Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Top ten religious idiots #1
In the spirit of Democratic Underground's Top Ten Conservative Idiots, I'm starting a new feature: The top ten religious idiots. I'll be adding and ranking stories to this post as I find them; when I get to ten I'll start a new post.
If you have any stories of religious idiots, comment on this thread or email me at lrhamelin (at) gmail (dot) com. To be fair, if any nontheists do something amusingly or egregiously idiotic on the basis of their nontheism, I'll include them here.
Update: Thanks to potentilla, we have our first ten religious idiots!
Statistics:
This list: Religion 10, Nontheism 0
If you have any stories of religious idiots, comment on this thread or email me at lrhamelin (at) gmail (dot) com. To be fair, if any nontheists do something amusingly or egregiously idiotic on the basis of their nontheism, I'll include them here.
Update: Thanks to potentilla, we have our first ten religious idiots!
- Andhra Pradesh villagers: Villagers burned an elderly couple alive for allegedly practicing "black magic".
(Reuters India; h/t to Fark; 7 May 07) - Nigerian Muslim Students: Students at Government Secondary School of Gandu, Nigeria, murdered a Christian teacher because she touched a bag containing a Koran.
(Compass Direct News; h/t to anticant's arena; 6 May 07) - The editors of L'Osservatore Romano: An editorial in the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, called public criticism of the Pope "terrorism".
(globeandmail.com; Thanks, Brian!; 6 May 07) - Managers of Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre: Haggling over the toilets in Christianity's most sacred church
(News of the Weird; 6 May 07) - NEW! The editors of the Hezbollah newspaper: The editors accused Iranian president Ahmadinejad of "indecency" for kissing the gloved hand of his former schoolteacher for Iranian Teachers' Day.
(TimesOnline; thanks potentilla!; 13 May 07) - Good News Independent Baptist Church: This North Carolina church put up a sign that reads on one side, "[T]he message of 'Islam' is submit, convert or die." The other side reads, "When is the last time you heard of a Jew or Christian with a bomb strapped to their body?" And when was the last time you heard of an atheist murdering an Ob/Gyn?
(WRAL.com; h/t to Fark; 12 May 07) - Austin "Jack" DeCoster: According to boston.com, DeCoster fired Cacy Cantwell because of Cantwell's atheism, and then lied about the reason for his firing.
(h/t to Fark; 6 May 07) - Don Larsen: Larson, a Utah County Republican delegate, introduced a resolution blaming Satan for illegal immigration.
(Salt Lake Tribune; Thanks Brian!; 7 May 07) - Michelle Incanno
(or Starbucks?): Incanno became outraged when she read a quotation on her Starbucks coffee cup, which was critical of religious belief. [see comments]
(Dayton Daily News; h/t to Fark; 7 May 07) - Mic-happy John Doe: "The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death." An unidentified person at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport gained access to the public address system and broadcast Leviticus 20:13 multiple times. Authorities are investigating.
(Orlando Sentinel, h/t to Fark; 6 May 07)
Statistics:
This list: Religion 10, Nontheism 0
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Why we fight
By drakeblackhorn
Music by Bad Religion, “Faith Alone”; used (presumably) without permission.
(h/t to God is for Suckers!)
Mopery on the high seas
"If ethics are a matter of only subjective belief," the objectivist asks, "then how do you justify your condemnation and outright oppression of murder, rape, theft, and mopery on the high seas? If all subjective opinions have equal (i.e. equally zero) objective moral weight, then why shouldn't you simply permit everything?"
There are two enthymemes in this position, one accepted and one rejected. The accepted enthymeme is "Every choice must follow from an asymmetry in the justification of the options." The rejected enthymeme is that "Every choice must have an objective justification."
The second enthymeme is false-to-fact. We make choices all the time on purely subjective criteria. I choose to buy vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate for no other reason that I subjectively like vanilla and dislike chocolate. There is no objective reason—there is nothing at all objectively superior about vanilla—only facts about what I like. I work as a computer programmer because I like computer programming; I'm not stupid, I can tie my own shoes without assistance, and there are many other professions I could have chosen, some which would have made more money, some which would have done more "good for humanity". But I like computer programming. I married the woman I did because I like her. I live in California because I like it here. These are not trivial or unimportant decisions. The idea that one must have objective reasons to make choices seems pretty obviously false-to-fact.
