zoo's are fundamentally wrong

1. 2016-05-15 at 4:11 PM UTC

   #21
   

   Obbe Alan What? [annoy my right-angled speediness]
   If morality were an absolute "fundamental law", something could be immoral even if every human disagreed. If, instead, human feelings and desires are what ultimately count, then that is a subjective morality.
   
   Therefore a subjective morality is strongly preferable to an objective one. That’s because by definition it is about what we humans want. Would we prefer to be told by some third party what we should do, even if it is directly contrary to our own deeply held sense of morality?
   
   Given that an objective morality would be highly undesirable, why do so many philosophers and others continue to try hard to rescue an objective morality? I suspect that they’re actually trying to attain objective backing for what is merely their own subjective opinion of what is moral.
   
   

   (plague is bad, yet plague has no consciousness or moral agency)

   
   Without someone to consider plague to be bad, plague is not bad, it is only plague.
   
   

   Similarly mass extinction of complex life would result in a world where nothing is around to subjectively experience the wrongness of it and yet we can consider such a world and most of us would deem such genocide to be wrong.

   
   Correct,, it is an opinion, a perspective, a consideration, something we deem. If we were not around to deem the world to be right or wrong the world would not be right or wrong, it would only be the world.
   
   

   Something in the nature of certain types of consciousness brings about morality inevitably

   
   Our moral sense is one of a number of systems developed by evolution to do a job: the immune systems counters infection, the visual system gives us information about the world, and our moral feelings are there as a social glue to enable us to cooperate with other humans.
   
   Evolution doesn’t operate according to what "is moral", it operates according to what helps someone to have more descendants. Even if there were an "absolute" morality, there is no reason to suppose that it would have any connection to our own human sense of morality. Anyone arguing for objective morality by starting with human morality and intuition is thus basing their case on a non sequitur.
   
   

   So we can look at abstract objects, regardless of what ontological status you grant them, as a similar example of something which is objective, or minimally non-subjective, and yet which owe their status entirely to subjective perception in a similar way to how we might propose a constructivist model of ethics.

   
   I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here. How can an abstract object be objective? What does this have to do with morality?
   
   What would "objective morality" even mean? Yes, humans have an intuition about it, but that intuition was programmed for purely subjective and pragmatic reasons, and thus is a hopeless base for establishing absolute morality.
   
   When asked, the advocate of absolute morality explains that it is concerned with what one "should do", regardless of human opinion or desire. When asked what "should do" means they’ll replace it with a near synonym, explaining that it is what one "ought to do". But if you press further they’ll simply retreat into circularity, explaining that what you "ought" to do is what you "should" do, and thus beg the whole question. They can’t do any better than that, though they’ll likely appeal to human intuition, which won’t do for the reasons above.
   
   There is one clear answer here. The "oughts" and "shoulds" are rooted in human opinion, they are what people would like to happen. Thus morality is of the form "George is of the opinion that you should …" or "human consensus is that you should …" or "people have an emotional revulsion to …". But, without the subject doing the feeling and opining, morality would not make sense. Morality is all about what other humans think about someone’s actions. That is why evolution programmed moral senses into us. Remove that subjective human opinion and the result is literally nonsensical.
2. 2016-05-15 at 7:51 PM UTC

   #22
   

   Lanny Bird of Courage

   If morality were an absolute "fundamental law", something could be immoral even if every human disagreed. If, instead, human feelings and desires are what ultimately count, then that is a subjective morality.

   
   That's not true. Consider utilitarians: they're generally realists (the believe in an objective morality) and yet human feelings are the only subject of moral inquiry under such a system. Yes, human mental states, well being, is "subjective" in that it is contingent upon individual minds but that doesn't mean we can't make objective statements about subjective states. For example, it's pretty uncontroversial that beauty is subjective, but we can say objectively that beholding beauty is a positive experience. Likewise the nature and causes of happiness may be contingent upon and variable between moral agents but that doesn't mean we can't coherently and objectively express a duty to maximize it.
   
   

   Given that an objective morality would be highly undesirable, why do so many philosophers and others continue to try hard to rescue an objective morality? I suspect that they’re actually trying to attain objective backing for what is merely their own subjective opinion of what is moral.

   
   Aside from the fact that most philosophers pursue an objective ethics simply because they believe such a proposition is true, there are also practical concerns as well. Subjectivist moral theories serve as very poor foundations for things like laws, governance.
   
   

   Correct,, it is an opinion, a perspective, a consideration, something we deem.

   
   But there are true opinions. "The sky is blue" is an opinion, but it's also an objective fact.
   
   

   If we were not around to deem the world to be right or wrong the world would not be right or wrong, it would only be the world.

   
   That was exactly the point of the example, we consider a world of completed genocide to be bad even though there would be no on in such a world to have moral judgements about it. We can posit a world without and still call it bad, meaning the "bad" we're talking about in such a case is not wholly dependent on moral subjects.
   
   

   Our moral sense is one of a number of systems developed by evolution to do a job: the immune systems counters infection, the visual system gives us information about the world, and our moral feelings are there as a social glue to enable us to cooperate with other humans.

   
   That's not what I was talking about. Most constructivist systems posit a world where we had evolved without moral intuitions would still be bound by the same moral mandates, that reasoning populations, regardless of an evolved intuition, would discover a moral theory through inquiry.
   
   

   I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here. How can an abstract object be objective? What does this have to do with morality?

   
   An abstract object is non-subjective because it's properties are not subjective. We naturally consider arithmetic theorems to be factual, but their existence* is still dependent on minds. Constructivist morality is similar, it owes its ontological status and the truth of its propositions to moral agents and yet is not subjective. The analogy is supposed to illustrate that things can be mind-dependent but non-subjective.
   
   *or whatever quality you believe they possess as to distinguish them from things like, say, unicorns
   
   

   What would "objective morality" even mean? Yes, humans have an intuition about it, but that intuition was programmed for purely subjective and pragmatic reasons, and thus is a hopeless base for establishing absolute morality.

   
   That generally why philosophers don't take moral intuition to be a sufficient base for moral systems on its own.
   
   

   When asked, the advocate of absolute morality explains that it is concerned with what one "should do", regardless of human opinion or desire. When asked what "should do" means they’ll replace it with a near synonym, explaining that it is what one "ought to do". But if you press further they’ll simply retreat into circularity, explaining that what you "ought" to do is what you "should" do, and thus beg the whole question. They can’t do any better than that, though they’ll likely appeal to human intuition, which won’t do for the reasons above.

   
   There's a difference between using human intuition to characterize a fundamental idea like "ought" and trying to use intuitions as evidence for normative propositions. At some point any description of a thing, if pressed, must regress towards experiential analogy.
3. 2016-05-16 at 10:49 AM UTC

   #23
   

   Obbe Alan What? [annoy my right-angled speediness]
   An objective morality doesn't make any sense, at least to me Lanny. Maybe I'm just too dumb to wrap my head around the concept, but honestly in my mind it is nonsense. Maybe it makes sense to you. Either way it probably isn't very important because we're still here living this life and I don't think a subjective or objective morality actually changes anything about that.
4. 2016-05-16 at 10:58 AM UTC

   #24
   

   kroz weak whyte, frothy cuck, and former twink
   ITT: FAGS
5. 2016-05-16 at 5:05 PM UTC

   #25
   The Self Taught Man Black Hole
   its your thread tho...
6. 2016-05-16 at 10:02 PM UTC

   #26
   

   kroz weak whyte, frothy cuck, and former twink
   ass?