[GhylTarvoke]

See, with that logic, we can't define anything objectively. Which is exactly what I meant when I mentioned solipsism:

Prefacing "this is wrong" with "I believe that" seems like a solipsistic caveat. Yeah, nothing is provable beyond cogito ergo sum. Who cares? To have an ethical discussion, we must relax our definitions of "provable" and "objective".

If you insist on rigor, the word "objective" becomes completely useless.

[The E]

But if we relax the definition of "objective" in this discussion, what are we left with? What would "objective" mean in this context?

You're asking "Who cares?" The answer is, I do. Because whether or not we can define something as objectively good or objectively evil (using non-relaxed definitions of objective) is a really interesting and hard problem. By redefining objective to mean something ultimately subjective, the question becomes meaningless.

[GhylTarvoke]

But if we relax the definition of "objective" in this discussion, what are we left with? What would "objective" mean in this context?

Objective morality exists independently of our beliefs. We can't know what it is, in the same sense that we can't know what anything is. The point is that some subjective moralities are better than others.

You're asking "Who cares?" The answer is, I do. Because whether or not we can define something as objectively good or objectively evil (using non-relaxed definitions of objective) is a really interesting and hard problem. By redefining objective to mean something ultimately subjective, the question becomes meaningless.

Actually, using the non-relaxed definition of objective, the problem becomes really uninteresting and easy.

(The answer is no. Nothing can be defined objectively. Might as well strike the word "objective" from the English dictionary.)

[The E]

Thank you for agreeing with me that objective morality doesn't exist.

[FrikgFeek]

He's basically saying that anything empirical can't also be objective. In the strictest meaning of the word, only self-contained ideas like pattern recognition or logical axioms(formulas) can be objectively true.

[zookeeper]

Using those definitions no moral system EVER could be internally consistent as there is no tautology to start with. You'd have to start from an assumption, as you do in everything else. Since you're starting from assumptions anyway you can start from any assumption and remain as internally consistent as any other system.

As I said, you need to start from an assumption, but you can still compare those assumptions and the ways one draws conclusions from them.

If Billy claims that his core axioms are that getting lots of cake is good and that Johnny should be punched in the face, we know that it's not true and that his claim would instantly collapse under scrutiny. He doesn't get to claim any arbitrary silliness as his core axioms (whether he's knowingly lying or just kinda stupid) simply because we don't currently have the technology to probe his mind and prove that they aren't. His axioms still need to be something that he cannot eliminate, reduce or generalize any further using reason.

If Billy revises his core axioms a bit and now states them to be that pleasure is good and that inflicting pain is only okay as karmic retribution (so punching Johnny is okay because Johnny punched him first, yesterday), then great, Billy is now being a bit more rational and consistent. He's still being pretty dumb, but at least it's an improvement.

My moral system, if you can call it that, does not offer any way to solve disputes between actors who actually hold different core axioms. If I run into a machine, alien or animal which truly doesn't share my axiom of pain being bad and starts dissecting me, then they aren't being immoral or internally inconsistent and there is no way for me to persuade them otherwise. However, if it was you who was dissecting me, you would be, because you do share my axiom of pain being bad. I wouldn't need to convince you to act according to my axioms, only your own.

So, to put it differently: sure, our axioms of course cannot be logically justified. That's fine, I don't mind. However, my claim is that due to our brains' similarity, in fact me, you, Hitler, the aztecs, Gandhi and the guy from Daesh all have the same underlying axioms if we all just use reason to chip away all the non-axiomatic cruft. And that's why I say that some of those guys are more wrong than me; I'm not comparing our axioms because they are the same, I'm comparing whether and how consistently we act according to them. If I believed that their axioms were actually different than mine, I couldn't say that.

[GhylTarvoke]

Thank you for agreeing with me that objective morality doesn't exist.

And nothing else exists objectively, either. Not even you. I'm 100% behind that.

I also vote that we strike the word "belief" from the English dictionary. Everything is subjective, so everything is a belief.

He's basically saying that anything empirical can't also be objective. In the strictest meaning of the word, only self-contained ideas like pattern recognition or logical axioms(formulas) can be objectively true.

Right.

[FrikgFeek]

Ah, but you're missing 1 thing. Some of those cultures truly believed they were better than other humans, almost like humans believe they are better than animals. So in the case of the Aztecs, those who truly believed that humans should be sacrificed to appease the gods or more-than-human leaders they made no faults in logic.
Death is bad, therefore I should avoid the apocalypse by ritually sacrificing a few.