Since we do act on pure subjective preference, the burden of proof is on the objectivist to show that specifically coercive action must follow from specifically objective reasons; such a premise cannot simply be assumed, much less assumed implicitly.
The first enthymeme is accepted, but easily satisfied. All purely subjective properties are objectively symmetric. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry: My subjective properties are privileged to me because they are mine (or I am my purely subjective properties). I act according to what I approve and disapprove of: I disapprove of theft, therefore I physically force (or sanction physically forcing) murderers and thieves into locked rooms where they cannot continue to kill or steal. It's really as simple as that.
Well... not quite so simple. It seems there are a few hundred million people in my own country, and six or seven billion in the world, with whom I interact on a more or less continuous basis. And—however they construct or express their beliefs—they have their own subjective beliefs about what they approve or disapprove of. Because I approve or disapprove of something is a necessary reason to act, but it's not a sufficient reason. Because of all of those people and their opinions—and their ability to coerce me—I have to consider how they feel about things.
For example, I see absolutely nothing at all wrong with smoking marijuana. I also enjoy making money. It therefore follows that I'd love to sell the stuff. However, my fellow citizens strongly disapprove, and they disapprove strongly enough that they'll put me in prison if they catch me selling weed. Since I dislike prison vastly more than I like money, I don't sell weed.
Another example: I very strongly disapprove of the United States' war in Iraq. The vast majority of my fellow citizens strongly disapprove. However, the war has been sanctioned by our political, legal process, And I approve of that process more than I disapprove of the war. (It's no small reason that I approve of the process because it does have a nonviolent methods to change such decisions, and I disapprove of violence.) I don't, therefore, take personal coercive action to end the war.
Yet another example: I violently disapprove of chattel slavery. If I were magically transported to the American South in 1840, I'm pretty confident that I would be a station on the underground railroad, and prison be damned: I disapprove of slavery more than I dislike prison.
"But what if everyone approved of slavery? Wouldn't it still be wrong?" I can only note that if everyone approved of slavery, it simply wouldn't be a topic of ethical discourse. I have better things to do with my life than disapprove of distant alien civilizations or imaginary possible worlds. I live in this world, with these subjective beliefs.
There are two enthymemes in this position, one accepted and one rejected. The accepted enthymeme is "Every choice must follow from an asymmetry in the justification of the options." The rejected enthymeme is that "Every choice must have an objective justification."
The second enthymeme is false-to-fact. We make choices all the time on purely subjective criteria. I choose to buy vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate for no other reason that I subjectively like vanilla and dislike chocolate. There is no objective reason—there is nothing at all objectively superior about vanilla—only facts about what I like. I work as a computer programmer because I like computer programming; I'm not stupid, I can tie my own shoes without assistance, and there are many other professions I could have chosen, some which would have made more money, some which would have done more "good for humanity". But I like computer programming. I married the woman I did because I like her. I live in California because I like it here. These are not trivial or unimportant decisions. The idea that one must have objective reasons to make choices seems pretty obviously false-to-fact.
Since we do act on pure subjective preference, the burden of proof is on the objectivist to show that specifically coercive action must follow from specifically objective reasons; such a premise cannot simply be assumed, much less assumed implicitly.
The first enthymeme is accepted, but easily satisfied. All purely subjective properties are objectively symmetric. However, there is a fundamental asymmetry: My subjective properties are privileged to me because they are mine (or I am my purely subjective properties). I act according to what I approve and disapprove of: I disapprove of theft, therefore I physically force (or sanction physically forcing) murderers and thieves into locked rooms where they cannot continue to kill or steal. It's really as simple as that.
Well... not quite so simple. It seems there are a few hundred million people in my own country, and six or seven billion in the world, with whom I interact on a more or less continuous basis. And—however they construct or express their beliefs—they have their own subjective beliefs about what they approve or disapprove of. Because I approve or disapprove of something is a necessary reason to act, but it's not a sufficient reason. Because of all of those people and their opinions—and their ability to coerce me—I have to consider how they feel about things.
