Moral relativism?

I agree with billymills in post #15; even with set axioms like "thou shalt not kill" and "thou shalt not steal", there are still vastly differing ways to interpret any given axiom. How an individual interprets the basic principles of human morality that everyone agrees with will change and vary based on said individual's upbringing, their environment, the beliefs of their role models, and their current circumstances.

If there's one thing we can learn from all of human history, it's that we will always try to take advantage of anything we can to gain an advantage. Tool making is where we started, and we're still doing it today even if today's tools are labor unions, trust funds, and political arm twisting. Just knowing how a person interprets axioms is important; a pacifist like Mahatma Ghandhi might believe in an absolute "you shall not kill", while most people believe that killing is wrong except in self defense, and others argue that only unprovoked, random killings are wrong. Similarly, if we were to introduce a new axiom, that of the preservation of the species, we would simply create more interpretations that are not included in the letter of the original axiom but are certainly within the spirit.

The Republican vs Democrat split is based on different interpretations of the same set of axioms (the 10 commandments of the Christian bible), mainly in the final few commandments, where the main arguments are based in simple terminology disagreements. For example, the abortion debate (please don't take this as an excuse to turn this into an abortion thread) is based on disagreement on whether an unborn fetus is human or not; the death penalty debate is based on whether killing is morally acceptable if the person being killed has killed themselves, and the assisted suicide debate is based upon whether it is morally acceptable to kill someone suffering from an immensely painful disease who wishes to die. And all those completely different debates sprang from one simple axiom!

Thus, adding any axiom to our moral code, no matter how simple, will create hundreds of different interpretations, all of which are equally correct unless we apply specific definitions to every word, which only creates more room for interpretation. The real question is, is it morally right to hold any one interpretation of our shared basic axioms as the one, objective morality?
 
capefeather said:
There are universal "languages" that we use, and moreover, there are things we can say generally about languages. Languages also evolve to fit various objective needs better, just as our moral systems evolve to fit various objective purposes better.
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There are no universal languages. Even body language isn't universal, much less spoken language. Language is not objective. It is a subjective, human construct that changes over time. Objective means not influenced by personal feelings. Language is obviously influenced by personal feelings. People think up new words and they are. This looks the same as morality.

Morality changes based on time and place. You've made the claim that no one would justify eating babies, but in fact, child sacrifice has existed throughout history and I'm pretty sure it will exist again. Morality has shifted to that extreme, and further, at different times and in different places. I highly doubt there's any moray or taboo that hasn't been broken by one culture or another at some place or time. That's because there are no objective standards by which all people construct morality.

Other than you claiming morality must be objective, what evidence is there that it is objective?

I feel like I'm arguing with one of those mindless bible thumpers gosh.
 
morality is subjective, through and through - just because a set of morals is widely accepted, even across the universe, doesn't validate it as an objective standard - a lowly alien can come around and disagree, and therein invalidate the accepted morality instantly. a lofty example obviously, but i don't believe there is any concrete right and wrong, past what humans have come to accept and agree upon over the years, the centuries. i think everyone sleeps a little better at night believing that we must all agree on the ideas that murder is wrong, defending the weak is right, and monsanto is forever evil. however, there's no telling what sort of moral standard can evolve eons from now, and how those people would feel about our standards as they read them in their history books, or holographic teachers, who knows!! (haha)

morality is wholly shaped by humanity and culture - even what we perceive to be aesthetically pleasing slowly evolves over time (for example, what is considered "perfect" in female/male proportions, comparing now to perhaps greek ideologies in the past) and i don't think morality is any different. to compare what is pleasing to the eyes to what is pleasing to the 'soul' may be a stretch, but i think the essence of change and creation in those aspects is very similar. a child fresh into the world doesn't know that murder is wrong. their parents inform them, as do they inform them that they can't run around naked in public, or spit on people, etc, and must behave. be civilized, a term whose definition also evolves over time.

much like "time doesn't exist, clocks do" i would say that "morality doesn't exist, human beings and their complex and ever-fickle emotions do."
 
Nothing is completely objective. At the level people require objectivity in the context of morality the word has no practical usage. No one would have a problem describing something as an objective cat. But any understanding of the word cat has plenty of subjectivity.

