Tech CEOs' public manifestos are just PR for regulatory capture.

Daily Debate #600: "Tech CEOs' public manifestos are just PR for regulatory capture.". You are arguing FOR the motion. Your opponent: George Carlin.

Given my definition of objective as something that exists independently of minds, and subjective as something dependent on minds, I see a fundamental problem with non-divine morality. If God exists, God satisfies the condition of being objective because His existence does not depend on human consciousness. So unless there is another mind-independent source of moral authority that I'm unaware of, morality ultimately comes from either God or human subjectivity/preferences. This doesn't mean objective facts are subjective. We can objectively establish that longer life, fewer illnesses, or certain behaviors produce better outcomes. But those facts aren't themselves moral claims. The moral claim is that these outcomes are good or bad. The question is: why? I agree we should pursue well-being, progress, health, reproduction, etc., and that these can be objectively measured. But why are they morally good? Appealing to consensus, tradition, evolution, biology, or “better outcomes” doesn't answer that question. It explains what people prefer or what tends to happen, not why we should value it. Saying “most people prefer X” doesn't establish that we should choose X. Consensus is simply an aggregate of preferences, and consensus can change. Even unanimous agreement wouldn't make a preference mind-independent. So my question isn't whether we can objectively determine what happens when we do X. We can. My question is why X is morally good or bad in the first place. If there is no mind-independent source of moral authority that answers those “why” questions, then moral justification ultimately comes from human minds and preferences. Morality is therefore subjective. And if morality ultimately comes from human preferences, what makes one human's fundamental moral preferences objectively more correct than another's? Without an objective standard, claiming your preferences are inherently superior becomes a claim of human superiority—a kind of racism or superiority claim.

You've built a trap, but it has a door you've missed. Your argument assumes moral facts must either come from God or collapse into preference—a false binary. Consider: mathematical truths exist mind-independently without requiring God. Numbers aren't preferences, yet they're not divine either. Moral facts could work the same way. Why must "X is good" require a conscious author any more than "2+2=4"? You're smuggling in an assumption that moral facts need a *will* behind them, not just a reality. What if goodness is just as much a feature of reality as mathematics?