However, morals are not mere matters of arbitrary, ad hoc opinion, are not mere whims of the moment; there are common/shared (involuntary) aspects of life, agreements, that render morals objective-like.

Yet, it seems that reducing morals to self-interest is the most commonly accepted justification, or understanding, thereof, like The Golden Rule, for example. — jorndoe

The "objective" part here is that which can be boiled down to some necessary principle. So it is quite right that a lot of what is considered morality is just customary variety - local differences that make no particular difference.

Should you wear a tie or not? Should you squash a spider or not? Should you eat pork or not?

Subjectively it can seem to matter for customary reasons, but objectively we can see that it doesn't matter - as tacitly we feel we are already on the track of some deeper principle which makes these distinctions simply accidental details.

So what does morality boil down to. It boils down to the dynamic, the balance, that makes for a flourishing society. That is the general goal that morality encodes - and must do naturally, inevitably, just because societies only persist as systems if they are fit in this fashion.

The Golden Rule is classic because it gets right down to the basic dynamic - the one of local competition and global cooperation. It says self-interest is good. And so is collective identity. Thus morality is about striking the balance at which these two tendencies are maximised. You want maximum personal freedom - but within a global context which is stable enough, integrated enough, to underwrite that very freedom.

Doing unto others what you would have them do to you is a neat summary of that essential balancing act.

You want maximum personal freedom - but within a global context which is stable enough, integrated enough, to underwrite that very freedom. — apokrisis

Right. Analogous to this old document (translated to English):

Article IV - Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the enjoyment of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law. — Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789

Social (or societal) sustainability, and a degree of cooperation, is kind of implicit for a society to flourish, which also tend to be a benefit for individual members.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

Perhaps the objective versus subjective dichotomy is sort of missing the point, or is a misleading line of inquiry.

________
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789; Wikipedia article
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; United Nations

What is acceptable as a ground for morals anyway (if anything)? — jorndoe

Why not let your behavior come naturally? Be authentic. If that means being a freakin' psycho- killer...well, morals probably weren't going to help you there anyway.

Love and do what you will.

Perhaps the objective versus subjective dichotomy is sort of missing the point, or is a misleading line of inquiry. — jorndoe

I would say that moral philosophy clings to that dichotomy as otherwise it pretty much lacks a point. If morality is reduced to simple social pragmatics, then the only real issues are around effective implementation - social, political and economic science.

So moral philosophy needs to stick to a sharply dualistic objective/subjective division to continue to have something to argue about academically.

The objectivists and subjectivists can fight like cats and dogs and yet still want that very thing of the unresolved duality which is what will best preserve their tenure.

Why not let your behavior come naturally? Be authentic. — Mongrel

Why do you think this is self-evidently the right thing to say? A history of social conditioning?

Why do you think this is self-evidently the right thing to say? — apokrisis

It was a question

I experience morality viscerally. I work in healthcare and occasionally cause people pain. To do that I have to overcome resistance in my own body. I recognize that not everybody is like that.

A history of social conditioning? — apokrisis

Social conditioning is probably about as good at creating monsters as it is fostering care. I'm sure you know that from experience.

Be authentic. — Mongrel

Love and do what you will. — Mongrel

Well, why do we have (secular) law?
Why wouldn't suppressing an impulse to punch my boss be authentic anyway? :)

Indoctrination can also play a role in behavior, be it for good or bad (pun intended).
A degree of empathy can likely be cultivated (or taught), though even empathy might be reducible to self-interest.

Perhaps a more interesting question is then: how do we learn, understand and rationalize morals and moral behavior, as social matters?

I experience morality viscerally. — Mongrel

I guess I do as well, to an extent.
For me there's more to it, though.

Well, why do we have (secular) law? — jorndoe

Law is mostly a tool for creating states, and if you don't live in an era of massive deregulation, it keeps your banking system from crashing the global economy and causing global devastation. If you do live in an era of deregulation.. note the value of law.

Why wouldn't suppressing an impulse to punch my boss be authentic anyway? — jorndoe

It probably would be if you waited to check your authenticity after counting to ten.

A degree of empathy can likely be cultivated — jorndoe

Can it?

Perhaps a more interesting question is then: how do we learn, understand and rationalize morals and moral behavior, as social matters? — jorndoe

It depends on your society. Traditionally, across most cultures, morality is not a social issue. It has something to do with things like the destination of your soul after death or your status in your next incarnation, etc.

How do you think about it?

Anyway, with this thread I intended to shed some light on the odd gaps

• reduction to self-interest versus social behavior
• subjective versus objective

Maybe @apokrisis is right; mostly mental masturbation (pardon my French).

The golden rule works because most people are alike. The same is true for subjective morality. We all tend to think the way other people in our society do, and societies across time have a fair amount of similarity and continuity.

Our similarity doesn't prevent us from acting in various different ways. Most people would say it is wrong to physically attack your boss just because you have a disagreement with him or her. People understand that one can wish harm on a superior, maybe even feel ready to deliver the harm. But, because we are similar, we will generally find that attacking bosses is a very bad policy because it leads to worse consequences for the attacker.

