Yes, that’s a subjective statement. In the Old Testament, for instance, enslaving the conquered canaanites was considered righteous, or at the very least not bad. Christian “scholars” would agree.
In a real world example, slave apologists in the 1800’s would claim that they were doing african americans a favor by enslaving them, since they’d just revert to their “animalistic instincts”. I’m sure they saw slavery as a moral act.
Part of the problem is defining something as objectively moral or immoral is that this objectivity needs to come from somewhere. If you believe in a deity this is easy. However, if you are an atheist (which is correct) then there’s really no argument in support of objective morality.
The closest you can come to it is that morality may be objective for an individual. but this is not the same as objective morality.
Yeah happy with that proviso, but it was true enough to get its own mention in the old testament so my guess is that people have been trying to con each other for a long while.
I agree that what people consider moral changes over time, but that’s a different topic.
I don’t think God helps with morality. Even if we were to accept that God tells us what is right or wrong, we need to ask the further question about whether (1) God picks out the things that are right in themselves (i.e., for some principled reason), in which case God is just a messenger and we can investigate the property of goodness on our own or (2) God picks out what is right arbitrarily, which is a rather strange kind of morality that we would probably want to reject anyway. See the Euthyphro Dilemma.
But that doesn’t mean that atheists have to say that right and wrong are just like any old preference, as though saying “Slavery is wrong” holds the same force as “Chocolate is better than ice cream.” The latter is subjective, but it isn’t at all clear that the former is as well.
There are lots of ways we could go to find an objective atheistic morality. You seemed amenable to the idea that if God were real, then we could ground morality in God’s will. This way we would have a foundation. The most basic building block (the highest good or only inherent good) is God’s will. So morality is objective on this view because there is something we can point to when asked about the truth or falsity of some moral claim. “Why is slavery wrong/right?” “Because it aligns with God’s will.” That’s wrong, but at least it’s a coherent moral objectivism.
But there is no God, so what about a different foundation? Mill famously (lol) argues that the highest good is pleasure. So something is objectively good when it increases the amount of pleasure in the world “from the point of view of the universe” (pace Sidgwick), i.e., from an impartial perspective. If that’s a good foundation (BIG if, but there are reasonable arguments that claim that whatever list of things that we take to be good are really only good in virtue of the pleasure they promote [see: graduating college → make more money → have more pleasure; have a kid → feel proud → feel pleasure; jerk off to cam girls → have an orgasm → pleasure; etc] then it’s only a hop and a jump over to an objective morality that aligns with many of our common sense intuitions about right and wrong. “Why is slavery wrong”? “Because it reduces the amount of pleasure in the world.”
This is a massive topic at the edges of post-Christian moral philosophy. Exciting stuff! Moral Realism
Speaking of Amazon. They sent me an offer of 26/h plus 1k signing bonus. I’m guessing it’s based on my indeed resume which I haven’t updated as a supervisor. Might schedule an interview and become part of the evil empire if they can bump that offer up to like 30/h with a bigger signing bonus.
I mean the beginning, middle & end of this story is that Amazon’s market share is so out of control that they successfully dictate what individual sellers can charge elsewhere to ensure prices at Amazon are best, and all they gotta do is tell sellers they won’t have their item listed as a “Buy Box” option. That’s it! No threats to break legs, just not allowing their widget to get Buy Box preference, and that’s important enough that sellers comply en masse. And that’s harmful for American consumers.
Anti-trust angle here is completely obvious, not sure what there is to disagree over.
Belief is pretty important tho. Really comes down to what each person is willing to sacrifice to help achieve the world they perceive to be acceptable.
I work in an e-commerce warehouse and I pretty much only have a job because Amazon’s crazy and ever changing rules for FBA means my company needs a guy sitting in a warehouse in America preparing our products for FBA shipments so I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
Please for the love of god don’t make me go back to waiting tables I have ptsd I’m like Morgan freeman at the end of shawshank when he still asks for permission to use the bathroom. Everyone buy stuff online and please remember to format your apartment correctly when you enter in your address.
Up until last week humans enslaved each other like it was going out of style (which it did, so maybe they were on to something) but upon coming to the completion of this sentence I realize my post might be a tangent.
Question for the thread: Is BoredSocial getting pushback because of the overconfidence and/or his politics separate from his misanthropic pessimism and/or him starting another pan-Atlantic feud with Merry Old England?
What separates him from me other than those three things above?
I suppose my calling it “overconfidence” isn’t totally accurate; it’s more like, being confident that saying “humans suck” can be empirically quantified.
But that is a two-to-tango situation. Boredsocial says humans suck, other people ask, oh yeah, how do you know, Bored says “well look at my suckometer, the needle is in the red!” And then other people think they’re settling the affair by saying OK WELL YOUR METER NEEDS RECALIBRATING.
The only reason I’ve never gone as hard as him is because I believe it’s impossible to have any sort of serious objective discussion. I’d just go [jean-raplhio]Humans are the woOooOOOoOorst[/jean-ralphio] and then maybe post a GoT sweet-summer-child when I received any objections.
