Some shit I wanna say

>For example, given the rule "All humans have intrinsic value" we can create a system of morality based on that idea
Can you prove this, though? Nope. I happen to agree with it, but that just means we both understand how one could form a system of morality based on such an agreed foundational truth. I'd even go so far as to say it's logically demonstrable as a truth, because anyone who claims that any other human is without intrinsic value is claiming to know more than every other human (or at least more than those humans who claim inherent value), which violates the fact that there is no single privileged perspective.

It's an information problem. Nobody has it all. We might have fleeting access at times, but at any given moment, if you are a human being whose empirical senses are bound by the timespan during which you are alive, then you simply must admit that your information is limited.

But yeah; I think your logic mainly checks out, for what it's worth. Keep the information coming.

I also read Nietszche. Thanks for pointing out some similarities between the major premise being discussed and the will-to-power concept that is borne mainly out of his often-misunderstood "ubermensch" concept (from a mixture of both Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, the latter of which I find personally much more compelling).

The problem with the will to power is that it was a concept that N. never fully fleshed out, and died before finishing, and never intended to really see the light of day - but his brother-in-law was a proto-Nazi, so he went ahead and posthumously published it with an eye on selling it to the nascent nationalist (and anti-semitic) groundswell of the late 19th/early 20th century zeitgeist in Germany. It was roundly considered a major dick-move by historians.

But sure, reduce it to a boring phrase if you want to. You do you, boo-boo.

I'll throw an analogy at you. Assume that there is a sign being held up above your head. It is high enough up that you cannot get it down without a stick. The front of the sign says, "Does God Exist?" (Or if you prefer, "Does Objective Morality Exist?") The only way to see the back of the sign, which has the answer, is by making a tool which will allow you to cut it down. The problem is, you and everyone else know very little about making tools. Additionally, everyone that tries to make a tool adds a piece that does not help, but rather hinders the effectiveness of the tool. The only way that people will be able to make the tool that can cut away the ropes holding this sign up is by working together- taking the parts that work and throwing away the parts that don't. This applies to all knowledge, including ethics. The problem with subjective morality is that it misses out on the core reasoning that humanity has used to progress the moral world. There is a reason why different cultures believe similar things, and there is a reason that society tries to give us autonomy in thought and action. There is a truth that is present in every system and theory of morality, but it cannot be properly used until the useless hindering bits are thrown away. Subjective morality contains but a portion of the truth.

Sure - flawless logic: now who the fuck you gonna elect to determine what's "useless?"

Also, your assumption misses an obvious detail that may, while it begs the questioning of the premise, prove noteworthy - you can see the back of the sign by shifting your perspective.

It definitely isn't a airtight analogy, considering I made it up in five minutes. Assume that it is an envelope instead containing a piece of paper with the answer. At any rate, it is a collective effort- relying on us using overlapping subjective ideas in order to determine an objective one.

...

>The problem with subjective morality is that it misses out on the core reasoning that humanity has used to progress the moral world.

This term, "progress" - it's troubling. Totally projects an idea of "the time before humans" being some literal dog-eat-dog kind of competition for survival, and then we "became moral." So, then what's after human? Are we there yet? And doesn't that ignore the fact that we are still very much in competition for survival, because people are still dying of starvation, curable illness, and all the other consequences of not sharing our resources?

>society tries to give us autonomy in thought and action

And isn't it "autonomy" that makes us think we don't need others, and contributes to this sense of rugged individualism that prevents us from accepting the need to share resources? After all, not only can you communicate with someone who can see on the other side of the sign, but unless this envelope actually was stuffed by a superhuman source (i.e. deity-quality), then you could find out (through whatever means available to you, provided you aren't stopped by "objective morality") who put the message there, and thus determine the source of what it says. It's also worth noting that the construction of this concept, "society tries to give us [x],"
anthropomorphicizes society exactly like one would deify any other god, and shifts authority away from the individual. This is paradoxical.

>There is a truth that is present in every system and theory of morality, but it cannot be properly used until the useless hindering bits are thrown away.

This is the most troubling thing, because it's the logic of every social-darwinist genocide throughout human history. All of them think they know better than everyone else what "society" should be, and what's "useful," but they were also human, and therefore limited.

>There is no ultimate authority to which we must defer (with whom we presently have any objectively provable contact), and that basically, you're it. Tag, muthafucka.

yeah no, try taking something from a store without paying for it, you'll meet a higher form of authority.

in a strictly material universe /k/ becomes the highest form of authority, which is both scary and hilarious.

I see your XKCD and raise you one.

Both parties are equally uninformed as to the superiority of their position. Hat is stating subjective belief, and No-hat is asking them to justify it by appealing to a study that might prove this belief objectively.

