An argument against objective morality that defeats itself 

I love how you seem to never really know enough about the examples you give, while knowing all about the philosophy

7:48 Charm and Strange. You have an amazing wealth of knowledge that isn’t in your chosen domain. I appreciate that immensely

The argument seems to imply that persistent consensus of opinion, if it existed, would amount to objective truth. That certainly is open to debate.

Why do I get the feeling I learned alot but gained no ground haha

"Persistent disagreement" is the name of my new klezmer metal band.

I appreciate your valiant effort to steelman an argument which states that moral truths are not real for failing to unanimously win a popularity contest

I take issue with the assertion that there are some moral claims that are so universally agreed upon that they can be held to be objectively true 'moral facts'. What level of general agreement is sufficient for them to fall into this category, and who gets to make that call? And even when you say something like 'almost everyone agrees that murder is wrong', you have to remember that different societies define 'murder' differently. For the vast majority of human history many people did not consider the killing of out-group people or certain subjugated classes of individuals (e.g. slaves, serfs) to be murder. Though there is inarguably less of that sort of thinking now, those sorts of sentiments are still broadly held in some places.

I love your work and the way you communicate ideas! Your enthusiasm is wondrous!

This guy is great at explaining, presenting and keeping things exciting about philosophical propositions.

funny you mentioned string theory in that context - it (or some of its sub-theories) currently appears to be untestable, so might actually be a good candidate for becoming one of those long-lasting (or "very persistent") debates.... :D

The argument has to concern primarily: can subjective morals exist? is "objective" an essential property or "morality"; are all morals objective? The answer I argue for is that because of the fact subjective morals exist, objective morals can exist but morality itself or morals themselves cannot be defined as objective. Therefore objective is only potentially a non-essential property. A temporal and contextually-dependent/mitigated property. For instance, someone stealing a loaf of bread to prevent starvation of themselves or those also vulnerable, and someone stealing a luxury good, despite being able to consensually obtain such an item through a fair and equal exchange, are the exact same behaviour which we apply a system of morals to. There isn't a system of morals that would equate these actions because their contexts are changing the same core action of stealing into a different morality. If morality changes with differing circumstances, and objectivity means that regardless of circumstance, some things are always wrong to do, then morality itself cannot be defined as purely objective, at the bare minimum. At the totality of this analysis lies the claim that objective and moral are mutually exclusive terms which necessarily and definitively contradict. This is not what I argue however. I argue that objective morality definitely exists, but because of the nature of morality itself, can only exist under specific circumstances and in a limited capacity. Therefore it means that morality itself is mostly non-objective. What else comprises morality is for nearly everyone, a great mystery that still has yet to be solved. We can say that health is made up of blood pressure, liver function, brain activity and many other things. But even if we pinned down everything and made tables describing the precise objective measurements by which the sum total of a person's health can be assessed, we would still not have an absolute or perfect definition of health. Likewise, we can say that morality is found in compassion and not being impulsively cruel due to repressed emotional pain and many other things. But again the same problem emerges. No perfect definition is arrived at, even with all its properties accounted for, analysed and measured. Because in our minds we know, that a perfect definition of morality would imply that a person who does everything (that because of its borderline existence cannot be defined as necessarily immoral) but who consciously tries to get as close as possible to the line, is a good person by definition obtained from our perfect definition of morality. Even still, intuitively we know that the person who pokes and prods at the borderline of rules is an immoral person because they are trying to get away with, being as close to immorality as is acceptable and unpunishable, which is it itself necessarily immoral, but with a perfect definition of morality, would have to be defined as acceptably moral. With a perfect formula for how murder is justifiable, we enable murderers to get away with their crimes unpunished, and we cause more murders to occur. A perfect definition with no vagueness at all would very much so enable far more immoral acts to occur so long as they were falsely dressed up as moral acts. To extend the metaphor from health. In the same sense that a heart swells and shrinks, so does the boundary of what we consider to be, and what necessarily is and is not, moral. And like a heart is considered the emotional and preferential, so too, in part, is morality.

Love your content!

Fantastic, thank you!

Genius-level teaching. 🏆

Excellent presentation!

Surely the dilemmas arise only because one is trying to denote 'true' or 'false' to morals whose impacts upon people are ultimately subjective. If nobody had any subjective feelings about anything, or ever felt pain or pleasure, there'd be no need for morality. The things that appear most morally 'true' are simply those things that have the most universal subjective effect. But that is not the same as an actual objective moral 'truth' that exists independently of that subjective experience.

