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If ONE moral law is sacred, then moral objectivity exists. Most atheists believe that fudging the truth to support a deity is a violation of a sacred moral law. They'll use every argument in the book to tell you what you're doing is wrong.

The price one has to pay to call religion objectively evil is they have to claim morality is objective. Otherwise why are they even complaining?

Lol who cares… his hair is not the point

Sure. Seems like a neutral God to me. Neither benevolent nor evil, just the guy who facilitates existence. So at that point you’d just be worshipping cosmic logos. And then you’d find yourself as a pantheist/pandeist.

When morality isn't objective, it's unnecessary to correct errors in thought. In fact, in some cultures it may be frowned upon. So don't bother with it.

I agree. How I think about that is when people argue for objective morality by gving examples of heinous crimes & ask if it's good - I just say for whom? Maybe not for you or the victim, but maybe for the criminal.

@@arpit.sharma I think when people argue for 'Objective Morality', all they're saying is that they don't know what the word 'objective' means.

@@andydee1304 Yea. I discovered Alex recently & just heard his views on veganism. He said that it's about minimising the animal suffering as we can't completely eradicate it. What are your views on it?

@@arpit.sharmaI have no reason to believe that the animals we eat (cows, pigs, sheep, chicken) have the ability to experience suffering. They can experience pain, but suffering is an abstract concept and there's no evidence that they are capable of abstract thought. You don't see cows grieving other cows.

All abstract concepts aren't subjective. In mathematics the axioms are subjective, but once you accept those, anything that follows objectively flows from those axioms.

Maybe he can offer this. Well, the evil God does judge by letting you choose evil, evil people will make it to the side of this evil God in the afterlife where they can enjoy inflicting infinite torture to the ones who died Good people. So he does judge but judges those who did the Bad as being worthy of having the worse of the people in the world by his side in eternity and them selfishly fulfilling the infinite torture of the ones who died good.

Well, it's definitely more consistent than moral relativity. That philosophy never gets anybody anywhere.

In other words, god is not bound by logic, space or time. Square circle, he can make 2+2 = 79. Such rubbish. Religion is a waste of neurons. To say something is wrong because and only because God says so, is to say, he doesn't say it's wrong because he knows it to be so, but that it's wrong merely cause he decided it so, and he decided it so why? Is there a logic to why? Then it goes back to he says so because he knows so. And if that's the case then god is irrelevant to something being wrong or right. The idea that the problematic nature of torture isn't evident or intrinsic to the thing itself, but instead we must go searching for some external proof written on some stone tablet or hidden message written in atoms for us to find, or some mysterious higher being appeal to authority, makes me embarrassed to be part of the human race.

A subjective statement 😂

@@rishabhthakur8773 If my first comment really was subjective then that means your comment is an objective statement! nice try squirt

You would have to prove "trying." Evolution isn't a conscious act. Whatever survives, survives, and does so mostly without conscious effort.

What you're referring to is descriptive moral relativism, i.e. the study of how different individuals or cultures understand morality. It doesn't contradict the idea of objective morality, per se. As we all know, it's possible for different people to believe different or even contradictory things about a given topic -- it's conceivable for them all to be completely wrong, or for some to be right in specific ways, or for one to be right in every way. The idea of objective morality is that it's possible to be right and wrong about questions of a moral nature. Therefore, it's possible for different people to believe wildly different things about it -- but this has no bearing on the subject matter itself. There are a number of different ways how we can think of objective morality. One idea is that moral rules are "real" precisely to the extent that they are honored. If 97% of people in a given society follow the rule "you should not steal", then that moral rule is 97% "real" -- in a way that is empirically measurable, and therefore objective. Another approach is to recognize that subjective preferences are actually objective, in a sense: if I have a preference for X, then it is possible to independently observe and verify whether my preference actually exists. My preference is of course limited to myself, but it can nevertheless be as real as any other fact about my material existence. Given that subjective preferences are "real" in this sense, we can conclude that it's possible to make objective assessments about them. For example, if I believe that theft is immoral, this implies that I should not steal, and I should not condone acts of theft. If I can be objectively observed not to steal and not to condone acts of theft, it can be concluded that I do, in fact, consider theft to be immoral (precisely to the degree that I follow up on my stated conviction). My preference therefore becomes an objective fact. Now, let's say that you wish to be a "good" person, but you don't know what it means to be "good", or moral. The only thing you know is that I consider theft to be bad, or immoral. From this, you can logically conclude that you should also consider theft to be bad relative to me, if you want to be "good" (relative to me), as this makes you "good" from my point of view. This approach is a bit more difficult to wrap your head around, because it superficially sounds like moral subjectivism. For example, if I consider theft to be moral, you might conclude that in order for you to be moral relative to me, you must be accepting of my preference towards theft. But this is not so: you don't have to accept other people's moral preferences, at all. Rather, you simply apply the moral rules that other people hold, relative to them. So if I believe that theft is morally OK, it follows that it's morally OK for you to consider theft to be morally permissible relative to *me*. In other words, if I don't respect other people's property rights, then I can't credibly expect other people to respect my property rights. This describes the type of moral logic that we intuitively use all the time and consider to be self-evident -- maybe for good reason.

