Is there such a thing as "Objective Value"?

[Memento Mori]

I came across this video today, it's worth listening to.



Essentially the point is made that many today live almost entirely within the world of their own subjective feelings, which are "valid" in and of themselves, and do not follow from, and cannot be measured against, something objective, because there are no objective values, merely what we, as individuals, attribute to it through our subjective feelings (which obviously differ from person to person, and even for individuals themselves at certain times). So something cannot be objectively true, or false, or objectively good, or bad, or beautiful, or disgusting. So a great artwork, or a spectacular natural vista, (for example) is not something that is objectively beautiful.

The point is further made that this position is false, that there are objective values, and that by rejecting them in favour of subjective self-invention people limit their understanding of the world and blind themselves, and that when the objective is disregarded it must inevitably lead to conflict as everyone's subjective feelings (in the absence of any reference to objective value) are equally "correct" and no appeal can be made to some objective truth or value to settle or decide things.

I think people do live their lives like this, absorbed within the "prison of self-invention" as Barron puts it. I think we can see the impact of this all around us in western culture. There is a further good point made in the video, namely that any objection to objective value, in effect is an appeal to an objective value because of the very nature of that argument.

But what do you think?

[CelticRambler]

Simple answer: no, there can be no "objective value" because any value must inevitably be defined by the observer who will calibrate such value against their own parameters. This then will be further complicated by the "observer effect" whereby (the argument goes) any observer inevitably interacts with the system being observed.

I think what you describe in western culture (an observation with which I would concur) is a loss of any kind of generalised, rigid system of beliefs and "truths" to which everyone subscribes. Back in the day (way back), communities were considerably more insular and developed a set of rules - usually based on the dominant regional religion - that gave everyone a framework within which to live. Those who couldn't live within those rules were either locked up or locked out.

My personal analysis of what we're seeing today is the unintended consequence of us Europeans pushing that framework to the limit. Over the course of several centuries, many European regions used "the New World" as a convenient dumping ground for the many misfits who wouldn't (re)align themselves with an evolving socio-political environment.

Until the start of the last century, that wasn't too much of a problem - there was plenty of space for them "over there". For the most part, they (re)created their own non-conformist communities, kept themselves to themselves and rarely re-crossed the Atlantic. Then came the 20th century, and suddenly all this isolationism/individualism became global, and spread with particular rapidity throughout the anglophone world.

Now, in this 21st Century, we can see that cultures or communities that have "strong values" - regardless of how good or bad they may be deemed by anything approaching an "objective" measure - are better able to maintain their traditional way of life and increasingly resist western wokeness and the like.

[knownunknown]

What are objective values? A few times this speaker referred to objective morale values so I'm guessing that's what he's talking about. Objective morality.

I don't believe objective morality exists, if there were such a thing then I'm sure the bible would have had a commandment regarding slavery.

Force = Mass*Acceleration would be an objective truth. It doesn't require an observer to infer any of their bias to get a result.

A post-modernist would argue there is no scientific or objective truth. They can be heard saying things such as 'science is racist' 'science is sexist' etc., because they believe everything is inherently subjective.

Although there are some objective truths, not every objective truth is provable(at least in maths). "We must know, We will know"(translated from german) are words engraved on the tombstone of David Hilbert who believed that everything true had a formal proof. Unfortunately Gödel's incompleteness theorems proved him wrong, not all statements that are true have a proof.

Fascinating video about it here

[isha]

Interesting thoughts and responses.

Our civilisational values in the west hark back as much to Pythagorus, Socrates, Plato, Plotinus and their successors as they do to Christendom, and those lads spent a lot of effort defining objective values (without mentioning God in any concrete way). Forms, Reason,Truth, Beauty, the Good, the One etc.

I have read interesting ideas about eastern influence on the older thinkers in that group and I credit those ideas.

I am not a scholar on these matters but in terms of western classical ideas I have read some of Plotinus's work and found them very uplifting.

I think one chooses whether to believe in objective values as per this classical foundation, such as Truth, Love, Beauty etc and this is influenced by personality, which is influenced by life experiences. So that could be a way of saying objective values are subjectively cleaved towards

Personally I believe objective values are useful - I see a lot of harmful neuroticism and illusion developing in their absence.

[Peregrinus]

I don't believe objective morality exists, if there were such a thing then I'm sure the bible would have had a commandment regarding slavery.

