post-structuralism has done a lot to attack the basic idea that something like "right" and "wrong" even exist in the first place, outside of the mind of the observer.
I'm kinda pissed about that btw.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify/codify popular/common moral beliefs.
Even "murder is wrong" is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic "murder is wrong" stance.
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out "murder" for "killing" the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
It's even worse than that. It floors me that it's widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn't murder. It's murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don't even have a proper word for it, they just say "it's not murder.... IT'S WAR!" What a lazy non-argument. It doesn't count because we're doing murder Costco style, in bulk?
I mean yeah, it's people killing people that don't want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It's more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.
As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn't have the baggage of human murdered. Don't want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they're doing, or they won't comply as reliably!
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in fact, that "murder is wrong" in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like "morality is subjective" as though it's an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
https://images.app.goo.gl/fBQbi2J5osxuFmvt7
I think "morality is subjective" is just something we hear apparently worldly people say all the time, and nobody really has any idea.
By the way, I have a PhD in ethics and wrote my dissertation on the objectivity/subjectivity of ethics. Long story short, we don't know shit!
"Morality is subjective" is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.
Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.
Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.
If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.
And since we can't point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn't even matter if one theoretically exists because it's inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn't exist for us.
Both of us are following different moral standards, the "rules" in your head are not the same rules that I'm subjective to.
You're morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.
My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There's no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don't believe that's possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
How do you overcome the is-ought problem?
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Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
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I've been a College and University prof for the past 6 years. I'm in my young 40s, and I just don't understand most of the people in their 20s. I get that we grew up in really different times, but I wouldn't have thought there would be such a big clash between them and me. I teach about sound and music, and I simply cannot catch the interest of most of them, no matter what I try. To the point were I'm no sure I want to keep doing this. Maybe I'm already too old school for them but I wonder who will want to teach anymore....
That is the same sentiment my music teacher had 15 years ago and the same sentiment his music teacher did before that. I don’t think it’s illustrating the times as much as just that teaching is a tough and thankless job and most people aren’t interested in learning
I could get that at the grade school level, but at the university/college level those students are choosing the music classes. To be that disengaged for a course you picked is a bit different than a student who is forced to take a course.
That being said, if the course is a requirement that does change things a bit.
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I wonder how much of that is a change in who is going to college and why, and what the requirements are. More people are being funneled into colleges that previously would have gone directly into the workforce or into an apprenticeship. Is your class a gen ed? Gen Ed's have really expanded and if you listen to bleeding hearts like me it's a good thing because it exposes people to new things, but I think it's actually so poorly managed that people end up taking the classes they think will be the least rigorous regardless of their actual interest just to get them over with.
I think this is less time-specific, and more just people not being terribly interested in learning.
For example, a professor who specialized in virology was explaining everything about how pathogens spillover between species, using a 2010s ebola outbreak as an example. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time because it was as fascinating as a true horror movie, and yet other students were totally zoned out on Facebook a few rows ahead of me. While the professor was talking about organs dissolving due to the disease and the fecal-oral (and other liquids) route of ebola, which wasn't exactly a dry subject, lol.
Rinse and repeat for courses on macro/micro economics, mirror neurons, psychology classes on kink, even coding classes.
Either I'm fascinated by stuff most people find boring, or a lot of people just hate learning. I'm thinking it's the latter, since this stuff encompassed a wide range of really interesting subjects from profs who were really excited about what they taught.
I miss them a lot, I used to corner various profs and TAs and ask them questions about time fluctuations around black holes, rare succulent growing tips in the plant growth center, and biotechnology. It was fun having access to such vibrant people :)
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Parallel: Teaching contemporary American literature to undergrads in 2019 was utterly bizarre because they hadn’t lived through 9/11. So much stuff went over their heads. There’s just a disconnect you’re always going to have because of lived experience and cultural changes. It’s your job, especially in a philosophy course, to orient them to differing schools of thought and go “oh, I didn’t think about it that way.” And correct them on Nietzsche, because they’re always fucking wrong about Nietzsche.
Gesundheit!
Can both points not be true? There will be local morals and social morals that differ from place to place with overarching morals that tend to be everywhere.
Not all morals or beliefs have to be unshakable or viewed as morally reprehensible for disagreement.
Unless they mean all their ethics are held that way in which case that's just the whole asshole in a different deck chair joke.
I'm sure both are true for some people, but I think the irony he's pointing out is that this belief system recognizes that every individual/culture has different morals, while simultaneously treating individual/cultural differences as reprehensible.
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viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity
This should be the slogan of public social media.
The misunderstanding I see here is in the definition of “subjective”.
Subjective is often used interchangeably with opinion. And people can certainly have different opinions.
But the subjective that is meant is that morals don’t exist without a subject, aka a mind to comprehend them.
A rock exists whether or not a mind perceives the rock. The rock is objective. It is a physical object.
The idea that it is wrong to harm someone for being different is subjective. It is an idea. A thought. The thought does not exist without a mind.
So yes. Morals are all subjective. Morals do not exist in the physical world. Morals are not objects, they do not objectively exist. They exist within a subject. Morals subjectively exist.
That does not mean that any set of morals is okay because it’s just an opinion, bro. Because it’s not just an opinion. Those subjective values effect objective reality.
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This is basically how teaching secular ethics always is, though. Doesn't seem special about 2025. People will always be overconfident in their beliefs, but it's not necessarily a coincidence or even hypocrisy that they can hold both views at the same time.
You can believe that morality is a social construct while simultaneously advocating for society to construct better morals. Morality can be relative and opposing views on morality can still be perceived as monstrous relative to the audience's morality.
But "constructing better morals" is by itself a non-relativist statement. How can you say there are "better morals" when you follow moral relativism, which states that there is no universal set of moral principles? In other words, that morals are not comparable with each-other?
It's not the same thing as accepting that different cultures have different set of morals, but whether some things are simply more moral than others, or not. For example, saying that slavery is always bad, and should never be allowed, is an absolutist moral statement.
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I don't know, I might intellectually understand that morals are relative to a culture and that even our concept of universal human rights is an heritage of our colonial past and, on some level, trying to push our own values as the only morality that can exist. On a gut level though, I am entirely unable to consider that LGBT rights, gender equality or non-discrimination aren't inherently moral.
I don't think holding these two beliefs is weird, it's a natural contradiction worth debating and that's what I would expect from an ethics teacher
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