Comment on Philosophy meme
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
An Aztec would not agree to any of that. They took slaves, they didn’t allow women to vote because they didn’t allow voting and women were second-class and they weren’t interested in a fair and equitable society, which is part of the reason their enemies helped the Spanish take them down.
So I’d say that your ‘objective truths’ didn’t apply to a major human civilization.
balderdash9@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
Here is an adjacent argument to the one you gave:
Moral of the story, disagreement alone does not entail a lack of objective truth. But the post was not about moral disagreement, it was about moral progress.
Moral relativists have a hard time explaining why we should have moral progress. The moral relativist will argue that any action whatsoever will be a good action if there is a certain group consensus. So why should we fight for a more fair and equitable society if the society we have no is *exactly * as morally good as any other system we could enact? Even worse, if the majority of people in your situation believe that something unjust is the right thing to do, then protesting against them is morally wrong.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
What does that have to do with my argument about the Aztecs? I don’t see the connection.
Wogi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Because you seem to misunderstand what objective means, the other user is attempting to help you understand that with an unrelated example.
Objective means something is true. It does not mean consensus.
FluffyPotato@lemm.ee 11 months ago
What would it mean for a moral to be true?
Like we can prove the earth goes around the sun but how would you prove a moral value to be true?
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yes, I know what objective means. What makes their morals untrue and yours true?
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 11 months ago
Whether or not an election has been fair has criteria that can be objectively evaluated. With “moral goodness”, those criteria do not exist.
A moral relativist does not have explain why moral progress is good, because they disagree that you can even really define moral “progress”. At best, there is moral change, and society always catching up to whatever that change may have been. Mortality is an inherently subjective concept, and therefore what is considered morally good can change, or rather: the ‘moral goodness’ of something changes over time. Someone in the past may have fully believed their actions were morally just, despite us viewing them as monsters now. And perhaps things we now consider to be morally just will be considered morally reprehensible in 50 years from now.