andrewducker | It's not a matter of rights

It's not a matter of rights

I've been thinking about morality, and while I know _my_ thoughts on it, and how they got there, I'm interested in what tack other people take. Specifically, for people that believe in absolute morality I'm curious as to what their basis/reasoning is.

I've therefore simplified the different approaches down to five options:

1) There is no absolute right and wrong - all morality is subjective opinion.
For those people who believe that all moral statements are claims about the way that the speaker would like the world to be. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates as "I wish people didn't engage in homosexual acts."

2) There is absolute right and wrong - I know what it is because God/God's representatives told me.
Which includes all of those people who draw their morality from religion. And know what right and wrong are either because they've learned from religious teachers or spoken directly to a divine entity. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates as "God says that people should not engage in homosexual acts."

The problem with this approach is that you're dependent on your religious teachers not having been fooled by their own religious teachers (or _their_ teachers, etc) and that the morality wasn't just made up by someone who then told them that God said so. If you heard it direct from God then this doesn't apply, but you might want to wonder about your sanity.

3) There is absolute right and wrong - I know what it is because it feels Right/Wrong to me.
Which covers all of those people who _know_ that stoning homosexuals to death is wrong, but this knowledge stems from internal intuition and feeling, not from external sources. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates to "Homosexuality is just plain wrong. I can tell."

The problem with this is that feelings aren't terribly trustworthy, and you if you feel that something is right, while someone else feels the exact opposite then you have to question why your feelings would have a direct link to Absolute Truth and theirs wouldn't.

4) There is absolute right and wrong - I don't know what they are though.
For those people convinced that there is an absolute morality, but don't maintain that they have access to said Universal Truth. You'd never hear these people say "Homosexuality is wrong.", instead they'd say "Homosexuality might be wrong, how would we know?"

The problem with this is that if you don't have access to Universal Truth then you don't have access to anything which could prove that there's such a thing as Universal Truth.

5) I have no idea if there is absolute right and wrong.
For those people that just don't know whether morality is objective or subjective. Those people aren't actually likely to have read this far, and probably don't think or care about this kind of thing, so who knows what they'd use to justify their stance on homosexuality. They might fill in the poll though, because polls are kewl.

[Poll #954176]

I am interested, by the way, and I'd love to know more. So do tell me how exactly you don't fit into any of the above categories - if nothing else I'll delight in pointing out exactly how you do :->

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I find it hard to fit into these obvious straw men, but given how you've described it I have to go with '3' for all that I'm philosophically much close to '1'.

I believe that there are a rather small core of actions which 'almost everybody' -- across all human societies -- finds pretty repellent. Breeding children for food, for example. (Repellent and also impractical and expensive, in that case). So unless you entirely reject the concept of absolute morality, there's this set of things that keep coming up, across ages and societies, as being not quite how people behave.

Note that very little in the way of consensual sexual activity would be in that category, and nor would capital punishment for major transgressions of societal norms.

Oh, I totally agree that there are certain things that are commonly considered wrong across all human societies. And that these things could, in general conversation, be referred to as Wrong, with a capital W.

I'm obviously a 1, but 3 is where I'd go for otherwise - there are things that I automatically feel are wrong, I just don't assume that just because I feel something it's true.

And I obviously agree with you on your final paragraph.

I agree. see below..

You left out "There is absolute right and wrong - it can be derived rationally without recourse to the supernatural".

Do you think such a statement is intellectually defensible?

It's no less intellectually defensible than options 2 and 3.

That doesn't answer my question. :-)

I think it's both defensible and as near a summary of my own views as there is on this page.

The entuire tradition of liberal humanism and secular human rights law is devoted to analysing and elaborating on this point of view.

1 is lazy thinking. It's easy to say "oh yes , that sounds right" but harder to live with the consequences. Is it only my opinion (and maybe most of my mates) that slavery is wrong, torture is worong, female circumcision is wrong, kiling the girls and not the boys in times of hardship is wrong? Would these things be right if we paid people for undergoing them or if the alternatives (eg terorism) are perceived as worse? That's the kind of places this sort of thinking goes. I'm a cultural relativist as far as sex and hobbies (in which I include religion and possibly freedom of expression) go - but not about these kind of issues. Morality IS different from squeamishness. I may not have any but I know that much :)

Is it only my opinion (and maybe most of my mates) that slavery is wrong, torture is worong, female circumcision is wrong, kiling the girls and not the boys in times of hardship is wrong?

