Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Morality
Rather than a discussion of what is right and wrong, I was wondering what people think morality is. Do you believe in an objective, true morality? Do you believe it comes from a deity or other higher power?
I personally don't believe that there can be an objective morality without a higher power. I believe that something is moral or immoral as far as I'm concerned, meaning that if I believe something is immoral, it will make me act differently, so personal morality exists. However, it seems to me that for an objective morality to "exist" it would need to have some kind of effect on the world, whether it's bolts of lightning or an emotional response from all mentally healthy people.
I personally don't believe that there can be an objective morality without a higher power. I believe that something is moral or immoral as far as I'm concerned, meaning that if I believe something is immoral, it will make me act differently, so personal morality exists. However, it seems to me that for an objective morality to "exist" it would need to have some kind of effect on the world, whether it's bolts of lightning or an emotional response from all mentally healthy people.
Comments
There is no such thing as morality on any level except what is arbitrarily assumed and agreed upon.
Though on a more intelligent level morality seems very egocentric. I don't know how to express what I find to be moral without undermining someone else's morality. I wan't global peace but I need chaos and anger to survive. I think all in all the world will never balance out but peoples perception will dull to the point where no one cares or no one can comprehend it.
I know what I consider right and wrong is pretty much identical to 99% of middle class suburban WASPs (While Anglo-Saxon Protestants) with few notable exceptions like abortion, gay rights, etc but I'm not Christian and never have been (nor was anyone I had any interaction with until well into high school) because I grew up in middle class suburbia just like they did.
I was being facetious in my use of savage, in case people were wondering.
I would consider killing them to be immoral in most circumstances, even if it were considered to be socially acceptable at the time.
As for eating their brains, since in doing so you put yourself at a large risk of disease with little to gain from it, I would also consider that to be generally immoral.
Did slavery only become immoral when society ceased to allow it? Is female genital mutilation moral within the cultures in which it is widespread? Was the holocaust moral because the Nazis thought it was?
I'd say the answer to all of these questions is "no".
Throughout history and even now there are many examples to show that entire societies can be very wrong.
A group thinking something is moral or immoral does not make it so, it just makes it so for them.
This brings the Dickwolves fiasco to mind; a small vocal group decrying the propagation of what they call "rape culture" and the subsequent shouting down of those people by many others who thought they were speaking nonsense. It simply does not compute for many that "rape as humor" should be considered so wrong and hurtful and thus they who do think that way must be "idiots". The other side cannot understand how anyone could consider rape to be anything other than odious and taboo and attacks those who do not as being callous or even culpable of the acceptance of rape in society.
Is either side objectively correct? No, because there is no such thing.
Does this mean that you shouldn't fight for what you believe in? Again no.
It actually means that you MUST fight for what you believe in.
I consider myself a humanistic pragmatist with slight shades of both absolutism and relativism (slavery is always evil, theft can be called for, murder is inherently wrong). YMMV.
Back to the argument, then. Or rather, what appears to be everyone agreeing.
How? If your actions or beliefs contradict the values you hold, then you're necessarily wrong about one or the other.
If an action does not match up to the values, then it must necessarily be the case that either the action is wrong or the values are wrong.
Please, before the flood of comments espousing moral relativism, notice that I said this was an imperfect list. We don't need to be reminded that cannibalism might be fine in some cultures or that it might be alright to engage in it when faced with starvation. I'm talking about Dahmer-style cannibalism. Surely everyone can agree that sort of thing is morally wrong.
From the other side, surely there are some things that we are morally compelled to do. Another imperfect list might include feeding, clothing, and providing shelter for children. Would it include educating children? Suppose an adult and child were alone on the frontier. Does that adult have a moral duty to educate the child to the best of his ability? Do we have an absolute moral duty to help others if we have the ability?
I think of morality must be thought of as an aesthetic for it to really make sense without out some spiritual mandate. I was raised surrounded by a culture which reviled things like incest and rape and murder and I have internalized that revulsion. Right Wing fundamentalists, no doubt, feel that same revulsion when they think about homosexuality and abortion because they were brought up surrounded by the belief those things are disgusting. That feeling of disgust and outrage is not enough to logically justify calling something absolutely right or wrong but it is definitely enough to prevent someone from changing their view of something. You also might notice that growing up in a culture that reviles something pretty much requires that it remains an abstract concept.
You can use rhetoric to win an argument with someone who disagrees with you on moral grounds but you cannot eliminate that gut feeling in your opponent with pure rhetoric; that person must be engaged on an emotional level for them to change how they feel about a topic.
The morality that we both probably have is the result of thousands of years of culture evolving and people fighting to make things better. It takes many generations before a change in a society's morality feels natural.
Also, I cannot agree with the use of these kinds of principles as a basis for morality. You yourself have already mentioned a flaw, but, despite your pre-emptive objection, let me name a couple more flaws with your list:-
- Why mention cannibalism when the real issue (apart from disease) is not cannibalism itself but murder?
- Why mention snuff films when the real issue is murder?
- Apart from the possibility of disease, what is wrong with necrophilia?
- Apart from the later distress you will experience when you come to regret it, what is wrong with defacing a mint copy of Detective Comics #27?
- Forced incest and pedophilia are redundant items, given that you already listed rape.
Indeed, I think you are wrong about some of these things precisely because you are subjectively revulsed by them, rather than at least making some kind of attempt at objectivity.
I would argue for something along the lines of preference utilitarianism, but I'm not done sorting through my ideas yet.
Our moral ethical code is absolute to us, but only because of the constraints of our society.
In a world where you are the only conscious being, there is indeed an objective morality: that which is in your interest is necessarily moral, and that which is not is immoral. This is a rather important point, and I think people too often get this wrong by assuming that a world with only one person has no morality at all.
However, the moral questions we tend to worry about most are questions that involve multiple people. This is where it becomes difficult - how do you reconcile your own interests with those of others? It seems that you cannot remain objective at this boundary, but if at the very least you feel empathy and believe in something like equality between human beings, then preference utilitarianism is the only sensible position.
objective means being the object of perception or thought; belonging to the object of thought rather than to the thinking subject.
Not trying to be a dick, I just think you are unclear as to the definitions of subjective and objective.
If you argument is that there is a mechanical element to morality (in that the brain physically reacts to something) then there can be no morality as it is merely a biological imperative limited to the biology of humans and thus not universal.