I'm at 10:38 so if he addresses this later, I don't know yet There is a very obvious rebuttal to this: Morality is something we make, something we feel. Physics is something that has nothing to do with us. It was there before us and it will continue to be there after us. There are observable truths and only observable truths. We can debate about why things happen (theories, which is why they're called theories. But keep in mind that Gravity is a theory) but we can not debate about what is there and what is observable, because whether you are looking at this through a screen is not debatable. It is a truth that you would be delusional to debate But also: I think that even if there is even one person who disagrees with a moral theory (and there always will be, for everything) it is not objective. If you have to ignore (an) opinion(s) for your theory to ring true, your theory is fallible The statement "murder is wrong" depends on the assumption that a human life matters and that the consequences afflicted on those who cared about the victim also matter, but what happens when someone thinks life has no inherent value and that people's emotional pain and trials are a necessary part of life, a right of passage as one might say and should not be avoided. As much as you might disagree with this, it doesn't matter, because it is that person's foundation, and people's foundations are based on how people feel. The concept that emotional pain matters and is bad has just as much logic in it as the reverse. It doesn't have logic in it. It's just an emotional conclusion. There is nothing for you to logically disagree with You can't disregard it because it's too out there, too extreme, because that's not an argument. You can't disregard it because they're challenging basic principles, because who decided what basic principles are? If we are allowed to disagree on if a woman's body (and sometimes life) matters more than the parasite within her, why are we not able to disagree on if a human life has inherent value? And also just: Declaring basic, objective truths that we all agree on and then refusing to listen to people who disagree on those truths is just bad debate Just because a moral standing is rare does not mean it is wrong or inherently untrue. The very fact that the basis of morality is a foundation of emotions makes it subjective because emotions are subjective 42:48 It's number 1 that is fallible. Make an argument that morality is objective (that does not depend on the existence of a God or the validity of a religion. Until that is proven, it cannot be a basis for an argument in a scientific sphere) that is not based off of perceiving emotions or perceptions (such as the concept of value) as factual. I dare you

In the free will as an illusion, it is irrelevant when it comes to deciding whether or not someone is responsible for their actions or not. If your TV stops working, you’re going to repair it or replace it. Nobody ever said “my tv stopped working, but its not the TVs fault. The TV doesn’t have free will, therefore, I will not take actions toward it.” Having or not having free will has nothing to do with responsibility. It’s important to be empathetic and understand that the person had a life and grew up from a baby to an adult, just like everyone else. If that person turns out to be dangerous for society, then free will or not free will is out of the question.

Thanks for the video. It is so helpful and great

I think it'd be more interesting instead of just hypothesizing objective moral truths you can just get a bunch of diverse people from diverse groups then stress test this idea then you'll have the answer to what is an objective moral truth and that would help determine if they exist or not

Well, that was interesting. I don't think I'm particularly good at this stuff just yet, but I immediately saw a seriously bad leap in logic from saying something about "some" moral claims as in #2, to inferring in #3 that "all" moral claims are not objectively true. In other words, I don't think the argument as originally given was logically consistent at all, but rather obviously not so. It seems so much simpler just to change #1 to say, "Some moral claims are subject to (very) persistent disagreement," and then change #3 to say, "Therefore, some moral claims cannot be said to be objectively true." On the surface, at least, this sound far more logically consistent. I have a feeling someone's going to say that this doesn't serve the moral skeptics very well, though. 🤪

I'd be interested in what they have to say about Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Morality seems to be expressions of opinions in the minds of any particular multitude of individuals that agree on a concept of thought or behavior in which ignorance drives their thinking whether the thesis is true or false. Reason is called free will which allows you to change your mind or behavior at any time with or without Reason. Pride and ignorance Pride is ignorance boasting. ignorance is life’s greatest adversary and denial is ignorance’s strongest ally. An opinion is a deep seeded selfish desire to express one’s own ignorance. A desire so selfish that even ignorance wants to be alone. ignorance miss uses the power of persuasion by transforming little knowledge into as if it were a greater knowing. Pressing one’s nescience point of view by oneself over another person. A willful disregard for the limitation of one’s own reference, and ignoring the evidence to the contrary. Pride is ignorance boasting. G. B.- Garcia (cc)2019 ◦

Moral norms are partly mental entities so the notion of objectivity does not aplly to them in the ordinary way as it applies to material things.

What you haven’t considered is that both must be linked in this paradoxical way. If there are no objective moral claims then being certain of moral skepticism suggests an objective moral claim in subjectivity. Hence, moral skepticism being wrong seems Gödel-like in disallowing an unequivocal consistency or completeness to this stance.

