Why Morality is Objective (rough draft)

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I've been working on a script explaining why morality is objective, it's about 90% done but some sections still need some adding. I'm gonna paste my rough draft here so I can get some feedback, and so you can let me know what needs more work and what should be removed. It's very long BTW.

“Morality” and its variants are terms that are often thrown around in discourse. Oh this is moral, that’s immoral, but what the hell does all it mean? What do we mean when we say the term “morality?” This is a question that seems easy enough to answer at first, until you actually stop to think about it.

Like, we look at things like mass shootings, or racism, and even extreme things like the Holocaust and war, and we all understand these things as immoral… but why do we KNOW they’re immoral? Sure, we may have an intuitive understanding of what it is, but it’s difficult to, I guess articulate, WHY they’re wrong. Or, conversely, why things like volunteering and donating to charity to more ambitious things like curing disease, are the right things to do. These are very important questions to ask, and the ones we will answer here.

Just as a warning, as you can tell this video’s pretty long and it might get kind of boring, but if this is a topic that interests you I hope you’ll find value in it. Just note that nothing here is really anything I’ve come up with since there isn’t anything new under the sun, this video is just me laying down my entire case for a secular morality, and why it is objective, after studying this topic for the past few years. Even though I’m going to go through a lot, I’m still leaving some things out just for the sake of brevity, namely certain moral scenarios. I might release a follow-up video that addresses criticisms and things I left out.

Note that for this video, we are going to be almost exclusively discussing SECULAR morality, I’m not going to be going into the problems with religious morality, nor am I going to delve into critiques of other ethical ideas, this video is going to be long enough as it is. I’ll touch on religious morality and other ethical schools here and there, but that isn’t the point of this video. I’m going to be arguing in favor of what is known as altruistic consequentialism, not to be confused with utilitarianism.

So, before we actually get into anything, we first have to establish a few definitions. What is morality? What does that combination of sounds even mean? Well, it’s a word, and words don’t innately mean anything, so how do we use these words? Words ultimately refer to concepts. Like how the word “Chair” refers to the concept of an object that a human being can sit in with proper lumbar support. While I’m sure there are some semantic disagreements, I think we can all reasonably agree that morality is the concern with what is right, and what is wrong. I looked at like ten dictionary definitions, and they all say basically much the same thing. It’s a fairly straightforward thing if you ask me, and I believe I am correct in saying that this is how the vast majority of English speakers view this term. I mean I’d expect that to be the case given that they’re dictionary definitions.

This section is incomplete, so some paragraphs will not seem to flow well. Here is where I'm going to define morality, but I'm still working on how to word it.
When the concept of something is created, as long as it isn’t fundamentally inconsistent, it technically exists. So the concepts of a square circle, a shape that is both 100% circle and 100% square, or a married bachelor, or a smart TOOL fan, are not logically possible, so these concepts don’t exist. Concepts of what is right and what is wrong exist to, provided that we can demonstrate them to not be logically incoherent.

Alright, so defining morality is easy enough. Now comes the part, how do we decide what is right and what is wrong? That’s a little trickier.

Fundamentally, we make our moral decisions for sentient beings based on their preferences, and get ready to hear that word a lot, I say it no less than 40 times.
It’s considering the interests of others; AKA, altruism.


Now sure, the preference that this sentient being has may be arbitrary and subjective, but whether or not that preference is fulfilled is objective. So, for example, your desire to not get punched in the face might be subjective, but if I were to go and punch you in the face, I am objectively violating your desire to not get punched in the face, am I not?

Of course, not all preferences are equal, and they conflict all the time. The murderer’s preference to kill his victim conflicts with his victim’s preference to not be murdered. When it comes to cases like this, we have to see who values their preferences more. So in the case of the murderer and his victim, as much as the murderer wants to kill his victim, the preference of the victim to continue living and not feel the pain of being killed is in all likelihood valued far more. Death in many instances is the ultimate violation of preferences, as it violates all the other preferences the person has in order to stay alive. We might value a lot of things, but the thing sentient beings almost invariably value beyond all others is being able to be alive, and no matter how much the murderer wants to kill the victim, his desire to kill is outweighed by the victim’s will to live.

