Lurker > The_Apologist

reincarnator07 posted...

Actually, this is one of the few cases where it kinda is, so long as that disagreement comes from a genuine belief that ones morals are right rather than merely disregarding the status quo for being inconvenient.

No. People have sincere, good-faith disagreements over objective matters all the time.

reincarnator07 posted...

Objective morality requires an objective standard of morality. Where has this been demonstrated?

There are staple ethical theories (utilitarianism, deontology, etc) that describe an objective standard. But regardless, even if there's no way to demonstrate that a moral statement is true, it might still be true, just in itself; that's what 'objective' means.

reincarnator07 posted...

What is considered moral changes over time even within the same culture

What's considered scientifically correct changes over time within the same culture. Ideas about the shape of the earth and the origin of the universe have changed over time, both within and across cultures. Ideas about whether humans evolved from other primates have changed over time. No one takes the 'disagreement therefore subjective' argument seriously.

ClayGuida posted...

No. How do you talk to people who think they're the victims all the time?

By stirring up their sense of grievance against the system. This happens all the time, all across the political spectrum.

COVxy posted...

Still not sure what alternative people want when all the posts met here with strong applause just describe normal garden variety feminism that the left attempts to drive forward every day.

I wish that were true. Unfortunately, the 'garden variety feminism that the left attempts to drive forward every day' doesn't take a strong enough stand against misandry, and in fact actively promotes it in some ways. I'm optimistic that this is slowly changing for the better, though.

Doe posted...

I just have trouble seeing how for example an error theorist negative claim might be more lazy than a moral realist positive claim.

Any position can be taken up in a lazy manner, of course. But I think a position that says "There's no answer" is more naturally conducive to intellectual laziness than a position that says "There's an answer, and we should try to figure it out". I reiterate, however, that there's a philosophically respectable way to be a moral antirealist; any generalizations are intended very loosely.

reincarnator07 posted...

Objective morality has a lot of stuff from human history indicating that it is not a thing

What are you referring to? Remember that disagreement isn't evidence for subjectivity.

emblem-man posted...

Which unique difficulties? Dating? Job and career?

A primer: https://www.reddit.com/r/rbomi/wiki/main

emblem-man posted...

#2 just sounds like standard liberal feminism

Sort of. There are a lot of 'standard liberal feminists' who deny that men can be oppressed (as men). But some don't deny it.

emblem-man posted...

#3 if you just meant you want to see less "it's the fault of white cismen" rhetoric, I'd agree, while also saying it's a terminal online/Twitter thing where that sort of negative name calling exists

It's also entrenched in a lot of academic feminist theory, unfortunately. That's where it seems to originate.

COVxy posted...

I wonder if people posting these suggestions would be surprised to know they are pushing feminism.

They're pushing a vision of what feminism should be, at least. Feminism should be masculism, and vice versa, since both follow from the principle of gender equality.

Quezovercoatl posted...

If people didn't reee whenever they heard the phrase "toxic masculinity" I think they would realize that it doesn't mean men are toxic in and of themselves, but the false standards of manhood they're being held to are whats toxic. Not being allowed to show emotion, having to resort of shows of physical strength to gain acceptance etc.

Yeah. If we could frame toxic masculinity as a form of oppression enacted on men, that'd be constructive. But people who use the term don't always frame it this way.

emblem-man posted...

What would courting young boys look like?

Three key components, as I see it.

1) Acknowledge the unique difficulties of being a man, with an emphasis on liberating men from them.
2) Affirm a conception of positive masculinity (and femininity) that rejects traditional gender roles as oppressive to men (and women).
3) Don't blame men for their plight, or for the state of society re: gender, and stand up against those who do blame men for these things.

This, or something like it, is the way forward.

reincarnator07 posted...

Flat Earth and Young Earth Creationism aren't moral arguments though, those are positions on measurable facts, which is why they can be objectively disproven. Morality has shown to not be so fixed in stone. Even ideologies like Christianity that not only have objective morality but a being that is the source of that morality do not actually demonstrate an objective morality.

Whether something is objectively true or false is separate from whether it can be proven true or false. So even if there's no way to prove objective moral truths, there might still be objective moral truths.

EthanSilver posted...

At the end of the day though, imo, "it's just subjective bro!" is such a useless notion in a practical sense.

To be fair, moral antirealism is a serious philosophical position (or family thereof) with serious defenders throughout the ages. But I agree that in a lot of contexts, calling morality subjective is often just a form of intellectual laziness and/or cowardice.

EthanSilver posted...

It's not actually that hard of a concept.