In as far as the word objective has any practical use it can be applied to morality.

There are a lot of tricks in language that make it difficult to agree on proper usage of words like good. Religion also certainly hasnt helped in that regard. But I feel that in most cases you can come to a level of agreement about the usage of these words as you could with whether or not something is or is not a cat.

Though I would say in most instances determining goodness is a lot more difficult than determining catness. There is a lot more to consider. I dont feel like that makes it less objective, just harder to agree about.
 
billymills:
Surely you see the difference between forcing an electron to have a location and seeing a mirage in a desert? For what you quoted, I meant, "More importantly, are your answers to these questions dependent on language, or are they dependent on reality?"

shinyskarmory:
We can look to any one statement that exists, but really we're looking at the wording of it, and due to flaws in the language (imprecision), the same statement can be interpreted in different ways. That's terrible from a scientific/rational perspective. We have to agree on what specific thing we're talking about, and decide whether it's a true statement, a false statement, or not specific enough to have a single truth value. If you look at the statement "do not kill", well, do not kill whom? I'm fairly confident that, deep down, almost nobody would really agree with "do not kill anybody".

The Republican vs Democrat split is based mostly on brand names.

mattj:
Maybe I misspoke when I talked about languages. Perhaps what we both really mean is communication. Communication is the phenomenon as a whole, while languages are tools to "observe" communication. When I say something and you interpret it, your interpretation doesn't change what I meant to communicate. My communication is objective, the interpretation is not, and the language is the medium. Similarly, the laws of relativity do not depend on an observer; the frame of reference is how an observer would make sense of reality, i.e. interpret it. Reality is objective, the observation is not (it depends on the frame of reference), and the frame of reference is the medium.

Some cultures in the past have been in favour of sacrificing children to gods, sure. That's not the same as eating babies being moral/amoral for its own sake. It's also not a thing anymore. We have a better understanding of the world now, and we have progressed past many of the superstitions of the past.

The difference between me and a bible thumper is that I don't presume to have access to the One Truth. I don't presume to know for sure what the truth looks like, any more than I know for sure what the theory of everything looks like. I can identify examples of what reality probably doesn't look like, though.

Fishy:
I think we're ultimately talking about the same thing. When I advanced the idea that there is an objective morality, but we just haven't completely uncovered it yet, I figured that that could be a good definition of moral relativism that people could agree with. It's still a kind of relativism, just as relativity theories (I'm talking broadly about both Galileo and Einstein here) dictate what is absolute and what is relative.

I agree that if we encounter an extraterrestrial, then morality as it applies to humans wouldn't necessarily apply to that extraterrestrial. Similarly, if it turned out we're all brains in a vat, then "reality" as it applies to us wouldn't necessarily apply to the world that the vat resides in. Still, there could be an even more "meta" morality that applies both to us and to the extraterrestrial.

I'm not sure that babies don't "know" that murder is wrong. Well, they don't know until it happens, but surely they'd react negatively to somebody being killed, due to our common biological inclinations reacting to what a dead body would typically do. These inclinations cause us to think that poop and exposed blood are disgusting to see/smell.

I think that people are overcomplicating what it means for something to exist objectively. I'm using the word "existence" in the mathematical formalist fashion. One might read the axiom of infinity as saying that the set of natural numbers exists, but formally it means I'm allowed to invoke the set of natural numbers and make statements about it. In this thread, I'm merely saying that I'm allowed to say that one moral decision is superior to another. I'm pretty sure that everyone in this thread desires to allow this. The opposite view is what may be more accurately called moral solipsism, as implied by my multiple prior references to solipsism. Solipsism means I'm not allowed to judge the truth of any statement. Moral solipsism means I'm not allowed to judge the morality of any choice, even if that choice agrees with Nazis. I don't think that anybody advances this belief.