Well, no. Because, obviously, it's possible that there could be objective moral truths that aren't stated in the bible (or in any text). The whole point of objective moral truths is that they would be true even if not stated anywhere. Your position that a moral value can only be objectively true if stated in the bible (or anywhere else) seems to be self-defeating.

Or, it's possible that there could be objective moral truths, but "slavery is wrong" isn't one of them.

More generally, we are reluctant to live in a world in which there are no objective moral truths. If there are no objective moral truths then we cannot say that, e.g., the Nazis in attempting to round up and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe were doing anything absolutely wrong; the Holocaust was was only wrong if, and to the extent that, other people objected to it, and even then the views of the objectors had no greater validity than the views of the perpetrators. Similarly, if I feed my own children into a meat grinder for my own amusement I'm not doing anything absolutely wrong; if nobody knows I'm doing it and therefore nobody condemns it what I'm doing is not wrong in any sense. Most of us recoil from such an idea.

The fact that we recoil from such an idea doesn't mean, of course, that our revulsion has any foundation in objective reality. We may choose to live as if there were objective moral truths, but that in itself is a subjective choice; it doesn't mean that there are objective moral truths; just that we have faith that there are. And perhaps that's as far as we can get.

Force = Mass*Acceleration would be an objective truth. It doesn't require an observer to infer any of their bias to get a result.

That's not an objective truth. "Force = mass x acceleration" is simply the definition of "force", which we invented. The meanings we assign to words are not objective truths since, if we weren't around to coin the words and assign meanings to them, neither the words nor their meanings would exist.

Is "the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides" an objective truth? It's provably true, given the axioms of Euclidean geometry, but of course we came up with those axioms. The platonic ideal of a perfect right-angled triangle doesn't exist in nature; can statements about imaginary geometric figures be said to be objectively true?

[knownunknown]

Well, no. Because, obviously, it's possible that there could be objective moral truths that aren't stated in the bible (or in any text). The whole point of objective moral truths is that they would be true even if not stated anywhere. Your position that a moral value can only be objectively true if stated in the bible (or anywhere else) seems to be self-defeating.

That's not my position and a rather an unfair interpretation of what I said. My position is that objective morale truths don't exist, everything in morality is subjective. What is your position on objective morale truths? Do you believe they exist?

Or, it's possible that there could be objective moral truths, but "slavery is wrong" isn't one of them.

"If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong" was a quote by Abraham Lincoln. If we cannot objectively say that slavery is wrong then surely nothing is objectively wrong.

That's not an objective truth. "Force = mass x acceleration" is simply the definition of "force", which we invented. The meanings we assign to words are not objective truths since, if we weren't around to coin the words and assign meanings to them, neither the words nor their meanings would exist.

Gravity is a force that we did not invent. We discovered it. It has a very real value at every point in the universe. This is denoted with a number that we did not invent, but we discovered. We discovered it through a system of disregarding completely our biases(science- objectivity). Given 2 properties we can calculate the third.

Is "the square on the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides" an objective truth? It's provably true, given the axioms of Euclidean geometry, but of course we came up with those axioms. The platonic ideal of a perfect right-angled triangle doesn't exist in nature; can statements about imaginary geometric figures be said to be objectively true?

It's an objective truth within plane geometry(2 dimensions). On a piece of paper euclidean geometry always holds true. An axiom is just a self-evident truth. Two points on a piece of paper will always draw a straight line between them. Did we just come up with that or did we discover that?

Can anything be said to be objectively true? What is your opinion.

[Memento Mori]

That's not my position and a rather an unfair interpretation of what I said. My position is that objective morale truths don't exist, everything in morality is subjective. What is your position on objective morale truths? Do you believe they exist?



"If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong" was a quote by Abraham Lincoln. If we cannot objectively say that slavery is wrong then surely nothing is objectively wrong.



Gravity is a force that we did not invent. We discovered it. It has a very real value at every point in the universe. This is denoted with a number that we did not invent, but we discovered. We discovered it through a system of disregarding completely our biases(science- objectivity). Given 2 properties we can calculate the third.



It's an objective truth within plane geometry(2 dimensions). On a piece of paper euclidean geometry always holds true. An axiom is just a self-evident truth. Two points on a piece of paper will always draw a straight line between them. Did we just come up with that or did we discover that?