How do you even define 'arbitrary silliness'. Do we just dismiss the truly crazy ideas that a mental patient might hold as true as 'arbitrary silliness'? From what you've wrote you also seem to believe that 'treat all humans as equal' is something every system that's not 'arbitrary silliness' should hold. And really, not everyone truly believes that. Putting yourself in first makes sense in systems which also assume that 'Things that exist have value'.
1.I exist
2.Others may or may not exist
3.Things that exist have value

Therefore I have value, others may or may not have it.

[zookeeper]

Ah, but you're missing 1 thing. Some of those cultures truly believed they were better than other humans, almost like humans believe they are better than animals. So in the case of the Aztecs, those who truly believed that humans should be sacrificed to appease the gods or more-than-human leaders they made no faults in logic.
Death is bad, therefore I should avoid the apocalypse by ritually sacrificing a few.

It doesn't matter whether they truly believed it or not, it was still an irrational belief. Whether their axiom was "death is bad" or not, it was still a logical fault to assume that greater amount of death could be avoided by ritual sacrifice. I'm pretty sure you agree that their belief was false.

How do you even define 'arbitrary silliness'. Do we just dismiss the truly crazy ideas that a mental patient might hold as true as 'arbitrary silliness'?

The point was simply that Billy is not a problem for me, because I only concern myself with genuinely held axioms.

From what you've wrote you also seem to believe that 'treat all humans as equal' is something every system that's not 'arbitrary silliness' should hold. And really, not everyone truly believes that. Putting yourself in first makes sense in systems which also assume that 'Things that exist have value'.
1.I exist
2.Others may or may not exist
3.Things that exist have value

Therefore I have value, others may or may not have it.

That would require more or less a solipsist psychopath, and I might be perfectly willing to put them in the "does not share axioms with me" box.

Whether someone belongs in that box or whether they're faking it is, in theory, provable: see if there's anyone whose well-being they actually care about. If you can find anyone whose torture they would object to, then clearly they do believe others exist. If there are no others whose well-being they care about, then they are genuinely a solipsist psychopath and moral arguments between us cannot be made.

[InsaneBaron]

It was okay for them.  That's why they did it.  9/11 didn't happen because the people carrying it out were monsters or insane.

That's it. I'm done. If you insist on claiming it was okay for bin Laden to kill thousands of Americans, or the Nazis to kill millions of Jews, just because they thought it was, then you've abandoned any ability to distinguish right from wrong, and there's nothing I can do for you. God help you.

This is a question we've been struggling with a lot in the aftermath of WW2. How responsible were the individuals that made up the armed forces of the third Reich for the atrocities those forces committed? Our legal systems, which are an expression of our moral systems, have long held that it is permissible to commit crimes in the service of the state, as long as its done within a chain of command. A soldier following orders cannot be blamed for doing so, cannot be convicted for committing premeditated murder when ordered to do so, because he is absolved of the full responsibility of his actions by the oath he swears.
So, can I blame my grandfathers for enlisting into the Wehrmacht, and being in a very tiny part accomplices to atrocity? No. They believed they were serving their country. They believed they were doing things that were necessary to ensure german prosperity. They thought that they were doing the right thing at the time. It was only afterwards, after everyone was forced to ackknowledge the truth of what happened, that they became remorseful.

So. While I condemn the actions as a whole and the people who planned and ordered them, I cannot truly condemn the people who were actually at the sharp end. Knowing what I do now, it's easy to say "Well, I would have done everything to stop it", but that question soon morphs into the angrily shouted accusation "Why did you not do anything to stop this?", because it's hard for us to separate our knowledge from their knowledge.

The hardest part for us to accept was that the Nazis weren't monsters. They weren't fundamentally different from us. All it took was misinformation and prejudice to enable them. If you've ever wondered why Germany has restrictions on certain types of public and political speech, this is why. Our civilizations are more fragile than they may appear, and all it takes is one demagogue and a bunch of parrots to create a monster.

I hope, InsaneBaron, that this helps you understand the complexity of this discussion a bit better. When I, or Aesaar, or Scotty say that all morality is relative and that there's no such thing as an absolute good or absolute evil, this sort of reasoning is behind it. What you are doing in this discussion, what you have done for several posts now, is mistaking understanding of a particular moral stance with endorsing that stance. There is a difference between the two, and you would do well to learn it.

This makes at least some sense. But I still don't completely buy it. Yes, I'm willing to concede that, considering the amount of brainwashing he was exposed to, an individual Nazi soldier, for instance, may or may not have been fully culpable for his actions. But culpability isn't what's at stake here, but accuracy. The German soldier may have thought "Jew are Pigs" was true, and we in general think "All Men are Created Equal" is true, but to claim that these two statements are equally true? That's unacceptable. The sincere beliefs of a specific person might effect their guilt, but we must always bear in mind that even if he believed them to be true, they were still false and evil. And there are some pretty clear and obvious guidlines we can use in sorting right from wrong. To begin with, Malice is obviously inherently bad, Charity is obviously inherently good.