I watch those videos to understand how other people think about such topics. It is radically different than the way I think. I, for example, would never say "moral truth". I don't think there is such thing, objective or subjective. In the same way you would never call some software "trurh". You can say it has bugs, you can say it is the best one that fits your needs. But truth? Never.

The idea that there is widespread agreement that "murder is wrong" is not precisely true, because it is, after all, the central argument concerning abortion and capital punishment, and if there is anything that is true about our society, it is that people largely fall into two camps: one believes abortion is wrong and capital punishment is not wrong, and the other believes abortion is not wrong and capital punishment is wrong. There are comparatively few people who think both are wrong (Roman Catholics, for instance, are commonly hypocritical on these matters, saying one thing, but doing another), or both are not wrong. The disagreement lies in the definition of "murder" or "homicide", or alternatively, the disagreement really lies in the definition of what a "person" is. If you believe a zygote is a "person", then you are apt to believe abortion is a moral harm. If you believe that capital punishment does not constitute "homicide", then you are apt to believe that capital punishment is acceptable.

I love your videos Thank you for making these amazing philosophy videos

A lot of people agree on subjective things. Dogs have bad breath. Sunsets are beautiful. These things don't become objective truths because people agree on them.

It seems to me that the attack on moral skeptisism is done by self referencing the argument used by those who support it. This is a well known method used, for instance, by Alan Turing to solve David Hilbert's "Entscheidungsproblem" (decision problem).

I think there might be a third path between moral objectivism and moral skepticism that preserves both... sort of. Or maybe it destroys both... sort of. The idea that the moral objectivist argues for is that there are some moral truths out there, but he doesn't seem to give any argument about how to FIND those moral truths. And there appears to be "very persistent disagreement" at least in what the correct method to find those moral truths might be. Utilitarianism, Kantian Deontology, and all of the videos you've done such a nice job in presenting don't seem to be arriving at anything like a "correct answer." It doesn't seem like we're going to get to the end of this stream of videos and Mr. Kaplan is going to say, "ok, so we've covered theory A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and the correct one was theory C. We've now reached the end of philosophy." So maybe the way forward for a moral skepticist is to say something like, "Ok, there MAY be moral objective truths out there in the Universe somewhere, but it appears as though there is no reliable way to determine what they are. That being the case, then there are no universal moral truths that are 'obtainable' (at least about certain moral claims)." So call this a modification of moral skepticism, then: "weak" moral skepticism. If there are moral truths somewhere out there in the universe, but no reliable universal way of determining what they are, then does it really matter if they "exist" in the logical sense?

Is he writing like in inverse? Or does he have some program that fixes it? It looks like he is writing on the opposite side of a glass wall

I don’t use this argument in favor of moral relativism. Because even if morality is objective, external factors can lead to moral disagreement.

Marie Antonette apparently didn’t say that. It was attributed to her decades after her death.

my perspective is that the fundamental requirement for objectivity, of any sort, is perfect and complete understanding of all relevant things. as to know something without any possibility of doubt, you must either be unreasonably confident in a potentially wrong idea, or you must have all relevant knowledge of and relating to a thing, which is at the very least unreasonably unlikely. but even worse, to be absolutely certain that no other information is relevant to a thing, you must fully understand *all* knowledge in general to rule out anything that might undermine your potentially justified certainty of a thing. so to be absolutely certain of anything, without any possibility that you could be wrong, you would have to be literally omniscient, and no human is omniscient as far as i can tell. an analogy of this issue would be knowing for sure that the code for a program you wrote is flawless without knowing all the ways your program could be used. you might have perfect knowledge of everything directly related to your program, but you might not know the exact environment of every computer that will ever run that program. to be sure that your program will never fail in any way, you would not only need to have perfect knowledge of every computer that currently exists, but you would need to have all knowledge relating to computers in general to make sure that no future computers could ever cause your program to fail TL;DR to have absolute certainty without absolute understanding seems like little more than absolute confidence, which can be demonstrated to be atleast inconsistent with anything akin to absolute understanding extra: though its reasonable to suggest that an omniscient being would either atleast be able to have objective morals, if not be forced to have objective morals as a part of their omniscience, you yourself would have to have omniscience to know for sure that this being truly is omniscient, in the same since that you need to know atleast as much about a subject as another person does to be sure that they are correct in their assertions about it. we cant be sure that a supposedly omniscient being truly is omniscient and isnt just sufficiently more intelligent than us that they can convince us that they're omniscient without actually being so. e.g. if i dont know enough about chess to be sure that someone isnt mistaken about how the knight moves, i would have no proper basis for disagreeing with them even if they were actually wrong. and if someone else pointed out the supposed mistake, i still couldnt know for sure if that other person is correct or not either. if you dont know, you dont know. even if someone else supposedly does know, you cant know for sure if they truly know, ya know?

