I've recently joined the forum, but I did so out of a problem that I have in a debate. Right now, I've been debating someone on the wider context of whether the State is better than individuals deciding for themselves. Currently, I'm at the impasse to explain why morality is objective (relation to calling the State an immoral agency for its use of violence to solve problems), or more maybe it should be called relevant, to the issue. Essentially, his argument can be summarized as follows: since everyone frames their moral arguments from their context, and everyone has a different context (a different mindset, intent, and etc), then morality must be subjective since it is entirely made up from that context regardless of the consequences. Now, I've answered this as simply stating that since there are outside consequences for given actions based on certain moral (or immoral) arguments makes such arguments objective in that the consequences originate outside the person's own context (that is it comes from other people or moral agents). His reply to this answer was that because it only applies to human beings then it is still subjective (which I think is a non-sequitur considering you can parse the moral arguments from the human beings as to model an invariant pattern of actions to consequences). In the end, it seems to me that his view is that all morality is a matter of subjective compromises between individuals, which makes little to me considering there must be something of an objective value to even make compromises possible (some sort of transaction or something else that can be called a measure of sorts).
How would any of you answer this? Or is it even worth the trouble to answer?
-- Brede