Again I want to focus on Keith Augustine’s brand of “moral subjectivism,” the view that “claims that there is no objective fact of the matter over whether a specific action is right or wrong; therefore it does not claim that anything makes an action right or wrong — including personal approval…. To say that a peice of music is beautiful or that an action is morally righteous is to invoke man-made distinctions between types of [art] or actions individuals find pleasing versus those they find displeasing.” For Augustine, subjectivism is true and consistent with “naturalism” and one of its “prime lessons [that] there is no inherent meaning in the universe,” but only meaning “humans create.”
Appeals to the self-evident nature of moral truths, for Augustine, are invalid because “one cannot appeal to evidence or arguments to defend or criticize” them, just like one cannot (for Augustine) appeal to evidence to “defend or criticize” logical truths (because they are self evident). Because positing mysterious notions of objective “moral truths” in some illegitimate way “overpopulates the universe” unnecessarily, Augustine insists that Ockham’s Razor“postulat[ing] moral standards would be a superfluous as postulating objective aesthetic standards. It is erroneous to elevate human invention to the status of a law of nature.”
Instead, what “we have in ethics (as in aesthetics) are basic criteria that we invent. In the absence of objective moral values we can have basic intersubjective moral standards — but intersubjective is still subjective.” This, for Augustine, explains why “it would be quite odd to say that objective moral standards would exist if sentience never arose in the universe or all sentient beings were extinct.” Further, subjectivism, for Augustine, “is a factual theory — a theory about what morality is.” Hence, “one cannot err morally; but one cannot succeed morally either, because morality is akin to aesthetics.” Simply put, there is “no standard at all for ‘what makes an action moral’ just as there’s no standard for ‘what makes art beautiful’.”
I explained my aversion to the notion of “man made” in my prior post, so I will avoid doing so again here. But I will say that I don’t know what sense “man made” applies to moral laws that doesn’t apply in the exact same way to logical or mathematical ones. I will also refrain from spending any more time on the notion that morality is necessarily subjective because “moral matters” were not contemplated before conscious beings were around to contemplate them, and will not be around to contemplate them when were gone, but I am interested in knowing what the status of mathematical and logical truths were and will be when nobody is around to do any math or logic.
I am interested in this notion of “intersubjectivity,” however, and recall this exact same term’s use by my friend Kevin Currie. If I understand the notion correctly, Augustine, as a subjectivist, believes in the objective truth (i.e., the fact) that there are no objective moral truths, but recognizes the often widespread agreement or disagreement between human beings regarding moral (and aesthetic matters). But this is not evidence of there being a fact of the matter regarding any given moral matter, but rather that morality is “intersubjective” in the sense that, for example, most people in any given culture are going to evaluate moral matters similarly. In this way subjectivists like Augustine explain away the existence of “obvious” answers to moral (or aesthetic) judgments in a way that doesn’t “sound odd.” mandates that we eliminate them from our conceptual realm. Therefore …
You need to distinguish between there being no objective moral standards and there being no objectively true statements pertaining to morality. When you say “Augustine… believes in the objective truth… that there are no objective moral truths…” you are equivocating between (1) “no objective moral standards” and (2) “no objectively true statements pertaining to morality”. He meant (1), you responded to what he said as though he meant (2).
I believe that the claim that there are objective moral truths is properly basic, i.e. we are as justified in believing it as we are in believing in the reality of the external world. I’m on your side here, but I just don’t think that your implication that he’s contradicting himself is accurate.
Thank you, nedved. (And I am quite sorry for the tardiness in getting back to you.)
I quite agree that the claim to knowledge of objective moral truths is properly basic, but I would further add that that when I make such a claim I am claiming that my statement “objective moral truths exist” refer to a feature of reality, that is, a constituent of the world. As such, I can say things like “it is a fact that objective moral truths exist,” the truth of which is rooted in my proposition corresponding to the fact. Augustine, as I understand him, would deny that “it is a fact that objective moral truths exist” (e.g., it is an objectively moral truth that one ought not arbitrarily inflict pain on another creature capable of suffering pain) because there are no such constituents of the world – rather, there are only subjective feelings about this or that, and therefore no objectively true moral statements pertaining to morality. So while I understand the distinction you rightly note I equivocate relative thereto, I wonder what, in the end, the product is of my equivocation. Thoughts?
My point was that there is a substantial difference between saying “there are no objective truths pertaining to morality”, and “there are no objective moral standards”. He can assert (1) and reject (2) without contradictiong himself.
I don’t think that moral truths are some sort of property of the external world. I think that they are “written on the hearts of all men”, so to speak. Just because we can’t agree on what those moral standards are does not mean that we cannot be as sure that at least some sort of objective moral standard. It’s similar to how people may disagree about the accidentals of the external world, but we can still know that the external world is real.
I should have said “Just because we can’t agree on what the moral standards are does not mean we cannot be certain that there is at least some sort of objective moral standard.”
Thank you again for the thoughts. I tend to agree with you regarding the objectivity of moral truths (or more simply the objectivity of morality) as an aspect of human nature – which is how I understand the “written on the hearts of all men” quote.
The struggle I have is with the distinction between the external/internal world, which is much the same struggle I have with natural/unnatural distinction people often make with respect to, for example, environmental issues. For example, when a radical environmentalist claims that littering is wrong (a claim I agree with entirely), when I press him or her to explain why, I often get a response like “well, littering is by definition the entry of something man-made or ‘artificial’ into the domain of the not man-made or natural.”
And at this stage I focus on whether a person is a natural being or not, which is usually conceded. But the step from the creation of a tool by a natural being to the conversion of that tool into something that is “artificial” seems awkward to me. For example, many of us have seen the footage primates using a “tool” (i.e., a stick or twig) to extract termites out of a termite nest, with the commentary of how remarkable that is. But I assume that few would argue that the stick became artificial the moment the primate exercised its domain over it and used it for a purpose other than its usual one. For this reason I struggle with the notion that any substance found in the world can be converted (no matter how complex the process is) by a human exercising dominion over it and used for a purpose other than its usual one and thereby the substance becomes “artificial” – especially if we admit that human beings are themselves natural.
Which all leads me to wonder what the external/internal world distinction really accomplishes in the end, all the while recognizing that proving the existence of the external world in the face of radical skepticism has been a classic problem of philosophy. The direction I tend to lean in is to emphasize the distinction between the external world (in the sense of sensible, natural objects) and the supernatural world (in the sense of super-sensible, non-natural objects) – which (I think) places me in the Moorean tradition – at least insofar as the supernatural nature of the property “good” is concerned.