Prove there is objective morality

I have. He's a good writer but I don't think he's a good philosopher. He has little coherency and is appealing to certain people based on lofty emotional platitudes about power, but that's it. He wasn't really that influential on philosophers that came after him either, just retards like Ayn Rand.

The thinkers he criticizes (Plato, Jesus, Schopenhauer) accomplished far more than his feeble body and syphilitic mind ever did. The man was insane and died being cared for by his mother, dude.

Morality is by definition objective, within its system.

Besides, Stiller says so.

I'm pretty sure you have understood nothing about his works.

Prove that anything is objective.

How is it contradictory? It exists as a prescription, but that doesn't mean the labels is ascribes to things describes real properties of actions. It's just expressions of feeling disguised as subject-independent statements.

>I'm pretty sure you have understood nothing about his works.

Great argument, faggot. There's little of coherency or substance to "understand" anyway, but what there is, I simply disagree with.

>Great argument, faggot.
You are the one who says that it is incoherent without explaining why.

There are a few ways which relativism is problematic.

Let's pretend that you need to make some sort of moral decision. If you are a relativist, you betray your belief in relativism the moment you decide that one choice is morally superior to the alternative. This is because in order to believe that something is superior to another thing, you need a FIXED standard of goodness to measure it against. This applies even to the cases where you are deciding on and itemizing everythinf that counts as moral 'for you'. This was written hastily, but hopefully you see my point.

>If you are a relativist, you betray your belief in relativism the moment you decide that one choice is morally superior to the alternative.

You're deriving a moral stance out of moral relativism: you are the one who is contraddicting himself.

>The idea of subjective morality is incoherent and self contradictory.
it's obviously neither of those things and you're an idiot

also
Veeky Forums- literature
can you all fuck off to your Veeky Forums woo deep thinking containment board please

you would make the moral judgement based on which would benefit you more?

>also
>Veeky Forums- literature
>can you all fuck off to your Veeky Forums woo deep thinking containment board please
Wew lad, just how new are you?

Because he relies on cute little aphorisms and flowery allegories instead of cultivating any kind of system in a concise and explanatory way? He acts like true knowledge is impossible, which is a claim to knowledge itself. He spookily divides wills into strong and weak without any solid definition of which is which, and even claims the weak Jews were able to dominate discourse for 2000 years by rallying against the "strong". How the fuck is any system or class inverted in that matter even strong to begin with? He laments that men and animals are "tamed", but thinks further control of base instincts will somehow transform individuals into overmen, as if this isn't a kind of taming indirectly caused by the ideas of others. He also flip flops on eternal recurrence as metaphysical or just some carpe diem shit. He's all over the place.

I'm saying you can't believe in such things as "better choices" if you are a relativist because concepts like better and worse only make sense when they refer to a fixed standard of goodness. Such a standard could not be sourced to the same agent who is making the decision in the first place.

This means the relativist should be able to go through life treating all the choices he needs to make as equal in every way since his relativism prevents him from acknowledging the existence of superiority and inferiority.

Moral relativism isn't subjective - it's a kind of moral realism that's just particular rather than universal. Moral nihilism is the opposite if your absolutist bullshit, either in noncognitivism (moral statements are expressions of emotion rather than fact) or error theory (moral statements are simply false).

You don't even know basic meta ethics you dumb faggot. Few people at all support moral relativism.

*of your absolutist bullshit

How can one short post contain so much misinformation? You got nothing right.

I've read all of Nietzsche's works, and he is not incoherent. Please point out an incoherence in his texts. He was deeply influential on almost all contemporary philosophy: Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, not to mention Freud, critical theorists, etc. Ayn Rand was not influenced by him. His critique to the figure of Socrates was more nuanced and not merely a rejection, his critique of Christianity is the main project of his philosophy and he was very successful at it, he admired Schopenhauer very much. He was cared by his sister, not mother.