EDIT: A question. According to your reasoning, is there even such a thing as an evil person?

EDIT: And "It was okay for them" is still a preposterous thing to say about 9/11, no matter how much context you want to add.

[Scotty]

Please go play Knights of the Old Republic 2 and then come back to the thread if you think charity is inherently good.

[FrikgFeek]

Have any reasoning why Charity would be inherently good and Malice inherently bad aside from pure gut feeling? You just seem to be repeating what 21st century morality is and claiming that to be some kind of objective standard or at least close to it.

[Unknown Target]

Aren't good and evil a bit like entropy and atrophy? If life likes to live, then life thrives on Entropy. Atrophy is the death of life, in a very literal sense; atrophying limbs will tend to not function and become dead weight.

So I would posit that, since I believe our civilization should continue, entropy is "good" and atrophy is "bad".

I don't think I'm bringing anything particularly new to the discussion, just framing it in different terms.

[Aesaar]

To begin with, Malice is obviously inherently bad, Charity is obviously inherently good.

Neither of these things is true.

Oof, you're having a really hard time finding objectively moral things, aren't you?

Please go play Knights of the Old Republic 2 and then come back to the thread if you think charity is inherently good.

This.  KotOR 2 makes some wonderfully scathing comments about charity.

EDIT: A question. According to your reasoning, is there even such a thing as an evil person?

Sure there is.  But not objectively evil.  They're only evil because I think they are.  To them and their supporters, they're not evil.  I think they're wrong, of course, and that's why I might fight them if I found them evil enough. 

Daesh believe they're good, and they believe we're evil.  I think they're utterly wrong.  And I believe that strongly enough that I'd happily go off to war to end them.  That belief isn't objective fact.  It doesn't need to be.

EDIT: And "It was okay for them" is still a preposterous thing to say about 9/11, no matter how much context you want to add.

So, what, you think that the people who carried out 9/11 decided "hey let's go do something evil today!"  Of course they thought it was the right thing to do.  If they didn't, they wouldn't have done it.  Are you really so small-minded that you're incapable of understanding that people can disagree with you about morality without being insane or evil?

That's it. I'm done. If you insist on claiming it was okay for bin Laden to kill thousands of Americans, or the Nazis to kill millions of Jews, just because they thought it was, then you've abandoned any ability to distinguish right from wrong, and there's nothing I can do for you. God help you.

You sound like those fundie Christians who think that by not believing in God, you're evil because you've abandoned the only objective moral standard.  It's pretty sad.

[Mongoose]

Just poking in from an outsider's perspective with a question here (and wondering who has the squirt guns ready for when things plummet into some sort of crazy-meta-solipsism hole again), but does the fact that someone believes their own morality to be correct automatically negate the possibility that there is indeed an objective morality in existence?  Yes, the 9/11 hijackers personally believed extremely strongly that they were on a holy mission, but we're all aware that fervently-held beliefs can be completely wrong.  There are still a frightening number of people out there who firmly believe that man never set foot on the Moon, and they can cite "evidence" at you until they're blue in the face and you want to smash said face in.  Now obviously morality is a far vaguer and thornier issue than an historical event with actual physical truth, but I still feel like there's a massive false equivalence being created.  "Everyone is convinced that their morality is correct, so there's no such thing as a universal objective morality!"  To which I respond...why?

[FrikgFeek]

Because universal objective morality would need to define the 'best' goal to follow. Using a prophetic supercomputer you can make a system that's best for the long-term advancement of the species but this isn't really what morality is, at least not for everyone.
With an infinite number of goals you'd get an infinite number of morality systems. Then you get to the question of how 'moral' a purely goal-driven system is. Is morality there for the advancement of that goal or are certain things principally wrong because they go against our beliefs as humans?
Both lead to an infinite number of subjective moralities. Even with omniscience the best you could do would be a very thorough analysis of those goals for every human and then combining those into one big 'best' morality that would work in the greatest number of cases compared to other systems.

[Mongoose]

I think a truly-objective morality would go rather beyond defining some sort of "best good" to follow, because as you note you'd automatically wind up with individual-versus-group arguments, and all you'd really be doing is slapping the word "objective" on another set of subjective moralities.  From where I'm sitting, an actual objective morality would define an action as good because it is inherently so, and evil likewise.  It's basically stating a tautology, I know, but such an objective morality would need to have an external definition, with all the various human individuals and groups and civilizations coming up with their own better or worse subjective approximations of that external objectivity (with the really ****ty ones usually being pretty easy to spot, at least in hindsight).  I fully realize that I come to the table with a religious upbringing, and so I'm used to treating certain concepts as axiomatic that others would never waste time considering.  Even so, I do remember a while back seeing a presentation by a prominent humanist thinker-type who made a compelling fully-secular argument for the necessity of an objective standard of morality.  I'll be damned if I can remember who it was, though.

