 Everybody, today we are debating objective versus subjective morality and we are starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for another epic debate. This is going to be a lot of fun, folks. I am really excited to have these guys with us today. We really appreciate their time just sharing their passion here with us as a lot of channels would love to have them. So this is going to be a lot of fun. Want to let you know all of the speakers. If you're listening today and you're like, I like that, I've linked them in the description just for you, so you can hear more. And also, if it's your first time here, consider hitting that subscribe button as we have a lot more debates coming up. So for example, you'll see at the bottom right of your screen, Dr. Richard Carrier will be coming on to debate Jonathan Sheffield on the resurrection on June 26th, so that should be a lot of fun. And we're a neutral platform, so in other words, we don't give any views ourselves as a channel. It's up to you, folks, to say who you think won or lost or who was more persuasive. And we hope you feel welcome, whether you're a Christian atheist, objectivist, subjectivist, you name it, no matter what walk of life, we hope you feel welcome. And with that, what we're going to do is it's kind of a flexible format, you know, kind of easy going. Hey, so what we're going to have is today, we're going to have, now gentlemen, feel free to correct me if I've got this wrong. If I understand right, is it Brenton would be going first? And then is it Converse followed by Randall followed by five by five or was there a tweak? Okay, we got it. Okay, so in other words, you'll hear kind of a, you'll hear kind of the statements interweaved from each side. And so you can clearly see on the side of your screen, the two gentlemen who are on the right would say, yes, morality is objective. And then those who are on the left, though, you'll, you'll know who's talking. They would take a more subjective perception, you could say position. And so with that one, I'll let you know, you can always ask a question fired into the old live chat. And if you tag me with that modern day debate, it makes it easier for me to be sure I get every question in that list. And Super Chat's also an option in which case you can ask a question or make a comment to which the speaker, of course, would get a chance to respond to. And it pushes your question or comment to the top of the list. So with that, very excited to get us rolling. Thank you so much, gentlemen, again for being here. I just want to quick say thanks and kind of greet you guys and say, we really appreciate you hanging out with us. So thanks, all four of you for being here. Very happy to be here. Thanks for having us. Absolutely. So with that, Brenton, the floor is all yours. Hey, folks, my name is Brenton Lengel. I am a playwright, writer, comic author of Snow White Zombie Apocalypse and North to Maine, the first play ever written about the Appalachian Trail. The topic of debate tonight is objective versus subjective morality. The question being, which is correct? Is morality something that exists outside of the individual, outside of human minds that the individual must first discover and then comport himself to in order to avoid some form of disaster that usually takes the form of some sort of supernatural punishment like eternal hellfire or the shackling of the offender and a kind of personalized karmic chains that will follow them from life to life as if they were the ghost of old Marley and Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol? But in either case, the moral realist will argue that there is something outside of humanity that has written codes of behavior into the natural world itself and that it is up to us to discover and obey them or else. Now to my mind, I find this line of inquiry to be a bit self-contradictory because in my view, the objective and the subjective are mutually in interdependent terms. You can't have one without the other. Without an objective world to exist in, a mind cannot have a subjective experience and without a mind to experience it, the objective world either ceases to be or might as well have ceased to be. As the only reality that matters is the kind of reality that can either that either can be or currently is subject to experience. And Buddhists like myself have been aware of this for millennia. Hence the popular Zen Cohen, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around, does it make a sound? The answer, of course, is no. As without an ear to process the vibrations into sound, the terrible cracking that might have been heard in the thunderous crash that follows would be mere vibrations that may or may have never, that may as well have never been. And thus, we can call the objective and the subjective dependently originate as in two sides of the same coin. When people talk about morality being objective, what they tend to mean is where is the line? How much of my will can I work on others in the natural world while ultimately still considering myself to be a good person? And when others in the natural world work their will on me, when have my rights been violated? When, if ever, am I justified in using force to restrict the free will of another? And when is it right to behave aggressively towards another person or another culture or nation who are engaged in practices that I find upsetting or abhorrent? So, when a person asks themselves this, first they look at the law and yet intuitively they know that the law is unjust as plenty of immoral things have been and will continue to be enshrined in human law. Then they look to God in the scriptures and there seems to be an answer, but then inside the scriptures of nearly all religions they find acts of extreme and excruciating barbarity and absolutely no one seems to be able to agree on just what these scriptures mean anyhow. Now, here's where the person gets frustrated, throws their hands up in the air and often embraces a very basic and pedestrian form of moral nihilism. It's all just a bunch of superstition, they'll yell. I can do what I want and everyone is more or less the same and no action is any worse than another. And if they're a more compassionate person, they might opt to take no action or even refrain from making moral judgments altogether. And if they're a little more selfish and aggressive, they might say, might makes right. It's all about who holds the power. And this statement makes them feel very powerful, because obviously the only the very dangerous and very powerful would argue that morality is dictated by the dangerous and the powerful. And this is a way for them to flatter themselves and signal this persona they have adopted to others who they hope will be very impressed, while simultaneously granting themselves license to ignore the voice of their conscience when dealing with others. This is the reason that this particular view of morality is very popular with adolescents and the occasionally socially stunted. Now, see, as this is all going on, however, every one of these people that I have just described is missing something very key, namely that the thing they are thinking of and speaking of isn't actually a single thing. Human morality, as it is practiced by humans, is more than just obeying the law. As the person who obeys the law, gods or man's, is a person to be feared, which is why lawyers, police, judges and clergymen who present themselves in a similar manner often make people very uncomfortable. This is a person who has often turned off their compassion, who will give you only what you are owed and not one red cent more and will always demand exactly what has been agreed to without regard for context or outcome. In short, this is a person who obeys and enforces morality out of fear, not genuine goodwill. And ultimately, their moral behavior comes from a very selfish place and thus is immoral. This is all to say that morality ultimately has individualistic, societal and cultural components, and it is only through their confluence that a truly satisfying moral answer can be reached. This is essentially the trick at the end of Alan Moore's Watchmen, not only one of the greatest graphic novels of all time, but one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. And it's this trick that people can't get enough of and leaves them wondering about it deep into the night. Well, as a writer myself, I'm going to explain what Alan Moore did. I'm going to reveal the magician's trick. Moore created a moral question at the end of Watchmen by creating two characters, each standing for a school of thought within secular morality, namely consequentialism and deontology. One cares about the outcome and the other cares about rules and principles. And at the end, the consequentialist commits an act of mass murder and in doing so saves the world from nuclear annihilation. The deontologist refuses to acknowledge the good that has been done here, the sacrificing of millions of lives to save billions and as such resolves to reveal the scheme and undo the work, therefore nullifying the meaning of the sacrifice and putting the world back on a collision course with thermonuclear war. He is then killed for his troubles. And none of the characters can figure out what was the right thing to do and neither can most readers. This is because they think of morality as a single thing rather than a dialogue, which is to say real morality and real moral judgments are the results of the collision of competing and seemingly mutually exclusive moral drives. The answer at the end of Watchmen is to punish the deontologist but leave his scheme in place. But Moore doesn't do this because if he did, no one would be talking about the end of Watchmen because there isn't one answer to morality and no one actually wants a single answer to the question anyhow because that's not what morals are. Morals are a cluster of mostly pro-social ideals that humans have developed through pressures of natural selection and cultural replication to aid us in our never-ending quest to connect and collaborate with one another. As such, they are necessarily subjective but they are by no means arbitrary. They are not fixed but they are united in the way that say a song is united in its chord progressions or a work of art is united in its themes because a song is never a single note nor even a series of notes but a combination of notes and intervals of silence within which similarity and repetition combine to form an aesthetic harmony. And this is how we need to approach conversations on morality because a fixed and rigid moral system cannot adapt to new and unforeseen challenges in a constantly changing world why an arbitrary and highly individualistic moral system inspires no loyalty among its adherents and appears to all but those who benefit directly from it to be both unfounded and unjust. To quote Shakespeare, nothing is good or ill but thinking makes it so. And as I have said on many occasions we as in humanity thinking conscious beings are the only ones here and so we better learn to live with ourselves and a big part of that is realizing that there is no set system to cleave to that will bring about happiness and success rather the battle between good and evil must always be waged within each and every conscious human heart. Insummation, morality is a process and if you want to be a person who is rightly perceived to have great moral character you have to do it. You have to walk a path without a map but guided by the stars of your own wisdom, reason and compassion. So walk that path and Godspeed. Thank you very much for your patience folks had my cord come undone, very embarrassing but we are pumped for a couple of things first just wanna let you know that red flashing that you see in my background in the studio is not a problem. The reason that we have any of the flashing red means a super chat came in. So thanks so much for your super chat and then green flashing means we have a new subscriber that's just joined. So with that, we are very excited to kick it over to our dearest friend, Converse Contender. Thanks so much. The floor is all yours. All right, thanks James. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for the invitation. I do appreciate you guys thinking enough of me to consider me. I have debated on here before but a lot of people recognize me as a moderator on this channel. But as I said, I've been on here before debating multiple times. So I just wanna start off by saying thank you to Brinton and to Robert for agreeing to this discussion. And as well, thanks to Randall for agreeing to be my tag team partner. I'm gonna need him I'm sure. And also I think that Randall deserves a lot more subscribers than he has. I know he has a new channel but I definitely recommend going over checking out his content. So with that said, so that I don't just ramble this entire time, I decided to prepare something ahead of time, which I think Randall probably try and piggyback on. We discussed before, so I'm just gonna lay out a brief argument real quick and then I'll let Randall jump in. All right, so I wanna start with the atheist philosopher Louise Anthony commented on this. And I like the way she puts it. She says, any argument for moral skepticism will be based on less obvious primacies than ones for objective morals. And I think that includes subjectivism. I start with that to show that this isn't just theist versus non-theist but rather many non-theists think some morals are objective. In fact, Brinton is a Buddhist and he is arguing for subjective morals tonight. So that should be an indicator of the diversity on both sides of the issue. With that being said, I want to argue two points that I believe follow from the moral progress argument. First, moral progress is the notion that we have improved or can improve from a previous moral position. Number one, is there moral improvement or just moral difference? What are we improving towards if a statement is morally better than it is an improvement? And number two, the second point is that reductios follow from not having an ultimate standard to improve towards. So for example, if God exists and has a nature that acts as a standard and it is the case that not murdering, for example, is improving toward that standard, then not murdering is an improvement. But if subjectivism is true and morals are based on your preferences or some other, then preferences are always true. So for example, I believe that the murder of George Floyd was objectively wrong, meaning that even if everyone believed that it was fine, it would still be wrong regardless of human opinion or stance. If subjectivism is true, then the person that believes that that was wrong is correct and the person that believes that that was fine is correct. You can disagree with either from your perspective, but it seems that those claims are just different and not one isn't a moral improvement because there isn't an objective standard in order to improve towards. So with that, I'll just wrap up by saying, think about this in justice. Justice also when it comes to preferences, like it's like say that someone chooses their preferences afford over a dodge, right? It wouldn't make sense to try and hold that person liable for that position because one isn't an improvement, it's just a difference. And as I, so I'll just leave it there for now and I'll let Randall pick up on that. And because I think the open conversation time will help us to iron out more of the kinks in this. You bet, thanks so much. And Randall, the floor is all yours. By the way, folks, I'm going to put Randall's YouTube link in the description. I had not known that you had started a YouTube channel, so we're excited for that. And I'm gonna put that in the description right now. So with that, the floor is all yours, Randall. All right, thanks to Modern Day Debate for hosting this debate and to Brenton and Robert for agreeing to it. And thanks to Converse Contender for inviting me to participate as well. So the topic of debate is the nature of moral facts, whether such facts are objective or subjective. So I'd like to begin with definitions. A fact is an actual state of affairs. For example, it is a fact that the earth is a sphere and that two plus two equals four because both of those propositions describe actual states of affairs. There are two different kinds of facts, objective and subjective. Objective facts are facts which have truth conditions independent of the cognitive attitude that agents have about those facts. For example, even if every human being believed that the earth is a sphere and two plus two equals four are false, those statements would still be true. They would be facts and all those people would be wrong. The reason is because the truth conditions for those facts are independent of the cognitive attitudes people have about them. By contrast, subjective facts are facts that have truth conditions which are constituted at least in part by the cognitive attitudes that agents have about them. For example, if I say vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate, that could be a fact but it would be a fact that is constituted by my attitude about vanilla ice cream and thus is relative to the subject or subjective. For that reason, we can call it a subjective fact. In this debate, Converse and I are going to argue and he has argued thus far that at least some moral facts are objective and have their truth conditions independent of the beliefs of any human beings. So we can define as well two kinds of moral fact. There are facts of moral value and facts of moral obligation. So moral value involves the description of the moral properties of good and evil to states of affairs. For example, the state of affairs of a little old lady being helped across the road is good while the state of affairs of a baby being tortured for fun is evil. Moral obligation is concerned with what philosophers call oddness. The obligation to act in a way that actualizes moral good and avoids moral evil. As Thomas Aquinas put it, good is to be done and evil is to be avoided. Moral obligation is lived out in countless ways. One is obligated to help that little old lady across the street. One is obligated not to inflict unnecessary suffering on the baby. Certain states of affairs are good and others are objectively evil. Some actions are objectively morally good and others objectively morally prohibited. And these facts about good and evil and right and wrong are true whether any human being recognizes them as true or not. Even if everybody tomorrow decided that torturing babies for fun was good, that fact would, the fact would still remain that it is evil. Now, surely as we make objective factual discoveries in the natural universe regarding the chemical composition of water or the properties of an atom. So we make objective factual discoveries in the moral universe regarding the nature of moral value and moral obligation. And then you might be wondering, well, why believe all the things I've just said? Well, the first reason the one I want to explore is because our cognitive faculties actually provide us with knowledge of objective moral facts. When it comes to gaining knowledge about the natural universe, we rely first and most critically upon sense perception. The immediate deliverances of our sense perceptual faculties, including sights, smell, hearing, taste and touch. In like manner, when we gain moral knowledge about the universe, we rely first and most critically upon moral perception or moral intuition, an ability to perceive moral properties like good and evil right and wrong. Just as my sense perceptual faculties enable me to see a little old lady being helped across the street, so my moral perceptual faculties enable me to see that this state of affairs of her being helped is morally good. The initial knowledge I received from a sense perceptual experience is non-discursive, meaning it is immediate, it does not depend on reasoning. Likewise, for moral perception, the basis of moral reasoning is moral intuition or perception of right and wrong, good and evil. The great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, provides a memorable demonstration of moral perception at work. On the occasion when he witnessed a man being publicly beheaded, he later wrote this of his experience. When I saw the head divided from the body and heard the sound with which it fell separately into the box, I understood not with my reason, but with my whole being that no theory of the wisdom of all established things nor of progress could justify such an act and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation by whatever theory had found this thing necessary, it was not so, it was a bad thing. And that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, nor by progress, but what I felt to be true in my heart. We can make two observations about Tolstoy's statement. First, he is insistent that he discovered an objective fact about the moral universe, one that would be true even if all people believed it to be false. Second, Tolstoy grasps this objective fact not as a result of a reasoning process, but rather through intuition, he perceives it. The truth of the judgment manifests itself to him with immediacy. He can just see the act is wrong. A similar account of moral facts is evident I would suggest in our own day in the shocking footage depicting the murder of George Floyd. I can put it like this. When we saw Officer Chauvin's knee pressing on Mr. Floyd's neck, we heard his cries for his mother and his desperate pleas for breath. We understood, not with our reason, but with our whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things nor of progress could justify this act. And that if all the men in the world from the day of creation by whatever theory found it necessary, it was not so. It too was a bad act. Now that perception is not mine alone. A similar grasp of objective moral evil of Chauvin's action in murdering Mr. Floyd has provided a sense of moral global outrage and with it a percussive impulse that has led to protests and calls for reform the world over. And it all begins with the raw embracing deliverances of our immediate moral perception of objective evil. I'm not claiming that moral perception is infallible. Tolstoy could be wrong, we could be wrong, but that's not just about moral perception. That's true of all our cognitive faculties. We are fallible beings. The key is to recognize that we don't exercise skepticism of our basic deliverances of our cognitive faculties until there's good reason to do so. And I would suggest we certainly know there are objective moral facts because we perceive them with the same raw immediacy that we perceive the nose on our face and the clouds in the sky. To conclude, any person who wants to argue that moral perception is fundamentally incorrect, that these facts are not objective at all, that person has the evidential burden to bear. One no less onerous than the skeptic who wants to claim that the world we sense perceived is really just an illusion and we're in the matrix. And less than until the moral subjectivist can present a powerful argument to justify their position, we can and should believe that moral facts objectively do indeed exist. You bet. Thanks very much for that opening statement. We will now kick it over to five by five. First time here, we're thrilled to have you five by five and the floor is all yours. Hey, thank you so much for having me tonight guys and thank you for Brenton inviting me onto this. I really appreciate that. I've got a new podcast to promote. I wanna thank the other two gentlemen who are here who are taking the opposite position of me for keeping this a civil conversation and for actually examining this in a dialectic way, which is one of the most important things that we've developed as a culture over the many, many thousands of years of Western culture. And like everybody else who's spoken already, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the tragic, tragic death of George Floyd and all of the people who are currently protesting for what we believe as moral justice in his murder. The history of morality is intrinsically