It actually is, though. Any attempt to demonstrate the status or legitimacy of rationality itself will inevitably presuppose rationality, since that's how we demonstrate things. So while rationality does appear to be self-authenticating--we can give rational arguments for why we should endorse our rationality--there's no getting around the fact that the self-authentication is circular. Is this an acceptable instance of circular reasoning? Maybe. And there doesn't seem to be any alternative anyway, so.

It's all complicated.

EthanSilver posted...

Or that personal takes are not always equal virtue of "subjectivity." Sometimes things can be set apart by rationality applied.

The next question--and one germane to the issue of moral realism--is whether rationality is objective or subjective. If rationality is objective, then it's a promising basis for objective morality. But if rationality is subjective, then we're in trouble (in many ways).

A majority of professional philosophers accept or lean toward moral realism (the thesis that there are objective moral truths).

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4866

No part of this requires religion or divine command; most professional philosophers are also atheists, according to the same survey. There's a robust tradition in Western philosophy of grounding morality in reason. This idea goes back to the Greeks and was reinvigorated by Enlightenment thinkers--preeminently by Kant. It's a purely secular way to have a theory of objective morality.

Of course, even if there are objective moral truths, they might be difficult or even impossible to know, or to know with certainty. Most moral realists believe that we're capable of knowing objective moral truths, but that's not an essential part of the moral realist position.

Lastly, objectivity and subjectivity have nothing to do with agreement and disagreement. If something is objective (mind-independent), then it's objective even if nobody agrees with it; if something is subjective (mind-dependent), then it's subjective even if everybody agrees with it. Hence the existence of moral disagreement across cultures or across individuals is fully compatible with moral realism, and people are making a really bad argument when they suggest that moral disagreement disproves objective morality.

Damn. Were they suspended for posting too randomly?

I like PanEx, but the orange chicken is way overrated. Not bad, just overrated.

It's a sex reveal, actually. Babies/fetuses don't have gender identity.

TheLiarParadox posted...

Not that anyone here is capable of making, it would appear.

Mine works, although it's not necessarily an argument 'against vegetarianism'; it's just an argument for the permissibility of eating meat.

Schopenhauer is based, but only retrospectively, because of his formative influence on Wittgenstein.

Revelation34 posted...

It is under the thesaurus.

The thesaurus doesn't recognize the sex/gender distinction. I'm guessing you don't either.

Mike_Stanton posted...

Surely you can rub two braincells together to figure out that a natural ecosystem creates a problem for your vegetarian utopia. Some animals need meat to survive, but in order for their prey to survive they need to not be eaten. At some point, some animals have to die in order for others to survive.

Predation is natural, but this doesn't mean that it's morally good or morally acceptable. Lots of natural things are bad. And in fact, predation is one of the clearest reasons why the wilderness is an abhorrent place.

Dark_Arbron posted...

Reminder that all morality is artificial. It doesn't exist in nature, it's a product of our self-awareness. It's a construct.

Reminder that moral realism/antirealism is still an open philosophical question, with a majority (about two thirds) of relevant experts favoring moral realism.

Lanzol posted...

murder is suffering

No, not necessarily. Things can be killed painlessly.

Lanzol posted...

factory farming is suffering

In many cases, yes. But it doesn't have to be.

royic posted...

I don't have future-directed interests please direct me to the pain sphere

You probably do. It's almost impossible, psychologically speaking, for you not to.

Lanzol posted...

Just a verbose "hurrr meet taste gud"

"And doesn't essentially require suffering"

Lanzol posted...

so why not factory farm humans if killing itself isn't bad?

Unlike (most) other animals, humans have future-directed interests that are defeated by killing them. Human well-being involves many complex factors. This is why killing humans is morally worse than killing other animals, whose well-being is simply a matter of immediate pleasure and pain.

Lanzol posted...

so what is your actual argument here?

The killing itself isn't bad. Suffering is what's bad. So if we kill animals without letting them suffer, there's no problem.

NoxObscuras posted...

Like, what situations are you in where the word female makes more sense in a sentence than the word women?

Situations where biology is more relevant than gender identity. "Females prefer to sit down while urinating, but males generally prefer to stand." Stuff like that. We could use the terms 'women' and 'men' in the previous sentence, but then we'd be conflating sex and gender, and we should be careful not to do that.

It's possible to raise animals for meat without causing them any suffering, and in that case there's no ethical problem with eating meat. (At least, there's no ethical problem stemming from considerations of animal welfare. There might still be broader ecological concerns, etc, but those could probably be worked around too.)

I'm saying that this is possible in theory; practice is a mixed bag, to put it mildly.

Smallville posted...