For example, I see absolutely nothing at all wrong with smoking marijuana. I also enjoy making money. It therefore follows that I'd love to sell the stuff. However, my fellow citizens strongly disapprove, and they disapprove strongly enough that they'll put me in prison if they catch me selling weed. Since I dislike prison vastly more than I like money, I don't sell weed.
Another example: I very strongly disapprove of the United States' war in Iraq. The vast majority of my fellow citizens strongly disapprove. However, the war has been sanctioned by our political, legal process, And I approve of that process more than I disapprove of the war. (It's no small reason that I approve of the process because it does have a nonviolent methods to change such decisions, and I disapprove of violence.) I don't, therefore, take personal coercive action to end the war.
Yet another example: I violently disapprove of chattel slavery. If I were magically transported to the American South in 1840, I'm pretty confident that I would be a station on the underground railroad, and prison be damned: I disapprove of slavery more than I dislike prison.
"But what if everyone approved of slavery? Wouldn't it still be wrong?" I can only note that if everyone approved of slavery, it simply wouldn't be a topic of ethical discourse. I have better things to do with my life than disapprove of distant alien civilizations or imaginary possible worlds. I live in this world, with these subjective beliefs.
Because we want to
Theists wonder why we atheists don't run around killing everyone in sight, and atheist moral objectivists seem to wonder the same thing about subjectivists such as myself. The idea, I suppose, is that without the idea of divine punishment, or the illusion of an objective ethics, there's no "reason" to be good.
It's as if our modern notions of "good" require so much self-sacrifice, so much self-denial, that it seems incomprehensible that one could be good unless one is forced to be good; it seems inconceivable that one could want to be good.
I give half the blame for this prejudice to Christianity, the other half to Kant. (Kant at least for writing so incomprehensibly that his readers consistently misinterpret him.) It's not surprising that Christians would feel this way: The morality one can extract literally from the Bible is so thoroughly self-denying and self-sacrificing that no rational atheist would ever follow it. Happily, no one actually expects literal Biblical ethics any more. Kant deserves some blame for defining "morality" as an act taken without any self interest. Now I'm not a Kant scholar, and it's entirely possible that Kant (a very smart guy) was attempting a proof by contradiction or some such, but millions of people have read him as establishing that self-interest cannot by definition be the foundation of morality.
Humanism takes a fundamentally different tack: Humanism is about what humans feel is good. And the crux of the biscuit is that human beings are naturally empathic: We do in fact feel bad when our fellow human beings suffer, and we do in fact feel good when our fellow human beings are happy. We didn't reason this out, this is just a fact about how we feel. In much the same way, you could absolutely convince me that eating a pound of Brussels sprouts every day would make me immortal and give me super-powers, you could convince me to eat a pound a day, but no amount of logical argumentation can ever make them taste good. Feelings are not the outcome of conscious deliberation, they are simply facts about our minds.
If people did not usually feel empathy, theists and moral objectivists would simply not argue that empathy "ought" to be the cornerstone of our morality. The idea that empathy is "objectively" true is a conclusion based on the evidence that most people actually feel empathy. I've written elsewhere about why the conclusion of objective truth is unjustified; here I'll just say that if the evidence of common feeling were sufficient to establish objective truth, then this selfsame evidence can also directly justify our social and legal rules, without the mediation of objective truth.
All atheists—objectivists and subjectivists alike—believe there is no supernatural enforcement of ethics. All atheists—objectivists and subjectivists alike—behave as they do because they freely choose (at least free of supernatural coercion) to do so. Even the staunchest atheist ethical objectivist must freely choose to behave according to her beliefs about objective ethics. And even a theist must freely choose to read more-or-less Humanistic ethics back into his Torah, Bible or Koran.
There's a simple answer to the theists who wonder why atheists behave in a good manner: We behave in a good manner for precisely the same reason that theists allow Humanist ethics to perform such textual and metaphorical violence to the primitive, savage and brutal ethics literally described in the Bible: Because those ethics represent how we actually feel about what is good. That we feel something is good is a necessary (but not always sufficient) reason to do it. And that's true whether we just choose to do what we want, or choose to construct an "objective" morality that sanctions what we want, or reinterpret scripture to sanction what we want.
