The idea that morality is objective if it comes from a deity is a mind projection fallacy. It can take two forms:
1) For the average person, assuming that if you think following God is a good idea, and God says it is a good idea, then it must objectively be a good idea. When prodded for details of how “God says it” turns into “it is objectively right,” you will find these people often have only vague and plainly incorrect ideas (“If you don’t you’ll go to hell” as if might makes right, “He created us” as if creators have complete moral authority over creations 100% of the time, etc.)
2) God is an all-powerful and omnipresent being, therefore, by magic, God’s subjective desires become objective desires.
Either God’s laws are good ideas in people’s heads or they’re good ideas in God’s head; neither makes them “objective,” and philosophers now accept that Divine Morality is a subjectivist theory of ethics.
Relatedly, the idea that something can be meaningful without a mind for it to be meaningful to. See William Lane Craig’s writings on Ultimate Meaning. Nothing can be meaningful to a rock. What many theists mean when they say God gives your life ultimate meaning is that it gives meaning subjective to God. Again, if you don’t care what God thinks—say you’re a paperclip maximizer and the only thing you care about is making paperclips—the heaven/hell endgame won’t be particularly meaningful to you.
Even in Goedel, Escher, Bach, when Hofstadter concludes that intrinsic meaning is possible in encoded messages, he downplays a bit the necessary caveat that he means it can only exist for minds like ours. If the universe had no minds, there would be no meaning.
The Labor Theory of Value is a mind projection fallacy. Value is something that can only exist in minds, and if everyone were to suddenly change their minds about that which is valuable, all the labor in the world used to produce a previously desired product wouldn’t mean a thing. Marxists recognize this, which is why they talk about “socially necessary labor-time,” a self-defeating addendum if there ever was one.
I know this isn’t typically a theology forum, but since we’re here.....
The counter-argument to this is that if there is an objective morality, then you could reasonably expect that an all-knowing God would know what it was. So when God (you believe) gives laws and tells you they apply universally, you might reasonably think they were objective, without necessarily knowing why.
Having said THAT, I’ve seen some theology textbooks that state that God has absolute freedom to make morality whatever he says it is, and if that’s not subjective I don’t know what is.
There is of course the argument that deities are mind projection fallacies in their entirety....
I’m also not sure about the idea that you need a mind in order to have meaning. If you make a robot that prefers to crawl towards lights to recharge itself through its solar panels, you’re making something on a continuum of more and more sophisticated feeding creatures, topped (arguably) by ourselves, who think that food is good and starvation, bad. Where does meaning begin? Arguably when you begin processing information—something sophisticated enough to be called a mind is not necessary to get started.
Fair enough; I was intending exactly a broad and unsophisticated definition of mind. An information processing unit should be all that’s required. It does still put a damper in “universal meaning” or, in an argument I had with a theist a long time back, the idea that the rocks and the trees and “creation” in general “groaned” when Adam and Eve sinned—as if these objects could care about such a thing were they not possessed by pixies.
That having been said, the passage your friend was referring to (Romans 8 22) is basically saying that the difference between good and evil is a matter of life and death, not just for us, but for everything. And singularitarians around here tend to think something quite similar. One group think there is a good God, and the others are trying to make one....
I’ve seen some theology textbooks that state that God has absolute freedom to make morality whatever he says it is, and if that’s not subjective I don’t know what is.
Presumably, if God is omnipotent he has the power to transform something from being subjective to being objective. I mean, once you’re already breaking the rules of physics, the rules of logic aren’t too far away.
The Labor Theory of Value is a mind projection fallacy. Value is something that can only exist in minds, and if everyone were to suddenly change their minds about that which is valuable, all the labor in the world used to produce a previously desired product wouldn’t mean a thing. Marxists recognize this, which is why they talk about “socially necessary labor-time,” a self-defeating addendum if there ever was one.
Huge pet peeve: you’re eliding between separate concepts in Marxian political economy. “Use value” has the referent of what you’re calling “value;” while “value” simpliciter refers to SNLT. Of course if prior demand is a sufficiently poor estimator of future demand then LTV ceases to be a useful simplification of reality, but that’s an empirical question.
Value is something that can only exist in minds, and if everyone were to suddenly change their minds about that which is valuable, all the labor in the world used to produce a previously desired product wouldn’t mean a thing.