@@AlexanderReiswich jesus, that is a hell of a reply. Great reading tho I still think because there is also no such thing as good or bad It makes no sense for morality to be objective. There is only what we make of it, what our opinions are. For example, somebody killing somebody else is alway based on a deeper feeling which isnt controlled by the individual, not really. In the end we are just not in control at all of our feelings and so, no free will, no good or bad, no obiectove morality. Only opinions.

It's not accurate to say that moral values equate to social consensus; these are distinct concepts. Moral values can be subjective (held by an individual) or intersubjective (shared by a group). In the latter case, consensus is a relevant factor. But it's not determinant of validity. For example, if I believe that red is the best color, and everyone else in my society believes that blue is the best color, it's not like my preference is being invalidated by the group preference. Subjective preferences are independent from each other, which is what makes them subjective in the first place. Whether there is such a thing as objective morality is therefore a separate question: it's perfectly possible (theoretically) for there to be an objective moral truth, and at the same time for everyone in society to be wrong about it. But even if there is no objective moral truth, and at the same time complete universal agreement regarding some moral principle, this does not mean that the principle itself is true -- it's only true to say that there is absolute agreement regarding it. It's important to distinguish between agreement and adherence; for example, if there is adherence to a particular moral rule, then it would be plausible to say that that moral rule is "real" to the degree it's adhered to. But this would constitute an argument for objective morality.

@AlexanderReiswich, I appreciate your reply and that you are thinking deeply about this subject. You wrote: “It's not accurate to say that moral values equate to social consensus; these are distinct concepts. Moral values can be subjective (held by an individual) or intersubjective (shared by a group).” All intelligent life has ethical moral values, something many humans do not understand. Furthermore, human individuals are actually not individual intelligences, but swarm intelligences with a self-aware conscious swarm intelligence that is designed to believe it thinks it is an individual when in fact it is a swarm intelligence. This is how and why an individual can debate with themselves over their personal ethical moral values. Ethical moral values are what some group of intelligences agree upon to what degree behaviors are good and/or bad, understanding that with complex intelligences behaviors are often a mixture of both good and bad as agreed upon by the group of intelligences deciding this. Different groups can come to different agreements as to what those ethical moral values are, as a result each human individual swarm intelligent mind has at least a slightly different set of ethical moral values than any other human individual swarm intelligence. Similarly, groupings of human individuals also have at least slightly different sets of ethical moral values. To get groups to reasonably follow the same set of ethical moral values within our civilization we create codified rules and laws defining them. Even so, it is very difficult to get everyone to always completely agree upon those codified ethical moral values. Because ethical moral values are the opinions of intelligences agreeing, they are all subjective. Furthermore, they are relative to the circumstances which can change to what degree a group agrees that some behavior is good and/or bad. For example, killing someone is frequently agreed upon as being bad, but depending upon the circumstances around killing someone that opinion can change from very bad, to somewhat bad, to neutral, to good, to very good. Now, it is logically better to decide upon what an ethical moral value is through using as objective of information related to that ethical moral value and then to analyze it in as logical rational reasoning manner as possible. However, in the end, the decision made is still a subjective opinion over to what degree a behavior is good and/or bad. An example of how different this can be, there are significantly large groups of people who have different opinions about how good and/or bad it is for someone to believe in and seek to cause the extinction of their entire species. While one might think this would clearly be considered very bad by everyone, there are groups that believe, depending upon the relative circumstances, it is a very good thing to do. Along those lines, there is literally not a single ethical mora value I know of which is truly universally held by all humans alive.