I have a question. When writing out argument 2 about how if some claims are persistently disputed then there are no objective truths, the word "moral" was dropped from the first argument, yet the attack on argument 2 was focused around non-moral claims. Is argument 2 stronger if the word "moral" is added? Do relativists mean that there is some special quality about moral claims such that when they are disputed they lose objectivity? Basically what I'm asking is why the word "moral" was dropped from claim 2. Is there something about the way arguments in logic are formed or?

I don't know if I should be proud that I never considered very persistent disagreement to be a sign of no objectivity.

The difference between moral claims and scientific claims is that scientific claims can be tested and proven true or false. Seems like the only moral claim that can be objectively tested is harm/benefit.

Never heard that consensus was a part of the argument. Mostly consensus is considered as an outcome of the argument.

Another interesting question about "very persistent disagreement" is HOW MUCH must there be to determine that a belief (i.e. as a belief in objective morality) is false? For example, while MOST of humanity has accepted for THOUSANDS OF YEARS that Earth is a globe, there have always been and continue to be those who INSIST that it is flat. That disagreement is VERY PERSISTENT by (I'd say) just about any definition of that term, but flat Earthers are a tiny (if vocal) minority, and not too many people would agree that this "very persistent disagreement" falsifies a globe Earth belief.

This analysis is the kind of second or third order thinking that needs to be applied by the public to basically every political claim ever spoken, because many of them fail at that point, yet they are persistently believed by a lot of people. It seems like this kind of analysis itself (is this argument self defeating of the claim it is being put forth to support) should be a whole topic in philosophy itself, that should probably be a freshman topic. It didn't exist when I got my philosophy degree, so I'm betting it is not a widespread topic.

Whats the argument that moral objectivism is true?

Even the refutation Shafer-Landau provides is predicated on that slippery word 'objective'. Were both arguments structured around their validity as 'objective', they would fall by the same notion. However, neither objective moral truths nor, objective moral scepticism are 'objectively' true - these are ideational constructs. Moral scepticism is still the more accurate description of human moral values, because it does not require the label of 'objective'.

"Modern Science" can be said to have originated with the first development of what we now call the "scientific method", which is widely attributed to Ibn al-Haytham in the early 11th Century.

Wait, the issue here is that there is a major difference between applying this argument to morals and applying this argument to subjects of persistent disagreement like the question of whether God exists. In the case of the existence of God, the disagreement *can* be attributed to human error. If there is a fact of the matter over whether God exists, one party in the disagreement is making an error. So the same can be said of the question over whether there exists moral facts. This doesn’t show that moral skepticism defeats itself at all. Unless I misunderstood something here.

Not including a transcendent moral being makes it convenient to reduce objective morality to a consensus. However objective morality is explain without that being is never going to true since the participation of people in the defining process already makes it subjective by definition.

I hate the example "murder is wrong". Murder almost by definition is "bad killing" - trivially we all agree that bad things are bad. However we do not all agree with what is murder and what is not. Is abortion murder? Is the death penalty murder? Should we execute X group of people? There is no universal objective agreement on what murder is - rendering the example moot

Wait this is a course? I've just been casually watching these

As a swiss german when i hear 'pickles' first thing i hear is 'pimple' (sounds the same). So let's discuss whether pimples taste good 😅

The tastiness of pickles is an objective truth!

"Murder is wrong" is subject to persistent disagreement because we don't agree what murder is. If in war a soldier intentionally kills someone from the opposing side is it murder? He volunteered to go to another country and encountered someone he likely wouldn't have met otherwise, and ended up killing that person. Is the war they're fighting necessary? Was killing that particular enemy soldier necessary? We don't agree on any of that.

Dammit!!! I am NOT a moral objectivist, but now I'm not quite so sure.

The argument mixes up two notions - universal and objective. They are not the same.there is no universal moral law. There are many moral laws and all of them are objective. But no the universal moral law. Mount Everest is objective but not universal as it exists only in one place.