They're not just your opinion. They're widely held opinions. I hold them myself, for instance.

OK here's the difference.

1 billion people think all the things above are wrong.

100,000 (possibly in one place, possibly scattered around) think they're ok.

You're saying that's fine, just a difference of opinion. Those people aren't wrong (or immoral or amoral), just differently valued.

I think in your heart you know that what you actually think is "those things are wrong". And you're right:)for reasons discused below.

Remember that in practice (and this is where pragmatism comes in) for people to be sanctioned for holding these values they generally have to PUT THEM INTO OPERATION. It is not necessarily absolutely immoral to think that faggots are evil (an issue of freedom of expression). It IS absolutely immoral to then torture them (or Christians, or Muslims) as punishment for their lifestyle (an issue covered by Art 3 of the ECHR, basic right not to be imhumanely treated).

A real civil rights lawyer would argue that freedom of expression is as fundamental as the right to life and the right not to be tortured. but I'm not so sure. No one can live as an autonomous and happy human being if they are in constant fear of their life or of terrible treatment. Therefore to threaten or inflict that without reason is absolutely wrong. I am not an expert on this - there are books and books on why many people have felt fundamental rights exist and which rights are fundamental. Read some of them before you take the easy/cool way out.

And no, morality is not a popularity contest either. In some cases the relative figures might be reversed.

And why is the above anything more than your opinion?

And how do I know that you wrote that? or that we're not living in an MMO and no one ever really dies or exists? WE have to play with what we've got..

I'm being completely serious.

You made several statements about how X _is_ absolutely wrong. But with no reason behind it, or argument as to why your beliefs are logical or anything more than your own personal opinions.

If you want me to believe that morality is absolute then you have to give me more than "If it's not then people can do bad things."

there are books and books on why many people have felt fundamental rights exist and which rights are fundamental. Read some of them before you take the easy/cool way out.

Oh, and I did. I studied morality at university. There's no absolute logic behind it. You have to, at some point, state axioms and work down from there. Those axioms are, by definition, subjective.

At no point is morality built into the universe. You can't detect it, it doesn't come from anywhere except the inside of people's heads.

morality occurs naturally in higher primates

higher primates occur naturally as part of the universe

ergo morality occurs naturally as part of the universe.

Oh. My. God.

Tell me you don't seriously mean that.

I mean, I can take it apart if you want me to, it's clearly fallacious, but I'd rather you told me you were just playing devil's advocate.

well, it had Kant convinced...do your worst.

Argument from authority butters no parsnips over in this neck of the woods :->

Your argument is equivalent to:

Liking Woody Allen movies occurs naturally in film buffs.

Film buffs occur naturally as part of the universe.

Therefore liking Woody Allen movies occurs naturally as part of the universe.

Which is technically true. But doesn't mean that there are natural laws involving Woody Allen. It merely means that people have an apparatus that allows them to make critical judgements, and that some of those judgements happen to involve Mr Allen.

You're conflating a human ability to make choices with the basis of those choices being itself a natural law. Which is a natural human thing to do. If I didn't like homosexuals (to go back to my original example), I'd like to think that this was because there was something intrinsically wrong with homosexuals, not just that I was wired by my nature/nurture into a dislike of them. But the morality is in _me_, not in the universe outside of me.

Compare that to, say, colour. People have an apparatus for detecting light and making decisions about it. They can spot "Red" and "Orange", and those are natural intrinsic properties of light (insofar as they are semantic shortcuts for describing particular frequencies of light - the frequencies themselves do exist, and can be detected using mechanical means). Colour is a property of the light itself.

