Leave Barry Manilow out of this
I was reading Tom Clark on the emptiness of supernaturalism and was prompted (not for the first time) to think about the idea of objective morality.
…it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to find in impersonal Nature any sort of validation for our moral intuitions, intuitions which evolutionary accounts suggest had adaptive value, whether or not they reflect objective values. Yet we ordinarily suppose our moral norms do reflect something objective, something that’s independent of them but which they accurately reflect. This moral logic says murder is objectively and intrinsically wrong, period, so we’re right to strongly feel that it’s wrong.
We do strongly feel that murder is wrong, but that’s because we’re the kind of beings we are; a different kind of being wouldn’t. Imagine for instance a being with thoughts but no feelings – literally no feelings. Not a being with slightly flattened feelings like Spock, but one with no feelings at all. A being like that wouldn’t, by definition, strongly feel that murder is wrong, because it wouldn’t feel anything, but it also wouldn’t because it is feeling that makes it wrong. The putative objective moral sense actually cashes out as the feeling-capacity. It depends on things mattering. Without that, murder is no more immoral than unplugging a lamp. If the being with no feelings were a whole species rather than an individual, murder would be a matter of indifference, like everything else. Murder is wrong because we value our own lives and those of other people – if none of us valued either one in the slightest (and assuming no harm to any other feeling entity, etc) then murder wouldn’t be wrong. I find this thought quite interesting.
Imagine for instance a being with thoughts but no feelings – literally no feelings. Not a being with slightly flattened feelings like Spock, but one with no feelings at all.
Sorry, no can do. But you’re right, the thought is interesting.
The feeling of ‘wrongness’ itself is a feeling, so it seems to me that to say that murder is wrong because it *feels* wrong is circular.
The question is *why* does it feel wrong. Or, more specifically, why do we have a feeling of ‘wrongness’? That, to me, seems obvious: for the evolutionary advantage of living in cooperative societies. I.e. for evolutionary advantage.
Murder is not wrong because it feels wrong, we feel it is wrong because our moral intuition, the feeling of wrongness, provides evolutionary advantage. Morality is inextricably tied to evolution, survival, and adaptive success.
Another way of saying what I’m trying to say is that morality came late to the game. Murder isn’t wrong because it feels wrong; it feels wrong because murder is ‘wrong’ from an evolutionary perspective. The feeling of wrongness does not define wrongness; evolutionary ‘wrongness’ influences the feeling of wrongness.
To say that if we didn’t value people’s lives, then murder wouldn’t *be* wrong, this is a backwards way of looking at it. The feeling is secondary. It arises from the evolutionary circumstances.
The most you could say is that if murder didn’t feel wrong, then it wouldn’t feel wrong. This is why I say that it’s a circular kind of thinking.
This reminds me of the old canard that if there’s no absolute universal ‘meaning’, then life itself has no meaning. People search for ‘the meaning of life’. But this is backwards. Life came first, meaning came after. Don’t search for the meaning of life, search for the life of meaning.
Same thing with morality. Life came first. Morality only makes sense in the context of living, conscious, feeling, social beings. The feelings came late. Don’t search for the goodness of life, search for the life of goodness.
“We”, you and I, may feel that murder is wrong, but lots of people see things that we would consider murder, for example, honor killing or killing apostates, as right. All cultures probably consider illegitimate killing (otherwise known as murder) to be wrong, but there sure is a lot of difference from culture to culture about what constitutes illegitimate killing.
Ugh, some Answers In Genesis drone just quote mined PZ on the human morality question a day or two ago. It’s such a losing proposition for them–and for Francis Collins, and anyone else who obstinately refuses to contemplate that ‘morality’ has distinct evolutionary advantages. The inclusion of a kindly (or not), judgmental sky daddy in these conversations is completely unnecessary. It vexes me, I tell ya.