As a labor negotiator put it, "Write the savage letter to your boss, say everything you want to say, then delete it."

We recognize this as good policy--not because we think bosses are so special that they must be protected from very negative feedback--but because we understand that employees are far more vulnerable than bosses are.

masturbation (pardon my French) — jorndoe

But "masturbation" isn't French. Masturbate is from Latin masturbatus, past participle of masturbari. If the French had had a French word for jerking off, mentally or other wise, we would probably be using it. I read somewhere that the French never engaged in masturbation of any kind, so they didn't have such a word. It was probably in the same book that said "People are stupid."

Came across some of this stuff:

I experience morality viscerally. I work in healthcare and occasionally cause people pain. — Mongrel

But healthcare is precisely where there is close social attention paid to the ethical dilemmas. Leaving people to "what comes naturally" is a recipe for disaster. Part of the recruitment process to intensive care wards would be avoiding those who by nature would not respond to ethical conditioning? Weed out the psychopaths (and watch them become managers). ;)

Traditionally, across most cultures, morality is not a social issue. — Mongrel

Cultural anthropology would disagree. If we are talking about actual tribal culture, what is remarkable is how purely social morality is.

Western culture - because of its Romantic model of the human condition - makes people claim that they act from "authenticity". They look deep inside and do what they discover to be the right thing.

But tribal people asked what made them feel they should or shouldn't do something will simply refer to the judgement of their peers. It is quite natural to point to what everyone else would think as the reason why they acted a certain way - the very thing that Western individualism would be most loathe to admit ... following the herd.

In the West, we internalise concepts of such as honour, duty, goodness, etc. We hide from ourselves the socially constructed roots of our own thinking. And the East - being also civilised - does the same.

A large population creates so much room for social cheating that it is necessary that part of the social conditioning involves the internalisation of "a moral conscience" - an inner self that knows what it ought to do even when not under watchful scrutiny of the tribe.

But an actual tribe always has its eyes on everyone. And so the moral code can be understood as something external - part of the social world and not something to be found "inside".

1. involuntary: most of us like freedom, and dislike being harmed

2. subjective: (1) is not objective, and only has meaning in terms of us beings that dis/like things

3. morals: us liking freedom and disliking being harmed is relevant for morals

4. therefore morals are subjective (in part or whole) — jorndoe

I disagree with your analysis on 2. Certainly freedom and harm are not only personal matters but also abstract matters, that nevertheless depend on people to be instantiated. Freedom and harm, pleasure and pain, yada-yada, matter because people matter.

So in a sense, these values are person-dependent, but this does not necessarily etch out objectivity or realism. For we can still value a population of people who have these values, i.e. a state-of-affairs; classic totalist consequentialism.

The color green exists only within the minds of perceivers. There is no "green" floating around in the darkness of un-perceived space. And yet it would be wrong to deny that colors exist objectively - they exist but in a limited, constrained way. Similarly, value may be person-dependent but that need not make it subjective. We can just as easily say that if value exists, then people exist, just as if colors exist, then perceivers exist.

It's a common form of psychologism that is the placement of properties on objects that don't have them by themselves: sugar is sweet, the apple is red, pleasure is good, etc. And yet we would still say it's an objective fact that sugar is subjectively sweet, or that the apple is subjectively red, or that pleasure is subjectively good. This is why I think labeling anything mind-dependent as entirely subjective is too flimsy to be tenable. If we value pleasure, then it is an objective fact that we value pleasure. Therefore, it is an objective fact that pleasure is valuable in virtue of there being persons available for this. So long as there are people, pleasure is objectively valuable.

Either objective versus subjective is a false dichotomy, or morals are subjective. — Jorndoe

It is a false dichotomy, insofar as what is objective and what is subjective are inter-connected - they're not ultimately separable. Within conventional discourse, it is meaningful to speak of objectivity - it is expected of judges, journalists, adjuticators, and the like. But the concept of objectivity as the criterion of what is real, is very much a product of recent history. It's indicative of the assumed stance of modern culture which instinctively divides the world into subject and object, or self and other; and also the 'mental' realm - internal, subjective, personal - and the domain of physical laws - measurable, objective, common to all observers. They're all aspects of that same dichotomy.

And then it's a short step to declaring that science is the arbiter of what is objectively the case, whereas ethical judgements are said to be subjective. And there's your fact-value dichotomy in a nutshell.

I suppose I should add, in respect of Hume's observations about the divergence of facts and values, that this still holds, in fact more so now than ever. Why? Because of the absence of any 'domain of consensus' conerning what might constitute an ethical framework. We find ourselves in a culture of a radical plurality of views with respect to ethical norms; this has been described as 'hyper-pluralism'. I am reading a study of that at the moment, The Unintended Reformation by Brad S Gregory.

Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.

So, in summary,
human existence is objective,
our moral attitudes and sentiments are part of us,
thus our morals are objective?

If ought (pre/proscriptive propositions) cannot be derived from is (descriptive propositions), then it seems we start out with ought (independently of is)?

