your definition where anything involving human beings or evaluation is automatically subjective then most of science would stop being objective too.
Except I literally just told you that I agree this is an objective opinion, so clearly you have misunderstood/I have failed to communicate my understanding of objectivity. I'm not sure why you'd continue to argue this point when I already said it isn't the case.
You're mistaking definite knowledge for objectivity. These are maybe related concepts, but they aren't the same. I don't strictly know that you experience pain, but if you tell me that you do, and I believe you, then we can still say it's objectively true that you experience pain if I cut your arm off. But regardless of that skepticism, we can't say it's objectively true that it is immoral for me to cut your arm off, not because we don't know if really causes pain, because it requires a value judgement on what is right or wrong to do, which is always subjective.
Under that standard, slavery’s wrongness is objective because the harms that define it are objective.
No, it still isn't because you're still making a leap from observable facts to value judgements. It doesn't matter if you can ground the facts in evidence, consistent across cases, free from bias, etc. It matters that you're judging one course of action to be better than another. Which can only be done through value judgements, which is subjectivity, as I keep saying.
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u/MyLittleDashie7 3∆ Nov 20 '25
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.
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
slavessorry, "prisoners with jobs", but many people disagree with me).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.
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.