The point was, in this case, she was stuck between the
good of protecting privacy of library patrons and the
good of helping a rape investigation.

She wasn't though, as you yourself established.
The police -- according to you -- got the information by
a means which had long been in place.
In other words, there was already a system in place for
getting the information, and that system worked.

1Z wrote:

"George Dance" <georgedance04@yahoo.ca> wrote in message

The speaker's only cited evidence is a cross-cultural suvrvey

showing

that 'everyone agreed' to certain 'core' moral values. But all

that

evidence of agreement shows is that those who agree share the same
opinion; evidence of agreement is nothing but evidence of opinion.

But for the real-world sceptic, evidence of agreement about the
existence
of external objects is likewise mere opinion and does not show
that external objects actually exist. So how does a relativist
maintain
scepticism about objective moral values without incurring doubt
about everything else?

That's a good question. One test of objectivity would be to look at
the explanations for the fact vs the opinion; another would be to look
at the consequences of changing one's opinion.

For instance, take the two statements:

D1 = "My apartment has a front door." and
D2 = "This object <pointing to the wall> is called a 'front door'."

D1 is true, and my reasons for believing D1, are completely different:
there's a front door because someone made it, and someone installed it,
and so on, but I believe D because I can see it, touch it, even stick
out my tongue and taste it - while the reasons for D2 being true are
identical to my reasons for believing it - that's what simply what I've
been told to call the thing.

Similarly, D1 and D2 differ in consequences. If D1 were false, then I
could simply walk in and out of my apartment without performing the
door-opening ritual. I can test that (and just did, just for the sake
of philosophical inquiry 8); and each time, not-D1 is falsified.
Whereas if it weren't called a door, nothing would be any different
except that I'd have to say something else (like "Fermez la porte"; but
I can say that, and be understood by my family, now anyway).

Notice that D2 depends entirely on agreement, whereas wrt D1 agreement
is irrelevant. If everyone just looked at me blankly when I said
'door', I'd soon conclude that it wasn't called that; but if everyone
disagreed that there was no door there (just, either a wall or empty
space), while my sensory experience remained the same, my opinion
wouldn't change in the slightest.

AFAICS, that's the distinction that calling D1 'objective' and D2
'subjective' (or, more accurately, 'intersubjective') is meant to
capture.

Note also that for naturalistic moral objectivism ,
the pertinent natural facts for ethical thinking are facts about

human

nature -- about what people in general approve of, or what causes
them suffering.

I'll agree that some objectivists - naturalists like Richard Taylor or
Doug Rasmussen, or contractarians like Gauthier or Narveson - take that
approach. The major problem I have with it is that, AFAICS, all that
those tacks accomplish is to present a relativist ethics without using
the r-word. It's merely a win by persuasive definition - 'objective'
is redefined as 'real', making D2 as 'objective' a fact as D1 - and
relativism gets redefined as the belief that the door really isn't
called anything.

The idea that
Freedom is an objective value requires no further justification than
that people in general desire and value it, and people simply stating
that they desire and value it is perfectly good evidence.

But what is freedom but being allowed to do what one wants? It's
tautologous that, if someone wants to do something, one wants to be
able to do it; but that's not the same thing as valuing one's freedom
to do anything else, or anyone else's freedom at all.

A non-drinker,
for example, has no reason of his own to value a freedom to consume
alcohol, for example

- the only way to get him to value that freedom
would be to appeal to something that he does value, and show its
logical connection to that. Which is nothing different from rational
subjectivism.

(Which is not a bad thing, in terms of answering stillsunny's original
questions about values education - if rational objectivists and
rational subjectivists agree on the same 'first-order' premises and
methodology, they'll reach the same conclusions, and that - premises,
reasoning, and conclusions - is what should be taught.)

Note finally, that relativists often seek to base their case on
evidence
of widespread variation of de-facto mores accross social groups; if
that is valid, then it is
equally valid to argue against relativism on the basis that the
evidence
actually points the other ways -- to commonly held values.

I think the 'disagreement' argument gets more weight than it should; I
can't think of one relativist philosopher who actually relies on it,
for example;

think it comes straight from James Rachels, who used it
in the same way you do, as part of a refutation of relativism. It's
only real value, that I can see, is as part of a refutation of
'intuitionism' - without any way to distinguish an intuition from an
opinion, and given the fact of disagreement, intuitionists have no
non-arbitrary way of saying what's right and what's wrong in any such
case. But intuitionism is a non-naturalist objectivism, and evidence
against it is not evidence against any naturalist objectivism. (Nor,
I'd say, are facts of agreement any evidence against subjectivism.)

If moral non-relativism is true, no one's opinion of morality is

any

evidence of what morality actually is (because, to a

non-relativist,

morality is independent of human opinion).

That is no more or less true than saying that for a physical realist
physical facts are independent of opinion; it is true in the
sense that someone's opinion can diverge from the facts, but at
the same time there is an assumption that most people will
perceive facts correctly most of the time.

I'd say that assumption is simply a matter of economy of effort, rather
than of any valid epistemology. For instance, I believe certain facts
of physics simply because most physicists say they're true. But that's
certainly not why a physicist would believe them; for him, the facts
are true not because of what the other physicists say, but because he
can perform the relevant experiments and observe for himself.

If the only 'relevant experiment' is surveying people, then there is no
right and wrong outside of what anyone says is right or wrong.

Nor is
it (unlike the physicists' own observations) evidence that trumps one's
own beliefs - the fact of (any) moral disagreement shows that majority,
and even near-universal, opinion does not prove truth.

For the relativist,
someone who thinks the earth is flat, or murder is OK, is correct
within their own reality-bubble;
for the objectivist, their views
are wrong at least in part *because* they are deviant and in the
minority.

The flat-earther at least can be shown, and somehow must reconcile his
belief with, facts he can observe for himself, such as: why do lakes
and oceans appear convex? OTOH, the murder-approver has no such facts
to deal with; if he never murders anyone, because of empathy or fear or
just plain lack of interest, he can explain everyone explaining
everyone else's re in the same way. One can't point to any fact to
burst his bubble; the only way to do that would be to persuade him that
murder is wrong by his own values. Which is exactly what a relativist
with his own moral convictions (and I don't know of any who don't have
those) would do in practice.

OTOH, if everyone's opinion is equally valid there is no point in
trying
to resolve dichotomies or reach agreement in the first place.

Everyone's opinion is not 'equally valid' - validity is a matter of
whether conclusions follow from premises, or are inconsistent with
them. A person who values doing things in the future, but does not
think it would be wrong if he were murdered, is being inconsistent (and
one of his opinions is not valid); and a person who does think it would
be wrong if he were murdered, but sees nothing wrong with the murder of
someone else (but cannot explain the difference) is similarly being
inconsistent.

In this way, a relativist can avoid being stuck onto the 'all
conclusions are equally valid' tar baby. He can argue that some
conclusions about actions are right and some wrong, while insisting
that they are right or wrong only by the actor's own premises.