How do you prove that morality is objective without appealing to emotions?

how do you prove that morality is objective without appealing to emotions?
if you think morality is subjective, how do you prove something is right or wrong without appealing to emotions?
Seems like both sides often come down to "we know X is wrong because it makes me uncomfortable". You can say "we know X is good because it can be tested to be beneficial in the long run" but then how do you prove that "testing things to be beneficial" is good without it ultimately being "it makes us happy"?

>how do you prove that morality is objective without appealing to emotions?
Impossible. Emotions are the source, the conditions and the object of morality.

Without emotions, everything is equal. The idea of establishing actions are more worthy than others when all objects are equal is absurd.

Utilitarianism is the most rational way to approach morality.

so any argument for any moral act will always be fallacious, because it will fall into appeal to emotion?
Not familiar with utilitarianism

If you can't prove morality is objective, why are you convinced it is?
Most good for the most people is Utilitarianism put simply

>why are you convinced it is?
well I do believe in objective morality but I can't find convincing argument for it. For example, I think torturing innocent people is objectively wrong, but ultimately the reasoning would be an appeal to emotion. Its wrong because it makes people feel bad. I guess you could say we have some intrinsic instinct that its wrong, like we have for protecting our children, but idk if thats even an argument.

No.
Appeal to emotions are not fallacious when emotions are the issue.

It is fallacy to say for example that Jesus is the saviour because nothingness is scary.
But it is not fallacious to argue that providing shelter to the homeless in winter will help them avoid suffering of the cold.

>But it is not fallacious to argue that providing shelter to the homeless in winter will help them avoid suffering of the cold.
but the argument isn't necessarily about helping the homeless avoid suffering, its about how do we prove that helping them avoid suffering is 'good'?
I presume you will go with the "utilitarianism most good for most people" thing again, but that doesn't really help with an answer because I'm still left asking "why is most good for most people good then"? is it "utilitarianism" all the way down?

The bible

The choice to work to increase happiness and alleviate suffering can't be justified by anything else than emotions.
But it's not a fallacious line of thought.

"This makes me feel better because it, in fact, does" is incontrovertibly true.
"This is true because it makes me feel better" is a fallacious appeal to emotion.

>"This makes me feel better because it, in fact, does" is incontrovertibly true.
but that statement could never be used as a proof. Isn't that like saying "being in jail is bad, because its bad"?
>The choice to work to increase happiness and alleviate suffering can't be justified by anything else than emotions.
I guess I could buy into that, but I'd think its still fallacious because it isn't actually justified considering your emotions can be wrong. We need a further proof. I almost feel like your gist is "good is good because its good. bad is bad because its bad"

>Isn't that like saying "being in jail is bad, because its bad"?
actually I think a better example for my point would be to say "I didn't kill the person because I didn't kill him" in court. It doesn't actually provide any sort of evidence or justification

Something can be subjectively wrong and still hold all the same impact. Objective morals aren't required to live a moral life.

well a society needs to have some way of deciding whats right and wrong

Proof of what ?
You only need experimental proof that it is true, and then use it as the basis of your choice of action.
There's no need to prove anything more.

My fist is that relying on emotions is necessary and unavoidable.

Good and bad are concepts that serve to simplify the issues, and you should go beyond. But you can't go past emotions.

>it isn't actually justified considering your emotions can be wrong.
Emotions are facts that are easily perceptible, you can get them wrong sometimes but they are not wrong in themselves.
If you hate a group of people for example, you can have good or bad reasons but the hate is most likely real and true.
Then if you decide to murder them "because" of your hate, that's a soundly justified choice.
Then if there's a conflict, there are two valid ways of solving it : by violence, and by arguing for other relevant emotions.
This group of people could murder you back, on account of their desire for self preservation, and this too, would be soundly justified.
Or they could argue, for example, that you also love peace and your security and that these emotions should justify a solution of compromise. That's the only valid kind of counter argumentation.