Can anything be said to be objectively true? What is your opinion.

Are you not saying that the statement "slavery is wrong" is one that is objectively true?

[knownunknown]

Are you not saying that the statement "slavery is wrong" is one that is objectively true?

No, I believe we reach that conclusion by using empathy towards others, and it is subjective.
Do onto others as you would like them do to you and all that!

In history, the more other people were made 'others' the easier it was to dehumanize them. The more closely we saw others as ourselves the harder it was to treat them poorly.

[Peregrinus]

That's not my position and a rather an unfair interpretation of what I said. My position is that objective morale truths don't exist, everything in morality is subjective. What is your position on objective morale truths? Do you believe they exist?

To be fair, your position as stated was slightly more than that: it was that, if objective moral truths did exist, they would be set out in the bible. In fact, that’s that only explanation you offered for your belief that they don’t exist, so I don’t think it was “rather unfair” of me to explore it. But, if you felt it was unfair, I apologise. I certainly didn’t mean to be unfair to you.;

Do I believe that objective moral truths exist? It’s a fair question. I want them to exist, and therefore I choose to believe that they do. But this is of course a subjective belief - as is (so far as I can see) your belief that they don’t. And our subjective beliefs can, of course, be objectively wrong. So this doesn’t get us very far.

"If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong" was a quote by Abraham Lincoln. If we cannot objectively say that slavery is wrong then surely nothing is objectively wrong.

Forgive me, but I’m not seeing the logical necessity here.

Gravity is a force that we did not invent. We discovered it. It has a very real value at every point in the universe. This is denoted with a number that we did not invent, but we discovered. We discovered it through a system of disregarding completely our biases(science- objectivity). Given 2 properties we can calculate the third.

I’m sorry, but I’m not following your argument here. The definition of force has nothing to do with gravity, and the gravitational constant does not feature in the equation you set out. In fact no constant does; mass and acceleration are both variables.

It's an objective truth within plane geometry(2 dimensions). On a piece of paper euclidean geometry always holds true. An axiom is just a self-evident truth.

Axioms are not “self-evidently true”; they are things which are taken to be true even though not proven. And the main reason we take them to be true is not that they are “self-evidently true”; it is that they are incapable of proof, but our system of reasoning falls down if we do not start from somewhere, and these axioms are useful places from which to start.

In a system like Euclidean geometry in particular, the axioms are certainly not self-evidently true; how can we have “evidence” of purely theoretical concepts?

Euclidean geometry is logically coherent; the axioms are logically consistent with one another and, starting from the axioms you can prove all the theorems. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that it correlates in any way to anything that is objectively real or true. And evidence doesn’t come into it at all; Euclidean geometry proceeds entirely without any evidence of anything at all. It deals exclusively with things which do not exist in nature, of which there can be no evidence.

For example, nobody attempts to prove Pythagoras' theorem by going out and finding a right-angled triangle, measuring the sides and doing the cacluation. And, if anybody did, a geometer would reject the proof as invalid since the triangle measures is not a true Euclidean right-angled triangle; it is at best a real-world approximation of one.

Two points on a piece of paper will always draw a straight line between them. Did we just come up with that or did we discover that?

We came up with it. We invented the concept of “point”. Points do not exist in nature.

An actual pencil dot on a piece of paper is not a Euclidean point, since it has an extent whereas a Euclidean point has no extent. It is just a real-world graphical symbolisation of a theoretical Euclidean point. Similarly the pencil-mark joining two dots on a piece of paper is not a Euclidean straight line since it has thickness and finite length; it just symbolises a Euclidean line, which has zero thickness and infinite length in both directions.

Can anything be said to be objectively true? What is your opinion.

Pretty well anything can be said to be objectively true. I can say that it’s objectively true that the moon is made of green cheese, for example, or that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. But my saying it doesn’t make it so.

I think perhaps you meant to ask one of two other possible questions:

Can anything be known to be objectively true?

- or -

Is anything objectively true?

Both are interesting questions. But can you clarify which one you want to discuss?