If I declare a liking for Red and a dislike of Blue, on the other hand, while I might like to think that Red is a better colour than Blue, that superiority is only in my relationship with the colour, not in the colour itself. The ability to make the choice is a natural part of me (and thus a natural part of the universe), but there is nothing about the universe that makes Red better than Blue, any more than there is anything about the universe that makes kissing babies better than hugging them. In fact the whole concept of "Better" doesn't really apply to colours, or to morals. Things are better _for_ something, or superior _at_ something.

If I want certain outcomes (more babies, for instance) then I can make pragmatic decisions. And (most) people have certain inbuilt prejudices. But just because they've been built into people that doesn't make them any kind of absolute. It's not like people are the centre of the universe.

Most of your argument, particualrly your dichotomy between absolute and subjective, rests on the assumption that "we" are not part of the universe; that the inside of our heads is somehow a seperate and distinct territory from the rest. For example, to quote you:

"At no point is morality built into the universe. You can't detect it, it doesn't come from anywhere except the inside of people's heads"

The work that this distinction does in your argument is to set up two distinct territories: an "outside", really existing, absolute and immutable universe Where The Real Things Are; and an "inside" subjective world where things are absolutely relative unless based on the immemorial certainties of "The Universe", which is out there, distinct, seperate.

Having established this essentially Cartesian ontology, you then elaborate an epistemology in which knowldege can only be derived from logical dedcutions from obesrved physical laws describing The Universe, the cold hard thing "outside" us. Of course, this mode of knowledge formation will only allow of a very limited kind of physics and maths. Finding nothing else there, morality is inferred to be "inside", and "subjective".

In fact, its interesting to look at the work you make the word "subjective" do. First of all it maintains this distinction between inside and outside; between the Absolute and the absolutely relative. Indeed, "absolutely relative" is the main sense in which you use it, so that if something is not found "out there" and Real, then it must be "inside" and of less truth value. Thats the other bit of work you make "subjective" do; its denotes a kind of devalued knowledge, inadequate in comparison to the Better, Real Knowledge about things Out There. As such "subjective" has both an epistemilogical and moral function in your argument.

Which is all fine, quite a few people live in that universe, one where Substance and Subject are considered as different kinds of things, different realms. Personally, I don't. I think there are problems with it, a whole suitcase full of which are packed into your statement "Colour is a property of the light itself". Suffice to say that the amount of blood spilt over that sentence is enough (for me) to empirically infer that your position is neither obvious nor unproblematic.

No, I live in a world where the distinction between inside and outside is untenable, where the most remarkable thing is not that Substance and Subject are seperate but that the former somehow became and continues to become the latter: that subjectivity is a property of the universe, all our knowledge of the universe is mediated through it, and the moral world is part of that.

Or as Fiona Apple put it.

“He said 'it's all in your head' and I said 'so's everything' but he didn't get it.”

Of course you are the centre of the universe Andrew. How else could you see it?

I'm clearly not explaining it properly, clearly.

Yes, the things in my head are part of the universe. But the attributes which I put on other things from the inside of my head are not part of those other things.

Objects have length. They have mass. They have colour. These are intrinsic properties of the objects.

They do not have a morality. Or rather, _I_ have a morality, but it refers to my opinions of other objects, not to the objects themselves. When I say "That person is evil." what I am saying is "I object to that person (or their acts)." - the statement doesn't actually refer to the person/act themselves - the object/act/person doesn't have a morality intrinsically, it's extrinsically assigned to it.

So yes, I, absolutely, _have_ morality. But it's part of me, not part of the things I assign it to. The error people frequently mistake is to think that morality is part of the object rather than the subject.

Is that any clearer?

no, really, you are very clear...all i was doing was elucidating the ontology and epistemology implicit in your position, which is still at work here: with all the extrinsic vs intrinsic; subject versus object; fact versus value.

Im not even saying its wrong, just, in its take on morality, a culturally relative, classic white-male-western position, and certainly not the only game in town.

Of course it's not the only game in town. People believe all sorts of things that are wierd and unprovable.

And the position that you fed back to me in your last comment is not at all the same as the one in my response. Which is why I started over.

Because I'm not trying to claim that things in my head don't matter or exist (which is what you seemed to think, from your response). Merely that they are in my head.

