Is he saying the first point is wrong or just that it conflicts with the second?
That it conflicts. He’s saying that if you believe that morality is relative and every person/culture has the difficult task of defining their own, it’s ironic to be so aghast when people have reached different conclusions than you.
Setting aside the unshakeable part, morality should be somewhat rigid. While relative, that doesn’t mean morality can or should change on a whim.
It seems like that tension between those things (which I’d expect are natural intuitions that many people experience) would be a foundational principle in ethics. Is it? Is that the joke?
That it conflicts with the second viewpoint.
What’s even funnier- is the amount of people in the comments here that perfectly illustrate the humor in the post without even understanding why.
I don’t see the problem. One can have unshakeable moral values they believe everyone should have while acknowledging those values may be a product of their upbringing and others’ lack of them the same.
What about the last part: “viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity?”
I believe abortion is moral. I believe people who disagree are morally monstrous. I can also understand that their beliefs on whether abortion is moral or not can be a product of their culture and upbringing. What am I missing? Why is this odd?
It’s the kind of thing professors say when they want to go viral on some fascist platform.
Kids thinking anything goes while also being incredibly close-minded is not new.
*humans
There are no adults in the room.
Im 50. The only difference between me and a 12 year old is cancer scares and a bit more wisdom due to experience. Im convinced this is true for most people.
I see no paradox here. Yes, the rubrics change over time, making morality relative, but the motivation (empathy) remains constant, meaning you can evaluate morality in absolute terms.
A simple analog can be found in chess, an old game that’s fairly well-defined and well-understood compared to ethics. Beginners in chess are sometimes confused when they hear masters evaluate moves using absolute terms — e.g. “this move is more accurate than that move.
Doesn’t that suggest a known optimum — i.e., the most accurate move? Of course it does, but we can’t actually know for sure what move is best until the game is near its end, because finding it is hard. Otherwise the “most accurate” move is never anything more than an educated guess made by the winningest minds/software of the day.
As a result, modern analysis is especially good at picking apart historic games, because it’s only after seeing the better move that we can understand the weaknesses of the one we once thought was best.
Ethical absolutism is similarly retrospective. Every paradigm ever proposed has flaws, but we absolutely can evaluate all of them comparatively by how well their outcomes express empathy. Let the kids cook.
To add to this, morality can be entirely subjective, but yeah, of course if I see someone kicking puppies in the street I’ll think: “That’s intrinsically morally wrong.” Before I try to play in the space of “there’s no true morality and their perspective is as valid as mine.”
If my subjective morality says that slavery is wrong, I don’t care what yours says. If you try to keep slaves in the society I live in as well I want you kicked out and ostracized.
Honestly, those two points don’t seem incompatible to me. For example:
Teaching the history of fashion to undergrads in 1985 is bizarre because:
- They insist that standards of dress are entirely relative. Being dressed decently is a cultural construct; some cultures wear hardly any clothing whatsoever and being nude is a completely normal, default way of presenting yourself.
- And yet when I walk into class with my dick and balls hanging out, they all get extremely offended and the coeds threaten to call the police.
(And yes I changed the year because I’m sick of so many of these issues being brought up as though “the kids these days” are the problem, when so often these are issues that have been around LITERALLY FOREVER.)
I’m not trying to dunk on this Henry Shelvin guy – I’m certain that he knows a lot more about philosophy than me, and has more interesting thoughts about morals than I do. And I’m also not going to judge someone based on a tweet…aside from the obvious judgement that they are using Twitter, lol. But as far as takes go, this one kinda sucks.
No, that is not the direct equivalence. The direct equivalence for 2. Would be something like
“But then they insist that being naked is never acceptable and is grotesque, and anyone that disagrees is a gross pervert”
That’s where the inconsistency comes from
And yet when I walk into class with my dick and balls hanging out, they all get extremely offended and the coeds threaten to call the police.
Cancel culture today is out of control.
We used to have academic freedom. Now we just have sensitivity trainings and PANTS. SHACKLES OF THE MIND, I TELL YOU!
Well because we have indecent exposure laws. Hanging your dick and balls out in public is not relevant to cancel culture or fashion.
plenty of people violate laws without comment or condemnation all the time. nobody makes a fuss about someone going 5 mph over the speed limit, or doing a fuck-ton of sexual assault, and it’s really hard to get anyone to care. you’re an asshole if you make a big deal about someone doing some drugs.
laws and morality don’t really correlate.
you’re an asshole if you make a big deal about someone doing some drugs.
Did you respond to the wrong person? I was talking about displaying your cock and balls in public being illegal. Where did this come from?
laws and morality don’t really correlate.
ok. yes thats right. what are you talking about though? when did we start talking about morality?
The woke mind virus strikes again.
I’ve had people, presumably young, argue with me on here about politics and morals. For example, I say the right to abortion is a political issue. Been screamed out that it’s not a political issue because a woman’s right to an abortion is a moral issue. Yeah, I agree, but the argument is still political. Some believe abortion is murder and that they’re right. That’s politics.