[isha]

Ahhh the sweeet sweet feeling of knowing oneself to be a dunce ..only thing I am thinking (maybe because it is one of the few things I grasp re this Euclidean stuff above) is that the idea that we invent points, that they do not exist in nature, that drawing them is a kind of rough approximation of a subtler theory - surely this applies to all of what we invent. Everything starts as thought before we make it. And it gets very non-dualistic to say - basically - nothing exists.
I spent a very long while amongst people who went with the nothing exists vibe and while I could understand the appeal I think I was brought up too countrified to get totally into it. There is something intellectually indulgent in complete detachment from the nuts and bolts of a (at least apparently to the senses) physical universe, and dropping a turnip on ones toe illustrates pretty quickly that things do objectively exist. The turnip will even draw a collection of points upon ones skin to prove itself.

[Peregrinus]

Ahhh the sweeet sweet feeling of knowing oneself to be a dunce ..only thing I am thinking (maybe because it is one of the few things I grasp re this Euclidean stuff above) is that the idea that we invent points, that they do not exist in nature, that drawing them is a kind of rough approximation of a subtler theory - surely this applies to all of what we invent. Everything starts as thought before we make it. And it gets very non-dualistic to say - basically - nothing exists.
I spent a very long while amongst people who went with the nothing exists vibe and while I could understand the appeal I think I was brought up too countrified to get totally into it. There is something intellectually indulgent in complete detachment from the nuts and bolts of a (at least apparently to the senses) physical universe, and dropping a turnip on ones toe illustrates pretty quickly that things do objectively exist. The turnip will even draw a collection of points upon ones skin to prove itself.

Couple of thoughts:

As you point out, there's a wide range of things that we don't invent, and we can be reasonably sure that they exist. Rocks, for example, were around long before we came along to observe them. They really exist, independently of us.

So far as we know, anyway.

Our belief that rocks exist is pretty well-founded, but it does depend on some unproven axioms. In particular, we assume that when we observe rocks - by seeing them, by tripping over them, by hearing them banged together - our sensory observations do reflect an external physical reality; i.e they are not illusions; they are not delusions; they are not dreams. We can't actually prove this assumption, because any attempt to prove it relies on us making observations, and an attempt to prove that our senses correspond to external reality by pointing to the observation of our senses is logically circular. But what we can say is that assuming our sensory observations reflect external reality seems to work consistently well, so we are pretty happy to proceed on the basis that the assumption is correct.

So, yeah; given a few fundamental assumptions that we think are entirely reasonable to make, we can be pretty certain that rocks are objectively real.

But this only works for material things that we can observe through our senses. There are lots of non-material things that we consider to be important; are they objectively real? Are numbers, for example, objectively real"? You can't see, hear, touch, smell, etc. the number "2". Are "justice" or "injustice" objectively real? Is "truth" itself objectively real?

A materialist (in the philosophical sense) holds that nothing exists except matter, and its movements and modifications. So abstractions like the number 2, the Euclidian plane, justice and truth itself do not exist; they may be useful, but they are not real.

An opposing view it the Platonic or idealist view, which holds that (a) just because we can't see something doesn't mean it isn't real, and (b) we have good reason to think that some things we cannot see are, nevertheless, real. Going back to Euclidean geometry, for example, a true right-angled triangle does not exist in nature, but the things we learn from imagining and reflecting on it do have useful real-world applications. We can't prove Pythagoras' theorem by looking for physical right-angled triangles and measuring their sides, but it does work the other way around; we can use the theorem to test whether how close a physical object is to the ideal right-angled triangle, by measuring its sides and doing the calculation. Similarly we can use the tools of pure mathematics to think about the empirically-observed world and to frame hypotheses about it and, lo, when we go out and empirically test those hypotheses they turn out to be correct. So these abstractions, although unobservable, aren't just random imaginings; they have a coherence, an integrity and a relationship with observed reality which suggests that they themselves have an objective validity or reality. Whereas if we theorise a right-angled triangle in which the cube of the two shorter sides equals the cube of the hypotenuse, that doesn't work, and it has no correspondence to anything we can observe. So that's not objectively real.

Right. Once you get to that point you think "well, is it only number and Euclidean figures and the like that can be objectively real in this sense? If there's an abstract but real right-angled triangle against which we can measure real-world triangular things to find out how close to right-angled they are, can there be an abstract but objectively real justice or truth, against which we can measure real-world actions and claims so as to say that they are, objectively speaking, more or less just, more or less true?

