Your account of objective morality appears to be deeply flawed. It assumes that if all humans are well-informed and reasoning without fallacy, they will all value the same things. But where’s the proof this is even true?

It’s possible that one can be well-informed and reasoning without fallacy, but come to completely different moral and ethical conclusions. For example, vegetarians are opposed to meat-eating and many see it as profoundly immoral, but no one would ever dismiss vegetarians as ignorant or vegetarianism as illogical.

How can there be such a thing as objective morality if people can reach contradictory moral and ethical conclusions, even when well-informed and reasoning without fallacy?

When does someone become fully informed enough that they’re able to act morally?

Exactly as defined for negligence law in criminal courts: When does someone’s ignorance rise to the status of culpable negligence, rather than a legitimate defense? We already have answered this with the reasonable person standard. If it is not reasonably possible for you to have acquired the knowledge that would have changed your decision in the given circumstances, you were acting morally (you acted on the information you had, with good intent). But if it was reasonably possible and yet you chose not to check the facts, then you are acting in willful negligence, and are culpable for any consequences that result from your ignorance. This is how it works in courts of law. It’s how in works in all moral judgment.

And who decides who is well-informed enough to act morally, a Supreme National Committee of Objective Moral Practice?

Anyone can. If they can show you acted wrongly out of willful negligence, they get to condemn you as doing so. That’s how moral judgment has always worked and would always work. And if you care about being a moral person, then you will care not to ever do such a thing, a thing even you would have to admit you could rightly be condemned for. Whereas if you don’t care about being a moral person, you are openly declaring to us all that you are not a moral person. You will then have made the judgment as to that yourself, saving us the trouble.

How do you draw the line in a way that’s non-arbitrary and non-subjective?

What’s arbitrary? Facts are facts. Logic is logic. There is nothing arbitrary about whether you acted in logical accord with known and knowable facts.

What’s subjective? We can all objectively observe whether you are acting in logical accord with known and knowable facts.

IOW the problem of the fully informed agent only affects whether prescriptive statements like “You ought to sterilize surgical equipment in an autoclave before surgery” are empirical, not whether sterilizing equipment is an effective way of preventing the spread of germs (descriptive).

Both are objective facts. Moral facts, same.

Medicine is a good analogy indeed: when we didn’t (and at the time couldn’t) know about germs, some of our normative statements about surgery were false; but as soon as we corrected our ignorance, we corrected our surgical norms. Social progress in moral knowledge works exactly the same way.

You seem to think that morality is a science because we can frame moral principles as a series of hypothetical imperatives. However, we can also frame mathematics as a series of hypothetical imperatives, i.e. if you want to find the hypotenuse of a right angle, you ought to use the axioms and deductions of the Pythagorean theorem, but this does not make mathematics a science. How would you respond to this?

Mathematics is a science in most classification schemes. But I think you mean, empirical vs. analytical science.

Mathematics differs from morality the same way it differs from physics: the latter are empirical sciences; the former, however, is an analytical science.

The distinction is actually weaker than that (since analysis takes place empirically in the theatre of the mind, and always retains a nonzero probability of being mistaken, and mathematics depends on axioms that cannot be analytically proved but only empirically demonstrated to be highly probable). But it’s distinguishable enough: we cannot answer moral questions in the theatre of the mind; unlike mathematics. We have to actually go out into the world and learn things. Just like medicine, physics, agriculture, etc.

Otherwise, yes, they are just the same. They differ only in where you look for evidence their statements are true.

OK, so there’s closure to the learning process.

This leads to my next set of questions:

When does someone become fully informed enough that they’re able to act morally? And who decides who is well-informed enough to act morally, a Supreme National Committee of Objective Moral Practices? How do you draw the line in a way that’s non-arbitrary and non-subjective?