This is mostly an argument about definitions. If everyone’s minds were modified so that people would start valuing the eating of babies, there is still a clear sense in which it won’t become a right thing. If you are talking about that which most people value at any given time, then certainly it depends on what most people value at that time, and people’s minds are part of your definition that controls its meaning. If instead you form a fixed designator for whatever people currently value, it will still be pointing to the same thing if people in the future start valuing different things, and minds of future people won’t be involved in this definition and won’t control its meaning.
The idea that morality is objective if it comes from a deity is a mind projection fallacy. It can take two forms:
1) For the average person, assuming that if you think following God is a good idea, and God says it is a good idea, then it must objectively be a good idea. When prodded for details of how “God says it” turns into “it is objectively right,” you will find these people often have only vague and plainly incorrect ideas (“If you don’t you’ll go to hell” as if might makes right, “He created us” as if creators have complete moral authority over creations 100% of the time, etc.)
2) God is an all-powerful and omnipresent being, therefore, by magic, God’s subjective desires become objective desires.
Either God’s laws are good ideas in people’s heads or they’re good ideas in God’s head; neither makes them “objective,” and philosophers now accept that Divine Morality is a subjectivist theory of ethics.
Relatedly, the idea that something can be meaningful without a mind for it to be meaningful to. See William Lane Craig’s writings on Ultimate Meaning. Nothing can be meaningful to a rock. What many theists mean when they say God gives your life ultimate meaning is that it gives meaning subjective to God. Again, if you don’t care what God thinks—say you’re a paperclip maximizer and the only thing you care about is making paperclips—the heaven/hell endgame won’t be particularly meaningful to you.
Even in Goedel, Escher, Bach, when Hofstadter concludes that intrinsic meaning is possible in encoded messages, he downplays a bit the necessary caveat that he means it can only exist for minds like ours. If the universe had no minds, there would be no meaning.
The Labor Theory of Value is a mind projection fallacy. Value is something that can only exist in minds, and if everyone were to suddenly change their minds about that which is valuable, all the labor in the world used to produce a previously desired product wouldn’t mean a thing. Marxists recognize this, which is why they talk about “socially necessary labor-time,” a self-defeating addendum if there ever was one.
I know this isn’t typically a theology forum, but since we’re here.....
The counter-argument to this is that if there is an objective morality, then you could reasonably expect that an all-knowing God would know what it was. So when God (you believe) gives laws and tells you they apply universally, you might reasonably think they were objective, without necessarily knowing why.
Having said THAT, I’ve seen some theology textbooks that state that God has absolute freedom to make morality whatever he says it is, and if that’s not subjective I don’t know what is.
There is of course the argument that deities are mind projection fallacies in their entirety....
I’m also not sure about the idea that you need a mind in order to have meaning. If you make a robot that prefers to crawl towards lights to recharge itself through its solar panels, you’re making something on a continuum of more and more sophisticated feeding creatures, topped (arguably) by ourselves, who think that food is good and starvation, bad. Where does meaning begin? Arguably when you begin processing information—something sophisticated enough to be called a mind is not necessary to get started.
Fair enough; I was intending exactly a broad and unsophisticated definition of mind. An information processing unit should be all that’s required. It does still put a damper in “universal meaning” or, in an argument I had with a theist a long time back, the idea that the rocks and the trees and “creation” in general “groaned” when Adam and Eve sinned—as if these objects could care about such a thing were they not possessed by pixies.
Well, yes.....
That having been said, the passage your friend was referring to (Romans 8 22) is basically saying that the difference between good and evil is a matter of life and death, not just for us, but for everything. And singularitarians around here tend to think something quite similar. One group think there is a good God, and the others are trying to make one....
Presumably, if God is omnipotent he has the power to transform something from being subjective to being objective. I mean, once you’re already breaking the rules of physics, the rules of logic aren’t too far away.
Huge pet peeve: you’re eliding between separate concepts in Marxian political economy. “Use value” has the referent of what you’re calling “value;” while “value” simpliciter refers to SNLT. Of course if prior demand is a sufficiently poor estimator of future demand then LTV ceases to be a useful simplification of reality, but that’s an empirical question.
Hmm.
Oops!
This is mostly an argument about definitions. If everyone’s minds were modified so that people would start valuing the eating of babies, there is still a clear sense in which it won’t become a right thing. If you are talking about that which most people value at any given time, then certainly it depends on what most people value at that time, and people’s minds are part of your definition that controls its meaning. If instead you form a fixed designator for whatever people currently value, it will still be pointing to the same thing if people in the future start valuing different things, and minds of future people won’t be involved in this definition and won’t control its meaning.