>If you are a relativist, you betray your belief in relativism the moment you decide that one choice is morally superior to the alternative
>you decide that one choice is morally superior to the alternative
A moral relativist or a moral skeptic would not do that. He doesn't make his decisions based on morality; he rejects morality.

>in order to believe that something is superior to another thing, you need a FIXED standard of goodness to measure it against
Why do you assume we believe it superior? Can't we not do things because we want to?
Why do you presume we have a need for systematizing and dogmatizing the way we live?

It seems you're conflating moral choices with any sort of choice. It is possible to value something over another, without leaning on morality.

The value you assign to something depends on your ability to refer to a fixed standard of value.

>instead of cultivating any kind of system in a concise and explanatory way?
A-systematicism is not a flaw per-se.

>He acts like true knowledge is impossible, which is a claim to knowledge itself.
It's an observation, not a claim to knowledge. There is no such thing in his books. What is also funny is that you are willing to accept as knowledge philosophical notions on the basis of wether the philosopher tells you to do so or not.

>How the fuck is any system or class inverted in that matter even strong to begin with?
Since you haven't read his books, I'll use a more contemporary term: think about these moralities as cultural hegemonies, from which stems the common sense that various groups follows. In BGE he describes extensively what the common sense of both moralities are.

>He spookily divides wills into strong and weak without any solid definition of which is which
I'll stop you here: social prescriptions in Nietzsche are just interpretations, and are not meant to be treated as Gospel. It's his view of the world.
His true philosophical background is his work in epistemology, which classifies him as a fully nihilist philosopher. About said prescriptions and descriptions (like the aforementioned slave vs master morality) he treat it as "moralizing" (his own words, from the introduction of Case Contra Wagner).

>but thinks further control of base instincts will somehow transform individuals into overmen, as if this isn't a kind of taming indirectly caused by the ideas of others.
He never said it: to become an overman you don't have to "tame" your istincts. You've made this up

>He also flip flops on eternal recurrence as metaphysical or just some carpe diem shit. He's all over the place.
You have grouped about 5 to 6 books in 1 paragraph: of course it's all over the place.
Have you only (mis)read TSZ? Most of the doubts you've described are elucidated in clearer terms in BGE, GoM and GS (only the eternal recurrence is inherent of TSZ).

First of all, this is moral nihilism rather than moral relativism: moral relativism implies that different moralities are equally right, therefore a moral relativist might simply follow his own morality, for he considers it valid.
If you are a moral nihilist, your strive for truth is merely a prejudice that relates to nothing in particular. To say "you have/should to do this or that" is downright mesningless in a nihilist framework, even if it seems to make sense to you.

As I've said earlier, from this conception of morality no absolute moral stance can be derived: this includes the ones you've derived, over which I might simply disagree (as I'm doing now).

>a moral relativist doesn't make his decisions based on morality; he rejects morality
Upon what do you base the moral decision that killing children is wrong? Upon some calculation/rational justification that is unrelated to morality (because you supposedly reject morality)? Give me a break. There is no calculation when it comes to the most simple ethical decisions. The notion that one can reject morality is absurd.

Oh, good, you're an expert! I'm not really familiar with any of this stuff.

Can you tell me this? Wouldn't morality grounded in the "particular" necessarily be grounded in the subjective experiences of particular individuals?

>You have grouped about 5 to 6 books in 1 paragraph: of course it's all over the place.
Have you only (mis)read TSZ? Most of the doubts you've described are elucidated in clearer terms in BGE, GoM and GS (only the eternal recurrence is inherent of TSZ).

I'll be honest and concede that you've got me here. I only read Zarathustra in full, and it pissed me off enough that I skimmed his other works. Still, I didn't find his critique of pity particularly convincing (which I would distinguish conceptually from compassion). His disregard for Buddhism also seems somewhat misplaced, although given that he only knew it secondhand from Schopenhauer it's understandable.

Being asystematic may not be a flaw to you, but I think it detracts greatly from clarity.

