Is there such a thing as objective morality?

[Hermit]

Nice try, Parrot Face, but I bet not even you can outdo this in the "utter nonsense and new-age-type wankery" department:

[Parrot Face]

Ok, I'm pulling the plug here.

Closed minds are not ready for ''Wankery'' talk...(smile)

I mean imagine trying to explain to an Elizabethan the wonders of contemporary computing.

Enjoy yourselves...

[Hermit]

Accusations of 'closed minds' are a thinly disguised and passive-aggressive way of special pleading: "You are disagreeing with me because you have a closed mind." I'm not buying that.

[Trolldor]

My particular favourite was the

I mean imagine trying to explain to an Elizabethan the wonders of contemporary computing.

[Coito ergo sum]

Is moral relativism just where you think there is no objective morality, or also that morality depends on the society you're in? If only the former, does that render moral questions completely pointless? To be honest, I'm having a hard time imagining suffering to be morally neutral; my definitions of moral have practically revolved around happiness/suffering, even though there's not neccesarily a reason to think that should be the case. :sighsm:

EDIT: Whoops, double post.

For me, morality is neither objective nor relative. Rather, a better way to describe it is that "morality" is not a "thing" that "exists" at all.

Morality, like "beauty," is not something that really exists. It's a value judgment placed on something that does really exist.

Let's take a landscape. It is.

Is it beautiful. If a human mind interprets it as beautiful, then it is beautiful. Take away all the minds capable of making beauty judgments, and you still have a landscape, but it is neither beautiful nor "not beautiful." It just is.

Things are, and actions/phenomena occur. Whether they are good or bad (moral or immoral) is just a judgment placed upon those actions by a mind/brain. Take away all minds, and the actions/phenomena still occur, but they are not good or bad. They just are. Morality is just a function of the mind judging something else. It is not a thing that exists externally to the mind.

Put two humans in a room - one sincerely believes masturbation is immoral - the other sincerely believes it is immoral. Who is right? Neither. Masturbation just is. If one of them rubs their genitalia, then he or she is masturbating. Whether that act is immoral or moral is purely a function of their minds. One or the other may be able to articulate reasons for their judgment, but having a reason doesn't make that judgment "objective." It just makes it a reasoned judgment.

[hiyymer]

Within the dream of separation, your point of view is valid, and i agree with it.


There is "One Subject"...but "It" is not objectifiable...

All the so-called other "subjects" are "subjectified objects"...relative phenomena...

The sense of self is a conceptual thought.
Conceptual thought arrived as the organism became more aware. It's ego,the ego evolved simply because it helps the organism survive.

I guess I look at it more pragmatically. "conceptual thought" has a funny connotation like there is a conceiver or a thinker. Looking at it from the brain/body's point of view, it basically needs to deal with fully caused biological processes that are out there. The tiger preparing to attack. It needs to predict what those processes are going to do, in order to survive and replicate. The self-caused intentional agent is the brain's way of doing that. The agent is just a representation created by the brain which models a thing called a tiger. The way tigers tend to occur becomes the intention of the tiger. But there is no agent inside the tiger. There isn't even a control center in the tiger's brain; no agent in any sense. What makes sense to me is that our human brain creates an agent called a self, probably because we are social. We are "self-aware" (ego), because our brain creates (as part of the integrated experience) that representation of the agent self so that it can better survive and replicate. It's no more profound than that.

Particles and antiparticles annihilate to create high-energy photons, and the collision of high-energy photons with matter creates particles and antiparticles so, we have it that matter is necessary to create light and light is necessary to create matter, thus, neither could have have a first origin.
The sense of self is the antithesis of Light.
It is a shadow... imagining itself to be... what it imagines light to be.
When the light dawns... the shadow does not transform into the light.
It simply disappears.

well you figure out whether we are talking about the same thing or not. In the light of what really is, there certainly is no shadow. It's only in the experience created by our brain.

When atoms which are really empty space clump together, form matter, appearing as you and I, but this phenomena is in no way separated from empty space, it only appears that way.

Not sure what you mean. Well actually I have no idea what you mean.

It doesn't prove anything, it doesn't get me anywhere, except to realize there is nothing to understand.

And yes, physical reality is real… apparently.

I guess we come out at basically the same place.

