Kids thinking anything goes while also being incredibly close-minded is not new.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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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.
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.
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.
Cancel culture today is out of control.
We used to have academic freedom. Now we just have sensitivity trainings and PANTS. SHACKLES OF THE MIND, I TELL YOU!
Well because we have indecent exposure laws. Hanging your dick and balls out in public is not relevant to cancel culture or fashion.
I've had people, presumably young, argue with me on here about politics and morals. For example, I say the right to abortion is a political issue. Been screamed out that it's not a political issue because a woman's right to an abortion is a moral issue. Yeah, I agree, but the argument is still political. Some believe abortion is murder and that they're right. That's politics.
It's like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics. "I'm on the right side of this thing so it's not politics!" As if I'm somehow lowering the debate to mere... something?
That was one of the first things I got confused by on lemmy. Am I making sense? Just crawled in from work and I'm wasted tired.
The owning class wants to be the only class doing politics. So they brainwash the proles into thinking politics is bad.
And making people believe preserving the status quo is not political but changing it is
It's also a health issue. It involves choices about life, not unlike someone in a coma or another situation where they are unable to make a conscious choice about whether to continue or deny treatment.
One argument in favor of abortion I recall reading was comparing it to donating an organ while you're still alive. You are under no obligation of donating anything, of risking your life to save another, even if you are literally the only person on Earth that can save the other. If medical professionals have to respect those choices, they should also respect the choice of mothers who decide to end an undesired pregnancy
But they are moral arguments, unless politics is added into the discussion. Let me give you a different example. If I believe people are entitled to the fruits of their labor then that's a moral point. If I believe the government should enforce everyone getting their fruits, that's political.
If I were to believe abortion is wrong then that can be a moral point. However if I think the government should take a stand on the matter, that's political.
The point they were trying to make (I believe, and this specific argument) is that the entire basis of the opposing argument is entirely based on religion and pretty much by definition specious. There is no sky daddy looking over your shoulder, and this any morality you base on its existence is inheritetly flawed at best.
What there is are women who need timely access to medical care or their lives are at risk. This is a tangible and real threat.
So treating the issue as "Politics" only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
So treating the issue as "Politics" only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
Your earlier paragraphs don't provide any evidence for this point.
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.
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.
viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity
This should be the slogan of public social media.
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.
in fact, that "murder is wrong" in in fact not a universally held belief. 20 billion animals wait solely sothat we can murder them eventually to consume their physical remains.
i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.
Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.
If you were to switch out "murder" for "killing" the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.
Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.
Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.
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People have been arguing about whether morality is subjective, and writing dissertations about that subject, for thousands of years. Is any of us really familiar enough with that very detailed debate to render a judgment like "morality is subjective" as though it's an obvious fact? Does anybody who just flatly says morality is subjective understand just how complex metaethics is?
https://images.app.goo.gl/fBQbi2J5osxuFmvt7
I think "morality is subjective" is just something we hear apparently worldly people say all the time, and nobody really has any idea.
By the way, I have a PhD in ethics and wrote my dissertation on the objectivity/subjectivity of ethics. Long story short, we don't know shit!
"Morality is subjective" is the inevitable conclusion of a secular, empiricalistic worldview.
Essentially, now that we are in a scientific world disagreement is resolved through experiment.
Disagreement not resolvable through experiment is removed from the realm of science, and is called falsifiable and is seen as subjective.
If you and I disagree, there are no scientific tests we can run to resolve moral issues.
And since we can't point to a God or objective moral laws, it doesn't even matter if one theoretically exists because it's inaccessible and infalsifiable. Effectively it doesn't exist for us.
Both of us are following different moral standards, the "rules" in your head are not the same rules that I'm subjective to.
You're morals are subjective to your experience, it simply is a fact.
My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There's no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don't believe that's possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
How do you overcome the is-ought problem?
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic. this is a big ol nothing-burger of a refutation, it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
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Yet you, and every other human still engage in moral behaviors. You have some prescriptive intuition buried deep inside you. The ability to describe the components, inputs and outputs of that intuition is the entire conversation.
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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.
Gesundheit!
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