Sublette County Sheriff K.C. Lehr has received more than 7,000 emails about a Wyoming man who reportedly captured and tormented a wolf before killing it, he told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday.
Some of those are threats.
Lehr said people in his office, as well as Sublette County and Wyoming Game and Fish Department personnel, have been receiving threats — including death threats — stemming from Daniel, Wyoming, man Cody Roberts’ reported capture, torment and killing of a wild wolf in late February.
Objective truths require objective evidence. Certain things we can take as morally objective, to an extent, because they’re almost universally not acceptable by human standards. Two key words there, “human” and “almost”. Morality is a human standard to judge things by. Nature has no such thing as morality, things simply do. Mosquitoes and ticks are not evil, they simply exist even though just about every human believes them to be a pest.
Nice. A subtle ad hom. Yes, English is my first language. I just woke up. If you want to nit-pick specific phraseology when it’s quite clear that I simply missed the order of a couple of words, then fine. That makes you the asshole lol. I’ve never met or read anything from any serious philosophers, today or in the past, that claims there can be moral objectivism without some extra-human knowledge.
Asking if English is your first language isn’t an ad hom, if you spoke this well as a non-native speaker that’d be more impressive than misunderstanding it as a native speaker, but neither is wrong or whatever, you just misunderstood me and used it as the basis for claiming I lost all credibility, which was annoying, but not a huge deal as long as it’s cleared up now.
So I’ll start my thesis here, hopefully it’s not too abstract for you to follow when you’ve never engaged in this type of material before by your own admission.
Objective evidence exists only within the framework of certain axioms. When you take some simple evidence, let’s say an apple falling, how do you know it fell? You take it as an axiom that your senses are accurate in describing some material set of conditions that exist in an objective reality. Even the concept of an objective reality that is shared with other beings is an axiom we take. You could just as easily be in a simulation alone, with no other conscious beings around you. Reality could be constructed as you view it.
This could be true even without a simulation theory. You could be the sole conscious being in existence, and all of reality is a hallucination that you just believe has to have consistent objective truths, so that’s how it appears to you.
The point is, it’s not truly knowable what the true state of reality is without taking axioms (engaging in assumptions). Once you assume there’s a real, shared, persistent objective reality, and that your senses accurately depict this objective reality in an ontologically consistent way, then you can start building what we call objective truths. (If you want to do your own reading in this realm, this position is called epistemological nihilism).
Moral truths function literally identically to this. Without axioms, in both the descriptive and normative realm, nothing is knowable. Functionally that doesn’t work though, people take axioms unconsciously, and we can’t not take them. If this isn’t your first exposure to the idea of axioms, you’ll understand it’s generally regarded as better (or often even required) to only take axioms that are “self-evident”. That is to say, you don’t take an axiom that all matter in the universe is held up by invisible flying unicorns, but you would take the axiom that you exist in some ontologically consistent and shared space.
If you’re in a conversation with someone, and for some reason they take a different axiom than you (e.g some people take the axiom that God exists, which is honestly far too complex to be reasonable), then you can’t functionally communicate about the nature of your (supposedly) shared universe. So to have the conversation, the religious person has to drop the axiom to be able to discuss whether or not you’re able to arrive at the existence of God by building off other axioms that all humans share (hint: you’re not).
Normative discussions work this way too. Essentially all humans take it as an axiom that suffering is bad (there are exceptions in both the descriptive and normative case, e.g schizophrenia or sociopathy, where generally accepted axioms about the true nature of things are misaligned).
You can use logic and reason to build off descriptive and normative axioms, and some people do this incorrectly because they’re being irrational. Just because people disagree on these things doesn’t mean we throw out the idea of objective truth (descriptive or normative), it just means some people are going about understanding the true nature of reality wrong. Flat earthers and Islamic fundamentalists stoning gay people are both wrong in the same kind of way, they’re not using logic to build off proper axioms to try to find the truth.
One look at mental illness is enough to throw out objective truth. Individual perspective is the truth for that individual, regardless of what anyone else sees as the truth. This much we agree on.
We have to have a shared framework, with similar assumptions about the unknowable in order to have a proper conversation… I’m a bit more skeptical of this one. Isn’t the entire point of debate to change the views of someone else on some unknowable?
Physics alone, the theory of relativity, is enough to suggest that there isn’t a set order to the universe. What happens first for me may happen third for someone else from a different spacetime perspective. That doesn’t make one any more correct, just different perspectives.
I can agree that flat earthers and people who use religion to defend stoning innocents are both guilty of a similar kind of thought … ‘crime’, I suppose, but don’t read too much into that choice of word. They’re both rejecting some other perspective, in favor of their own.
I disagree, however, that this correlates at all with morality. Morality has no objective truths. Morality entirely exists within axioms, and they’re mostly formed by where you were raised. Just like the spacetime example, that IS your reality, and it may be completely different from that of another person. This is why we have so many different societies and cultures. Each holds a slightly different view of the world, and the discerning individual can choose the one that best fits their personal beliefs. Most people simply choose the one they were born into, because it’s what they know.
I’m sure you’re familiar with sentinel Island. The one that is actively hostile towards anyone coming there trying to convert them. I think they’re in the right. Yes, they’re killing people. They also have their own land, their own culture, their own beliefs that are simply “leave us alone.” If we violate their request, we become the wrong party, even though they killed a person.