[quote]You can no more object by saying “maybe there is something we both don’t know that would change this fact,” than you can say this of any other claim in science. Because the same statement is true of every fact in the universe. Yet you don’t let this cripple you, thereby insisting all science is false and not objective; you instead accept scientific facts exist and are known and are true even though each and every one of them might be false “because of something we don’t know.”[/quote]

You’re confusing two separate issues. Normative imperatives are prescriptive, but their subjectivity wouldn’t affect the objectivity of the underlying scientific methodology, which describes a state of affairs. IOW the problem of the fully informed agent only affects whether prescriptive statements like “You ought to sterilize surgical equipment in an autoclave before surgery” are empirical, not whether sterilizing equipment is an effective way of preventing the spread of germs (descriptive).

My question:

You seem to think that morality is a science because we can frame moral principles as a series of hypothetical imperatives. However, we can also frame mathematics as a series of hypothetical imperatives, i.e. if you want to find the hypotenuse of a right angle, you ought to use the axioms and deductions of the Pythagorean theorem, but this does not make mathematics a science. Just because it occurs in time and space does not mean that it can be investigated using empirical methods. How would you respond to this?

OK, so there’s closure to the learning process.

This leads to my next set of questions:

When does someone become fully informed enough that they’re able to act morally? And who decides who is well-informed enough to act morally, a Supreme National Committee of Objective Moral Practice? How do you draw the line in a way that’s non-arbitrary and non-subjective?

[quote]You can no more object by saying “maybe there is something we both don’t know that would change this fact,” than you can say this of any other claim in science. Because the same statement is true of every fact in the universe. Yet you don’t let this cripple you, thereby insisting all science is false and not objective; you instead accept scientific facts exist and are known and are true even though each and every one of them might be false “because of something we don’t know.”[/quote]

You’re confusing two separate issues. Normative imperatives are prescriptive, but their subjectivity wouldn’t affect the objectivity of the underlying scientific methodology, which is meant to describe a state of affairs. IOW the problem of the fully informed agent only affects whether prescriptive statements like “You ought to sterilize surgical equipment in an autoclave before surgery” are empirical, not whether sterilizing equipment is an effective way of preventing the spread of germs (descriptive).

My question:

You seem to think that morality is a science because we can frame moral principles as a series of hypothetical imperatives. However, we can also frame mathematics as a series of hypothetical imperatives, i.e. if you want to find the hypotenuse of a right angle, you ought to use the axioms and deductions of the Pythagorean theorem, but this does not make mathematics a science. How would you respond to this?

You aren’t listening. “No agent can be fully informed” is the same fact as “no physicist can be fully informed.” Yet we still continue to gain knowledge of physics. So too we can continue to gain knowledge of morality. It is not necessary to know every true fact of physics to know true facts of physics. It is likewise not necessary to know every true fact of morality to know true facts of morality.

In no way does this make moral facts not objective facts, any more than it makes the facts of physics not objective facts.

When you look at what makes a claim in physics true, it’s the same for morality: of any moral fact claim (of any fact of physics; of medicine; of history; of car maintenance; etc.), if you respond to evidence rationally, then you will agree it’s true once we tell you all the reasons it’s true (“becoming fully informed”).

You can no more object by saying “maybe there is something we both don’t know that would change this fact,” than you can say this of any other claim in science. Because the same statement is true of every fact in the universe. Yet you don’t let this cripple you, thereby insisting all science is false and not objective; you instead accept scientific facts exist and are known and are true even though each and every one of them might be false “because of something we don’t know.” The way you resolve that conundrum for every fact of the world, is exactly the same way we resolve it in morality.

You didn’t answer my question.

My point is that when you define objective morality as what “you would do if you were fully informed,” you no longer have an objective morality. No agent can be fully informed because the accumulation of moral knowledge is an endless process. Even if we limit ourselves to what is currently available, the information is still vast … and growing. It would take many lifetimes to sift through all of it. A fully informed ideal agent would have to be a morally omniscient one. Because of this, all we can do is speculate about what a fully informed agent would do in a hypothetical situation.

Your definition of morality contains an a priori and is therefore subjective. How can it be a posteriori if we cannot observe what a fully informed ideal agent would do in a laboratory setting? Saying that science is the same way does not avoid the problem, but merely indicates the subjectivity of normative imperatives.

At what point do we become fully informed enough that we are able to discover moral truth?