I wish philosophy had been taught, or emphasized enough to foster a potential interest, during the period of compulsory indoc... education & thus avoid discovery of the topic, or an interest in, midway+ through one's life 🧐

This is great and I see the reasoning here. I think it is unfortunate, however, that he uses the 'is there a god' example' of a persistent disagreement. He does specify something that often gets left out of the argument - definition of terms. There are literally hundreds of formal definitions of 'god' that often hold other definitions as invalid. And, most people have some personal definition on top of that - and still invalidate other definitions. Spinoza's 'god', for example, is vary different from the Evangelical versions. And Pascal's wager is stupid as he still loses his bet if he picks the wrong definition. However, the 'definition' he causally throws out there is easily defeated. A god cannot be all loving and all-powerful at the same time if he doesn't stop evil from happening. He can't have created everything if he didn't also create evil (see: Isaiah 45:7 for example.) If he COULD be all-loving AND all-powerful, then there is no objective moral truth - 'mysterious ways' doesn't cover that discrepancy. Also - skeptical means you need to be shown that something is true, not that you claim it isn't. A skeptic will acknowledge (agree) with a claim if it can be shown to be true. It seems to that someone who is skeptical that there is objective moral truth isn't saying there isn't, just saying that it hasn't been shown to be true. Given the null-hypothesis, it seems to be the more reasonable stance.

but hang on.. in the final argument (about moral skepticism being not objectively true), there is a contradiction that would break it apart; the first assumption present "moral skepticism" on equal footing as "moral claim", but the third point (the conclusion) assumes they must not be of the same type, in order for it to hold. if that hidden assumption is true (which is sensible IMO), these are not really of the same category, and "moral skepticism" should indeed be treated as a meta-theory, with different (superset?) errors and underlying axioms.

Kaplan fails at distinguishing if a thing is in itself morally wrong or it's wrong for other reasons. Murder is wrong not because it is wrong in itself but because no society would survive if anyone could kill any time for any reason any member of that society. However a society does decide that killing is right in order to defend itself ( AKA declaring war on an enemy threating its survival). So "murder is wrong" is not an absolute, universal objective moral law. It never was, and never will be.

"murder is wrong" only seems important and useful to this discussion if you don't think about what the word "murder" means. Expand the terms and you get "Killing someone when it is wrong to kill them is wrong" ...and the weakness of that statement becomes obvious. For it to mean anything, you have to get into the specifics of under what circumstances killing is wrong and under what circumstances it can be justified and as soon as you try and do *that* all that seeming agreement you had evaporates. The other two go-tos for something safely considered "bad" are rape and theft, but you won't actually get very strong agreement on the universal wrongness of theft and probably no one will *admit* to you that they think rape is permissible the relevant statistics show that in practice there's no shortage of people who are kinda "meh" on that one. (And if you really need someone to admit it you only need to look in the right sort of cesspit.) And slavery? America couldn't even quite bring itself to outlaw slavery. You don't actually have these points of common agreement unless you use sloppy language. But I don't think this is the real argument against objective morality. I think the real argument against objective morality is "What are you even talking about?" Because the majority of people who claim to believe objective moral values exist can't tell me. It's not just that people disagree about what correct morals are. It goes so much deeper than that. It's that they can't say what it would actually mean for something to be objectively morally correct. What *is* an objective moral fact? How do we detect it? If we can't detect it, then in what sense does it even exist? This is not quite like God or unicorns, which more or less exist or don't exist regardless of our feelings on the matter, because it is a sort of declaration about our correct behaviour. What is a declaration no one can ever know about? What is the difference between an objective moral fact and an idea about morality that is very popular across time and cultures? What would it mean for something we commonly consider to be repugnant to be objectively morally true? If I disagree with some moral claim and then you could somehow prove to me it was "objectively" correct, why should I care? Why should I modify my behavior? If I shouldn't, then what's so objective about it? These are the sorts of questions a person could answer about a firm concept. It's not like God or a unicorn, where we can say what we mean by "God" or "unicorn" and proceed from there. There's no such thing as an objective moral fact for the same reason there's no such thing as Memretikal. For there to be any such thing, the phrase would have to actually refer to something.

The debate about the existence of God and free will is very easily explained by human error. That error is ignorance, but ignorance as a species. We do not have proof of his existence or non-existence. We are debating but without all the facts, because we do not yet have the facts

The conclusion of this video is: that moral skepticism - which states that there is no objective morality- is itself not objectively true. This is a self-referential statement, in the same vain as: "this sentence is false", that is, if it's true, it must be false, and if it's false it must be true. So your whole exercise of two premises following by a conclusion is not valid as its conclusion is neither false or true.

What about them all being objectively true, and the human error is seeing only partial truth?

Why is murder wrong? I'm not sure that I agree concensus is a good measure that's just popularism not a objective argument

15:49 d) The grass has always been wet.

But if moral skepticism is not objective, that still doesnt deny the fact of it being subjective. Doesn't this just mean that we're back at the reality that some people believe morality is subjective while others believe morality is objective? This video said that the claim regarding the objectivity of moral skepticism is not a moral claim itself I guess, but this still doesnt give any direct proof for or against objective morality itself. I kind of relate to another comment on this video saying that they feel they "learned alot but gained no ground."

