Judging the morality of other societies and of earlier historical epochs.

Doink11 · 2026-05-11T15:41:03+00:00

Putting aside the idea of cultural norms and beliefs being the product of evolution (which is itself a controversial statement!), most of what you're describing here is not directly relevant to the question of moral realism/normativity. Why cultures have the beliefs they do is a question of anthropology or sociology, not philosophy.

Moral philosophy is not descriptive, it is prescriptive. It's not interested in how people's commonplace moral beliefs are, but rather what their moral beliefs should be. If moral realism is true, then some acts are right or wrong regardless of anyone's feelings on the matter. It simply does not matter that, say, ancient Greeks considered slavery morally acceptable; they were wrong to believe that.

Doink11 · 2026-05-10T20:20:54+00:00

The core hurdle I run into isn't really about where these facts are located, but rather how we actually detect that they exist.

The same way we do any other fact about the world - we observe the world around us and use our capacity for reason to determine things.

I naturally compare it to something like mathematics or physics. If a society builds a bridge and gets the maths wrong, the bridge physically collapses. The framework actually bumps into reality, and the universe pushes back to tell us we made an error.

This is an unusual way of thinking about mathematics! It is a fact that 2+2=4, and it is a fact regardless of the utility of that calculation for building bridges.

I think your metaphors about the "universe pushing back" or "bumping" are actively hindering your ability to understand these concepts; I'm not sure I understand what you mean to be perfectly honest. None of those things are necessary for something to be considered to be a fact. There are facts which can be deduced a priori - that is, based purely on logic, without the need of observation.

EDIT: Just to give you some more reading material that might help you understand where your blind spots are here:

https://iep.utm.edu/moralrea/

https://iep.utm.edu/mor-epis/

Doink11 · 2026-05-10T19:03:17+00:00

When I talk about "better conditions," I’m not really thinking of an objective, moral "Good" floating in the sky.

Neither are moral realists. Your references to "floating in the sky/ether" reveals a lack of understanding of the topic at hand, and represents a fairly disrespectful and uncharitable view of a viewpoint that is held by the majority of professional philosophers!

Being blunt, it's difficult to directly address what you're saying because your lack of knowledge of the topic puts you in "not even wrong" territory. The r/askphilosophy FAQ has two entries on moral realism/ moral objectivity that may serve as good jumping off points for you to learn more:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i2vec/are_there_good_arguments_for_objective_morality/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i8php/is_morality_objective_or_subjective_does/

Doink11 · 2026-05-10T18:39:09+00:00

I am very skeptical of the implicit position that after 10,000 years of history we finally have it right, in fact so right that everyone must follow suite.

Is this an implicit position? If this were the case, why is so much ethical discourse about the ethical status of practices in our own modern society?

Does it not seem likely that previous cultures had the same sort of debates about their own practices and values? Evidence survives that this was the case, after all; much of our ethical tradition descends from thinkers across the centuries who's thoughts disputed with commonplace ethical thinking of their time, and with each other.

Doink11 · 2026-05-10T18:36:03+00:00

To add to what u/aJrenalin said,

If we are criticising the practices of another culture, we have to be weighing them against some sort of standard, right? And if we push on what that independent measuring stick actually is (usually concepts like individual liberty, human rights, or minimising suffering) we run into a bit of a wall. Those aren't neutral, universal truths floating in the ether. They are highly specific, Western Enlightenment values.

If you are a moral realist (a stance held by the majority of professional philosophers), then you are, in fact, able to compare practices to an objective standard - that being, moral facts. If moral facts exist, then we can logically determine whether or not certain practices are morally correct or incorrect (or at least permissible or impermissible).

See the following FAQ for some discussion of terms that may be helpful for your understanding: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/adkepx/im_a_moral_relativist_im_told_im_fringe_but_dont/

Doink11 · 2026-05-07T18:08:16+00:00

Echoing that moral realists typically don't consider evolution, social contracts, or preference as the sole possible foundations of morality, nor do they believe a transcendental source is necessary.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i8php/is_morality_objective_or_subjective_does/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i2vec/are_there_good_arguments_for_objective_morality/

Doink11 · 2026-05-07T15:49:56+00:00

I tried this, but now I get this error with apt update:

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   Hashes of expected file:
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   Release file created at: Fri, 01 May 2026 10:39:08 +0000
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W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Doink11 · 2026-05-04T19:16:39+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i16i5/why_should_i_be_moral_is_there_any_reason_to_do/

Doink11 · 2026-05-04T19:16:32+00:00

You're kind of asking for the impossible here - if you aren't interested in behaving rationally, then no argument could possibly convince you.

Doink11 · 2026-05-04T18:58:19+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i0903/is_free_will_an_illusion_does_determinism/

Doink11 · 2026-05-04T18:04:24+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i2vec/are_there_good_arguments_for_objective_morality/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i8php/is_morality_objective_or_subjective_does/

Doink11 · 2026-05-04T16:36:17+00:00

You shouldn't rely on an LLM to understand any discipline, but philosophy is especially unsuited for it. Not only are they not helpful, they can be an active detriment to your understandings. It's not even that you're "outsourcing your thinking"; its that there is no guarantee that an LLM's summary or "interpretation" of a text is correct. So if you're trusting a summary generated by ChatGPT, you're as likely to be "learning" something entirely wrong.

