I know that's my opinion, hence me mentioning its subjectivity. You mistake Objectivism for majority approval, when it is not. Objectivism is universal Logos. I'm not arguing about opinionation, I'm arguing about the terms you are using. It's impossible to objectively say one is better than the other morally or emotionally (but you can in terms of logical efficiency and reasoning), it is entirely possible to subjectively say one is better than the other.
First, I do not think objectivism has anything to do with majority opinion. I am saying that fundamentally it has to do with biology. Even if no one on Earth believed in objective morality, even if every single person had different opinions about how they like things to be, there is one common denominator: that they have preference at all.
It’s true whether or not you believe it. It’s true whether or not you have the right answers. People prefer. There is good and bad, inescapably. They aren’t just mental constructs, either. They are physiological states. Pleasure and pain occur in animals, who have no ability to conceptualize.
The fact alone that this dichotomy exists is the basis for morality. In no situation is it actually an opinion what brings about positive feelings in a person and what brings about negative feelings in a person. Exact actions have exact effects – they make us feel good or bad. Hitler decreased the amount of wellbeing in the world, and this could be an objective, quantifiable fact if we knew enough about how to measure people’s happiness – but it can be done and we are beginning to develop ways, especially with our enhanced knowledge and mapping/imaging of the brain.
Good and Bad only exist subjectively. Everyone likes feeling good, but good is a matter of opinion. Morality is subjective. Emotions are subjective. Opinions are the core of subjection.
There is no good or bad. There are only facts. What we do with those facts determines whether or not something is "good" or "bad".
If good and bad only exist subjectively, the same could be said of any object. But good and bad have physical manifestations. You can measure someone’s sense of wellbeing, just like you can measure the weight of an apple or its diameter.
Not sure what you mean when you say ‘good is a matter of opinion.’ Do you mean ‘what is considered good is a matter of opinion’? Because if that is the case, it still doesn’t get rid of right and wrong – it just gives different sets of circumstances for the same rules to apply within. If Bob gets physically ill at the sight of red and Alice has orgasms when she sees it, it is morally wrong to show Bob red without some reason for doing so that outweighs the pain he will feel. Basically it amounts to torture.
What else could morality possibly mean? Morality is “doing good.†If you show Alice red, she has orgasms, which she considers good. If you find Alice starving and dying of thirst on the side of the road, you have a choice between turning Alice into a slave or giving her help. The difference is clear; on one hand you will cause her much quantifiable suffering and illbeing, on the other you will make her happy, in a similarly quantifiable way. It’s not just someone’s opinion of whether or not you have done good – you literally, objectively have increased wellbeing.
lol, alrighty then. Good debate by the way. I'm going to go check out that thread now.
I appreciate it as well. Certainly better than gender wars.
I didn't say worth defending. A random person might just oppose Hitler because it disrupted his routine and not really care about the ethical issues.
Someone who defends something finds it worth defending, by definition. Well, then what is valuable about it? Does the person’s routine bring him wellbeing? There’s 2 levels to this. The first level IS his opinion. He likes his routine. The second level is the fact that BECAUSE he likes his routine, it is valuable. Objectively. By the only possible metric – how it makes him feel, what happiness it brings him. So, because he subjectively values something, it becomes objectively wrong to disrupt that or withhold it from him without some reason whose benefits outweigh that cost. Hitler is going to cause this person suffering if he disrupts his routine – that is a fact.
Perhaps you could point to bad in the environment for me. Also, rocks don't know good and evil because rocks don't have brains - good and evil are merely creations of the human mind. Good and evil don't exist IRL. Hitler, as you might have it, is someone whom everyone should feel was evil…except not everyone did feel that way; hence the Nazi party. There are still neo-Nazis who feel perfectly justified in their political stance.
There is no IRL, either then. IRL is also, equally a creation of the human mind. This is what the paper I posted earlier in the thread was talking about. Reality seems to be mind-dependent. If good and evil exist in our minds, they exist. People suffering isn’t just some concept. People really suffer, it is real. Those who spent years in concentration camps suffered immensely. That is inherently bad, because reality is mind-dependent and we don’t like to suffer, by definition.