Ask Lemmy

I'm having a hard time understanding your view. Do you think that morality is relative to each person's view point or do you think that moral facts do not exist at all?

To recapitulate: If you condemn an action or practice, slavery for example, then this is typically understood as a moral judgment. You have judged that the practice of slavery is bad rather than good. But you said you do not believe in objective facts about morality. So, in order to understand your view, I took you to be substituting moral reasons for practical reasons. So instead of saying slavery is bad for moral reasons, you're saying that it has consequences that are undesirable. Hence, I argued above that this is to act as though morality is objective even though you do not think it is. The analogy with numbers was meant to illustrate the salience of such a view, but it seems this is not your position.

Now on to my view. For someone who thinks that facts about the moral goodness/badness of actions are as objective as facts about the physical world the question "who decides the facts?" is erroneous. "The Earth is a sphere ." = true. "One person murdering another." = morally bad. Even if everyone gets together to decide that the Earth is flat, this would not change the descriptive fact about the world. Even if everyone gets together to decide that murder is okay, this would not change the normative fact about the world.

Since you claim that morality is objective I would assume that you would be capable of tracing where this objectivity comes from, how it emerged, and how it stays that way.

I have my own philosophical views about why morality is objective and how we can make moral judgments. I wrote this in other comments, so I will paste them here:

"Personally I go for Kantian deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do)."

"Immanuel Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis, for murder, stealing, etc."

"Why should we think that morality comes from our own reason? In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow."

Also, if it were objective for all people, I imagine we would all know its content.

Not necessarily. I personally think that we can know right and wrong, but our epistemological access to moral facts is not required in order to think that the moral facts are objective. Again, consider the analogy with objective facts about the physical world. The Higgs Boson is an elementary particle that we did not know about for most of human history. It is only recently, in conjunction with discovering the scientific method, that we have gained access to facts about the Higgs Boson. The point is, objective facts about the world are not dependent on our ability to know them. The same is true about normative facts. Morality can exist objectively without our yet having a method to determine what the moral facts are.