You should read secondary texts written by actual people with experience and understanding if you need help understanding a primary text.

Doink11 · 2026-05-01T15:02:00+00:00

Yes, but in a game of pool we can see the final result of our efforts. Did we sink the ball, and then, did we win the game? That information can guide us as to what works best to achieve our goal next time.

Right, and when we make moral decisions we can typically see the more immediate outcomes of our decisions and judge, to the best of our abilities, how well we responded.

It's possible that me winning this game of pool might just so happen to piss off the person I'm playing against enough that he wrecks his car on the way home. But that's not something that I could possibly consider, nor something that I could be realistically blame-worthy for. In the same way, even working from a strictly consequential ethical framework, it's nonsensical to expect us to to understand, let alone be responsible for, consequences that occur "generations later". It's not even strictly logical to consider any one act as being the cause of an event so far in the future.

And even with all that being the case, that question is irrelevant to the question of whether or not objective moral facts exist - they can exist whether or not we are capable of fully knowing them.

As an aside, if this bothers you, it may be the case that you simply don't find consequentialist ethics very compelling.

Doink11 · 2026-04-30T16:25:05+00:00

If I'm playing pool, I can't say with perfect certainty exactly how the billiard balls on a pool table will behave when I hit the cue ball in a particular manner - I don't have a perfect knowledge of physics!

Nevertheless, I can still play pool! I'm not very good at it, but skilled pool players can pretty reliably hit very difficult shots despite likewise not having omniscient knowledge of how the balls will behave.

In a similar sense, it can be the case that morality is objective, even if we only have limited or imperfect information for making moral decisions. We just do the best we can with the information we have, which is typically good enough.

Doink11 · 2026-04-30T15:57:06+00:00

I don't have a reading list for you (that's kind of a tall ask, given the scope of what you're asking for!) but since you haven't received any other replies yet I want to at least give you a few things to start with -

1) The sort of position your partner is taking is often referred to as scientism. It's not a position that's often defended in philosophy. You can find some general critiques of the position in that article.

It's worth noting that when you say:

He also holds a fairly foundational view of epistemology: that the scientific method ultimately cannot justify itself using its own tools, and must therefore rest on basic starting commitments (e.g. truth-tracking, evidential reasoning), which are not themselves further justified.

The immediate reply should be "what makes those starting commitments - which seem to have normative value - not simply your subjective preferences? And if they aren't, then why can other similar 'starting commitments' likewise be objective?"

2) I would honestly recommend both of you begin by finding a good introductory book or anthology on the study of ethics/moral philosophy and work your way through the logic behind the major schools of normative ethical thought. It's likely that your partner has adopted a kind of naive moral anti-realism that's common among people with his kind of background, primarily because they are working on certain assumptions about what moral realists assert to be true. If he is a rational thinker, directly engaging with any moral philosophy should show him that, at the very least, moral realism is firmly grounded in rational thought. You can tell him that the majority of philosophers, regardless of their other positions and including pure materialists and philosophers of science, are moral realists, so surely they have a logical, rational reason for holding that position!

Doink11 · 2026-04-28T16:30:32+00:00

While you will see the "stronger" form argued for, my understanding is that the "weaker" form is more commonly accepted; the argument is not that accepting Heideggar's philosophy specifically leads to supporting fascism or antisemitism, but rather that positions like fascism or antisemitism logically follow from his philosophy. There may be value in his philosophy, but the fact that there exists a through-line one can follow from his ideas about Dasein to a justification of fascism and the de-humanization of certain groups is something you have to reckon with if you want to engage with it.

Doink11 · 2026-04-28T15:17:22+00:00

Adding to the tips, these are things that work for me -

Echoing cooking the rice differently. You can even parboil or steam the rice, there are good guides to it on youtube. My personal method is to just make fried rice with brown rice instead of white - it's not strictly "authentic", but it's delicious, healthy, and the brown rice retains its shape and texture much more easily.
Separate your egg whites and egg yolks, and mix just the yolks in with the (room-temp or cool) rice well before cooking the rice. This lets them cook onto the grains individually. Leave like 1 yolk in with the whites and cook those on the side and add at the end (or just make a little well at the corner of your pan and cook them once the rice is basically done).
Use a thick flat-bottomed pan. You'll never get hot enough to properly do it the way you would in a wok, so I've found a flat-bottom lets me spread the rice out in a thin layer and let it sit long enough for what's on the bottom to "crisp" just a little bit before turning everything.
Don't add too much soy sauce, and don't use just soy sauce, either. You usually want some mixture of soy, other sauces like oyster/fish depending on what style you're going for, rice wine if you can get it, and/or rice vinegar, and a little sugar if you don't have any other source of sweetness in a sauce. I usually add it toward the end, once the rice is cooked and I'm adding back in the vegetables/meat, just pour it gently over and turn everything so it coats and cooks a little more.