Society decides what is right or wrong through the ratio of power of the competing groups. Abstract thought and philosophy can motivate them but they are not necessary and cannot set rules for a society without the material power of the people.

you don't prove that it's right, you just prove the other person believes it too. morality is a tool to control people, but it's one of the better ones because it strongly relies on things such as consent and reason.

observably, nowhere does morality exist independently of human biology and only would it in a similarly complex biology. It evolved by means of simple objective cause and effect values of reality (life, death, sex, society, disease, scarcity, climate) but those values in the context of morals are always subject to human experience and are only significant to us and the result of the development of complex or advance reason. in my opinion morality is more or less objective or subjective though ultimately subjective as you cannot examine it independently or without the influence of human perception. the more objective something becomes the more it becomes just a meaningless value. a concept tangible or not. "emotions" add value

Stop. Why did you make this decision that you cannot understand or acknowledge human feeling and emotion? You have now identified the root of your problem. Seek therapy.

There is no right or wrong.
When an earthquake happens, It's just plate tectonics. People got killed? Okay, it happend. It's not good or bad.

Good and bad are subjective concepts so to say that something isn't good or bad is implying that those states can't be applied to it. The reality is that a perspective must be taken before morality can follow. So the earthquake is both good and bad and to varying degrees it is simply the perspective that changes the equation.

To answer OP. Unless you can prove morality to be objective you must state assumptions in giving a moral judgement to something. For a simplified example if you give an AI the command maximize the number of paperclips in the long run. Its moral system will always come down to a binary choice, does this action maximize the number of paperclips. If it does then it is good if it doesnt than it is bad.

Humans are not fundementally different than the paperclip machine we are just more complex and are modable.

Pull yourself from the mud with your own hair.

That is excessive

>how do you prove that morality is objective without appealing to emotions?
I would argue that a very basic morality stems from evolved behaviour that turned out favourable for humans as a social species.
Besides that, morality is very much subjective and I don't see why anyone would claim anything else.

there isnt any convincing argument for it and we have no obligation to find one.

Had it right up until the last sentence. But yeah, obviously morality requires an appeal to emotions, OP, do you think anything would be moral or immoral if people were unfeeling robots?

Yes, morality is just judgement of worth. If you give a robot a set of goals its morality is to ensure those goals happen. In humans those goals are primarily revealed through our own emotions.

Violations of reciprocity. E.g. If I grant someone citizenship they pledge to protect the same norms, ethics, manners of my population, not respecting/practicing those norms would be a violation of reciprocity and is immoral. Non-reciprocity = immorality.

Morality is the philosophy of behavior. What you shouldn't do is bad. What you should do is bad. If one identifies what one should do one can construct an optimal strategy to attain said state. What you should do could very well equal the meaning of life. (They are practically synonyms). Meaning is the end goal of a construction. So if one could find a good definition of the end goal of life one could make an objective moral system.


EMOTIVISTS REEEE GO READ KANT OR SOMETHING

I think the issue is that the end goal is arbitrary. If you cannot find an agreeable end goal then you start off on the same place as OP. Only being with which their end goal is preset can their be a morality with any basis that isn't fleeting.

By realizing that without God, there is no objective basis for morality.

The issue is the basis. You must take as an initial condition that nonreciprisity is immoral. It's a circle in that any system of morality must at some point find an arbitrary basis upon which to start. I have yet to hear any argument that proves one basis over another. Their are ones which I find agreement with on emotional level, but this only means that I agree not that it is nonsubjective.

Morality is an emotional concept, a human with no emotion has no morality.

The feeling of disgust is the reason you can conceptualize evil, no disgust no evil you wouldnt feel a thing except probably pleasure seeing someone skin a baby alive.

Why is God objective? Not to be an asshole, but being a creator doesn't make one subjective. I may create a robot and set up its moral system. Does that make my moral system objective in respect to the robot. Honestly, idk.

Well it gets fuzzy when you look at how does one define an emotional. Is hunger an emotion. If so does an extreme hunger make theft and murder as a way to satiate hunger ok. It's hard because emotions aren't set in a neat organization that lends itself to making a moral system. You could argue that any moral system is an incomplete model a person's real internal morality.

