Q&A: Objective Morality
Objective Morality
Question
Hello Rabbi, if I understood correctly, you claim that morality is objective, because that is our intuition. If so, then in your view is a certain food that you like also objectively tastier than others? Or regarding respectable clothing, is that too objectively respectable? And if not, then why not?
Thank you very much.
Answer
I could ask you the reverse. If morality is subjective, why is physics objective? Or sight? I do not experience morality the way I experience love for chocolate. For me, morality is a kind of observation, like sight. I understand it to be objective just as I understand sight to be objective.
Discussion on Answer
It is not a sensation or a feeling in the usual sense. It is an intuition. Just as the fact that my eyes reflect an image to me does not in itself mean that there really is something there. It could also be a subjective hallucination. The sensation/intuition that accompanies sight is what tells me that this is a reliable tool. The same applies to moral feelings. It is not just the bare fact that I feel that doing X is good and Y is bad. Attached to that is also a feeling/intuition that this is indeed valid and binding. On intuition, see column 653.
Thank you very much.
The question is different. People do not feel bound by an intuition that arises, for example, from the fact that they smoked a cigarette that day, and the question of whether it is objective is there. Are most/some of our feelings caused, say, by our position or things like that?
Thank you very much for the answer, but I still haven’t fully understood. You don’t experience morality the way you experience love for chocolate because those are senses, so the experience is of a different kind, no?