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WillowOne's Positions

Objective morality

My Positions

  1. There is no objective morality.1
  2. Morality is the emergent product of intersubjective agreements that align individual self-interest with group norms in order to enable social cooperation and stability.
  3. The absence of objective morality is not a problem to be solved. It is simply the way things are, and human societies have always functioned without it, whatever they believed to the contrary.

Clarification / Notes

  1. By "objective" I mean mind-independent: a moral fact that would remain true even if no minds existed to hold it. I know of no such facts, no mechanism by which they could exist, and no method by which they could be detected. See J. L. Mackie's "argument from queerness" (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977).
  2. The strongest apparent evidence for objective morality is the near-universal agreement on certain rules (do not murder, do not steal, care for children). This is better explained by shared human nature and shared circumstances than by moral facts. Universal agreement that water is wet is not evidence that wetness is a moral property.
  3. Moral intuitions feel objective. This is to be expected. A moral rule that felt optional would be a poor tool for coordinating behaviour. The feeling of objectivity is a feature of the heuristic, not evidence about the world.
  4. The theist's claim that objective morality requires a god, and that we have objective morality, so there is a god, is addressed under Moral Argument - Argument from Objective moral values. Even if objective morality existed, the Euthyphro dilemma (Plato, Euthyphro) shows that grounding it in a god's commands does not help: either the commands are good for independent reasons, in which case the god is unnecessary, or they are good only because commanded, in which case they are arbitrary.
  5. A common objection is that without objective morality, one cannot say that the Holocaust was wrong. One can. One can say it with every fibre of one's being. What one cannot do is claim that the universe agrees. The condemnation is ours, and that is sufficient.

Definitions

  1. Emergent: not designed, but arising from complex social interactions over time.
  2. Intersubjective: dependent on shared understanding and agreement between agents, as opposed to subjective (held by one agent) or objective (independent of all agents).
  3. Self-interest alignment: norms persist when they balance personal incentives with social cohesion.
  4. Group behavioural norms: codified expectations that promote stability and cooperation.

Also see

Footnotes

  1. This is asserted insofar as one can make objective claims about the current state of emergent intersubjective moral norms. Morality is not objective in itself, but certain facts about shared moral systems can be described objectively. "Most societies prohibit theft" is an objective claim; "theft is objectively wrong" is not. ↩