Why do you mix moral claims with scientific claims in regards to objective truth? Scientific claims have a specific domain of validity, as their validity is subject to verification by peers and the current scientific paradigm, until better models are being created. Therefore scientific claims naturally subjected to disagreements and they should always be doubted (see any book about philosophy of science) However moral claims do not follow this pattern and no moral claim should be subjected to follow the pattern of scientific claims.

*_"String Theory";_** Is not a theory, it's a **_"scientific hypothesis"_** .*

I think that Relativists and Subjectivists should be placed in the Moral Objectivists category and not in Moral Skeptics because, they believe the individual or group will have moral beliefs and those beliefs are true, and those beliefs would have to include both that there are Objective Moral truths and that there are not making both equally valid and now thinking about it would place them in both and neither category at the same time. Maybe they should be called the live and let live moralists because it seems they allow for and against all moral principiles and they allow for and against interfering with others beliefs. Seems like a catch all principle to me.

The question whether something exists or not might be an objective fact but it does not confer objectivity to the content of that question. For instance, doe Mickey Mouse exist or not? The question is an objective fact, but its content, Mickey Mouse, is not.

moral skepticism is not objectively true, it is also subject to human error. acting accordingly seems to be the logical way in order to reduce biases but this would be kind of a false sense of security.

The difference between philosophers and scientists? Philosophers habitually armchair theorise using black and white deductive arguments, without appropriate reference to actual reality. In contrast, scientists propose a hypothesis and inductively, rigorously, test the extent to which it fits reality. So how would a scientist approach this assignment? He may take a hypothesis which has already been rigorously scientifically proven, such as the theory of evolution, and apply it to what we call morality. A natural outcome is the observation that social species gain an evolutionary survival/replication advantage by looking after members of their clan. i.e. by performing moral actions. So morality is then seen as an evolved and inherited tendency to care for others (aka performing moral actions). A test proving this hypothesis involves observing other social species (eg monkeys and dogs) in controlled conditions to establish whether they perform moral behaviours... which they do. So we share, with other social species, a TENDENCY to share, to an extent, moral behaviours. There is no proper/sufficient evidence proving that any uniform, objective morality exists.

Human error is objective in itself

String theory is not that old compared to say incest for which there is no consensus as to if it's wrong, how wrong or how much separation is required before it is no longer incest. In twenty years string theory will be no longer or will be true while incest will continue to be debated.

This is an odd position for a moral skeptic to take anyway. The idea that disagreement entails that a proposition is not true is immediately dubious. I take the moral skeptic to simply be unconvinced about the assertion that there are objective moral facts due to lack of agreement, and therefore lack of evidence, in that way, supporting plausibility.

Is the concept 'murder' or, 'abortion' an objective fact? Aren't they rather human cultural constructs? Prey animals kill in the wild as a matter of course. We don't consider this murder. It isn't that they kill for food that makes what they do not murder, otherwise human cannibals would not be committing murder, either. There is a human definition of a type of killing that classifies it as murder, but again, this is a cultural construct, not an objective (moral) fact.

There were societies for thousands of years that practiced human sacrifice, so the idea that murder is universally repugnant has a counterexample. Also, almost everyone with clothing today has a hand in financing slavery since the textile business around the world is filled with it. So perhaps they are morally repugnant today locally, but the world at large or historically may be apathetic to it. So using these universal objective values are problematic as they have counterexamples today or historically. There are countless such examples from rape to historic mysogeny, today's misandry and more. In my opinion, Jewish values specifically engendered in the last 2000 years after the second exile has a lot to do with the influence of normative objective values on major topics such as these.

This is smart. He he

29:13 Cake meant cake. But that story had previously been told of a German duchess, so it’s certainly not true.

"Laissez les manges du brioche!"

Objective morality is a really stupid thing to beleive in, but this argument is even stupider.

All creatures have a selfish instinct. Some creatures have a social (herd) instinct. This instinct tells us comply with the herd. The group as a unit decides what is best (moral) for the herd, not an individual. Most societies have arrived at similar conclusions such as “murder is wrong”. It is NOT some innate rule. Objective means “external”. Objective morals are morals written or given by others. To those creating the morals, they are subjective. To those following them, they are objective. However, the interpretation of those morals are subjective.

I'm not sure why all the effort about delineating human error. The first claim that moral claims are subject to very persistent disagreement that is not best explained by human error, doesn't need the last phrase because it is redundant. ALL disagreements are based in the assumption that one party is in error. So, the first premise change adds nothing to the argument making the whole argument fail.

the persistent problem better not work otherwise you could substitute just about anything from philosophy in there!

