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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • A lot of what you said here is an implication of subjectivism, but not an argument for it. Subjectivism about morality is no more an implication of an empiricist worldview than subjectivism about the shape of the Earth.

    What you’re suggesting here sounds a lot like the logical positivists’ position on ethics. The descriptive is falsifiable, the normative is not, so it must be subjective. The problem with that view is that we can’t draw neat lines between the normative and the descriptive. If I’m attempting to model the world descriptively, I’m still going to be guided by normative considerations about what constitutes a good model. Science is not purely empirical, and ethics is not purely normative. Philosophy in general is not a discrete subject, separate from science. The two are continuous.

    And we’ve known since Plato that God doesn’t play into it, one way or the other.


  • I think the issue is that students aren’t consistent. They’ll fall back on relativism or subjectivism when they don’t really have a strong opinion, or perceive there to be a lot of controversy about the subject that they don’t want to have to argue about. But fundamentally, whether there’s an objective and universal answer to some moral question or not really doesn’t depend on whether there’s controversy about it, or whether it’s convenient or cool to argue about.

    I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t. Variation in cultural norms is totally okay, as long as we don’t sacrifice the objective, universal stuff. (Like don’t harm people unnecessarily, etc.). The contours of the former and the latter are up for debate, and we shouldn’t presume that anybody knows the exact boundary.


  • I think this is a bit too simple. Suppose I say that moral badness, the property, is any action that causes people pain, in the same way the property of redness is the quality of surfaces that makes people experience the sensation of redness. If this were the case, morality (or at least moral badness) would absolutely not be a subjective property.

    Whether morality is objective or subjective depends on what you think morality is about. If it’s about things that would exist even if we didn’t judge them to be the way they are, it’s objective. If it’s about things that wouldn’t exist unless we judge them to be the way they are, it’s subjective.











  • Its “allowed” in the sense that you can return a verdict of innocent without providing an explanation for why you found him innocent, and the court is not allowed to issue a verdict notwithstanding the jury in criminal cases. It’s perfectly legal for the court to dismiss you as a juror if you announce your intention to nullify at any point in the trial or explain that your intention is to nullify when you announce your verdict. So if you intend to nullify, you should stay quiet about it until you finish deliberating.

    Source: I’m a law student and we just covered this in Criminal Law.