And yes, I believe that there are facts, and opinions on those facts. So far as I can tell this isn't even slightly a strange view. In fact pretty much everyone believes this to be the case. The arguments generally come over which beliefs are factual and which are value-based.

between the subjective and the absolute, between fact and value, most of human life is lived:

Psychology, anthropology, the wisdom of ascetics, of therapists who have helped people overcome suffering; the wisdom of those who have gone through extreme suffering; the wisdom of all those who have spent time trying to help people get better or to better themselves; wisdom as distinct from knowledge; the embodied wisdom of social institutions that mean there are many many hard to remove barriers between you and me and barbarity; the Sittlichkeit of daily life; the emerging science of the Social Mind that clearly shows we are, from the word go, wired to be intersubjective, co-dependent, co-operative; that there are better and worse places and societies in which to live; the feeling you get of guilt when you know you have treated someone badly; the Law; sociology; social psychology; politics; ethics; virtue; social cognition; embodied cognition; self harm and self care; the moral development of children; trying to be a better person, a good neighbour, friend, lover...

i really could go on and on. I know of almost no-one who would say all of the above, none of which can be based on Absolute Fact, is entirely subjective, or that there are no ways of making meaningful distinctions within these bodies of knowledge and wisdom. Its where we live, and knowledge of that habitat, knowledge of how to live, of how to treat oneself and other people, is what I understand as Wisdom. I've got a lot of respect for it, and I know it when I see it....

but hey, maybe I'm just a big softie at heart. Maybe I should be waiting for proof before I start shooting my mouth of to myself, my clients and friends about how they should treat themselves and other people. After all, who am I to be spreading the inside of my head around the place? What do I know? Apparently nothing...

I think you misunderstand me. I'm tilting myself against the absolute, the "Right" and the "One and Only Answer" and thus in favour of the answer that works for the individual, the subjective and the intersubjective, the one that can be taught from person to person and adjusted to fit the uniqueness of each of them. I'm against the idea that there is one true morality that we must fit to, and in favour of the idea that there are many different approaches that we can find value in.

In saying "There is no Answer." I am also saying "There are many answers, find the one that fits you best."

I'm not an idiot you know. None of what you've said is new to me, and I've agreed with narly all of it. I really don't see why it is you think I don't, because I haven't said anything to the contrary...

hey, i know you are not an idiot, i just cant resist a good dichotomoy, thats what gets me tilting

but more than that, a lot of what i said was new to me, it was useful, for me, to work out the distinction between knowledge and wisdom; to realise that the latter has become de-valued as a form of know-how; to think about what happens when you apply the criteria of science to the ethical life, and how the unworkability of doing so has meant that there has been hardly any Ethics in philosophy from the enlightenment onwards; how ethics was shunted into religion and has since foundered with it etc etc

Its not tham i'm disagreeeing or anything, its more like its been a useful forum to work out what I think, using your texts as a spur and sparring partner. I'm now trying to work out how wisdom and knowledge are in turn distinct from understanding, which has lead me back, as usual, to Judaeism and to the textual exegises of this:

"By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures." (Proverbs 24:3-4)

Next stop Kabbalah. so thank you :->

I agree entirely on the point of ethics being abandoned. People hit "It's all subjective" and stop there, rather than trying to rebuild ethics as something useful if not True (if you see what I mean).

A lot of people seem to be stuck thinking that if their point of view isn't Right then it it's valueless, whereas we ought to be trying to teach people that their opinion is important in and of itself (insert about 5000 caveats here regarding the stupidities that occur when people take this too far - i.e. Sokal's "Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity").

And yes - sparring is incredibly useful. I have to remind myself that the point of arguing is not to win, it's to help all parties think about the problem.

As a side note, I spent large amounts of the last couple of days feeling twinges of fear whenever an email arrived. Leftovers from days of horrifically hurtful arguments, but nowadays thankfully under control and diminishing, rather than controlling my reactions. Feels like quite a positive step.

To phrase that first sentence differently:

Yes, there are all sorts of beliefs about morals. But most of them start from incoherent positions and don't actually have good arguments to back them up.