[Aesaar]

Battuta and I discussed this on IRC.  I'll summarize.

There has been no argument made in this thread attempting to prove objective morality is true, only statements like 'X is objectively moral'.  Every argument made is about how it's useful to believe it's true and that it's frightening to imagine how people might behave if they didn't believe in objective morality.  But being afraid of something has no bearing on the truth of things.  It doesn't matter if it's scary.  I pointed this out earlier.  We could all believe the Holocaust to be a good thing if only we'd been raised in a different environment.  That's a scary thought, but just because it's scary doesn't make it false.

[12:17.48] <battuta> to argue that we MUST believe in an objective morality to be good is to abandon the possibility of any good — since it denies people the ability to set up moral systems and choose which ones work over ones which don’t

Analogy time: What makes a game good?  There's no objective standard by which we measure whether a game is good or bad, so how do we determine it?  I mean, we're perfectly capable of deciding which games to play and which we like and don't like, but how do we do this without an objective standard?  Could it be that believing a game is good or bad is enough?

[12:19.17] <battuta> subjective morality is just a set of game rules for human civilization. you don’t lose anything by realizing morality is subjective - you GAIN the power to design good rules

[12:24.57] <battuta> i’ve never seen anyone argue for objective morality without saying “if we abandon it, we are lost to chaos"
[12:25.14] <battuta> well, so what? lots of terrible things are true, something being scary doesn’t make it untrue
[12:25.28] <battuta> implicitly your argument is ‘we should all CHOOSE TO BELIEVE In objective morality, lest we be lost to chaos’
[12:25.45] <battuta> a very useful consensual lie

And that's the crux of InsaneBaron's argument.  Objective morality is fact because it's useful to believe it exists.  But the universe doesn't give a **** about what's useful to us.

Just poking in from an outsider's perspective with a question here (and wondering who has the squirt guns ready for when things plummet into some sort of crazy-meta-solipsism hole again), but does the fact that someone believes their own morality to be correct automatically negate the possibility that there is indeed an objective morality in existence?  Yes, the 9/11 hijackers personally believed extremely strongly that they were on a holy mission, but we're all aware that fervently-held beliefs can be completely wrong.  There are still a frightening number of people out there who firmly believe that man never set foot on the Moon, and they can cite "evidence" at you until they're blue in the face and you want to smash said face in.  Now obviously morality is a far vaguer and thornier issue than an historical event with actual physical truth, but I still feel like there's a massive false equivalence being created.  "Everyone is convinced that their morality is correct, so there's no such thing as a universal objective morality!"  To which I respond...why?

What makes the 9/11 hijackers wrong?  You can't compare this to something like the Moon landing because it's trivial to prove that we did in fact land on the Moon.  The reason Moon landing conspiracy theorists and Flat Earthers are wrong is because their beliefs are testably false.  "The Earth is flat" is objectively false.

Prove to me that the 9/11 hijackers were wrong to do what they did.  Something which no thinking person could disagree with any more than they could disagree that 1+1=2. 

An objective morality that does nothing, can't be agreed upon by anyone, and leaves no evidence for its existence does not exist.  You may as well be arguing that God objectively exists, and, indeed, that's what it leads back to.  It might not be the Christian God whose existence you're arguing for, but it is a god.

[NGTM-1R]

Prove to me that the 9/11 hijackers were wrong to do what they did.

It was a tactically and strategically terrible choice that cost them support, bases, personnel, and credibility. It set AQ in particular and that brand of extremism in general back decades, if not more. It fundamentally misunderstood that terrorism is successful by the application of continuous pressure rather than by spectacular but brief and unrepeatable gestures.

If not for the entirely unpredictable and completely unlooked-for result of the United States eventually invading Iraq with a considerable amount of bungling, things would have likely stayed that way.

Doubtless, if you explained the consequences as they stand now to Osama bin Laden, he would be delighted with them. (Or maybe not, al-Baghdadi's new brand of radicalism may not have appealed to bin Laden any more than it does to his other surviving AQ contemporaries.) However what happened was very much unlikely at the time to his knowledge, and if you explained the short-term consequences prior to Iraq it's likely he and his immediate circle of advisers and supporters would have perceived them as catastrophically unwelcome.

Thus, they ultimately should have realized they were acting against the interests of the causes they believed in, and against the interests of those people they had chosen to follow; wrongly, in simplest terms.

[The E]

But that's all post-9/11 reasoning. The harder task is to prove that it was the wrong decision at the time when the decision was made, using only information available to the deciders at the time.