Moral conversion

[Yazata]

Good points, Yaz. I think that morality is largely subjective, which is why we have so many differing opinions from religious to political in our culture.

I do too. I'm inclined to say that when I say that some action X 'is wrong', I'm really saying 'I don't approve of X and nobody else should either'.

I don't really believe that 'good', 'evil', 'right' or 'wrong' refer to some mysterious objective property that events possess like matter possesses mass. Events wouldn't be good or bad at all unless there's some social agent present morally evaluating them and assigning those labels.    

Objective morality though must exist if we form laws, and there are consequences for breaking those laws.

Yes. Ever since the 1960's, there's been an argument circulating that there's something wrong with the whole idea of punishment. But I'd say that punishment is simply the idea that 'actions have consequences' drawn large. In a small hunter-gatherer band (like those in which humans evolved) going against the group could get somebody shunned and banished. So people were motivated to conform to what the others wanted. But once people lived in large villages and cities, things got more impersonal and it became apparent that there could be a lot of upside in acting for one's own behalf against the interests of the group. So the larger group needed sanctions.

If there isn't collective agreement on how a society should be governed, etc...then, where would we be? Most people feel stealing should be illegal, most people feel sexual assault should be illegal, etc. Those would be laws built upon objective morality, yes?

That's why morality isn't an entirely individual thing. Morality is fundamentally social. (I don't believe that solitary intelligences would have any moral sense.)

When we say that 'X is wrong', we aren't just expressing our own personal taste. ('I don't like this brand of cookies'.) We are making demands on the rest of the relevant group. We grow up surrounded by and embedded in our social group, constantly exposed to the net aggregate of their moral judgments. We internalize it, it seems natural to us and we start thinking of it as objective. (Which in a way it is, since it isn't entirely about us and our opinions.) To steal a trendy phrase, morality is socially constructed.

It's objective in the sense that it isn't just a function of our individual tastes (we absorb most of our values and standards from our culture) but it isn't entirely objective either since it isn't a physics-style property of events themselves. It's not something that would exist in the world if there were no people. It's human-invented qualities that people ascribe to the events for their own purposes.

But, such things as gay marriage, abortion, LGBT initiatives, etc. seem to be where many people collide with their views, and thus ...morality then seems to be subjective. If you're a Christian, then you feel homosexuality is sinful, if you're an atheist, you may see nothing wrong with it. And so it goes.

Yes. Not everyone on the planet shares a culture that's morally compatible with the modern West in its fashionable left-academic variant.

That's the fatal defect in all the dreams of making everyone in the modern West abandon their own cultures in the name of homogenizing the world in some global rainbow fantasy. It's always assumed that our own moral values, the values of individual liberty and of things like women's and gay rights, will somehow magically become the entire world's values. But most of the world doesn't share them.

For all the talk about the need for us to abandon our own age-old traditional cultural identities in favor of... something else, there's still a fundamental colonialist assumption at the core of it. The assumption that our own values are superior and will inevitably triumph and become the world's values.

[Syne]

You can actually test whether a moral principle is objective or subjective. If the action does more objective harm than good, it is wrong, regardless of how many people approve of it. For instance, cannibalism is accepted in some cultures, but killing a human does more objective harm that the benefit of temporarily feeding another.

It's somewhat baffling that atheists insist upon a subjective morality, when in every other case they insist on objective reality and eschew subjective beliefs.