Oh, and…Barry Manilow? ‘Trying to get that Feelin’ again’? ‘Doctor my Woman?’ I’m adrift in a sea of sappy lyrics without a rudder. Help me out, OB.
The trite answer to ‘why is murder wrong’ is that it’s wrong because that’s the definition of murder: wrongful killing. Nobody ever argues about whether or not murder is wrong; they argue about which sorts of killing qualify as murder, and which don’t.
‘Do not harm those who are similar to yourself unnecessarily’ seems to be both likely to evolve as a sense of ‘fairness’ in a group-dwelling species, and a bare-bones reduction of morality. Studies have shown that even babies detect and resent unfairness. Animals do also. Right and wrong indicate that there are meaningful relationships.
When there are differences of moral opinion between groups, they don’t really seem to be disagreeing over this basic foundation. They’re disagreeing over the facts of the matter. They’re either saying that it isn’t really harm, or that the harm wasn’t unnecessary, or that what was harmed, isn’t similar enough to the person harming it, to matter. They’re not in a relationship.
Yes, OB. I’m with Jennifer B Philips. I did a search on your linked Tom Clark article, and could find no reference to Barry Manilow at all.
Was he just a random subconscious choice on your part? His unique combination of schmaltzy piano and narcissistic lyrics is something else again, but IMHO he would have done better if he had learnt bluegrass banjo or mandolin, and stuck to mastering say ‘Cripple Creek’.
I hope I have not taken a hammer to an idol there. If so, my apologies in advance, and also after the fact. ;-)
I had never thought about it like that Ophelia. I find this thought of yours fascinating and profound. Thanks.
How could a species that is social survive if murder were common place? If you were just as likely to be murdered by your fellow troglodyte as you were by a lion you’d keep your distance from both. This would lead to the death of all troglodytes as together we stand, divided we fall. So there’s an obvious selection advantage isn’t there? A strong feeling against things like in group murder would confer an advantage of that group than on one that goes around slicing and dicing each other as well. Eventually the troglodytes get all thinking like and rationalize what they were doing and feeling anyway. As societies grow, so does the members of the group or extension of prohibition on murder.
This just so story brought to you by ignorant of the facts pty. ltd. :)
Rusell’s comments about psychopaths ties in well with OB’s post. A psychopath has no feeling that others are part of his/her group. Others are just things, means to an end, objects. Which proves that Dawkins was correct in labeling the god of the OT one of the most vile thingys in fiction. The god of the OT didn’t give a rats arse about killing or smiting. It was all a means to the end of being worshipped by its creation. His chosen folks also killed and had their way with other tribes. Psychopathic morality.
Barry Manilow was just a joke! I just think of him as shorthand for schmaltz – though I wouldn’t recognize a song as his because I’m not actually familiar with his work.
I know there are evolutionary reasons for inhibitions on murder, of course. The point of this thought was different…just an observation really.
As OB says in her post, murder is wrong because the life of others matters to “us”. It doesn’t matter to a psychopath, and there’s nothing “we” can say to him (why are there more male than female psychopaths?). There are laws and prisons to prevent psychopaths from free-riding, but there are no moral arguments to convince psychopaths. Moral arguments, unlike laws, only function among “us”. You can convince me that, say, capital punishment is murder because we already form an “us”, a community of shared explicit or implicit values. Perhaps you could show me that the idea that capital punishment is murder is implicit in values that I already profess.
It’s interesting that those who claim there is an objective morality like to talk in terms of laws. They’d have you believe that morality has law-like status such as the law of Gravity. But the law of Gravity is a description of empirical nature. It’s inter-subjective but could in principle be different i.e. it’s contingent. Morality is not this type of law. If the law of morality says murder is wrong I can still go and murder whereas if I jump off a cliff with intent to fly, I fall all the same on Earth. So morality has no universality in nature even if we hold that it’s universal amongst ourselves.
