Topic: Why not impose morality?

[seaotter]

Your moral system is subjective, but once you chosen the system the conclusions of right and wrong are relativly objective. Is this what Harris is on about? If so it could be easily diffussed with an acknowledgment that he subjectivly chose his system using his own values.

[jomike]

hard to talk about things with a vocabulary not befitting them.

there are two senses of subjective and objective--an epistemic and an ontological sense.

[good stuff snipped]

I think that goes to the heart of the problem:  our vocabulary lacks sufficiently descriptive, non-technical terms intelligible to the general public.  Discussion of moral ontology & epistemology causes eyes to instantly glaze over, and did you see those pics of Kate Middleton in those tight orange pants?

So the water-cooler discussion is reduced to "them there moral values, are they OBjective or are they SUBjective?"  And we all know they can't possibly be subjective, because anarchy!  human sacrifice!  dogs living with cats!  Therefore they must be objective...

[Citizen Skeptic]

This is a little bit of a tangent but it goes to how societies organize.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person.[1] Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.[2] Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

And somewhat ammusingly:

Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, primates must maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through social grooming. Such social groups function as protective cliques within the physical groups in which the primates live. The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex. This suggests that there is a species-specific index of the social group size, computable from the species' mean neocortical volume.

We can't groom everyone so instead we impose norms.