I spent a lot of time in confusion regarding the whole area, triggered by some study of it at university. It took cutting back all the way and starting over at "What do we mean by the word morals" and building up from there to clear things up. Doing so also highlighted how much argument in the area was because people didn't actually seem to know the answer to that question.

Yes. Mostly because I forgot that there are people who believe this.

Lacking a device to measure morality, and as logic can only transform statements, not generate them from nowhere, what would you derive it from?

You could logically state that something is an absolute wrong if there are no compelling and reasonable arguments in its favor.

It would be hard to find a leg to stand on for the pro-breeding-children-for-food camp, since it would be difficult, expensive, not healthful (diseases transmitted from eating human flesh), slow, ineffective (you'd have to feed the breeder, and the birth cycle is too long to be worth it), as well as morally repugnant. Since the effects are horrible and the benefits non-existent, it would be pretty obvious that this would be an absolute wrong.

Murder, on the other hand, has compelling pro-arguments in some situations, so it would not be an absolute wrong. Perhaps if more restrictions were placed on it (murder without good reason).

So everything is wrong unless proven right?

And one of your arguments against eating children being moral is that it's morally repugnant.

All of your other arguments would work just as well against eating blowish. Which is silly, but not actually morally wrong, I'd say.

So everything is wrong unless proven right?
Err, no. I don't see how that follows from "You could logically state that something is an absolute wrong if there are no compelling and reasonable arguments in its favor." It would make more sense to say that everything is right until overwhelming evidence shows it's wrong.

And one of your arguments against eating children being moral is that it's morally repugnant.
I don't think moral repugnance is a logical reason for declaring something an absolute wrong. But that also doesn't mean that the natural reluctance of our species to kill it's own young doesn't exist, either.

But it's a contrast to something like killing another human, which the vast majority find to be morally repugnant, but which is occasionally necessary (self-defense, war, capitol punishment are obvious areas in which it becomes clear that there is too much grey area to be considered absolute.)

Actually, it follows exactly.

You say that "Something is... wrong if there no...arguments in its favour." which is exactly the same as "Something is wrong unless proven right." (assuming that it's proven right by arguments in its favour).

I agree that there are common things across cultures that people generally find repugnant. That doesn't make them absolute though - just commonly held.

You say that "Something is... wrong if there no...arguments in its favour." which is exactly the same as "Something is wrong unless proven right." (assuming that it's proven right by arguments in its favour).

That would be more convincing if the vast majority of things didn't have arguments in their favor. It is quite difficult to find anything that has no argument in its favor.

That doesn't make them absolute though - just commonly held.
I specifically said that didn't make them absolute - but it made them a counter argument, along with being unpractical, unhealthy, and the rest of the list.

However, you're right - it's one of the things a fair chunk of people believe, and should have been in the poll. It's clearly been too long since I hung out with people who did believe it :->

I am tempted to say there is an absolute right and wrong that could be derived rationally by omniscient and perfectly objective beings, but since we humans are no such thing (and because I doubt the existence of such beings) we're pretty much on our own and left to do the best we can...

I refer you to my comment on his comment...

Hmm, yes. That's probably what I believe, but it's not very defensible when I think about it, so feel free to file me under (3).

Or perhaps I believe in some sort of evolutionary morality - that any species that does well must have a similar morality because that's what works, and you could call that absolute morality because it's the only one that can ever survive.

Sadly, the more I think about that, the more I think that the evolutionary morality is at odds with what I'd like it to be. So maybe I'm a subjective moralist after all...

I kind of want to say that there both is and isn't absolute right and wrong. Something can be wrong in an objective way, while still being, subjectively, in a certain context, the right thing to do, because it's not *as* wrong as the alternative.

That's fine though. If you want to say that "punching people in the face is absolutely worth -10 points on the badness scale, while raping babies is worth -540,000" then that's still an absolute statement. It's only a subjective one if you're saying that you and I might differ about the points we assign, and it would be a matter of opinion, neither of us would be right.

Yeah, point. Hmm. I'm veering towards answer number four in that case, I think - there might be an absolute morality, but it's pretty much unknowable, so we all just have to do our best to figure it out.

