Yeah I agree with you completely. This seems to strawman Camus, misrepresent the Rebel completely, and at the same time gloss over all the inconsistencies that Sartre had in his career as well. Ridiculous to hold Camus to such standards and then say of Sartre "his fearless public condemnation of state-sponsored violence, be it that of France (and later the U.S) in Vietnam, or that of the French police against immigrants in the streets of Paris and elsewhere" while not mentioning his problematic support of communist regimes that did loads of state-sponsored violence.

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But I think the point is that this article seems to be very reductive of Camus's positions. I read The Rebel and nothing in this article seems to correspond with what I got out of that book.

Nobody has solved it.

The most important thing to have when approaching this debate (or any other major philosophical debate) is epistemic humility. If you think that moral truths are obviously objective, or obviously subjective, consider the possibility that you're missing some of the complexity of the arguments on the other side.

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One thing worth doing here is laying out out the universe of major debates in meta-ethics, because a lot of times "subjectivism" gets conflated with a lot of different views.

Moral Realism is the view that there are some true moral facts. Say, murder is wrong.

Moral Anti-Realism is not just "subjectivism" but could be divided into some different views:

1. Non-cognitivists believe that moral statements are not the sorts of things that can be true or false. They may just be expressions of approval or emotion. So "murder is wrong", according to a non-cognitivist, might just mean something like "boo murder!". They key here is that moral statements are not beliefs. "murder is wrong" is neither true nor false on this view.

2. Error theorists believe that moral statements ARE beliefs that could be true or false, but that they are never true. So "murder is wrong", according to an error theorist, is false. It is false not because murder is good, but because the property "wrongness" doesn't exist in the world.

Subjectivism is technically a moral realist position by my definition. But Traditional moral realists are objectivists, believing that the truth or falsity of moral statements are mind-independent. So "murder is wrong" is either true or false no matter what I happen to think about murder. Non-objectivists believe moral truths are somehow mind-dependent. Subjectivism would say "murder is wrong" means something like "I disapprove of murder". But there are other non-objectivist positions. Cultural relativism, for example, would say "murder is wrong" means something like "my culture disapproves of murder".

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I'm not taking a view on any of these questions, I just wanted to lay out the landscape for you for further reading or maybe help you pinpoint your own views. Very important to remember that anybody who is giving glibly confident answers to these questions probably doesn't understand all the nuance because this stuff is not easy.

More or less.

Broadly painting Camus as a colonialist despite his long history in anti-colonial rhetoric was a bit fucked up. Most of the people critiquing him were not active in speaking up for Algerian Arabs until it became a popular movement to support.

I don’t know why pacifism gets called problematic. There is a lot of research indicating pacifistic revolution as more effective: https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/06/10/are-peaceful-protests-more-effective-than-violent-ones/

There is also the fact that Camus might have been killed by the KGB: https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/05/albert-camus-murdered-by-the-kgb-giovanni-catelli

Camus risked a lot being vocal against communism. It was not a popular position in left-wing French philosophy circles. He genuinely might have been a straight up martyr for it.

Thank yourself, I am having a great time discussing this topic with you. Your questions really make me think in directions which I haven't considered before. My initial thought was very immature, some inspiration I had in the moment. As we flesh it out together it seems to have greater depth than I could have anticipated.

I believe it wasn't so much that we found our paths, as we subconsciously looked at the reactions of the people around us for answers and consequences. Instead of being told what to do, we had to think and gather information from a variety of sources.

You say “due to evolution” as if it’s the only belief people have, which is untrue. We very well could have been put on earth in another way which would tear your theory down

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I was talking about the people within these organizations that make decisions about marketing and PR on behalf of the whole organization. You're right that corporations are not moral entities, but people are, and corporations are full of people and the entities that make decisions within corporations on the behalf of corporations are people. None of these business decisions (PR, advertisement, hiring decisions) are metaphysically neutral.

If all the efforts of a corporation is done in pursuit of profit, and the majority of Fortune 500 companies put out this kind of advertisement (BLM, anti-racist, female empowerment, etc), then it follows that such endeavors are profitable, that a sufficient number of people support such things, and my assertion in my original post that our society isn't a New Jim Crow follows.

All of those possibilities listed would be subordinate to the prime directive of profit. Corporations are not moral entities, they are designed to make a profit for the shareholders and everything else is beholden to that aim.

It’s a pretty big assumption that corporations are always acting perfectly efficient at acquiring wealth. Corporations act on behest of moral values significantly more than you’d think. Look at Elon musk, his shitty moral projecting is costing him and his businesses immensely. He is clear evidence that corporations will forgo profits and optics for moral projection.