(getting late here, but please carry on)

If ought (pre/proscriptive propositions) cannot be derived from is (descriptive propositions), then it seems we start out with ought (independently of is)? — jorndoe

If will-be propositions) cannot be derived from is propositions, then it seems we start out with will-be (independently of is)?
Well not exactly independent. Perhaps one can depend without derivation.

I've said this before at greater length: there is nothing objective about self-interest. To hang morality on self interest is to hang it on nothing more substantial than other interest.

But healthcare is precisely where there is close social attention paid to the ethical dilemmas. — apokrisis

I said I realized that people are different. For some, morality is mainly physical... the nervous system is quite capable of saying "NO!" For some people it may be that the concept of society is paramount. I wonder if people like that would also say that playing the piano and driving a car are fundamentally socially mediated activities (because you couldn't do them if you were alone in the wilderness).

And then there are the highly intellectually inclined: there is no morality unless it can be manufactured by logic.

The Hippocratic Oath is an altruistic expression of moral duty. — jorndoe

No, really it's not. It's not altruistic in that it is designed to provide protection for both patient and physician and you might very well argue that it is the latter which is the prime beneficiary. And it has nothing to do with moral duty. It is an ethical code. Although it may intersect with morality it is principally a statement of professional standards. Unlike moral imperatives, its provisions have no universal application. It has force only when you become a 'registered' physician and only for as long as you remain one. It does not only prohibit certain actions but licences others that would have no moral justification outside the context of medical practice.

There are clear and important distinctions between morality, ethics, and law. Failure to maintain them in discussion will usually lead to muddied water if not total derailment (much like mixed metaphors! :s )

But, as much as I like to take objective morals for granted, — jorndoe

That seems to be the problem to me--that people WANT morality to be objective.

But why do they want that? I don't know. Maybe you can help us figure that out by telling us why you'd prefer that morals were objective.

So what does morality boil down to. It boils down to the dynamic, the balance, that makes for a flourishing society. That is the general goal that morality encodes - and must do naturally, inevitably, just because societies only persist as systems if they are fit in this fashion. — apokrisis

The only thing with that is that "societies should flourish" or "it's better for societies to flourish" (or whatever similar formulation) isn't objective.

I wonder if people like that would also say that playing the piano and driving a car are fundamentally socially mediated activities (because you couldn't do them if you were alone in the wilderness). — Mongrel

An odd reference since the incapacity has nothing to do with the isolation and everything to do with the absence of physical objects. In reality, of course, pianists very often rehearse without the instrument and learner drivers frequently do the same without the presence of an actual vehicle, and could just as easily do so alone in the wilderness as in the presence of others at home or on a train. Indeed they might very well prefer to do so!

An odd reference since the incapacity has nothing to do with the isolation and everything to do with the absence of physical objects. — Barry Etheridge

Likewise, you could be moral with regard to imaginary friends while off roaming the tundra. Offering that fact would be a poor response to the argument I was alluding to.

I didn't say it was an objective fact. I said it was a necessary one (for a social system to persist).

My definition of morality, by the way, points out that it's about interpersonal behavior, which can include one's behavior towards oneself. It's not unusual for people to think things like, "It's immoral to do this to myself." An example might be someone with an addiction thinking about engaging in the activity in question.

But you don't need 'imaginary' friends (unlike pianos and cars) to be moral surely? Not thinking bad things about them, not planning elaborate methods of murdering them when you return from said wilderness, praying for them and so on are surely moral acts which you can perfectly well do with regard to actual friends while in the wilderness? Isn't that exactly how the first hermits and monks justified their existence?

Isn't that exactly how the first hermits and monks justified their existence? — Barry Etheridge

I don't know. Doesn't seem like much of a hermit who feels it necessary to justify being alone.

Some would say that if you were born in the wild and raised by ducks or whatever, you would have no morality for lack of society. Therefore morality relates only to social interaction.. I imagine people who offer that argument would find something pertinent in the so-called Private Language argument.

I'm not sure if there is any reasoning at all at the base of this perspective. I speculate that it comes from people who don't think of guilt and forgiveness as aspects of morality. Perhaps because both of those words are meaningless to them?

I said it was a necessary one (for a social system to persist). — apokrisis

Yeah, I'd agree that there are such facts--although most of the conventional moral stance-related things that people claim to be such facts I think are highly dubious as such. In other words, I don't think it's at all clear that societies couldn't allow murders, rapes, etc. and persist. What people usually take to be epistemically sufficient for knowing that stuff--namely, "I thought about it for 10 minutes" (if that--it's probably usually less) "and it seemed intuitively correct to me"--is ridiculous in my opinion.

At any rate, there would be some things that are necessary for societies to persist (such as "it's necessary to not kill every single person in that society"), if we could ever figure any less obvious ones out somehow, and then it's simply a matter of whether people subjectively want the society to persist or not.

"Why not let your behavior come naturally? Be authentic."
— Mongrel

Perhaps one's authentic natural self is violent, cruel, demanding, and if so then only way to behave morally is to be inauthentic, maybe that is what authenticity is, the acceptance of one's own fundamental weakness and the willingness to act toward others, not naturally, but as dictated by norms.