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Moral Subjectivism = Nazis Were Doing Good and We Shouldn’t Have Stopped Them

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Under moral subjectivism, good and bad are entirely subjective commodities.  This means that if I think a thing is right, it is as right as is possible for moral right to exist.  The principle of subjective morality authorizes an act as “morally good” if the person that performed the act believed it to be the right thing to do; that is the only framework available to moral subjectivism for an evaluation of “moral” and “immoral”.  It is strictly a relationship between the actor/believer and the act.
Therefore, as long as Hitler believed his actions right, and those who carried out his orders believed similarly, then to the full extent that the principle of moral subjectivism has to authorize anything as “moral” or “good”,  the holocaust was a good and moral event, and moral subjectivists must (rationally speaking) admit this. (I doubt they will, though.)

The way that moral relativists attempt to wiggle out of this is by saying that in their opinion, Hitler was behaving immorally.  Unfortunately, they have no rational basis for making this statement. It is a category error, a non-sequitur under moral subjectivism, offered as if there was some means by which to pass judgement on what others consider to be right.  Their principle necessarily endorses the actions of the Nazis as morally good as long as they (the Nazis) believed what they were doing was right; what anyone else thought or thinks is entirely irrelevant.  The most that the principle of moral subjectivism logically allows subjectivists to say is that gassing the Jews would not be morally good for them personally to do, but that it was morally good for the Nazis to do.

Furthermore, since the principle of moral subjectivism offers no valid reason to intervene in the moral affairs of others (since it is entirely subjective and there is no objective obligation or authority to do so), and since moral relativists must admit that nothing morally wrong was occurring in the first place (in fact, only moral good was likely happening, since the Nazis believed what they were doing was right), they must hold that we should not have interfered with the Nazis.

Thus, moral subjectivism necessary means that the Nazis were doing good and we shouldn’t have stopped them.

