Let's accept that there is an absolute truth and that moral

>>1945837
Do you have any way to divine absolute truth? String theory and dark matter and shit going on inside black holes might be true, that doesn't mean we know shit about them because we have no way of learning more about them. Then you just end up with guys running around claiming they have the objective truth spoken to them by god.

>>1945848
Well, I'm not saying there are absolute truths and objective values, I made this thread with the purpose of understanding those who say so.

>>1945859
Those that say so have faith in a set of values generally from a holy book. There's a few secular humanists that try to derive absolute morality from self evident universal truths.

>>1945864
It is not difficult to find people arguing for absolute values without appealing to holy books in threads about ethics. The problem is that I only see them defending their position against relativists, I never saw any of them developing his view as something of itself, explicitly showing how the existence of an absolute is practically relevant to me as an individual, it is like that absolute only has a value as a form of making leaps to their own subjective values and being smartasses saying things like "So that there is no absolute truth is an absolute truth?? checkmate!! x)"

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>>1945916
They're just being defensive and generally have no argument except
>implying

Also have a shitty webcomic, which happens to be true.

"humanity must survive" is the only moral absolute, and even then it's only an absolute from the subjective position of a human being, in that everything that promotes your species' survival is inherently performing the core purpose of existance which cannot be anything but just. To argue that humanity should not survive is the antithesis of the core value of any living species and so those people that ascribe to the destruction of their own race can be seen as an absolute evil from the perspective of a human.

HOW you make sure humanity survives is when it all becomes subjective. Then there is no right answer, only the result is an absolute moral truth.

>>1945935
Yeah, maybe they really have nothing to say if it is not for showing off their dialectical abilities. The only exception I can think of is Spinoza, and even then his Ethics is way different from what is usually called an objective ethics, it is more like an objective description of how subjectivity works.

>>1945943
That's not true though. It's more of a "our descendants and legacy must carry on" thing. We evolved from ancestors that no longer exist as a species, and this has happened time and time again. And life was born from non-living sequences of chemicals. Humankind may give birth to a descendant that transcends the flesh.

>>1945943
But what makes you think life is teleological and not something that simply happens to be good at perpetuating itself? I can't think of any natural imperative besides fate or necessity, nothing can really be against nature.
As Nietzsche said:
>Do you want to live “according to nature”? O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature — extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown — imagine this indifference itself as a power — how could you live in accordance with this indifference?8 Living — isn’t that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn’t living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And if your imperative “live according to nature” basically means what amounts to “live according to life”— why can you not just do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? The truth of the matter is quite different: while you pretend to be in raptures as you read the canon of your law out of nature, you want something which is the reverse of this, you weird actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe to and incorporate into nature, this very nature, your morality, your ideal. You demand that nature be “in accordance with the stoa,” and you’d like to make all existence merely living in accordance with your own image of it — as a huge and eternal glorification and universalizing of stoicism!

>>1945963
maybe "species" was too specific a word in the grand evolutionary scheme. I think that the preservation of the life of those you can breed with is the only true moral absolute, and when I say that I mean "human moral absolute" which is to say that we are not transcendent beings but fleshy sacks with chemical reactions deciding our thoughts, and at the very core of that lack of freedom is the survival of your "kind," whether that means your exact species or your entire evolutionary line, which may pass through you onto something else, but even then that is still your genes, which need to be passed on as the core function of life. Survival is a moral absolute because it is the basic cornerstone of the consciousness which could not even question the universe without first surviving.

To that end, existing is the only moral absolute, for anything sentient or not. You cannot say something cannot exist when it does, it is there and must be recognized. That in itself is a moral absolute, no? Life is merely an extension of that, only it needs not only to exist but to also survive through offspring, or regeneration, or cloning, or whatever else. That something or someone exists and must do what is necessary to exist is the only moral truth. It can be said without contention that intentionally sabotaging your own genetic line for the purpose of ending life is the only absolute evil from the perspective of whatever is being destroyed.