To me, the premise 2 is false, even with everything added, thus, it doesn't work.

You can separate Objective moral truth individually you don't have to judge them all as a group. However I don't agree with the premise of because there's constantly disagreement that means that It can't be objectively true. There are people who think Putting juice in Evans was not wrong but actually good Most people reasonable normal people clearly without much thought can see how obviously evil that is. So OK now what are you willing to say that I guess it's not objectively true that it's wrong to Commit mass murder or genocide just because someone thinks its ok. Is that really what your thought would be walking away from that discussion Was slavery objectively immoral or because some people wanted it does that make it not objectively wrong. I'm sorry it's wrong regardless if they think it's right or not and if that means you Have to be willing to say I don't care what you say it's wrong And Stan firm and have the backbone to acknowledge it regardless of what they think because if there's not something inside you they can easily determine that that is evil despite the fact that evil people like to do it Then we're in big trouble. The problem is people think it's just a matter of opinionIf you're a Christian you justify it by God's moral standardsWhich also happened to be trueBut if they want to say well I don't believe in The BibleSo I can objectively say slavery was ethically wrongThen that person has a Serious problem psychologically and spiritually. Kind of like the Nuremberg trialsIt was the 1st time that there was a trial that said what happened here was a crime against humanity it was wrong no matter what your religion what your culture says or what the circumstances are there's nothing that exists that can justify what has happenedIt was basically saying there are universal moral truths that apply to everybody in the world and we all know it

modern science didn't begin with galileo or europeans for that matter. they are other ancient civilization of egypt and mesopotamia.

Well, (2) is just a logical fallacy, even that something is a likely explanation doesn't prove anything. What we can conclude from (1) is, that *if* there is an objective reality, there isn't any agreement on it. But even if there *were* agreement, that doesn't prove a thing. There was agreement on a lot of things among the majority of humanity that only in recent decades is considered wrong, so how can it have been objectively true or objectively moral, when it now isn't? And what from what we now consider moral will be judged immoral in the future? Even considering it an absolute moral truth that murder is morally wrong is problematic, when the concept of murder isn't agreed upon first. Some consider soldiers to be murderers, some consider them to be doing their duty when they shoot at enemies in a war. Some think it righteous to distinguish the world into believers and non-believers of some god or some ideology and slay the latter. But if there *is* an objective moral, then that should hold for any conceivable (and even inconceivalble) form of society, maybe of aliens, or whatever may become of humanity, which even might include beings for which murder isn't even a valid concept. Human morals are rooted in human nature and contemporary human societies. I'd hardly call that "universal".

Science started with Heraclitus, or thereabouts.

"Murder is wrong" I know this sounds uncontroversial, but I certainly know people exists that claim that at least the murder of some people is the right thing to do, whether they are religious extremist or fascists. But just if you found an act that absolutely everyone agree that is unethical, that still doesn't make that a fact! We can all agree that you can't observe or measure objective morality, so how do you conclude something is true? Isn't arguing for objective morality similar to arguing for some god, in that any claim for objective morality can't be falsified?

Why does every video start off half way into the video like it was produced for 14 year old kids watching mrbeast

Murder is a bad example. Murder is the immoral killing of a person and therefore is immoral by definition, not by agreement. One man’s murder is another man’s execution.

