Yeah, it's a good question. Although I dont put much store in evolutionary biology, as it currently stands - bunch of pseudoscientists, if you ask me. I certainly wont grant that our attractions and repulsions are the source of our morality. Telling a story doesnt mean you've tested an hypothesis.

I dont hold a strong view about aesthetics (I've never really thought about it). I'm inclined to think it's subjective, since there are very few universally held preferences. No doubt (with due deference to tame deuces critique earlier) part of it is that irrespective of my own views, I can conceive of someone rationally finding a dead body attractive whereas I can't conceive of someone rationally finding "torture for fun" to be moral.

Mainly though, I suspect it's that I've never thought about it (because I dont really care) - perhaps most questions of aesthetics I've encountered are of the kind with multiple answers (which flavor icecream is best?) whereas most moral questions I've encountered are more universally held.

Fine, but in that case the subjectivist can make the same claim about moral statements: there is no whole moral statement unless fixed by indexical facts about the speaker.

Depends on the version of subjectivism we're interested in. Zumby has been focusing on a very simple version of cognivitive subjectivism for illustration purposes. As a theory of morality, it seems pretty bad. On the other hand, noncognitive subjectivism seems like an interesting theory that does make sense of a lot of how we use moral language and hence has some initial plausibility.

This is an unwarranted level of skepticism for an entire field of science full of highly talented and respected scientists. In fact, this makes me question whether you even know what 'pseudo-science' is.
Firstly, this is a non-sequitur. Secondly, you actually expect me to test this hypothesis? Have you tested your hypotheses for the existence of 'objective' morality? Where have you published these results?
Just because you don't hold strong views towards it does not mean it is not important to the discussion at hand.
This is disingenuous at best. There are definitely people who find torture fun, just as there are people who find dead bodies attractive, just as there are people who find murdering fun and the list goes on and on. Your argument here does not hold up, nor have you explained why the idea of objective aesthetics is separate to the idea of objective morality. If aesthetics is subjective, then there is no conceivable reason to expect morality to be objective.
Moral questions appear to be universally held - up until you look into evolutionary biology and evolutionary diversity. Same way aesthetics may appear to be universally held - up until you look into genetic influences and evolutionary diversity.

Yeah, that's fine. I raised what amounted to a superficial objection to coherence that zumby dispensed with neatly with this crafty philosophical resource.

If you tend to think (like me and bunny I guess) that some sort of realism is necessary to explain how we talk and reason about morality, then you're probably not going to get anything out of any of the anti-realist positions. Like picking a favorite Kardashian I suppose.

Two items of food for thought:

"Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Accept or lean toward: objective 382 / 931 (41.0%)
Accept or lean toward: subjective 321 / 931 (34.5%)
Other 228 / 931 (24.5%)"

That's from a survey of philosopher faculty. The same survey shows that over 56% believe in realist morality. This is in case you think philosophers don't defend objectivism in aesthetics.

And also this, which is not a statement of objectivism, but it describes the posture of judgment as not simply liking stuff.

Thank you for the informative response but the difference between those who think its subjective and those who think its objective does not appear to be substantial meaning that we don't really have an answer to this question yet. Science however is making substantial headway in answering these particular questions via evolutionary biology, neuroscience and genetics. Those who stray far from the science will soon be left behind I feel.

What percentage of self-identified realists are something other than objectivists?

Was Sam Harris part of the survey?

I do.
No it isnt. I was identifying exactly what part of evolutionary biology strikes me as pseudo-scientific.
I only expect you to test hypotheses if you're holding something out as science. I dont claim there is any scientific evidence for objective morality, so no - I havent published anything of the sort.
LDO.

I was answering your question: "My question for Bunny is. If you believe morality to be objective, what reason do you have for believing that aesthetics are not objective?"
Luckily, I'm not making an argument, so whether "it" holds up isnt terribly important.

I'm interested that you feel qualified to rule out a whole bunch of hypothetical reasons on the grounds that you can't conceive of them. Not terribly scientific.
As ever, your opinions stated as facts are fascinating.