Laws, of course, are also prescriptions or regulations of behavior. Perhaps moral law means this. But then law must have been prescribed. If it is prescribed by people or societies then it is not objective and subject to changes of mores in those societies. Perhaps the law was given unto us by a god. Of course then you get into Divine command view of morality and it’s nemesis the Euthryphro dilemma. If morality is just doing the bidding of a tyrant then how is that moral? (How is that doing what’s right instead of doing something arbitrary?) Also, how is that objective? It’s subject to the whim of the god. If as Swinburne has it, it’s part of the fabric of that god, with said god unable to be bad, then it falls onto the other horn of the dilemma and that god is no more the prescriber of morality than anything else. Is morality prescribed then by the universe, a contingent thing? According to theists the fine-tuning argument suggests that it could have all been very different, what then of morality? Seems like the idea of objective morality or law of morality is pretty lame.
Well, that’s enough morality 101 from this immoral black duck. :)
That’s a very neat summary, Brian. I don’t think you get to quack about being an amateur and out of your depth and all that any more; none of use will take you seriously.
As for OB’s post directly, I think the thought experiment is rather too counterfactual to make the point it’s gesturing towards: Organisms have needs, therefore there are actions that are better and worse – valuable and disvaluable – for organisms. Since those needs are the ultimate causes that structure of the organisms’ inclinations – the feelings, drives, instincts, and other internal machinery that moves the organism to satisfy those needs (all originating with and tuned by natural selection, of course) – the notion of a being which has no feelings of any sort is sort of an intellectual non-starter for me. Might as well be “Imagine a square circle.”
Then again, perhaps reflecting on the impossibility of it – and thus seeing the connection between “feelings” and value and morality in a more sensible way than looking for objective external validation – is the point of the thought experiment.
Brian,
Morality is not this type of law. If the law of morality says murder is wrong I can still go and murder whereas if I jump off a cliff with intent to fly, I fall all the same on Earth. So morality has no universality in nature even if we hold that it’s universal amongst ourselves.
The law like character of morality wouldn’t prohibit your being able to murder. It would prohibit your murder from having a moral justification, and this it would do with law like inflexibility.
Ophelia, I think your post was right on, but it has invited a lot of confusion about whether morality has an objective basis. You are exactly right, murder is wrong because we value our own lives and those of other people.
People critical of objective morality tend to stop here, thinking their point is proved. But this is like saying moons don’t objectively exist, because without planets there would be no moons.* But there really are planets and consequently that there really are moons. Moons depending on planets in order to exist is not relativism.
Similarly we are objective things out there in the world, of whom moral prescriptions can hold true or not when depending on the state of affairs we find ourselves in.
* I got this example from lukeprog,
This is kinda off-topic, but given the mention of hypothetical beings who wouldn’t view murder as bad, in the spirit of Halloween I have to plug my favorite old-time radio horror show, Quiet, Please. In episode 88, “Where Do You Get Your Ideas?”, it describes a race of moon people who are effectively immortal: when killed, they simply stay dead for about a day or so, before fully reviving, Jesus-style. As you might expect, these moon beings have a pretty callous view on murder, and murder each other all the time for the slightest offenses. The moon man featured in the episode constantly murders his girlfriend whenever she gets on his nerves, and she doesn’t mind too much (talk about the ultimate abusive relationship!). The trouble is that these moon people often come down to Earth to murder people, since they find it more fun to kill people who will actually stay dead. You can listen to all the surviving episodes of Quiet, Please here: http://www.quietplease.org/index.php?section=listepisodes. I’d recommend episodes 60 (the famous “Thing on the Fourble Board”), and 7.
It would prohibit your murder from having a moral justification, and this it would do with law like inflexibility. Yet there are many a moral justification for murdering or what appears to some to be murder depending on the situation. Just War, self-defense, etc. They may not float your boat, but they do others. It seems to me that saying it has law like inflexibility is a bit weird. If “Murder is never morally justified” mixed with “This is murder” then completing the syllogism we get “This is never morally justified”. Sure, but what’s murder? If it has law like universality, why does it have this cultural subjectivity in some cases?
