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>Do you believe the same about values? That there is an objective preference ordering all humans should have and those that do not are wrong/bad/broken? That's a misconceived question in the first place. There are only actual feelings, preferences, etc. that actually-existing human individuals really have. To talk about "more objective" versus "more subjective", you have to talk about how well-informed those feelings and preferences are by someone's experience of the world: the objective, normative preference is the one you would form if you had all relevant experience of the world. What values are not is subjective in the economic sense, of being both completely particular to each given agent and also arbitrary, unlinked to what sort of person you are or your circumstances. This is why it's often a better idea to inform and educate someone than to merely give them what their misconceived desires currently point towards -- for instance, to hospitalize suicidal people. >I don't particularly favour capitalism or democracy as systems, but I do prefer them over central planning or dictatorship BECAUSE I believe values and morality to be subjective. Any alternate system should take that into account. But again, you are completely ignoring both the definitions of the systems you're talking about, and how they actually operate. The questions you're trying to argue about are not fundamentally about "objective values" (a less misconceived idea) versus "subjective values" (a very extremely misconceived idea). They are about how you transmit information about what actually-existing people want or would want, and combine material inputs to give people what they want or would want. Capitalism, especially of our current kind, is quite bad at giving people what they want, whether it's objective or subjective or naturalistic! This is why you are sitting here resorting to bad meta-ethics and bad history: you cannot justify your system by reference to the broad masses being genuinely satisfied with their lives, so instead you say, "Values are subjective, so capitalism is the only alternative to dictatorship, because Arrow's Impossibility Theorem." Every part of this statement is fractally wrong: there are more political systems than just "democracy" and "dictatorship", there are more economic systems than just capitalism and "central planning"/command-economy, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem demonstrates certain limitations that markets have to follow just like everything else, values are naturalistic, and the masses are mostly quite unhappy with their lives. Please, learn more history, learn more political science, learn more economics, and learn them honestly. Avoid ethics, actually: it's a crappy field because it's founded on the false assumption that there are actually things called "values", which are either dictated by God, spring fully-formed from the Platonic Form of Reason, or are "subjective" to the point of meaninglessness. |