A week is an eternity in the political blogosphere, but it's a short time in the world of philosophy. Or at least, that's my excuse for responding now to a couple of Matt Yglesias' week-old posts on the objectivity of morality. Some things Matt says in the course of arguing against the existence of objective moral facts really don't have much bearing on the question of objectivity. In fact, many of his criticisms apply just as well to areas of inquiry where objective truth is clearly at stake. (In other words, I'm saying that his criteria for objectivity aren't good.) Let's first consider this:
Sometimes, you face a question that you think has an objective answerlike "How much should we care about budget deficits?" What you'resupposed to do in those circumstances is look at the evidence in aneven-handed and objective way. The big issues of political commitmentdon't work like that at all. Siegel didn't go learn Arabic fluently,then read the Koran (it says you should only read it in Arabic), thenstudy the works of Sayyid Qutb and other Islamist commentators,and then objectively weigh those arguments against the great names ofliberal political thought in an open-minded and unprejudiced way beforedeciding, "Yes, those Islamists are all wrong!" That would be dumb, andnobody lives their life like that.