@@MusingsFromTheJohn00 I'm not entirely sure how literally you mean it when you say that humans should be understood as swam intelligences. Strictly speaking, swarm intelligence isn't a "real" thing; it's an *appearance* of intelligence (coordination / intent) that occurs naturally, without direction. This isn't really true for humans, as we rely on communication and other techniques to achieve what may superficially look like swarm intelligence. That being said, it's possible to argue that both intelligence within individual humans and swarm intelligence are just abstractions that don't literally exist. So this is intended as more of a comment than an argument. In any case, I think it's important to keep in mind that not only values are subjective -- all of our perception is. Objectivity can be said to be "qualified" subjectivity. Every phenomenon that we experience is a mental model in our minds. The degree to which it is able to describe, explain and correspond to observations is the degree to which it's objective -- but it never truly represents the thing in itself. As we can see in the example with swarm intelligence, it is possible to have a mental model with an objective quality of something that doesn't even physically exist; therefore, it doesn't seem implausible to suggest that there can be a model of morality with an objective quality -- despite the fact that it doesn't represent anything that literally exists. There are other ways to measure the "moral validity" of propositions than to look at the extent they're agreed upon intersubjectively -- which is something that we wouldn't necessarily consider a great standard for determining truthfulness in other contexts, either.

@@AlexanderReiswich I mean the literally, science is showing, the human mind is a swarm intelligence and that all living intelligence we know of is swarm intelligence. I can go into this in great detail if you are interested or I can point you to some videos or references for it. In brief, each individual cell in the human body is a massively complex swarm intelligence that is effectively a level of nanotech super intelligence still beyond the tech level of human civilization, though we are rapidly reverse engineering this technology, are already using pieces of it in primitive ways, and will probably master it within decades to not more than a century from now. All the cells in the human body are part of the overall human swarm mind, but for the higher intelligence we can restrict ourselves to looking at primarily neuron and astrocyte cells, of which there are ~172 billion cells, though the count has a potential significant level of uncertainty and may be considerably lower or more likely considerably higher. Each of the ~86 billion neurons in the brain have on average ~7,000 synapses. It is estimated that a single astrocyte can contact ~100,000 synapses in the hippocampus, ~300 to ~600 dendrites in the cortex, and protoplasmic astrocytes may connect to about 2 million synapses. Synapses and dendrites are also just one form of intelligent communication between cells, because cells also use electromagnetic fields, biochemical gradients, vesicle virus like messaging which can deliver proteins, bits of RNA, bits of DNA, etc. While some of these messaging paths are simple, some are not so simple. The thing to understand with in the mind is the tremendous degree of complexity which builds up from just being an individual cell into being something vastly more complex. Within that swarm intelligence is laying like an onion, separate definable regions like soap bubbles, overlapping regions like overlapping spheres, fast highways of information flow where the pattern of the highways effects the pattern of intelligence, and that this is not just neurological as once thought but happening down into the level of RNA and DNA as playing an active dynamic part of how our minds think from moment to moment. Then we can look at things on a higher level and understand that what we call the self-aware conscious mind is a sub-swarm intelligence which acts like a pilot or leader to make centralized fast decisions for the whole of the human mind/body, and part of the consequence of that is that the self-aware conscious pilot thinks of itself as an individual instead of a swarm and perceives everything through a virtual reality created by subconscious to it parts of the human mind, thus what we think of as ourselves is by design somewhat a hallucinating delusional intelligence. Thus, trying to gain a better understanding of the actual reality we live in can at times seem mind blowing. Now... We don't need to know those details to understand that ethical moral values are by nature subjective and relative, but it can help. It is one of the reasons why we should try to develop our ethical moral values based off as objective of facts as we can while applying logical rational reasoning to debate and decide what we agree should be the codified ethical moral values our society will enforce with punishments against those who do not follow the rules made.

@@AlexanderReiswich oh, if you are not aware of how human minds are swarm intelligences, you might not be aware of some of the very exciting research being done around learning the language of cells and how to talk to them. This has extremely exciting potential because it means that before we fully understand how a human cells works, we will learn how to communicate with those human cells and tell them to do things like repair damage normally thought unrepairable, regenerate limbs, cure cancers, reverse aging, fix eyesight to perfect vision, fix hearing to perfect functioning, etc. We might need only a decade or more advancement to achieve these things through talking to cells without having to first fully reverse engineer how cells work which will likely take decades longer.

A cumulation of many (overlapping) subjective views does not equate to an objective view; it equates to an intersubjective view -- which is entirely distinct from an objective view.