..though I would emphasis the "it's unknowable" rather than the "I don't know". Because I don't think anyone else knows either.

Might I ask, in the spirit of curiosity, why you think there is one?

I think for reasons close to what

bohemiancoast and

wolflady26 have said, because some things are pretty much universally seen as wrong, and there are very few good arguments for doing them.

I have an analogy to Chomsky's Universal Grammar percolating, but I don't have time to think it out properly just now, so it probably has a huge hole in it somewhere.

Oooh, Universal Grammar. I love it when you talk dirty :->

There are almost certainly such things built into us. Which would make some morality cross-cultural and near-universal. But that would just make it human, not absolute. If you see what I mean.

And would we have to define people who differently as non-human?

Ooh, controversial. I hate talk about inhuman crimes and comparisons to animals :S so maybe not...

I'm not sure I would make the distinction between "human" and "absolute" - I mean, I can see why you are, but I was thinking about an absolute morality for humans, I suppose. But I think I could argue that the Universal Morality could be in animals and theoretical gods and everything else as well, so could be absolute. Hmm. Now I want to meet some aliens and check if the universal grammar applies to their languages too :D It would help pad out my theory...

Does your universal grammar apply to horses?

I am somewhere between the first and the last. If you find morality a trait in all sentient beings, then perhaps we could get somewhere, but alas you can mangle many statistics with a sample size of 'one' :-).

"Homosexuality is wrong." translates as "God says that people should engage in homosexual acts."

Surely you need a "not" in one of those sentences?

Anyway, I'll go for 1 with the proviso that you replace "subjective" with "intersubjective" and accept that it's not about what world people would wish to see, but the one they do see. Because, while the law or the norm may be a "construct", it's a construct you get in a lot of trouble for deconstructing or choosing to disregard!

Through a miracle of livejournal-edit technology I've negated God's will.

I agree that some questions are about what people do see, but when it comes to morality, it really does seem to be a case of "I wish the world was such that that act was not possible.", not that they see the act as having not occured. I suspect I'm misunderstanding your meaning though.

I do agree that intersubjectivity and culture definitely inform our moral choices.

I would propose a 6th alternative:

Right and wrong are socially created values that are designed to allow a smooth(ish) functioning society. E.g. Murder is considered very anti-stability, hence big taboo, as is lying. But something not as directly societal threatening (even if questionable) like trident is less taboo.

A good example is homosexuality. Where this is not seen as a challenge to society it’s not a big issue. Where it’s seen as an attack on society, it is.

I'm looking at it from a purely personal point of view - and as no culture is entirely homogenous (and most contain huge swathes of differing opinions), it would be very hard to maintain that morality is purely societal in nature.

True. You would also have to assume some biological pre programming and some practical moral developement, e.g. lying is bad as dont know where you stand. then the wide variation in morality could be seen as simply the application of different social structures taking effect. As there are so many different sources during developement, the final moral outlook will invariably be to a certain level unique. This can be seen by childrens morality largly following parents with some variation. The exception to this is "rebels", but they can be seen as reactionary and taking a deliberatly opposite view.

I think people often overlook evolution as source for metaphysical answers.

2 and 3 are more or less the same thing!

Kind of...

Oooh, controversial.

Permission to steal your icon?

fine by me, I didn't make it though!

I'd go for number three, but with the rejoinder that I know other people don't agree with my absolute beliefs, and I accept that they have equally absolute beliefs. I also don't necessarily follow mine.

I don't think it'd make sense for my own beliefs to be anything less than absolute to me. I have no desire to make other people follow them. Other people can do whatever the heck they like.

Hm, that's not as clear as it could be. I think that my beliefs are absolute. I honestly think that the things which I view as wrong (in a serious way, not when I'm being over-the-top about, say, art rock bands) really are absolutely wrong. There are some trangressions of these beliefs that will affect my friendship with people, or at least change my view of them. I don't seek to convert them however, but it's definitely stronger than some damn wishy-washy subjective view.

If all my beliefs were rigid laws of society, it'd be terrible, since even I don't follow my beliefs - I do things that I know to be wrong.

