how about, instead of wondering, guessing, or thinking tactically on what this does or does not do to your argument and position, you just honestly answer the question. It is just an opinion, it is not provable, just want to know what your honest thought is on it. — Rank Amateur

Because it's a pet issue of mine. I see that appeal to the crowd, to the status quo, come up again and again, in all sorts of guises.

At any rate, there's no moral stance that I can't imagine someone sincerely having. I wouldn't be able to guess how common any stance would be, but I don't think that's relevant to anything. That irrelevance was just my point immediately above.

But something coming from nothing, including no time? Sounds unbelievable to me. — Devans99

Hence "precipitated by the counterintuitiveness of it," but the world isn't actually required to conform to what's intuitive to us.

There is a strong argument for a start of time here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5302/an-argument-for-eternalism/p1 — Devans99

I had a laundry list of objections to that in that thread.

Re the other two things, constructing things with mathematical conventions doesn't actually work as evidence.

So what's the point of drawing attention to "except for some incredibly minute exceptions" as if that's of no importance for imagining this?

I don't think presentism and a start of time are compatible. What would come before and cause the start of time? There is nothing to do that, so it seems an impossible combination. — Devans99

So first, by definition, nothing comes before it. Re causing it, apparently you buy the old "something can't come from nothing" bumper sticker slogan, but that slogan is actually unsupportable. It's just an arbitrary fiat, precipitated by the counterintuitiveness of it.

And as I believe the evidence points to a start of time — Devans99

What evidence?

Aside from that, you didn't address this: "Not to mention that the experiential issue I'm bringing up is all that presentism is when we get rid of unjustifiable metaphysics, after all."

The point here is that when it comes to all issues concerning time, the most likely answer may be the we have no idea what we're talking about. — Jake

Why couldn't we simply focus on what we're referring to in "practical," observable, experiential, phenomenal terms? What would be the motivation to posit time being anything different than that?

I don't think I even gave any evidence in your quote. — Judaka

Correct. Hence why I wrote "the supposed evidence you give of it after the post above"

wondering your thought on this as well. Can you imagine, except for some incredibly minute exceptions, that any human being could actually be honest with their conscience, and say it would be moral to needlessly torture innocent children? — Rank Amateur

What bothers me about comments like this--and they tend to be legion--is the apparent assumption that it goes without saying that the popularity (or as others prefer, "prevalence," just to avoid Aspieish confusion) of something has some significance for its normative merit. Basically it seems to be an endorsement of an argumentum ad populum. Or it's an endorsement of conformity for its own sake--as if (almost) everyone doing, saying, etc. something is a good reason to have to follow suit.

The infinite regress occurs only with infinite time; if there is a start of time there is no infinite regress. If time is circular, there is no infinite regress. It's only the 'time goes back forever' model that is a problem. — Devans99

So not actually presentism but presentism without a start. I'd agree that would require time that extends backwards infinitely by definition. I wouldn't agree that either option disallows presentism. And further, saying either has a problem doesn't address the experiential issue I'm bringing up. Not to mention that the experiential issue I'm bringing up is all that presentism is when we get rid of unjustifiable metaphysics, after all.

Alt-right speakers I've listened to talk about the sanctity of white cultures, of white people having indispensable value, of white people banding together and thinking collectively. They want to secure the survival of their whites and the lands traditionally owned by whites. They want to be proud to be white, for their governments to prioritise whites over other ethnicities as the main citizens of the land. They feel the alternative is to reduce them to statistics in their performances economically, educationally and how they contribute to society.

My main challenge to people is to ask, not whether this is a good way to think or not but to discuss the prevalence of this way of thinking among ethnic groups outside of the Anglo-Saxon white citizens of Western nations. I would argue that the vast, vast majority of nations outside the West have cultures that can be characterised by alt-right thinking. Secondly, I would argue that outside of Anglo-Saxon whites in the West, all ethnic groups think like the alt-right, sometimes less extremely and sometimes more. — Judaka

I find that idea extremely dubious--that that is a common, unchallenged way to think at present, and the supposed evidence you give of it after the post above is very sketchily circumstantial at best.