Hunger is an instinct not an emotion and its stronger than emotion to begin with. Most of the evil things we do is due to our instincts not our emotions, we steal because of our resource gathering instinct, we rape because of our muh dik instinct, we kill because of our savage instinct, and so on.

Can you define a difference between emotion and instinct. But still emotions can conflict and make a moral system hard to create. Does Hatred of an individual justify killing them?

Everything is arbitrary because the means by which you determine whether or not something is arbitrary is arbitrary.

An instinct is an emotionless mindless behavior while an emotion is a more advanced controllable uh something. Emotion + instinct= evil behavior as we see in chimps who have happiness combined with a violent instinct= pleasure from violence.

That's not what I said at all.

I said that without God, there is no objective basis for morality.

Sorry, I would agree that the existence of God is necisary but not sufficient for an objective basis for morality.

The way I see it morality is nothing than a way to mentally restrict humans from acting on their impulses for the order of society. With no society there is no reason for morality to exist hence why animals have none.

Then you're denying the reality that morality is derived from God, who he is, what he says is good and what he says is evil, and how he enforces it from above.

Modern culture has stolen morality from God and claims it can be moral without God.

Humanity cannot be moral even with God's active participation; humanity is completely depraved.

Is that an argument or complaining

What "God"? The Jewish Yahweh is one of the most evil things in human fiction.

>Emotion + instinct= evil
care+horny
>expressing love physically is now evil


morality is both subjective and objective. killing is evil because it's harmful waste. killing is not as evil when that which is killed would do more harm and create more waste by living. killing something impacts both that which is killed and the killer, and should be avoided as much as possible so that the killer does not become corrupt. corruption is the greatest evil, because it subverts purpose. morality is a system by which we attempt to avoid corruption.

morality is complex, but in simple forms exists on all levels of life. at the most simple level you will find that the universe itself, as far as we've seen, seeks to avoid corruption. the laws of the universe do not violate themselves until you reach extremes. human morality changes in part because we are constantly seeking the proper balance of subjective and objective morality, and this has changed over time.

so anonit's not about emotion and instinct. it's about avoiding corruption.
love can be evil when the component parts of it are not in balance. our consciousness is a passenger that can manipulate the degree to which we feel emotions and allow instincts to guide us, but the job of the passenger is not to declare absolutes, but only to be aware of them. our consciousness is a tool to further anti-corruption and help ourselves reach a state of catharsis in existence.

morality's only objective is to refine our existence to the next level. a dog is content to live, breed and die. a human wishes to live, breed, and die, and be happy with it. this value judgement is what has driven us into self-consciousness

That was a very well written. But, your core statements are corruption is bad because I set up my moral system so that corruption is bad. It gets to a fundemental problem of if I say that corruption is not bad and come up with some justification and make it so that my moral system is corruption nuetral than there is no way in which to really access the worth of each moral systems since they disagree at a fundemtal level.

It sucks because the desire to model seems to be strong in people on a fundemtal level. But modelling abstract concepts runs into a wall when there a fundemtal lack basis upon which to start said model.

Morality is simply a system of assigning values. I don't think a being that is a God (relative to us) must have perfect judgment and some method of setting up an absolute value system. Unless said God where to remove any choice from its creation in which case God could choose to make everyone's morality the same and objective. Since people disagree often I would say it's safe to assume God chose not to give us all the same value system. If God allows for conflicting value systems then he is allowing there to be subjective morality. Thus God chooses to make morality subjective by allowing some freedom of will in his crwstures. God may have a preferred moral system, but chose not to make it objective by giving it to everyone and predefining all actions.

I can judge right or wrong based on the context of whether or not this behavior or action is detrimental to the collective in which I belong, such as the nation. This is the only non-emotional, non retarded way of thinking that does not rely on baseless universalism or equally retarded atomized individualism.

You can say one is dumber than another but can you justify that thought

Me three

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