Hmm.

I view my morals as subjective. But if I caught someone nibbling on babies it would still strongly affect my friendship with them :->

Presumably you might entertain the notion of extenuating circumstances, or of it being an intriguing cultural difference for you to make a friends-list-dividing livejournal post about?

I, on the other hand, would mentally condemn them, then ask how it tasted with a sort of guilty expression.

I believe in the absolute wrong...of polls.

I'm somewhere between "God/God's representatives" and "it feels right", I think. However, while I *do* think there's absolute right and wrong on some issues, mostly I think it's more complicated than that; things like homosexuality and gender roles vary widely from culture to culture, so it's not as easy to talk about absolutes there. Something like murder, on the other hand, is pretty much universally condemned, even with exemptions for things like war, self-defence, and (sometimes) People Who Are Not Real People by the rules of the society in question, and I do think that it is absolutely objectively wrong.

I go about my daily life as a 3 but really I'm a 1. I live like a 3 because society allows me to live like a 3 and living like a 3 makes me comfortable, but I'm aware that if it came to the crunch I'd probably eat a baby sandwich.

Oh, me too. Well, maybe not a baby sandwich. But I certainly act like a 3 most of the time, with an underlying awareness of 1.

Incidentally:
http://ljconstantine.com/babycakes/page1.htm

YOU'VE SET UP A WEIRD dichotomy here, between "absolute" and "subjective"; most human phenomena lie in the bell curve inbetween those two extremes

ONLY PHYSICAL LAWS would rank as absolute, and even their we've got observer effects and local effects.

ONLY DREAM STATES are almost entirely without intersubective and objectyive input, but even they rely on previous experience of the world and other people.

MAYBE YOU ARE ASKING: is morality innate or acquired. Its pretty clear its innate, mediated by hormones like oxytocin, and necessary for the survival of the species.

IT IS ALSO PRETTY CLEAR that is is based on an intersubjectivity that strictly defines in groups and out groups.

THE BASIC MORAL LAW, biologically speaking is: preserve the in group and destroy or avoid the out group.

THATS ABOUT AS CLOSE to a human absolute as you will get. Without it none of us would be here.

MAYBE YOU ARE ASKING: is morality innate or acquired.
Nope, I was asking whether people believed that morality was objective or subjective. Because while it's clear to me that it's subjective a large number of people the world over believe that morality is objective. Of course a large chunk of those believe it was passed down from God.

I was therefore wondering how many of my friends group did, and whether they beleived that their access to said moral absolute was external (God or God's representatives) or internal (their own perfect moral sense).

oh well, if you are interested heres what i believe

1. Moral responses are hard-wired, objective facts, mediated by substances (hormones promoting trust and kindness) and structures (mirror neurons and the pre frontal cortex). They are adaptive andnecessary for the species; their absence is a pathology.

2. They are, like language, innately wired and intersubjectively elaborated. The basic "phoneme" of morality is the groups that one belongs to. Morality is about Us and Them. You can wire up peoples brains, and see them neurologically "blank" people not identified as part of the tribe. Thus, in the run up to wars and Rwanda like situations, the drive to first of all designate the to-be-killed as "others".

so far so objective

3. Like any other basic human drive (sex, fear, aggression), we have evolved the capacity to respond to stimuli and symbols that did not intially evoke the response. As we can be phobic of buttons and get turned on by leather, so we can decide to get worked up about female circumcision in Nigeria. To care for people outside of ones immediate group is a luxury of evolved society, one that can dissolve alarmingly quickly - e.g. Yugoslavia.

4. I think, therefore, morality is an obectively existing drive that is intersubjectively elaborated early on in development. In highly civilised people it can expand beyond it's immediate remit, but can be equally quickly rescinded.

SO THATS WHY i have problems with your scheme. Where do I fit into it?

What you are saying (and apologies if I'm misunderstanding) is that it's objective that there are such things as morals.

Which I'm not going to disagree with even slightly :->

The "Us/Them" thing is something I agree with - and have bumped into a few times before. It's inextricably linked to Dunbar's Number, and amusingly explained in Inside the Monkeysphere".

