If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and manipulation.
I await with arms crossed all the lost souls arguing it's subjective.
In case you are going to make an argument about how happiness or some related factor objectively determines success, let me head that off. Altman thinks that power rather than happiness determines success, and is also a human being. Why objectively is his opinion wrong and yours right? Both of your definitions just look like people's opinions to me.
Was not going to argue happiness at all. In fact, happiness seems a very hedonistic and selfish way to measure it too.
My position is more mother goose-like. We simply have basic morals that we teach children but don't apply to ourselves. Be honest. Be generous. Be fair. Be strong. Don't be greedy. Be humble.
That these are objectively moral is unprovable but true.
It's religious and stoic in nature.
It's anathema to HN, I know.
That... is actually a pretty interesting argument. I have to admit that if an objective morality existed floating in the Aether, there would be no way to logically prove or disprove that one's beliefs matched it.
Since I can't argue it logically, let me make an emotional appeal by explaining how my beliefs are tied to my life:
I chose to be a utilitarian when I was 12 or so, though I didn't know it had that name yet. The reason I chose this is that I wanted my beliefs to be consistent and kind. Utilitarianism has only one basic rule, so it can't really conflict with itself. Kindness wise, you can technically weigh others however you like, but I think most utilitarians just assume that all people have equal worth.
This choice means that I doubted that my emotions captured any truth about morality. Over the years, my emotions did further effect my beliefs. For instance, I tweaked the rules to avoid "Tyranny of the Majority" type things. However, my beliefs also changed my emotions. One fruit of this is that I started to mediate conflicts more often instead of choosing a side. Sometimes it does make more sense to choose a side, but often people will all behave well if you just hear them out. Another fruit of these beliefs is that rather than thinking of things in terms of "good" or "bad", I now tend to compare states of the world as being better or worse than each other. This means that no matter how little capacity I have, I can still get myself to make things a little better for others.
All this to say, I feel like deciding to doubt my own feelings very much did what young me wanted it to do. I wouldn't be able to grow as a person if I thought I was right in the beginning.
I'd be interested to hear how you came to your beliefs. Given how firmly you've argued in this thread, it sounds like you probably have a story behind your beliefs too.
I dunno if you have kids, but for me, main thing is having kids. It does a lot of things to your psyche, both suddenly and over a long period of time.
It's the first time you would truly take a bullet for someone, no questions asked. It tells you how much you know on an instinctual level. It forces you to define what behavior you will punish vs what you will reward. It expands your time horizons- suddenly I care very much how the world will be after I'm gone. It makes you read more mother goose books too. They all say the same things, even in different languages. It's actually crazy we debate morals at all.
I don't have kids, it does make a lot of sense that that would affect a person's psyche. The bit about having to define what behavior is good or bad seems to me like you are working out your beliefs through others, which seems like a reasonable way to do things since you get to have an outside perspective on the effects of what you are internalizing.
About debating morality though. That's exactly where principles become needed. It's great to say that we should be kind, but who are we kind to? It can't always be everyone at the same time. To bring things back to the trolley problem, I may save my mom, but it really is super unfair to the 20 people on the other track. This sort of thing is exactly why people consider nepotism to be wrong
""Healthy family relationships and rich circle of diverse friends" is an objectively better definition than "Money and companies with high stock prices""
Pretty broad principles we're comparing there.
When you get into specific cases, that's where you really need the debate and often there's no right answer, depending on the case. This is why we want judges who have a strong moral compass.
These values are bundled up in a person and they should even counterbalance each other. "Be Kind" should be balanced with "Be Strong". "Be Generous" should be balanced with "Be thrifty" and so on. The combination of these things is what we mean when we say someone has a moral compass.
I would argue it's immoral in some sense to sacrifice your mother for 5 other strangers. But these are fantasy cases that almost never happen.
A more realistic scenario is self defense or war.
None of these things are arguable in the abstract. When you're confronted with a case where you sacrifice one, it's always for the sake of another.
I'm assuming you aren't familiar with these terms and so am defining them. Forgive me if you already were familiar.
Consequentialists think that the purpose of morality is to prevent "bad" consequences from happening. From a consequentialist perspective, one can very much argue about what makes a consequence "bad", and it makes a lot of sense to do so if we are trying to improve the human condition. Furthermore, I think consequentialists tend to care more about making their systems consistent, mainly so they are fair. As a side effect though, no principles have to be sacrificed when making a concrete decision, since none of them conflict. (That's what it means for a system to be consistent)
Virtue ethicists think that the purpose of morality is to be a "good" person. I think you are correct that it's pretty hard to define what a "good" person is. There are also many different types of "good" people. Even if you had such a person with consistent principles, if you try and stuff everyones "good" principles into them, they would become inconsistent. It's hard for me to tell exactly what the point of being "good" is supposed to be if it is not connected to the consequences of one's actions, in which case one would just be a consequentialist, However, if the point was to improve the human condition, then I think it would take a lot of different types of "good" people, so it doesn't try and make sense to argue our way into choosing one of them.
This isn't really an argument for a position as much as me trying to figure out where we disagree. Does that all sound correct to you?