So in essence, I took what I said was the definition of meta-ethical moral relativism very, very literally, and took it to its most literal conclusion... and you guys took it less literally. Probably the "real" accepted definition of meta-ethical moral relativism *is* that there is no objective morality (or meta-morality??) that we have fully discovered or are likely to fully discover. That is, we are not allowed to declare without proof that what we think is right is equal to what is right, but we are allowed to talk about things being right. Call that universalism if you want, but the irony in that is that this belief is more conducive to change and improvement than the other view, which throws up its hands and leaves everything alone, however absurd. We improve by generating newer, more meta ideas to replace the old ones, not by accepting everything, no matter how contradictory, in some kind of kumbaya of ideas, at the expense of humanity's kumbaya.
 
capefeather said:
In this thread, I'm merely saying that I'm allowed to say that one moral decision is superior to another. I'm pretty sure that everyone in this thread desires to allow this.
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I am confused. This is allowed regardless of whether morality is objective or not. You only need to understand what moral statements mean. Morality is a strong opinion on what people should or shouldn't do. It is obviously in any moral agent's best interests that every other moral agent thinks like them, so moral statements should not be understood as statements of fact, but essentially as a sort of command. When I tell you that "it is moral to do X", I mean to say: "you must believe that people should do X". Now, is it "objectively" true or not that you "must" believe this? I really, really don't give a shit. I want you to believe it and that's entirely sufficient to justify that I should say it. Truth is entirely irrelevant to a moral agent's purpose: their goal is to propagate their ideas and to make society match their idealization of it.

So in essence, I took what I said was the definition of meta-ethical moral relativism very, very literally, and took it to its most literal conclusion...
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No. You confused meta-ethical relativism with normative relativism. Whether morality is objective or not is entirely irrelevant to any practical matter, and there is no conclusion whatsoever to be had from meta-ethical relativism. Let me put it this way: consider the idea of a de facto objective morality: a morality that everybody holds. The goal of any moral agent is to push society towards adopting their own morality as a de facto objective morality. This always remains the case: morality is nothing less than open ideological warfare and every moral agent plays to win. All that philosophical nonsense about objectivity and relativity is besides the point.

Probably the "real" accepted definition of meta-ethical moral relativism *is* that there is no objective morality (or meta-morality??) that we have fully discovered or are likely to fully discover. That is, we are not allowed to declare without proof that what we think is right is equal to what is right, but we are allowed to talk about things being right. Call that universalism if you want, but the irony in that is that this belief is more conducive to change and improvement than the other view, which throws up its hands and leaves everything alone, however absurd. We improve by generating newer, more meta ideas to replace the old ones, not by accepting everything, no matter how contradictory, in some kind of kumbaya of ideas, at the expense of humanity's kumbaya.
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That's more or less what happens, but I think you are mistaken in thinking objectivity or relativism have anything to do with it. We are allowed to talk about things being right because it is in any moral agent's best interests to engage in moral discourse, either to pull the rug their own way, or to compromise with another moral agent in order to get part of what they want. Whether this process converges on some objective morality or not is both uncertain and completely irrelevant. We like to think that it does, but that doesn't mean it does, nor does it mean we throw up our hands in the air if it didn't.

After all, if I think it is immoral to kill people, what reason could there possibly be for me to stop telling people to stop killing people? I would only stop if I didn't see any way to succeed, and you can certainly see how the objectivity of morality has little to do with the effectiveness of moral discourse. For instance, I could tell people that it is objectively wrong to kill people, because some deity said so. I don't need to believe that, but if it can make other people behave the way I want them to behave, what do I care? Believing you are working towards some objective ideal may help motivate you, but I assure you there is no logical requirement for that belief. It is a crutch, nothing more.

There still remains the question as to whether morality does converge towards something. It is an interesting, but difficult problem, because on one hand, there is a certain global direction humanity feels compelled to go, and on the other hand, at any point in history, it stands to reason that moral judgements are the tangent of a curve, which doesn't actually tell us much about any particular destination. It's a bit like evolution: for any given species, you could project a mutation path that will make them perfectly adapted to their current environment, but of course, by the time you go through with that plan, the environment will have changed, so now you have to follow a different path. Ironically, it might lead you in circles, because by adapting to your current environment you might unadapt to future ones.

As far as morality goes, anyone's thought processes are deeply influenced by the environment they grew up in. This has a few consequences of interest, namely that most people have a "comfort zone" that's never too far from what they grew up in, so they will become increasingly conservative as they get older. But see, if the direction someone wanted to push society in was directly in line with some kind of objective morality, then there would be no such phenomenon: future generations would push the same way. So morality follows a curve. Does that curve lead anywhere? Perhaps it does, or perhaps there is an asymptote. Or it might fall into a permanently unstable equilibrium.