Think about conversing with someone who has a mental disorder, where their version of reality literally doesn’t align with yours. If they don’t want to help themselves, there’s essentially nothing you can do short of force-feeding them medication to get them to align and actually have a coherent conversation with them.
People who don’t have mental disorders have some shared framework to operate under. You’ll both believe that the other is conscious, that you both have sensory experiences that depict the (functionally) same reality, etc. These are unproveable axioms you take at baseline to have a conversation with someone else, always.
Only to someone outside of your lightcone. If this was the case to someone within your lightcone, then you’d run into all sorts of paradoxes. Functionally our universe has consistent ordering. Either way an interesting sidebar but irrelevant to the broader discussion.
Morality (normative reality) is entirely based on axioms, but it doesn’t exist entirely within them. This is also true for descriptive reality. Nothing is truly knowable (epistemological nihilism is valid), but functionally we believe in objective truth (both descriptive and normative) because we take axioms that are so obvious and self-evident that they might as well be undeniable facts.
These are contradictions given the definition of morality I’m operating under (a system of normative truths). It seems your definition might be essentially a set of practices a culture or individual engages in, and in that case it’s just tautologically subjective, but that’s a deeply uninteresting point (like the point that a triangle has 3 sides).
Interestingly, that second statement you made signals to me that we might agree more than we think. So instead of using the word “morality”, I’m going to start using the phrase “normative reality” to describe the set of truths that exist in the normative realm. Do you agree that arriving at truth in the descriptive realm and normative realm is epistemologically identical?
I think we’re more alike than apart, and that’s where the most heated arguments tend to arise, outside of actual warzones. I’m not going to go into much into a reply here. For one, keeping it to one thread, and two, I’m not entirely sure what you mean by your last question. I don’t think that you CAN arrive at a concrete truth, just one that the majority will agree on. There exist such vast differences in humanity, between mental illness, “mental illness”, and such vastly different cultures that the closest I think we can reasonably get is an approximation.
Edit: were continuing here, so I’ll let you reply and go from there.
I thought this was the main thread.
You don’t functionally hold that the earth is round as an objectively true thing? What’s your perspective on flat earthers? They’re arriving at a different conclusion with the same information and that’s somehow valid?
They would fall into the “mental illness” category above. There’s a reason I used quotes on one lol. I honestly doubt anyone who doesn’t suffer from an actual mental illness believes the world is flat. It’s such a complete departure from any of the things we consistently observe.
If they do truly believe it, then that’s on them. I would not be able to argue with them in any kind of reasonable capacity because I myself wouldn’t be able to believe they believe what they do. And simultaneously, it wouldn’t matter. They’re free to believe it, that belief isn’t harming anything, and I’ll just keep shooting down their bad points time and again, not for my benefit or theirs, but for anyone who may be looking on, trying to form their own world view.
That’s an easy dig, but in reality there are a lot of people who believe irrational things are objectively true (God, flat earth, moon landing being staged, etc.). Not all these people have mental disorders.
I feel like your answer is more of a deflection than an honest answer. The point I was making was that you do believe somethings are objectively true, and that some people are actually objectively wrong.
Which is contradictory to your statement “I don’t think that you CAN arrive at a concrete truth”. As far as I can tell, you do believe in objective truth.
Don’t tell me what I do and don’t believe. We’re seeing a clear difference between your thought process and mine. I’m willing to have the humility to admit I cannot know what someone else actually believes, and you’re over here claiming to know that it’s somehow a deflection.
Let me state this in no unclear terms. I believe in objective truths where there are objective proofs. I do not believe in objective truths when there exists subjectivity, or at least relativity. I believe, personally, that morality is both subjective and relative, therefore when it comes to matters of morality, I do not believe in absolute truths.
Saying my English is good for a non-native speaker in the same breath you “misinterpret” what I said is absolutely an indirect ad hom attack. It takes about 2 seconds of critical thinking to realize what the actual message you’re trying to say is.
I haven’t read the rest of this, will in a bit.
I asked it for good reason, the structure of the sentence doesn’t lend itself to the misinterpretation you had. You would’ve had to completely restructure the sentence to arrive at “moral subjectivism is a minor view” because in that exact sentence I mentioned in the context it was a minority view, amongst PhD graduates. You would’ve had to not connect the first and second part of the sentence to arrive at a misunderstanding that was severe enough that you literally said I lost all credibility.
This makes much more sense if you come from another language where subject/object placement is different.
“moral subjectivism is a minor view” versus “moral subjectivism is a view held by a minority” are pretty fucking close. If you were actually concerned about interpretation, a less aggressive method of saying so would be appropriate.
See the difference here.
“You speak English well” “You speak English well for a non-native speaker.”
I’m willing to concede I may have interpreted it with more vitriol than was intended, but it’s hard not to when just a couple of posts ago you were saying I was funding torture and abuse. Hopefully you can see why one ad hom can have a ripple effect through the rest of your conversation/debate.
FWIW, I know I’ve used a few ad homs in this, I’m open about them, and not using them to discredit your argument, however. Your being an asshole (from my perspective) doesn’t make your argument any more right or wrong, compared to implying I don’t have fluency in the language we’re speaking in.