From a different perspective: How would you approach the position that morality is totally derived from human neurological structure? That is, the basis for human social interaction is entirely based in the physical, and thus so are morals......My perspective, laid bare, is this: Moral standards are indeed based in the structure of the human brain, and arise naturally from patterns in human social behavior. So then morality cannot be called objectively true nor objectively false, it is entirely emotive and psychological.

Zetetic11235:
What the objectivist insists on, however, is the existence of a further, nonconventional morality, which is true independent of human cognition, and which can serve as a standard for assessing the merits and shortcomings of conventional morality.

In other words, objectivism argues that conventional morals are fallible and can sometimes be mistaken.

Well, what fixes the objective content of natural laws in physics, biology, and chemistry?

Certainly not our say-so.

Further, those facts would have remained facts even if human beings had never existed--even if there never were any beings capable of conceptualizing them and rendering them into symbolic language.

More importantly, the physical laws governing those facts existed long before us, and will continue to exist, long after we are gone. These laws are objectively true because they obtained prior to, and independent of, human opinion.

Here's three examples: (1) the laws of logic and rationality are normative. They tell us what we ought to do. But no one invented them.

(3) If you are faced with contradictory propositons, and know that one of them is false, then you must accept the other.

Given that we have now examples of (nonmoral) normative laws that are objectively true, it is becoming increasingly plausible that objective (moral) laws might exist as well.

Zetetic11235:
Given that we now have examples of (nonmoral) normative laws that are objectively true, it is becoming increasingly plausible that objective (moral) laws might also exist as well. I certainly haven't proven that to be the case--far from it. Proofs are notoriously difficult to come by in philosophy. But I believe I have cast sufficient doubt on the assertion that because conventional moral principles are the product of brain activity, this must rule out the possibility of an objectively true morality obtaining independently of human cognition.

I do wonder, Value Ranger, if you mix up your word processor with your food processor at times. :bigsmile:

And I wonder why burgeoning philosophers here go round-n-round without straight solves...

Well I reckon I put up a fairly good rebuttal but it was more or less brushed off. I still maintain there is no object without a subject, but that is a metaphysical argument and I don't think it will get any traction here.

Of course nobody believes any of this kind of thing anymore. It is all just ancient history.

every kind of belief is reducible to brain activity

If you insist on certainty as a precondition for knowledge, as Descartes did, then get ready for some disappointment, because you can know almost nothing. You can know that you exist (cogito ergo sum), so long as you are thinking, though you can't know anything much else about yourself.

Maybe because life is a spiral an not a straight line? Just guessing, but I don't see any straight lines in nature but I see lots and lots of spirals. Spirals are much more flexible and easier to shape into new things. Straight lines, are rather inflexible. I prefer flexibility. What do you prefer?

Rich

Me: Well, what fixes the objective content of natural laws in physics, biology, and chemistry?

You: Good question. I have never known such to be fixed. It seems like it is constantly changing. Something new is being discovered all the time. I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal today that discussed how biologists once thought up until the 80s, that hearing hair follicles, could not regenerate, and then they discovered fish (and probably others species) where it could. Special Relativity totally upended the concept that time is constant in all frames of reference, and Quantum Physics upended the notion that light was a particle, or that light was a wave. It is neither. But what is it? The laws of nature seem to be constantly changing, beginning in ancient times.

Or maybe it is. Rupert Sheldrake suggests that the laws of nature are habits subject to change. Seems like an interesting idea to me in light of my own observations that science is constantly (and I mean day by day) changing its mind on things.

But, follow the scientific literature (particularly biological or medical) and observe how invariably new studies come out contradicts some prior study (this is by necessity of the profession, which has to come up with new stuff in order to survive), and you may not be so convinced about laws as you are now. They change - though some may think they don't if they ignore all of the constant new developments.

Me: In other words, objectivism allows that conventional morals are fallible and can sometimes be mistaken.

You: Yep, something that we have to live with.

Why is there a straight line integrated with a spiral in a caduceus?

Why do effects evolve from direct causal sequences (chains, sequitur, metrics, measurement, philosophy, etc.)? How do species spin-off from the core equation? How do centripetal and centrifugal physics forces play out in the balance of philosophy and genetics?

Many people, while voicing skepticism about objective morality, nevertheless embrace views that entail a commitment to its existence, as you have just shown here. Unless you are a moral objectivist, you cannot acknowledge with consistency that conventional morality is fallible. Moral subjectivism's and moral relativism's picture of ethics as a wholly conventional enterprise entails a kind of moral infallibilty for individuals or societies. No matter the content of the ultimate commitments of either individual sentiment or collective endorsement, these can never be wrong. By rejecting the possibility of objective morality, you implicitly acknowledge that our own basic moral commitments can never be wrong. We, or our society, are morally infallible, at least with regard to what we hold dear, and the same holds for other individuals and other societies (moral equivalence). According to subjectivism and relativism, the ultimate decrees of conventional morality cannot be mistaken. One might, of course, disagree with an element of a competing conventional morality, but that doesn't signal any error on its part. If conventional morality is the final word in ethics, then the wholly consistent Nazi, or the flawlessly rational terrorist, who perfectly embody their own conventional morality, are also perfectly morally virtuous, without moral flaw. Besides, there are no objective standards that could serve as the basis for measuring errors between competing conventional moralities. In other words, you cannot reject moral objectivism and yet state with consistency that conventional morality is fallible. If the answers to moral questions are given just by personal opinion (subjectivism), or by collective endorsement (relativism), then any moral view is just as (im)plausible as any other. If subjectivists or relativists are right, then the basic views of all individuals or all societies are morally on par with one another, on equal moral footing. In conclusion, you cannot consistently hold to either the subjectivist or relativist view of moral equivalence between competing conventional moralities and also submit that conventional morality is fallible, period.