It's as if our modern notions of "good" require so much self-sacrifice, so much self-denial, that it seems incomprehensible that one could be good unless one is forced to be good; it seems inconceivable that one could want to be good.
I give half the blame for this prejudice to Christianity, the other half to Kant. (Kant at least for writing so incomprehensibly that his readers consistently misinterpret him.) It's not surprising that Christians would feel this way: The morality one can extract literally from the Bible is so thoroughly self-denying and self-sacrificing that no rational atheist would ever follow it. Happily, no one actually expects literal Biblical ethics any more. Kant deserves some blame for defining "morality" as an act taken without any self interest. Now I'm not a Kant scholar, and it's entirely possible that Kant (a very smart guy) was attempting a proof by contradiction or some such, but millions of people have read him as establishing that self-interest cannot by definition be the foundation of morality.
Humanism takes a fundamentally different tack: Humanism is about what humans feel is good. And the crux of the biscuit is that human beings are naturally empathic: We do in fact feel bad when our fellow human beings suffer, and we do in fact feel good when our fellow human beings are happy. We didn't reason this out, this is just a fact about how we feel. In much the same way, you could absolutely convince me that eating a pound of Brussels sprouts every day would make me immortal and give me super-powers, you could convince me to eat a pound a day, but no amount of logical argumentation can ever make them taste good. Feelings are not the outcome of conscious deliberation, they are simply facts about our minds.
If people did not usually feel empathy, theists and moral objectivists would simply not argue that empathy "ought" to be the cornerstone of our morality. The idea that empathy is "objectively" true is a conclusion based on the evidence that most people actually feel empathy. I've written elsewhere about why the conclusion of objective truth is unjustified; here I'll just say that if the evidence of common feeling were sufficient to establish objective truth, then this selfsame evidence can also directly justify our social and legal rules, without the mediation of objective truth.
All atheists—objectivists and subjectivists alike—believe there is no supernatural enforcement of ethics. All atheists—objectivists and subjectivists alike—behave as they do because they freely choose (at least free of supernatural coercion) to do so. Even the staunchest atheist ethical objectivist must freely choose to behave according to her beliefs about objective ethics. And even a theist must freely choose to read more-or-less Humanistic ethics back into his Torah, Bible or Koran.
There's a simple answer to the theists who wonder why atheists behave in a good manner: We behave in a good manner for precisely the same reason that theists allow Humanist ethics to perform such textual and metaphorical violence to the primitive, savage and brutal ethics literally described in the Bible: Because those ethics represent how we actually feel about what is good. That we feel something is good is a necessary (but not always sufficient) reason to do it. And that's true whether we just choose to do what we want, or choose to construct an "objective" morality that sanctions what we want, or reinterpret scripture to sanction what we want.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Comments eaten
Blogger is apparently eating comments in the moderation queue. If you're not the troll, and your comment doesn't appear, Blogger has eaten it, I haven't deleted it. Hopefully my pernicious troll will find another bridge soon and I can go back to having open comments.
Feeding the beast
If I were a brutally honest Democratic politician, this is what I'd say:
To all you liberal, progressive, anti-war bloggers, calling for an end to the war in Iraq: What are you smoking?
You think a few thousand soldiers dead is a political problem? Ha! You think a few hundred thousand brown people dead is filling the American people with remorse? Pull the other one. You think anyone cares that we've put a half trillion dollars in the pockets of Halliburton et al.? Give me a break. Habeas corpus? Torture? Unlawful detention? Puhleeze.
Sure, we made a big deal about the war in Iraq in the 2006 campaign; that's what a lot of people wanted to hear. But we're actually in office, and we have real problems to solve, problems that have nothing to do with why you morons elected us.
Let me tell you about a political problem: The price of gas. What do you think is going to happen if gas goes to $5/gallon? Uh huh: Democratic politicians—the lucky ones—will become assistant professors of Political Science at East Buttfuck State University. The unlucky ones will be drawn and quartered by a torch and pitchfork wielding mob, their families slaughtered, their houses burned to the ground and salt plowed into their fields.