It’s like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics. “I’m on the right side of this thing so it’s not politics!” As if I’m somehow lowering the debate to mere… something?
That was one of the first things I got confused by on lemmy. Am I making sense? Just crawled in from work and I’m wasted tired.
It’s like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics.
I think they point they are trying to make is that once you are very very wrong about something (in their mind), it’s no longer a political position, it’s just an immoral position. And if that’s what they’re saying, I disagree with it.
I’m not saying that there are no immoral positions, I’m saying that a position can be completely immoral and still be political. I hate when people use the phrase “it’s just politics” as a shield, as though everyone else has to be OK with some incredibly shitty attitude they have, just because they have managed to also make it a political attitude.
And that’s such a terrible superpower to give to politics, too: the ability to instantly legitimize a position simply because it falls under the domain of politics.
Not to long ago, the question of “should white children and black children be allowed to go to school together” was a political issue in the U.S. And I’d say that’s still a political issue. It didn’t magically become some other type of issue just because a few decades passed and we now agree that one side was completely wrong. The fact that it isn’t actively being discussed anymore doesn’t change the fact that it falls under the umbrella of political issues. It means that someone can have a political opinion and they have to be a real piece of shit to hold that opinion.
It’s also a health issue. It involves choices about life, not unlike someone in a coma or another situation where they are unable to make a conscious choice about whether to continue or deny treatment.
One argument in favor of abortion I recall reading was comparing it to donating an organ while you’re still alive. You are under no obligation of donating anything, of risking your life to save another, even if you are literally the only person on Earth that can save the other. If medical professionals have to respect those choices, they should also respect the choice of mothers who decide to end an undesired pregnancy
It’s even worse than that. You can’t even be forced to donate organs or blood after you’re dead. Most places are opt-in for organ donation. A few jurisdiction are opt-out. Nowhere has mandatory posthumous organ donation. Some despotic countries have apparently used force organ harvesting on political dissidents, but no country has ever established some broad rule, based on patriotism or some such, that everyone has to donate organs after death.
In red states, pregnant women literally have less bodily autonomy than corpses.
The owning class wants to be the only class doing politics. So they brainwash the proles into thinking politics is bad.
not just bad, but extremely venal, petty, and a thing that happens in marble rooms you aren’t allowed to go in.
And making people believe preserving the status quo is not political but changing it is
But they are moral arguments, unless politics is added into the discussion. Let me give you a different example. If I believe people are entitled to the fruits of their labor then that’s a moral point. If I believe the government should enforce everyone getting their fruits, that’s political.
If I were to believe abortion is wrong then that can be a moral point. However if I think the government should take a stand on the matter, that’s political.
The point they were trying to make (I believe, and this specific argument) is that the entire basis of the opposing argument is entirely based on religion and pretty much by definition specious. There is no sky daddy looking over your shoulder, and this any morality you base on its existence is inheritetly flawed at best.
What there is are women who need timely access to medical care or their lives are at risk. This is a tangible and real threat.
So treating the issue as “Politics” only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
So treating the issue as “Politics” only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
Your earlier paragraphs don’t provide any evidence for this point.
post-structuralism has done a lot to attack the basic idea that something like “right” and “wrong” even exist in the first place, outside of the mind of the observer.
I’m kinda pissed about that btw.
viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity
This should be the slogan of public social media.
Hah! Cool to see Henry pop up on my feed. I knew this guy back when he was a grad student. And as somebody that also teaches ethics, he is dead on. Undergrads are not only believe all morality is relative and that this is necessary for tolerance and pluralism (it’s not), but are also insanely judgmental if something contradicts their basic sense of morality.
Turns out, ordinary people’s metaethics are highly irrational.
I just commented elsewhere in this thread, but isn’t moral realism a thing for this exact situation? Is his post not a self report on his inability to identify a moral framework that fits his students worldview, or at least to explain the harm that arises if one has a self contradictory worldview and help them realize that and potentially arrive at a more consistent view? Seems like this comment section is filled with a lot of people that understand their moral framework more than this professor, but obviously are not in the field. Can you please elaborate on the issues here? Like I think abortions are fine, but I understand that others think it’s murder. I don’t think they’re bad people for that, but I understand if they think I’m a bad person for my views. How we deal with it on a societal level is obviously even more complicated. I don’t see how there’s a problem there.
It seems like ALL is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. Do they really believe ALL morality is relative and are also always insanely judgy if things contradict their beliefs?
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.
Your beliefs seem to align with what the students are saying and generally with moral realism.
You just said “I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t.” so you can view some morality as subjective and some as necessarily universal. That is what most people default to and what you seem to saying is wrong with the students. You state they aren’t consistent, but you’re also not consistent. Sometimes subjectivity is right sometimes it’s not. I’m not seeing a distinction, so please elaborate on it if I’m missing it.
This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.