>therefore a moral relativist will follow his own moral system for he considers it valid
>for he considers it valid

And the validity is based upon??? You are so fucking retarded it is painful. You cannot deem a moral system valid unless you accept a criterion of its validity, the criterion being objective morality. Otherwise you have to accept that all moral stances are equal, e.g. a "moral" system that prescribes slaughtering children and a moral system that condemns it. Fucking retard.

Relativism isn't particular to individuals, it's intersubjective and defers to whole cultures. Noncognitivist ethical nihilism does claims that moral statements are subjective in that they're statements of individual feeling, rather than factual descriptions of reality - but this should not be confused with the contradictory realism of ethical relativism, as it leaves no moral facts to be described.

>You are so fucking retarded it is painful
>Fucking retard
I don't think Veeky Forums is for you. I say this as someone who actually agrees with the general thrust of your argument.

The insults weren't necessary but I sure am tired of these threads and the moral relativists regurgitating the same nonsense over and over again. They rely on poor sophistry in order to avoid the one and only consequence of moral relativism: all moral systems are subjective, and therefore equal.

Killing children (and killing in general) is anti-social. It's conducive to conflict and it's disruptive, that's why we deem it wrong, because it's in our interest to not be in conflict and to not live in a disrupted community. If we were in a context where killing children would be in the interest of our society, like the eskimos are (and they do kill children), we would deem it acceptable (and they do deem it acceptable). Furthermore, no one denies that empathy is a natural feeling for humans, and because of empathy killing a child or seeing a child killed would be painful for me. Not because of guilt, but because of an emotional reaction.

Where morality comes in is when it extrapolates this to a principle, something beyond human: an absolute rule delineated by the divine or by ''reason'', which is in most cases as transcendent as a divinity. At that point, there will always be a perversion of whatever value is esteemed and prescribed: an elevation of empathy leads to a perversion of empathy (see: Christianity), and then genuine empathy can't be attained, and then the other side of the spectrum and the middle grey areas of the spectrum are wasted, because some apathy and some unscrupulousness can also be good and desired.

Moral claims you just made:
Anti-social behavior is bad
Conflict is bad
Social disruption is bad
Pain is bad

There isn't

>And the validity is based upon??? You are so fucking retarded it is painful.
What? I have not identified as a relativist: you are the one who mentioned moral relativism (which is a fringe stance in moral philosophy), I have just pointed out that you were mistaking it for moral nihilism. Why the vitriol?

>You cannot deem a moral system valid unless you accept a criterion of its validity, the criterion being objective morality.
You are equating the idea of following objectively a morality with the objectivity of the morality itself. Saying "following a criterion makes it objective" is only a thesis that needs to be justified (in this case to justify it you would need to clarify which morality are you following, or your conception of morality in the first place).

>Otherwise you have to accept that all moral stances are equal, e.g. a "moral" system that prescribes slaughtering children and a moral system that condemns it. Fucking retard.
A moral relativist might think that. It may sound retarded to you, yet there is no reason to insult me, since I have not championed these views.
A moral nihilist would instead say that morality is null in the first place.
Most people, me and you included, simply do not follow such strict rules. We intuitively know that killing children is wrong, and even if we are skeptic of our own istincts, conclusions like these seems to be impossible to disavow, at least for non-sociopathic individuals.
If you were to ask me if there is an objective morality I would say "I don't know: certain moral conceptions seems to make certain sense even after having applied skepticism to it, so I follow them".

Ultimately: chill out.

*certain moral conceptions seems to make sense

>there are some savages that have an abhorrent immoral practice and therefore moral relativism is fine
If you were all of a sudden forced to live in an eskimo community you would most definitely condemn such attrocities. Why? Because an actual human being, unlike a savage whose mind is close to that of an animal, is fully aware of how wrong and horrible childslaughter is. The conditions in which they live do not and cannot justify such an act. The proof of this statement is, as I have already said, the fact that a more educated, i.e. mentally evolved human being would condemn their primitive, violent habits.

