Is there a single decent argument against moral relativism?

Culture is lovely. Culture is the style of a place, style of behavior, style of art, literature, music, architecture, belief, clothing, food, colours, the impact upon style that their local climate and vegetation has on the people dwelling there.

At least, ideally. Culture as a widely integrated means of social programming can be and often is incredibly insidious, as what Terrence Mckenna refers to in his "culture is not your friend" idea. Perhaps that is what you have a qualm with?

Can you explain to me why you're bringing aestheticism into objective morality? This idea that things converge and come together in a universal osmosis of sorts is funny, I surmise that Will to Power is not your cup of tea?

"God did it lol"

As an atheist? No. Enjoy your nihilism.

Beauty is not mere aesthetics, it is value. Value is what we mean by "morality", whether we know it or not.

To live beautifully is to live morally.

Also, the motion towards individuality, isolation, this can and is part of the general motion towards unity - fundamentally. It's an exhaling (fragmentation) and an inhaling (reorientation). The universe breathes out into these limited spheres of consciousness and then swallows them all back up into itself to form an ever more perfect vision of itself. Fragmentation is the very process by which it can appreciate the beauty that is its ultimate condition. The process is beautiful. So, the Will to Power (I haven't read it, though I'm somewhat familiar with Nietzsche), if I can assume, is about the value of the will of the individual, perhaps? This is the "dynamite" he speaks of? I think this is a good thing. People need to become proper individuals before they can give something beautiful to the community of humanity. However ultimately that community will not thrive if the will of the individual to dominate its environment in the way of "expressing its will" over it never subsides. There is a balance to strike.

You're coming to me and saying that culture has objective merit because society has accepted it and thus it has furthered, if not aided in creating, society. Society merely accepts these because the dejection of such things is not trite. Thus to further slander your position you defend culture by subjective second hand opinion. At what point does objective morality come in, if at all? All you have shown is that people /objectively/ aren't fans of skepticism.

I wasn't the initial user you responded to.

I'm really not great with philosophy. 80% of me says why is this buckaroo trying to say beauty is morally good, was the serial killer who drove around in a yellow bug not beautiful in a sense? (Forgot his name lmao) Is he still good? Or do you mean but forgot to include, that must you have beautiful intention as well, as Kant says in his 3 deontological principles?

But then 20% makes me think my trivial experience with philosophy is just misleading me into err. I can't truthfully tell if what you're saying is utter bullshit or not, it seems to be lmao.

>informality best formality

All "ought" statements can be reworded as "will" statements, and can thus be falsified.

Yes please informality is best.

I'm not familiar with Kant either. But yes, beauty of intention would certainly be the main thrust of what I'm saying. I could put all this another way. Fear is a rejection of what we consider to be ugly. If we are afraid of the future, anxious about it, we are afraid that the narrative of our life will be such that it holds nothing beautiful about it. That if a biography of your life were to be written, it would be boring, without beauty, without novelty. This is by and large what people really fear about the future. Fear is the other side of love in the sense that it has an idea of what is beautiful and uses fear to steer towards the beautiful by rejecting what they feel is ugly in their life (their thoughts, feelings, intentions, places, people, whatever). However, as a modus operandi, this only a serves a person with limited sufficiency. To complete the picture, they must have a clear concept also of what they feel is beautiful, not simply what they feel is ugly. Most people have a clear enough picture of that. The difficulty is clarifying the former. So, "love" becomes the compass for clarifying beauty instead of fear. And since love and beauty are the same ultimate condition I was talking about, that is the underlying non-relative principle of orientation I have been speaking of. Beauty is what we want out of the story of our lives. To behold ourselves in memory and in the present in the same kind of wonder that a great work of art can present us with.

Buckminster Fuller has a pertinent quote, referring to an idea he has just conceived: "But when I am done, if it is not beautiful, then I know it is wrong."

Nobody accepts ought statements regardless, not objectively anyhow. What's your point?

The point is that they actually ARE objective, but it's obscured under semantics.

Your life is the standard by which morality is built, as should be held as such.

>they must have a clear concept also of what they feel is beautiful, not simply what they feel is ugly
>feel
This is not proof for morals that are objective. This is merely stating that X is within everything and X is composed of Y or Z depending on the living beings preference, what correlation does this have to prove objective morals? I could walk in your footsteps and say that everything has a conscience, does it? Maybe. How does this prove objective morality? But back to your thoughts of beauty, I could say that XY pleases me, and that is my perception of beauty, but XY is the antithesis of beauty, fear as you put it. Thus beauty is subjective yet objective then because there is in fact an antithesis. Fuck.?!

