Ok, so if someone else just decides your life isn’t of value, then that’s OK since your moral worth is subjective? Am I understanding your argument properly?
It’s not okay for someone to hurt me to me in my subjective moral opinion.
If a lion attacks a human, I don’t view it as a moral failing on the part of the lion. It’s still an affront to how we order the importance of creatures, so we’ll destroy the lion because it poses a threat to something we view as more important than it, and so much more important than it’s not worth the risk of trying other options and letting them fail, usually.
Socially, we expect humans to have a baseline of shared values necessary for society to function. Social contract and all that. If someone behaves in a fashion outside that baseline, they either share the values and chose to transgress, or they don’t share the values and have no issue with what they’re doing. In either case the people who share that baseline inevitably seek some method of protecting themselves from this person.
Acknowledging that what we value is subjective does not obligate us to value what others value, or to ignore when they act contrary to ours.
Like I said above: in a fire I’ll rescue my child before I rescue a stranger or a chicken. Likewise, I don’t expect the stranger to rescue my child before their own, but I do expect them to rescue mine before the chicken.
Some values are more subjective than others, though. Especially when it comes to matters like aesthetics. We might disagree on whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza, for example, but when it comes to our own lives having value, it’s nearly universal that our own lives have at least some value to ourselves.
The universality of those values are the basis of that social contract.
If society were to one day just decide that a certain class of people were less valuable for a superficial reaaon, let’s say because they have red hair, for example, is it not possible that that decision could be an objectively bad thing?
It’s not objective at all. We are still fully entitled to feel outrage at it, but that doesn’t make it not a subjective judgement. You can’t measure morality with a tool, and if two people disagree on a moral question there’s no impartial test or metric you can use to decide the matter.
If the earth is destroyed in a calamity, the universe will not weep for our loss. It will just be another thing in the big list of things that have happened.
A value or belief doesn’t need to be objective to be valid, and a belief being subjectively true is functionally identical to objective truth, as far as the believer goes.
Ok, so if someone else just decides your life isn’t of value, then that’s OK since your moral worth is subjective? Am I understanding your argument properly?
value judgements can’t be objectively correct. you’re allowed to arrange your values how ever you like.
I’m fairly confident you are not.
It’s not okay for someone to hurt me to me in my subjective moral opinion.
If a lion attacks a human, I don’t view it as a moral failing on the part of the lion. It’s still an affront to how we order the importance of creatures, so we’ll destroy the lion because it poses a threat to something we view as more important than it, and so much more important than it’s not worth the risk of trying other options and letting them fail, usually.
Socially, we expect humans to have a baseline of shared values necessary for society to function. Social contract and all that. If someone behaves in a fashion outside that baseline, they either share the values and chose to transgress, or they don’t share the values and have no issue with what they’re doing. In either case the people who share that baseline inevitably seek some method of protecting themselves from this person.
Acknowledging that what we value is subjective does not obligate us to value what others value, or to ignore when they act contrary to ours.
Like I said above: in a fire I’ll rescue my child before I rescue a stranger or a chicken. Likewise, I don’t expect the stranger to rescue my child before their own, but I do expect them to rescue mine before the chicken.
Some values are more subjective than others, though. Especially when it comes to matters like aesthetics. We might disagree on whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza, for example, but when it comes to our own lives having value, it’s nearly universal that our own lives have at least some value to ourselves.
The universality of those values are the basis of that social contract.
If society were to one day just decide that a certain class of people were less valuable for a superficial reaaon, let’s say because they have red hair, for example, is it not possible that that decision could be an objectively bad thing?
It’s not objective at all. We are still fully entitled to feel outrage at it, but that doesn’t make it not a subjective judgement. You can’t measure morality with a tool, and if two people disagree on a moral question there’s no impartial test or metric you can use to decide the matter.
If the earth is destroyed in a calamity, the universe will not weep for our loss. It will just be another thing in the big list of things that have happened.
A value or belief doesn’t need to be objective to be valid, and a belief being subjectively true is functionally identical to objective truth, as far as the believer goes.