To argue that life doing what it needs to do as anything less than a moral absolute is completely ridiculous, you cannot ask a living thing to not survive or spread their kind, it is the basic fundamental principle of existence.

>>1946000
OP here, no the anon you replied to. So, why is it my purpose the survival of my species and not just my survival? Even thought I carry my species will, so to say, could not the will of the individual prevails over the will of the species, as Schopenhauer would put it? And would not my individual will be something way more rich and immediate, of more value to me, than the will of some undifferentiated species?

>>1946000
Many of the smartest people have had no human offspring, only their brain children. They are rare, but they are significant. It only takes so many of these men to create something that transcends humanity. There's also other philosophies like transhumanism. Your genetic self may no longer exist in the future. You may become a ship of Theseus.

>>1946021
to champion the individual will at the direct expensive of the community is an absolute evil, because you are making the conscious decision to go against your core instinct. Humanity is unique in that is it the only thing we know of smart enough to be capable of evil, of actually rationalizing the destruction of one's race and consciously deciding that you will be evil. We're also social creatures that inherently need groups to survive. (can't fuck ourselves). Nihilism is a convenient rationalization for the psychopath, but only the psychopath needs Nihilism to justify his inherent evil against his own kind. Why should an affront to existence be anything else but an affront to the human perspective, the "moral absolute?" You're trapped in the human perspective, and like we've discussed, it's all chemical reactions anyway so you literally cannot go against the core instincts unless you use the power of your consciousness, which by default requires survival so denying the necessity of survival with a mind that must survive is likewise inherently hypocritical.

Will you fight, or will you die like a dog?

>>1946045
But the psychopath doesn't have your "core instinct"

>>1946053
life has anamolies. There are gay people. boy dogs fuck other boy dogs sometimes. whales beach themselves, cattle run off cliffs. These anamolies only become evil when they threaten the entire existence of said life.

>>1946061
That's literally a definition of subjective evil.

>>1946066
and you literally can't be objective as a human being so there are definitely moral absolutes for humanity. The very fact that you can rationalize anything else besides "survive" is creating the potential for am absolute evil against the human race.

If you want to argue morality from the perspective of a rock, you're just gonna have to keep dreaming because that will never be possible.

>>1946045
The will of my species is only the matter from which I develop my own will, it is just a confused mass of instincts, the lowest common denominator, there is nothing here to be glorified or treated as an end. Humanity is just the ground over which stands the individual. And I am understanding humanity here as the "human nature", not as "every human being", the fact that I cannot exist without being human does not imply that I should care for the perpetuation of my species. Yes, we are social beings, but because it is convenient to us as individuals, not because it is important to "humanity".
>>1946061
There are no anomalies from the perspective of nature, everything happens from blind necessity (or blind chance, you decide). An anomaly is what happen to disagree with our views of how things should be, it is based on subjective expectations, it is could only be evil for the ones it happens to be inconvenient, from its own perspective it is good. As Spinoza said "if crime pertained to my essence, it would be pure and simple virtue".

>>1946076
This thread isn't about morality in general, it's specifically about objective morality.

>>1946089
objective morality is a punching bag designed to be torn apart by nihilists, but it is a meaningless strawman. There are real "human absolutes" or "subjective morals" or however you want to put it, and that's an actual discussion worthy of having, and despite that nihilists always bring up "there is no moral absolute" when they want to tear down someone's moral appeal, but that's nonsense. You cannot separate yourself from your flesh, you are your flesh. Stop clinging to "objectives" which are designed to be unobtainable. This thread basically asks "is this impossible thing actually impossible?" yes, because being impossible is implied to be impossible just like being objective is implied to be impossible.

>>1946106
No, objective morality is argued by people who actually believe in objective morality. It's not a strawman. That's what this thread is about. What's a strawman is you projecting nihilism when objective morality comes up.

>>1946124
>people who actually believe in objective morality

So idiots/religious people? So this is a thinly-veiled "lol Christian so dumb!" thread? How boring, thought an actual philosophical discussion might occur.

