An argument against objective morality that defeats itself

This is a lecture about chapter 14 of Russ Shafer-Landau's book 'Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?' This chapter is about the popular argument that starts from the claim that there is persistent disagreement about moral matters to the conclusion that there are no objective moral facts or laws. Shafer-Landau is able to turn this argument against moral skepticism itself. This is a pretty long video lecture, but I spend a lot of time modifying the argument, which should be helpful in learning how to deal with arguments themselves. This is part of an introductory level philosophy course, Introduction to Ethics.

[yoavshati]

I love how you seem to never really know enough about the examples you give, while knowing all about the philosophy

[gideonelson]

Why do I get the feeling I learned alot but gained no ground haha

[toms]

The argument seems to imply that persistent consensus of opinion, if it existed, would amount to objective truth.

That certainly is open to debate.

[jonadams]

7:48 Charm and Strange. You have an amazing wealth of knowledge that isn’t in your chosen domain. I appreciate that immensely

[MLHunt]

I take issue with the assertion that there are some moral claims that are so universally agreed upon that they can be held to be objectively true 'moral facts'. What level of general agreement is sufficient for them to fall into this category, and who gets to make that call?

And even when you say something like 'almost everyone agrees that murder is wrong', you have to remember that different societies define 'murder' differently. For the vast majority of human history many people did not consider the killing of out-group people or certain subjugated classes of individuals (e.g. slaves, serfs) to be murder. Though there is inarguably less of that sort of thinking now, those sorts of sentiments are still broadly held in some places.

[eliranmal]

funny you mentioned string theory in that context - it (or some of its sub-theories) currently appears to be untestable, so might actually be a good candidate for becoming one of those long-lasting (or "very persistent") debates.... :D

[quakers]

A lot of people agree on subjective things. Dogs have bad breath. Sunsets are beautiful. These things don't become objective truths because people agree on them.

[GrimSqueaker]

I hate the example "murder is wrong".
Murder almost by definition is "bad killing" - trivially we all agree that bad things are bad.

However we do not all agree with what is murder and what is not.

Is abortion murder?
Is the death penalty murder?
Should we execute X group of people?

There is no universal objective agreement on what murder is - rendering the example moot

[peterstanbury]

Surely the dilemmas arise only because one is trying to denote 'true' or 'false' to morals whose impacts upon people are ultimately subjective. If nobody had any subjective feelings about anything, or ever felt pain or pleasure, there'd be no need for morality. The things that appear most morally 'true' are simply those things that have the most universal subjective effect. But that is not the same as an actual objective moral 'truth' that exists independently of that subjective experience.

[zooblestyx]

"Persistent disagreement" is the name of my new klezmer metal band.

[valentinrafael]

In the free will as an illusion, it is irrelevant when it comes to deciding whether or not someone is responsible for their actions or not. If your TV stops working, you’re going to repair it or replace it. Nobody ever said “my tv stopped working, but its not the TVs fault. The TV doesn’t have free will, therefore, I will not take actions toward it.”

Having or not having free will has nothing to do with responsibility. It’s important to be empathetic and understand that the person had a life and grew up from a baby to an adult, just like everyone else. If that person turns out to be dangerous for society, then free will or not free will is out of the question.

[gloop]

I'm at 10:38 so if he addresses this later, I don't know yet

There is a very obvious rebuttal to this: Morality is something we make, something we feel. Physics is something that has nothing to do with us. It was there before us and it will continue to be there after us. There are observable truths and only observable truths. We can debate about why things happen (theories, which is why they're called theories. But keep in mind that Gravity is a theory) but we can not debate about what is there and what is observable, because whether you are looking at this through a screen is not debatable. It is a truth that you would be delusional to debate

But also: I think that even if there is even one person who disagrees with a moral theory (and there always will be, for everything) it is not objective. If you have to ignore (an) opinion(s) for your theory to ring true, your theory is fallible

