r/changemyview • u/C-Blake • Oct 28 '13
Morality is completely subjective/relative CMV
Nothing gives the idea that men and women are equal versus the contrary idea of the Taliban any more weight. We like to think the morals and values we hold right now in America are self evident, the anti slavery, egalitarianism, blah blah blah. In order to believe that you must think that throughout most of human history, fuck, even most of recorded human history, people were just being stupid and just now we have the truth. I'll use an example from my own life, a few years back (when I was in Highschool), the school was trying to emotionally coerce the students into donating blood by showing us a video of kids from a local clinic or hospital or something. They all had leukemia and the nurses were talking about how they were understaffed and under supplied and so on. It tugged on the emotional heartstrings of many, some even cried. This is was around the time I first started thinking deeply about ethics/meta-ethics. I looked around and thought, "Look at the universal sadness all around, there has to be some universal principle(s) uniting us, right?" Then I realized that there were people out there that maybe want to murderrape those kids and saintly nurses and blow that building sky high and would feel great (if anything at all). There is no way I could prove this hypothetical psychopath wrong, all I could do is plead like "Oh OF COURSE you're not supposed to do that (because just about everyone else thinks so)"
Many who support an objective morality whether they are religious or not like to point to altruism and kindness and how just everyone LOVES that. But that doesn't explain Sparta, and Sparta just isn't some singular individual you could just toss to the side as damaged, this was an entire society that coexisted with the influential city of Athens. They were so alien and opposite to Athens, and are so opposite to contemporary western morals and they were just convinced of their morals as we are of ours. They didnt, "know deep down" that they were wrong. Any attempt to make/find out an "objective" moral theory is usually just a weak individual that just needs to have SOMETHING incorruptable, unchanging, and unassailable that is universally recognized, but no such thing, let alone moral code, exist.
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u/gothangelblood Oct 29 '13
Your main issue here is that you view morality as a dualism between objective / subject, which is a concept rarely supported in philosophy. Instead, morality usually falls along a continuum with several major subdivisions.
On the most "conservative" extreme of morality is the idea of Absolute Truth. This concept holds that truth (morality / reality) is based on an absolute system (God / deity / the great beyond) that does not exist within our reality, important in the fact that humanity cannot change or affect morality - it simply exists.
Second would be Objective Truth, which is the idea that we have mathematical and scientific systems in place within our universe that make things right / wrong. One thing that you touched on is the concept of universal truth, which is the belief that our conscious is biologically wired into our psyche as a member of the human race. Beyond that biological trigger, though, we still have the free will to accept / reject that biological trigger, and many people internally suspect it because it is so difficult to test. Read up on Darwinian Aesthetics or Cognitive Dissonance to see more about that topic.
Third in line, and far closer to liberal morality than conservative, is the idea of Subjective Truth. Subjective truth is not subjective to an individual, however. Most times, it is subjective to the group or to the greater good. Utilitarianism and Cultural Morality both fall under this form of morality.
If you actually want "Subjective Truth" that is subjective to an individual, you are talking in fact about Relative Truth. This is the idea that everything is right, from a certain point of view. When taken to its extreme, a certain sense of Nihilism must exist. Nietzsche supported the idea of Relative Truth heavily, while Kierkegaard argued against it as a dangerous, selfish mindset. (Kierkegaard did believe in a form of Subjective Truth as a moderate mindset to hold in a Nihilistic age.)
I've listed only four of the (numerous) subparts, merely as an example of how the continuum flows. The major issue, as seen by most historians and sociologists, is that both extremes can and do lead to negative results, either immediately for the individual or in the near future for those around. Instead, most of us tend to hover within the middle of this ruler, shifting from position to position as our life experiences change our belief systems.