This article is problematic for quite a few reasons. Number one: the false dichotomy being presented that Camus and Sartre are “opposites,” when one limits their primary focus to existentialism (Camus) while the other is WAYYYY more vocal about civil rights and post colonial analysis (Sartre). Camus’ silence shouldn’t be taken as complacency. Number two: The article tries to paint Camus as a racist evil monster just because he is LESS VOCAL about stuff he isn’t really too knowledgeable in. Camus mostly advocated for peace and was simply anti war without much consideration of any nuance beyond that. Ok sure, that’s a bit problematic, but let’s not pretend he was a militant racist colonial Nazi just because he was anti war including colonial revolution. “Opposites” my ass. Not every writer who doesn’t write about The Current War therefore supports the status quo. Grasping at straws. Number three: revolt falling within the purview of Europeans is a quote completely taken out of context. Here Camus isn’t even saying only Europeans can revolt, otherwise it’s bloodshed. HE IS CRITIQUING. The rest of his article in Rebel was about how hypocritical European colonial analysis is. He was against the French treatment of Algerians, and described this repression as a bad thing, yet the OOP insists that since his language wasn’t inflammatory enough, he is therefore a racist? Cmon. Sorry if my comment comes off as rambling, but I’m pissed off at this cherry-picked shitty clickbait journalism that doesn’t even attempt to read these people in context or in good faith. At least it serves as a reminder that Sartre was a badass, but that’s the only redeeming quality of this dogshit article.

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Yes, I am privy to Mark Fisher and how capitalism commercializes the dissent of capitalism. But this neglects possibility that there are true believers of such ideology at the helm of these businesses, or the decision-makers of such businesses feel compelled (or pressured) internally to make outward professions of said ideology either through personal statements themselves or through PR and advertisement, or even that some people within businesses use this ideology in subterfuge against competitors within the business.

>You haven't actually resolved the moral question. Why is it right to fulfill those biological needs? What makes that correct? By what standard, and by what authority is that standard applied to everyone? You can ask the same slate of questions of every purported moral system out there, and I, for one, have never seen convincing answers.

1. We have universal and objective biological needs to be healthy and free from harm, people are just born with these needs. (animals too)
2. We ought to do things that maintain our biological needs, because they are innate to our existence. (due to evolution).
3. Therefore we ought to develop morality based on biological needs, which are universal and objective.

Would this be a good premise and conclusion for moral objectivity?

I disagree with your assessment of theism, since it is very much not the case for myself and other theists who are philosophically-minded. But this post is not about the veracity or sufficiency of theism, it is about naturalism.

I can see no reason why a naturalist would think our self-made purposes, meaning, and morals are anything more than a self-imposed illusion. On such a view, my life is ultimately inconsequential. How I live will eventually matter to no one and, on this view, when the universe is empty and silent, there will be no one to care whether I existed or not.

Sure, your life might have a relative significance in that you influenced others or affected the course of history. But ultimately mankind is doomed to perish in the heat death of the universe.

The contributions of the scientist to the advance of human knowledge, the research of the doctor to alleviate pain and suffering, the efforts of the diplomat to secure peace in the world, the sacrifices of good people everywhere to better the lot of the human race—ultimately all these come to nothing.

If naturalism is true, then there is ultimately no hope for deliverance from the shortcomings of our finite existence. For example, there is no hope for deliverance from evil. By far, most of the suffering in the world is due to man's own inhumanity to man. The horror of two world wars during the last century effectively destroyed the 19th century's naive optimism about human progress.

If naturalism is true, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with gratuitous and unredeemed suffering, and there is no hope for justice or deliverance from evil.

Or again, if naturalism is true, there is no hope of deliverance from aging, disease, and death. The sober fact is that unless you die young, someday you yourself will be an old man or an old woman, fighting a losing battle with aging, struggling against the inevitable advance of deterioration, disease, perhaps senility. And finally and inevitably you will die. There is no afterlife beyond the grave. Naturalism is thus a philosophy without hope.

Consider, if each of us are just a collection of atoms, why think that we are any different than the animals or insects around us? Is anything lost when a spider captures and consumes a fly? No, it is simply destroyed, and no one cares. But why think we are any different than the fly, on naturalism? It’s not obvious that our life is any more inherently valuable than the fly’s— to say otherwise would just be a form of bias in favor of the human species.

Or consider the morality of a spider capturing and consuming a fly; does the spider murder the fly? No, it simply kills it, and no one cares. Why think of our actions on Earth to be any different? If one accepts naturalism, then all ability to condemn or praise others would be reduced to neutral words and matters of opinion.

Does a fly have any objective purpose for its existence? On naturalism, it’s hard to imagine. The fly just exists, buzzing around until it dies. But why think we’re any different just because we have more intricate brain matter? What reason is there to believe in a purpose that isn’t just self-created?

Some may be satisfied with the idea of self-created purpose, but any sort of purpose like this is just subjective by definition. If your purpose is subjective, then you may as well just say you have an opinion about yourself. If that’s true, then there really is no objective purpose on naturalism and no reason why any of us exist at all.

When taken together, the lack of real purpose, morality, and human value— combined with the eventual heat death of the universe— provides a grim outlook for our lives if naturalism is true. It is in the naturalist's interest, then, to seek to falsify naturalism. If there’s any hope at all that it's false, even if there were only a 1% chance, it should still behoove them to seek rational reasons to falsify it.

The reason those firms adopted such stances is because of cooption and recuperation. Such recuperative action is good for business and bad for subversive politics. It's the same false shrouding in rainbow you see by big business as well. It's all recuperative.

