And thank you for the interesting conversation as well!
The point I was making about actors who care is that they are moral participants, and not merely observers. I think we agree that reality, all that is, regardless of whether there are observers, is objective. The experiential world of our minds, including our will, our values, and our own mental representation of reality, is subjective. That all goes away if we disappear. That mental world is also a part of reality, of course, and in that sense is also objective: we can objectively discuss another person's mental state, as we are doing here. But that mental state of perception, conception, desire, emotion, will, values, and intent is a special domain to the one person who experiences that mental world, and is worth treating separately as subjectivity.
If we are snuffed, or abandon our post as observers, the objective light remains with all its various wavelengths, but our subjective experience of their color disappears.
To objectivity and subjectivity, I would add a third domain: that of the interpersonal. The interpersonal covers systems of cooperation, given that the players cannot directly connect their various subjective worlds. You are an Apple, I am a Linux box, and she thinks EBCDIC. How can we work together? We do it by developing externally-facing devices that talk to each other, and we process the conversation internally each in our own special subjective way. Computer networks work this way, and so does human language. So too does practical morality.
Subjectively, you have a set of desires, values, and agendas that you want to accomplish, and I have another set that probably does not exactly correspond to your set. If we turn ourselves loose to do whatever we subjectively want, we are likely to clash. So we develop interpersonal protocols to reign ourselves in so that I am not stepping on your toes and you are not casually destroying things that are important to me. This is the simple, non-supernatural core of practical morality: it is the gentle art of getting along with others by playing nice.
Interpersonal morality forms freely from the bottom up. We police each other, and we usually limit our own actions so that other people don't have to hit us. Moral objectivism, in contrast, thinks of morality as being a command from the top down. Morality is ripped from its natural context in the interpersonal world of negotiating the conflicting outcomes of one party's subjective interests against another's, and is redefined as a value in itself: a value consisting in absolute submission to a set of abstract commandments to which all people are supposed to be objectively subject. Morality (interpersonal) becomes a value (subjective), and that value is then supposed to be objective in the same sense that a brick wall is.
The promise of moral objectivism to its adherent is to be able to settle moral disputes with the indisputable clarity of solving a mathematical problem, or of being objectively "right" politically in the manner of getting the right answer on a test. In reality, it never works, because the supposed objective standard is either unclear or arbitrarily made up by the person trying to settle the dispute. In the end, it just confuses and inflames the original issue, by preventing the litigants from seeing any value in the other side.
Moral "relativism," I think, is a sophomoric attempt to deny moral objectivism in the wrong way, by accepting its top-down, arbitrary commandment-based baggage and trying to locate the authority for those commandments in the shifting tides of human institutions. As soon as Hitler comes along, those smarty-pants moral "relativists" will flip to authoritarian moral objectivists immediately.
Moral "relativism" is a bizzaro anti-twin of moral objectivism. Moral interpersonalism differs radically from both of them.
Sorry for rambling so long, and thanks again for your provocative thoughts!
And thank you for the interesting conversation as well!
The point I was making about actors who care is that they are moral participants, and not merely observers. I think we agree that reality, all that is, regardless of whether there are observers, is objective. The experiential world of our minds, including our will, our values, and our own mental representation of reality, is subjective. That all goes away if we disappear. That mental world is also a part of reality, of course, and in that sense is also objective: we can objectively discuss another person's mental state, as we are doing here. But that mental state of perception, conception, desire, emotion, will, values, and intent is a special domain to the one person who experiences that mental world, and is worth treating separately as subjectivity.
If we are snuffed, or abandon our post as observers, the objective light remains with all its various wavelengths, but our subjective experience of their color disappears.
To objectivity and subjectivity, I would add a third domain: that of the interpersonal. The interpersonal covers systems of cooperation, given that the players cannot directly connect their various subjective worlds. You are an Apple, I am a Linux box, and she thinks EBCDIC. How can we work together? We do it by developing externally-facing devices that talk to each other, and we process the conversation internally each in our own special subjective way. Computer networks work this way, and so does human language. So too does practical morality.
Subjectively, you have a set of desires, values, and agendas that you want to accomplish, and I have another set that probably does not exactly correspond to your set. If we turn ourselves loose to do whatever we subjectively want, we are likely to clash. So we develop interpersonal protocols to reign ourselves in so that I am not stepping on your toes and you are not casually destroying things that are important to me. This is the simple, non-supernatural core of practical morality: it is the gentle art of getting along with others by playing nice.
Interpersonal morality forms freely from the bottom up. We police each other, and we usually limit our own actions so that other people don't have to hit us. Moral objectivism, in contrast, thinks of morality as being a command from the top down. Morality is ripped from its natural context in the interpersonal world of negotiating the conflicting outcomes of one party's subjective interests against another's, and is redefined as a value in itself: a value consisting in absolute submission to a set of abstract commandments to which all people are supposed to be objectively subject. Morality (interpersonal) becomes a value (subjective), and that value is then supposed to be objective in the same sense that a brick wall is.
The promise of moral objectivism to its adherent is to be able to settle moral disputes with the indisputable clarity of solving a mathematical problem, or of being objectively "right" politically in the manner of getting the right answer on a test. In reality, it never works, because the supposed objective standard is either unclear or arbitrarily made up by the person trying to settle the dispute. In the end, it just confuses and inflames the original issue, by preventing the litigants from seeing any value in the other side.
Moral "relativism," I think, is a sophomoric attempt to deny moral objectivism in the wrong way, by accepting its top-down, arbitrary commandment-based baggage and trying to locate the authority for those commandments in the shifting tides of human institutions. As soon as Hitler comes along, those smarty-pants moral "relativists" will flip to authoritarian moral objectivists immediately.
Moral "relativism" is a bizzaro anti-twin of moral objectivism. Moral interpersonalism differs radically from both of them.
Sorry for rambling so long, and thanks again for your provocative thoughts!