Maybe I’ve missed the point….
Instead of calling this objectivism, you should say that there is nothing wrong with subjectivism.
Should he? I’m not sure about that. There’s something about the term “subjectivism” that implies, to the non-technical listener, that morality is merely arbitrary. Likewise, Russell, your definition of “objectivism” may be technically correct (not a philosopher, so I don’t know), but I don’t think that’s what people mean when they say morality isn’t “subjective” or is “objective.”
It might be useful to emphasize the difference between “homicide” and “murder.” Any time one person causes the death of another it’s a homicide. Killing another person is not automatically illegal or immoral or unjustified. That depends. However, as alluded to earlier, in Anglo-American jurisprudence (and many others) murder is a legal term restricted to particular kinds of homicide, always (legally) unjustified (and typically intentional or grossly reckless). Other killings, such as self-defense, military actions, and government executions are homicides but they are not murder. (Accidental killings, such as in car accidents, are homicides, as well, but not murder and usually not even criminal.)
Distinguishing murder from other homicides is mostly a matter of legislation. The demarcation has been fairly stable historically for most homicides. (There are, of course, certainly disputes “at the edges” about whether some particular homicide, or type of homicide, “should be” classed as murder. There can also be questions about whether a particular homicide is a murder, but that’s a different matter.)
Murder is, by definition, never legally justified. It does not seem obvious (to me, at least) that there could be a murder that is nonetheless morally justified. If there is, it would surely be under most unusual circumstances. On the other hand, the morality of many homicides that are not murder seems more open to debate.
If there is, it would surely be under most unusual circumstances. On the other hand, the morality of many homicides that are not murder seems more open to debate. Under act Utilitarianism. Murdering someone who’s about to kill 100 people is very justified. So is pulling the lever on train track points to divert a trolley that will kill an innocent worker who was told there would be no trolleys on that line to save five smart-arse kids who played on the main-line even though they knew trolleys traveled there.
My point is not to support act utilitarianism it’s only to try and say that just saying Murder is never justifiable doesn’t confer objectivity. In the end what you say is murder someone else might, for seemingly good or justifiable reasons say is not murder. It seems we’ve defined Murder as never morally justifiable and have legislated it according to cultural norms but that in itself says something about culture and not to some platonic ideal or objective law about morality….
Ophelia, apologies if I’ve dragged, or have played a part in dragging, the topic into somewhere you’d not intended.
I’m a bit late – too late? – entering this discussion, but I want to return to something Russell Blackword said about subjectivism. Subjectivism, according to this, suggests that a morality is subjective when it takes account of subjective states, like needs, feelings, desires, etc.
I would rather say that there is something objective about beings who are characterised in this way, and that this is what makes morality objective. Moral subjectivism is the theory that our moral prescriptions are prescriptive, not that our needs, desires, hopes, etc., on what they are based is subjective, surely.
That’s why feeling strongly that murder is wrong is not enough to go on. It’s also why we can morally criticise those who don’t take the needs, wants, desires, and other subjective characteristic seriously, and go ahead anyway and kill the person. Is murder instrinsically wrong? Yes, because it’s the illegitimate termination of a life whose subjective states are important. And if it doesn’t feel wrong, then there’s something morally pathological about you.
That’s why its not feeling wrong to kill your sister when she talks to another man on the street is a morally atrocious thing to do, because in this case you do not consider her subjective states important, and that’s a very nasty way to be, and it’s objectively nasty. Such men are dangerous. And morality has to do with beings like that, who can ignore other people, or who can take other people and their subjective states into consideration when making decisions.
A human being with thoughts and no feelings is psychopath (although I get sociopath and psychopath mixed up), and we lock them up for our protection – since, psychopathic or not, we do take their subjective states seriously, we just don’t let them determine what they are allowed to do to others.
