And there are groups that intentionally induce extreme pain in young boys as as a rite of passage in to manhood.

That doesn't mean there isn't a biological basis for the near-universal human preference to avoid pain.

I think consent plays a part here

So there can be nothing of value to be gained, scientifically or otherwise, from subjectively asking people which hand they prefer? That strikes me as false.

We have a strong understanding, for instance, that because raising a child is an intensely resource-heavy endeavor for humans, cheating on a spouse is generally considered unethical. Thus asking people, "Do you think cheating on your spouse is unethical?" will result in responses that align with that understanding. Simply saying, "Well most people say they prefer that their spouses not cheat on them, but we can't assign any value to that finding because we can't determine whether that's true objectively," isn't accurate.

Maybe I'm not understanding the objection. I could sort of see it that assigning a particular meaning for why people answered a moral question in a certain way is itself unscientific - there are several possible explanation why a person could think killing another is morally wrong, for instance, and it would be difficult to say which of them is the scientific explanation for why humans believe killing to be wrong.

But to say that we cannot glean anything broader from asking people moral questions and finding which questions generate strong agreements among people seems incorrect.

Morality arises from us being the types of creatures we are living in the type of universe we are living in. Science and philosophy both attempt to understand this predicament. Therfore both science and philosophy have something to say about ethics. Done argument over see ya later.

There are groups that believe in honor killings

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There are objective measures of handedness, and lots of people love to claim ambidexterity when they do not possess it.

Many moral questions are really questions about new situations, not new principles. For example, if you already believe you ought not eat pork, there's no violation of Hume's Guillotine in turning to DNA sequencing to determine whether there's pork in a dish.

I don't know if this is what this guy means, but it's not unreasonable to suggest that we already believe the moral principles that would let us answer most moral questions to our satisfaction, and we're just waiting for a thorough understanding of the facts.

"Science cannot provide justification for the value clause". Why is this necessary? Isn't the justification simply that we want a better world as opposed from a worse one? And if you don't happen to agree then you're not really getting the whole concept of morality that we are all trying to understand. It's not deflationary of morality, it is what we mean when we say morality.

'Science can't justify Science, that doesn't make it unscientific.' Health can't justify we why want to feel better, but once we admit that we all want to feel better than we can have a Science of medicine. ' if someone comes along and says well I want to continually vomit and live in pain, he isn't offering an argument against the Science of medicine?

I fail to see that problem. To say that Science can't bolster our moral claims is absurd. What else could?

Science is simply our attempt to understand the world. If you want to base your morality off of something else such a religious dogma or whim go for it but you will be inviting suffering, I garuntee it.

>This just shows what their preference is. It does not entail anything beyond their preference.

Hang on, I think this needs expansion. If, for instance, you asked a large group of people whether they were left handed, right handed, or ambidextrous, the result wouldn't just be dismissed as "That's their preference." We don't understand handedness, but we do know that there is some kind of biological imperative on humans which drives both preference for one hand over another and a ~90/10 ratio of right handedness to left handedness across all human populations.

Why can we automatically assume there is no analogous imperative for moral decisions?

>"If it is right for you, it is right for everybody".

If it is right for the surgeon to cut a person open, it is right for everyone to cut a person open.

Intentionally harming others is ubiquitously considered bad by any moral framework worth its salt. So, though there might not be an objective yardstick, we have a certain metaphysical inkling of right and wrong.

Here's an example of 'if it's right for you, it's right for everyone' failing.

In an industrialized society, near-unlimited access to water is frequently (and correctly) considered a human right.

In a nomadic society in a dry climate, it almost definitely should not be.

>someone says that the grotesque is beautiful. For them this may be a true experience while others don't experience it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that aesthetics are relative. What if existence itself is beautiful?

This is what I'm getting at in the article. The subjective experience that the person is having is real and we cannot judge this subjective sense based on the opinions of others. Just because others don't find this same thing as beautiful doesn't make the experience wrong, only unpopular.

Aesthetics isn't contingent on reason, its determined by subjective experience. Existence may be beautiful for some, awful to others, and those sensations are real, yet they exist in a different reality than material or metaphysical truths.

The objective is subject to empirical verification and testing, the subjective is not. There is no way to test whether I believe something, identify as something, or experience something outside of the belief, identity or experience itself. The meaning we impose on life or our personal ethics isn't subject to tests of right or wrong, but are within the realm of our subjective, which we are free to create.