This is basically how teaching secular ethics always is, though. Doesn’t seem special about 2025. People will always be overconfident in their beliefs, but it’s not necessarily a coincidence or even hypocrisy that they can hold both views at the same time.
You can believe that morality is a social construct while simultaneously advocating for society to construct better morals. Morality can be relative and opposing views on morality can still be perceived as monstrous relative to the audience’s morality.
But “constructing better morals” is by itself a non-relativist statement. How can you say there are “better morals” when you follow moral relativism, which states that there is no universal set of moral principles? In other words, that morals are not comparable with each-other?
It’s not the same thing as accepting that different cultures have different set of morals, but whether some things are simply more moral than others, or not. For example, saying that slavery is always bad, and should never be allowed, is an absolutist moral statement.
Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify popular morals.
“Murder is wrong” is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic “murder is wrong” stance.
in fact, that “murder is wrong” in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like “morality is subjective” as though it’s an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
https://images.app.goo.gl/fBQbi2J5osxuFmvt7
I think “morality is subjective” is just something we hear apparently worldly people say all the time, and nobody really has any idea.
By the way, I have a PhD in ethics and wrote my dissertation on the objectivity/subjectivity of ethics. Long story short, we don’t know shit!
“Morality is subjective” is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.
Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.
Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.
If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.
And since we can’t point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn’t even matter if one theoretically exists because it’s inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn’t exist for us.
Both of us are following different moral standards, the “rules” in your head are not the same rules that I’m subjective to.
You’re morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.
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.
My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There’s no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
Goals and priorities might differ a lot between an ant and a human but not so much between two humans. At least not enough to not get at least a few rules for behavior.
Just because its easy to get a bunch of humans to agree say murder is wrong, doesn’t mean you can call that objective.
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
If morality is subjective, you’d expect creatures with similar subjective experiences to agree with each other.
You’d expect one subjective blob of rules to conform to human biology/sociology and a separate blob of subjective rules to apply to antkind with no real way to interface between the two.
and you base that expectation on what?
hopes and dreams?
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it. knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”
the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us. the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don’t believe that’s possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
How do you overcome the is-ought problem?
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic. this is a big ol nothing-burger of a refutation, it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors. You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you. The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors.
Just human? I mean, sure do, but we’re leaving out a huge array of animals who also engage in rudimentary moral behavior.
You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you.
Of course, we evolved to be social animals did we not? What else would you expect but inate instinctual “rules” when they’d lead to a clearly fitter society.
The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
Right, and just like the variation in genetic material this variation in inputs and outputs that we all have which are wholly unique to us as individuals and while remarkably similar to others raised in similar environments, also remarkably unique in subtle ways.
I agree this is the entire conversation. And the obviousness of this fact, that moral expression is subtly unique to each individual, is the ultimate answer to the question.
If you are raised in a subjectively different environment, then the rules you learn to behave by will be subjective to that environment.
“murder is wrong” is a moral absolute if you adopt the deontological viewpoint. It’s not if you adopt the teleological approach. Discussing these things is literally what I learnt in the very short Ethics course I had in third year uni (while in France that sort of stuff was much much earlier during Philosophy class…)
Edit : and to be clear, I think absolute opinions are the province of the philosopher and the fanatic. Real life tends to be a bit more messy. But that’s why it’s important to sort of know what the options are and how difficult the choices can be (again, for real human beings who struggle with dilemmas ; fanatics tend to eachew all that and I’d say that’s how you can spot them).
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out “murder” for “killing” the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
It’s even worse than that. It floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder. It’s murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don’t even have a proper word for it, they just say “it’s not murder… IT’S WAR!” What a lazy non-argument. It doesn’t count because we’re doing murder Costco style, in bulk?
I mean yeah, it’s people killing people that don’t want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It’s more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.
As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn’t have the baggage of human murdered. Don’t want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they’re doing, or they won’t comply as reliably!
and this is exactly my point, the definition of the word generally points directly to it being killing in a fashion that is unlawful which rests on the applicable law in the context.
Nation state soldiers killing enemy combatants doesn’t fit this description in most circumstances. (There are of course rules and exceptions etc etc)
I’m not arguing the morality, I’m arguing the factual definition and it’s the reason why i said the language causes it’s own issues.
floors me that it’s widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn’t murder
Because it’s not. Murder is one sided. War, you are fighting. It’s not 1 sided. It’s killing, and can easily and is often morally reprehensible. But that does not make it murder. Civilian deaths are still murder in a war.
It’s not defanging language. Its using it as it is.
Excuse me I was told that anyone who says “people view disagreement as moral monstrosity” is actually a nazi.
Parallel: Teaching contemporary American literature to undergrads in 2019 was utterly bizarre because they hadn’t lived through 9/11. So much stuff went over their heads. There’s just a disconnect you’re always going to have because of lived experience and cultural changes. It’s your job, especially in a philosophy course, to orient them to differing schools of thought and go “oh, I didn’t think about it that way.” And correct them on Nietzsche, because they’re always fucking wrong about Nietzsche.
Gesundheit!