I’m sure you can think of other examples. Like slavery; The slave owner certainly preferred owning slaves to his economic benefit, but I think we can all agree that his slaves’ desire to be free is much stronger. Ultimately, what the slave owner really wanted was cheap labor, and having slaves was certainly cheaper than the other options at the time.

Same thing applies when we consider the preferences that pertain to the individual. For example, let’s take two preferences I have; The preference to not have my foot get stepped on, and the preference to not have my dick chopped off. While I do have both of these preferences, I would much rather have my foot be stepped on than have my dick cut off. Might be different depending on the person, but this is how I value these preferences that I have. What might be unethical to do to me might be ethical to do to someone else.

Note that preferences differ from pain. It’s common to take a more hedonistic approach to ethics, which places considerations on pleasure and pain. The thing is, pain is not the moral metric to use; It should only be considered when the being in question has a preference to not feel pain. Granted, that applies to the vast majority of at least moderately sentient beings; However, this doesn’t mean it’s completely universal. Is it morally permissible to kill someone just because you do it painlessly, in their sleep? What about people who are unable to feel pain? It’s an actual condition, Congenital insensitivity to pain. Would it be fine to inflict harm on these types of people? Probably not, since, although they’re unable to feel pain, they very likely still have the preference to not have their bodies be harmed. I mean kicking someone in the balls who can’t feel pain would be more ethical than kicking someone in the balls who can feel pain, but doesn’t mean it’s harmless.

And hey, some people WANT to feel pain, for whatever reasons that may be, maybe they’re pushing themselves at the gym, or that’s a certain kink they have, but either way, that’s their preference.
So this is why it isn’t useful to place moral relevance on pain. Sure in 99% of cases moral beings have the preference to not feel pain, and it’s something that’s reasonably assumed in most moral decisions, but given the inconsistencies, it isn’t the proper metric to measure moral actions.


This is incredibly important to highlight, as it pertains to animal rights. (ah boo wtf dude) Yeah yeah I know cry me a river, but it’s a huge ethical topic. Yes, humans are not the only sentient beings around.

Animals, especially the ones we breed and slaughter by the billions, are sentient, therefore have interests which are deserving of our consideration. The only people who still deny this in a modern first world country are willfully ignorant or just not mentally compotent, OR are practicing yellow journalism.

Animal sentience is not a controversial issue. Animal cognition has been studied, though it is true that certain animals have more intelligence than others.

However, this is actually how we decide how much moral value beings have; Since morality is based on the preferences of sentient beings and how much those beings value those preferences, things like intelligence and cognition are what we use, since there’s a direct relationship between how much a being is able to have and value their respective preferences with their level of intelligence.
Call it ableist, but this is the only non-arbitrary and mostly consistent metric to use in order to determine moral value, though there are some pretty big diminishing returns to it. What I mean by that is, the moral gradience between an insect and a mammal is massive. The difference between mammals, or highly intelligent life, however is less significant.

And a big thing people forget is how much of an impact language has on developing intelligence. Without language, we wouldn’t be much better off than chimps. So who knows how many other species could be at our level if they were able to create and develop language? Species that are able to develop language are generally the same as far as more consideration is concerned.

Of course, there are exceptions to this, when we consider how much the being in question violate the preferences of others. So for example, while a being like a psychopathic serial killer likely has far more cognition than a housefly, given the harm he caused, the housefly would be the one with more value, since its lived a neutral existence, maybe slightly positive since it might’ve helped pollinate, while the existence of the serial killer has had a negative effect in the world.