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Is/Ought Divide has entered the chat.

Why, oh why is he still on this? It was terrible when he proposed it years ago and that hasn't changed. What is it about Philosophical Liberalism that gives people the Brain Worms?

No. Plato > Aristotle.

People say "subjective" and imply relativity, but if a subjective viewpoint doesn't conform to reality the descriptive capacities it enables fail.

What is a subject if not a type of object? And, as an object in a world of objects, its representation of being to itself must approximate accuracy in order for it to function.

So, for example, someone says that the grotesque is beautiful. For them this may be a true experience while others don't experience it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that aesthetics are relative. What if existence itself is beautiful? Everything is beautiful? Beauty is not made up, but transcendental?

Do you see what I'm getting at? Subjectivity isn't necessarily relative. It's necessarily limited. These are very different.

Objectivity is also limited. After all, subjects are the types of objects capable of knowing, and objectivity is a type of knowing. And, I hope we can agree on this much, subjects are limited.

The difference between subjectivity and objectivity is not the amount of effort put into realizing and eliminating limits of perception, nor the methods of that effort, but the claim of totalization.

Certain circles reserve the right to totalization for objectivity, but my God this is absolutely opposed to the scientific project. Logically and historically we know that our scientific descriptions of the world are limited, imperfect, and provisional.

But, hey, look, they conform to reality well enough to make accurate predictions. That's what makes them objective. Now, what about subjectivity releases it from this demand to conform to reality? That is exactly what every theory of morality (or any other topic the author relegated to subjectivity) seeks to do. They make predictions, and they're either false or true.

The testing ground for moral systems is the same as the testing ground for scientific observations.

So, does goodness exist? Test it. Test if it exists independently of the mind. If you find that it does not exist, fine. That's not what my experiments resulted in, but now we can at least begin discussing truth instead of summarily dismissing the great majority of human thought and experience as relative.

Don't just listen to these people. Go out and see, as best as you can, whether ideals inflect real properties of existence or simply inflect some biological propensities tempered by society and projected over dumb and mute matter.

So then you have to argue the morality of nobility. The same for the morality of any "governing" body in a society. No easy answers outside of subjectivity.

The following is an example for an argument for a moral claim.

Value: All random killing is wrong

Fact: X is a random killing

Moral claim: X is wrong

Science can provide insight into the Fact clause here. Therefore, Science helps us determine the claim. However, Science cannot provide justification for the Value clause.

Shermer makes the following assertions in the interview (roughly).

"If you want to know if something is wrong, ask the people". - This just shows what their preference is. It does not entail anything beyond their preference.

"If it is right for you, it is right for everybody". - While most people today would wholeheartedly agree, this maxim too is a value statement. It could be seen as a version of Kant's Categorical Imperative, but, it is (arguably) an axiom rather than anything independently supported by either Reason or Science.

The best understanding I can give to Shermer is that morality is whatever people prefer. Perhaps that is the best we can do, but it is deflationary of morality. If true, morality is not a useful concept. There are only subjective preferences. It also does not solve the problem of how to aggregate opposing preferences.

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In many cases some people would say that theft is morally correct. Like stealing food during a famine from the exploitative nobles exporting said food for profit like during the Irish famine.

I thought the dark horse atheist types lost their steam with Harris. Seems Shermer is still trying to form himself a legitimate career with the same level of amateur thinking.

In a way, you can describe all reality to be in the subjective world. It may be accurate to describe objectivity as "shared subjectivity." And the objective world certainly shapes our subjective perception of the world. They interact, but are still separate.

And I would agree, that public verifiable evidence belongs is the objective whereas value judgments are strictly within the subjective.

The concept of two worlds is certainly a plausible way to look at things, however I would take issue with some of the distinctions that the article makes.

What is the epistemic basis for the "objective world"? Is it not the subjective world? In that case the subjective is also very concerned with the "is".

Perhaps it would be better to view the objective world as a model that explains (some of) the constraints of the subjective world.

Divide the subjective phenomena into two classes. Those that (what are perceived as) other people speak of as similarly constrained to the way the subject experiences them to be constrained. Call these the evidential basis for the objective world. The remaining subjective phenomena including, but not limited to, value statements, correlate only sometimes and perhaps never to the reports of other people. So leave those all in the subjective realm.