Uhhhhh. I'm going to take a quick get out of jail card and just say it's because it's nearly 3 am and that is my excuse if I'm wrong :)

Falsity ≠ Objectivity in my book wym

731

That sounds rather subjective user

There is a consensus of subjective feeling to be felt when in the presence of beauty, which you could qualify as an absolute. Whether or not a person actually felt it, this can always be disputed. The way you can test this is by observing their behavior, how they live.

It comes down to the same problem of 'objective standards in aesthetics', whether or not certain pieces of art are Good with a capitol G and not simply 'good' because a lot of people say and feel so. The way I would handle this problem is to say that there is a real presence of Beauty in life that artists can and do approximate from their own sphere of experience, to greater or lesser degrees (as in distance from a more perfect representation of Beauty, which is non-subjective in the sense that it is the totality of being itself). The development of faculties to determine what is beautiful or not is something you as an individual can develop. The greater sense of wonder and perhaps even ecstacy any given piece of artistry can give you or really any experience in life, likely the more refined are your faculties in the apprehension of beauty.

Morality comes down to taste. You could say that Hitler had terrible tastes, and that Jesus had impeccable taste. I'm aware that this probably doesn't clarify what I'm saying too well but that's as far as I can think at the moment.

Moralities are merely a sign language of the affects.

Moral relativists falsely imagine that good/evil originate in the human will; whereas good/evil are in nature first, and in the will second.

Goodness, truth, and beauty are transcendental properties convertible with being - everything that exists is good in itself, what is evil is the defect / lack of being in it, e.g. sickness in a man, rust on a car. This is good/evil in a metaphysical sense.
Moral good/evil refers to the will which chooses either to act towards & in accordance with truth, beauty, and being (good), or away from & against it (evil).
To say that falsehood could be as good as truth, or ugliness as good as beauty, or nothingness as good as being - is sophistry that leads to self-annihilation.

If moral relativism is true, there is no objective basis for action because death could be as good as life, sickness as health, lie as truth, war as peace, hatred as love, adultery as fidelity, etc. If moral relativism is true, the weak have no argument against the strong when the strong oppress them, and the strong have every "right" to make unjust laws that oppress the weak.

What is interesting is that there is really no "lack of being in Beauty", because it is still part of the matrix of existence. The process of moving seemingly "away" from Beauty is part of the process of Beauty itself. It is right and good to become lost and seemingly out of sync with what is 'natural', and it is also good to eventually move back towards what is 'natural'. What happens is that naturally all creation seeks beauty, but Beauty as the infinite universal intelligent mind also recognizes the necessity of fragmentation as part of the eternal process of self-recognition, of self-appreciation. If you were god, you would want to ever-more appreciate your condition (and thereby deepen your joy) as "that which is". We are all pawns in this lovely process. That it should seem 'wrong' is also Right. That we should desire to move away from what we conceive as wrong is Right. We cannot escape the Rightness of things. And if that sounds like metaphysical nonsense with no real life application, then that is also Right of you to think that.

Good and evil are religious words, buddy. Most of us here, I hope, have moved Beyond Good & Evil.

*™

I think you are putting the experience of beauty too much in the sense faculties, which leads you to say, "morality comes down to taste", which would seem to me to lead to obvious absurdities. For example, if someone with a deranged taste preferred the taste of excrement to bread, that would not make excrement a fitting dish.

Beauty is perceived in the intellect by means of the senses - not immediately in the senses. Beauty is not the same as (sensible) pleasure, although such pleasure often goes with and facilitates our apprehension of beauty. Beauty exists in reality itself before we perceive it; we don't create beauty ex nihilo.

>The process of moving seemingly "away" from Beauty is part of the process of Beauty itself.

Only in an ultimate, universal, and eternal sense.
Not in an immediate, particular, and temporal sense; as in that sense, moving away from beauty is simply ugliness.

>Most of us here, I hope, have moved Beyond Good & Evil.

How was the move? Good?

How is it subjective if it applies to you as well as every single living human on the planet?

>Most of us here, I hope, have moved Beyond Good & Evil.

You contradicted yourself. Hope is, by definition, a movement towards the good; if there is no good/evil, there can be no hope (or despair).

>Not in an immediate, particular, and temporal sense; as in that sense, moving away from beauty is simply ugliness.
Well the general topic was about universals as in opposition to relativism so that's where I was taking it. And yes, when our lives as limited spheres of awareness are felt to be ugly, this is bad, and we suffer for it, and it is right that this be the case. I do think it is helpful to have a proper metaphysical grounding in the general principles by which existence operate though, because it allows you to more easily accept conditions beyond your capacity to alter as part of the proper state of life, freeing you to alter that which you can do something about.