Well, this brings up an interesting point in ethics. The punishment VS rehabilitation issue. (here I'm gonna explain why rehabilitation is the ethical thing to do)

Going back to valuing intelligence, this is actually also WHY abortion is morally permissible in most instances. I mean the whole debate is kind of a shitshow since it’s just politics. As far as I can tell, most people oppose it based on the religious principle of taking a life being inherently wrong, while supporters tend to argue from the idea that the woman has the right to choose. The reason why I don’t think the position of it being the woman’s right to choose to be very strong is because it isn’t really considering the position of pro-lifers that you ARE affecting the life of another being. The problem with that objection as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, is that fetuses, especially early on in the pregnancy, have little, if any levels of sentience. As far as I can tell, it takes until about the third trimester for fetuses to begin feeling some sort of pain, which we can reasonably assume it would prefer not feeling.

I mean almost no one is happy to have an abortion, not even most pro-choice people; It’s not like they’re all like “fuck yeah let’s have an abortion!” Even for them, it’s a psychologically stressful thing that’s difficult to go through with, because even if they realize that the fetus has virtually no sentience, it still feels wrong, when you’re going in to actually do one, though this isn’t very rational. It isn’t possible for the fetus TO place significant value onto their preferences, and their preferences in that respect certainly do not outweigh the preferences of the mother, who may be getting the abortion out of financial necessity.

So we shouldn’t be taking beings into moral consideration based solely on them being alive, because if we value things for just being alive, then all sentient life would have equal value, which is obviously not the case. We should be taking them into consideration based on their sentience level. If we valued all life equally, then we’d be saying stupid shit like plants have moral value, or if you just want to include sentient life, we’d have to value a housefly as much as we value a dog or a human.

Basically, you’re left with three options. You can A) Ascribe moral value based on intelligence, B) Say that intelligence is not morally significant and all life has equal value, from a head louse to an elephant to a human, or C) Be a speciesist and say that a sentient being’s moral worth is based on species membership. Or, you can base it on something equally arbitrary, such as the color of the animal or where in the world its from.

There are diminishing returns to intelligence; Once a species has the ability to use language, the intelligence gap between other species that have language isn’t as dramatic. Without language, we wouldn’t be that much better off than chimpanzees in terms of intelligence.

I would say that most animal species have little or no sentience, which would be the invertebrates (just because something is an animal does not automatically merit it moral value). Mammals in particular have higher levels of intelligence, but also others such as octopi, crows, and of course the species on Earth with the highest level of intelligence, humans. These sentient beings have a very strong capacity to value their preferences, and at a certain point their preferences might not be at odds with others ones between a chimpanzee and a dustmite.

Of course, in the wild, morality isn’t something that is necessarily thriving. You might say that since many animals in the wild aren’t considering the interests of other sentient beings, they aren’t deserving or moral consideration. But in actuality, whether or not a being acts morally or amorally doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it is a sentient being with interests that have to be considered.

I’ll give you another hypothetical of competing interests. Let’s say you’re stranded on an island with a live cow. The cow is able to survive fine off the grass but there ain’t any food for you to eat. In this case, you would be justified in killing the cow for food, since your preference to stay alive outweighs the cow’s preference to stay alive. One of you is going to die, so the choice has to be made. However, let’s say if on this same island with the cow, you were also stranded with a crate of canned beans that can last you for a whole year. In this case, killing the cow for food wouldn’t be ethical, because at that point, it isn’t really a matter of eating, it’s wanting to eat certain foods. However, your preference to eat steak does not outweigh the cow’s preference to not be killed.

This is where the problem with subjective morality arises. If morality is something decided by culture or the individual, what utility do you expect that to have? If we’re going to say that morality is dependent on culture, on what grounds can we criticize say Nazis in what they did during World War 2, or how women and gays are treated in the middle east, and in most parts of the world even? Hell, on what grounds can we criticize ANYONE who holds traditional values that are antithetical to equality and progress? We condemn them just based on our opinions? Why should they have any value? Opinions I think should be reserved for things like film and games and music stuff like that, not figuring out what the right thing to do is. If you say female genital mutilation is wrong, what’s stopping someone from saying “yeah, well, you know that’s just like your opinion man?”