tied to the history of humanity. Every human society has developed a moral code. Every human society has found it necessary to develop a moral code and every human society has developed their moral code based on the society that they've created, based on the political choices that they've made. The great political philosophers of the early liberal period, Hume, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, all talked about what they called a state of nature. Hobbes had the worst vision of it where he envisioned a state of nature as being a war of all against all, where everybody has a right to everything, including each other's bodies and therefore nobody had a right to anything. In that state of nature, Hobbes argued that there was no morality, there was no possibility of morality. But as we come out of the state of nature and form a society, Hobbes argues that we create a moral code, we create laws, we create the rights to individual bodies, individual existence. Rousseau argued a little bit more optimistically that human beings are born a blank slate and eventually developed and learn their values and society is actually what corrupts people. Rousseau is a very fun read. Even Hume, who takes an extremely libertarian view of the social contract and the state of nature, realizes that the state of nature can exist because human beings are a social animal, but he does concede that that state of nature is not a viable, not a desirable state of being. Why am I talking about this with morality? Because all of these philosophers and all of the great thinkers acknowledge that the society that is created coming out of the state of nature, the early society, is what creates one's moral values. The great thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, argued in the genealogy of morality that good and evil, good and bad come out of what he calls a master slave morality, which Nietzsche, if you've ever read him, is not only extremely depressing, but he's also extremely provocative in his language, which becomes problematic. But he argued that the original morality was both coming from the master morality, which was developed by the strong to oppress the weak and that slave morality, which he would refer to as most of the morality that we hold today, which values compassion, intelligence, conversation, like the one we're having now, comes from the weak imposing a system upon the strong. He also argues that the original morality, guilt and bad conscience, which I'm paraphrasing from the German here, so please bear with me, come from an original sense of debt because without a social system, Nietzsche argued that you would feel a debt to people for doing favors or feel a debt for people for interacting with each other, which developed moral principles over time. We see from examining these thoughts that, no, we don't actually have an objective moral truth. Morality is a function of the societies that we're creating, a particular system of values and principles, conduct especially held by one specific person or society is the dictionary definition that I found earlier, which I think is similar to the ones that have been talked over already, but those socially constructed things, we have a tendency to think that things that we've constructed as a society don't exist. Morality objectively does exist. The fact that it's socially constructed and changes over time doesn't mean that it doesn't exist and that we can't draw moral conclusions. George Floyd, to use the example that everyone seems to be, was murdered, but the act of killing him is considered murder because of the socially constructed value structures that we have in common as Americans. I'm very glad that everyone here, I think we're all Americans, is in agreement that that was a murder, but in another society that might not have been the case. Randall, I'm sorry to use examples and other people's arguments that have already been used, but I feel that this is actually very illustrative. Randall used the example of torturing children as being an objective moral bad, but that hasn't always been the case. If you look back at certain societies, very famous one that a lot of people are probably familiar with because of a really terrible movie, 300, it was Sparta, they viewed it as the highest moral good to torture children brutally for years to produce killing machines to subject, subjugate the rest of the known world. That was viewed as a higher moral good. And while, yes, we have made moral progress since then and we can condemn that as awful and we do realize that probably objectively that didn't build the greatest society, that was a socially constructed value judgment that was considered the highest goal of morality for those people. And the fact that we don't acknowledge that progress is actually, I think, an extremely harmful thing. Moral absolutism, deontology, the idea that morality is a fixed objective fact and that we only make progress towards a greater truth, in my opinion, is a very harmful thing because it eliminates the imagination for the prospect of change. If everything is fixed and we have an objective moral truth, then we can't question something that's awful, something that's harmful, something that's disgusting to us as we progress morally, as we have dialectic and as we progress towards a better ideal, seeing that things are fixed eliminates the imagination for that. It eliminates the glorification of the moral progress that we've made since the awful society I just referenced and it limits the imagination of people trying to think for moral change. And I apologize for the slap shot nature of that opening statement, but I'm very glad and excited for to continue this conversation. Thank you gentlemen. You bet, thanks very much. We will now jump into the open conversation mode. So thrilled to have you here guys. And as I had mentioned folks, if you're listening and you're like, mm, I like that you can find their links that I've put in the description box for you. Also, if you have any questions, feel free to fire them into the old live chat. And with that gentlemen, the floor is yours. All right, if you guys don't mind, I'll go ahead and start. That way I can get my thoughts out at a time and I don't lose track. Let me know if you're having problems here or me or anything like that. So my audio is good, let us know on the side chat. So since it's fresh, I'll just, I just wanted to comment on some of the things we just heard. He talked about Hobb through Sohum and morality being socially constructed that it was just created and that our moral values are created. Then he talks about Nietzsche and slave morality versus master morality. It's interesting because I actually was just, I've been over this before, but I was just, I'm going back through an audio book on philosophy that I've been listening to. Well, it's not a book, it's more like a lecture series, but I was on that part today. So it's really good that you brought that up. Yes, so I just listened earlier and you're right, you're exactly right that Nietzsche, he said, he thought that, well, the slave morality is inherently wrong and the reason why is because you should rise up and fight if you have courage and that kind of thing. And he thought that religion and things like that were built to say basically, hey, look, one day the last will be first and the first will be last. So in the next life, we're working for a purpose, we're working because in the next life, we're going to be rewarded where these people who are doing good now, they're going to be the last one day, that kind of thing. Well, but one of the problems that came back with Nietzsche was what really hit him was, well, then why did the state adopt Christianity? Because that was kind of a defeater for his argument was that the master class shouldn't have accepted this slave mentality like Christianity because he criticized it so harshly. And so that's one point that I would make is that I think that he was incorrect about it actually and I think that we've seen evidence of that in history. So that's one point. But the other is that you said that George Floyd murder was wrong because socially, we don't accept that but it may have changed in a different culture or it may have been different. I'm sorry to interrupt. It wasn't that the George Floyd murder was wrong Well, actually, no, go ahead. I'm sorry, I'll let you finish and I'll adjust. I'm sorry. Okay, so I just, again, I don't, I personally don't think that it's a, I don't think that it's just different the claims that it was wrong and the claims that it's fine. I don't think those claims are just different. I think one of them is actually more improvement. And speaking of which, you brought up more progress when you said, you talked about Sparta and 300 and now we've made more progress since. And again, I just want to ask like, if there is no ultimate standard, what is more progress? Like, what are we progressing to? And so that's all my thoughts on that. I just wanted to jump in on that. So the last question that you asked first, Hegel argues that there is an end of history, a goal of history and through the dialectic, through the conversation that we're having right now and through conversations that we have like this, we advanced the dialectic, we advanced the ideas that we have. Some people might say that there is actually a utopian thing that you can reach. I'm personally not a utopian, but that doesn't mean that if there isn't some perfect standard, we can't advance further. We can't find something that improves our material condition currently. That doesn't mean that we can't find a standard that works better for our ideology as a society. That doesn't mean that we can't realize that something was not desirable or beneficial to a social structure. I'm sorry, you had a question? There's something I'd like to say here actually really quickly. And this is actually one where Robert, you and I kind of somewhat disagree, though I agree with you on Hegel. But I've actually been somewhat skeptical of the idea of moral progress. I do like the idea, you know, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. But the thing is is that with regard to moral progress, what we have to remember to do is to use our empathy and try to put ourselves in the place of a person in another society. And what I wonder about very strongly is is that there is only the perception of moral progress because each society creates its own values. So for instance, right now we think that it is wrong for George Floyd to have been murdered the way that he was. But for instance, in the antebellum South, if the same thing had occurred or a very similar thing had occurred, it would have been fine for the police officer to do that. And in fact, you know, people said, well, we're reacting like this to George Floyd. Yeah, we're all horrified by it. It's completely unacceptable and the country is an open revolt over it. Thank God. But, you know, I've been fighting this fight for over a decade. And I can tell you, there are a million George Floyds, there's worse than George Floyds and people don't care. So it kind of has me thinking that like, if there were, for instance, a society of bird worshipers that fought a war and defeated us and took over the earth more or less, and then they instituted a bunch of churches where everyone went to worship the birds as they fly through the sky, they would be sitting there saying, look at how much moral progress we've made. Look at how many people are worshiping birds because that's those values that they have decided on and then imposed on the world through power. So is the sense of moral progress, I can see how it is true in a certain extent, but also, you know, once again, like I keep hearing from- There's a lot to digest there. Yeah, yeah, well, I mentioned bird worshipers. And I do actually kind of have something to say about that, is that what you're talking about, morality Foucault wrote about this is absolutely transmitted through structures of power. He wrote about the church, economics, so your work actually might transmit some sense of