Objective Moral Values

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Originally Posted by Shadowsarin

Desire to live is a survival instinct in my eyes, no different than for example a need to feed. So, an equally extreme example for you. Is it wrong to kill and eat another human if not doing so will result in your death?

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Do you intentionally blur the distinction between desire and right? Are you proposing that your hypotetical disturber, who is to kill you is doing a wrong thing only because it does not correspond to your instinct of survival...If his violation is of instincts and not of values, then what is the hindrance to exonerate this "petrel"' counterinstinct of aggression/ notice that we must still have defined "bad" and "good" instincts, so as to condemn the killing for example and decide in favour of the instinct to preserve life/.Where is the violation when an instinct is opposed to an instinct. The truth is that if a value was not violated then we would not have a violation...
My answer to your question:
Millions of people are dying because of hunger, are we to witness a cannibalistic feast in this respect. Thankfully we still have some antirelativism in this world...

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Originally Posted by cuppajoe_9

Fear of death is not an objective thing. It's a completely subjective and rather irrational thing. Fear and objectivity are two concepts that simply do not go together. Something cannnot be objectively said to be fearful any more than it can be objectively said to be plesant or (as I am trying to argue) objectively moral.

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Ah, then I have misinterpreted you. Sorry for that, cuppajoe

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Originally Posted by Shadowsarin

Is it wrong to kill and eat another human if not doing so will result in your death?

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For me, it is wrong. Coz I know death is nothing to me.

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Originally Posted by ShoutGrace

Objective Moral Values



Do objective moral values exist?

- - - - - If you believe so, what reasons do you have for believing in the existence of objective moral values?

- - - - - If you believe that objective moral values do not exist, what is your reasoning for that belief?

If objective moral values do exist, what are the necessary implications of that fact, if any?

If objective moral values do not exist, what are the necessary implications of that fact, if any?

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i think morals aren't really that constant i think they depend on certain situations and more importantly the conviction of the person looking at the act itself(really nice thread by the way);)

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Originally Posted by Shadowsarin

Desire to live is a survival instinct in my eyes, no different than for example a need to feed...

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I am quoting again shadowsarin's post as I've just come across this text from a book. Sorry for the length, but I think it is worth quoting here to further our discussion. This is from C.S. Lewis:

Some people wrote to me saying, "Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't it been developed just like all our other instincts?" Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.

Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is. The thing that says to you, "Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up," cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.

Here is a third way of seeing it If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call "good," always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses— say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct.

....Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the "wrong" ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

What do you guys think about Lewis' argument?

For my part, I think that this is right on the money. It occurs to me that these decisions and the associated instinct are all going on within an individual(s). The conflict does not exist outside of this context. This framework or decision to choose to one instinct or impulse over the other is enforced or favored and encouraged in a social setting or group. Learned! Then, tradition and longevity tend to leave the impression that certain value judgments are immutable and eternal. This board itself is a testament to the existence of the perpetual exception. C.S. Lewis huh? Good work. :p

I rather like the Lewis argument (except, perhaps, for the definition of the sexual impulse as bad in most cases). I do not, however, think that it contradicts any of my arguments, and in fact fits rather nicely into my morality-as-quality-of-music analogy.

objective moral values: doesn't insight into the nature of objective moral values require a divine mind?

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Originally Posted by jon1jt

objective moral values: doesn't insight into the nature of objective moral values require a divine mind?

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I for myself think that morals are relative, that there is no such thing as an absolute right or wrong.
Regarding the issue that the belief on objective or absolute moral values requires
the belief in a divine mind as well here's an excerpt from Bertrand Rusell's lecture "Why I am not a Christian" (it doesnt have much to do with the topic but i find it rather interesting):

"Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this
situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the
mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line
that some of the gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it."

It seems what Russel calls God there is a no-God. The problem to argue, then, would be on the comprehension of the term "God".

I have often had a chuckle out of the Gnostic notion. Kind of like a major verison of the Norse god Loki or the tricksters in folk tails.