Your reasoning is flawed. A great many subjective opinions concerning a proposition does not GENERATE an objective fact regarding that proposition. The best that it can be said to do is CONFIRM an objective fact. In other words, that fact has to already exist. Then individual opinions can serve as approximations to it, and the statistical average of these may approach the fact itself. But the fact has to exist in its own right, with no need for any opinions at all. In any case, this matter of morality is easily accounted for, as a consequence of our evolution as a social species. We actively want to cooperate, most of the time, for many purposes, but we also have other instincts which can come into conflict with our prosocial ones. Morality is somewhat messy because of this, and also because of variation among individuals. This kind of morality is necessarily subjective even at a species level. A different species with different physical requirements, subject to different evolutionary pressures, will evolve a different balance of instincts. Each species as a whole, therefore, develops its own subjective positions with respect to morality. If there were to be an objective morality, it would have to hold even in the absence of all these different species. In other words, it would have to hold in a lifeless universe, subject therefore only to physical properties such as the charge on an electron. We could, as a distinctly artificial exercise, come up with some construction of an "objective morality" based on such physical properties, but it doesn't seem to map to our ordinary intuitions about morality at all. Possibly, if we had other universes to compare against, having different physical properties, we might try to claim that some of those universes are "better" or "worse" than others, based on some value like the potential to give rise to life or consciousness or complexity. We can imagine other universes that are very regular or very disordered, not that they would be "bad" universes, but they would be less interesting to explore. You've seen one orthogonal crystal lattice, you've pretty much seen them all. Again, this doesn't look much like what we'd ordinarily recognize as morality, but if it must necessarily be objective then I think it's the best that can be proposed. I don't find that it has much application.

Do you have one to present?

@@RichWoods23 Yes I do

@@ConceptHut Care to share it?

@@RichWoods23 Are you asking me to share the framework in a TH-cam comment or just the definition of good simpliciter?

@@ConceptHut It sounds like both would be needed if anyone is to evaluate your idea.

You dare to conflate "homework" with the suffering that a child with bone cancer and their families go through or those that endured years of sexual abuse. 😡😡🤢🤮 Shame on you and those like you that sacrifice both your humanity and your reasoning at the alter of Yahweh for the promise of an afterlife. It's a price I'm not willing to pay

You have to differentiate between something being intrinsically wrong and something being instrumentally wrong. Not all suffering is instrumentally wrong, as it may lead to more good things down the road. But in those cases, the only reason it's not wrong in that regard, is because other good things result from it that 'compensate' the bad part. To figure out if any painful practice as you call it is worth it, you still count the suffering as a negative. It's just that the positives may outweigh it. So speaking intrinsically instead of instrumentally: in your cases suffering could still be viewed as always wrong.

@@joephorbach2656 agreed

That's exactly correct. The problem is that most people get caught up on the terms objective and subjective and see those as a dichotomy of which only one can be true, while in reality it's more of a spectrum of intersubjective agreement on axioms with preferably objective application within an open framework. It's neither fully objective, nor fully subjective. Just like chess, journalism or the judical system. This problem arises in philosophy, because philosophical objectivity is essentially unattainable by any being that has an experience. The subjective vs objective morality debate is nothing but mental masturbation and should simply be ignored.

@@Luftgitarrenprofi I'm glad you agree! In terms of the "agreement on axioms" I also find that implications of moral disagreement are vastly overestimated, if they exist at all. It's true that moral truth is "contingent" on axioms of somekind but my sense is that those axioms are derived from our nature and the nature of experience rather than from our transient preferences or opinions. If morality aims to answer the question "how should we treat each other?" rather than "how should I act?" then the answer itself must maintain the social context of the question. There doesn't appear to be diversity in how people want to be treated, not on the fundamental level. Morality takes on a logical layer, which I think is basically Sam Harris' whole point. There is basically not real discussion to be had about it

Intersubjectivity isn't terribly interesting; it simply describes commonalities between various subjective viewpoints. To say that moral truth is intersubjective is to claim that consensus is what justifies it's truth-value. I don't think this is a reasonable claim to make: if 9 out of 10 people agree that theft is moral, does this make it moral for them to rob the one guy that disagrees? But maybe I'm simply not fully grasping your proposition...

