Before you encounter it, you'll find a planet where the gravitational force varies according to your mood. If morality is subjective, might makes right, Stalin led a blameless life, and the only thing Hitler did wrong was lose. All this being objectively true, there are nevertheless many, even some professing Christians, who profess to believe in the thunderous imbecility of subjective morality; but never did anyone draw breath who believed it with blood and heart. If they did, they'd never get angry at a perceived injustice; and there isn't a doubt in my mind that you believers in this insane myth get mad whenever somebody on the internet has the gall to speak ill of one of your ideological sacred cows. Any questions?
morality is of course subjective, which is why it varies from region to region, and from society to society, and even from religion to religion. what we know is objective truth, is that morality is a philosophical human construct, and has varied greatly for the entirety of human history. Thus, subjective. Injustice is based on laws, not subjective morality. where do you get your whacky ideas from?
I do wonder to what extent morality is subjective. That is to say, if the line between what is good and bad is subjective and not an exactly clear line, the whole concept that it is subjective without a clear line is also subjective. (i.e. a second order degree of skepticism) In logical analysis this isn't a paradox, it would be examined the same way mathematically that an infinite sum series would.
Well, given that our individual perceptions of the universe and everything in it can be call "subjective" it stands to reason that even our objectivity is subjective. IOW, our individual universe is a construct of the stuff between our ears.
Wonder no more: that extent is zero. The topic here is perception of morality, not perception in general.
I mean morality is subject to our individual perception just like the universe and all that transpires within it.
Not really. Your conclusion makes the assumption that Stalin and Hitler had no moral qualms, or would have had no moral qualms if they had been fully aware and conscious of the problems they caused, the results of their actions and the probabilities of those results. If morality is subjective, then Stalin has the ability to blame himself. It is not might that makes right, it is one's own morality. Subjective morality is not moral nihilism. Obviously, I don't know the mind of either of them, but if Stalin really thought that sending people to the Gulag and the front secured a future in which people were actually better off (it of course depends on exactly how you interpret people being better off, but given the OP, I reckon that's outside the scope of this thread), then I think the problem is not one of morality but one of information (or of him actually acting immorally, by his own standard). If on the other hand we assume that Hitler and Stalin had no moral qualms, I would argue that they are more akin to a natural disaster. Bad, but blame isn't really the right way to address it. I would argue tsunamis and earthquakes have no moral ability, calling them blameless might technically be correct (or not be, depending on the definitions) but it'd be beside the point.
Subjective morality is an inference. Necessary morality is an implication. Necessary morality is what it is with no possibility to change, come to be or not be. Subjective morality is not necessarily what is implied. It can change, come to be or not be.
It's not subject to anything at all. That's the whole point. The perception of morality will of course differ not just from person to person but from moment to moment; but just as the law of gravity is not subject to the unique interaction of any two massive objects, neither is morality subject to the momentary perception of any individual. Yeah, really. No, you make the erroneous assumption that the assertion depends for its truth value on that premise. Which is of no moment whatever, as such an exercise would be nothing more than internal theatrics if morality is subjective. If my morality says I get to kill you if I feel like it, and I have the means and the motivation to do so and to get away with it, and your morality says otherwise, who's right? I am, obviously, because I will make your morality permanently irrelevant. Of course it is. If morality is subjective, it's not a problem of morality whether he thought that or not, because there's nothing objectively immoral about mass murder just for fun.
Morality is a purely human construct that arises from our sapience and the need to regulate behavior within the cooperative social groups necessary to survive and thrive. It is not a thing to be discovered, its a thing to be invented that would not exist without human perception. Personally I have great confidence that the universe would physically exist without a single human alive to perceive it.
Then those who disagree with it have no reason to abide by it absent the possibility that those who agree with it will subject them to unpleasant consequences. Said need being every bit as much a human construct, it may be similarly disregarded. Indeed, it makes about as much to talk about discovering morality as it does to talk about discovering the nose on your face. OTOH, it is, from a certain perspective, a thing to be obscured so as to liberate the diabolically inclined. Or reinvented to suit the purposes of those in power.
Your entire life is an ILLUSION: New test backs up theory that the world doesn’t exist until we look at it https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...cks-theory-reality-doesn-t-exist-look-it.html
Yes, i believe the religious refer to those unpleasant consequences as the wages of sin. Again, yes social controls. Think of it as the law of the herd if you will. Oh no. survive and thrive are far more than human constructs. They are the essential driving force in all terrestrial life. When applied to inert matter, we see it survive and thrive play out on cosmic scales as we observe the behavior of its matter and energies. You know the stuff that we are actually constructed of. Nonsense. Morality is taught but I agree that often that teaching involves "discovery". It is inculcated by culture from birth. Contemporary morality has a way of changing with each new generation in the digital age. Advancing knowledge and constant cultural exposure have a way of doing that to morality, don't you think? I totally agree that morality has always been a useful social control for the diabolical and powerful. How many popes have been assassinated? Look to the sexual immorality of church leaders of all shapes and colors. Amongst the pious the sinners also wear the cloth.