>In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the cultural appropriation of any subversive symbols or ideas by mainstream culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

I agree with the assessment that corporations, all things equal, will pursue profit above all else. My statement about corporations is said in response to the ideological ecosystem (and wide spread belief/assumption) that asserts that our institutions are racist. I mentioned in a comment in this same thread about how our reality is far more heterogenous than how it is presented to us in news, social media, which is captured in your examples.

Dude, you tried to posit a clone army. 😂

Why? Because I'm a progressive. I want to stay on the pulse of social progress, which means not waiting for society to force me to adapt. New society-shaping technologies will almost certainly appear and will force us to reexamine our values. Those who refuse to do so are doomed to become conservatives.

Science fiction (and fiction in general) has always been a useful tool for social progress. The hypothetical scenarios allow readers to stress-test their beliefs and moral instincts, and to resolve internal contradictions that familiar real world scenarios couldn't.

I have a long time consideration for a cosmos defined in 2-1/2D as a static universe. Over the period of my long life, so far, many of the things required for this envisioned cosmology has either come to light or has become a new fascination in science.

I use 2-1/2D specifically to account for branes, the natural follow-on from string theory so well explored by Brian Greene. A brane being defined classically, and by me, as a 2 dimensional plane of sorts. The 1/2D is about stacking sheets of branes for the lack of better analogy.

This makes for a static 3D cosmos by most accounts except that you could consider a brane a unique element not shared in stacks. Only 'impetus', to be defined of course, but only impetus passes from one element of a brane to the neighboring brane through 'influence'.

What is the brane? I know Brian Greene is going at this from the string theory perspective and it is overly complicated in my view but it does define interaction that I cannot comprehend at this time. However, this 2-1/2D cosmology fully supports the interactions that Brian has defined/discovered/ and theorized. I want to simplify a brane here to mean a field with 0 as one side and 1 as the other for schematic reference. Binary, as quantized as Planck considers our classic universe based on the ultraviolet catastrophe and the resulting Planck scales. Therefore, in this Planck-scale cosmology, the brane is all protential, from 0-1, analog BTW, waves, strings, planes, whatever... a quantum state of 'every possibility at once' as quantum implies. For the purpose of this treatise, the brane is a standing wave of any value interacted with by its neighboring brane/wave, and for want of restrictions, I even want to make that interaction absolutely perpendicular to the influencing wave. This is where the bounds of string theory come in.

The branes don't make me happy in this cosmology. Even the branes need to be quantized. They have lateral influence too. Quantized segments of a single brane are of the same generation as the brane making their interaction much more string theory in their connections. Having quantized the brane, we now you have the potential for interlocking branes in all directions. A universe of quantum bits. Absolutely stable and in their own time. 'The universe is quiet."

Introduce a big bang. I know, how does that even happened in this peaceful cosmos. But say something flexed. That becomes a propagation throughout the 'crystals' of the cosmos. Nothing moved, remember, just a influence for one quantum state to change to another, and so on and so on. Eventually, all states will be realized... by the cosmos itself.

Light is the ultimate speedster in this cosmos. A quantized series of cubes arranges in such a way to communicate with one and other. Each passes information and adds previous influence before passing off the information to the next 'dot'. Light ray is what we consider the least restricted 'element' devised by the impulse. Being static, the light ray has no reason to obey time. It can spontaneously exist in one cosmological state and not in every other state. After all, light is only light to an observer... a transition. Quantum states are not bound by this.

The implications of such a universe are not minor. This can explain a lot including black holes and the very illusion of reality. We are the only observers and properly considered, we are the only probes that can influence the quantized cosmos. Just to get to our Planck scale, we still have 100's if not 1,000's of divisions before we reach this quantized scale. Even quarks would involve many 1,000's of these quantum elements at worst, likely into the millions for a single quark.

The real beauty of this cosmology is the fact that scale means nothing anymore. Time means nothing anymore. And above all, this cosmos is not quantized; time is. There seems to be a horizon where time becomes manifest.

So this is my philosophical universe. We literally move through time which is a construct of a quantum state. No multiverses; no blinking out; no grand scales - just a possibility. We, our consciousness, literally passes from one quantum element to the next en-mass every moment of our lives, as does matter.

"What would happened to humanity if they realized they don't actually exist?"

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Thank you MODs for making Monday a funday ;]

While I agree that an article like this should mention it, seems very reductive to reduce Sartre’s position to that, these ideas are much more complex and should be discussed more

I think the notion of capitalist entities supporting an organization founded by people with open marxist beliefs is what’s being examined here, instead of any racial components.

Yeah we will have to agree to disagree. I can't fathom how you think life doesn't seem to match naturalism because naturalism, by definition, isn't adding anything beyond what you are observing.

I disagree that naturalism has all of the gaps ("lack of") that you suggest. And I am not aware of any alternative to naturalism that would fill those gaps. Theism tends to submit itself to a subjective God belief and the subjective whims of the believed God.

its not about people at all... its about the future of artificial intelligences or transhuman minds