Zetetic11235:



Throughout human history, individuals and societies have constructed moral standards to govern their behavior and to give expression to their normative viewpoints. We call the fruits of these efforts conventional morality. Conventional morality is created by us, for us, and serves an adaptive evolutionary role. Properly understood, there's no denying that conventional morality is reducible to brain activity. In fact, every kind of belief is reducible to brain activity, so there's nothing really unique about identifying moral beliefs with cognition. Beliefs of every kind have in common this feature of deriving from brain activity. No moral objectivist denies that conventional morality, as a set or system of beliefs, just is the product of brain activity. But our beliefs, moral or otherwise, might be objectively true for all that. My belief that the Rockies are taller than the Appalachians is totally derived from brain activity, to be sure, but it also happens to be the case that my belief is objectively true.

So what the moral objectivist insists on is the existence of a further, nonconventional morality, which is true independent of human cognition, and which can serve as a standard for assessing the merits and shortcomings of conventional morality. In other words, objectivism allows that conventional morals are fallible and can sometimes be mistaken.
Much resistance to moral objectivism stems from puzzlement about how there could be nonconventional or objective moral standards that are not human creations. If brain activity doesn't fix the content of objective morality, then what does? Well, what fixes the objective content of natural laws in physics, biology, or chemistry? Certainly not our say-so. Indeed, our brains give us the vocabulary for expressing physical laws in symbolic language, but our brains aren't the final arbiters on their objective truth. Imagine a world prior to ourselves and the existence of any language.
There actually was such a world--this one. There were still countless facts about the earth's nature, despite the absence of anyone who could have said what they were. Further, those facts would have remained facts even if human beings had never existed--even if there never were any beings capable of conceptualizing them and rendering them into symbolic language. More importantly, the physical laws governing those facts existed long before us, and will continue to exist, long after we are gone. These laws are objectively true because they obtained prior to, and independent of, human opinion.

So here's the point. Since objectively true physical laws governed the world and everything in it long before the emergence of brain activity, it must be true that not every principle expressible in symbolic language is necessarily dependent on, or reducible to, or totally derived from, human cognition.

Gravity, which we discovered, operated long before we hit the scene, even though the principle of gravity, a human invention, "is based in the structure of the human brain." Now, if we can have objectivity independent of brain activity, and if we can have objective physical laws independent of brain activity, why can't we have objective moral laws independent of brain activity? More importantly, what is it about moral laws which exclude them from being objectively true in the same sense as physical laws?
One common response runs as follows: while scientific or physical laws are objectively true, normative laws--those that tell us what we ought to do, or how we should behave--are altogether different in nature. Even if we concede the existence of objectively true physical laws, we still need some reason to think that moral laws, which are obviously normative, are also objectively true. So, what the moral objectivist needs to show in order to build a plausible case for the possibility of objective moral laws are examples of objective normative laws, since objective normative laws would contain the same essential features objective moral laws would also contain (as opposed to objective physical laws).

Here's three examples: (1) the laws of logic and rationality are normative. They tell us what we ought to do.

but the law of non-contradiction, which states that something cannot be both P and not-P, obtains independently of human opinion--indeed obtained long before humans ever hit the scene.

(2) If you have excellent evidence for one claim, and this entails a second claim, then you should believe that second claim. (3) If you are faced with contradictory propositons, and know that one of them is false, then you must accept the other.

But I believe I have cast sufficient doubt on the assertion that because conventional moral principles are the product of brain activity, this must rule out the possibility of an objectively true morality obtaining independently of human cognition.

There is a problem here; the Rockies are taller than the Appalachians may be a result of brain activity, but it is still also a result of sensory input. It is strictly a posteriori knowledge. There is not necessarily anything about the architecture of the brain that affects the truth of that statement, neither is it the case that such a fact is present in the brain prior to the requisite sensory input, as I have claimed is possibly true with moral standards. So the knowledge of moral standards would not be a posteriori, or even a priori, but totally implicit and emotive. The consequences of morals may be synthetic a priori, but this is not the case of the morals themselves. I am afriand that this seems to me to amount to little more than a straw man.

A questionable and difficult to defend claim. Please further expaciate so that I might see your reasoning. I fail to see how logic can be considered normative. I consider logic to be descriptive, I also consider physics to be descriptive.

(2) If you have excellent evidence for one claim, and this entails a second claim, then you should believe that second claim. (3) If you are faced with contradictory propositons, and know that one of them is false, then you must accept the other.

points.

Rich

A caduceus, like any other metric, has a lifeline origin X, and a death, Y. Between these two points, is the singular myriad of choice points (see: matrix theory) that evolve from The Law of Opposites, to a myriad of aesthetic potentials.

You can map life through 6x6 interconnected, modular and scalar matrices. Sequiturs from Newton, to Einstein, to the current top problem solver, equally evolve potentials.

What logic system do you think equitably follows boolean, to systems theory, to......?

A caduceus, like any other metric, has a lifeline origin X, and a death, Y. Between these two points, is the singular myriad of choice points (see: matrix theory) that evolve from The Law of Opposites, to a myriad of aesthetic potentials.

You can map life through 6x6 interconnected, modular and scalar matrices.