I've said all I'm going to say in this thread. I lack the time or energy required to continue responding unproductively to what appears to me as so many distortions and so much sophistry from some of those here. — Janus

The "I can't actually address the objections brought up, but I'm not about to drop my spiel" tactic.

Your argument is that we'd need a large set of data. — Echarmion

That was the beginning of the sentence. The rest was:

showing, for multiple scenarios, that there is some correlation to how many witnesses there are relative to whether something turned out to be the case, where the latter was checked via independent means. — Terrapin Station

And I said that this was just the start of what we'd need to do.

Torturing an innocent child could never bring about a harmonious society, — Janus

How would we know such things, unless you're just defining them tautologously to things like if a child is ever tortured . . . but then that wouldn't be telling us much besides how you're choosing to use a word.

So if we experience a stream, a linear sequence of nows, where we don't experience the past and future in the same way, how do we avoid an infinite regress in terms of our temporal experience?

Than would you say moral relativism would require the individual moral judgements to be authentic and honest need to be in accord with one’s conscience — Rank Amateur

Yes--it's simply a matter of whether something is really the judgment someone is making or not. We can't say it's their moral judgment if the utterance in question isn't really the judgment they make. (At least not ideally--again, they could be lying to us, and we might not have very good clues to tell us that they are . . . )

My view is (I think) informed by Kant. No thing needs mind to exist. — tim wood

So thoughts, desires? They don't need mind to exist?

But what does it matter? — tim wood

For one, it matters for an argument that morality is objective because it is based on reason. If reason isn't objective, then that doesn't work as an argument for the objectivity of morality.

It also matters for how we know whether some claim of reason is correct rather than just a statement of how some individual(s) happens to think. If reason is something aside from that, then when there's a dispute we can simply check the mind-independent stuff we're referring to to see who is right about it (assuming that people are really making a claim about mind independent stuff, and aren't simply making a claim about how they happen to think in the first place).

While fdrake has already provided a fairly in-depth post on the value of multiple accounts, for most everyday examples it seems fairly self-evident that multiple witnesses increase the probability of the event having occurred. It's unlikely that multiple people hallucinate similar observations. — Echarmion

Basically you're restating the common belief that witnesses matter re probability of something being the case. I'm aware of the belief. I addressed. You didn't address anything I said. You're just restating the status quo.

If you allow reason, — tim wood

Speaking of reason, I didn't see you answer if you were claiming that reason exists independently of persons.

But if your morality were based only on your personal preferences, and you were satisfied with that then nothing anyone raises could be a problem for you, then no argument could be against your position and hence would not be worth arguing against. It would be like arguing that your preference for beef over lamb was somehow mistaken. — Janus

Not that I expect anyone to read the whole thread, but I addressed this above:

"Basically, one needs to ferret out other stances that the person has, and then try to appeal to them via those stances. In other words, it's a matter of "trying to talk them into something" using things that they already accept/that they're already comfortable with, to try to lead them to a different conclusion. Or, this is similar to the traditional sense of what an ad hominem argument is--it's a matter of appealing to views the person already has, appealing to their biases, to push them to a different view. (But in this case, the ad hominem approach isn't a fallacy, because we're not even dealing with things that are true or false, correct or incorrect, though it is necessarily manipulative.)

"At that, it might not be possible to persuade the person to a different position. "Hitler didn't do anything morally wrong" might be foundational for them, for example, so that it doesn't rest on any other views they have. Or their stances might be so situation-specific that there's not a sufficient way to generalize that would lead them to different stances. "

"They are nothing more than personal preferences", is to ignore the reality of cultural and normative influences on the individual. — Janus

Well, or it's to note that the cultural and normative influences aren't themselves moral stances. In terms of literally, what they are on a physical level, they're sounds that other people make, motions they make, marks they make (writing), etc. They don't literally contain meaning, for example. As sounds, marks, motions, they're not identical to judgments/assessments.

