Error

Sorry, could you please just formalize the argument for objective morality because while not everything you say is false, I don’t see how any of it logically leads to moral objectivism as used within the context of moral philosophy.

You haven’t addressed the is-ought gap at all. If there is an objective morality, I’d challenge you to make a moral judgement as an example that logically follows from purely descriptive premises (this is generally considered to be impossible.)

The only thing I can think of that you could do is maybe re-define objective (within the context of moral philosophy) to try to sneak it in there, but that’s all that’ll really be. It’s just logically possible for truly normative (prescriptive) conclusions to be objective, this is something that’s been known for hundreds of years.

I second Hay’s suggestion of making a more formal argument. The unstructured sections of this post made it unclear which propositions you took to support which.

I’d also note that your definition of “objectivity” at the beginning makes it trivially true that morality is sometimes subjective, since people are surely at least sometimes biased by their emotions when discussing morality.

An alternative definition of “objectivity” that is pretty standard within meta-ethics goes something like this: X is objective if it is not constitutively dependent on the attitudes/​reactions of observers. The funniness of a comedian is subjective because it is constituted by how amused the comedian makes people feel. In contrast, the solidity of a table is objective because it does not depend on anyone’s reactions.

arguing that eating meat is morally wrong because animals suffer in the process is not an appeal to emotion—it’s an appeal to facts about conscious experience.

Thank you very much for the post that addresses the question of “objective morality.”
Certain moral and altruistic behaviors have been observed in non-human animals, all of them related, naturally, to the survival of the species as a social community of shared interests.

But human beings have a cultural capacity to develop morality… also emotionally.

Regarding about eating meat, there is abundant testimony from people from vegetarian cultures (for example, Hindus) who feel a terrible repugnance to eating meat (because it goes against a religious mandate). There is no reason why cultural strategies cannot achieve the same effect based on non-religious principles.

The philosopher of religion Loyal Rue believes that religion can be considered to consist of “educating the emotions.”

Therefore, it may be useful to figure out what “objective morality” is, but we are cultural animals, and we can create an emotionally effective morality simply by organizing socially viable psychological strategies based on rationally constructed moral principles.

Of course, the scope of effectiveness of these strategies is limited. We cannot create moral emotional reactions based on principles, for example, of purchasing consumer goods (as marketers would like), but a political adherence internalized as “communist morality” has indeed been achieved to a certain extent in Marxist regimes.

For those of us who believe in altruism, it is feasible to attempt to achieve an internalized morality based on rationally constructed altruistic principles comparable to traditional “Christian saintliiness.”