Not poster your responding to, but it's because it exists only in the subjects. In subjects = subjective even if it derives from objects (DNA)

Except it exist in all humans by which morality is form. There is no moral relativism when I say that every single human that has a system of morality upholds at the very least their lives.
The only one who don't are nihilist, and even then the only good nihilist is a dead one who doesn't value his own existence over nonexistence.

>And yes, when our lives as limited spheres of awareness are felt to be ugly, this is bad, and we suffer for it, and it is right that this be the case.

Is it right that infants are born deformed? Is it right that the homeless as spat on and left cold & hungry? Is it right that murderers and thieves rule over nations?
These things are all wrong in themselves. They can only be ultimately justified if they form part of a universal scheme that draws good out of evil. I think you are agreeing me with here. There seems to be two cosmologies: the one that says that the whole is wholly good, and particular evils are redeemed by the good that is drawn out of them; or, there is an absolute good mutually opposed to an absolute evil which are co-equal and co-eternal. I suppose the last is that there is no good/evil; but this is not really a cosmology, but an anti-cosmology / nihilism which ultimately denies existence itself (I suppose this is what Buddhism teaches).

>there is an absolute good mutually opposed to an absolute evil which are co-equal and co-eternal.
I dare say you haven't been following my line of thought if you think I'm saying that! The former is the case. Good is the state of existence. As Alan Watts puts it, "If existence were ultimately bad it would have committed suicide long ago."

No, I do think you agree with the former (and with me).

No matter the form, if it's in the subject, even all the subjects, it's still subjective. That's as as linguistically true as metaphysically.
>nihilism
Nihilism doesn't value life objectively, but still, it can value life subjectively.

>Is it right that infants are born deformed? Is it right that the homeless as spat on and left cold & hungry? Is it right that murderers and thieves rule over nations?

Ultimately, everything that happens is Right (with a capitol R), but as humans, things are felt to be right or wrong, and this is proper and inescapable. I cannot use my metaphysical ideas as balm to heal my suffering mental or emotional states, and therefore I prefer certain states and reject, and it is right that I should feel this way, which seems to contradict my understanding that the universe is perfect, but it doesn't. It is perfect that I prefer, desire what I consider to be beautiful over that which I consider to be ugly. This is the motion of life that I'm a part of right now, and I dig it. It's not something I can negate intellectually, it's part of what it means for me to be alive at all.

>it can value life subjectively.
No, it can't. Because it values nothing.

>and reject others

100

Yeah, Morality.

...

Don't think about it OP, just ignore it lest you fall into Nihilism. Smarter people than you have done just that.

WELL THEN THEY WAZZAINT SMART ENUF

As Alan Watts puts it, "If existence were ultimately bad it would have committed suicide long ago."
if existence was really bad, it never suicides because it wants to keep doing bad things, you know?. ,

Then it enjoys being a bad-ass and is ultimately good.

This argument is going to seem incredibly spooky, and maybe it is, but some morals feel so innate that it's hard to think it's all relative.

In his book "A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism", Hans-Hermann Hoppe brings up an interesting scenario: imagine if we lived in what was pretty much a Garden of Eden, with no scarcity of resources, and thus no one would have to fight over food or water or any kind of material. The notion of "property" would probably not be a thing.

Even in such a place, you would still recognize that people using your BODY without your permission is a blatant violation of morality. For instance: someone giving you a hair cut without your permission. Or someone raping you without your permission. Someone would probably be a "moral relativist" and argue there's nothing wrong with it, but virtually anyone could recognize that your body is YOURS and thus a violation is immoral.

It values nothing objectively... that's just the definition user

Kant's version goes something like this:
Logical thinking is used by everyone to some extent, whereever someone might be, whoever he might be, he is able to reach logical conclusions (if he's a sane person of course) using his mind. So if I talk to anyone and we both use just reason/logic (i don't know which word is used in English translation) when confronted with a problem, we will inevitably reach the same conclusion. We might have different opinions and culture, but we can both debate - in the philosophical sense, trying to discover the truth, not in the pseud sense of just exchanging opinions and trying to win in an argument. I get a lot of shit from even bigger pseuds than me for trying to debate like that.

Moral relativism is bullshit if it contains the positive assertion that there are moral facts and they are relative to cultural context. Then it's very fucking easy to argue against.
Presumably some form of moral nihilism is implicit in your stance, so when you say moral relativism you really mean relativism of mores, traditions etc, rather than relativism of the moral facts non-nihilistic ethicists claim there to be and discuss in their theories.

Biology