We're politicians, not saints. Do you think for a second we're going to commit political suicide to temporarily interrupt a war which will only be redoubled when you idiots elect Giuliani and 434 (we just can't get rid of that ridiculous bastard Kucinich) Republican congresspeople in 2008?
We're going to keep our bargain with the Devil. We'll keep feeding the beast until the last dollar and the last drop of blood are spent—our job is to shake our heads and say, "So sad," while we shovel money and lives with both hands. With all good luck we'll be retired when the game is up and it'll be someone else's problem.
Because the Devil is the people: addicted to SUVs, cheap slave-labor trinkets and the whole apparatus of mindless consumption, outraged at the thought that if they want something they might not be able to simply reach out and have it. Change that and you might have a chance at ending the war in Iraq. And I have a bridge you might be interested in.
Grow up.
The importance of the subjective
One frequent objection to meta-ethical subjective relativism is that it somehow trivializes ethical discourse by calling ethical statements only subjectively true (i.e. ethical statements are fundamentally only true statements about minds). But why should this sort of subjective relativism trivialize ethics? Implicit in this view is the notion that our emotions are intrinsically irrational and our purely subjective properties intrinsically unimportant. But where is the argument for such a position?
Minds are real: They exist in reality. Emotions and subjective properties are real properties. Real properties are facts, just as that the Earth is roughly spherical and ~8,000 miles in diameter are facts about reality. It is always rational to discuss and account for actual facts. It is the case that our ability to make logical arguments is sometimes impaired when our minds are experiencing certain emotions. But this is a separate issue. Emotions sometimes cause irrational thinking, but that's a different issue than emotions being inherently irrational.
This prejudice is partially due to the fact that professional scientists tend to focus on understanding objective reality—the world outside our minds—because objective reality is much simpler than subjective reality. And, of course, to get a good picture of what is truly objective, one has to subtract out the purely subjective. This is not, however, a metaphysical position; it's just a control, in the same way that a scientist will randomly divide experimental subjects to subtract out effects due to causes other than the one she is studying. It's not that these other causes are unimportant, it's just that it's more efficient to study one cause at a time.
This prejudice is also, I suspect, an artifact of the historical sexist position of attributing "emotionality" to women as a put-down and a justification for their oppression. The idea that women are more emotional—and thus less "rational"—than men is egregious bullshit, flatly contradicted by the thoroughly emotional and almost exclusively male institution of war. (It boggles the mind that anyone could with a straight face call the slaughter of hundreds of thousands or millions of people—one's own countrymen as well as the "enemy"—a dispassionate, logical endeavor.)
I also suspect many hold the notion that our emotions and purely subjective properties, not being directly representative of objective reality, are highly variable. But ordinary observation easily contradicts this notion. Yes, purely subjective properties, not subject to constant feedback from objective reality, do vary more than our prosaic understanding of physical reality. On the other hand, our minds—including the intrinsic properties of our minds—are the product of tens of millions of years of evolution, as well as the product of tens of thousands of years of socialization and acculturation. Our common humanity, our common society and our common culture are not just abstract philosophical or rhetorical positions, they are real effects of real processes.
We are, as a species, quite enamored of objective truth-seeking discourse, just as we are enamored of minded teleological discourse. And for good reason: Objective truth-seeking discourse has been very successful at developing science and technology. Furthermore, because our minds are self-referential, we can apply the mode of objective truth-seeking discourse to rationalize and make consistent our purely subjective beliefs, by treating them "grammatically" as "objects".
MESR denies only that truth-seeking discourse applies to the content of our ethical beliefs. Our ethical beliefs are not about the world outside our minds, they are real properties of our minds. But that's only one mode of discourse, and it's an historically unproductive mode of discourse about ethical content. Every ethical philosopher who has put forth an objective theory of ethics has—amazingly enough—justified his own ethical intuitions (and often the ethical intuitions common to his own cultural and social milieu). Hardly a surprise: What evidentiary basis does he have other than the content of his own ethical intuition?
But why shouldn't we consider the content of our ethical intuition to be objectively true a priori? After all, we take the content of our perception to be true a priori; that's the foundation of science, n'est pas? Au contraire! The veracity of our perception—the truth of the content of our perception—is a conclusion, not an a priori metaphysical position. It just so happens that we are so practiced at drawing consistent, predictive conclusions from our perceptual experience, practiced both consciously and by the physical evolution of our brains, that the veracity of perception seems true a priori.