The wonderous thing about the quantum level is that we can only conceive of it in abstraction. For instance at the quantum level the majority of any and all matter is just one helluva lot of empty space. The paradoxes of superposition and measurement are also conceptual abstractions of conditions that do not scale up to the Einsteinian universe.
The implication is that you don't actually know this, that everything we see may only exist because man first looked at it. That then a second man looked at it didn't change the reality of the superimposed state that occurred from the first man looking at it. If I see an orange sofa in a room and then you walk into the room, you, too, will see an orange sofa. But that orange sofa didn't exist until someone thought of it. And the same may be true of the universe, that the stars didn't exist until we looked at them, that galaxies and quasars and pulsars may not have existed until we started looking at them through telescopes, etc. Astronomers have found 300,000 new (to us) galaxies through the use of radiotelescopes. Where were they before? Did they really exist before we looked? Or did they become reality from a superposition of states existing prior? The universe is 13.8 billion years old. But was it really? Or is it that because we measured it? Just some food for thought.
You seem to be extending the quantum world onto the einsteinian one in which we live. As to the recent discovery. Its quite clear that they were always there, in fact are billions of years old. The discovery is merely a result of our increasingly sophisticated observational technologies. Yes the universe is truly 13.8 billion years old or so. We know this from the observed measured and understood physical processes of energy/matter conversion.
Moral nihilism is the idea that there are no morals, subjective morality is the idea that there are no objective morals, but that there are morals which originate in the each person. You seem to conflate the two by presupposing that objective morals are the only morals, and that certainly seems to be jumping the gun if we're discussing moral subjectivity. It'd be circular logic if you use a tenet of objectivism to construct an argument for objectivism. You give several arguments calling subjective morals "of no moment" and "irrelevant". I don't see that as a problem, or at least no more so than objective morality. Morality always has a problem with enforceability. You say if you kill me, my morality is irrelevant. I could just as easily make the argument if you kill me, objective morality is irrelevant. You say that Stalin's ability to compare himself to his own morality is internal theatrics, I would argue that on objective morality, its just as much theatrics, albeit external (although that in itself begs the question of the mechanics of objective morality, which I don't think is solved, on objective morality, Stalin is just as justified to simply argue that genocide is objectively moral). You seem mostly concerned with people who show no moral qualms ("I feel like it", "for fun"), and while that is an important question, I would argue that it is rarer than you seem to imply (although I do not accuse you of actually saying that). I don't think Stalin did what he did out of a lack of morality so much as conflicting understandings of morality with a touch of willful ignorance. Our subjective morality is not as haphazard as you imply. Humanism (which I think most moral subjectivists subscribe to) suggests that our humanity bestows moral values. As such, the notion that it is subjective does not mean we look past it.
Ok, so if morality is objective and not subjective, then morality is universal regardless of the time and place in which something occurs, yes?
That would be the Creator, of course. To be sure, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between religionists who modify their behavior in the hope of avoiding unpleasant eternal consequences and atheists who think like you. Seeing despots love people who think like that, I'll pass. Oh yes. is one thing; the perceived need for same, quite another. Which might be interesting, were that objectively necessary. You don't know what you're talking about. Who the hell do you think you're kidding? Morality, OTOH, does not. Sure, that's why it was moral for the Hitler Youth to revel in their hatred of Jews. No, because unlike you, I am not utterly devoid of any understanding of what morality is.
So you have absolutely no evidence for the existence of Objective Morality, this is why religion is based on faith and not critical thinking or reason.
[QUOTE="yguy, post: 1070268813, member: 36186] To be sure, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between religionists who modify their behavior in the hope of avoiding unpleasant eternal consequences and atheists who think like you. [/quote] I'm impressed by such a powerful demonstration of your "differentiation" abilities, Seeing despots love people who think like that, I'll pass. Oh yes. is one thing; the perceived need for same, quite another. Which might be interesting, were that objectively necessary. You don't know what you're talking about. Who the hell do you think you're kidding? Morality, OTOH, does not. Sure, that's why it was moral for the Hitler Youth to revel in their hatred of Jews. No, because unlike you, I am not utterly devoid of any understanding of what morality is.[/QUOTE] You should consider the possibility that the understanding you have of what morality is, is superficial and entirely one dimensional. It might prompt you to actually respond with something of substance.
Considering that human beings invented morality, and all human beings are equal in the sense that none of us is above any other human being, the only thing morality can be is subjective. That's one of the primary reasons we needed to invent God. For humanity, the prevailing morality of a given society is pretty much just a consensus anyway.