Or you can bite the bullet and say that yes, even if we think it’s wrong, what groups like the Nazis did is still morally correct since morality is subjective, in which case, good luck defending that position, and figuring out how to address the concern of them going against the culture of the people they were oppressing.

That isn’t even the only problem with deciding that morality is based on culture. Why is culture even relevant? If you really think about it, basing morality on culture ultimately leads to subjective morality pertaining to the individual, which is also known as naive moral relativism. For example, let’s quickly grant that morality is decided by culture. OK, which culture? Western culture? Sure, they generally have the same values of things like freedom and democracy and what have you. But wait, there are dozens of countries in the west, and all have different views on what’s right and wrong. OK, so let’s settle for country, that’s something that’s agreeable, I guess. But wait, what about a country like the UK, which is really made of four countries, that all disagree with each other? I mean just look at their election results for Brexit and recent elections. Clearly, Scotland and Northern Island have very different standards for what ought to be done compared to England. And even looking at each individual country, you’ll see there are some areas that voted very strongly for Brexit, largely in the rural parts, and areas that voted strongly against it, largely in the urban areas.

If you keep doing this sort of regress, you’ll eventually realize that culture just isn’t a useful metric to use to decide morality, since individuals within a culture tend to have a different idea of what that culture thinks is the right thing to do, and besides culture is a vague and arbitrary line to draw. The UK is only one example, this type of disagreement within culture is a nearly universal thing, and I’m sure you can come up with a few examples right now.

And what if we were to apply this idea to other ideas, that culture is a deciding factor? Apply it to science for example. Aristotelian physics was so fucking wrong on many levels, yet, that was the dominant school of science in Europe and even other parts of the world up until Galileo and Newton. Or what about history? A lot of places in good ol’ Dixie claim that the Civil War was fought over “State’s Rights,” don’t they? Do ideas have any validity because they were decided by culture? If not, why would it still apply to morality? So yeah, I don’t find the argument that morality is subjective because cultures are influenced by different things as very relevant or compelling.

So all in all, moral relativism renders morality completely useless, and I think I made a solid case for why this is. But, it still remains a prevalent idea in most atheist and skeptic circles.

I’ve noticed that amongst non-religious people, where there seems to be this idea that objective morality is solely a religious idea, which is why they’re so dismissive to it, which makes them subscribe to moral relativism. Now sure, while objective morality is something that is present in all major religions, that doesn’t mean that it’s an inherently religious idea, nor that non-religious people who believe in an objective morality are still clinging on to religious thought. Saying those types of things is frankly rather ignorant about the arguments made in favor of a secular objective morality.

I can understand defaulting to subjective morality once you relinquish your religious views, I mean I used to think that too, until I realized that it would render morality utterly meaningless.

A common criticism you’ll hear from moral relativists comes in the form of how the terms “objective” and “subjective” are defined. It usually comes down to the simplistic definitions of objective and subjective, with “objective” being defined as something that is mind independent, with subjective being something that is mind dependent. These seem like fair and reasonable definitions on the surface.

The problem is, whether or not something is mind-dependent is not really all that relevant to something being objective. There are tons of things that are mind-dependent that blur the line being either objective or subjective; Take things like neuroscience or human psychology; These things are certainly mind-dependent, but are they really things you would call subjective? Or just take the social sciences in general. I mean take something like economics; This is a field that certainly requires humans with minds to exist at all, but is it a subjective thing? I don’t think it’s possible to make a reasonable argument in favor of that.

Same applies to morality. Just because morality is mind-dependent, or doesn’t exist in the physical universe, doesn’t have any bearing on it being real or subjective. Just as in the same way that as long as there are humans, there’s human psychology, as long as there are sentient beings with preferences, there’s morality. Something doesn’t have to be built into the universe or whatever for it to exist. Life exists, and that isn’t something that’s built into the universe. It is, however, a product of the universe, and eventual and natural consequent, under very precise circumstances. And with morality, it’s the natural consequence of having these beings achieve sentience, and thus, have interests.