For the sake of consistancy, I am going to take God as a projection of mankind in the sense that Plato presented as the idea of the perfect form of human intelligence. In this sense perhaps you could argue that the perfect intellegence would make the perfect choices and these would be... perfect and Immutable. However that perfect intellegence would have to be human in this sense. If it wasn't would humans be condemned for the agressive expansion on the planet at the expense of so many other forms? or is this just natural selection? In this case then there is no good or bad only "the process". If the process is deemed good then our opinions have no meaning. This is the tao. --- random thoughts..

I was thinking about an act like kamikaze or other similiar acts, in which the subject voluntarly sacrifice his/her self for a reason, which are actually against human natural instinct (to use Lewis' term, self-preservation).

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Originally Posted by subterranean

I was thinking about an act like kamikaze or other similiar acts, in which the subject voluntarly sacrifice his/her self for a reason, which are actually against human natural instinct (to use Lewis' term, self-preservation).

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A bit off topic, those acts are not really against human natural instinct, I think. Remember the term thanatos? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatos_%28Freud%29

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Originally Posted by holograph

Morality is an individual experience, one that the individual ascertains and changes throughout one's life. A sense of morality en masse can become an objective reality, and has become to a degree, but it is fully based on perception.

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I think morality is an individual experience in terms of how we apply a larger moral framework to our own personal decisions. Making morality totally defined by the individual (which is a popular idea these days) is frankly pretty scary because the world presents us with a wide variety of different world-views (as well as various levels of rational function). If morality is totally subjective, then we have no right to "impose our views on someone else" (a popular phrase when the topic of objective (or worse, "Christian") morality pops up). Once morality becomes solely self-defined, we now have no way to ajudicate between parties in dispute over the nature of an action or behavior. Hence the development of a collective morality - which allows us now to render socially defined ideas about "right" and "wrong" - but these are only "objective" in terms of agreement: the majority believe that a, b, and c and "right," so therefore they are. These "objective" standards are open to debate and revision - which means their "objectivity" was merely an agreed upon convention (which is not in the strictest sense "objective" at all).

So we've solved the social problem, somewhat. But what about the "global village" we all live in? Technology has brought numerous cultures within closer contact. So far, so good. But what happens when cultures clash in terms of morals? If morality is socially defined by consensus, then how can any culture "judge" another? It's very popular in a number of threads here for people to post the politically-correct sounding "who are we to judge someone else/else's culture?" - but that reasoning creates a problem: how do you solve disagreements between cultures with moral systems that disagree? Just say "Well, that's just how they do things and it's none of our business"? Aren't there some behaviors that ought to be condemned, regardless of culture? I think we paint ourselves into a scary corner when we decide that morality is self-defined, because, at some point, some culture will present a behavior that we will look at and go "That is unmistakably wrong."

I think you answered your own question. The root of the word morality comes from Latin roots that roughly translate to "customs". I believe that the problem is only a "social" problem as you phrased it. The cultural conflict is certainly an issue. Agreement does not necessarily exist across cultures. I think this is the easy side of the problem. I think the problem has more to do with systems that are used to justify what is not moral behavior in any culture. I think you can agree that killing is generally regarded as wrong across the board. Now you have groups believing that it's OK to kill if you are doing God's work. Not picking on religion. The secular argument is it's OK to kill to protect the state from the bad guy. I picked on these because most people believe they are sort of the absolute anchor positions. The biggest being self defense. In truth, it could be argued that there is really no justification to take a life ever. With this as the anchor point, it becomes a debate for what is acceptable. The problem now is that the lines for what is acceptable are changing. This is because of advances in technology as well as cultural clashes mixed with long standing tradition. The abortion debate is the text book example. So in the new world, which is coming into being every single passing moment, how shall we agree to what is acceptable. Globally! By the way once we agree, some new breakthrough in understanding may need consideration next week. It will be on the net. So we may have to do it again. The moral framework will require shifting. I am of the opinion that people will need to adjust to less tradition and more dynamics as the pace of change grows more rapid. This is not comfortable for many. Nothing is a substitute for individual compassion and a sense of practical.