This brings us back to Nietzsche, actually, because No-hat's tacitly privileged position (we're supposed to agree, right?) is essentially what N. called "Scientism" ("something-wissenschaft-something" probably in the original German; I don't remember), which is the belief in the authority of science that he correctly identified as that which filled the post-enlightenment void after the power-elite (to borrow from his slightly-earlier contemporary, Marx) shifted away from accepting rule by the Catholic Church (read: Holy Roman Empire, if you wanna go deep...).

I haven't actually read Hofstadter (though "Gödel, Escher, Bach" has been on my shelf for a few years now; I'm just lazy), but it seems that the recursive aspect of authority toward that which is uncontainable by humans (as we stare into the heart of uncertainty itself after a hundred years of quantum research) should challenge the notion of any privileged position, because even between the most and least "intelligent" humans [side-note: humans can't measure their own intelligence unless other animals can, can they?], there is very little phenomenological difference.

Whatchu talkin' bout, Willis? (I sort of researched the pic for source, but I didn't spend enough time to know, so that pun is an act of faith).

You're terrifyingly correct. The problem is that we have conflated "morality" with "the ability to force us to do the right thing."

The logical escape from this form of "moral authority" actually rests on the ability to detach yourself from the belief that your physical body is inherently valuable. That's actually scarier to most people, because we fear death and the unknown, and we obviously have physical triggers to pain that are very not good, so we tend to cower to the bullies.

But it doesn't make them right. In fact, maybe we should disinclude this sort of physical dominance from the definition of "human."

Have you ever seen The Kingsmen? Not the sequel. Fuck the sequel. But in the original, there is a key phrase that bears scrutiny: "Manners maketh man." Note that it's not "the man," but the indefinite form, "man" (which we'll have to de-gender, obviously, to render as the intended "human," which would have sounded clunky in the film).

Without agency, without choice, without free will, what are we? We're fucking robots. Almost literally, because it reduces the only functional behavior of humanity (that which perpetuates the cycle of manipulation by the "programmers") to reproduction. It might as well be a serfdom where instead of the divine right of kings, we have the divine right of people who can kill us.

So, as dangerous as it is to say, it seems like the only logical conclusion is to overcome our fear of death, and say "fuck it - if that's the universe I'm in, then you'll have to kill me to prove it. Then I won't be there."

nice response....

the pic is a Willis cartoon, he does lots of /k/ related cartoons:
google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=/k/ Veeky Forums&chips=q:/k/+Veeky Forums,g_1:willis&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiO1JiRqefYAhUP6WMKHXMJB4wQ4lYIJygA&biw=1517&bih=735&dpr=0.9#imgrc=_

Samefagging:

So, like, we already found god.

The moment we realized that there was something more than human, we found god. That's all it takes.

Maybe it was what we would call an ape. Maybe this idea of humans as something biologically significant as distinct from other lifeforms is sort of fallacious, because with all of our science (which is a human construction, btw, in case you forgot, which you might have (I'm like forty years old and I forget this all the time) we can only control a little more than just other people.

If the nukes went off, would life die? Fuck no.

It's totally possible that there have been entire other species on this planet who have removed all their physical data, and we just don't know it because we're limiting our entire construction of knowledge to that which can be empirically recorded and reproduced.

Fucking think about it.

I'm like over nine thousand right now. This is not even me talking. This is fucking something you need to think about right now. I'm thinking about it, and I don't even know what to do other than play video games. I'm gonna try to beat Mike Tyson's Punch Out (!) after about twenty five years with no cheat codes.

Think I can still remember the patterns well enough to do it?

Well, no. It was Bald Bull that TKOed me in the first round.

At first, it was like magic - I remembered everything. The nationalist stereotypes were like a familiar, racist old uncle I never had (well, I think my uncle is probably racist, but I've only ever heard tell of him using the n-word while watching football... but this was in the 90s, so isn't that enough?).

I remembered when I had my grandpa play this game (a WWII veteran who was a jeep driver for signal corps, carrying messages to allied troops while dodging Axis firepower; he once had a Sherman Tank cross his path, and avoided death by sensing the scent of detonation caps in the air before the bridge he was supposed to cross was blown to smithereens, but who the fuck cares about that shit?) - he held the controller in his hands, and I told him to press A or B to punch left or right, respectively (I mean, I obviously didn't use those words; I was ten, but you know).

He said , and I quote "...I don't wanna hurt the guy..."

I fucking died, /x/. I mean, here was this man, whose veteran status never once made me think of him as hardened or embittered - he was just grateful to have survived it and start a family, even if it meant bombing the japs, which he would always claim as necessary, despite the human tragedy of it, which was a paradox I'm only beginning to understand, and hopefully never fully will - and he was concerned about causing pain to Glass Joe, a virtual depiction of pixels that vaguely resembled another human being enough to trigger his empathy instinct.

I want to be him, man. That's fucking amazing.

This became a pretty shockingly human digression, didn't it?

I came here to post this actually

No, fuck you. Just ignore the human memories if you must. How do you even know I'm the same person, asshole?