The argument is not valid. To make a general argument, the first claim has to be universal. So the statement would be "all moral claims have persistent disagreement" The second premise has to bring the second term, in this case "objectivity" So it would have to be something like: Something objective cannot be disagreed upon. Then you could come up with that conclusion. But it's not what happens. The first premise as you point out is not true. Some claims are generally accepted and most of them are in general. Of course immoral people will disagree, but that is not a case against morality, but the exception that proves the rule. The second is not built properly, it just repeats the first one. Basically it doubles down on the idea that for something to be "objective", it has to be accepted by complete consensus, which on the face of it is a ridiculous claim. There would be no laws if everybody agreed upon them, criminals always do and it's the whole point of the law. The only conclusion you could make from that if it was true, is that some moral claims are not objective, which everybody knows to be true, but then there is a caveat. They may not be true at first, but sometimes they become true after which they become custom and then sometimes law. A good example of this is eugenism. It was not considered bad at first, and in fact was considered good, which is why people wanted it. Then something happened and people generally agreed it was bad. Then now it is making a strong comeback again, but it's too late because now there are laws against it, so it is objective no matter how people try to spin it. Now they have to prove the laws are unjust, which is a lot harder to do. Any law that is written by the right authority is by definition objective, and that's the final argument against this type of thinking. What this do is reject laws which are official objective moralities, and the only argument is that some people disagree with them, which in no way takes out their legitimacy nor their power of coercion. Prisons are full of moral relativists and nobody cares about their opinion, and that is another objective "morality". There are secular laws but also religious laws, and like I said, customs are also important even if not codified. If everybody drives on the right side, it is objectively the right thing to do, and it's irrelevant that some other places it's the opposite. Something does not have to be universal to be objective. When you go work for a factory, they tell you how to do things and it's objectively how it has to be done, it's objective morality. It is irrelevant that if you were to work somewhere else, they would do it differently. It would just be another objective morality that happens to be different but works just as well or similar. Just because those two factories do things differently and have a different sets of behavior does not mean it is "subjective". They do it their way because it works for them, but more importantly for the relativist, everybody has to do it the same anyway. If you move from factory 1 to 2, you have to adapt, and it is objective for you, and is objective for those that came up with the rule. We have those problems with immigration. People move into other countries, don't learn the customs and the rules, claim it is different in their country, which is true but irrelevant, and then become activists to try and change the rules in the new country to the old one. It never occurs to them the reason they moved is because their own rules didn't work for them. What they want is a second chance to double down on their mistaken morality in the hope of having different results. It's pretty annoying, but shows another thing, which is that the relativists are pretty much all closet objectivists. They would secretly want their own personal opinion to be objective but it isn't, so they then claim all others are subjective and therefore equivalent and equal, but some animals are more equal than others, so their own should prevail. That's the real argument they try to make, and yes it's self-defeating. People simply don't follow bad stuff if it's bad for them and they can tell. The only way they will do it is if they cannot tell it is bad, which is the problem of the relativist. They can't tell the difference between good and bad, so assume all others have the same problem. It's simply not the case. Just the same, if you are clueless about beer making, it does not mean your opinion is equal to the one of experts. The whole argument is based on that false assumption that is not said but is implied.

30:50 I have the bias, that anyone, who doesn't write the correct amount of i's, probably doesn't understand what he's talking about :P

Either there is objective morality or there isn't. The fact that there is disagreement about the existence of objective morality doesn't mean there isn't an objective answer ryt? U cant just from disagreement to "let's agree to disagree" and there is no objective answer to: Is morality objective

If objective morality doesn't exist, why do its advocates claim to be virtuous while calling their political enemies evil incarnate? From my point of view, they just want an excuse to declare themselves the standard for everything, and you can't do that if there already is a standard. They must remove God so they can usurp His throne. Objective morality isn't hard: Give as you'd be given lest what you've given be thrown back. Would you want it done to you? No? Then, don't do it. See? Easy. The argument of subjective morality stems from parasites who want to do unto others without it being done unto them. Morality isn't subjective; hypocrisy is.

I think that many moral disputes revolve around the differences between free and slave mentality. The slave (clone soldier) has no morality of their own. Their morality is extrinsic. The arbitrary decrees of those in authority are their moral standard. Obedience to authority is the definition of good. The free man has an internal/intrinsic morality. The arbitrary decrees of those in authority are viewed as advice. Obedience to internal moral principles tempered by circumstances and tradition are the definition of good.

Does Free Will Exist? If so, where does it come from? If not, then nothing matters. When you find the source of free will, search there for moral truth. Everything else is foolishness.

Marie Antoinette (according to urban legend): "Let them eat cake." Donald Trump (actually): "You need an ID to buy groceries."

You can get by the last objection by saying philosophical claims are a different category than moral claims. Philosophical claims are claims about ideas and thought, while moral claims are about actions. Moral claims to me seem to be us trying to describe what we want and don't want when agents interact. Wants to me seem subjective.

If instead of calling it moral skepticism we call it moral relativism (opposed to objective morality) then the last example just confirms it. Moral relativism is true and false at the same time, because the relativity also applies to itself. I also disagree with some examples. The existence of God and string theory are not moral claims. Should we believe in God? Should we believe in string theory? Those are closer to moral claims. Morality, in a sense, does not care about truth, it cares about what is the right thing to do. What if advancements in string theory will lead to an even more powerful "string" bombs? What if your beliefs justify the suffering of ideological opponents? Morality cares about the outcome, not the underlying truth. Even if Kant refuses utilitarianism, it can't help but try to conceive some idea that will make the world better off. Because that's the right thing to do. We have conceived these thought experiments out of the blue, it is naive to think that out of our thinking can come out some absolute imperative. And this goes to show our desperate need for certainty, for something to hold on to, because if everything is just really relative than nothing matters at all.

Excellent stuff, moral realism comes out on top (again)