So would you say that you know more about evolutionary biology than they do? or that you have more evidence to the contrary of evolutionary biology? or that you don't believe in evolution or biology to begin with? Which part makes you think they are pseudo-scientists? Calling them pseudo-scientists personally makes no sense to me because they fully adhere to the scientific method and they do not fabricate evidence or results. They also publish in important and highly respected journals.
I am sorry but I may have completely missed what part you are referring to. Are you arguing that they have no evidence for their hypotheses? Please be a little clearer on this point.
If there is no scientific evidence for your hypothesis then what exactly does it have going for it apart from intuition - which has shown to be wrong countless times - e.g., intuitively it makes sense that the earth is in the center of the universe so this is what we believed for hundreds of years. It also made intuitive sense to believe that the sun spins around the earth and this is what we also believed for hundreds of years. I could go on..
My issue is that I want to learn something from you about your view on objective morality but I am not getting anything substantial out of you and I am trying to probe every little exception to do so, but you just keep dodging the process of actually engaging in any sort of useful discourse. It makes it even harder when you don't seem committed to your ideas very much at all. It makes it difficult to take your idea on objective morality seriously.
I would like to conceive of what you conceive, if only I could get a little fight out of you, which doesn't seem to be possible.
Yes, I believe it's called - having confidence in one's ideas. It doesn't mean that they are facts and I would not advise readers to treat them as such, I simply want to convey confidence in my ideas, allowing for some sort of useful discourse to take place at least.

Have you tried focusing on the parallel to Platonic realism? Might help to see where he's coming from even if you don't think it works.

My issue with the scientifc nature of evolutionary biology is where they begin speculating about how something like disgust evolved (for example). They tell plausible stories, but they dont line those up and perform an experiment to determine which of their plausible stories it was. The stories make sense, but it's easy to construct a mechanism which makes sense. It's more difficult to provide evidence that the mechanism occurred the way they said it did.
Bearing in mind that mine is a particularly naive view of morality - nothing. (Although I dont know that "the earth is the centre of the universe" or "the sun travels around the earth" are necessarily incorrect, FWIW. They're not very useful models, but utility doesnt necessarily lead to truth. That's a pretty major tangetnt though).

Given it's a reasonably well defended view in philosophy, I'm going to speculate that there are logical arguments supporting objective morality.

For me intuition is enough though.
That's fair enough. It might help to remember that I'm not defending my views in this thread, I'm just articulating them. There were two reasons for starting it - one was in case Neue Regel wanted to go back and forth again the way we did several years back (in which case, we may well have ended up making actual arguments). The other was so that I could understand what a subjective account of morality actually entailed - previously, the conversations I've had with subjectivists have generally been them attacking my views (normally on epistemological grounds) rather than them advancing some positive account.

I think the reason I seem not terribly committed might stem from that.
If you and I were to argue about morality I doubt it would get very far. As I recall, you are a hardcore empiricist - if there's no scientific way of talking about it, it isnt worth talking about (right?). I reject that general outlook - so I'm not sure we have common ground for any kind of useful discussion. Happy to give it a go if you like, but it didnt go so well previously.
I was just making a joke, really. It seemed funny to declare what you seemed to think of as an argument as disingenuous based on relying on the limits of my conception. Only to then declare that there was no possible reason for distinguishing between aesthetics and morality - based on the limits of yours. There's extra effort entailed in adopting an empiricist mindset since you have to hold yourself up to a higher standard as well.

FWIW - I wasnt actually presenting an argument when I said this:

"I'm inclined to think it's subjective, since there are very few universally held preferences. No doubt (with due deference to tame deuces critique earlier) part of it is that irrespective of my own views, I can conceive of someone rationally finding a dead body attractive whereas I can't conceive of someone rationally finding "torture for fun" to be moral."

I was acknowledging that I didnt really have any reason for leaning that way other than my inability to "get into the head" of someone who thinks murder is A-OK, in contrast to people who might find dead bodies attractive.

I was making the point that I havent really thought about aesthetics, so I'm not really entitled to a view (whilst confessing that I've got an inclination - one that harms my moral objectivist stance, if there's strength in your argument).

I certainly think that mathematics is the closest analog to morality, as I think about them.

Aesthetics seems like a totally different kettle of fish.

I appreciate the thought-out response here and I have one more follow-up question because I personally believe that utility does lead to truth - particularly in the case of biology (hence empiricist mindset and all our disagreements). My question is. Do you believe that our (objective or subjective) sense of morality has utility to it?

P.S. what I thought was disingenuous was your statement comparing aesthetics to morality and the differences in the objectivity of those but if it was simply a limit to your understanding then I am mistaken for calling it disingenuous.

Yes.

I commented above that, although its a mystery to me how we are able to know moral truths (just as it's a mystery to me how we can understand the properties of infinite dimensional, finite projective planes). It wouldn't surprise me if knowledge of such such gave us an evolutionary advantage. It also wouldn't surprise me if there was some immoral tendency that was selected for.

If it does have utility then shouldn't we at least consider morality from this perspective? I assume we must. You assume it may be pseudo-science, yet I hope I've managed to communicate that pseudo-science is not defined by anything else but the actual publication (e.g., which journal its published in) - which is a good indicator that the researcher is accurately following the scientific method.