One problem is that the current genetic makeup of humanity may very well not fully match any coherent moral system, and if we were to change humanity, or if humanity was to drift for long enough, anything we currently view as a moral axiom may come to fall. Heck, even individual humans show a remarkable capacity for para-consistent logic (reasoning from inconsistent premises), which casts doubt on whether the moral thoughts of any given individual are even logically consistent.
 
whoever's been tagging this thread

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Morality is a function of the interactions between human beings.

There is no objective and universal basis for it - if humans didn't exist, there would be no morality left over in the universe. It's not some magical thing embedded in the quarks and electrons.



That doesn't mean you can't judge other people's morality; you can say "Hey, my morality doesn't involve the oppression of 50% of the population, it has measurably less pain and suffering than yours. My morality is therefore better than yours." I remember a speech by Sam Harris that said something to this effect; we can conceive of Utopia, and of the worst possible morality with suffering and pain everywhere - we can see that one of those is clearly better than the other. But in the middle ground, unless two moralities are exactly the same other than one of them is worse in some particular, well-defined respect, it's impossible to determine which is better than the other.
 
Sam Harris has also advocated the idea of science being able to answer moral questions. In this video (which I stumbled upon yesterday), he gives an example of a culture where women are killed for being raped, and get battery acid thrown in their faces for not dressing how the culture tells them to dress. I'd hardly think it helps your case to invoke him. In fact, I was constantly tempted in this thread to refer to something like the video I'm linking (though I was initially thinking Eliezer Yudkowsky but whatever), but I didn't because I knew it would colour the argument in a way that wouldn't be desirable to rational agents. (I also don't like referring to videos, but I don't follow any of the so-called "Four Horsemen" closely enough to refer to their writings.)

At any rate, in middle ground situations like you describe, it's entirely possible that some things are better for one society and other things are better for the other. It's also possible that they'd have things in common, and thus they'd have some morals in common. What I've been saying does not at all exclude this possibility.

I think that it's entirely missing the point to abstract everything we perceive about morality and then say that no truth can be made about it. Like I said before, morality isn't something that's completely independent of the universe. It's an expression of what we humans have in common, just as almost all humans have two hands with five fingers each. If humans didn't exist, then neither would human hands or fingers. I think that nitpicking on the fact that some people may not have two hands or ten fingers is missing the point. After all, how would you even define a human, if you were nitpicking like that? It doesn't matter that we can't define humanity perfectly. It only matters that we can refer to humanity, and that doing so is useful for various things. Morality is at least as real as fiat money.

I also regret using the word "allowed" because the way Brain interpreted it really wasn't how I intended it to be used. In mathematical formalism, logic is a game of finding truths implied by a base set of axioms that essentially provide the rules. There is a ZFC axiom that "disallows" me from invoking a Russell set. I can still conceive of a Russell set, sure, but it would be irrelevant to playing the game. That's really all I'm asking for. It's almost funny how it got complicated in this fashion, since my original intent with the post was precisely to show how bad it is to switch between two different meanings of a term.

The ZFC formalism works because almost everybody who'd ever care to go that far into the fundamentals of mathematics agrees with them. They're just that simple/fundamental/"obvious". Clearly, to have the same thing work out for morals (or anything, for that matter), we need to have a base that's so simple/fundamental/"obvious" that every rational, unbiased agent would conceivably agree with it. Then, when we begin with something really simple, like minimizing needless human suffering, a huge chunk of moral questions end up having objective answers that may or may not be known. A given agent's agreement to such answers would provide evidence of the core axiom's compatibility. Moreover, an agent's apparent disagreement may provide evidence if that agent provided flawed justifications for it, which would indicate that maybe there isn't really a disagreement to the core axiom after all.

Obviously, everybody who seeks to approach these questions rationally has to be vigilant so as to find and correct for their own biases and contradictions. Maybe we'll never be able to stamp out them all, but I don't see that as an indictment of the practice. Maybe that doesn't matter to everyone, but it matters to me that rationality saves me from joining cults, inadvertently hurting/bullying people, and otherwise compromising my intentions to improve humanity in whatever way I can.
 
capefeather, your argument still strikes me as a non sequitur. You do not need to posit the existence of an agreeable morality to seek one, and claiming that morality is objective prior to finding the precise framework by which it is objective is putting the cart before the horse.

