Philosophy meme
Philosophy meme
Not sure why this got removed from 196lemmy..blahaj.zone but it would be real nice if moderation on Lemmy gave you some sort of notification of what you did wrong. Like an automatic DM or something
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All 3 would receive a negative response in the last 100 years in different parts of the world. Hell there are plenty of places currently where women can't vote, slavery is a thing and the government isn't working toward a better society. Those places wouldn't exist if those people thought it was morally wrong. Objective morality is definitely not a thing.
The "truths" picked here are just pretty terrible to make that point. There's for example one kind of slavery that people are usually fine with: children are to some extent the slaves of their parents. They have to do what they say, have no freedom of where they want to live and should they run away, the police will return them to their owners. Oh and kids can't vote either and roughly half of them are female.
That's exactly the point. For example, people used to think chattel slavery in the US was morally acceptable because they viewed black people as inferior. But today we would say that black people are not inferior and that they were mistaken. The moral relativist would say that slavery was okay to do back then because that's what the people agreed on. Do you still agree with the moral relativist?
I agree that morals are relative considering there are a ton of people who still believe black people are inferior and also places with slavery.
Something can be morally objective if every single person in the world believes it but I can't think of a single example of that.
Even if everyone agrees that doesn't make it objectively true.
If everyone agrees the Earth was the center of the universe it would be a case of mass ignorance, and still be objectively wrong.
If everyone agrees on the same ethic, it doesn't mean morals come from an objective source (i.e. God or karma) but could merely be everyone having the same preferences at that moment.
That would be the case if morals were something we can measure outside the human experience. Unfortunately there is no way to measure if something is moral or not outside how someone feels about it.
That's exactly the reason people are moral relativists.
For an objective morality, there would need to be something outside human opinion to observe and measure.
Not really, if absolutely every single human at all stages of life believed it's morally good to spit in their palm every day that would be an objective moral truth, there would be no subjectivity to it. For morals though no such thing exists.
You don't need to be able to observe it externally to distinguish it. For example i can say I have a conscious experience and that would be objectively true even though we have a pretty minimal understanding on what that really is or how to measure it.
You don't need to be able to observe it externally to distinguish it. For example i can say I have a conscious experience and that would be objectively true even though we have a pretty minimal understanding on what that really is or how to measure it.
Consciousness can be observed an measured. There are machines that can tell if someone is conscious, and even reach conclusions about what that person is thinking about based on brain activity.
You can measure brain activity but not consciousness. Consciousness is most likely an emerging property of brain activity but we can't really say more with out current understanding of it.
You can't solve a mystery you can't properly identify to begin with.
People feel like something more than physical is going on. Rather than see it as a natural consequence of abstract thinking and self-reflection, they jump to the conclusion that this sense is supernatural.
Science isn't in the business of examining vague hunches. The first step to getting an answer is deciding what there is to explain. Our current theories on the brain are compatable with people thinking about their own thoughts, and even having emotional reactions to that process.
Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing contradicting the scientific worldview has happened. So what is there to explain?
You can ever solve a mystery you can't properly identify to begin with.
People feel like something more than physical is going on. Rather than see it as a natural consequence of abstract thinking and self-reflection, they jump to the conclusion that this sense is supernatural.
Science isn't in the business of examining vague hunches. The first step to getting an answer is deciding what there is to explain. Our current theories on the brain are compatable with people thinking about their own thoughts, and even having emotional reactions to that process.
Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing contradicting the scientific worldview has happened. So what is there to explain?
That doesn't mean it does not exist though. It simply means we can't measure it.
I'm not saying that, just that there's no outside way of verifying if something is true or not in case of morals. I don't believe objective morals exist because you can't find a single moral stance shared among all of humanity not because you can't measure the truth of that stance.
Is suffering good or bad? I don't mean that in a specific context, but any type of suffering in itself.
I can't really say about all kinds of suffering, it really depends on context.
It's like asking if all love is good. There are so many situations I can imagine it could be good or bad or even neutral.
With out of context I mean in it's nature. Imagine you have to cut off someone's leg who doesn't like pain and won't profit from experiencing it during the amputation now or in the future, is it better to do it in the way it causes the most pain or the way it causes less pain, when it leads to exactly the same result?
Oh in that context it's absolutely worse. And in a complete vaccum where no action or even existence precedes or continues from that one moment of suffering it's also bad.
Though because such a vacuum does not exist in reality suffering can be good. For example choosing to suffer to bring about some good outcome would be good. Or suffering that builds character for some future event. Also some forms of suffering are enjoyable to some people.
Why are you trying to measure something, when you have no evidence for it existing to begin with?
Anything you could point to as objective morality would be explainable as a relative preference by some group.
Putting it into some objective context is something religions do, on faith.
Do you think pain is real?
Yes, it's a physical process where a creature reacts to unwanted physical stimuli.
There's even ongoing research into objectively measuring pain: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30700064/
Exactly, physical pain and other forms of suffering are an objective reality. You can, in theory at last, decide objectively whether any decision will lead to more or less pain immediately and in the future.
If you look at ethics you could assume the only axiom it has is that when comparing more pain or less pain, less pain is better. This is even independent from circumstance if you consider all suffering now and in the future that are consequences of an observed decision.
In my opinion that makes the decision whether something is morally bad or good objective in it's nature.
Many people think pain is necessary for virtue, so that right there would dispell pain as the objective measure.
Many others have some biased view on it. That it should only be for their clan/nation/species that this applies.
Even if all of humanity agreed reducing pain was the #1 goal, that wouldn't mean it had any objective value outside that society. An uncaring universe with a lifeform that have similar values, is still an uncaring universe.