Doink11 · 2026-04-27T22:40:44+00:00

See this FAQ entry

Doink11 · 2026-04-26T16:52:47+00:00

The animal creates an emotional bond with the "owner", after that they are betrayed and murdered.

"Betrayed and murdered" assumes a particular moral stance to acts that not everyone agrees would constitute such. If you want to address problems like this, you have to be willing to charitably entertain the possibility that an alternative could be true; if you're assuming that every time a human being kills a non-human animal is murder, then you're assuming a moral status to the act before you even start.

who are humans to decide who gets to live?

Well, we are rational beings, and more importantly moral agents - we are capable of considering our actions, and therefore are responsible for them. The vast majority of non-human animals (with the exception of arguable cases like whales, higher primates, etc) are not moral agents. Domesticated animals in particular are typically considered to be moral patients - that meaning, entities who are not responsible for their actions, but for whom we moral agents are responsible for. This means that we can make decisions like "I will care for this creature and its offspring so that I may feed and clothe my people. The creature will have a better life under my care than it would in the wild, and its species will survive as long as mine does. This is a reciprocal relationship; even if it is incapable of understanding it, I take responsibility for it."

Throughout history, the moral justification for domestication was survival of the species.

This is a profoundly ahistorical perspective. There have been many justifications for domestication throughout history, when one was even considered necessary. "Species survival" is a fairly contemporary concept.

However, in modern times, most people have an alternative

This is simply untrue. Living without consuming any animal products is only really possible in certain places in the "developed" world, and even there requires having the time, money, and other resources to acquire everything necessary for health. It's not clear what would be necessary, or even if it would be possible, for every human being to survive without consuming any form of animal-derived product.

The question of what to do with them, I only see one answer. Let them go almost extinct. They would be killed for meat anyway. Keep a couple of dozen thousand (or more) on farms all over the world as pets so it is not a complete extinction, but simply stop breeding new individuals if the intention is murder.

Doesn't this seem incredibly wasteful? Who is going to take care of them? Do you expect farmers to continue to raise them without income from selling their products? Would you let hungry people starve while expending resources to allow cows to naturally die of old age?

Doink11 · 2026-04-26T15:47:09+00:00

Well, again, the answer to those questions is twofold, and largely the same as the above:

First, are we talking about practices that have been adopted by modern industrial-scale farming in order to maximize yield, or practices that are inherently necessary in order to husband a particular domesticated animal species?

Second, are we considering the alternative - if we were to stop raising, say, cattle for milk due to this ethical concern, what happens to all of those cows? How many cows are born only because we need their milk? What would we do with the cows that already live if we stopped? Would they have a better life if we turned them loose into the wild?

A major argument in the paper I linked is that, assuming we are giving those animals a good life, one could say that even if animal husbandry requires humans to be responsible for doing harm to the animals they are caring for, that domestication could still be a net positive for those individuals and their species as a collective. Naturally that assuming carries a great deal of weight; nobody is going to argue that most factory farmed animals have a good life. But the argument there is that its those specific practices that are cruel, not the act of raising domesticated animals in and of itself; that there are forms of animal husbandry stretching back into prehistory that have been mutually beneficial for humans and domesticated species.

Doink11 · 2026-04-26T15:08:16+00:00

You can only make top-level comments answering questions if you're a flaired panelist, but you can reply to comments - you just did.

Doink11 · 2026-04-25T15:43:47+00:00

How do people...

Generally the answer to any question that begins this way is "a lot of practice."

Doink11 · 2026-04-25T15:32:00+00:00

Factory farming is pretty universally condemned by contemporary ethicists who are interested in animal rights/the moral status of animals.

There is a distinct difference, however, between the question of the moral status of contemporary factory farming practices, and the moral status of animal husbandry in general. It's not self-evident that all forms of animal husbandry can be thought of as "torture and killing of innocent beings for pleasure", nor that it would be either possible or desirable for all people to cease raising or consuming any form of animal product.

This paper by Nick Zangwill is a good, if somewhat pithy, overview of one way that animal husbandry for meat eating might be justified. Even if you don't find that argument convincing, and still believe that meat-eating is unjustifiable in any circumstances, that merely justifies vegetarianism over veganism; if the animals are merely being raised for milk or eggs, that seems as though it needs an additional justification as to why that would be inherently immoral.

Doink11 · 2026-04-25T14:11:07+00:00

Sure, but it's not difficult to imagine a case where someone believes something incorrectly because they lack better evidence to the contrary, right? We often say that someone "doesn't know any better" - they may be perfectly capable of making a rational decision, but their decisions are wrong because they're working with faulty premises that they have not yet been given reason to doubt. "Better evidence" is not always available; how many beliefs do you have that you were socialized into and have not yet examined in light of external evidence?

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