Let me put it this way: if you see that the sky is blue, but you'd rather the sky be pink, then you will work towards making the sky pink. But for as long as the sky is blue, it's not pink. It goes the same way for morality. Morality, as we currently observe it, is relative. Perhaps you would like to extract commonalities and figure out an objective morality in some way, but the proof is in the pudding, you see: until you get people to actually agree on morality in the real world, then I'm afraid it's not objective. As it stands, it is not even clear that it is possible to derive an internally consistent account of what people at large consider moral.

It might help clear things up if we could define what "objective" means. On an intuitive level, if, for some concept, everybody agrees on the application of the concept on every object, then the concept is objective. If they disagree, then it is relative. "Being red" is an objective property because everybody agrees on what "red" means; if people disagreed on what "red" meant, then "being red" would become relative. Depending on the whims of society, a concept can very well switch from relative to objective and vice versa. "Objective" is a *linguistic* property which reflects the universality of the interpretation of a word.

Morality, at any given moment, is objective in proportion to how much people are in agreement about it. If you had a simple/fundamental/obvious base for morality that everybody agreed to, then morality would **become** objective. However, you can't claim that morality is objective *before* the agreement actually happens. Right now, "beauty" is considered relative. In the future, we could conceivably decide that an object is beautiful if and only if it is turquoise. However, the future objectivity of beauty has no bearing on its current objectivity.

You could devise a precise moral system and call it "capemorality". Obviously, such a system would be objective, because when "capemorality" is mentioned, everybody agrees to what it means. But to say that "capemoral = moral" is plain equivocation: until everybody agrees that capemorality is the system to use, you cannot merge the concepts. Doing so would serve no logical purpose, and as I said, it would be putting the cart before the horse.
 
The great thing about using the example red is that redness is pretty subjective. The borderlines between red and purple or violet or maroon or whatever other similar colours you might think of are extremely subjective, and yet people seem perfectly willing to accept that redness is objective.

Everyone can agree that firetrucks are red, so redness becomes objective. Likewise everyone agrees murdering babies is wrong, but morality has to live up to absurd levels of objectiveness.

Whether that should be the case or not is a kinda pointless argument, it does seem silly to me though. But I think that is pretty much always the source of the disagreement about this topic. Nobody really questions the meaning of morality in a practical sense. Or those that do do so because they dont really understand the topic, but we just end up with a discussion of objectivity disguised as a discussion of morality.

Though discussions of morality tend to be about as interesting as a discussion over whether that car you bought is red or pink. Actually, that could be kinda fun, its way worse than that..
 
My point in talking about objectivity was never to advance a "capemorality". The only thing that I've really been trying to advance is the importance of truth and logic. The point is to question everything so that we get a better handle on what we really want. The point is that it's okay to say that something is right or wrong when evidence shows that it is right/wrong. It is objectively correct to say that the [clear midday] sky is blue (and not pink) because we know from observation that it is, and we can even explain it. It's also objectively correct to say that our natural patterns of thinking are subject to biases. I suppose that shouldn't necessarily be called "morality" and we should call it "metamorality" or something. It's not the wording that matters, though.

I'm not even suggesting that there is no subjectivity. Some things derive some or all of their existence from the individual's perspective (e.g. the speed of the bus outside my window), and these things are subjective. Sometimes they are even temporary (e.g. physical beauty). I'm just saying that there are things that do not depend on perspective (e.g. the speed of light in a vacuum). These things are permanent, and they are true no matter what anyone thinks. It's always possible that we are wrong about such things, but in that case, they were always false all along.