morality to you, schools. All of these are actually centers of power that society exerts on you and that society transmits moral goods to you through. And what you're talking about is a hypothetical society of bird worshipers. Hopefully it's a really cool bird, but taking over our society and instituting bird worship on us, that's one of the reasons it's so important, and we're seeing this with the unrest that we're having in the country now, is so important for a society to be democratized to, excuse me, him, sorry, to be democratized and to maintain control of those transmitters of moral authority to the people in as much of a democratized and empathetic way as possible. And that's something that we've learned over time through the dialectic, through exchanging ideas, and if everyone's familiar with Hegel, I'm so sorry if you had to read Hegel. If I could insert myself. Please, please, I'm sorry. Yeah, at first point. So maybe I'll start with Robert, so five by five. So it seems to me that you are making a mistake of moving from the observation that descriptively, societies to some degree disagree on moral facts to the conclusion that therefore there are no objective moral facts about which they disagree. And to my mind, that's just a non sequitur. The mere fact that there's some me, let me just take my thought, no problem. So the mere fact that people disagree, that doesn't yet tell you whether or not there is any objective moral fact. So you have to take a closer look in that. So I appealed to a strong sense of moral intuition. I actually think that that sense of moral intuition is underlying your whole presentation. At the end, you were talking about how harmful moral objectivism is for achieving the kind of society we want to actualize. And I think that implicitly there is an assumption there, but there is some objective standard towards which we want to work. You gave the example of 300 in response to the idea of torturing children and said, well, they torture children. But of course, the first thing I wanna see again is it is again a non sequitur. I mean, yes, the Nazis sought to eliminate Jews. It doesn't follow that there was some objective or not, there are no objective moral fact about the question. I would also suggest that if you give a closer look, often you will find there's more agreement than you might recognize. So it wasn't simply that in Sparta they were torturing children for the sake of, but rather they were submitting them or subjecting them to rigorous training procedures for the betterment of society. And there was an arguable moral justification for it where there are not, we agree. So I'll just throw it back to you. Maybe I'll just give one more example. We can give examples all dead. Let's like to give one from the film, Birth of a Nation. So this is a film that takes place in Ad de Bellum slavery period. There is a scene where a slave refuses to eat. And so the slave owner takes a chisel and chisels out his teeth and then pour a slop into his mouth and then he vomits out blood, slop and teeth. And I would challenge anybody to say that that is not an objectively worse society. It seems to me quite obvious intuitively so that that is an objectively bad society inferior to the one we now have despite all the imperfections of the one we now have. Congress contender gave an argument about moral progress. And he also, and I think that that argument is borne out by this example, the contrast from society today and at the Bellum slavery. So I'll just throw it back to you or to Brent. As horrifying as that is, I'll do this quickly and then we'll move on to Robert. And it is a horrifying thing. Don't forget that Birth of a Nation was celebrating the KKK. Like they were the heroes of Birth of a Nation. No, no, we're talking about the Birth of a Nation film that came out like five years ago. Oh, the newer Birth of a Nation. Okay, thank you for getting that. Did anyone actually see that though? I saw that, yeah. Oh, okay. I recognize that the controversy over the director and the rape charge he had, which is actually another issue, right? As people are making moral judgments on the films they'll watch based upon the moral rights of the director. Yeah. Well, I mean, and to a certain extent, you got to separate the art from the artist, but also sometimes an artist's more toxic views can inform their work. I'm rand. But like, I don't see, yeah. I don't see how like any of this is necessarily objective. You seem to be using the term objective to be a stand-in for I really, really have a problem with this and it's totally great that you do really, really have a problem with this. When you talk about, for instance, children being an objective bad, it's an objective bad in relation to what? Like you can't say, you can't identify there without here, you need a perspective from which to make that judgment. If there's no mind making the judgment, how could anything, how could any judgment be cast on anything? I did actually give a definition of objectivity. I said that the facticity of it is independent of the attitudes that minds have about it. Now, I think that- But you appeal to your own attitude to detect that. I know that in your presentation, you are making an interdependency between objective and subjective. I think at this point, I'm gonna suggest that I think that you're conflating two concepts. So the one concept is that there is always a subject who knows, right? I am a subject, I know. And you're moving from that to the idea therefore there are no objective mind and independent facts that can be known by subjects. And I think that's a inflation. I think that the subject can know objective facts. Yeah, I mean, it's a fact that the subject cannot know objective facts. In fact, there's a TED talk on this. You can Google this, do we perceive reality as it is? And they talk specifically about a problem that's happening with a certain type of beetle in Australia. And the beetles are going extinct now. They've survived for millennia, but they're going extinct because their perceptions are tied like the hottest beetle female out there is kind of round and brownish and bumpy. And so is the bottom of a beer bottle. And so all these male beetles are ignoring the female beetles and trying to mate with the beer bottles because evolution does not favor organisms that see reality as it is, rather it favors organisms that see reality in a way that is most conducive to their successful reproduction. Are you now taking the view that we don't have any objective facts at all, that everything you're taking in an anti-realist position? I'm saying along the lines of their, I would say there are objective facts and objective things in the universe to experience, but none of them can ever be experienced directly. They can only be experienced through subjective perception. Can I chime in just for a moment, please? Yeah, go ahead. I think something that we're missing here, especially in regards to Birth of a Nation. I think that was an excellent example. Thank you for that, Randall. Not only was the behavior that you talked about in the remake considered a high moral good in the antebellum South. It was considered an objective fact that it was a high moral good. Not only was the original movie The Clan considered heroes for massacring unarmed African-Americans. It was considered an objective fact that they were good for doing so. Now, the thing that I think that we're missing here is that because a society constructs a system of morality, a definition of good and evil, which is also something that we construct out of the state of nature, that has changed over time too. Just because we construct that as a society doesn't mean it doesn't objectively exist and does not mean that we can't understand and make moral judgments. And that doesn't mean that we can't make moral judgments about societies that have come before or ideas that have been, I don't wanna use the word defeated, but been replaced in the dialectic that we have now. Sorry, go ahead. All right, so for one, you were saying that, well, yeah, well, the people sound they, the majority of them thought that was a moral thing, that it was objective. But again, objectivity means that it doesn't matter if all of them believe that it was objective or great or whatever. It's completely independent of anyone's stance to that. So it's saying that even if an issue were, everyone thought that it was moral, it can still be the case that that is not the case. Now, the second thing is- I have a quick question. How do we know that? Yeah, like is there a way to detect it? Could somebody in the antebellum South have gone and run some sort of scientific experiment in a lab and said, oh, actually, these are people and it's horrible to treat them as such? Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know what natural, you're asking for like a naturalistic way like science to discover that? I mean, if it's in the objective reality, there should be an objective way to establish objective morality. You should be able to, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, if you're saying that something is objective and it's an intrinsic law of the universe too, if you try to break a law of physics that falsifies that law of physics if you manage to break it, or you're just not able to do it. If you take an immoral action that doesn't, nothing stops you from taking an immoral action. So one thing I would believe is, I mean, you could say Randall gave an argument about intuition, right? But I would say more than that, of course we have things like guilt and conscious that tend to inform our views, but Randall, maybe you wanna say something about that, but I wanted to make one more point that before you stopped me there was that my argument about moral progress, whenever we're talking about these, you brought up the Antebellum South and you said that, well, yeah, but they thought that was a good thing. And we thought, and we know that it's not, right? It might have been acceptable then. But what I'm saying is that, yes, us thinking that it's wrong is a moral improvement, but what you have to be saying is that it's just a different statement, right? Not that there can't be an improvement because there is no standard to improve it towards. So I wanna make that point and Randall, if you wanted to pick up with what I was saying. Wouldn't the standard be our perspective? Exactly. What's that? Our perspective becomes... Oh, sorry. The standard when making a moral judgment, like it's coming from my mind is our perspective. So when I say, when I look at human history and say, okay, for instance, the caning of Charles Sumner, he was attacked on the floor of the Senate by another, a guy from the family of a Southern senator that he had insulted while pushing for abolition. And he was beaten until he was almost blind. And the people in the South were like, rah, rah, great, that's because he insulted Southern honor and it was seen as a very good thing to attack this old man with a cane and he couldn't come back. Now, I can look at that from my point of view and that's the standard that it comes from. It comes from my mind. Okay, so would you say the individual or the majority of people? Let's say both. The individual. Okay, so how about, so let's give a list of, invoke Godwin's law since you brought up Hegel, Robert and let's say now that you talked about Hegel about his moral, about some of his moral thoughts and Hegel, yet Hegel was a Nazi and Hegel was not a Nazi. Hegel was 130 years earlier. So yeah, you're thinking of Heidegger. Oh, I'm sorry, Heidegger, I'm sorry. Well, anyway, let's have both, you're right. It's all depressing Germans, man. Don't worry about it. You're right. 