Is it actually? As far as I'm aware, it doesn't really make any statements that anything is moral or immoral, nor is it a framework that could be used to determine such things by itself, more so a statement on the validity of such things. Or in other word, is it really a moral thesis, or is it a thesis about moral thesis?
40Yeah I don't understand the point the meme is trying to make
13You're on the right track here. It's a metaethical claim, not a moral one.
12You could argue that moral relativism is a metaethical thesis and so is not straight away self-defeating. Even so, moral relativists often go on to claim that we shouldn't judge the moral acts of other cultures based on what we take to be universal moral standards. Because, get this, it would be wrong to do so.
11Is it that it's wrong or simply that it lacks proper context? Like if you're going to judge a culture you should learn the culture that seems obvious even without the arguments about morality
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This just in: Literally everything in life is made up as we go along.
34Except table manners. Those are dictated by the Universe itself!
12Read somewhere that the elbows thing comes from the days where tables were just planks of wood sitting on something. Your elbows would tip the board over so it was a dick move to knock everyone's food over. Anyway idk if it's true but it's a neat idea
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Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die.
Come watch TV?
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I'm pretty sure "moral relativism" is in the realm of metaethics and not ethics. There's a distinction between making a claim about morality and making a claim about how moral claims are made.
8Does it really play ball in the context of metaethics?
I'll define morality and ethics as a normative system (operating on different levels of abstraction, with different targets as their focus, but maintaining the same kind of interaction) emergent from imperfect information transmission between any two points in space-time, i.e. the same body at t=n, t=m; or two different bodies at the same time (just to account for quantum stuff) which occur at level of complex life. I'll say life is any system with the capacity to maintain or decrease entropy (Schrödinger is where I first saw this) for some period of time, and intelligent life meets some threshold for delay or non-direct determinants of information from outside the continuous body to manipulate its environment to a lower entropy state, one which does not as of yet have the same quality of decreasing or maintaining entropy as the intelligent lifeform does.
In this case, metaethics is a distinction in the realm of a type of interactions yet still a part of them. It's like one pizza, you can cut it in half and say you have a left half and right each belonging to the meta and non-meta partitions. Or you can say that what we regularly refer to as morals or ethics is simply the toppings, metaethics is the dough which is frankly too frequently ignored in discussions of ethics and pizza-quality. The dough similarly provides the framework or support for the toppings, without which you would have a spread out cheesy and saucy salad (if veggies are a topping, otherwise you have what I make in the middle of the night when I don't want the microwave to sound off to warm up food that would fill me up) which couldn't be characterized as pizza.
Sorry I think I changed topic there, I hope some of the point comes across.
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Well, this one seems to be going over better than your last philosophy meme.
I appreciated both of them, by the way.
6Thanks, I appreciate the sentiment. I'm still going to take a pause on the philosophy memes as I literally can't stop myself from arguing in the comments and I should be working lol
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That same One Weird Trick has been used to academically shoot down logical positivism as well.
The idea that only matter exists and that only things that can be measured in a laboratory environment exist in a meaningful way (concepts don't real) is itself an idea that can not be measured in a laboratory environment.
4At least the logical positivists where philosophically rigorous enough to drop the view when they realized it's untenable.
2Academically, yes. Logical positivism persisted and had an unofficial resurgence among the "academia is bunk" junk/pop science crowd. I saw it pop up, by name, more than a few times on
in years past.2
My main takeaway from philosophy is that I hate philosophy and mostly just want to wing it. So much hair splitting
2Is it not?
1I've never heard a rational defense of moral relativism that made any sense. If there are no moral truths, then serial killers have done nothing wrong for example. If a moral relativist admits that there are some moral truths, then moral relativism is completely indefensible. At that point, you're just arguing over what is and what is not a moral truth.
-2How about the fact that all morals are made up and therefore obviously relative to those who made them up? There may be instinctual preference on many, but that doesn't make it a universal rule.
13The fact the morality was invented makes it synthetic but not necessarily relative. Numbers are also "made up".
Its possible that moral truths are objective but our interpretation of these objective truths is imperfect and therefore seems relative.
To use another commenters example, the fact that killing is not morally blameworthy in some cases doesn't mean that an absolute moral truth doesn't exist but just that our concept of killing is just too broad to express it.
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Universal moral truths. Like absolutes. We can say killing is bad, but many would say killing a mass murderer currently on a murder spree would be more moral than letting them kill a bunch of people.
8There’s a fundamental misunderstanding here that seems suspiciously like a bad faith argument.
6Just because there aren't moral truths doesn't mean a serial killer did nothing wrong. You seem to be stuck on finding a single contradiction and using that to dismiss everything else related as irrelevant. That's not actually how the world works.
Similarly in physics, the existence of non-newtonian fluids, doesn't invalidate Newton's work in fluid dynamics.
5If there are no moral truths, then serial killers have done nothing wrong for example.
This is a sort of circular argument, it's premised on the notion that serial killers have done something objectively wrong.
If you start with the notion that some things are objectively wrong, then of course you'll come to the conclusion that objective morality exists, because it's one of the assumptions you started with.
3It all starts with defining what morality means. The way I would define morality is behaviors that maximize flourishing for sentient creatures and minimize suffering. While it is clearly difficult to quantify flourishing and suffering, there are behaviors that clearly cause suffering in this world and impede the opportunity for flourishing and, by the above definition of morality, are plainly immoral. The way I see it, rejecting the possibility that flourishing and suffering can be quantified at all is the only argument that can be made against moral absolutism. Everything else is just quibbling over relevant variables across the spectrum of available behaviors to determine what makes them more or less moral. There is always a behavior that is objectively the more moral choice, but it might be difficult in practice to determine which is the more moral choice due to a lack of available relevant data. The absence of said data shouldn't be assumed to be because it doesn't/can't exist, but rather that it hasn't been collected. Rejecting the idea that there is always a more moral behavior amongst several choices is the dangerous assumption, imo.
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Sure, and how does your understanding contend with the concept of a serial killer of Nazis? Or a capitalist?
1If there are no moral truths, then serial killers have done nothing wrong for example
This does not follow from moral relativism. Moral relativism simply states the morality of serial killers is determined by people rather than an absolute truth.
For example, if you add the detail of “serial killer of humans”, most societies would deem that morally wrong. In contrast, “serial killer of wasps” would be considered perfectly fine by many. A moral relativist would say the difference between these two is determined by society.
You can, of course, claim that murdering humans is not morally wrong. A moral absolutist might say “you’re wrong because X”, while a moral relativist might say “I don’t agree because X”.
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