I just see so much bullying in arguments, not just in mainstream media, but also in forums like this one. P1 accuses P2 of not being accepting of P1's point of view, and that turns out being P1's last resort, an out to say it (ironically) no longer seeks understanding, but (also ironically) wants to judge P2, anyway.
 
truth is pretty much as subjective as reality.

for example, i'm blind. you tell me the sky is blue, and i don't believe you. i say it's black. you can argue all you want that it's blue, and you can get countless people to agree with you that it's blue, but in the end, to me, it's black, and unless i want my mind to be changed, you will never change it.

even something that is considered scientific fact can be disputed by people living in "their own little worlds". you can say that humans breathe air, but if i were in a different... state of mind, as it were, i could say that humans breathe silly putty. you could come up with 1000 different ways to prove that humans breathe air, but i don't believe you. i believe in the silly putty.

also, in the same vein something may not be true just because we perceive it to be. for example, 100 years ago, there was no such thing as the atom. if you believed that, you were full of crap and/or insane. even something that is "proven" (e.g: the world is flat), may be completely false, especially due to the lack of scientific ability to prove something is true or not true. for all we know, humans could legitimately breathe gaseous silly putty. it's pretty much impossible for current scientific standards, but hell, why not? perhaps we're all characters in a video game and nobody knows it.

it is likely that there is some sort of universal truth for everything, but it really is impossible to tell what is relative and what is true, if anything. just because the majority thinks it is so does not make it so, as is true the inverse. human senses may be completely wrong in the true perception of the universe. the thing is, who knows? science isn't so much based on what is proven - rather, what is not disproven. that's the beauty of it, and why it can and will continue to evolve.

...i'm not sure how this is useful or which point i'm trying to make or anything. it's just a "bleh" statement, i guess.
 
The blind person can't see the sky, and has to make stuff up to conclude that the sky is black. Our ignorance does not dictate reality. The atom existed before Rutherford discovered the nucleus by experiment, before Dalton conceived of it, and even before anyone dared to conceive of an indivisible particle against Aristotle. It has always existed. The mayor of the city I live in can insist on the undeniable truth of everything he says. That doesn't make him right. We can't get everything perfectly right, but our error can itself be measured. I don't think that the truth has to be so complicated. When people complicate the notion of truth, it's usually because they have an agenda.
 
capefeather said:
The blind person can't see the sky, and has to make stuff up to conclude that the sky is black. Our ignorance does not dictate reality. The atom existed before Rutherford discovered the nucleus by experiment, before Dalton conceived of it, and even before anyone dared to conceive of an indivisible particle against Aristotle. It has always existed. The mayor of the city I live in can insist on the undeniable truth of everything he says. That doesn't make him right. We can't get everything perfectly right, but our error can itself be measured. I don't think that the truth has to be so complicated. When people complicate the notion of truth, it's usually because they have an agenda.
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Black is what, the lack of photons with wavelength between 400 and 700nm being received from a certain direction? Then the blind person would see everything as black. You seem so keen on including relativistic effects, so what would you call a strong blue-shift that meant all the photons were recorded as ultra-violet (and hence none in the visible spectrum)? Have you made any arguments that imply there is a 'truth?' Have you defined truth? What do you mean by 'have an agenda?' Are you trying to poison the well?
 
ah this discussion has taken an interesting turn! just today i was reading "phantoms of the mind" and started a chapter titled "Do Martians See Red?"

it boils down to discussing "qualia," which is a subjective/conscious experience singular to the person experiencing a particular qualia. using the blind man example (which is perfect) it went on to define the disparity in first person and third person experiences, ie "i see the color red!" and "he says he has seen, or experienced the color red - whatever that means!" a simple disagreement - which perspective, first person or third, harbors a firmer grasp on what reality is? it's something that puzzles neurologists and the like to this very day, and reading about it is truly fascinating.
 
You'd have to be ignorant of the fact that you're blind in order to make the judgment that everything is black.

There's a difference between an object and the stuff it emits (e.g. light) to allow things to acknowledge its existence. If a train is coming almost toward me near the speed of light, but from a slightly glancing angle (say, it's on a rail and I'm waiting for it?), then it will look kind of "backwards" because the light from the back will reach you before the light from the front does. That's different from what the train is actually doing: just speeding along. On the other hand, the train actually is shorter from my frame than it would be in the train's frame. That has nothing to do with the light that reaches me. Scientists know the difference between an observation and the thing being observed. We see points of light in the sky, but stars are unfathomably gigantic balls of gas.

I just really don't think that this is as hard a concept as people keep saying it is.
 
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