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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

How does one precisely define love for purposes of defining morality?

The article’s author was very imprecise, defining love and morality in subjective terms relating to one’s personal outlook and perceptions of others.

I’m not at all interested in subjective morality.

The reason most philosophers have defined morality and ethics in terms of duties and obligations is precisely to try to remove subjectivity. I’m not saying anyone has been successful, but other approaches don’t appear to lead towards objective morality.

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Virtue ethics (Aristotle), care ethics (Noddings), and agape traditions have all developed structured frameworks for defining love as a moral foundation without sacrificing objectivity or universality.

I'm not familiar with care ethics but I'm somewhat of a fan of Virtue ethics

However I do that Virtue ethics is not terribly objective. You could argue endlessly about what the virtues are

It's pretty clear what virtue meant to Aristotle: respect the place you were given in the natural order. So if you're, say, a slave, you should work for your master without rebellion, and if you're, say, an Athenian upperclassman, you should... uh... enjoy yourself?

If you ask me, that's a pretty convenient definition of morality for them.

>I’m not at all interested in subjective morality.

I have bad news for you. That's all there is.

Factional conclusion regarding a contentious subject and worded blithely.

There's no universal judge to establish "the rules," the only justification for morality is what justification we can argue.

Objectivity can be found in science because eventually you find the universal, unbreakable rule that determines whatever you're studying. No such thing exists in morality, since it's a subjective human invention.

Not even in science. Any knowledge requires its axioms. That's the bitter lesson.

I think this is premature. I think its more honest to say that it's an open question and that moral relativism is currently in vogue.

Why do you believe that there is such a thing as objective morality?

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