Why Objetivity-Subjectity is poison to society

Objectivity and Subjectivity are fundamental inventions of how we perceive reality. Most people believe that there is an objective reality which we perceive subjectively. Not all people believe that there is an objective reality, but since we still behave like there is one this doesn't matter (The fact that you are making an effort to walk around a parked car instead of walking right through it is seen as evidence that you strongly believe it is "really" there objectively"). The popular view from this is that "things" are either subjective or objective, where the Eiffel Tower is clearly objective, while thoughs, feelings and morals are subjective, and this is loosely what Ethical subjectivism claims.

If I were a paid philosopher I would be troubled by this, as it means that my morals are just as good as any persons. And if that is really the case (if a matter is totally subjective, how do we know who is "good" and should get paid) I would be worried. I will go back to what could happen here in a moment but first lets review two professions who had this issue and were in trouble because they couldn't produce any "good" results:

The physicists (me, and what I do) who were having calculational issues with interacting electrons and decided to make a model where they didn't interact (sort of) to make things easier for them. Job saved!
The economists who were having calculational issues with people being unpredictable and hence decided to make a model where they didn't interact (they were greedy and only wanted to maximise their own wealth) and were not limited by non-local phenomena (they knew everything and there were not any uncertainty). Job saved!

In the first case the result is that we can calculate more electrons.
In the second case we got a lot of new economic models.

The difference between the examples are that while Physicists are always in danger of getting bad results, we know we did something wrong when we compare with reality. In no way will our models bullshit the real electrons to behave differently. Economics is a social science (my claim, since it involves people) where perception of reality is actually able to change reality. If people are taught in business schools that reasonable people are maximising their own wealth, it will soon be impossible to know whether this was the case to begin with or not. If you don't apply what you learned in school; why go there?

So we haven't proved anything, but we have seen.
If things are complicated: simplify
If you are simplifying perception of reality in physics, reality will not change. We know for sure
If you are simplifying perception of reality in social sciences, reality may or may not change. We don't know for sure.
Philosophy is a social science

Now as going back to philosophy there was a perspective called moral subjectivism which, if "true" (note that "true" here would just mean "considered to be true by most people") would erase every persons high ground in fashion, politics (at least the moral part of it), law, or any other man made subject. Our culture would be similar to that of the lions, plus mathematics and out knowledge of natural science. We (Philosophers) really needed to be able to reject moral subjectivism to stay in business.

Fortunately some philosophers were up for the challenge.
More about this can be found here:


In short it says that although for example headache is a subjective reality, there are plenty of ways to make it an objective science. Most drug companies are hence building valid objective knowledge and reality on a platform of subjective knowledge and reality. The analogy from a drug developer to an art critic should be straight forward. The analogy to morals should be similarly straight forward.

This is not true. The reason it is not true is this:
Headache is a subjective reality but since people share over 99.9 % of their genes; this subjective becomes a "collective subjective" reality. With this I mean that people respond subjectively but similarly to pain. And since they do; collective subjectivity is a close approximation to objectivity. But you cannot give a pill to a Dolphin, as he is not defined as part of your collective.

Here comes the take home message. Ethical subjectivity can only be eliminated when people think or function alike. This often works as we like and dislike many things collectively, giving rise to ethics. But many people claim subjective knowledge to be objective mainly by experience. This is in not guaranteed by philosophy without a proper collective platform. Even though our genes are 99.9% the same: our thoughts are not. Our collective subjectivity probably emerged as a consequence of evolution (People less prone to murder was on average more likely to reproduce). But there is no collective subjectivity in matters of whether or not Israels blockade on Gaza is moral (correction, there are plenty of collective subjectivities but each fraction has its own, all of them stating moral superiority). The question of the whether the blockade is moral can hence only be answered with "mu", which is Robert Pirsigs way of answering neither Yes or No but that the question is Ill defined.

(Edit: this came to me while out running later)
This matters because it removes focus on the answer (since it is neither yes or no but "stupid question") of the polarizing question and shifts it to the question itself. And when focus is put on the question we see that there is much more room for debate. We can for example discuss what morality means in this context to us and explore similarities and differences. Now comes the climax: we find that what was polarizing with the question was NOT the question but rather the answer! We are so formed in our thinking about objective reality that we suppose that every question and statement is either Yes/No or True/False regardless of context. The logical (which is a trap) step from there is that anyone disagreeing with me (saying False when I say True) is then as far away from my values as philosophically possible , which will lead to a mental blockade in which no knowledge is generated.

We see this all the time. One example is if you are going to vote left-right, which leads to mental blockade in a debate or at least to competitive argumentation (I do this all the time: if someone is left i pretend to be right just for sports). No truth or knowledge is generated by this unnecessary (illogical) focus on the answer. Now it should be said that most people in these debates are not knowledge seekers more than a soccer mob are really soccer enthusiasts. But accepting focus on polarizing answers only engages the mob to scream and throw bottles. The question of whether the blockade on Gaza is immoral is mu, let's discuss and rephrase the question to see how different our version of collective subjectivity is.