What I am getting out of this so far is that everyone non-critically accepts that some moral propositions are relative; that given such a moral proposition, P, some folks hold for P, some for not-P, and because of moral relativity, both are right, neither is wrong. — tim wood

I don't agree with the last phrase. Right and wrong in this context are simply another way of saying whether someone holds moral position P or not-P. In other words, we have to be talking about moral right and wrong, and that's only a matter of someone thinking x is/should be morally permissible, y should be morally prohibited, etc. It's not the case that from any perspective, both P and not-P are right or wrong unequivocally.

ok - but what if my conscience is really saying “slavery is bad you idiot “. But I like money so much, I just say “I think slavery is moral” — Rank Amateur

In that case, you'd simply not be honestly reporting your moral stance. You're saying something different than your actual stance for some other motive.

Okay re "correct."

So how do you think we'd argue that relative to the person in question's views, slavery isn't morally permissible? Isn't that simply a statement of fact about what their views are? Even if you think that objectively, they're wrong, it's still the case that relative to their views, slavery is morally permissible.

I want to own slaves, because owning slaves will make me a bunch of money. And I really like money.

I think about it a sec, and then I decide, my moral view is slavery is morally permissible.

In your view or moral relativity, relative to myself, am I correct, slavery is morally permissible ? — Rank Amateur

I wouldn't say that you're correct relative to you. Correct/incorrect is a category error for this stuff. So you're neither correct nor incorrect. It's like asking if "slavery is morally permissible" is green or orange.

I would say that relative to your views, slavery is morally permissible, that it's morally acceptable, etc.

First, the only way we could establish that the number of witnesses testifying to something implies that it has a greater probability of being the case would be if we had a large set of data showing, for multiple scenarios, that there is some correlation to how many witnesses there are relative to whether something turned out to be the case, where the latter was checked via independent means.

In other words, we'd need actual frequentist data to plausibly support a probability claim, in my opinion.

Even with the frequentist data, however, there would still be a number of problems to overcome. That's because there are so many different variables that can come into play. Making a probability claim on this sort of frequentist data implies that we're parsing the witnesses as ideal--no sort of bias, no sort of hidden agenda, no perceptual problems, ideally intelligent and rational, etc., and it also implies that we're assuming they have a more or less ideal access to information. Otherwise there would be no way to establish that the correlation is implicational, and that's what you'd be looking for here.

agree - and neither can prove the other false. — Rank Amateur

Right, as no empirical claim is provable, period. That includes claims like "There is a refrigerator in my kitchen."

You could think of it like that, but physics makes no distinction between now and past/present and in relativity, there is no preferred reference frame. — Devans99

Well, in terms of what we experience, how else could we think of it? Does anyone experience no distinction between now and past/present?

not also directed at ethnic minorities because they treat alt-right differently because it's white. — Judaka

Is the reason that anyone criticizes the alt-right because "it is white"?

The alt-right in my view is arguing for essentially exactly the same thing that most other ethnical groups take for granted, even in the West. — Judaka

I don't know what that is referring to, though. What is it that they're arguing that most other "ethnic groups" take for granted?

And since this is the core, there is no correct answer to what is the right moral view. — Rank Amateur

Of course, I don't think there's any doubt that there is no God, so I'd say there's a correct answer there, but I realize you don't agree with that.

Simplest: conditions themselves are merely states of affairs; — Mww

But states of affairs are some way that things are. Some arrangement of things.

Technical Point: conditions themselves are non-entities; — Mww

I don't know if "entity" is any clearer.

The other two points don't make much sense to me. I don't know why we'd be talking about if they can be "intuited," and "nderstanding cannot assign a concept to condition itself" just reads like gobbledygook/word salad to me.

some people at some time, and for some reason believe slavery was moral
other people at some time, and for some reason believe slavery was immoral

Both times the people were correct, and the morality of slavery changed.