>implying

None of those things are bad in themselves, none of those things are bad on principle. They're bad as far as they hurt me, and they are deemed bad by most people because they hurt most people. There are of course situations where anti-social behavior is good, where conflict is good, where social disruption is good and where pain is good. What I was saying was not that killing a child is wrong because it's anti-social, but that killing a child is considered wrong because it's anti-social, and there's no difference between ''considered wrong'' and ''wrong''.

This debate has been done to death. Get over it and stop wasting your time.
The only reason these overly ambitious /pol/crossposters disagree is because they fail to differentiate between what they feel is right and what would be objectively right.
Same with WLC. The question "if objective morals don't exist does that mean you think raping kids is okay" completely misses the debate. People who say there is no objective morality still have subjective morality. And just as your subjective morality it steams from our genetic heritance and our social conditioning.

Read up on the lives of eskimos. The harsh living conditions of their tundra, their meager population and their social organization of labour and hunt make it so that, if they allowed every female child to live, they would simply be extinct in a matter of decades. In order for their society to continue, infanticide is necessary.

The point is that childslaughtering is necessary for both their survival and the survival of other children. It's a moral compromise that might have lead to even more deaths, which is why it was accepted socially.
If a society can't survive, it can't be moral either.

He didn't claim they were moral facts. He claimed they were in our general interest.

And what determines our interests?

The will of Gnon is objective. Morality is simply the will of Gnon.

So cannibalism can be 'considered' wrong in one place and 'considered' right in another. How can the same act be both wrong and right at the same time?

>everyone who argues for objective moraloty is a /pol/ crossposter (in your terminology, a code word for "an idiot whose opinion is irrelevant")
But hey, I can solve the question of morality in a single sentence!
>morality stems from our genetic heritance and social conditioning
It is far from that simple, and you are a top tier example of a pseud.

>Because an actual human being, unlike a savage whose mind is close to that of an animal, is fully aware of how wrong and horrible childslaughter is.

Savages and civilized people aren't "close to animals". They are animals, in every sense of the word.

Plenty of civilized people support abortion. The value of life has never been supreme. Virtually everyone condones some kind of death, whether it's war, abortion, execution, eating animals, euthanasia, pest control, self-defense, suicide, managing medicine in the face of scarcity or anything else. Even not being as healthy as you possibly can all the time will cause your life to shorten just like a gunshot will, except to a lesser degree.

Desire. But I don't agree with his argument, I just think you're making a shitty argument against it.

>how can altitude be high on a mountain and low in a valley at the same time

But what do you desire and why?

It isn't either wrong or right. It is only deemed wrong and deemed right. Moral wrongs and rights aren't a valid category.

>everyone who argues for objective moraloty is a /pol/ crossposter (in your terminology, a code word for "an idiot whose opinion is irrelevant
I didn't say that you bootyblasted /pol/crossposter.

>morality stems from our genetic heritance and social conditioning
>It is far from that simple
That wasn't the point. The point was a misunderstanding of what it means to claim there is no objective reality because the only arguments people ever bring including in this thread talk about morals no human could deny without being a meanie poopiehead.

>But hey, I can solve the question of morality in a single sentence!
If you can bring any argument that is relevant to the discussion and actually engages the meaning of objective morality I'm happy to hear it. I never heard one.

I did not miss your point, but it does seem to me that you are missing mine. Your stance is reductionist - equating morality with survival. I would argue that these are two separate questions: the morally correct decision can conflict survival - there is no contradiction (e.g. a hypothetical scenario where you are forced to either burn some innocents alive or face the guillotine yourself). The point is, once again, that a question of ethics and a question of survival are two separate questions.

right/wrong → one object

high/low → two objects

These are not the same.

>altitude is high here
>altitude is low here
>"low" is not an universal description of altitude

>cannibalism is wrong here
>cannibalism is right under these circumstances
>"wrong" is not an objective description of cannibalism

What do you mean by objective morality? Define your terms please.

