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I've been a College and University prof for the past 6 years. I'm in my young 40s, and I just don't understand most of the people in their 20s. I get that we grew up in really different times, but I wouldn't have thought there would be such a big clash between them and me. I teach about sound and music, and I simply cannot catch the interest of most of them, no matter what I try. To the point were I'm no sure I want to keep doing this. Maybe I'm already too old school for them but I wonder who will want to teach anymore....

This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.

Parallel: Teaching contemporary American literature to undergrads in 2019 was utterly bizarre because they hadn’t lived through 9/11. So much stuff went over their heads. There’s just a disconnect you’re always going to have because of lived experience and cultural changes. It’s your job, especially in a philosophy course, to orient them to differing schools of thought and go “oh, I didn’t think about it that way.” And correct them on Nietzsche, because they’re always fucking wrong about Nietzsche.

Can both points not be true? There will be local morals and social morals that differ from place to place with overarching morals that tend to be everywhere.

Not all morals or beliefs have to be unshakable or viewed as morally reprehensible for disagreement.

Unless they mean all their ethics are held that way in which case that's just the whole asshole in a different deck chair joke.

viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity

This should be the slogan of public social media.

The misunderstanding I see here is in the definition of “subjective”.

Subjective is often used interchangeably with opinion. And people can certainly have different opinions.

But the subjective that is meant is that morals don’t exist without a subject, aka a mind to comprehend them.

A rock exists whether or not a mind perceives the rock. The rock is objective. It is a physical object.

The idea that it is wrong to harm someone for being different is subjective. It is an idea. A thought. The thought does not exist without a mind.

So yes. Morals are all subjective. Morals do not exist in the physical world. Morals are not objects, they do not objectively exist. They exist within a subject. Morals subjectively exist.

That does not mean that any set of morals is okay because it’s just an opinion, bro. Because it’s not just an opinion. Those subjective values effect objective reality.

This is basically how teaching secular ethics always is, though. Doesn't seem special about 2025. People will always be overconfident in their beliefs, but it's not necessarily a coincidence or even hypocrisy that they can hold both views at the same time.

You can believe that morality is a social construct while simultaneously advocating for society to construct better morals. Morality can be relative and opposing views on morality can still be perceived as monstrous relative to the audience's morality.

I don't know, I might intellectually understand that morals are relative to a culture and that even our concept of universal human rights is an heritage of our colonial past and, on some level, trying to push our own values as the only morality that can exist. On a gut level though, I am entirely unable to consider that LGBT rights, gender equality or non-discrimination aren't inherently moral.

I don't think holding these two beliefs is weird, it's a natural contradiction worth debating and that's what I would expect from an ethics teacher