15 hours of philosophy lectures and I'm like, Heidegger, Heidegger. It hits you, brother, it hits you. Yeah, so the point's the same. Listen, vote Godwin's law and go with the Nazis. Okay, the classic example is, all right, so you said maybe it's majority, maybe it's individual, right? But as pointed out, I said it's both just so you're aware. Both, okay. So as pointed out is like, let's say that they brainwashed everybody and won the war or killed whoever disagreed with them that killing Jews was fine until everybody thought that that was the case. Then it would be moral, correct? In that case, in the man in the high castle dystopia, we wouldn't be, one, we wouldn't be having this conversation because we wouldn't have free speech because we'd be living in our Nazi dystopia, which would be awful. Yeah, but that's good. But two, two, it's actually- That's the fallacy of John Leslie, right? That's the John Leslie fallacy. That wouldn't be living here if that were the case. Well, to address your actual point, if in some awful reality, fascism dominated the entire planet, then I wouldn't find it moral, but in that society, the construct of morality that that society would live under, they would believe that it was completely moral. We're still not a non-sequitur at this point. I mean, it's the same thing with natural science. The fact that we disagreed with people from the 16th century about the nature and structure of the universe does not follow that there's no objective fact about the nature or structure of the universe. The universe- Oh, sorry. There's just a couple of points here. One is just to come back to Converse Contender's argument about moral progress. I mean, I think this is a really significant argument. I think that we're all implicitly talking about the kind of society that we'd like to actualize. And there is an implicit sense that that is something that transcends our own culture. And if we deny that, we do run into the problem of the moral reformer. Because on this view, there is no sense of moral reform. There are moral improvement. There was only moral change. There are only changing behaviors. We have different ways of interacting with racial minorities now in the 21st century than they did in the 19th century. But there's no fact about it. And I think that that's just so profoundly counterintuitive. Now, Converse Contender began his talk by referencing Louise Anthony making, I think, a very important point. And she's an atheist. So I think it's doubly worth eating in this context. And that is that any argument for the kind of moral skepticism that I think you're both really suggesting here, which is that there's no objective moral factor, objective moral improvement, the arguments forward are always gonna be weaker than the moral knowledge that we actually have, that these things, some things really are wrong, some things really are right, and there really is moral improvement over time, or there can be more devolution over time. I see what you're saying there. I think there is a little bit of a fallacious appeal to consequence. I don't agree that that would necessarily be the consequence with the acknowledgement of subjective morality. But whether or not truth puts us in a specific position, and it's independent of truth itself. Now, what I kind of wanted to bring up is, and this is a question for both you and Converse, either one of you guys can answer it, what is the material difference between an evil thing taking place in a culture where no one believes it's evil, and a good thing taking place in the same culture? For instance, what is the relevant difference of these two things? I'm sorry, could you please repeat that? I can jump in, and then as I respond, you can perhaps jump in afterwards. The difference of the problem is your question's a little bit ambiguous, because difference as regards what? One difference would be this, that objectively, one society, all things being equal was better than the other society, because one society had a moral good that the other society lacked, or one society had a moral bad that the other society lacked. And so there would be an objective difference in that regard. I feel like that's begging the question though, because you're assuming that it is a moral good in the construction of the question. Well, no, you asked what would be the difference if moral objectivism is true, and I just answered it by describing what's the difference. I asked what the material difference be, I mean, independent of our minds. What do you mean by material, like some sort of phenomenological? Yeah, what would be the physical difference? I mean, because unless we go down like the route of like substance dualism, there needs to be a relevant difference outside. Like if morality exists independent of minds, then obviously immoral actions will have a different material effect than moral action. So where's the effect? Well, so an evil act, like a woman being raped, that would have the act of exemplifying a property of moral badness within the society. And I was talking about that, you perceive moral badness and it's just that you can see it through some perception, you can perceive colors. So there would be a property that was exemplified in that society that was not exemplified in the society in which the woman was not being raped. Okay, I can see that, but also like using color, for instance, and I brought this up in my debate with that neo-nazi JF. Like the thing is, is that color itself, the perception of color is heavily subjective. For instance, the ancient Greeks did not have the word for blue, and therefore like when they looked at the ocean, they didn't see blue. And if you look at the ocean now with blue blocker sunglasses, you'll see it the way they saw it as quote unquote wine colored. And it does, it looks like red wine, if you look at it with the blue blockers. We've seen studies where cultures that are raised without the ability to distinguish between blue and green literally can't, but can distinguish between different shades of green better than English speakers because of the language that they use. So I'm not sure. Go ahead, Converse, man, you go ahead. So if I'm hearing you, but let's think about that example, right? Like, how do you compare blue and green? You can't say, well, I like blue better. So it's better than green, but you can't, like let's say that you're gonna apply this ethic. You can't take somebody who picks a green, something green over blue and say, well, hold on, cause blue is better, right? It depends on the situation. Like look at camouflage, you got jungle camouflage and you've got like the Navy camouflage. Well, sure, like, but that's like saying, well, two plus two equals four, unless you add another one. It's like, well, that's a different situation, of course, but to go back to the example that I gave because right after we kind of switched, but Robert, I believe you guys both said that given the example I gave that the Godwin's Law took place and we had that I brought up and the Nazis took over or they won World Two and nobody exists left except for people who agree with them. And I said, would that then be moral to kill Jews? Like if they, everybody thought it was fine and Robert I don't know, but I guess you agree as well said, well, in that society, not me, but to that side. So yes, it would be more, my point is that, that to me is a significant reductio that if by morality, you can mean both that killing Jews is wrong and that it also can be not wrong at the, depending on the mind that precedes it. I think that's a relevant enough reductio for me to just say, you know, I think the way you're using the term morality is not the way that we typically, so. So if that society, if the only transmitter of moral good was one that you're describing, then we would all agree on that because that would be the only morality that would have been transmitted to us. The moral conclusions that we're all making, and I think that you and Randall disagree with me, I know on this, but the moral conclusions that we're making right now are entirely predicated on the moral philosophy that's been transmitted to us, that on the political ideologies that have been transmitted to us through society and based on the collective conclusions that we've made through those structures, the difference between two plus two equals four and murder is wrong is that two plus two equals four is referring to an objective, a thing that exists. You know, the number two and another two things together would be what we call four. But morality and all of the things that we construct in a society are completely constructed artificially, not in nature. Well, hold on a second. No, I don't think the moral numbers were up. Hang on one second. If I can say something. So you brought up numbers that they're objective, which, well, the concepts of the numbers are what we use typically. You can't find an objective thing that's a number, right? You can have a thing and use a concept, but in the same way, that's what we're saying about morality, right? Cause let's just say I give an example of God's law or God's nature being the standard. Let's just give that as an example. That is objective in the way that you're using it, that there is the concept of God's nature or the standard, right? And that we use the concept to understand the standard. So for example, if I were, but the actual objectivity of numbers, cause numbers are just abstract objects, right? In the same way that's how we consider God is, is we're not thinking. In mathematics, in the mathematical sense, when you're thinking theoretically, yes, numbers are artificial constructs that we've made to represent a phenomenon in the universe. Yes, however, if you take two objective things that we know exist and put them together, then you would have four things based on that construction. But morality is different in that it's completely socially constructed and it's constructed by society, not by any, you can't prove an objective moral standard because it's completely constructed by society and it will change in another society that's constructed differently. I think that there's a conflation there again that what is constructed to the degree you wanna talk about that are social mores, legal systems, but all of those are attempts to map onto what is objectively moral. Now, if I may just respond to Brendan talking about green and blue, cause I think that is an important point, the idea to which sense perception is indeed impacted by our social context. And I'd also maybe like to maybe take it to a conversation in another direction as well. So I'll just respond to that quickly and then give another point. So on that point, first of all, I don't know what the phenomenological experience of the Germans seeing blue versus green was cause I can't experience their qualia, right? Their first person, I don't have access to that, but it is true, I agree that sense perception can be impacted by our culture or by our environment. There's a famous example of a tribe of indigenous people that lived in the rainforest. And when they were first brought out to a clearing, they did not conceive of depth perception. When they saw small people walking on a distant hill, they thought they could reach out and grab them because of their environment. But to reason from that, that there is no objective fact about a world they are perceiving is a non sequitur. What we should conclude is that their environment, their culture shapes and informs how they perceive, but there still is an objective reality that they perceive through their perspectival sense perception. And it is exactly the same with moral perception. We are shaped by our societies. If it's a good society, our moral thinking is honed and sharpened. If it's a bad society, it may be corrupted, but there is a moral objective reality that we're perceiving. Now, if I could just to give the second point then, there's been a lot of talk about these moral facts being constituted by cultures, but I'm wondering which culture? I mean, I'm a Canadian, actually not an American. So. Oh, I apologize. No problem. I have American family in Colorado though. So we always love going down there. But so I have, I met part of the Canadian society. There's also a culture within Alberta where I live. And there's a somewhat different culture in Edmonton where I live. My church has a culture. My family has a familial culture. I mentioned before this thing began that I like particular kinds of new movies and