Yeah, that's because moral relativism is cool when you live in a free and decent society.
The irony is that you can afford to debate morality when society is moral and you're not facing an onslaught of inhumanity in the form of fascism and unchecked greed that's threatening any hope for a future.
But when shit hits the fan, morality becomes pretty fucking clear. And that's what's happening right now. Philosophical debates about morality are out the window when you're facing an existential threat.
I've been a College and University prof for the past 6 years. I'm in my young 40s, and I just don't understand most of the people in their 20s. I get that we grew up in really different times, but I wouldn't have thought there would be such a big clash between them and me. I teach about sound and music, and I simply cannot catch the interest of most of them, no matter what I try. To the point were I'm no sure I want to keep doing this. Maybe I'm already too old school for them but I wonder who will want to teach anymore....
I see no paradox here. Yes, the rubrics change over time, making morality relative, but the motivation (empathy) remains constant, meaning you can evaluate morality in absolute terms.
A simple analog can be found in chess, an old game that’s fairly well-defined and well-understood compared to ethics. Beginners in chess are sometimes confused when they hear masters evaluate moves using absolute terms — e.g. “this move is more accurate than that move.
Doesn’t that suggest a known optimum — i.e., the most accurate move? Of course it does, but we can’t actually know for sure what move is best until the game is near its end, because finding it is hard. Otherwise the “most accurate” move is never anything more than an educated guess made by the winningest minds/software of the day.
As a result, modern analysis is especially good at picking apart historic games, because it’s only after seeing the better move that we can understand the weaknesses of the one we once thought was best.
Ethical absolutism is similarly retrospective. Every paradigm ever proposed has flaws, but we absolutely can evaluate all of them comparatively by how well their outcomes express empathy. Let the kids cook.
Hah! Cool to see Henry pop up on my feed. I knew this guy back when he was a grad student. And as somebody that also teaches ethics, he is dead on. Undergrads are not only believe all morality is relative and that this is necessary for tolerance and pluralism (it's not), but are also insanely judgmental if something contradicts their basic sense of morality.
Turns out, ordinary people's metaethics are highly irrational.
Can both points not be true? There will be local morals and social morals that differ from place to place with overarching morals that tend to be everywhere.
Not all morals or beliefs have to be unshakable or viewed as morally reprehensible for disagreement.
Unless they mean all their ethics are held that way in which case that's just the whole asshole in a different deck chair joke.
Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify/codify popular/common moral beliefs.
Even "murder is wrong" is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic "murder is wrong" stance.
Parallel: Teaching contemporary American literature to undergrads in 2019 was utterly bizarre because they hadn’t lived through 9/11. So much stuff went over their heads. There’s just a disconnect you’re always going to have because of lived experience and cultural changes. It’s your job, especially in a philosophy course, to orient them to differing schools of thought and go “oh, I didn’t think about it that way.” And correct them on Nietzsche, because they’re always fucking wrong about Nietzsche.
post-structuralism has done a lot to attack the basic idea that something like "right" and "wrong" even exist in the first place, outside of the mind of the observer.
I'm kinda pissed about that btw.
Honestly, those two points don't seem incompatible to me. For example:
Teaching the history of fashion to undergrads in 1985 is bizarre because:
- They insist that standards of dress are entirely relative. Being dressed decently is a cultural construct; some cultures wear hardly any clothing whatsoever and being nude is a completely normal, default way of presenting yourself.
- And yet when I walk into class with my dick and balls hanging out, they all get extremely offended and the coeds threaten to call the police.
(And yes I changed the year because I'm sick of so many of these issues being brought up as though "the kids these days" are the problem, when so often these are issues that have been around LITERALLY FOREVER.)
I'm not trying to dunk on this Henry Shelvin guy -- I'm certain that he knows a lot more about philosophy than me, and has more interesting thoughts about morals than I do. And I'm also not going to judge someone based on a tweet...aside from the obvious judgement that they are using Twitter, lol. But as far as takes go, this one kinda sucks.
*edit: I'll add that I hope this professor is taking this opportunity to explain what the difference is between morals being relative vs being subjective, which is an issue that has come up in this very thread. Especially since I bet a lot of his students have only heard the term "moral relativism" being used by religious conservatives who accuse you of being a moral relativist because you don't live by the Bible. I know that was definitely the case for me.
Witnessing people you believe to be moral now supporting genocide will create strange inconsistencies like that.
The misunderstanding I see here is in the definition of “subjective”.
Subjective is often used interchangeably with opinion. And people can certainly have different opinions.
But the subjective that is meant is that morals don’t exist without a subject, aka a mind to comprehend them.
A rock exists whether or not a mind perceives the rock. The rock is objective. It is a physical object.
The idea that it is wrong to harm someone for being different is subjective. It is an idea. A thought. The thought does not exist without a mind.
So yes. Morals are all subjective. Morals do not exist in the physical world. Morals are not objects, they do not objectively exist. They exist within a subject. Morals subjectively exist.
That does not mean that any set of morals is okay because it’s just an opinion, bro. Because it’s not just an opinion. Those subjective values effect objective reality.
Good! In a culture that worships cops and "thought leaders", this is two steps up from meekly accepting whatever powerful people say.
Now it's time for:
(3) Acting on your ethical convictions towards specific goals, and learning to work with people who share them, even when their motivations or values are different.P.S. As others here have stated, (1) and (2) are not contradictory. If morality is constructed, then we all construct our own. Unless you actually WANT to be an amoral bastard.
I don't know, I might intellectually understand that morals are relative to a culture and that even our concept of universal human rights is an heritage of our colonial past and, on some level, trying to push our own values as the only morality that can exist. On a gut level though, I am entirely unable to consider that LGBT rights, gender equality or non-discrimination aren't inherently moral.
I don't think holding these two beliefs is weird, it's a natural contradiction worth debating and that's what I would expect from an ethics teacher
This is basically how teaching secular ethics always is, though. Doesn't seem special about 2025. People will always be overconfident in their beliefs, but it's not necessarily a coincidence or even hypocrisy that they can hold both views at the same time.
You can believe that morality is a social construct while simultaneously advocating for society to construct better morals. Morality can be relative and opposing views on morality can still be perceived as monstrous relative to the audience's morality.
Subjective morality is self evidently true, but that gives us no information about how to live our lives, so we must live as if absolute morality is true.
We only have our own perspective. Someone else's subjective morality is meaningless to us, we aren't them.
Everything in moderating or something. I'm not an ear doctor
For the people not getting it:
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They treat morals as opinions.
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They also treat their personal opinions like they're the absolute best opinion.
Another way:
They think everyone likes different ice cream flavors and that's fine. They like Rocky Road flavor. They also think anyone who doesn't is a monster.
Convictions are one thing. But they need to be logically consistent. Saying morality is subjective but you're evil if you don't subscribe to my personal version is illogical.
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Now that is funny. Its funny because its true.
Excuse me I was told that anyone who says "people view disagreement as moral monstrosity" is actually a nazi.
I'm not quite following. From my recollection meta ethics deal with the origins of morality, with absolutism being that morality is as inherent to nature as, say, gravity is, and relativism that morality is a social construct we have made up.
Is it hypocrisy to acknowledge something is a social construct while also strongly believing in it?
If I grew up in the 1400s I'd probably hold beliefs more aligned with the values of the time. I prefer modern values because I grew up in modern society. I find these values superior but also acknowledge my reason for finding them superior ultimately boils down to the sheer random chance of when and where I was born.