The statement "murder is wrong" depends on the assumption that a human life matters and that the consequences afflicted on those who cared about the victim also matter, but what happens when someone thinks life has no inherent value and that people's emotional pain and trials are a necessary part of life, a right of passage as one might say and should not be avoided. As much as you might disagree with this, it doesn't matter, because it is that person's foundation, and people's foundations are based on how people feel. The concept that emotional pain matters and is bad has just as much logic in it as the reverse. It doesn't have logic in it. It's just an emotional conclusion. There is nothing for you to logically disagree with

You can't disregard it because it's too out there, too extreme, because that's not an argument. You can't disregard it because they're challenging basic principles, because who decided what basic principles are? If we are allowed to disagree on if a woman's body (and sometimes life) matters more than the parasite within her, why are we not able to disagree on if a human life has inherent value? And also just: Declaring basic, objective truths that we all agree on and then refusing to listen to people who disagree on those truths is just bad debate

Just because a moral standing is rare does not mean it is wrong or inherently untrue. The very fact that the basis of morality is a foundation of emotions makes it subjective because emotions are subjective

42:48
It's number 1 that is fallible. Make an argument that morality is objective (that does not depend on the existence of a God or the validity of a religion. Until that is proven, it cannot be a basis for an argument in a scientific sphere) that is not based off of perceiving emotions or perceptions (such as the concept of value) as factual. I dare you

[Bartleby]

I love your work and the way you communicate ideas! Your enthusiasm is wondrous!

[emunozq]

Why do you mix moral claims with scientific claims in regards to objective truth? Scientific claims have a specific domain of validity, as their validity is subject to verification by peers and the current scientific paradigm, until better models are being created. Therefore scientific claims naturally subjected to disagreements and they should always be doubted (see any book about philosophy of science) However moral claims do not follow this pattern and no moral claim should be subjected to follow the pattern of scientific claims.

[robcerasuolo]

Well, that was interesting. I don't think I'm particularly good at this stuff just yet, but I immediately saw a seriously bad leap in logic from saying something about "some" moral claims as in #2, to inferring in #3 that "all" moral claims are not objectively true. In other words, I don't think the argument as originally given was logically consistent at all, but rather obviously not so.

It seems so much simpler just to change #1 to say, "Some moral claims are subject to (very) persistent disagreement, " and then change #3 to say, "Therefore, some moral claims cannot be said to be objectively true." On the surface, at least, this sound far more logically consistent. I have a feeling someone's going to say that this doesn't serve the moral skeptics very well, though. 🤪

[g.b.-garcia]

Morality seems to be expressions of opinions
in the minds of any particular multitude of individuals that agree on a concept of thought or behavior in which ignorance drives their thinking whether the thesis is true or false. Reason is called free will which allows you to change your mind or behavior at any time with or without Reason.

Pride and ignorance
Pride is ignorance boasting.
ignorance is life’s greatest adversary and denial is ignorance’s strongest ally.
An opinion is a deep seeded selfish desire to express one’s own ignorance. A desire so selfish that even ignorance wants to be alone.
ignorance miss uses the power of persuasion by transforming little knowledge into as if it were a greater knowing.
Pressing one’s nescience point of view by oneself over another person. A willful disregard for the limitation of one’s own reference, and ignoring the evidence to the contrary. Pride is ignorance boasting.
G. B.- Garcia (cc)2019
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[paulsmart]

"murder is wrong" only seems important and useful to this discussion if you don't think about what the word "murder" means.

Expand the terms and you get "Killing someone when it is wrong to kill them is wrong" ...and the weakness of that statement becomes obvious.

For it to mean anything, you have to get into the specifics of under what circumstances killing is wrong and under what circumstances it can be justified and as soon as you try and do *that* all that seeming agreement you had evaporates.

The other two go-tos for something safely considered "bad" are rape and theft, but you won't actually get very strong agreement on the universal wrongness of theft and probably no one will *admit* to you that they think rape is permissible the relevant statistics show that in practice there's no shortage of people who are kinda "meh" on that one. (And if you really need someone to admit it you only need to look in the right sort of cesspit.)

And slavery? America couldn't even quite bring itself to outlaw slavery.