>>1946106
OP here, I am not asking if an objective morality is possible. As it is usually put I don't believe it is, I just want to understand how people make the existence of an absolute universal parametre to be relevant to someone as an individual, to one 'subjectivity'.
For me the problem is not really the leap from fact to value, but from objectivity or universality to subjectivity or individuality. I agree with you in the core premises, that is, that from the fact of my will I can study its necessities and derive an ethics, I just disagree that the end of that ethics is the well-being of the human species and not of the individual. But my purpose here is not arguing with you to try to prove my point and convert you to my worldview, you can stick with yours if it works better for you, I just make questions to dig more deeply in it, to know *how* you make that transition from universality to individuality.

>>1946128
You didn't bother to read the thread or the OP and you jumped into a discussion not knowing what it was about, to interject your own views on subjective morality. I'm sorry but you might have a double digit IQ.

>>1946136
I read all 5 posts ITT before I posted, and it was nothing but "lol religions are dumb" so I brought my own angle, highjacked the thread if you will. I like it better now, but it could still use improvement.

>>1946134
Kierkegaard.

>>1946145
By interjecting a strawman, and then going around and saying it was other people were strawmanning. You should have just started your own thread.

>>1946145
The only mentions of religions in the first five posts are:
>Those that say so have faith in a set of values generally from a holy book.
>It is not difficult to find people arguing for absolute values without appealing to holy books in threads about ethics.
I see no "religions are dumb xd" here.

>>1946147
I haven't read him, what does he say about it?

>>1946155
never actually implied anyone ITT was strawmaning, but who am I to expect someone to read my posts before criticizing them. I only brought up a strawman in the sense that objective morality is denied by virtually every philosophical school of thought and is now merely a strawman for nihilists when they want to attack subjective morality. That's quite the leap to say I'm now a hypocrite because I claimed a moral fallacy on someone else's part(which I didn't do) whilst falling for the same fallacy. Yes that entire "nihilist" personality I created is a strawman, but I never implied that you or anyone else ITT was that strawman.

Nice try maybe find something else on your fallacy Wikipedia page to attack me with

>>1946159
it was the underlying implication of the entire discussion, which by that point was literally, "So we all know religions are dumb lol but who else is dumb?" Shit topic senpai, way better now.

>>1946175
>it was the underlying implication of the entire discussion
In your head
>"So we all know religions are dumb lol but who else is dumb?"
Maybe it is just you who tries to interpret everything in the worst way possible, I am OP and I don't think you really ruined the purpose of the thread. It was going fine until your ego became the centre of it by you trying to show how you are above some nihilists limited mindset.

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>>1945837
610 nm is actually orange

>>1946205
nobody asked for your opinion

>>1945837
God.

>>1945943
>"humanity must survive"
Bioconservatives say the darnedest things.

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>>1945837
I'm colorblind so that flower is most certainly not red.

The flower having a wavelength of 610 is a fact, but the color that someone perceives it as is not a fact.

Delete this comic from your computer.

>>1946490
not an argument

Depends entirely on the values and the truth.

>>1945864
>a few secular humanists
>Ignores all of moral philosophy

>>1947378
Not all moral philosophy says it is objective.

Good: a measure of an actions efficacy to some aim. Example: A good arrow is one that hits its mark. A bad arrow is one that misses it (classic Aristotle example).

Normative moral philosophy: concerned with moral goods.

Moral goods: goods which we ought to aim at.

Ought: a command or duty to switch aims from an aim we already desire to another aim.

The purpose of an ought is to change the aim of our actions to another aim. If we already have the same aim, then the necessity for an ought disappears.

P1) All of humanity shares the common aim of happiness
P2) A good action relative to that aim which we already have is one which maximizes happiness (how we maximize is an other question)
C) Therefore, in each context there exists an objectively good action.

Note1: "Objective" here is taken to be objective to humanity. So if humanity disappears so does this system.