In this way “the putative objective moral sense [actually not cashed out] as the feeling capacity,” but as the thinking one, in which the feelings of both ourselves and others count in the calculation of what is right and wrong to do. A morality based simply on feeling states would be a very dangerous one to have around, if it was held by a significant number of people.
Should have reread my early morning post more carefully. The sentence reading: “Moral subjectivism is the theory that our moral prescriptions are prescriptive, not that our needs, desires, hopes, etc., on what they are based is subjective, surely,” should read: “Moral subjectivism is the theory that our subjective moral prescriptions are what are prescriptive, not that our needs, deisres, hopes, etc., on which these prescriptions are based are subjective, surely.” That our needs, desires, etc. are subjective goes without saying. Of course, this kind of moral egoism is often contradicted, as soon as it concerns something which will have an effect on the individual subject, who for himself is quite prepared to lay down prescriptions for himself and others, regardless of what other people may feel. Moral egoists are quite quick sometimes to say what others ought to do, where these have consequences for the moral egoist himself – which of course make moral egoism very unstable.
Eric, isn’t there are difference 1st order and 2nd order moral stuff? (Stuff being a philosophical term.) I can be hold that morality is subjective (i.e. there is not objective morality) and still hold that it is more than subjectively wrong to murder. Mackie said something like that in his book on Morality.
Brian —
Most statutes contain “justification” provisions (of which self-defense is a subset) for the use of deadly force, that would likely remove the situations you’ve described from being “murder.”
For example, here’s New York’s general “justification” language (complete with the usual legalese, but still intelligible):”
“Conduct which would otherwise constitute an offense is justifiable and not criminal when … such conduct is necessary as an emergency measure to avoid an imminent public or private injury which is about to occur by reason of a situation occasioned or developed through no fault of the actor, and which is of such gravity that, according to ordinary standards of intelligence and morality, the desirability and urgency of avoiding such injury clearly outweigh the desirability of avoiding the injury sought to be prevented by the statute defining the offense in issue. The necessity and justifiability of such conduct may not rest upon considerations pertaining only to the morality and advisability of the statute, either in its general application or with respect to its application to a particular class of cases arising thereunder.
I’m not, of course, suggesting that there is no difference between “legality” and “morality,” nor that legal compliance is always moral nor that moral compliance is always legal. I’m rather suggesting that the legal stuff is pertinent (when one is discussing “murder”) and can usefully be distinguished from the moral stuff.
Eric and others, this gets complicated. However, prescriptivism is a theory of moral semantics usually associated with Hare.
It says that when we make a moral judgment we are prescribing conduct, rather than making a claim about the world (or some other world, or the will of God, or whatever). It denies that moral judgments are claims about any facts. They are not the sorts of sentences that can be true or false. They have no espistemic content.
Subjectivist theories are not necessarily prescriptive. In particular, so-called “simple subjectivism” is not prescriptive.
According to simple subjectivism, when I say “Xing is wrong” I mean something like “I feel a certain sense of dislike or repugnance when I contemplate Xing”. That is clearly a claim that has epistemic content; it can be true or false (I might be lying). I am making a claim about something in the world, namely a claim about what I like or don’t like. It is subjective, however, because it irreducibly involves reference to a “subject”, that is “I”. But it is not a prescription; it’s a report about a factual matter.
Simple subjectivism doesn’t seem to have the resources to make morality non-arbitrary, but there are far more sophisticated subjectivist theories.
Note, though, that subjectivist theories are meta-ethical theories. They shouldn’t be confused with normative theories like utilitarianism. I think some of my earlier wording may have introduced a note of that sort of confusion.
Yes, you could be a utilitarian and also an objectivist. You could say that, irrespective of your own desires, values, etc., you are objectively bound (by the will of God or whatever) to maximise the preferences of everything in the universe, regardless of whether those things are also moral agents.
Subjectivism denies that that is how morality comes about. The point is that it is somehow based on the desires, etc., of the moral agents concerned.