Also, I think a lot of these mysteries begin to be filled when one considers biological life from an information-perspective. As evolution continues more and more information is incorporated into our DNA code. Under this perspective, this information is not just 'information', it is the complete sum of you (subject to change of course during your lifetime). You are an information process essentially.

Now, certain environmental influences (or feedback) can act to either reinforce this code into future generations or it can act to change this code in search of greater adaptability (p.s. this is not a conscious process but simply the result of the laws we already know). As more environmental feedback is incorporated into this code, the code becomes increasingly complex. It becomes so complex that it generates consciousness, much like the emergence of the biological phenomenon known as photosynthesis. I bring up photosynthesis because I want to emphasise that consciousness under this perspective is nothing more special than any other biological phenomenon that we observe. It is simply different: suited for the survival of particular species within particular environments.

Furthermore, under this perspective, our moral intuitions and our aesthetic intuitions are in part already hard-coded from eons of environmental feedback, and they are also in part emergent - from solely the environmental feedback incorporated during your own lifetime (e.g., cultural influences etc.).

I am sure you already know much of this, but looking at morality and other such intuitions from this perspective allows us to overcome some of the challenges and mystery that has puzzled us for so many generations, and even if this avenue of research proves to be a dead-end, we at least collect evidence along the way and this evidence may be used to generate more realistic descriptions. This is why I get upset when people dismiss entire fields of science as if such generalization is even meaningful. Finally, provided you do not believe in evidence however, I would have no idea where to start.

If materialism is true, then everything is basically applied physics. However, I don't think the physical is the sum of all existence, even though it would be kind of neat if that were true.

Having said that, I was quite taken with a Dennett comment that dualism is essentially "giving up". His basic point was that, if science doesn't explain consciousness, what else can we do? Therefore, let's assume materialism is right and use science. That makes sense if you're working in the field - it doesn't have any special claim to being "probably true" though, as far as I can see.

Evolutionary biology might have become "proper science". I haven't been impressed so far though - granted my reading is perfunctory and kind of out of date now. If you've got some decent demonstrable explanation of disgust (or something similar) then I'd be interested to see it. What I saw when I went looking (back when Pinker's popular book came out) was just a lot of twaddle.

Pseudoscience (like SETI, to give another controversial example) annoys me since it takes resources from genuine scientific endeavour.
Evidence is awesome. Where there's evidence, I favour that over anything else. How does on demonstrate empirically that there is no objective morality though?

More from the field of evolutionary psychology but they are interrelated nonetheless:

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/bul/135/2/303/

I'm 99% sure that all of bunny's "evolutionary biology" references should be replaced with "evolutionary psychology".

I have to admit it is puzzling how you could call evolutionary biology pseudoscientific. It has certainly proved its mettle in both observation and experiment just as rigourously as any other scientific discipline.

I could understand if someone had issues with evolutionary psychology, since we don't really have have access to direct remains of behavior. This makes it ultimately inductive and thus a heuristic rather than an empirical approach. However two points must be remembered here:

1.) Evolutionary psychologists don't just sit around saying "well we do this, so it has to be an advantage - right?". It is a cross-discipline field which use a wide variety of methods and data collecting to support their statements.

2.) The fact that the discipline is ultimately inductive rather than deductive is not hidden. It is a common methodological limitation that the field in general is very upfront about.

I think calling it a pseudoscience would be a stretch. The field in general certainly works well within scientific paradigms. The ultimate goal of any scientist should be empirical deduction yes, but you can't get there without exploratory means.

It would be better to state that evolutionary psychology has limitations that most laymen would do well to learn and remember.

It's fun to try to think about but I doubt I'll ever get past my feeling that a prescriptive statement semantically must point to external motivation of some kind or else it's moral gobbledygook. Not sure exactly what it is that I'm trying to give a platonic treatment to.

Me too. (What other kind of biology is there?)

EDIT: I'm quite glad you're here actually. That's about the third time you've worked out what I probably mean when I say something flat out wrong.

My prejudice is probably out of date anyhow. I read on it quite a few years ago - back then it had the usual problem of early adopters being somewhat zealous and overstating their achievements.

I'm planning on reading the article VeeDDzz' posted for me (just as a random place to start). It was from 2009 so the field has no doubt developed.

As said my impression it is that it is laymen who are the chief concern when it comes to evolutionary psychology. Well, those and pop-scientists who stretch findings too far to make their books more interesting.

Certainly Pinker's book (How the Mind Works or something like that) was irritating in that regard. I did make an effort to read some papers though. It wasn't just a critique of popular accounts.

I haven't read much Pinker, but debating with his disciples tend to make my heard hurt. They tend to be somewhat versed, but the minute they start on behavior it is like the distinction between phenotype and genotype is completely lost on them.

Which is akward.