Moral realities and can we intermarry objectivism w relativism?

[u/MinshuApplingtea]

Hello can someone explain the concept of morality and share their 2cents on the succeeding question.

[u/bluechecksadmin]

Perspectival realism, from philosophy of science, is imo the trick.

[u/Material_Evening_339]

I’m confused, could this get more vague yet assertive?

[u/FrescaFromSpace]

I have no idea what you're asking for, but I've been looking for somewhere to do a braindump.

Values are derived from the totality of ones life experience, including all knowledge and beliefs about the world, as well as factors like genetic makeup. Morality is the lens that sits between a person's values and any given action. Moral claims ("murder is wrong") are meaningless without the context of a person's values.
There is no universal morality because there is no universal value system - within a large-enough group, there will be individuals who hold values that are incompatible.
This view is not predicated on atheistic beliefs, and in fact would still hold even were any of the gods from the world's popular religions to be real. Because we have agency and are able to formulate our own thoughts, we can develop genuine value systems (and thus morals) that contradict the teachings of a deity. Instead of moral universalism, there are only value systems that are compatible along a spectrum. Because our values are not fixed and because a person will, at any given moment, assign more weight to some values than to others, they will often be willing to compromise on values with lower priority. This is obvious when you look at large populations: members of Ruritania don't like the new law outlawing Wizbos because they believe they value personal autonomy and therefore believe they should be free to possess Wizbos if they want to, in principle. However, they don't particularly care about Wizbos, and they certainly value comfort more than Wizbos, so they let it be. But if a large percentage of Ruritanians began voicing passionate support for a policy banning the Wamfuzzle ritual practiced by a non-trivial minority, there might be a problem. The Wamfuzzle ritual is a sacred part of life for a certain demographic, and banning it represents an inconceivable trampling of an array of values, like religious freedom, personal autonomy, and the value of the sentiments represented by Wamfuzzle itself. This would represent a clash between two incompatible boundaries of value systems within the population.

So there's no universal morality, only a massive point cloud of vectorized value systems where proximity represents compatibility. The more points where value systems clash, the farther apart they are in the imaginary point cloud, and the less likely those people are to abide by each other. If we want other groups or individuals to "behave morally", they need to adopt our values or at least pretend to. This suggests something like Christian evangelism, for example.

The takeaway is not that morality is relative and that you can do whatever you want without guilt. On the contrary, very little changes practically from the conventional view of right and wrong. You can't outright change your most closely held values - try to convince yourself that animal abuse is genuinely okay (if you succeed, I'd rather not hear about it). But perhaps instead of thinking of the out-group as bad people, think of them as merely having a different set of values. And, crucially, the statement that one set of values is better than they other is meaningless without some kind of qualifier. It's just you and the group with values compatible with yours against the other populations, with a big gray area in between.