music and I go to festivals and there's a culture there that I particularly. Which cultures are the ones that constitute moral facts? Because all of these cultures are a little different and they all, many of them disagree on what the moral facts are. So what fixes the moral facts if it is a culture? I mean, I would say it's the confluence of all of them and it's your mind making the decision as to what is the moral fact. But yeah, I mean, again, I feel like, and this is as I said my opening statement, morality is not one thing. It's a confluence of a number of somewhat, sometimes lateral and sometimes intersecting things and sometimes mutually what appears to be mutually exclusive. And it is the conversation of these things together that eventually allows us to come to a satisfying moral answer about something. Now, there is one thing I wanted to bring up just before I forget it. And oh, also by the way, Randall, thank you so much for bringing up Tolstoy. He's one of my favorite writers and also, yeah, one of the most famous anarchists in history, so good on you that. Now, there was one thing which was, I feel like there was an attempt to shift the burden of proof that wasn't 100% justified. Yeah, and it's that the shifting from the sub, to put the burden of proof on subjective morality. Now, if we look at morality, we know that it exists. We all agree that people have morals. So then the question then becomes, is that morality, does it exist in human minds or does it exist in reality? We know it exists in human minds at least because people have ideas about morals and people disagree with each other about morals. So therefore, we know that it exists in human minds beyond the shadow of a doubt. Now, is there an objective standard out of that? That's what we don't really know. And we would need proof if we wanted to take that in. So I do actually think the burden of proof is on objective morality, not subjective morality, but I'd be open to having my mind changed. So you said, first of all, I mentioned many cultures and I said, where's the moral fact come from? And you said, well, it's your mind interacting with all those cultures, but here's the problem. Is that each mind interacts with a different subset of cultures. So by that logic, every mind has its own morality. So that you have a radical subjectivism that everybody has their own morality. There is no sense that I can objectively say to you, you've done something wrong, even if we're in the same American society or Canadian society, because each one of us has our own individualized morality. You can, because the dialectic ultimately decides that. So it's the rationality of the subject. So the moral argument ultimately decides whose position is adopted by the society at large. The- Where is the moral argument that decides, are you going to let two people talk? Well, two people talk is the ideal and it's what we're trying to do here, well, four people, but you understand the principle of what I'm saying. In society, we see, I mean, you can look at the stacks of moral tomes that have been written over the last few thousand years. They're all essentially arguing for a specific ideology, a specific moral standard, being more desirable based on the ideology that the writers have had transmitted to them or have come up with if they're a great thinker like Tolstoy or maybe Nietzsche. But that is all completely constructed by society based on the ideologies that we have, that we've constructed in the political choices that we've made. It's not something that exists in nature. It's something that exists as we've come out of the state of nature and formed society. So Derek Chauvin, it was part of a culture in the Minnesota Minneapolis Police Department that believed it was appropriate to treat people in a particular kind of way. And all you're saying is, yep, that was his morality. It's different than mine. That's all you can say. But the structures that we've created as a society that he agreed to live by under the social contract that we create when we come out of the state of nature and form a society. That's illegal, that's a fiction. There is no such, there never was any day when we decided that, and I've already pointed out that there are multiple cultures that we're talking about. So which culture had this decision that we're all gonna live by a particular way? So in our specific case, it comes out of the Enlightenment and what we would use as a placeholder, the Western dialectic, it might come from a completely different place in another culture and they would be committed to their moral code no more, no more less than any of us here. I mean, part of the reason why cops got away with killing people like this so long, so many times even though we had the video evidence of it, in the evidence of like, for instance, Eric Garner getting choked to death in New York saying, I can't breathe and the cop getting away with it scot-free, not even a slap on the wrist and the person who filmed it being punished by the cops for it. I mean, we can see that there is a certain level of respect that we as a society give to cops and a certain assumption of their moral character that let them get this far and this far out of what we would otherwise consider morality until it finally all came crashing down. Right, but so if I can make a couple of points here because I think that I could maybe ask some clarity to this. I did some ties with Randall's last point that, yeah, so Shaman was, it was this part of the society that shaped him or the culture that he was in at that point and your point is that, well, we've kind of agreed to the social contract but that's kind of the problem because think about it. When people step out of these social contracts that we've agreed on, right? You would just, if we've all agreed on them then when people step out of them, you should say that that's morally wrong, right? But the problem is, let's think about Martin Luther King, right, I mean, he stepped out of line with what was acceptable. Think about the Nuremberg Trials. When we went to, when Martin Luther King, he said, for example, how did he justify his claim? He wrote a letter and said there's a law that's higher than the law of the state of Alabama. And then if you look at the Nuremberg Trials, for example, when they went over there, whenever they had the trials for the Nazis and they said we were just following orders of our culture, it was what we were part of, they didn't just say, well, you're right, so just get moving, no. They were saying there was something above cultural norms that is obligatory. And if I could just say something about Brinton's point is that I didn't want to ignore your point about knowing objective morals, right? So, but I don't know if it's because we don't have that much time left. What you're getting at is epistemology, like how do we come to know something, right? And I think that'll take us quite a long time because I could simply, just to give an example, I could say, well, the revelation from Jesus Christ is, you know- Well, hang on. Let me correct you. I just want to let you guys know that we will go to Q&A in just a minute. Sorry to interrupt. Okay. Can I just, there's something I really wanted to bring up and I haven't had a reason to, but this does need to come up. So there was a study done several years ago in 2009. So, geez, 10 years ago. 11. And what they found was, was that when people were reporting, they would have people, they do a neuro scan on people and have them report their own feelings on an issue, God's feeling on an issue, and also another person's feeling on issues. So like Democrats or Republicans or something. And what they found was within the parts of their brain that lit up, when they talked about their feelings and when they talked about God's feelings, the same part of the brain lit up. Whereas when they talked about other people, a different part of the brain activated. So it seems from the study, what it would imply is that when people are saying that they're appealing to God or some sort of objective truth, the brain is literally just going back and they're thinking about it themselves. Right, but you should know as well as anyone that those studies can be heavily skewed. And I did see that study before, it's been brought to my attention, but as you should know yourself with studies like this, I mean, it depends on number one, who you ask, right? Number two, are they the sample group, right? Well, I mean, there could be problems with the study, but if you've seen it before, do you know any specific problems with the study that you can bring up? I definitely studies can be wrong. Well, it's, as you said, it's kind of an older study. So I haven't actually thought about it in the last, I mean, read about anything on it in the last, in years. So, but I have had it brought to my attention and looked into it. And I bring up other studies like that, but the opposite similar to it, at least before, and I got similar feedback from people who disagree with it. But the point is that I could easily say, well, Brendan, let's think about it. The reason why you disagree with me is the studies show that when you're confronted with the view that contradicts your beliefs, you tend to cling tighter to your beliefs. So that's why you're not accepting what I'm telling you right now. That's neither here nor there. Well, I'll let you guys know that at some point. You can accept the rationale. At some point, if one of you is willing to defer to the other, giving them the last word, excellent. Otherwise, in about two minutes, I will have to forcefully take us into the Q and A. Okay, I'm gonna jump in then greedily and just say something. So a couple of things I wanted to respond to to Brenton when you said, I've shifted the burden of proof or we've shifted it. You remind me of George Barkley and you may not mind that, but of course, George Barkley tried to shift the burden of proof on the realist. For those who don't know, he was an idealist. He believed that we do not perceive a world external to our minds. There are only minds and ideas. He said, all we actually experience are our ideas, not a mind external to them. And it seems to me that you're trying to argue something similar that all we perceive are actually our perception of moral facts, not objective moral facts out there. And I think the realist is on good grounds to reject both of those. Because in fact, the vast majority of people intuitively believe that there is a mind external to themselves and they also, most people are intuitive moral realists. So yes, I think the burden of proof is on you. Now, there was also some equivocation, I think here, that you can see that there's a radical subjectivism to your view that, well, morality is perceived as the individual engaged with multiple cultures and just decides for themselves. And yet you also talk about a social contract that somehow stands over that individual and judges individuals and they're somehow obliged to conform to the social contract. I think it's either one or the other. Either you create morality as an individual interacting with cultures or somehow a culture imposes morality on you through a social contract. And if so, which culture is it? Is it from the Canadian culture, Alberta culture, the city of Edmonton culture? My church's culture, I'm not clear. I mean, I would say you conflated me slightly with Robert because he was the one who was bringing up the social contract. For the record, I'm an anarchist and I'm not an idealist though I do have a lot of idealist, like philosophical idealist. It really, like if you wanna know how I view reality I would highly recommend checking out the philosopher Alan Watts. Amazing. So I guess if James, if you wanna end it there or we, I've got a whole question- I hate ending it. I hate ending it, but just because we could always go there's always another rebuttal from one side or the other. So it might be a good chance too. And maybe during Q&A though, feel free if what your point was that you had on your mind if it's relevant to a question, feel free to squeeze it in there