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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mardoc Redcloak" data-source="post: 3764860" data-attributes="member: 40569">I intend to.That's an excellent point.The best response I can think of at the moment is something akin to that which Compatibilists might resort to in response to similar objections regarding determinism: judgments of "responsibility" are only relevant insofar as we wish to draw a connection between the action or consequence and the person. For instance, to show that a person is evil, we must demonstrate that she is genuinely responsible for evil actions. But since "responsibility" is important only with respect to the individual, when it comes to the individual himself, she need not be responsible for what she is to be judged by what she is: what she is is her, she need not be "responsible" for it.Thus, to judge a person's moral standing, we need only resort to "responsibility" if our evidence is indirect, if we are judging her by her actions and their results. If she is under a dominate spell, her actions under it are excused because they are not representative of her moral virtue. But if somehow we have direct access to her moral virtue, we need not be concerned with responsibility: we can judge her directly based on that, because fundamentally it is a part of her, and is determinant of how we judge her morally (rather than  a mere indicator of that determinant.)To bring this back to subjective morality, it follows that I can (with a subjective standard) judge someone to be morally evil based on her moral beliefs (say, "It is right to murder innocent people") simply because that is her moral belief, regardless of her responsibility for it.That was somewhat convoluted... I'm not sure how much sense it made. Even if you are right, though, that subjective morality makes judgments of moral responsibility impossible "across" moralities, this in and of itself does not establish the falsity of the theory. It makes it inconvenient, not wrong. The basic problem, in my opinion, with most of the arguments for subjective morality is that they reduce all rationality to instrumental rationality ("how to accomplish x") and thus lose sight of the possibility for moral rationality ("ought I to seek x in the first place?")Actually, the "compass" analogy is a very good one. It gets at the point precisely. Compasses do not "define" what is north; they simply recognize it. Another standard (in the specific case of the compass, the location of the northern magnetic pole) determines what is north; compasses merely inform us of the right direction by that standard.But by the same token, if there were no "objective" north, the mere fact that a compass pointed in a certain direction (even that all compasses happened to point in a certain direction) would not tell us where "north" was. The direction the compass pointed would be merely arbitrary.Similarly, the mere existence of "cosmological good" (compasses that point in a direction) does not necessarily indicate objective morality. It only indicates objective morality if what is cosmogically good is so because it corresponds to the objective moral law--if the compasses point in a certain direction because that direction is north.</blockquote>

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