Comments
Mapou: “We need a solid definition of good and bad.” Sez who? Alan Fox: “Consensus and experience are worth more than dogma.” Sez who? Graham2: “So I can kill anyone!” Who sez you can’t? Graham2, you are especially hypocritical, blithering on as you do about killing children when you are the one who insists that the killing of children is ultimately meaningless and that when you say it is “wrong” to kill a child all you mean is that it is your personal preference not to kill children, but you can think no reason other than your personal preference to refrain from doing so.Barry Arrington
November 17, 2013
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And yet I cannot think of, and am fairly certain WJM could not identify, any people who actually hold the belief that he claims is a necessary consequence of moral relativism. Your spiteful attack is wishful thinking, not fact.
The fact that self-proclaimed moral relativists rarely hold the beliefs that are the inescapable logical consequence of their premises, and rarely act as if moral relativism is true, only serves to demonstrate their hypocrisy and irrationality. It doesn't turn my logical argument into "wishful thinking".William J Murray
November 17, 2013
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VK: I think you are confusing 'is' and 'ought' (BA77, where are you when we need you?) Just because you dont like the consequences, doesnt make it so. Gravity does all sorts of nasty things to us, but it doesnt mean gravity is fictitious.Graham2
November 17, 2013
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mapou and vikingmom, Wishing there were a universal absolute code of ethics will not make it so. The UN charter on human rights is a more pragmatic approach, subjective but definitely not arbitrary.Alan Fox
November 17, 2013
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Thinking again the 1970s movie "Cabaret". It's Germany...in the early 30's just before the Nazis took control. The Cabaret, with its always grotesque women performers, represents the post WW1 audience...cast adrift morally...Nothing matters...except to indulge oneself. Those who are morally adrift...face another danger. The self assured...those who have grabbed ahold of some belief system might devour those morally adrift. By the film's end, the Nazis have taken over..."Cabaret" is definitely not a family film, but you can catch it late at nite (or watch it online when the kids are in bed). Those morally adrift...can be manipulated, bullied, even seduced...or enslaved...by those with a strong agenda. My comments do not "prove" there are moral absolutes. But the stakes are HIGH for people who so blithely discard moral absolutes. Those proclaiming "no moral absolutes" have cut their moral anchor...they are boats adrift...and the ideological UBoats - like the incredibly potent WW2 Wolfpacks...powered by people with a strong, seductive agenda--(such as the Nazis offered) could well seduce or sink those in their little cast-adrift boats of "self determination". Which also explains...why some students, others latch onto a charismatic charmer like Dawkins. They are seduced into believing he is truly an honest truthseeker...which apparently he is not.vikingmom
November 17, 2013
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And Craigs justification ? So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? ... Not the children, for they inherit eternal life So I can kill anyone! I think Im getting the hang of this.Graham2
November 17, 2013
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Lane Craig thinks its OK to kill children ... it hastens their journey to heaven or some such nonsense. Is this the great morality-in-the-sky at work ?Graham2
November 17, 2013
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And yet I cannot think of, and am fairly certain WJM could not identify, any people who actually hold the belief that he claims is a necessary consequence of moral relativism. Your spiteful attack is wishful thinking, not fact.Pro Hac Vice
November 17, 2013
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Alan Fox:
Why should the fact people make up and agree moral standards make it arbitrary.
Are you kidding me? Different groups of people will agree on different standards of morality. This is precisely why it's subjective and arbitrary. The mafia, too, have their own standard of morality. There has to be an objective standard. I propose that the standard is unity: a house divided will fall. Morality is self-correcting, in my opinion. The conservation of unity is a spiritual law. You can call it karma, if you wish. It stipulates that every violation of the law will eventually be corrected. In other words, every debt will be repaid sooner or later. This is a firm doctrine in both Christian and Eastern religions. There is no getting around it.Mapou
November 17, 2013
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There has to be a standard and the standard cannot be arbitrary.
Why should the fact people make up and agree moral standards make it arbitrary. Consensus and experience are worth more than dogma.Alan Fox
November 17, 2013
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There is only subjective morality, William, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself you can reason to one. Sorry about that.Alan Fox
November 17, 2013
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We need a solid definition of good and bad. Christians and others insist that there is no good without God or that we are born with an intuitive understanding of good and evil. But that is not a definition, sorry. There has to be a standard and the standard cannot be arbitrary.Mapou
November 17, 2013
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From Phillip Johnson’s Nihilism and the End of Law :
Yale Law Professor Arthur Leff expressed the bewilderment of an agnostic culture that yearns for enduring values in a brilliant lecture delivered at Duke University in 1979, a few years before his untimely death from cancer. The published lecture—titled “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law”—is frequently quoted in law review articles, but it is little known outside the world of legal scholarship. It happens to be one of the best statements of the modernist impasse that I know. As Leff put it,
I want to believe—and so do you—in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe—and so do you—in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.
The heart of the problem, according to Leff, is that any normative statement implies the existence of an authoritative evaluator. But with God out of the picture, every human becomes a “godlet”—with as much authority to set standards as any other godlet or combination of godlets. For example, if a human moralist says “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” he invites “the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as ‘the grand sez who?'“ Persons who want to commit adultery, or who sympathize with those who do, can offer the crushing rejoinder: What gives you the authority to prescribe what is good for me? As Leff explained,
Putting it that way makes clear that if we are looking for an evaluation, we must actually be looking for an evaluator: some machine for the generation of judgments on states of affairs. If the evaluation is to be beyond question, then the evaluator and its evaluative processes must be similarly insulated. If it is to fulfill its role, the evaluator must be the unjudged judge, the unruled legislator, the premise maker who rests on no premises, the uncreated creator of values. . . . We are never going to get anywhere (assuming for the moment that there is somewhere to get) in ethical or legal theory unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist's words, there is no one like unto the Lord. . . . The so-called death of God turns out not to have been just His funeral; it also seems to have effected the total elimination of any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal system dependent upon finally authoritative, extrasystematic premises.
. . . Here is how he concluded his 1979 lecture:
All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked. Buying and selling each other is depraved. Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot—and General Custer too—have earned salvation. Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned. There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now:] Sez who?
God help us.
Barry Arrington
November 17, 2013
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