So that’s my entire case for objective morality, and it should help a little bit in making moral desicions. Though I should say that even though you do know all of this, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to make moral decisions. Sometimes, you just don’t have all the information, or maybe you make an error in judgement, but it’s a step in the right direction, and it’d be especially useful for non-religous people.

Most religious apologists believe that atheists are nihilistic amoral hedonists who are more concerned with short term pleasures than actually being good people. And speaking as an atheist, I don’t think they’re completely wrong in thinking that. The stereotypical hedonistic atheist that just drinks, smokes tons of pot, gambles, has a lot of sex, well let’s be a bit more realsitic on that, chronically masturbating, that’s more accurate, and in general has a pessimistic and nihilistic view on life may not be too far off for a lot of us.

That isn’t to say that most theists are exactly upstanding morality, seems to me they’re content to just slap their respective religious label on themselves and feel as though that makes them better people because they were raised on the “right” religion, but that’s besides the point.

Anyway, without a god and threats of hell, or promises of heaven, or a consideration of a next life, what incentive would a non-religous person have to be a good person? Well, nothing really, not outside of the law, anyway. You are under no obligation to be a good person, or make any attempt to be better. You can live basically however you want, be as apathetic going to all the problems going on in the world, be entirely self-interested, and be as wasteful as you can afford. No one’s gonna stop you.

You can work a job that pays well but is a plague on society, like being a bloodsucking lawyer or a lobbyist for the oil industry, make hundreds of thousands off of it and not donate a cent of it to charity; Just let it collect dust in your bank account, or squander it on crap you don’t really need. You can live in a house that’s much bigger than necessary, and be excessively indulgent in your energy use, never recycle, drive a Hummer or some fancy sports car, not make any effort to cut down on animal products. Why give a shit about the environment, I mean it’s only really going to affect the global poor, and why should you care about them?

You can vote for politicians who will cut social programs and wage wars in poor countries if it means you’ll save just a little bit more in taxes. The same politicians who will also go against science and slow down progress on fighting climate change and medicine. You can go against science yourself and fight progress on things like vaccines, GM technology, nuclear energy, and you can feel free to peddle bullshit yourself too, you might be able to make some money off of that.

You can be as racist, homophobic, transphobic as you want and make an effort to make minorities and LGBT people feel like they don’t belong in society, and hell for good measure you can deny the existence of mental illnesses, and say people just need to “get over themselves.”

It doesn’t have to stop at you; You can have kids and raise them on the same terrible values of selfishness, indulgence and apathy, and just have that cycle keep on going. Why not write a book about it, telling others to do the same? Government can’t arrest you for peddling socially harmful ideas.

You can do all of that; Nothing is stopping you. Except, of course, the will to do the right thing. That’s the only real incentive you got.

You can choose to work a job that’s useful for society, like a doctor, engineer and even trades like a plumber or electrician, and give some of the money you earn to charity.

You can live in a place that’s well within your means, drive a modest car or better yet bike or take public transit, and do make an effort to reduce meat consumption, both for the animals and the environment.

You can vote for politicians, who, while far from perfect, want to expand social aid, and at least to an extent reduce wars in other countries, even if it means your taxes will go up. The same politicians who will try to follow the science and use it to help stop climate change and disease. And hey, why not help educate people on science yourself, like posting videos about them for free on the internet?

You can work on being accepting and inclusive to people of color, LGBT people, and helping them feel comfortable being who they are, and want to help people suffering from mental health problems, and there certainly is no shortage of them.

And if you do decide to have children, you can pass on those values. You can raise your kids to be compassionate, caring, and altruistic. Hell, why not extend those values to others around right now? Friends, family, even strangers on the street. Doing all of these things will not only reduce the amount of harm you do to the world, but also help make sure that it’s a better place than when you first got here.

So, do you want to be a good person, just to be a good person? That’s up to you. And I hope you make the right choice.