I Really Aught to Respond...

Aught3, the author of Indoctrinating Freethought last month made a response to my post "Philosolosophy time! Absolute truth, morality, Nazis and God." I've left it long enough. Let's actually address what he has to say.

I'll start off by making a bit of an apology for my original post to which Aught responded. Honestly, it was a bit of a mess. I basically sat down and started typing, with no clear idea of where I was going with it. As a result, it probably came across as a confused rambling with half-formed ideas. Which is, in all honesty, probably fair comment.

I agree with Aught for the first five paragraphs, until he says the following. On quoting what I said about Nazi wrongness being subjective, he says:

"But is this test sufficient? What if we change the topic and consider a flat-Earther? Surely there is a single flat-Earther who considers their position on the shape of the Earth to be justified, or - if not - we can at least agree there is the capacity for someone to consider the flat Earth position justified. According to Nasher’s test this makes the issue of the planet’s shape subjective, but earlier we agreed that this was an objective question. I would submit to Nasher that his central test for subjectivity leads to outcomes that he would reject."

I think the issue lies is a failure of communication on my part. I was not trying to use the question of whether someone can hold an opposing viewpoint as a test for whether something is objective or subjective. Rather, it is closer to a "property" if you like, of subjective viewpoints.
I made the claim that moral viewpoints can only ever be considered opinions, but I never really justified this particular point. I took it (mistakenly, perhaps) as a given.

So let's try and justify it:

I make the claim that moral standpoints are inherently subjective. Whether something is morally right or wrong cannot be determined as an objective fact, but instead varies from one individual to another.

Aught uses the example of "apricots taste better than strawberries" as an example of something subjective. I'll go further. I say that "sugar tastes better than elephant dung" is also subjective. Now, you will be hard pressed to find a single person who enjoys the taste of elephant dung over sugar. But we shouldn't limit ourselves to our species. I'm sure dung beetle larvae might beg to differ, for example. Or an alien species to whom monosaccharides are toxic, perhaps.

In a similar way, I make the claim that moral issues can only ever be subjective in nature. Certainly, we might be hard-pressed to find a human who considers the Nazis morally righteous. But what about, say, an alien species to whom, for whatever reason, the belief that eugenics and cruelty to ones' own kind is right is evolutionarily beneficial? Might not it seem completely natural to them to admire the Nazis? Who is to say they are in the wrong? What standards do we use as a frame of reference? Our own?

Okay, now let's bring this a little closer to home (ie: the real world). It is a fact that variation occurs between humans. This is partly due to genetics and partly due to the effects of our environment. I am doubtful that there are any humans alive who possess sufficiently different genetics to make them excessively prone to bigotry. But there are certainly humans exposed to environmental factors capable of this. A man who lives in poverty whilst many people of a certain group live well might be inclined towards bigotry against that group of people, even when many of them live in poverty alongside him.

The amount of change to a person's psychology that can be brought about by environmental factors is so enormous that no objective frame of reference can be used against which we can compare their morality. In the case of the Nazis, a person brought up in the modern world is unlikely to be exposed to factors that make them susceptible to thinking they were righteous. But there are of course still some neo-Nazis. And if we go back in time, we see people who were increasingly more bigoted than us. Even listening to old people, brought up in a different environment to my own, I am sometimes shocked by the xenophobic or homophobic bigotry they come out with. But of course, they don't see themselves as immoral. Might not our descendants think the same of even the most moral people alive today?


So, to sum it all up:

A viewpoint can be objectively true or false if there is a clear, immovable frame of reference to which we can compare and contrast the viewpoint.

That the Earth is round is objectively true because there is a clear, immovable frame of reference to compare it to. Namely, reality. We can check. If a flat-Earther checks, they will still see a round Earth, even if they really don't want to.

For a moral view, there is no known absolute frame of reference. Perhaps in our pursuit of science, we will find one. Perhaps the moral objectivists were right all along. Perhaps (disheartening though that would be to us) humans are ourselves an objectively immoral species. But for now, in the absence of any evidence for an absolute frame of reference, I am inclined to believe (mind-bendingly, perhaps) that moral relativism is true.




I think I've made my points clear. But I may have miscommunicated some parts. I guess we'll find out.