I’m probably still not expressing this well. But maybe it’s enough if I say that subjectivist theories somehow ground morality in the psychology of the moral agents (which is always human beings, in practice so far). Objectivist theories seek something outside of this as the ultimate source of morality. E.g., the religious are always asking how we can live in a world where there is no real right or wrong, by which they seem to mean a right or wrong that would be the same regardless of human psychology.
But the terminology gets very confused, so I’ll leave it there, having probably muddied the waters further. :(
“A human being with thoughts and no feelings is psychopath”
Is that right? I thought a psychopath was rather a (human) being with no other-regarding feelings – not one with no feelings at all. As David M started things off by saying, a human with no feelings at all is hard even to imagine. (Though Antonio Damasio describes a guy who approaches that state, due to brain damage – he still has very interesting complicated thoughts, but they’re empty of feeling; the result is quite weird, as you’d expect.)
No probs about expanding the subject Brian; no waters muddied Russell. It’s all good.
Dammit! I see from the number that I accidentally deleted a comment from here. The god damn spammers are disguising the spam with sane-sounding sentences at the beginning of each post to make it impossible to pick out a repeated word so that I can delete all similar comments with one click – so I have to go through one at a time, looking at numbers and names, sorting the fake from the real. I try hard to be careful and to check and double-check – but still I got one wrong, which doubtless means I got more than one wrong. Dammit. Anyway if it was yours, sorry, and it wasn’t For Cause.
The Meta-ethical/normative distinction that Russell explained was what I was getting at in my 2nd order/1st order stuff comment. One can hold that morals are to be obeyed (normative) and not believe that morals exist (subjective) or that there are no moral rules (normative) but morality is objective (objective). So it gets quite confusing when saying morality is subjective. Do you mean that it’s the yeah-boo subjective morality (I think this is wrong because it makes me feel bad.) or that morals do not exist but it still makes sense to talk about moral theories type of subjective? Mackie spends the first chapter of his book (Ethics: inventing right and wrong) trying to clear this up.
Ophelia, I’m with you. A sociopath or psychopath (sociopath who’s gone violent I think) has feelings about himself (usually a guy) but others are treated as if they don’t have feelings or as objects. They’re a means to an end. But a sociopath certainly has feelings and emotions. I guess they’re just emotional solipcists.
but morality is objective (objective)
Facepalm! Holy redundancy batman!
What the psychopath lacks is a certain kind of sympathy for others, which can be formulated as a desire for the non-suffering of others or as placing value on the non-suffering of others.
While Hume, at least in the Treatise, sometimes seems to be promoting simple subjectivism, which is obviously an untenable meta-ethical theory, he’s surely right that our morality is built (at least in large part) on our sympathies.
But they’re built even more basically on simply caring at all, about anything. Sympathy is a kind of extrapolation, after all (and ‘do unto others’ or ‘how would you like it if’ is a kind of quick heuristic for that sort of extrapolation) and what it extrapolates from is what the self cares about. A being that didn’t care about anything at all wouldn’t have any basis from which to extrapolate to other people. We have to care about staying alive etc ourselves before we can even begin to realize that other people care about staying alive too. (Or change it to other goods if staying alive confuses the issue because of the obvious adaptiveness of a survival instinct.)
The DSM-IV lists these traits for anti-social personality disorder (psychopath):
1. failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
2. deceitfulness, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
3. impulsivity or failure to plan ahead;
4. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
5. reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
6. consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
Basically lacking in what some might call a moral compass. :)
Right – no other-regarding feelings, not no feelings at all.
Eric MacDonald has expressed a lot of what I was thinking about subjective vs. objective morality. I think, Russell, that you’re calling morality subjective because it depends on the existence of a particular type of psychology/subjectivity that is near-universal among humans. But I think, since the existence of that subjectivity is an objective fact, it’s fair to say morality based on that fact is objective.
