WJM challenges the moral subjectivists:
I challenge CF and zeroseven to explain, from logically consistent moral subjectivism, how any of their moral views do not depend entirely upon personal preference, and how that principle cannot be used to make anything moral – even cruelty.
Clown Fish rises to the challenge:
Morals, regardless of their origin, span the gamut from deeply entrenched to weakly held. I assume that you would agree with this. It was “beat” into me from an early age by my parents that I must hold the door open for women and the elderly. I think that you would agree that this is not an objective moral value, yet I feel very uncomfortable if I don’t get to a door fast enough when a woman or an older person is entering a building. Is this a personal preference on the same level as ice cream flavours or music. Of course not. No more so than my revulsion when I hear racially charged language, which is also the result of my parents “beating” that value into me. So, if you persist in making the false claim that subjective morality is no more than personal preference, then you have no idea what subjective morality is.
Fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. WJM challenges Clown Fish to demonstrate that under his premises, anything can be made to be moral, even cruelty. Clown Fish responds by saying that his morality is based on the conditioning that his parents imposed on him. Which demonstrates WJM’s point. If Clown Fish’s parents had conditioned him to hate Jews, then under Clown Fish’s reasoning Jew-hating would be moral for him.
I use the Jew-hating example, because some Islamic parents do in fact make a concerted effort to condition their children to hate Jews. Under Clown Fish’s reasoning, when those children wind up hating Jews as a result of their parents’ conditioning, their Jew-hatred is entirely moral. In fact, CF reasoning leads to this conclusion: The more powerful their hatred for the Jews, the more moral it is.
Also, notice this gem: “Is this [i.e., holding doors open] a personal preference on the same level as ice cream flavours or music”? Well, I presume by this statement that CF means to show that his personal preference for door holding is felt more strongly than his personal preference for ice cream or music, and therefore the former is in a different category from the latter. Well, yes they are in different categories CF. One is in the category “strongly held personal preference.” The other is in the category “weakly held personal preference.”
Wait a minute though. While in one sense, they are in different categories, in a more important sense — and the only relevant sense in responding to WJM’s challenge — they are in exactly the same category. It does not seem to occur to CF that a strongly-held personal preference [door holding; racial dignity] is exactly the same as a weakly held personal preference. They are both personal preferences. Yet, somehow, CF believes he has rebutted WJM’s reasoning. Astounding.
Yep, CF showed WJM alright. He showed him that he is exactly right.