And that splits into two questions, which I already pointed to. First, could such abstract realities exist? A Platonist would say, at least in principle, that they could; the fact that we cannot observe them directly is no objection to their reality. And, secondly, if they do exist, can we know what they are, given that we cannot observe them directly?

[isha]

^^^I will have to think about all that Peregrinus, after first trying to understand some of it, and maybe after taking a shot of some kind of brain stimulant first .
I did spend a long while reading (though not remembering at a knowing level) advaita vedanta materials and I know that early mathematicians were very akin to abstract philosophers, eg Brahmagupta and forebears, but I must confess it was a very cerebral pastime rather than a practical experience for me.

I liked the spacious feeling of the abstraction, rather than lived in it. Might get into it again later in life after I have dealt with more turnip- style reality, I think I took it on too young!

I am with the Platonists (and their predecessors) in that I believe abstract realities exists.

Can we know them directly - I think as we refine perception, including mechanically, our knowing of abstract reality expands. So I think it is presumptious to deny what one cannot presently perceive.

There is one simple way I know or understand this. When I was a teenager I did not know the names of garden plants, nor did I have an interest in them. I can recall herbaceous borders having an amorphous quality when I saw them. Gardens were clumpings of shapes and colours but only unusual things struck me. When I learned the name and nature of plants and appreciated them, the previously amorphous became incredibly distinct and clear. It was like a new level of perception opened up.

I think by the same process that some people or tribes have levels of perception of abstractions I cannot perceive because they have been trained to know and appreciate them, like say Sami medicine people for example. And scientists, astronomers, mathematicians etc have access to modes of perception of what others think of as still abstract realities.

I also think we have problems nowadays with politicisation of objective values.

If this is garbled it is because I am fueled merely on mint tea and not glanding Quicken or some neural stimulant which would help me think straight

[CelticRambler]

If we're going down the rabbit hole of what is and isn't real, it might be worth remembering that when we observe something - with our eyes - we're not doing so as directly as we might believe.

Photons of light reflected of the object or scene we think we're looking reach take time to reach our eyeballs, then pass through the internal structures to trigger a chemical reaction on our retinas. That chemical reaction sends a bio-electric impulse up our optic nerve, where it passes through a variety of neural circuits in our brain to end up as the phenomenon that we call "seeing". Several points along that chain can introduce delays and irregularities, so there's no certainty that what one person sees is the same as what another person sees. And as if those physiological inaccuracies weren't enough, the final version of what we "see" is error checked against our memories of known and expected data and "repaired" before we become consciously aware of the image.

[knownunknown]

Descarte's strategy was to doubt, or not believe, any claim that is false or could be false.

He found that he could not doubt that he himself existed, as he was the one doing the doubting in the first place.

I'll continue to believe that a line drawn between 2 points will always produce a straight line within 2 dimensional geometry, until I see evidence otherwise. Perhaps that is just a subjective belief. But we know there are things that are true which can never be proven. Weird paradoxes arise from self-reference but thinking about these things has led to great advancements in modern technology.

[Riffmongous]

What if we wiped out every human (and maybe some of the smarter animals), would Euclidean geometry or any abstract reality 'exist'? Did they exist before they were thought of?

[isha]

Would love, sacrifice, honour, poetry, etc etc exist if we did that? Perhaps the existence of some things is dependent upon our existing? The Buddhists are big into that idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%A ... tp%C4%81da. They want to reverse out of that dependency though, the party poopers. Though some days I agree with them

[Peregrinus]

Concepts like honour and sacrifice are meaningless in the absence of self-aware, free-willed creatures that can make choices which can be characterised as honourable, sacrificial, etc. So if we or someone like us were not around no, these things wouldn't exist. They refer only to us and, in a universe without us, they have nothing to refer to.

Whereas abstractions like the number 2, a point on a plane, etc, don't refer to us. We imagine a universe that doesn't include any intelligent life - our own universe at an earlier stage of its evolution, perhaps - and still see that numbers, geometric figures, etc, can still have relevance to it, even though they are abstractions that do not exist in nature in that universe. Do they therefore have objective reality?

Conversely, in a universe which does include us, honour, sacrifce etc do have something to refer to. So, in that universe, do honour and sacrifice have objective reality?

[Peregrinus]

Descarte's strategy was to doubt, or not believe, any claim that is false or could be false.

