I have been challenged to write an essay about moral objectivity.. I have not read the essay on the Standford or Internet encyclopedia of philosophy.. [Whatever is there I am sure I could never write anything better than that.] But in the meantime, I just want to organize a few thoughts about this subject.
First, Professor Michael Humemer does not use the idea of the fallacy of subjectivity in his essay because he knows that an outside statement about morality can be coherent as long as the statement itself is left outside the set of all moral facts.[As Moshe Israel Rosten noticed]
To defend Moral Objectivity I could in theory use Professor John Searle's argument. [ Here is the web adress: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/] But his argument works really only against the idea that all knowledge is subjective. But some people don't say that. They say just moral facts are subjective. This is harder to defeat. (Moshe Israel Rosten pointed this out to me. This is because the moral relativist might accept there is objective truth but just not in the area of morality. For that you need the essay of Michael Huemer in Colorado http://www.owl232.net/objectiv.htm)
But I should mention that my interest in objective morality actually goes deeper than a challenge on the Internet. When I was learning Torah I certainly thought I had found one self consistent objective logical and reasonable system of morality and a unified coherent world view. That illusion has been smashed. In its place I have a philosophical system based on Kant and Plato that the Torah can be justified with. But what I presently believe in does not really come anywhere near the grandeur of Torah and Talmud. So what I try to do is to fit the Torah into my present world view. But the whole process is like the practice medicine used to be about a hundred years ago. It is a hodge podge of different things that seem to work with no unifying principle
At any rate Michael Huemer does a neat thing. It claims that also the claim of all moral values are subjective is alos incoherent in this way:
Since rational judgment presupposes some ground apart from the judgment on which for it to be based, the denial of objectivity implies the intrinsic impossibility of rational moral judgment, since said denial means that moral values cannot have any independent existence apart from the mind
First, Professor Michael Humemer does not use the idea of the fallacy of subjectivity in his essay because he knows that an outside statement about morality can be coherent as long as the statement itself is left outside the set of all moral facts.[As Moshe Israel Rosten noticed]
To defend Moral Objectivity I could in theory use Professor John Searle's argument. [ Here is the web adress: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/] But his argument works really only against the idea that all knowledge is subjective. But some people don't say that. They say just moral facts are subjective. This is harder to defeat. (Moshe Israel Rosten pointed this out to me. This is because the moral relativist might accept there is objective truth but just not in the area of morality. For that you need the essay of Michael Huemer in Colorado http://www.owl232.net/objectiv.htm)
But I should mention that my interest in objective morality actually goes deeper than a challenge on the Internet. When I was learning Torah I certainly thought I had found one self consistent objective logical and reasonable system of morality and a unified coherent world view. That illusion has been smashed. In its place I have a philosophical system based on Kant and Plato that the Torah can be justified with. But what I presently believe in does not really come anywhere near the grandeur of Torah and Talmud. So what I try to do is to fit the Torah into my present world view. But the whole process is like the practice medicine used to be about a hundred years ago. It is a hodge podge of different things that seem to work with no unifying principle
At any rate Michael Huemer does a neat thing. It claims that also the claim of all moral values are subjective is alos incoherent in this way:
Since rational judgment presupposes some ground apart from the judgment on which for it to be based, the denial of objectivity implies the intrinsic impossibility of rational moral judgment, since said denial means that moral values cannot have any independent existence apart from the mind