When was this though?

About 150k years ago, according to estimates.

DoctorPiranha3 posted...

I think highly of the introspection and communication skills humanity is capable of, but not fondly of basically destroying so many habitats and contributing to a heating earth

You wouldn't have approved of cyanobacteria poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen and extinguishing most other organisms a few billion years ago. (They then evolved into plants.) But this is what life does; it's always changing the game, paving the way for whole new paradigms of possibility.

Revelation34 posted...

It is under the thesaurus.

The terms aren't synonymous, because sex and gender aren't perfectly correlated. There are lots of biologically female people who don't have the gender identity 'woman'. Some of them have the gender identity 'man', some are nonbinary, etc.

I agree that we usually shouldn't use 'male' and 'female' as nouns, though.

And we also shouldn't use them as adjectives when we're talking about gender, since they refer to a person's sex, not their gender.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Cool scientifically, but probably a disaster in terms of social relations. Imagine the racism.

In some situations, it can be useful to classify people by sex rather than gender, referring to them as 'males' and 'females'. But apart from this highly specific situation, using 'male' or 'female' as a noun (when talking about humans) is rather cringe and/or sus.

It could happen again by many means. We need self-sustaining off-earth colonies as soon as possible for sake of redundancy.

GranAures posted...

If they did not commit the action they are not accountable. If they did, they are.

Suppose somebody does something because they were brainwashed into doing it. Should they be held accountable in that situation?

PBusted posted...

Because I have morals unlike you.

Where did they come from? Your upbringing?

PBusted posted...

By your logic, everyone has been dealt a shitty hand in life when we're all victims of culture.

Yes, although some people may, if they're very lucky, have a hand that enables them to rise above their cultural programming. But that's probably rare.

PBusted posted...

Although, you yourself seem perfectly fine with judging and talking down on people here who could "just be saying things beyond their control" too

I mean, I'm trying to persuade people. Is that what you mean? I think I have a moral obligation to attempt to do that, even if it's all futile.

GranAures posted...

And you consider holding someone accountable for their actions an injustice.

We know.

Honesty test: In a hypothetical case where someone isn't accountable for something, would it be an injustice to hold that person accountable for that thing?

GranAures posted...

We know. You hate holding people accountable for their shit.

I hate committing injustices against people, yeah.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


No, not at all. And most monocultural societies haven't had different political parties, by the way.

In any case, I'm sure you grant the underlying point: there's a lot of similarity among people within the same culture, and this is because culture is one of the fundamental forces that make people the way they are.

GranAures posted...

And I'm satisfied with you conceding that you support the worst of the human condition and seek to remove their culpability of their own actions.

In a lot of cases, yes. This is usually the correct approach. And it doesn't detract in any way from the badness of those actions, to be clear.

PBusted posted...

No, because I'd be one of the millions of people who defied the Nazis inside Nazi Germany.

Why do you think that?

PBusted posted...

Your argument is exactly the type of arguments Nazi/rape apologists use though

It's the argument people use when they want to treat criminals with compassion instead of throwing the book at those who've been dealt a shitty hand in life.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


It's generally true, yeah. Don't let the multicultural societies distract you. In monocultural societies, there's a high degree of uniformity in customs, language, worldview, and other things.

GranAures posted...

The only obvious thing in this thread

So you concede that culture has control over people. I'm satisfied with that.

GranAures posted...

So now we have you trying to run and hide behind a deflection

You mean that you're doing this, right? I asked you a question:

Is it just a coincidence that people from the same culture tend to have the same customs, speak the same language, see the world the same way, etc?

and you're refusing to answer it. It's obvious why, but still.

PBusted posted...

So you'd be an apologist for Nazis?

Like in all other cases of cultural upbringing, most Nazis probably weren't at fault for being Nazis. You would've been a Nazi if you'd been born into the culture, right?

GranAures posted...

Speaking English is worlds apart from raping children, homelsice.

Answer the question, though: Is it just a coincidence that people from the same culture tend to have the same customs, speak the same language, see the world the same way, etc?

McMarbles posted...

Because humans have free will.

How do you know? And to what extent do they have free will?

GranAures posted...

Good thing people have plenty of control over their ability to not rape children or spread/defend bigotry.

Sometimes (and in some ways) they do, and sometimes they don't. The issue is complicated.

GranAures posted...

Meanwhile, "culture" has no control over anybody

It has enormous control over people. Is it just a coincidence that people from the same culture tend to have the same customs, speak the same language, see the world the same way, etc? Did you choose to be an English speaker?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Neither are viruses. But they can still use their hosts to propagate themselves.