All this says is whatever one thinks is infallibly morally correct for you - that is nonsense. — Rank Amateur

It's just important to realize that a moral relativist is never going to say that any moral stance is "infallibly morally correct." That's pretty much the opposite of moral relativism.

Maybe, just maybe, your view of how the world really is, is not correct. — Rank Amateur

Sure. That's always the case (that it's possible for my view to be incorrect). It follows from the fact that we can't prove any empirical claim. So how do we proceed when someone is claiming that my view is incorrect? Well, I require the other person to provide evidence that something incompatible with my view is correct instead. If the other person won't provide evidence to the contrary, there's no reason for me to change my belief (which is always based on some evidence or other besides mere possibility).

(And of course, the mere fact that they consider something to be evidence isn't sufficient. The person the evidence is presented to has to assess it, has to agree that it's good evidence, that it supports the claim in question, etc.)

here is no god, therefore the source is human, — Rank Amateur

That's not actually my argument. As I pointed out earlier, there are plenty of objectivists who are atheists. Heck, there's even a very famous one that gets mentioned here sometimes--Ayn Rand.

I'm not going to make any assumptions about what the objective source might be. I'll leave that up to the objectivists at hand. It's their position. I don't want to put any limits on what their view might be. It's up to them to present whatever alternate view, and maybe they'll come up with something I could have never imagined. But they need to provide evidence of some objective source if they're going to make that claim (and they expect me to think the claim has any merit).

if you can come up with another argument against objective morality that is not the source argument. — Rank Amateur

I'm not saying that's not what this is about. The issue is solely one of "where do moral stances occur?" So that's a source argument.

Morality never was a “thing”, but always the condition of a thing — Mww

Why wouldn't conditions be "things"?

It seems to me the argument of relative morality vs objective morality is not being argued on the merits of one vs the other. — Rank Amateur

In my view it has absolutely nothing to do with what the merits of one versus the other would be. It has to do with which one is the way the world really is.

Look at it this way: let's say that we make the argument over whether Jack is a multimillionaire versus being homeless and having to depend on handouts about the relative merits of one versus the other. Obviously "multimillionaire" is going to win out there (well, at least for most people). The problem is that it's not true that Jack is a multimillionaire. Jack is homeless. So why would we pretend that he's really a multimillionaire?

That's the way I look at this issue.

Your source argument is certainly the best argument against objective morality - but the argument is based a proposition that can not be shown to be true. — Rank Amateur

Do you mean that in the sense of "It can't be proved"? No empirical claim can be proved, period. That includes proving that Jack is homeless.

There's plenty of evidence that it's true, though, and no evidence that it's false.

I think it's a mistake to see this as being about God. But maybe that's the only way that you could imagine moral objectivism being the case.

However, if God does exist, isn't God's morality just one more set of mental preferences? Or is God's morality supposed to be something different than "things that God thinks"?

I've brought this up before, including in this thread, but a problem with value objectivism (so not just moral, but aesthetic, etc.) is this: let's say that somehow, maybe because God prefers it, maybe because it's embedded into the nonmental universe in some way, etc., it's an objective fact that Brahms was a better composer than Frank Zappa. That would have no impact on the fact that I prefer Frank Zappa as a composer, that I have lots of reasons that I prefer Frank Zappa as a composer, that I'll try to persuade other people to see the merits of Frank Zappa as a composer, etc.--in other words, there's no reason to believe that it would change anything about anyone's preferences, about the way that anyone behaves and interacts with others, etc.

That's because it being a fact that God, or the world itself, etc. has a preference for A over B is practically no different than it being a fact that any random person has a preference for A over B, where that might be different than your own preference. So if you're not going to conform to your parents', or your music teachers', or your political leaders', etc. preference to Brahms over Frank Zappa just because they have a different preference than you do, why would you conform to God's, or the world's preference to Brahms over Frank Zappa just because those things have a different preference than you do?

a society in which murder was considered virtuous could never be a harmonious one and would not even survive for long. — Janus

First, this is pure speculation, and it's dubious at that. But we can ignore that, and ignore the problems with a term like "harmonious" and just say as a given that it's a fact that a society in which murder was considered virtuous could not survive for long.