All that objective truth-seeking discourse in ethics has provided is an illusory justification for sanctimony, self-righteousness and oppression. To call one's own ethical beliefs objectively true is to call competing ethical beliefs mistaken, to invoke the normative value of objective truth to override another's will.
If there really were objective ethical truths, this tendency would be benign. The Earth really is round; no amount of propagandizing, negotiation, or coercion of others beliefs will change this fact. But there aren't any objective ethical truths (or at least we've found no way at all to know about them). The illusion of objective truth-seeking discourse has been exclusively used by a self-appointed, self-privileged elite—usually claiming direct or indirect communication with God—to justify what has mostly been at best parasitism and at worst outright exploitation and oppression.[1]
To say that MESR entails that all ethical opinions are "equal" is either irrelevant, trivial or false. To say that they all have equal objective truth irrelevant; it's like saying that turtles and snails have an equal capacity for space travel: No shit, Sherlock. To say that ethical beliefs are all subjective is trivial. To say that all opinions are absolutely equal is false: My ethical opinions are always privileged to me because they are—unlike your opinions—my own (the reverse is, of course, true of you).
MESR does not entail that our subjective opinions are unimportant. It does not entail that we cannot make ethical judgments. It does not entail that we cannot act on our ethical judgments. All that MESR entails is that we can't resolve fundamental ethical disagreements with objective truth-seeking discourse[2]: We must use other modes of discourse (e.g. propaganda, negotiation or coercion) to resolve fundamental ethical disagreements.
Our emotions, our passions, our will—our purely subjective properties—are who we are, as individuals, as members of societies and cultures, as the human species, as sapient beings. As such, they are important, just as important as objective reality. We are not just will-less, judgment-less, emotion-less computers, and very few people want to be such. Our emotions might not be an excuse for irrational thinking, but rational thinking is as well no excuse for denigration and deprecation of the real facts of our subjective properties.
[1] This is a bit of an overstatement: It's likely that religions and ethical authorities in general serve an important social function, as evidenced by their persistence and prosperity. Any social system based on meta-ethical subjective relativism must identify and fulfill that social function.
[2] There are some ethical opinions that are intrinsically false: Ethical distinctions made on false-to-fact objective distinctions, such as ethical distinctions made on the basis of the false intellectual inferiority of Black people (or, of course, any ethical belief predicated on one's fantasies about God being real). This case is one where objective truth-seeking discourse is applicable to ethical discourse, although at a derivative—not fundamental—level.
Minds are real: They exist in reality. Emotions and subjective properties are real properties. Real properties are facts, just as that the Earth is roughly spherical and ~8,000 miles in diameter are facts about reality. It is always rational to discuss and account for actual facts. It is the case that our ability to make logical arguments is sometimes impaired when our minds are experiencing certain emotions. But this is a separate issue. Emotions sometimes cause irrational thinking, but that's a different issue than emotions being inherently irrational.
This prejudice is partially due to the fact that professional scientists tend to focus on understanding objective reality—the world outside our minds—because objective reality is much simpler than subjective reality. And, of course, to get a good picture of what is truly objective, one has to subtract out the purely subjective. This is not, however, a metaphysical position; it's just a control, in the same way that a scientist will randomly divide experimental subjects to subtract out effects due to causes other than the one she is studying. It's not that these other causes are unimportant, it's just that it's more efficient to study one cause at a time.
This prejudice is also, I suspect, an artifact of the historical sexist position of attributing "emotionality" to women as a put-down and a justification for their oppression. The idea that women are more emotional—and thus less "rational"—than men is egregious bullshit, flatly contradicted by the thoroughly emotional and almost exclusively male institution of war. (It boggles the mind that anyone could with a straight face call the slaughter of hundreds of thousands or millions of people—one's own countrymen as well as the "enemy"—a dispassionate, logical endeavor.)