He found that he could not doubt that he himself existed, as he was the one doing the doubting in the first place.

I'll continue to believe that a line drawn between 2 points will always produce a straight line within 2 dimensional geometry, until I see evidence otherwise. Perhaps that is just a subjective belief. But we know there are things that are true which can never be proven. Weird paradoxes arise from self-reference but thinking about these things has led to great advancements in modern technology.

Well, all beliefs are subjective beliefs. That's inherent in the notion of "belief".

But if you accept that it is or can be objectively true that any two points in a Euclidean plane can be joined by a straight line, then obviously you accept that there may be objective truth or objective reality in wholly abstract, non-material things. In which case, why should not ethical, moral, aesthetic etc values be objectively true/real/valid?

"They're not mentioned in the bible", or any variant of this, isn't really an answer, since the whole point about objective truth/reality is that something is true or real independently of whether we recognise it or not. In the field of natural science there are likely to be many, many objective truths or realities that we have yet to discover; why should the same not be true in other fields?

[Memento Mori]

No, I believe we reach that conclusion by using empathy towards others, and it is subjective.
Do onto others as you would like them do to you and all that!

In history, the more other people were made 'others' the easier it was to dehumanize them. The more closely we saw others as ourselves the harder it was to treat them poorly.

If something is only wrong because we think it is - and not that it is objectively wrong regardless of anyone's subjective stance - then why should one subjective opinion be held to be above another, and people forced to abide by it? The popularity of the subjective stance? A numbers game? The power of those who hold a certain opinion? Such an approach totally undermines the concept of human rights, it would seem to me.

[Memento Mori]

I don't mean to spam Bishop Barron, but he follows up on the video in the OP with some more commentary on the importance of objective values, and how the absence of same can lead to totalitarianism.

[knownunknown]

If something is only wrong because we think it is - and not that it is objectively wrong regardless of anyone's subjective stance - then why should one subjective opinion be held to be above another, and people forced to abide by it? The popularity of the subjective stance? A numbers game? The power of those who hold a certain opinion? Such an approach totally undermines the concept of human rights, it would seem to me.

Not because we think it is, because we know if it was done to us it would be wrong. We then extend this to other people. We know people have different views about morality, so yes, I guess it boils down to a numbers game in the same way a referrendum would.

If there was objective morality, then could you provide an example?
Many might say that killing would be objectively wrong, but why then do we include self-defence as an exception to being punished.

How does this undermine human rights? Human rights are largely negative; the right not to be interefered with(Speech, property, enslaved). The right to life is a negative duty not to kill. These still all hold true in my mind.

We get to this place of human rights and morality by using our empathy, and the word for people that aren't empathetic has some very nasty connotations.

[Memento Mori]

Not because we think it is, because we know if it was done to us it would be wrong. We then extend this to other people. We know people have different views about morality, so yes, I guess it boils down to a numbers game in the same way a referrendum would.

How can we "know" something without there being an objective truth? If it is the case that a moral position is legitimate merely because 50+1% of people hold it at a particular moment in time, that very much seems to me a recipe for totalitarianism. It would also undermine any concept we have at looking at accepted or encouraged practices in the past, or indeed in the future, as being morally wrong, because the deciding factor in something being right or wrong is not an appeal to an objective standard, but rather the power of those holding it.

If there was objective morality, then could you provide an example?
Many might say that killing would be objectively wrong, but why then do we include self-defence as an exception to being punished.

Do you not think there can be anything that is wrong, was wrong, and will always be wrong? Or the opposite? When I say "objectively wrong" I do not mean that a certain act, is wrong in every circumstance, but rather there are acts that are always wrong in some circumstances regardless of whether the person committing them, or witnessing or supporting them, thinks they are actually good. This is an extreme example, but if somehow a society, or even a majority in the world, convinced themselves that it was a good idea, even a moral good or necessity, to commit genocide and massacre millions of innocent people I would maintain that this would be something that was objectively wrong regardless of any numbers game or subjective opinion.

How does this undermine human rights? Human rights are largely negative; the right not to be interefered with(Speech, property, enslaved). The right to life is a negative duty not to kill. These still all hold true in my mind.

