In general, this is right. A few points:
- You can’t reasonably reject something without giving reasons. You can withold judgment if the burden’s not in your court.
- What’s most plausible is to think that if you’re going to discuss morality with some other culture then there would have to be some objective domain with which to appeal. If taste is subjective, (for example), then we look ridiculous to have a debate about whether apples taste better than oranges. And if we do discuss it, then we’re doing nothing more than voicing opinions, without any reason for the other to care or consider anything. Imagine that if the truth of what I’m saying (about morality, or any topic) is relative to me, then why should I care about whatever objections you have to what I’m saying—because what I’m saying is already true!
- I think this is what I took myself to be saying when I made the section on the list of reasons why claiming objectivity is a good thing.
I don’t think you believe that. When you hear of an Iranian girl who is stoned to death because she ran away from a forced marriage at the age of 13… do you immediately say, “Well, different strokes for different folks”? Because if not, then intuitively you think morality is objective. You might have some explanation about it being illusory, but you’d at least recognize that some explanation is required. None has ever been provided in this thread. And yes, I have made some burden shifting arguments. Usually what happens now is that someone will scoff and then bring up a legitimate cultural difference revolving around an incredibly complex issue for which we couldn’t know the answer. If I say here that it might be that we disagree and neither of us is wrong, that’s no threat to objectivity, either.
Agreed. I think I did a fair bit in my original post. There was a list of 5 points toward the end of the post. And of course I argued from extreme cases to shift the burden as well—you know, forks in eyes and stuff like that.