I also suspect many hold the notion that our emotions and purely subjective properties, not being directly representative of objective reality, are highly variable. But ordinary observation easily contradicts this notion. Yes, purely subjective properties, not subject to constant feedback from objective reality, do vary more than our prosaic understanding of physical reality. On the other hand, our minds—including the intrinsic properties of our minds—are the product of tens of millions of years of evolution, as well as the product of tens of thousands of years of socialization and acculturation. Our common humanity, our common society and our common culture are not just abstract philosophical or rhetorical positions, they are real effects of real processes.
We are, as a species, quite enamored of objective truth-seeking discourse, just as we are enamored of minded teleological discourse. And for good reason: Objective truth-seeking discourse has been very successful at developing science and technology. Furthermore, because our minds are self-referential, we can apply the mode of objective truth-seeking discourse to rationalize and make consistent our purely subjective beliefs, by treating them "grammatically" as "objects".
MESR denies only that truth-seeking discourse applies to the content of our ethical beliefs. Our ethical beliefs are not about the world outside our minds, they are real properties of our minds. But that's only one mode of discourse, and it's an historically unproductive mode of discourse about ethical content. Every ethical philosopher who has put forth an objective theory of ethics has—amazingly enough—justified his own ethical intuitions (and often the ethical intuitions common to his own cultural and social milieu). Hardly a surprise: What evidentiary basis does he have other than the content of his own ethical intuition?
But why shouldn't we consider the content of our ethical intuition to be objectively true a priori? After all, we take the content of our perception to be true a priori; that's the foundation of science, n'est pas? Au contraire! The veracity of our perception—the truth of the content of our perception—is a conclusion, not an a priori metaphysical position. It just so happens that we are so practiced at drawing consistent, predictive conclusions from our perceptual experience, practiced both consciously and by the physical evolution of our brains, that the veracity of perception seems true a priori.
All that objective truth-seeking discourse in ethics has provided is an illusory justification for sanctimony, self-righteousness and oppression. To call one's own ethical beliefs objectively true is to call competing ethical beliefs mistaken, to invoke the normative value of objective truth to override another's will.
If there really were objective ethical truths, this tendency would be benign. The Earth really is round; no amount of propagandizing, negotiation, or coercion of others beliefs will change this fact. But there aren't any objective ethical truths (or at least we've found no way at all to know about them). The illusion of objective truth-seeking discourse has been exclusively used by a self-appointed, self-privileged elite—usually claiming direct or indirect communication with God—to justify what has mostly been at best parasitism and at worst outright exploitation and oppression.[1]
To say that MESR entails that all ethical opinions are "equal" is either irrelevant, trivial or false. To say that they all have equal objective truth irrelevant; it's like saying that turtles and snails have an equal capacity for space travel: No shit, Sherlock. To say that ethical beliefs are all subjective is trivial. To say that all opinions are absolutely equal is false: My ethical opinions are always privileged to me because they are—unlike your opinions—my own (the reverse is, of course, true of you).
MESR does not entail that our subjective opinions are unimportant. It does not entail that we cannot make ethical judgments. It does not entail that we cannot act on our ethical judgments. All that MESR entails is that we can't resolve fundamental ethical disagreements with objective truth-seeking discourse[2]: We must use other modes of discourse (e.g. propaganda, negotiation or coercion) to resolve fundamental ethical disagreements.
Our emotions, our passions, our will—our purely subjective properties—are who we are, as individuals, as members of societies and cultures, as the human species, as sapient beings. As such, they are important, just as important as objective reality. We are not just will-less, judgment-less, emotion-less computers, and very few people want to be such. Our emotions might not be an excuse for irrational thinking, but rational thinking is as well no excuse for denigration and deprecation of the real facts of our subjective properties.
[1] This is a bit of an overstatement: It's likely that religions and ethical authorities in general serve an important social function, as evidenced by their persistence and prosperity. Any social system based on meta-ethical subjective relativism must identify and fulfill that social function.
[2] There are some ethical opinions that are intrinsically false: Ethical distinctions made on false-to-fact objective distinctions, such as ethical distinctions made on the basis of the false intellectual inferiority of Black people (or, of course, any ethical belief predicated on one's fantasies about God being real). This case is one where objective truth-seeking discourse is applicable to ethical discourse, although at a derivative—not fundamental—level.
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