Jenavir, yes I agree that subjectivity is an objective fact. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no distinction between meta-ethical thoories that depend, sooner or later, on the subjectivity (essentially the desires or values) of the moral agents concerned and those which claim that morality objectively binds the agents concerned without regard to their subjectivity.
Would it help you if I called the more sophisticated theories of the first kind “constructivist” theories? Would could then say that Hobbes, for example, was a constructivist, and I’d assert that the correct theory must be some kind of constructivist theory.
Separately, there’s a distiction between meta-ethical theories that see moral sentences as propositions with epistemic content and those that see them as commands, prescriptions, expressions (not reports as in simple subjectivism) of emotion, etc.
Is it allowable to see them as both? Or is that just lazy?
I get the distinction you’re making, Russell, and it makes sense. “Constructivist” makes me think of jargon-spouters who go around saying everything is a “social construction,” but that’s my own damage and not a legitimate objection.
I would echo OB’s question, though.
I’d like to join in this discussion, because I’m not happy where it’s heading, but I’m not in a condition now where I can intervene without going seriously off the rails – gout has got me in its clutches, and if you know what that is like, you know that it is almost impossible to think clearly under those circumstances. However, just let me say that valuing beings about whom emotive metaethical theories may be constructed, are also beings about which objective theories of moral right and wrong can be constructed – and perhaps ‘constructed’ is the wrong word, because I don’t want to talk about constructivist theories.
It seems to me that Aristotle probably provide a basis for developing an objective3 theory of morality for beings of this kind, and I suspect, with MacIntyre, though not perhaps for the same reasons (or perhaps so), the last few centuries of moral philosophy have been a bit of a detour in moral philosophy as a whole. I suspect that virtue theory can provide what might amount of a naturalistic theory of morals, which is objective in a much stronger sense than twentieth century moral theory can provide.
However, that’s all that I can say rationally at the moment. I just think it is wrong to take values as things which are subjective just because subjects are the only kinds of beings which can have values, but they are as objective as can be, and as naturalistic too.
Ophelia, I think that ordinary moral discourse is thoroughly confused, as is ordinary aesthetic discourse. A lot of the time people do seem to think that they are making the kinds of claims that are strongly objective in the sense I’m describing. I’m with Mackie that those sorts of claims can’t be true, so I agree with him that our ordinary moral discourse is riddled with error (though perhaps not quite as systematically as he thought). Often people do just seem to be prescribing conduct or expressing how they feel, or whatever. It’s a mess.
As I say we usually cope with the mess well enough, but sometimes I see an argument on the internet go totally off the rails when a substantive moral discussion turns into an argument about meta-ethics. That argument then gets no further than some very naive positions, and of course the more sophisticated positions (including mine) are highly controversial.
Eric, classical virtue theory is all about what dispositions of character are needed for individuals to flourish. Apart from the fact that the theory is based on how to satisfy a human need, it has the problem that concepts of what it is to “flourish” are, in turn, deeply contested. I quite like classical virtue theory, but it isn’t the basis for an objective morality in the strong sense of “objective”. I wish we could all give up any residual sense that we need something like that.
I’m not sure what you mean by saying that values are objective. It’s objectively a fact that people have values, but of course no one is denying that. I may value opera and my friend may value professional wrestling. In both cases it’s an objective fact that we value these things. The question is whether either of us is making a mistake about the world. I see no reason to think so. It’s just that I have a psychological disposition to like one kind of thing and she has a psychological disposition to like another.
Fortunately, we have evolved as social animals with a lot of psychological dispositions in common, e.g. to respond sympathetically to the suffering of others. That makes a lot of moral consensus possible. But it never surprises me that there’s also a lot of moral disputation beyond a certain core of agreement. Similar things could be said about aesthetics.
Russell: I would dispute that common moral discourse uses the “strong sense” of objective at all. The problem I have with your definition of “objective” morality is that it’s something hardly anyone would actually defend, including people who say they think morality is objective.