That being said, I’ve been going to some philosophical
discussions. And at the moment, on my mind is the discussion I horribly
seemed to have lost an argument in or lost the room in. Now, I’m probably
about the lose my large internet audience as well.
When asked, “is morality objective?” one must probably
automatically answer: no, morality is subjective. I thought about it a bit, and
I went with “Yes, I think it could be objective…”
To be honest, I surprised myself with my answer. And luckily for me, I absolutely
love that. When we check with ourselves, and ask
ourselves a question again, in current time, and consciously really think about it anew and
afresh, do we surprise ourselves with a new answer and a new thought? I did.
So, here’s what I argued. There could be an underlying “objective”
morality function of several inputs, which is perhaps too difficult for us to compute at any given time. Perhaps there are 10 key aspects/inputs, or
perhaps there are infinite. If we were to enter values for all of these
key inputs of any given situation, perhaps we could do the calculation and get
a decently “objective” answer (currently defining “objective answer" to mean
one that most/all people in the world would at the deepest levels agree with) for how moral a certain act or behavior is or which would be the most moral course of action. I
argued that there are perhaps too many factors, and we are not able to make the
calculation, so we go with some bounded rationality version, and put down an
answer after we get tired of thinking a sufficient amount. This leads to subjective answers,
based on people’s levels of effort of thinking. Thus, in this regard, morality
APPEARS subjective. And perhaps for all practical and functional purpose, it
will indeed remain subjective.
Someone in the room argued, “morality is subjective…”
because when you give people a situation, and ask them what they'd do in
situation X or Y, answers are likely to be quite different, and this shows that morality is subjective. I surprisingly argued that
perhaps some of those people are not moral. That is, their own level of
morality (on some underlying objective morality scale, assuming it exists)
impacts what they would do in a given situation. (people might also vary in their efforts of thinking/computation of the morality function) At the very least, I was not convinced that people’s
opinions on morality can be taken as a way of saying there is no true morality
in the world to be discovered.
Someone else reminded us all about an experiment where
infants who were shown various scenarios knew to side with a victim whereas adults in the same experiment
didn’t. I thought this point added fuel to my argument, and clearly, people
must now stop and reconsider that morality could be objective if we were given
it at birth. Someone argued back saying, “well, we evolve.. and are corrupted,
and the right or wrong we experienced as kids is not something that stays with
us..” basically implying that a child’s view of morality is not applicable to
this current adult conversation. Lol, and I thought to myself, this guy is
corrupt.
Just kidding, he seemed quite nice and was raising very
interesting other points (hehe, note that “other” is my way of admitting that I
was not intrigued by this point he made, but mostly jk again). So, I would say there is some
possibility that if children know what’s moral or not, we shouldn’t ignore this point.
We should think about whether there exists something we have forgotten over time or do
not care to practice or to think about because we are too busy with other things. Perhaps we have accepted and endorsed moral subjectivity as a way of alleviating feeling
immoral.
I guess we should distinguish between "morality is
objective/objectively exists" vs. "where do we stand on
that scale." If we continuously rank low on a morality scale, and other adults continuously rank low on
that morality scale, we just start to say there is no such scale? We say don’t
look for it, it’s a futile scale? We say it requires too many things to think
about, so we’ll never try come up with maybe 10 or 20 or 50 rules/concepts in life
that matter most to all of us and that we could all potentially agree upon? It’s too much
to calculate, let’s not bother. Let’s just accept that morality is for sure
subjective. [I got called "an objectivist" by the end of the night, lol and maybe I deserved it, but I was also the only one fighting for the subjectivity of this question being discussed]
Well, there’s a lot of talk about “accountability” and “measurement”
when it comes to people’s gym goals. Counting calories, keeping track of your progress on weight lifting, on cardio, etc. There are days you're hitting all your gym goals, and other days you're not. But many people agree that having that scale helps us perform better.
I would say it’s hard for us to accept that every
day, we are immoral. And that we don’t meet the morality metrics that we maybe intrinsically
know do exist. This hurts our self-concept.
[Further, I worry what would happen if we don't have a scale in this case -- wouldn't we underperform?]
[Further, I worry what would happen if we don't have a scale in this case -- wouldn't we underperform?]
I’m not sure what to say about a metric we are more often
than not bound to fail on. I’m not sure I would say this scale doesn’t exist, I’m
not sure I’d say there isn’t an underlying consensus across religions,
cultures, and philosophies about what is moral. I know we have not been able to get at/find this
objective/universal morality/truth/fundamental set of moral rules that we all agree on ever
before if it does exist, but I’m not one to say what we have not achieved in
the past, we will continue not to achieve (though perhaps I should say that (?) lol), and that
we should not even bother try and deny the possibility of its existence. I would still say as I believe I have always said, we should dig further into the consensus or consensuses that do exist out there regarding morality.
I like Seattle : )
