[Houshalter]

The author's examples are all moral issues. There is no "right answer" to a moral question. Morality is all just subjective personal feelings, biases and culture. But even in politics, there's an entire world of questions that do have objectively correct answers. You can't debate "should people be allowed guns" but you absolutely could debate whether guns statistically increase the murder rate. And there's all sorts of data and examples you can point to on that subject.

I do think you could make a more interesting argument for the author's view though. One thing that's always disturbed me is just how highly heritable political views are in twin studies. And that's after excluding the influence of family which share much of your genetics. If people's political beliefs are so predictable, then there can't be that much influence from reason and debate.

Perhaps this is just a consequence of the above. Perhaps most political issues are just about people's subjective moral feelings about things. And that could be mostly genetic.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree. And I suspect most political disagreements would be solvable if all participants of a debate approached it in good faith, and were willing to dig into core disagreements about moral issues. The moral disagreements may or may not turn out to be irreconcilable, but there's just so much wiggle room in the implementation details, the details that are objective, that an agreement could be reached regardless.

The main source of problems, however, is that not all participants engage in good faith. Some treat arguments not as tools of truth-seeking, but as instruments of war, trying to win some influence for themselves. Pretty much anything humans create can be gamed by people who start treating it as an instrument to something else; I'm not sure we can even do something about it. Are manipulative people always going to win?

[jadedhacker]

This is not true. If you dig deep as I did with a family member, you get to a question like "So if they can't pay, they should ultimately just die?" and get a hemed and hawed yes.

[tunesmith]

Maybe it's the optimist in me, but if they hemmed and hawed, I'm thinking they might have been internally rocked a bit, and might be subtly changing their view on their own timetable.

[TangoTrotFox]

The problem even with what you're saying here is that it's all but impossible to objectively prove beyond a reasonable doubt much of anything on social issues. Take guns. We invariably end up seeking comparisons, yet there is no country that's even remotely comparable to the US in terms of the mix of economy, demographics, size, and culture.

And then some statistics are politically incorrect to discuss, even though they're absolutely critical to the issue. For instance the murder rate among the largest majority in the country is 3.4 per 100,000. For a certain demographic that makes up about 13% of the population, it's 24.7 per 100,000 meaning that 13% actually ends up responsible for the majority of all murders in the nation. There are all sorts of other interesting numbers and figures from the DOJ here. [1]

And then you end up getting into questions of liberty. Alcohol, for instance, is behind vastly more deaths per year in the US than all homicides - many of those being people other than the imbiber himself, yet we view the liberty of the masses to be more important than the misbehaviors of a minority of users.

-----

But I think there's perhaps an even more important point here. Many political issues are 'fake' in the sense that if they were not so highly politicized I do not think anywhere near the number of individuals would politicize them themselves. Imagine you were aware of all the statistics on crime, death, and other things - yet there was no directed politicization of any specific issue so you had to come up with your own views.

Where would guns rank? I suspect the answer would be far down. But they're a handy political tool to divide people which helps ensure the status quo in our government. Abortion is identical. Where would abortion rank if people had to choose what was important on their own? Again, I suspect it would a nonissue but it's similarly very useful in dividing people.

[1] - https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

[drdeca]

You are incorrect. There is a fact of the matter as to what is good.

I do not mean to say that my beliefs as to what is good are always correct. It is quite possible for me to be wrong about such things.

But I am not incorrect when I say that there is a fact of the matter.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes and no. You'd have to answer, what's the objective source of morality?

If you're a believer, you may say God - though that still leaves two questions open. One, of implementation details - where is that morality codified, so that we can tell good from bad? In God's word? In our brains? Two, (almost?) all religions teach we have free will. So we can accept or reject God's morality. That decision is based on something that's purely in us. I'd suggest that this something is morality.

If you're not a believer, the only reasonable source of somewhat-consistent morality is the shared architecture of human brains. That is, we're all born with mostly-same hardware and firmware, and as members of human race, we find ourselves in agreement to some basic moral ideas - like "suffering bad", "joy good" - from which each culture weaves its complicated moral lattice.

[dredmorbius]

Is "good" a matter of morality?

Can there be a conceptualisation of "good" independent of morality?

How or how not? To what limits? Or is good axiomatically moral?

[AstralStorm]

There is such a thing as robust morality. This means that it can respond to various real life occurrences while still being consistent; while not resulting in unfalsifiable statements.

Three tragedy of it is lack of emotional "belonging". This is what most moral amd honour systems build upon. Not even of belonging to an elite.

The main question it asks is whether any given question is meaningful and by how much, how it affects yourself, others, who benefits and who does not.

[TeMPOraL]

I'd say good is moral by definition :).

As for morality, I don't see how it can be objective. It's not a feature of the universe, it's a feature of a mind. Humans have common values, because we naturally have common brain design.

[AstralStorm]

Not just brains, simular biology too.

Consider that outright murder (in-group) and cannibalism are considered immoral by almost all moral systems. There are very good reasons why. (Both are due to is how fear works and social survival.)

Also why any act of killing is very restricted and the individual is cut out of the group.

Being moral does not guarantee a good outcome...

[dredmorbius]

Can good be defined within a system, without morality?

Can a system of, say, sheep, have goodness or badness? Does it have morality?

Trees? Amoebae?

[Houshalter]

You couldn't argue with an alien that doesn't share your moral feelings. You can't reference any objective fact or point to where your morality is written into the laws of the universe.

Maybe you could say humans mostly have the same moral feelings since we have 99% the same DNA. But we seem to have no trouble finding important issues we disagree about.