Comment Re:Good racial comments or bad ones? (Score 1) 416
The problem is that in those areas where objectivity doesn't exist is that there is no reason to follow along with your subjective opinion over my subjective opinion. In areas of subjectivity it must be left up to the individual to decide. Anything else is tyranny. Even then I don't think there are nearly as many areas where objective reality doesn't exist as postmodernists would like to think. Meaning of a text is a good example. I've seen it argued that there is no one true interpretation of a text for example. But this argument always discards authorial intent as an inconvenience. Muddying the water up with how people interpret that doesn't mean there is no objective reality. It means that the objective reality of people's interpretations differs from the objective reality of the authors intent. In that case we call peoples interpretation wrong. I think in most situations regarding accusations of racism that the accusation is a statement about the intent of the person being accused. That accusation may or may not align with the person's actual intent. Whether the accusation is accurate depends on whether the person actually had the intent to of being racist. The person who made the original statement has the best view of the objective reality of the accusation because only they actually know their true intent. Just like the author has the best objective view as to whether a persons interpretation of their text is correct. Subjectivity is a relative value comparison and objectivity is an absolute one. The existence of one doesn't exclude the other.
Uhm, no, that's not even wrong. Objective reality is what exists outside of human analysis or evaluation. Meaning doesn't exist in objective reality. The objective reality of text is that it is atoms of ink attached to thin sheets of wood pulp or it is magnetic variations on a hard drive disk or whatever other physical form it takes. There's no meaning to any of that. Meaning only emerges when a human being analyzes the form of the text in the context of a shared but arbitrary definition of language, etc. It exists only within the human mind. You can't find it in a lab. That's subjective. Any time you start talking about intent or meaning or any other aspect of human brain function, you are out of the realm of the objective and into the subjective.