Absolute truth

The short answer is yes, but it is still an incomplete field of philosophy. That does not mean ethics are subjective, but rather we've yet to discover how it properly works.

One of the big reasons you can tell that it is not arbitrary is precisely the reason you asked the question. If it were arbitrary and subjective by its nature it would not occur to you or to anyone else that it should not be thus.

It suffices to say, if you take the rational egoist approach, you get into praxeology and psychology and (Aristotelian) virtue ethics; These are the branches of science that study action qua action, the motivation for action, and those actions which will make us happy in almost every case, and these are probably the branches which will develop the science of ethics into the future.

Here I will point out, although needlessly, that ultimately humans are the ones interacting -- ethics pertains to interpersonal standards of behaviour -- therefore any truth about ethics must come from either the human construct, or a physical construct that the human body follows.

Your proposition is that definitions are not well agreed upon. I disagree: given the amount of communication that takes place in the world, most definitions are well agreed upon. Further, the fact of poorly defined concepts does not preclude the fact of truth. If you have a bad telephone line to emergency services and are thereby unable to communicate effectively, then this does not change the fact that your building is on fire and you need a firetruck.

This is also false. Firstly, there exists such a thing as a perfect female form, this much is scientifically demonstrable: even features, right height, 70% waist to hip ratio, etc etc, and we have the capacity to measure reactions in the brain to these various images. (I'm sure you can find those studies and look them up yourself.) But as to the subjective value structure that people walk around with in their heads, it isn't actually subjective, we just think of it that way.

The problem is a big one philosophically. It is the lack of knowledge, especially of the future, but also of the present. Each human lacks an incredible amount of knowledge about his environment. We have total tunnel vision: one small view point for a few short years.

What we choose is generally the best option open to us given the information we had. If all information traveled everywhere, instantaneously, all the time and for free, then it seems likely that everyone would arrive at the same conclusions about everything. That is: if you knew exactly what I know, and I knew exactly what you know, then debating is pointless. By sharing experiences we would no longer disagree.

 

This doesn't disprove the perfect female form, it just disproves universal preference among males for females -- although even here I would argue that there does exist universal preference, but by the biological-science standard of universality; That is: If I say a cow has four legs, and you show me a cow born with three legs, it doesn't mean that I'm wrong, it just indicates that the standard of universality I am employing allows for minor subcategories at variance with the universal principle.

Actually here too you are wrong. We don't need to look inside people's heads to find their preferences, we can simply observe their action. Race mixing is one of the most common things in the history of the world. Even if there exists a slight preference toward your own race, it certainly isn't manifest in the general actions of the general population of humans.

Well yeah, now you are just redefining the term. If you define beauty as whatever anyone prefers then necessarily you will class it as subjective.

But it all is rather beside the point. I only corrected you because it is an incorrect statement that "pretty" is a subjective category. It really, physically, biologically, isn't.

 

Firstly, you contradict yourself:

Secondly, that's not what I was arguing.

The concept of universality is once removed from being its own raw absolute, for the context of the biological sciences:

If we say that "the concept of universality means X in the context of Y, for these reasons: A, B, C," then we are stating an absolute right here.

Then when we go to apply universality in that context, we talking in terms of an already existing and contextually specific concept.

The same goes for all categories with few exceptions.

If you are to have categories at all in biology, then you must accept this basic premise, or are you saying that that biological categories are not a valid form of knowledge?

It follows from these premises that 'the perfect female form' would technically be a cluster of similar forms, with the general convergence being toward one point, and not, as your arguments lead the reader to believe, any arbitrary thing anyone cares to think of.

 

I would argue that a term is being misused here: either 'truth', or 'subjective'.

Perhaps what you mean by 'subjective truth' is like what we mean by the term pain? That it is necessarily self-referential truth. You can't properly describe it, and it always refers ultimately to the self, and when we speak of it, each thinks of their own personal experience of it.

But if you are using it in this way then it is a confusing use, because it this use is still a subset of 'absolute truth'. That is: it is the absolute truth 'that X is good, for me,' or it is the absolute truth that 'I find this girl most attractive' -- that is, we still speak in absolutes, but the absolutes are in the context of the speaker.

Which might be the case except that are biologically coded to reproduce and, not just that, but biologically coded to seek out certain features in a mate.

It really isn't even a philosophical issue, it's just plain empirical fact, with many studies backing it. In fact, being attracted to and reproducing with pretty girls is one of the few things male humans don't need to be taught to do -- they do it on their own without any prompting, and for females visa versa.

For studies search: waist to hip ratio
For example:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V9F-44RNMPW-H&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2002&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1356194702&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0af083192eb7c6fd4e2ba923b5c25573

I already asserted that this was the case. Although I would argue that the region is the (biological) universal preference.

 

If, biologically, there is variance in individual cases and we still accept the universality of a principle, and this variance is primarily genetic, then it follows that there can be genetic groups with that same set of variance. I don't see that this particularly invalidates the point.

As to mapping the concept of beauty in the region of preference, it can be said that rather than mapping each factor independently, we are mapping relations between certain factors, some with a greater weight than others. Certainly it is the case that beauty pertains almost exclusively to youth and fertility.

If, for a given group of humans, weight and youth are the key indicators of fertility then of course there will be a preference for lesser waist to hip ratio (which is another way of saying fatter women, incidentally.) This doesn't detract from the universal attributes of beauty.

Believe what you will, but it makes no sense whatever for people to find arbitrary features beautiful. We are speaking here of the process of sexual selection, as we are subject to it. In fact it is quite absurd to assert that beauty is [purely] in the eye of the beholder then go running after a pretty girl (which I am sure we both have the urge to do most every day.) If beauty were in the eye of the beholder then we would not understand eachother's fixation with whatever the other was attracted to, but as it is, we perfectly understand eachother when we speak of 'pretty girls'.