The question then is, "Well, so what?" How does that fact have any implication for anything?

under the assumption of moral relativism, no normative criteria by which one can be assessed to be better than another. — Janus

I have no idea where you'd be getting that idea from. Has any moral relativist ever said anything like that? Under moral relativism, normative criteria are relative (and subjective on the subjectivist brand of moral relativism).

I think that if a disinterested person observed a whole bunch of moral relativists expressing their different moral opinions and arguments, she would not, in fact could not, find that there is, within the very criteria with which the moral relativists justify their own positions (which is just that they happen to prefer them) any reason to prefer one over the other. And the obvious conclusion would be that they are all equal. — Janus

A hypothetical person with no preferences would indeed not be able to find a reason to prefer one moral stance over the other, no matter what the person were to look at. The very idea of that doesn't make any sense. We'd be wondering if a person who has no preferences in domain D might gain preferences in domain D as an implication or upshot of examining some set of facts (such as the fact that J prefers m, K prefers n, etc.), or the fact that A causes B. They wouldn't, because no set of facts implies any preference. That's just the point. So it's an argument in favor of the relativist position, not an argument against it.

The person might develop preferences based on simple exposure to something they weren't previously familiar with (if John never heard jazz before and then starts listening to a lot of jazz, he might develop (or learn he had) preferences for some of it), but that's a factor of how their brain works, and then it would turn out that it's not true that the person has no preferences after all.

there can be no reason whatsoever (apart from individual preferences) to prefer one argument over another, — Janus

As if anyone prefers anything for a reason other than preferences.

With eternalism, isn't it the case that we experience a series of "nows"?

people can tend to pigeonhole themselves to fit into a spectrum or compass, which isn't a good idea. — Terrapin Station

Yeah, even with the compass "people can tend to pigeonhole themselves to fit into a spectrum or compass, which isn't a good idea," as I noted.

But the compass is a bit better than a simple left/right line. Not much better, maybe, but there's at least an additional metric to it. It would be nice if we could just give our views on various things without needing to categorize them, organize per the categories, etc.

It's called reason. — tim wood

And would you claim that reason is something that occurs independently of persons?

(I don't want to ignore the rest of your post, but I don't want to overlook the question I just asked you above, either)

Ethics talking about itself is part of ethics, — Janus

"Talk about what ethics is ontologically," "talk about how we can know ethical stances," etc. is conventionally named "metaethics." If you don't like calling it that, that's fine, but conventionally that's what it's called.

Not at all; it says that the essence of moral relativism as Terrapin frames it (and I'm not saying that is the only possible framing) is that all moral arguments are equal apart from individual preferences; — Janus

I'd agree that all moral arguments are equal from any objective perspective, but I'd add that an objective perspective is a category error when we're talking about morality.

It's no different than saying something like "All flavors of ice cream are identical to the pavement." That's true in a sense, but only because pavement is the sort of thing that can't taste anything at all, so there are going to be no flavors to the pavement. Focusing on pavement when we're talking about flavors is a category error. When we're talking about flavors, we need to talk about the sort(s) of thing that are capable of taste.

The very purpose of mores is to engender social harmony — Janus

The purpose according to whom? Or are you going to make a category error there, too? People are the only sorts of things that have purposes.

Once we've agreed upon starting values, there are no more meaningful relativist implications on moral debate/morality in practice. — VagabondSpectre

That's really only going to work if the "starting values" are pretty specific. It wouldn't work if the starting value was something like "it's is morally wrong to harm people," because people are going to disagree on what amounts to harm with a normative connotation, they're going to say things like, "Where there are competing interests, someone is going to be harmed no matter what we do, so we need to invoke a caluculus" and then they'll disagree on the relative weights of things, and so on.