The whole idea of human rights is that they are articulating something which is objective and intrinsic to our being and cannot or should not be taken away, and if they are, you have been greatly wronged. In other words, you would still have and deserve human rights even if you lived in a country where people voted that you shouldn't - their denial of your human rights would be wrong. If we say something cannot be objectively wrong and it is merely a numbers game, then how can you say that it is actually wrong to commit horrific abuses if a majority supports them (something which you have said is your standard - the numbers game). Of course, I am talking about human rights as a concept - it is possible that these will be refined further in the future as we gain greater understanding, I would argue, of how to behave. But implicit in this statement is the idea that there is something objective to understand.

We get to this place of human rights and morality by using our empathy, and the word for people that aren't empathetic has some very nasty connotations.

You seem to think treating people with empathy is a good thing. If you read a poll that showed that 75% of people believe that treating people with empathy is a bad thing, would it be bad? Or would you say these people were wrong? If you would, and will not make any appeal to objectivity, then why should anyone change their mind given that everyone's subjective opinion is as valid as someone else's? What legitimacy would you have in your claim?

Of course, these conversations tend to centre around evil things (because of our fallen nature perhaps) and not good things, but it works both ways. Some things are objectively good and beautiful.

[Peregrinus]

Couple of thoughts:

1. Don’t confuse “objectively wrong” with “absolutely wrong”. MM has already covered this, but it’s worth emphasising. “It is always wrong to tell a lie” would be an absolute moral principle which might, or might not, be objectively true/valid. “Telling a lie requires a compelling justification” is not an absolute principle and it might, or might not, be objectively true/valid.

2. Don’t confuse “moral principle” with “thou shalt not”. Ethics is mainly about the things we do, not the things we refrain from doing. A classic ethical statement like “love your neighbour as yourself” points us to behaviour we must engage in, not behaviour that we must not engage in.

3. This is connected with the notion of human rights being largely negative. I think we have this perception because much of our discourse about human rights focusses on governments - governments being in a position, because of their power and authority, to abuse human rights on a grand scale. And our response has been to develop the notion of limited government, to constrain what governments may do. So the government many not arrest you without due cause, it may not limit your freedom of speech, etc, etc.

4. But if we ask ourselves not “how should the government behave?” but what is arguably the more pressing question of “how should I behave?” or “how should we behave?”, I don’t think your human rights impose only negative obligations on me. If you are starving to death and I have surplus food, do I not have some moral imperative on me to share it with you? If you are drowning and I have a lifebuoy, surely I must throw it to you?

5. There’s a principle in Jewish law that any other law can be broken in order to save a life - your own, or someone else’s. So, for example, you can do life-saving work on the Sabbath, or you can eat pork or shellfish if the alternative is starving to death, or you can steal food to give it to someone who would otherwise starve. (I’m sure this principle is not confined to the Jewish ethical tradition; I just happen to have read that it is explicitly stated in that context.) That looks to me like a statement of the right to life that is affirmative, and not purely negative; the right to life not only imposes positive obligations, but it imposes positive obligations which transcend all other negative prohibitions.

6. If we are looking for moral principles that we think may have objective validity and not arise simply out of our personal preferences or our particular context or situation, I think they may well be relative rather than absolute. “Break any other law in order to save a live” is not an absolute moral principle, but a relative one - it’s about the priority of different moral principles.

[Memento Mori]

I would add that when the word relative is used as Peregrinus has above, I don't think it is meant to espouse moral relativism.

[Peregrinus]

I would add that when the word relative is used as Peregrinus has above, I don't think it is meant to espouse moral relativism.

Yes. "Moral relativism" is usually a shorthand term for the view that this thread exists to debate; are their any objective moral values? A moral relativist will argue that (1) there are no absolute rules to determine whether something is right or wrong, and (2) what we consider right or wrong depends on opinion, social context, culture, etc.

It is, of course, possible to accept point (2) while not accepting point (1) — our views on what is right and wrong are always subjective and are shaped and constrained by our experience, culture, etc, but we can still say that there are objective standards of right and wrong, and our subjective beliefs are an attempt to discover and approach those standards, and can be nearer to or further from those standards.

This isn't just a religious view, though of course it is foundational for most religious ethical systems. But the whole notion of moral progress - seeing our tolerance as an advance over previous generations' judgmentalism, or seeing our democracy as an advance over absolute monarchy, etc - implicitly evaluates moral developments in terms of movement towards a desired or ideal end-goal.