Moral knowledge resides in what is available to know. Just like all other sciences. Hence just as we can be wrong about a fact or not know a fact in physics, so also morality. This has nothing to do with being a priori. It is, rather, an inalienable feature of the a posteriori.

Just as our quest to know what’s true in physics is eternal, but increasingly close to complete and certain, so also moral knowledge. There is therefore no problem here for moral facts than already exists for all other facts in all other sciences.

You say, in one of the articles you linked:

“Moral truth is what you would do if you were fully informed and reasoning without fallacy.”

According to you, this can be empirically investigated.

The only problem here is that this isn’t an a posteriori observation, but an a priori one. At what point do we become fully informed enough that we are able to discover moral truth? Isn’t it possible that one could forever be searching for moral truths since the process of informing ourselves is an endless one?

At what point do we become fully informed enough to formulate moral truths? Setting limits would necessarily be arbitrary and subjective, given that rational deliberation about moral truths is an endless one.

If a “fully informed” ideal agent is an impossibility, your subjunctive clause is a counterfactual and is therefore a priori. No one can be fully informed about anything, although we can speculate about what a “fully informed” ideal agent “reasoning without fallacy” would do in a hypothetical situation. However, this speculation is not something that can be established empirically because no such ideal agent exists.

In short, you contradict yourself when you define objective morality as what an ideal agent would do if he “were fully informed and reasoning without fallacy.” This is an a priori statement because it involves a fictional possibility that transcends experience because it cannot be decisively established by it.

Evolution does not dictate morality, it discovers morality, the same way it does not dictate logic, it discovers logic.

Our brains evolved to be better at logic over time, but our evolved brains are still highly defective in the logic they think is correct. So we eventually had to fix evolution’s errors by continuing to discover correct logic on our own, and installing a “software patch” to fix evolution’s mistakes (which patch we call education and culture). Evolution was not creating this logic. It was discovering it. And did so imperfectly, requiring us to go the rest of the way through investigation and cultural evolution.

Morality is exactly the same: evolution discovered some true moral principles, but did so just as poorly and incompletely as it did logic, requiring us to go the rest of the way on our own, and discover what evolution got wrong, and installing a “software patch” (again, education and culture) to fix it.

To get up to speed on the difference, follow my debate on this point with Wallace Marshall, starting here.

You’ll there see that the statistical probability of there being moral facts for any self-aware entity is 100% in every possible universe: it is a logically necessary fact of any such being, that there is a best way for it to live. That is what moral facts are. We simply have to discover what it is. And we do so empirically.

You are now also confusing different concepts; subjective is not the opposite of absolute. Situational ethics are also objectively true. You do not seem to understand what “subjective morality” means. Please do what I have been asking you and read the articles I directed you to. You need to correct a lot of misunderstandings. You don’t know what you are talking about. And I wrote those articles exactly for people like you so you can get informed. So get informed.

Here are some suggestions, again (and I suggest you read in this order):

Objective Moral Facts

The Real Basis of a Moral World

How Can Morals Be Both Invented and True?

Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same

I was under the impression that morality was a set of evolved social behaviors that had to be analyzed to uncover objective moral principles, but I know I’m wrong now. Thanks for clarifying that.

What is the statistical likelihood an objective morality exists? We haven’t discovered any objective moral principles and it is quite possible we will never discover any. We don’t know what an objective morality looks like precisely because we haven’t discovered objective moral principles as yet. Judging from the widespread disagreement among philosophers, we’re not even sure they exist.

Since there isn’t any reason to assume objective moral principles are any more probable than subjective ones, wouldn’t assigning them equal probabilities (basically 50% either way) be the only reasonable option? How would you calculate it?

An objective morality would entail quantitative measurement of aggregate human well-being on an absolute scale of moral “oughtness.” This reading would then be used to determine whether you ought to act in a certain way, depending on the situation. Given how difficult it would be devise such an absolute scale, wouldn’t a subjective morality be more practical? At least until we discover objective moral principles?

Shouldn’t the greater practicality of subjective morality count in favor of its being more probable than objective morality?