I did not miss your point, I simply wasn't being a pragmatist.
The point here is that you are reducing these actions to "killing children" and "not killing children", while forgetting that "not killing children" implies "killing all chidren and all adults".
In this sense and context, childslaughtering is moral. Of course to reach this conclusion you have to take in account contexts as harsh and unfavourable as the one in which Inuit lives: it certainly tells us nothing about what does it mean to kill a child in a Weatern society (certainly not killing children will not lead to the death of the entire tribe, which means that for us it is absolutely immoral).

The point is that both contexts can be analyzed from the same exact moral point of view (if I'm in a context I reach a conclusion, if I'm in another I might resch the opposite one: this happens due to the fact that no action happens in a vacuum), as long as you don't forget what the consequences of each actions are (aka: by not reducing them semantically).

tldr: Inuit's practicing childslaughter for survival are not s good example for moral relativism, it would be easier to pick ritual practices in tribal societies, such as human sacrifices

I desire many things, either because I was gradually conditioned into liking them or because my ancestors multiplied with a higher fitness because of them.

Either way, the feedback loops of fecundity are irrelevant. They're descriptive and do not necessitate any prescriptive morals. No biology does.

Altitude is a measurement. High and low are opposing (and relative) states of this measurement, which vary from place to place.

Likewise, morality is a scale, and good and bad are relative points on this scale

>relative points on this scale
No because high altitude is always more "high" compared to "low" altitude.
Morality is many scales. Subjective scales.

>equating morality with survival
I'm equating the immoral with the anti-social.
The reasons a behavior might be deemed undesirable by a society are multiple. It's undesirable for a woman to have multiple children with unknown partners, thus female promiscuity is immoral. It's undesirable for conflicts between neighbors to arise, thus jealousy is immoral. Trade and accumulation of wealth are conducive to a prosperous community, thus thievery is immoral. It's desirable for a solider to do good in battle, thus courage is a virtue. The list goes on, I'd think this is pretty obvious so far.
But the catch is: these values are now abstractions, they aren't attached to their original function. One is not opposed to them because of practical reasons, but because of a moral doctrine. And in that process, one forgets that promiscuity, jealousy, thievery, cowardliness, etc are also desirable, sometimes just as desirable as their counterparts.

Doing away with morality does not mean to do away with values altogether. It means to do away with a dogmatic, systematic approach to ethics that is driven by ideals, by abstractions. It's impossible to live without any sort of ethics, but it is possible to live without an imposed moral dogma, what Nietzsche called herd morality. There's a difference between ethics and morality, although ethics traditionally are a prescription to live a moral life, there can also be immoral ethics and ethics which prescribe a behavior and lifestyle with entirely different goals than to just be ''good''. The key point is that, for Nietzsche, such ethics must be a constant creative exercise; in the same way that the Übermensch creates meaning when there inherently is none, he also creates values.

are you guys spergs? expressing something as nuanced in 'scales' and 'altitudes', read a book lmfao

>all moral systems are subjective, and therefore equal
Yes, they are
>But muh children killing
Good and bad are determined by communities. You don't get to choose the rules you're playing with. If your action i against the rules of the community, you're wrong. Morality is a social contract. It is not transcendent. Prove me wrong, faggits

Because they're not the same act. The nature of an act is conditioned by the person doing it and the context in which it is done.
"Cannibalism among cannibals" and "cannibalism in a western-like society" are two different issues.
>But if I'm a western man and become a cannibal amirite or not?
You have two contradicting systems of rules. You have to choose what game are you playing, but the consequences of your actions are in all the games you play.
tl;dr
You have to choose if you want to eat this lady or not. If you do, the cannibals will accept you, and they're right, but the West will cage you, and they're right. If you don't, the West will still accept you, and they're right, the cannibals will not accept you, and they're right.

you guys are retarded and tryhard as shit

>Prove me wrong, faggits
I'm not a worthless bootlicker who can't think with his own head.