[Hermit]

My particular favourite was the

I mean imagine trying to explain to an Elizabethan the wonders of contemporary computing.

You can't beat

The sense of self is the antithesis of Light.
It is a shadow... imagining itself to be... what it imagines light to be.
When the light dawns... the shadow does not transform into the light.
It simply disappears.

Someone going by the name of Melanie said the same thing in another forum. The accompanying graphics were a perfect match.






Edit: I see Coito is trying to get back on topic. Shall we join him?

[leo-rcc]

No there isn't.

Topic closed.

[hiyymer]

Let's take a landscape. It is.

Is it beautiful. If a human mind interprets it as beautiful, then it is beautiful. Take away all the minds capable of making beauty judgments, and you still have a landscape, but it is neither beautiful nor "not beautiful." It just is.

Well the landscape that you think is beautiful is not out there. It's being created by your brain in your experience. Out there is just a bunch of molecules bouncing into each other. There is no color, on sounds, no thing-ness. Take away the "mind" and there is no landscape, let alone a beautiful landscape. What's more "beautiful" is not a concept. It's an emotion.

I think you are missing emotion/feeling/motivation. These are real physical bodily states that are a part of a physical process that is determining how your body/brain responds to the representations in your experience, including your sense of those emotional states. It's your clue that something is going on in your brain that you are only indirectly aware of. Your body has to decide how to respond to a moral choice; go hungry or shoplift a box of cereal. It's not a conceptual problem. It's a problem of survival. The brain has associations of the outcomes with emotional flags. Thinking about being hungry all night and thinking about being in jail create associated feeling which arise from the physical machinery and past experience (actually being hungry all night or being in jail). But the real test is when the hand reaches for the box of cereal. Then the brain is no longer in "as if" mode. You don't decide. Your brain decides and then puts the perception in your experience "I went to bed hungry because I knew it was the right thing to do".

Things are, and actions/phenomena occur. Whether they are good or bad (moral or immoral) is just a judgment placed upon those actions by a mind/brain. Take away all minds, and the actions/phenomena still occur, but they are not good or bad. They just are. Morality is just a function of the mind judging something else. It is not a thing that exists externally to the mind.

Except that you are missing that there was a physical biological process that determined the action and experience was part of the mechanism; not as only as concept but as motivation. As one theist quipped, there must be a God because I know right from wrong. He correctly identifies the knowledge of right and wrong as being an irrational emotional knowing which is coming from beyond our experience. It just feels right.

[PsychoSerenity]

OK, how about the actual reason for a value judgement. To make this clear - NOT the reasoning the mind goes through that makes it think it knows why it holds that judgement, - but the actual reason, that is probably best described through evolution, or as causality in the complex system of the universe, as a result of the laws of physics. Surely that has an objective answer?

And then when you look at the evolution of morality, partly as genetic and partly as a social structure which is then learned throughout the individuals social development, there are absolute limits on what can be held as morally right or wrong.
- For instance, a society cannot evolve a morality that allows the death-rate, as a result of murder, to come too close to the birthrate. That must have an objective effect, through an individuals social development, on their moral judgements. Even if it doesn't completely remove murder/psychopaths it does mean that the society as a whole must condemn those actions.

I'm still not sure either way - and I don't think what I'm describing is exactly morality anyway. But I'm not going to simply write it off as impossible. Maybe it's something obvious that we're all missing - or something that the human mind isn't intelligent enough to understand.

[Feral_Punctuation]

The one thing stopping me agreeing with the relativists is that suffering/happiness seem intrinsically morally bad and good respectively. It seems almost axiomatic (is that a word?). I'm sure there's something wrong with this idea, but I can't put my finger on it. Would you kindly put your finger on it?

[Trolldor]

The one thing stopping me agreeing with the relativists is that suffering/happiness seem intrinsically morally bad and good respectively. It seems almost axiomatic (is that a word?). I'm sure there's something wrong with this idea, but I can't put my finger on it. Would you kindly put your finger on it?

How long would a species have survived if it had evolved to enjoy suffering?

[Feral_Punctuation]

I think by definition you can't enjoy suffering.

[Trolldor]

I think by definition you can't enjoy suffering.

Who says you can't?

[Feral_Punctuation]

You may well be able to derive pleasure from suffering, but you can't enjoy suffering itself. Otherwise it wouldn't be suffering, it would be pleasure.