We are in the “hard times create hard men” part of the cycle.

I’m having a hard time understanding your view. Do you think that morality is relative to each person’s view point or do you think that moral facts do not exist at all?

To recapitulate: If you condemn an action or practice, slavery for example, then this is typically understood as a moral judgment. You have judged that the practice of slavery is bad rather than good. But you said you do not believe in objective facts about morality. So, in order to understand your view, I took you to be substituting moral reasons for practical reasons. So instead of saying slavery is bad for moral reasons, you’re saying that it has consequences that are undesirable. Hence, I argued above that this is to act as though morality is objective even though you do not think it is. The analogy with numbers was meant to illustrate the salience of such a view, but it seems this is not your position.

Now on to my view. For someone who thinks that facts about the moral goodness/badness of actions are as objective as facts about the physical world the question “who decides the facts?” is erroneous. “The Earth is a sphere .” = true. “One person murdering another.” = morally bad. Even if everyone gets together to decide that the Earth is flat, this would not change the descriptive fact about the world. Even if everyone gets together to decide that murder is okay, this would not change the normative fact about the world.

Since you claim that morality is objective I would assume that you would be capable of tracing where this objectivity comes from, how it emerged, and how it stays that way.

I have my own philosophical views about why morality is objective and how we can make moral judgments. I wrote this in other comments, so I will paste them here:

“Personally I go for Kantian deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).”

“Immanuel Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis, for murder, stealing, etc.”

“Why should we think that morality comes from our own reason? In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow.”

Also, if it were objective for all people, I imagine we would all know its content.

Not necessarily. I personally think that we can know right and wrong, but our epistemological access to moral facts is not required in order to think that the moral facts are objective. Again, consider the analogy with objective facts about the physical world. The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle that we did not know about for most of human history. It is only recently, in conjunction with discovering the scientific method, that we have gained access to facts about the Higgs Boson. The point is, objective facts about the world are not dependent on our ability to know them. The same is true about normative facts. Morality can exist objectively without our yet having a method to determine what the moral facts are.

While internalized racism is real, this is borderline implausible.

Ah I see. In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow.

He gives different philosophical arguments for these positions in The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason. Unlike science, where we can appreciate the result without combing through the evidence, the philosophical arguments have to be understood in their entirety to see the salience of the conclusion. I’m willing to give a sense of the view (see the foregoing), but I’d rather not recapitulate the entire work. If you’re interested, I would read the following entry page on the issue. You might find Kant’s arguments convincing: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/

So your suggestion is that we can keep our moral judgments out of practical considerations without espousing the objective truth of moral facts? This would lead one to act as though they believed in objective moral truths. Which is fine! It would be like thinking numbers don’t exist (perhaps because you don’t believe non-physical/abstract entities exist) but acting as though numbers exist because it is useful to do so. I don’t hold that view, but I can see your perspective.

The question of who defines morality is potentially a category error. We don’t ask who defines descriptive facts about the world. The Earth is round, that is a fact, and its truth does not depend on anyone’s opinion. It is our job to develop ways to figure out whether it is true. Similarly, there are normative facts about morality and aesthetics. Some things are morally or aesthetically good, and it is our job to determine whether it is good.

Admittedly, we have had more success with descriptive facts than with normative facts.

I’m not sure I understand your question

I wouldn’t say we have no way of knowing, just that we disagree (often on edge cases). But people way smarter than me spend their lives thinking about these things and form convincing arguments is support of definitive answers.

To draw a parallel, most of human history we observed the world and reached conclusions. Mostly we were wrong but sometimes we came pretty close. Then we discovered the scientific method, which allows us to move closer to the truth over time. (Note, though, that the epistemological worry reappears, albeit in lesser form, as the scientific method must always be amendable to new empirical evidence that contradicts highly confirmed theories.) My hope is that philosophy will discover a science of normative facts, giving us an agreed upon method for determining moral and aesthetic value.

Yes, there are problems with the categorical imperative. Another problem: what if two moral duties are in conflict? A third: can’t we phrase the same action under different descriptions in a way that yields different results?

There are objections to every moral theory because this is philosophy and we rarely reach a consensus on topics this large. These problems are indicators of epistemological grey areas. They do not, in my opinion, entail moral nihilism.

This position is called Cultural Relativism and it has a number of damning consequences:

• You cannot say that obviously immoral actions are wrong (e.g., slavery, female circumcision, etc)
• You cannot fight for social justice if this goes against the status quo
• Tolerance of the intolerant. If one culture tries to genocide another, we cannot say the first culture is wrong.
• Logically inconsistent. If there are no objective moral truths (i.e., Cultural Relativism), then you cannot say that there are no objective moral truths. To say that there are no objective moral truths is a statement that purports to be objective and to hold across all cultures.

I’m leaving some philosophical details out for the sake of space. Kant thought that the moral law is a duty that is imposed upon the self by reason. But we cannot place a duty on ourselves that is logically inconsistent. Since the moral law should be the same for everyone, if everyone doing something leads to a logical contradiction, then that must not be an action prescribable to ourselves by reason.

The notion that we (morally) ought to do something implies that we could do it; conversely, if we could not do the action, then this implies that we are not morally obligated to do it.

I can see your perspective, but I would argue that these are epistemological grey areas, not moral ones. Again, just because we don’t know whether something is true/false or good/bad doesn’t change the objective value of the fact.

Of course, for non-normative facts about the world, we have the scientific method to help us to move toward the truth. (Note here that the epistemological problem reappears, albeit in a lesser form, as we cannot be sure whether science has reached the truth; the scientific method is always open to new and contradictory empirical evidence.) Recall, however, that most of human history lies before science. Left to our own observations, we believed in such theories as geocentrism and the four humors. Hopefully ethics and aesthetics will reach a science for determining the objective value of normative facts.

Reposting my response from above:

Personally I go for deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).

Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis for murder, stealing, etc.

Personally I go for deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).

Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis for murder, stealing, etc.

This is a bit meta, but I believe morality is objective. Actions have objective moral worth; epistemological disagreements about how we know the moral value of an action are irrelevant to the objectivity of goodness/badness itself.

$20 mil is pocket change for this guy. Elon makes ~$100 million in his sleep. The richest people are so wealthy that they can’t even spend it all.

Here’s 139 billion dollars to scale: https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ . Note that Elon is worth more than double this amount.

Your mother did what to your vagina now?

And this is from the gun rights and conspiracy theory crowd.

Conversations with Tyler. An academic asks interesting people (often prolific academics in other fields) personal and professional questions. One that I keep going back to is Professor Dunlap’s explanation of Chinese cuisine while a panel of foodies ask her questions at the dinner table: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onWbXaRFge0

Clearly Bernie Sanders is a positive force for actual left-wing policies. But the criticism (that you all so readily downvote) is that Bernie will redirect frustrated Americans to continue to vote for Democrats. While we can’t be sure that this will happen again, it sure has happened in the past.

We cannot expect politicians to save us, because they invariable work within a system that is incapable of significant positive changes. Both parties take donations from billionaires, both parties play in the stock market, both parties give corporate welfare, and both parties will fight tooth and nail to maintain the two-party system.

The real way forward is bottom-up, not top-down. The American people need to save America: grassroots organizing, mass protests, labor strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience. If we don’t actually go outside, things will only continue to deteriorate.

The people need to save this country. Yes that means you and me actually going outside. We need to stop expecting systemic change to come from politicians within a two-party system.