@@AlexanderReiswich Your description is usually the strawman stark defenders of either moral realism or anti-realism create by oversimplifying the concept and reducing it solely to consensus instead of nuanced considerations of shared experiences, perspectives, and dialogues that contribute to understanding rather than just counting votes for truth. But it also perfectly demonstrates the false dichotomy between philosophical subjectivity and objectivity I highlighted. The intricacies are in the substance of a perspective, not just simply in a view being stated and expected to be accepted in a vacuum. Intersubjectivity means, in essence, to accept that while moral axioms are ultimately subjective, they are shared amongst not even just humans but many sentient beings. And from there frameworks based on rationality and objective evaluation can be created. And before you go any further yourself, I'll do you a favor and take it to the extreme for you: If a psychopath doesn't agree and wants to harm others while not feeling empathy, then no argument could convince them to feel (not necessarily do) otherwise. This is not a flaw of intersubjective morality, but a fact about a degree of the human/sentient condition. It is a flaw and sound critique of moral realism, I agree. Because it negates universal moral truth as absolute and objective fact about the universe, which is not a problem of intersubjective morality, because it doesn't make this claim. To be precise, I'd probably agree with the moral realist philosopher in the video on most points, but find it inaccurate to claim pure objectivity on something ultimately based on (shared) intuition. That's exactly why in more recent times the term intersubjectivity became popular in the field.

@@landonpontius2478 I've read the moral landscape and while I agree with most arguments being made, I don't agree with the use of the term objectivity and complete disregard of the naturalistic fallacy (Hume). I believe if Harris used the term intersubjectivity instead of objectivity, he could have (like most moral realists) avoided unnecessary critique and brought his point across without joining the (in my opinion misplaced and misdirecting) polarized debate of subjectivity vs objectivity.

Does this approach stand up to scrutiny? I immediately have to think of people who are extremely dedicated to their beliefs, and truly make an effort to apply them consistently -- it just so happens that their beliefs are bad. For example, I can hold the belief that consistently praying to some deity will get rid of my cancer. But it's not like my belief here is just as valid as any other belief about cancer. I only hold it because I don't know any better.

@@AlexanderReiswich you do raise some very solid critiques, however to respond the specific example you provided, I’d say just praying isn’t consistent. If you look at the evidence and submit it to analysis properly, you’d conclude that the choice that maximises good would be proper treatment. To elaborate a bit, if someone genuinely views suffering as a moral good, as someone who thinks the exact opposite, it’d also be my duty to try and prevent them from inflicting suffering upon others. It’s not because my moral system is more correct, it’s merely because that’s what would be consistent with my underlying assumptions about ethics

​@@adne4336 Hmm, I think the term "consistent" becomes rather confusing in the prayer example. I would suggest that the term "true" would be better, after all, because the relevant question is: what do you *truly* value? Your health? Or something else, i.e. your religion? But I believe I understand your broader point: consistency is something that we can look for to determine the values that a person truly holds -- consistency in this way is a tool to reveal truth. If a person chooses to punch people in the face for no reason whenever they get the chance, then we can conclude that it is "good" or moral from their point of view to do so. This doesn't necessarily mean that we should accept or respect their belief -- if our values do not align with theirs, we still have a duty to prevent them from punching people in the face. But due to the consistency of their behavior, we can determine what their true values likely are, and act accordingly.

@@AlexanderReiswich you make very solid points, however I think the term true is a bit problematic when it comes to ethics. I think all ethical systems come with a couple of axioms. For utilitarianism it’s simply that happiness is desirable, for kantianism it’s the categorical imperatives and for a deontologist it’s that certain actions are always desirable/undesirable. Most of these fundamental axioms we can’t disprove and hence they can’t be true or false. However if a utilitarian goes out and punches people in the face it wouldn’t necessarily be an incorrect ethical decision, but it would be inconsistent with their fundamental axioms.

​@@adne4336 I actually disagree somewhat -- the reason why "truth" is often considered problematic relative to ethics is because we think of ethics as a normative discipline (which I'd agree with of course). Norms are necessarily independent of subjective preferences. Therefore, they're axiomatic, or assertory, absent an objective truth value. But having a subjective preference is not normative -- it's descriptive. If I believe that punching people for no reason is moral for me, it doesn't imply that punching people is moral for everyone. It simply means that I accept this particular proposition, and demonstrably prove that I do by consistently acting upon it. Thus, my preference can be empirically and objectively established as a fact. Ironically, subjective preferences are exactly the type of thing that can be determined objectively. But again, this is only true relative to a subject. The mistake that you're referring to is made when we attempt to separate the norm or value from the subject, which is of course not possible.