Not sure why this got removed from 196lemmy..blahaj.zone but it would be real nice if moderation on Lemmy gave you some sort of notification of what you did wrong. Like an automatic DM or something

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[–] Fandangalo 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Half of the comments in here are a bunch of equivocations on the words.

“Objective” morality would mean there are good things to do, and bad things to do. What people actually do in some hypothetical or real society is different and wouldn’t undermine the objective status of morality.

Listen to this example:

Todd wants to go to the bank before it closes.
Todd is not at the bank.
Todd should travel to the bank before it closes.

This is a functional should statement. Maybe Todd does go, or maybe he doesn’t. But if he wants to fulfill his desires, he should travel if he wants to go to the bank. The point is that should statements, often used in morality, can inform us for less controversial topics.

Here’s another take: why should we be rational? We could base our epistemology on breeding, money, or other random ends. If you think I should be rational, you’re leveraging morality to do that.

Most people believe in objective morality, whether they understand it that way or not. Humans have disagreed over many subjects throughout history. Disagreement alone doesn’t undermine objectivity. It’s objectively true that the Earth revolves around the sun. Some nut case with a geocentric mindset isn’t going to convince me otherwise. You can argue it’s objective because we can test it, but how do I test my epistemology?

This is just a philosophy 101 run around. I’m a moral pluralist who believes in utilizing many moral theories to help understand the moral landscape. If we were to study the human body, you’d use biology, physics, chemistry, and so on. When looking at a moral problem, I look at it from the main moral theories and look for consensus around a moral stance.

I’m not interested in debating, but there’s so many posts making basic mistakes about morality. My undergraduate degree was in ethics, and I’ve published on meta ethics. We ain’t solving this in a lemmy thread, but there’s a lot of literature to read for those interested.

[–] Bgugi 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess I don't really understand. Does moral objectivism argue that there is "one true" framework for assessing the rightness of decision/action, or merely that there are objectively right/wrong answers within any given framework?

[–] Fandangalo 3 points 1 year ago

Meta ethics focuses on the underlying framework behind morality. Whenever you’re asking, “But why is it moral?” That’s meta ethics.

Meta ethics splits between cognitivism (moral statements can be true or false) and non-cognitivism (moral statements are not true or false). One popular cognitive branch is natural moral realism, the idea there are objective moral facts. One popular non-cognitivism branch is emotivism, the idea that moral statements all all complicated “yays” or “yucks” and express emotions rather than true/false statements.

Cognitivism also has anti-realism, which is there are moral facts, but they are truth/false conditional based on each person or group. My issue is you lose the ability to call out certain behavior as wrong; slavery is wrong; not respecting others is wrong. If you want to believe all morality systems are valid, meaning your morality is no better than some radical thought group’s, then go ahead. On an emotional level, speciesism level, rights level, deontological level, utilitarian level, and many more slavery is wrong. Again, some nut job doesn’t invalidate all other thoughts. That’s my take.