You don't actually have these points of common agreement unless you use sloppy language.

But I don't think this is the real argument against objective morality. I think the real argument against objective morality is "What are you even talking about?"

Because the majority of people who claim to believe objective moral values exist can't tell me.

It's not just that people disagree about what correct morals are. It goes so much deeper than that. It's that they can't say what it would actually mean for something to be objectively morally correct. What *is* an objective moral fact? How do we detect it? If we can't detect it, then in what sense does it even exist? This is not quite like God or unicorns, which more or less exist or don't exist regardless of our feelings on the matter, because it is a sort of declaration about our correct behaviour. What is a declaration no one can ever know about? What is the difference between an objective moral fact and an idea about morality that is very popular across time and cultures? What would it mean for something we commonly consider to be repugnant to be objectively morally true? If I disagree with some moral claim and then you could somehow prove to me it was "objectively" correct, why should I care? Why should I modify my behavior? If I shouldn't, then what's so objective about it?

These are the sorts of questions a person could answer about a firm concept. It's not like God or a unicorn, where we can say what we mean by "God" or "unicorn" and proceed from there.

There's no such thing as an objective moral fact for the same reason there's no such thing as Memretikal. For there to be any such thing, the phrase would have to actually refer to something.

[judsongordy]

Is he writing like in inverse? Or does he have some program that fixes it? It looks like he is writing on the opposite side of a glass wall

[GynxShinx]

I'd be interested in what they have to say about Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

[callumrhind]

The argument has to concern primarily: can subjective morals exist? is "objective" an essential property or "morality"; are all morals objective? The answer I argue for is that because of the fact subjective morals exist, objective morals can exist but morality itself or morals themselves cannot be defined as objective. Therefore objective is only potentially a non-essential property. A temporal and property. For instance, someone stealing a loaf of bread to prevent starvation of themselves or those also vulnerable, and someone stealing a luxury good, despite being able to consensually obtain such an item through a fair and equal exchange, are the exact same behaviour which we apply a system of morals to. There isn't a system of morals that would equate these actions because their contexts are changing the same core action of stealing into a different morality. If morality changes with differing circumstances, and objectivity means that regardless of circumstance, some things are always wrong to do, then morality itself cannot be defined as purely objective, at the bare minimum. At the totality of this analysis lies the claim that objective and moral are mutually exclusive terms which necessarily and definitively contradict. This is not what I argue however. I argue that objective morality definitely exists, but because of the nature of morality itself, can only exist under specific circumstances and in a limited capacity. Therefore it means that morality itself is mostly non-objective. What else comprises morality is for nearly everyone, a great mystery that still has yet to be solved.

We can say that health is made up of blood pressure, liver function, brain activity and many other things. But even if we pinned down everything and made tables describing the precise objective measurements by which the sum total of a person's health can be assessed, we would still not have an absolute or perfect definition of health.
Likewise, we can say that morality is found in compassion and not being impulsively cruel due to repressed emotional pain and many other things. But again the same problem emerges. No perfect definition is arrived at, even with all its properties accounted for, analysed and measured. Because in our minds we know, that a perfect definition of morality would imply that a person who does everything (that because of its borderline existence cannot be defined as necessarily immoral) but who consciously tries to get as close as possible to the line, is a good person by definition obtained from our perfect definition of morality. Even still, intuitively we know that the person who pokes and prods at the borderline of rules is an immoral person because they are trying to get away with, being as close to immorality as is acceptable and unpunishable, which is it itself necessarily immoral, but with a perfect definition of morality, would have to be defined as acceptably moral. With a perfect formula for how murder is justifiable, we enable murderers to get away with their crimes unpunished, and we cause more murders to occur. A perfect definition with no vagueness at all would very much so enable far more immoral acts to occur so long as they were falsely dressed up as moral acts.

To extend the metaphor from health. In the same sense that a heart swells and shrinks, so does the boundary of what we consider to be, and what necessarily is and is not, moral. And like a heart is considered the emotional and preferential, so too, in part, is morality.