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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6416240" data-attributes="member: 42582">Hey, Alzrius was the one asking for citations!But here are some points that I think can be understood without prior specialisation:* There is a scholarly discipline, moral philosophy, widely studied in English-language colleges and universities, which deals with the controversy over the nature of morality; * Among the practitioners of that discipline, the mainstream (but not universal) view is that morality is objective; * The reason for that view is that it best accords with features of usage - eg truth and falsehood predication, denial, contradiction etc in moral contexts don't seem to behave any differently from ordinary contexts (contrast pronouns - I can't deny your claim "I'm hungry" by saying "I'm not hungry" - I have to say "You're not hungry!" - but there is no corresponding rule for moral utterance); * Those who think that morality is objective recognise that the methodology for ascertaining moral truth isn't going to be identical to the methodology for working out (say) how far the earth is from the sun - and they have theories of what that methodology is (eg reason; intuition; human nature; etc); * One of the biggest issues that anti-objectivists (subjectivists/relativists) have to deal with is what I have called the "hypocrisy problem" - namely, if moral judgement is not answerable to some objective standard, then it is hard to explain how acting against someone else on the basis of one's moral judgement is any different from bullying * There are various ways of trying to deal with the "hypocrisy problem" (eg Russell argues that compossibility vs non-compossibility of desire is key to identifying desirable courses of action without hypocritically privileging one's own moral judgement; Nietzsche embraces the implication of hypocrisy, and moves the focus of evaluation from morality to aesthetics and self-cultivation).I think there are also some secondary points, about the nature of argument, that can be taken away:* "Burden of proof" is a greatly overrated technique in most serious arguments - most people are defending some view or other, and can reasonably be called upon to provide reasons for that view; * The idea that "you can't/don't have to prove a negative" is also greatly overrated - for instance, when the Buddha denies that there is such a thing as the self, he certainly feels the need to provide an argument (given that the claim is quite contrary to common sense), and there are plenty of instances where proving a negative is fairly straightforward (eg proving that there is no greatest natural number); * The idea that "argument from authority" is a fallacy is also greatly overrated - for instance, if I want to know what the typical views are in a discipline with which I'm unfamiliar, the best way to find out is to ask someone familiar with that discipline; and more generally, most things that I know - about physics, about history, about other places - I didn't discover for myself but learned from reading someone else's account ie by relying on authority.Sure. Those arguments can, and have, been made. And there are replies available, too. (For instance, most people who study child labour recognise the important economic contribution that it makes to family wellbeing, but they regard this as a problem - that no way of making such a contribution is available that doesn't also stunt the child's wellbeing - rather than as a marker of flourishing.)Raymond Geuss has a nice passage in which he argues that equality is not, in general, an objective good, but that some other things might be (Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton University Press 2008) p 80):[T]he distribution of medical services in a modern hospital can be described, depending on the frame of reference chosen, as ‘equal’ (all are to get, notionally, as much as they need), or ‘unequal’ (those seriously ill get more treatment than those with minor ailments) … There is nothing special about equality; what is objectionable is depriving people of needed medical treatment, if it is in principle available. That in most societies is a definite social ill … [T]here are any number of different reasons for thinking that mass death for want of medical help is a bad thing – it is virtually a paradigm of what we mean by a social ill – and we think in this case the reason so many people are dying is that those who need it are not receiving medical help There are some people, of course, who think that widespread death due to a want of medical care that is in principle available is a matter of indifference. But there are also some people who think the world is flat.The number of people who will defend bonded child labour as something other than a social ill is, I think, comparably modest. To the best of my knowledge, there is no serious campaign under way to repeal child labour laws and Factory Acts in those jurisdictions that enjoy the benefits of them.In itself, none of this is an argument for objectivity. But I think it shows that claims about what is or isn't a social ill, or what does or doesn't contribute to human flourishing, isn't hopeless.I think that you are conflating two different points here.No one (either in this thread, or in moral philosophy) is confidently asserting that they have easy objective answers to difficult moral questions. The point, rather, is that there is some such answer or other available, and hence that our moral reasoning and judgements is answerable to, and aims at fidelity to, that answer - even if it is hard to find.A comparison in counting would be this: no one knows how many carp were swimming around in the imperial fish pond in the Forbidden City exactly 1000 years ago from the moment I am typing this, but we all know that there was some such number, that it was zero or greater, that (if non-zero) it was either odd or even, etc. The fact that I conjecture that it was odd, and that you conjecture that it was even, and that neither of us has a good basis for rebutting the other's conjecture, doesn't mean that the issue is subjective and has no objective answer.Likewise in morality: the main point of insisting that morality is objective is to make the point that error is possible, that belief is not equivalent to truth, and hence (for instance) that there is, at least in principle, a difference between enforcing moral requirements and the mere exercise of power. This is where I find that Planescape falls down - it abandons objectivity without seriously engaging with the hypocrisy problem, and without (in any obvious way) providing the resources for dealing with it in one or other of the ways it might be dealt with.Sure. That's why many of us don't use GM-adjudicated and enforced alignment.But this is also why the objective/subjective issue matters - if you deny that morality is objective, then you are arguably robbing the notion of moral code of its meaning - you may as well say that each player brings his/her own taste in ice cream to the game. It is highly plausible that if moral conflict and disagreement to carry weight, it must actually be conflict, in the sort of fashion that  [MENTION=49239]BenK[/MENTION] described upthread.EDIT: [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION], I've cross-posted with your mod warning. I don't think what I've said in this post is in violation, but am happy to delete/be mod-edited if I'm wrong about that.</blockquote>

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