>concepts like better and worse only make sense when they refer to a fixed standard of goodness
>The value you assign to something depends on your ability to refer to a fixed standard of value.
No, there's no need for a "fixed standard of value". I compare things between themselves directly, not indirectly by comparing each to a "moral standard" and then doing calculations to see which is the best. Also the value of things is pretty circumstantial even to the same person: food is one thing when you're dying of hunger, and it's another when you're full.
Also, to talk about "scales" in such a subject is pretty inadequate.

Would you murder a child if you lived in a community that demands you to do so?

That would be him judging from the moral status quo of this society about a hypothethical status quo of another society.
Yes, he would, so would you, which is why human sacrifice was a thing.

And yet there were people who thought it was wrong. How else was it abolished?

It's like saying, "you would've owned slaves if you were born into the ruling caste of a slave society," while ignoring the fact that all those societies had privileged dissenters and critics.

It was abolished because alternative societies who didn't do it outcompeted the sacrificing societies

read Luhmann

>Prove that anything is objective.
anything you can´t simply wish away is objective like the money you use, you can use other money but that would be really difficult. your understanding may be subjective but you can´t ignore the forces that influence you, which cannot be changed easily.

A schizophrenic can't wish away his hallucinations.

Are you suggesting that societies are morally static, then?

But isn't it the case that our own society has evolved greatly over the past two centuries? We weren't overtaken by a society that gave women the vote - the change came from within the system.

I think Peter Singer's moral circle is a far better way of understanding morality, though it may be imperfect.

No, but, to my knowledge, the societies practicing human sacrifice just collapsed, as all civilisations do, and were overrun by new civilisations and societies

Well, what's your point then? How do you explain slave societies evolving into non-slave ones?

That one is an example of societies moral codes changing. Human sacrifice isn't

so his hallucinations are an objective reality for him

4 is objective

Is proof of determinism also proof of objective morality?

My morality is the measure of objectivity and is therefore objective.
You don't matter, never did, never will.

Become a Christian or read Kant

Or embrace consequentialism and read Machiavelli and Hobbes.

Or fuck morality and read Nietzsche.

read Durkheim

>these threads keep getting (you)s

here is your (you)

What's wrong with seeing morality as soft law. Is law objective? No, but it exists because people made it up and enforce it. Similarly, morality can be thought of as norms made and enforced by men.

Nobody thinks one shouldn't abide by the law since its not objective, and for the same reason, nobody has any reason to think moral laws ought not be followed because they're not objective either.

Prove this wrong.

Some behavioral pattern are selected by evolution. Imagine two tribes or groups of animals. In one, the newborn are eaten as a snack, in another they are cared for. Ten years forward, which group do you think will still be there ?
Turns out these things are usually considered "ethical".

WTF. Don't post shit like that.

could have at least chopped its head off so the hair didn't get all up in the soup, sheesh, but honestly hotpot has to be the weakest culinary tradition in the world, just cook up a big ass thing of water to a boil and throw random shit in it

You're assuming a value, instead of starting from scratch and proving the truth of one. The one you're assuming is that it's good to survive. In what way is that objectively true? It's certainly something most of us want, but why how could what most SUBJECTS desire be used as evidence for what is true of the OBJECT, i.e., true independently of a subjects mind.

Almost every moral objectivist argues like this:

>How can you disagree that child sacrifice is inherently wrong? It's disgusting. It's savage. It's absolutely appalling.

Notice the pattern of emotionally laden words here. It's all they have. Each one of them is Feelio Feelington, King of the Feels. Yet emotion is a subjective property known only to conscious subjects.

this is how intelligent design (at least of humans) is true, the people who believe in religion and so have big ass traditional families with five kids will innevitably be the future of mankind as all the athiest just abort their way to the dustbin of history, so the human species is selecting for brains that believe in supernatural gods

>humans began selecting for beliefs in supernatural gods
>all humans believed in the supernatural for almost the entirety of history
>humans start to stop believing in the supernatural
>increasingly more humans stop believing in the supernatural
>they're going to die out!