too. All right, so thanks so much folks. I really appreciate it. I do love this. And I even was like so tempted to keep going because I just really enjoy this and we're in the kind of the depth of it. So wanna say thanks so much everybody. I'm going to start reading these questions as fast as possible. Let me know folks, somebody said we might be able to get through questions faster. Someone said you don't have to say thank you to every single super chat. I've seen some where they just say thank you to everybody upfront for doing your super chats. And now we're gonna read through the questions Bing bang boom. So let me know. I also just want you guys to know how much we really appreciate that support though. And we will get into it. Steven Steen, thanks for your super chat says Converse contender looks like a bearded Matt Damon. So true, I can see that. And that's objective. So thank you very much. Let's see, Dwayne Burke, thanks for your super chat. That objective, something that is 100% wrong. Subjective means on the other hand, something that isn't 100% wrong. So there is at least a 1% possibility that child rape is okay. I can't accept even 1% that child rape is okay though. Do you want to take this or do you want Robert to take it? Robert, do you want to take it or me? Okay, Robert's mic isn't on. So I guess I'll just go. So subjectivity versus objectivity has to deal with what you have subjectively decided to value. So for instance, if I subjectively value someone's autonomy and especially the autonomy of children to not be sexually molested, it's still 100% wrong. But it doesn't change the fact there is nothing written into the code of the natural world that forces me to say that. I say that because that is the morals that I have come to through reason, logic and compassion. Gotcha, and thanks so much for your next, let's see, next Super Chat from, we don't have too many, so we're gonna rock through these quick. And then we do have a number of questions though, the standard questions as well. Wreck it, thanks for your Super Chat said. I'm glad I found your channel. Always interesting discussions. I enjoy this one so much tonight and I am so glad. I gotta pass the enjoyment onto the speakers and say all credit to the speakers for making it fun. Royce Tagal, thanks for your Super Chat said. I teach babies with special needs and have worked with other special needs age groups. So how do I determine what is right or wrong in the behaviors they display? Does objective morality still apply to them? I think this one. Brenda, you wanna take this one or me? Yeah, of course. I mean, objective morality, if it's objective, it applies to everyone. Now our ability to grasp objective morality is going to depend on our cognitive state and cognitive awareness. That includes both our age, right? And also our environment, how we're raised as I said and if there are some aspects of the human mind and an individual that are not functioning properly. The most egregious or obvious case is a clinical psychopath. A clinical psychopath is an individual that does not grasp moral facts as such. They can recognize externally moral facts and conform to them for their own benefit, but they do not perceive them as an experiential reality. And I would suggest in the case of the clinical psychopath, that's a great example of showing how much most human beings have that they sadly lack. It's like a person who's colorblind, but in this case as regards morality. But irregardless, morality exists. I mean, if it's objective, it's objective. You bet. And thanks for your Super Chat. Jake4D says, you know what? It takes like not even a full second to say thanks for your Super Chat. I'm just gonna keep saying it because it's like the person who said that is like, how much time would that save us? I don't think it would save those. Okay, so they, Jay guys, we all have the same basic needs, i.e. avoiding harm. Group morality is about finding our communalities and developing shared morals or laws. And laws give us objective standards. This is not objective morality. Agreed? I don't think that people share some perception of morality makes it objective. I agree with that. Exactly what you said applied to the Nazis and all other groups that I think are objectively immoral. In fact, I mean, I like to use an analogy of say a video game. The creator creates the game, right? And the objective for the characters or the players in the game are to do X. If they are not to do X, they're just not following the standard that they were, the purpose that they were created to perform. So I mean, that's, I can agree with the statement and just say that they're, I agree with that. That's not a problem for us. If I could jump in on the end of that just for one second. That example that Congress just used of a video game is a good actual reason that morality isn't an objective thing. Because in a video game, if you try to do something that the creator didn't intend for you to do, that is against the cosmology of whatever game you're playing, you can't do it. It's not going to happen. Well, you can. Yeah, I'd have to disagree with that. Say that you have to, just say you're in Mario, right? And you're supposed to jump over a hole in the ground to reach the finish line or whatever and you jump into it. You can obviously. And then even if that were the case, I could accept. The creator intended for you to be able to jump into that hole in the ground and lose your life. To be able to, but the agency, right? The choice is a factor. But if it was a completely objective thing of morality, you wouldn't be able to. Well, you're talking about doing something that's intended. And I think it's a very, very, very lacking cosmological creator that would allow you to do something that isn't in your interest or in the interest of the society to. Sorry, I see your hand going up my bad. No, one more point, James. I actually disagree with you on this. You said it's an entirely lacking creator that would allow for you to even have the possibility. Actually, I think let's just, I think it's the opposite. I think that if you, because I've heard the statement that an all-powerful God would allow free creatures, well, is an all-powerful person capable or powerful enough to partially limit their powers in order to have free creatures to have their own will, for example, in order to interact with them? So I just don't think that's the case. I have a quick question for Converse here. So if we go by divine command theory, which is God says it, therefore, that is what is moral and what is not. Let's just say hypothetically, God said child rape is great. Now go do it. Would that make it? Right. I think you started off with a straw man. So God says it, therefore, is moral. That's not what we claim. So that's one. Is morality subject to the will of God? No, so God's nature is the standard in which morality is measured, like an infallible barometer or something like that has been given as an example. And when you do not fall in line with the nature of the one created, so let's just give it like this. So I think I know where you're going with that. If God changed its nature, would the nature of child rape be OK? Because I assume if God is all-powerful, God can change God's own nature. I've got to give lots of words to the objectivists on this one. And then we'll go to the next question. Can I jump on this one then? Go ahead. I mean, so two things quickly. First of all, most divine command theorists are not divine command theorists about moral value, but rather moral obligation. I made the distinction at the beginning. So moral obligations, right and wrong, what we ought to not do are constituted by commands or identified with commands. And we can perhaps know them through reason or moral intuition or something else. And then moral value is, as Converse said, to be identified with God's nature is the necessary expression of his nature. So counterfactually, God cannot choose other than what his nature is. For God to be omnipotent means that God can do whatever is consistent with his nature and logically possible. But it's a metaphysical necessity of morality that evil cannot be good and good cannot be evil. And so that's just a necessary expression of his nature across all possible worlds, or in every possible way things could have been. So no, he could not have chosen to make evil good. James, one thing, sorry, just to give an example, say that the God that there was nothing besides this God, and he created all that exists. So everything that exists flows out from God, and his nature and being is the standard of all that exists because it all came from him. And let's just say that something like, well, could God say that stealing was right? Stealing or something like that is a feature of an agent that is wanting. God having all things is not wanting for anything because all things flowed from God. So that's just an example quickly to show why that's not the case. All right, jump in. Just one quick thing here, though. Hold on, I'm so sorry to do this. Just because the Super Chat was originally for the Objectivist, I don't want to gang up on him. So I want to give you the last word. Yeah, yeah, no problem for him. Next up, Lily R.O., thanks for your Super Chat. Five by five, are you really Dave Rubin? No, no, thank God, no. My camera isn't on because I'm not looking really great right now, but my haircut is much better and my suits are fitting. That's impressive, I mean. I don't believe it. That's good. Next time I'll turn the camera on. Next up, Jake Forty, thanks for your Super Chat, said, what is your culture? Everyone then that influences you, it is your country, it's your church, it's your town or groups you attend to the degree you influence them and they, you. You are their culture. This is maybe regarding the last thing from- Yeah, no, that's a good way of putting it. Absolutely, I mean- Maybe I misunderstood what was the point of that or what was the question in it? I think the person who was asking the question was talking about the methodology of how we transmit culture to people and the structures which do that. So like your church, your friend group, your town, your church, I said church already, excuse me, your workplace, all of these things transmit culture, transmit ideas and transmit things like moral philosophy to you. Yeah, I mean, we understand that, but I think- What he was saying was he was asking like, where is the culture? What is the culture that is influencing me? What he was saying essentially was, was that you, Randall Rouser, that you are the culture of all of the, like you are the micro expression of the macro confluence of culture around you that then leads to the moral judgment. It's kind of like what Walt Whitman said, I am large, I contain multitudes. And that's the point actually I was making that once we recognize that, then we're left with a radical subjectivism that each individual has their own moral code that is born of the radical confluence of cultures within that individual. I mean, they do, but it's just not just that. There's also the other institutions within society. There's the other individuals. There's the broad sweeping cultural movements that we all exist in. And it's the- It's all ultimately created by each individual. So what is right for Derek Chauvin is wrong for another particular individual for all of us. But what is right for Derek Chauvin was also determined to be wrong by the broader society in which he existed. Right, but same thing with Martin Luther King is what Martin Luther King did was determined to be wrong by the broader society. It wasn't though, because the Civil Rights Act was passed in his presentation and his- Not during his time though. You're saying that later on people with 2020- About a year after his death, the Civil Rights Act was passed. But I'm talking about when he crossed the bridge, right? When he crossed the bridge, there was an outpouring of popular support in multiple states for him. Most of those people who were crossing the bridge with him were existing in the societies that were living under Jim Crow. And