Note2: This doesn't prove there are objective morals. Only objective goods. This is because an objective morality requires proving an "ought" which we have not attempted to do. I believe proving objective goods rather than objective morals to be the more important of the two questions.

Thoughts?

>>1947396
The bulk of it does. You know what I meant.

>>1947413
>Ought: a command or duty to switch aims from an aim we already desire to another aim.

*Ought: a command or duty which switches an aim we already have to some other aim.

>>1947414
And they are few in number compared to Christards

>>1947418
>>1947413
>OUGHT
IS

>>1947432
"Christards" are theologians not moral philosophers. So no.

>>1947433
I'm not falling into the is ought gap. I'm not concerned with oughts at all.

>>1947441
Are you saying theologians have nothing to say on morals?

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which moral values?

>>1947453
Theologians aren't doing moral *philosophy*. They're doing theology. They can comment on morality from a religious perspective but that doesn't make it moral philosophy.

>>1947492
So pagan theologians like Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, are no longer philosophers?

>>1947492
But who said anything about philosophy? The question was about objective morality.

>>1945943
Why should I care about other human's survival? Why not just me? Seriously, I'll be dead, so why give a fuck?

Pure spooks.

>>1945837
You have to assume your senses are correct and that this isn't all an illusion first though.

>>1945837
What follows is a clear means to interpret the universe and live your life. I'm not sure what kind of response you're fishing for here.

>>1947303
>>1947490
That is the question. When someone debunks relativism by saying things like "There is no absolute truth and that is an absolute truth?", the thinking just stops here, he says that there are absolute truths, but never says what they are, and when they say what they are, I can't see why they would have any relevance to me. The only kind of objective ethics I can think of is in the line of what Nietzsche and Spinoza thought, and what >>1947413 thinks; that is, something made out of the knowledge of my will (which makes the ethics relevant) and by the knowledge of what is common with other wills (which makes it objective, but objectivity here would only be relevant insofar as the others' wills are relevant to me).

>>1948383
The kind of response I am fishing for is, firstly, what universalists understand by those absolute values, and, secondly, how they make those values be relevant, that is, how these values are the values of an individual, why the individual should care for them. And in my view, a value can only be really a value when it is subjectivised, individualised. I am not trying to argue against them, I can only argue against what I can first make sense of, so what I am trying to do is make sense of their views.

>>1948799
>And in my view, a value can only be really a value when it is subjectivised, individualised.

Why is that?

>>1948863
Putting it another way: a value can only be relevant to someone when it is subjectivised, individualised, when it is made that person's value. An objective ethics that can't be relevant to anyone is simply uneffective, it doesn't matter how "objective" it is.

>>1948886
>a value can only be relevant to someone when it is subjectivised, individualised, when it is made that person's value.

I don't see why this is the case. Values of other people, whether they are considered by them to be subjective or objective, certainly are relevant to me even if I don't share them, as I am able to interact with such people and feel the tangible results of the realisation of their beliefs.

>>1948942
In that sentence I only had the objective values in mind, not the values of the others; basically it doesn't matter to me if a value is objective if it is not mine or if I am "wrong" from some absolute perspective if I am not wrong in mine. Yeah, the values of others can be relevant to me, but because they affect *my* values.

>Let's accept that there is an absolute truth and that moral values are objective

Why would you need to ask this if they were?

>>1948960
I really can't think of a way to refute that.

I will say however that I see a great advantage in holding beliefs that are considered to be objectively correct, as that generally makes people act upon them with more conviction, as well as protecting them from the gradual slide into nihilism I see in most relativists.

>>1946128
>Who is Sam Harris

>>1948989
Just so I don't be too biased towards relativism: we could say that if "absolutism" is irrelevant, relativism is irrelevant too. I always get pissed off when a discussion about values ends with "It's relative, nothing to do here, lol". Yes, values are relative, but we can still study or discuss about what they could tell us about those who hold them (as the idea of genealogy proposes). The problem is that ethics discussions in this board are usually more about people concerned with being right than with deepening their views about a question, it is quite frustrating.

>>1948968
Cuz da j00z