• fort_burp@feddit.nlOP
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    3 days ago

    the world doesn’t even have objective morality

    Deductions based on subjective information got you here. Or did you objectively observe (through, for example, objective experimentation) that there is no objective morality?

    That’s what therapygary was trying to tell you, but not sure why they expected your subjective experience to realize the contradiction it itself is based on, lol.

    • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      Can you define objective morality for me please? What exactly would the world look like if there was objective morality?

      • fort_burp@feddit.nlOP
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        2 days ago

        Hey, check this out, you might find it interesting. From Parenti’s Contrary Notions:

        If what passes for objectivity is little more than a culturally defined self-confirming symbolic environment, and if real objectivity—whatever that might be—is unattainable, then it would seem that we are left in the grip of a subjectivism in which one paradigm is about as reliable (or unreliable) as another. And we are faced with the unhappy conclusion that the search for social truth involves little more than choosing from a variety of illusory symbolic configurations. As David Hume argued over two centuries ago, the problem of what constitutes reality in our images can never be resolved since our images can only be compared with other images and never with reality itself.

      • fort_burp@feddit.nlOP
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        2 days ago

        Sure, objective morality is the belief that certain actions are inherently right or wrong, regardless of individual opinions or cultural beliefs, that moral truths exist independently and can be universally recognized. The second question I haven’t the slightest idea, but it would be interesting to find out.

        • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          If they exist independently of us, where could they originate? If they originate from patterns, evolutionary psychology, or a god, doesn’t it make it subjective, just to that thing, whatever it is?

          Edit: nvm, I saw you replied to my other comment where I said something similar :3

      • The world would look the same way it does now with or without objective morality. Objective morality is just the idea that moral truths exist independent of individual beliefs. E.g., that raping babies is an inherently immoral thing regardless of an individual’s feelings about it

        Again though, I personally don’t believe this. I just won’t claim to know that there is no objective morality. No one can know that, the same way no one can know that there’s no god, or anything else unfalsifiable

        The best argument I’ve heard for it, from a moral philosophy professor and personal friend of mine, is (paraphrasing) “I know for a fact that genocide is inherently wrong, and I’m not open to debating that. It’s just true.”

        • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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          3 days ago

          What would it mean that it’s ‘inherently’ wrong, though? Where would the judgement come from? And if it does come from somewhere (eg evolutionary psychology, a god), doesn’t that make it just the subjective morality of that thing?

          • The way it was explained to me was as analogous to maths. Idk much mathematical theory, but there are supposedly mathematical truths inherent to the universe, and this argument for morality is similar- that it doesn’t come from somewhere, it just is. I don’t think ‘judgement’ has anything to do with it, bc that would be subjective like you said

            • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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              15 hours ago

              Maths is objective, yes. But maths is an ‘is’, while morality is an ‘ought’. And you can’t get an ought from an is without subjective values. And while maths is objective, any individual’s understanding of it may be inaccurate.

                • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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                  8 hours ago

                  What would that actually mean though, for an act to be ‘intrinsically good’? I understood a good act as meaning an act that is virtuous to do, but then surely what is virtuous is determined by personal values.

                  • There are three main camps of ethics:
                    virtue ethics, which I think you’re describing,
                    consequentialism (which is exclusively about the outcome of actions),
                    and deontology, which are the moral objectivists.

                    Deontologists argue that virtues and outcomes don’t matter- that there are universal underlying rules determining what is good or bad.

                    I believe the answer to ‘what that would actually mean’ is something along the lines of “it just is”