whether he was a great reformer or not is only a fact that could be answered on your view with respect to each individual making their own judgments with respect to the unique confluence of cultures within that individual. There is no transcendent moral fact even for two individuals on the view that you guys have defended. Well, I don't think there should necessarily be a transcendent moral fact because there's nothing in the material world is fixed. Everything is in a constant flux of change. And as everything is in a constant flux of change, anything that would be transcendent through that would necessarily get to a point where it's completely outdated and wouldn't make any sense. In my view, there's no normative moral debates. We can't have a disagreement about morality because each individual is right with respect to the unique confluence of cultures within that individual. I mean, we can have a disagreement. Unless my interpretation is wrong. I think that the last super chat, maybe my interpretation wasn't on the same page as everybody else, but I think it was maybe more of a challenge to the objective of it. So I do want to kind of give them the last word and then move to the next question. Sure, sure. Sure, so James, I'll give, I'll give one, I'll just say one more thing. Short pithy. So, so Brennan, I heard in a debate, you said on this guy's view on race, you said as a Buddhist, I see your ideas on race as something of a religious, I have a religious law that I have to oppose. Yeah, yeah. It seemed that you had some type of moral law that you had to oppose based on it. I just want to ask that quick question. Oh, awesome. Yeah, I would love to answer that really quickly. Yeah, so essentially what I meant to say, religious duty, my brain screwed up there a little bit. Well, maybe that was just a... No, no, it's fine. Religious law, religious, it means the same thing, but so I am a Nichiren Buddhist. I believe in the mystic law of the Lotus Sutra and one of the things that four people who embrace this way of living and these values that I have, I am obliged to confront slanders of the Lotus Sutra, which is to say I am obliged to confront people who through their words or actions do something that denies the truth that each and every human being possesses the Buddha nature and this Buddha nature can manifest within themselves within a single lifetime. So essentially anyone that says anything that denies the basic inherent right to liberty, the right to dignity and autonomy that people have, that is something that I am religiously opposed to. But the fact that I came to this decision, I would say is ultimately subjective because I chose to join this religion and I chose to embrace those values. There's some objective stuff going in there with Buddhist cosmology, but that's beyond the scope of this. Must keep moving. We do appreciate it. Thanks for your super chat said. Let's see. James, please dye your hair pink. I'll think about it. Royce de Gaulle, thanks for your super chat. Let's see. They thought, they're challenging Randall. They said, I thought, they said I, they didn't give an argument why. As I said, they thought that your response to the objection where they brought up children with special needs and whether or not morality is objective for them as well. They said that they found it, your response, they said it's morally objectionable. I'm not sure, maybe Randall, do you think, would you guess on like why they might have or are you kind of, I know it's, they're not giving you much on why. They would need to explain what is morally objectionable. I said that objective moral facts exist independent of people. That's what I've taken the view of. Now again, I said that everybody's gonna have a relative grasp of those moral facts through a variety of factors, including their cognitive faculties, their culture, their development in terms of age and so on. I don't know what they're talking about. James, maybe I can, I'll give an example. I think may help. It may or may not, we'll see. But so say that a radio, right? Depending on the strength of the antenna, may receive a signal, full signal, a partial signal or no signal at all, right? It does not have any effect on whether there's an actual correspondence between that radio and the actual station. So while there may be a special needs that has less of a signal, right? The objectivity has no bearing on the objectivity of the moral. Gotcha. And thanks. That might help. You betcha. And thanks for your super chat from Dave Gar, who said, this is an interesting one. And one of the final ones, they said, I'd be interested if the interlocutors could steal man their opponent's position. Also keep saying thank you, James. It's the moral thing to do. Very nice things, Dave Gar. OK, go ahead. I would love to do that. But I think I've talked quite a bit. Robert, do you want to take a stab at it? Like, do we actually want to do that? Do we have time to steal man the other's positions? Maybe one representative. I can do it pretty easily. I'd just say that the argument from the other side seems to be that, well, regardless of if people think there's an objective moral or not, cultures and individuals are typically what decide whether something's moral or not. And that if there is some objective fact of the matter, it needs to be shown objectively. And that there is differences between cultures only means that there are different morals. It doesn't have any bearing on whether we're right or wrong. Now, maybe that's not a still man, but you can tell us if that was correct or not, I guess. Do you want to take that one, Brenton? Why don't you take that one? Like I said, I've talked a lot. Yeah, so I'm not very good at steal manning positions. Oh, OK. I can do it if you don't want to do it. I'm just not good at taking positions I disagree with. It's a flaw of mine. All right, well, why don't you let me handle it then? I'll do it real quick. OK, so the thing that I'm getting from the moral objectivists here is that there may be disagreements on the details of morality throughout history, but there is a definite theme in morality that we keep coming back to that seems to be independent of time and place and context. And that when I see wrongdoing in my heart, I can feel something and it doesn't feel like just an opinion like whether or not I like chocolate or vanilla. The murder of George Floyd was horrifying and it should never happen again. And I can feel that that conviction that I feel is something that feels beyond me and feels like it is a part of the objective universe. And so I choose to put that forth. And thanks for your superjet, Jake 4D, who says laws are simply largely agreed upon and codified moral statements. Societal mores change ahead of laws. This is why we stand up protesting for change, such as Black Lives Matter. I would just say that laws, social mores and laws are again attempts to approximate what the good society is, to exemplify or model a society on what we believe to be objectively a good society. And I believe in more respects than not, 21st century America is a more just society than 19th century America. John Rawls had a famous thought experiment for this about being in the original condition, which I think is quite a legitimate insight. So the idea is all things be equal. If you didn't have your, if you didn't know how you'd be born into a society, you didn't know what your gender would be, you didn't know what your ethnicity, your socioeconomic status, your ability versus disability, what it would be, would you rather be born into America in the 19th century or the 21st century? And I think clearly we would rather be born to America in the 21st century. And that's evidence that America in the 21st century is a more just society. And that's an objective fact, not a subject. Must just keep moving. Thanks for your super chat. Really appreciate it from, Tioga says, thanks, Converse, let's stick together. I'm, you've got a fan of us. Okay, next up, thanks for your super chat. Gabrielle Kay, appreciate it, says, Alan Watts is a cult that didn't make it. Be very careful to buy in any ideology. If the message is sweet, you might not taste the poison. I would say that Alan Watts is kind of, he's a poetic speaker. He talks about Eastern religions. I mean, although that could be possibly true, I can digrew with Brendan that sometimes I'll listen to Alan Watts, I can pick nuggets out and just say, oh, that's a great principle, right? Like I can read a Buddhist principle and say, makes sense, I can read anything, you know? Like if you read, you reap what you sow from the Bible, right? And then you read karma from, you know, Buddhism or something like that. You're like, well, hold on a second. It's not about the personal, it's about his ideas, right? So, I think- Gotcha. If I could chime in on that one for just one second, that's kind of why it's so important to maintain a democratized ideology and to subject all of your, excuse me, I'm so sorry, to subject all of your ideology and all of your ideas to the dialectic and to have civil conversations like we're having right now to subject your ideas to examination, otherwise you do fall for charlatans. Gotcha. I mean, what I would say is, I think Alan Watts is one of the only public intellectuals who's really worth a damn, like maybe Chomsky, but even he doesn't really get close to Alan Watts from what I've noticed. Now, if he was a cult, he's a cult of one. He didn't really have followers and he didn't attract them or attract a movement, like in the sense of like Elron Hubbard. You know, he definitely had his flaws. He wasn't a great father, unfortunately, neither was Shakyamuni Buddha. I appreciate his philosophy and I really appreciate his ability to explain Eastern thought in a way that Westerners can understand, but I don't agree with everything that he says. Gotcha. And last, before we wrap it up, we do have a Patreon comment from Brian Stevens, who also says Matt Damon looks like an unbearded version of Converse Contender, so very nice. Full circle. Yes, it is. Thank you folks for hanging out with us tonight and most of all, thanks for our speakers being here, hanging out with us tonight. It was a really fun conversation. Hope you all enjoyed it and want to remind you one last time, I put all their links in the description box, including Randall's YouTube channel, which we just learned about tonight. So you can check out any of these four gentlemen and thanks again to these four gentlemen. Really appreciate you guys being here. It's been a true pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much and thanks for the other speakers. Absolutely, with that, we'll keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable folks. We hope you have a great night. We will be back tomorrow. We will have Cliff from Ask Cliff, the famous kind of YouTube channel in which he kind of goes out and does evangelism and apologetics. He and his son, like real life son, this isn't just me making it up, is they're going to be teaming up and they'll be going against Randolph, who is the president of Canadian Atheists. By the way, Randall, he asked, he said, what part of Canada is Randall from? Edmonton, Alberta. Gotcha. That's why you sound like Jordan Peterson. Well, he's from Toronto, so. Oh, he is? What about five days drive away? Okay, so then I just, I'm just racist. All right, thank you. Well, apparently I sound like Dave Rubin and as a New Yorker, I'm deeply offended and saddened by that. But a poutine is gross. Just that's an objective fact. That being said, it is objectively wrong if you did not subscribe to modern day debate. Absolutely. Appreciate it. It's been a fun time folks. And so yes, that should be a good one tomorrow night on whether or not it's reasonable to believe in Jesus as one savior. So we'll have two atheist guests. Jim Majors will be back for the first time in a while and he will be partnering with Randall. So should be a lot of fun. We hope you guys keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. Take care and have a great rest of your night or day wherever you are.