Vegetarians, for instance, clearly believe that all animals are more "Us" than carnivores do.

What I was asking about was individual ideas of right and wrong. i.e. "Do you believe that your morals are objective?" which you clearly don't - you believe they're opinions, albeit ones based on both nature (for their basics) and nurture (for the range and complexities which they change to cover).

My question is thus orthagonal to the answer you're giving, in that I (effectively) asked "What movies do you think are cool?" and you responded with "The definition of cool is intersubjective and dependent on both innate and cultural characteristics." - a fascinating topic in itself, but not actually what I was talking about. Try being less meta next time :->

you didnt really ask what movies we thought were cool, you asked if we thought our judgments about cool were absolute or subjective, and again the answer has to be neither...

what I am trying to point out is that your question enacts a category mistake; you are applying a logic/asking a question that whilst it might make sense to ask about Maths (do you think Number is an absolute or a subjective phenomenon), doesnt make sense as applied to morality.

That category mistake is clearest when you summed up my position as saying that I believe moral judgments are "opinions"...far from it.... to say that your moral judgments are subjective opinions is rather like saying your erectile response to naked ladies is an opinion, or your fear of wild bears is subjective....

i think that, in a strict Wittgenstinian sense, it makes absolutely no sense to apply the axis/category absolute vs subjective to morality.

so i agree, we are arguing orthogonally, its just that i think you are the one that needs to change axis to understand the phenomenon under discussion (*appends smiley face to signal In Groupness*) :->

to say that your moral judgments are subjective opinions is rather like saying your erectile response to naked ladies is an opinion, or your fear of wild bears is subjective....

Which they are. They're personal responses based on both nature and nurture. What else is an opinion but that?

And I still think you'll find that there are a fair number of people out there who strongly believe that moral values are absolute, something built into the fabric of the universe or declared by God. That eating babies isn't just distasteful, or frowned upon, or that people abhor it, but Wrong (with a capital W).

And I still think you'll find that there are a fair number of people out there who strongly believe that moral values are absolute

oh, dont get me wrong, I agree, its just that i think that they are as wrong as the ones who says they are purely subjective...neither position illuminates its subject, or not in a way that I find useful. IMHO, of course.

Oh, I agree that it's grossly simplified. I was mostly looking to find out how many people believed that morality was absolute. The answer being 16%, which was lower than I was expecting.

I was quite disturbed by the responses from surliminal, and am currently writing a proper response in the form of an entry by itself. I could have sworn that the idea of rational morality went out about a hundred years ago.

I gave up because as THA says your categorisations fail to respond to my analysis. It was a waste of time.

I've gone with no.1 because personally I feel that morality is subjective to the society you're brought up in. I know my own morals and try to live by those, but who's to say that those morals would be the same as those held by someone who is living in a completely different culture.

Or, indeed, in exactly the same culture. Because I can guarantee that your neighbours have different morals to you :->

Morality is something that is subjective in my opinion and suggesting someone is "wrong" believe something is in itself immoral in my book.

It is difficult to give examples and morality covers a number of subjects but in order to explain why there is no absolute I will use Murder. Most people would believe that Murder is an absolute wrong. But behind that statement there is quickly a number of contradictions.

If someone has a gun pointed at you and you have the opportunity to kill them before they kill you, I would say that is morally acceptable. If someone is pointing a gun at someone else and you have the chance to kill them first, I would say this is also morally acceptable. So right off the bat I have conceded that at some points, murder is acceptable.

Then there is what most would consider dodgy ground. If someone kills your lover in cold blood, is it morally wrong to kill them if you get the chance? The law definitely states it is, but I would be morally at odds over the subject, If it were me having lost someone I cared about deeply, I can't say for certain I would not do it or regret it afterward.

I know this is only one aspect of morality, but the value we place on human life is pretty intrinsic to our moral code. I'm probably oversimplifying it somewhat, but I fail to see how is there a clear cut code that we should follow; we all have to find our own way and live true to what we believe. Our interactions and observations help shape our opinions and morals and we should keep an open mind where possible.

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It's not a matter of rights

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