Objective Truth Essay

Submitted By jlh757747
Words: 865
Pages: 4

My point is that no one can be truly objective and to better explain why, one must know what objectively true means. Objectivity means the state or quality of being true even outside of a subject's individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings. It also deals with one’s ability in any context to judge fairly, without bias or external influence. The reason why objective truth does not work is due to the fact that being objectively true is very subjective. It is subjective because our Civilizations are not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes. To clarify my position on relativism I believe the appropriateness of any positive or negative custom must be evaluated with regard to how this habit fits with other group habits. For example having several wives makes economic sense among herders, not among hunters. While breeding a healthy skepticism as to the eternity of any value prized by a particular people, anthropology does not as a matter of theory deny the existence of moral absolutes. Rather, the use of the comparative method, which provides a means of discovering these things. If all surviving societies have found it necessary to impose some of the same restrictions upon the behavior of their members, this makes a strong argument that these aspects of the moral code are indispensable. Thus bring us back to what I was saying. If you collectively bring enough educated or ignorant people together you will get their version of “freedom” and their version of “morality” based on that groups individual biases, interpretations, feelings, imaginings and other societies influences. The point I am making is with those varying groups you get different perceptions of reality and thus different perceptions of freedom and morality, one person’s a Wiseman to one group and a fool to another group and so on and so forth. So what one group perceives is then ones reality, influenced from the civilizations and cultures they hailed from. What is moral to one is heinous to another what is freedom to one is prison to another. So in the end there are allot of wise men that actually turned out to be fools and allot of fools who turned out to be Wiseman depends on whom you ask. But what determines if someone is wise or a fool the answer lies in the hands of the collective mentalities of one group. That perception at its rudiment therefore must be based on what that individual group believes which to another group may be to there perception not there view of freedom or there view or morality. Thus each culture is never truly right or never truly wrong because right and wrong are subjective.

I am glad you brought up Plato for a couple of issues I take merit with. First, what Plato’s argument is missing is the fact that like all of us he was brought up in a civilization like us all and he was raised to their customs, laws, politics, religion, views and influences and like us all he was educated to some degree within that civilization, specifically by Socrates. So Plato was already a prisoner of the unconscious bonds of his own culture, which inevitably bias his perceptions of, and reactions to the world.

Cultural