Is artificial standards of morality better than absolutely no morality at all. The Marquis de Sade argued that morality was an artifice imposed by rulers to control the masses. So even if that was true if artificial morality bring more stability than no morality than it is better.
Why would there be no morality? Everyone’s a psycho?
Qin, can you please distinguish between artificial morality and any other sort?
I am not arguing that there is no such thing as morality, by the way. I just want to know what you mean ere I respond.
This was my question, too.
We can’t even begin to debate this issue until you make clear what it is that makes certain types of morality artificial, and certain types not.
If as some people such as Sade for instance are correct and there is no such things as morality any sort of morality would be “artificial”. We’re debating in that context.
So why use the term “artificial” at all?
Your question simply becomes, “Is morality better than no morality?” Seems like a rather pointless debate, if only because i’m having trouble even imagining a society that has no morality. What would such a society look like? How would its members relate to one another?
Just as I said what you were thinking earlier, you just wrote what I am thinking now. Stop that. 
Right. You might even say that a society without at least some implied shared morality wouldn’t be a society at all. Societies only exist when there are some basic rules that tell the members what they can expect of each other. AFAICS, that is what morality is.
Or to turn it around, you only need morality wrt other people (or, if you’ve got a religiously motivated morality; other people and gods).
Stability seems to be your most important criteria in determining how good a society or an idea is. How much have you examined this assumption?
Remember that this is the guy who thinks that Emperor Palpatine was the best thing to ever happen to the Republic.
(Is this Curtis, and if so, will you be returning to this thread?)
Anyway, I’d say de Sade was simply wrong about that, since morality (artificial or no) seems to be built in to our psyche through evolution. You can find evidence of morality in chimps and other apes, and probably other, less developed versions, in different mammals. And, there have been many studies that seem to show that everyone (other than some sociopaths, I guess) seem to have an in-built moral framework.
Can we take that as an established fact at this point? If so, then is your question, if that wasn’t true, and if it was true that morality is in artifice imposed by the rulers to control the masses, is that better than no morality?.
If so, I’d say, “yes” – some form of morality is better than none, even if it’s not truly heartfelt or whatever it is that makes it artificial.
Heck, with things like the Prisoner’s Dilemma out there, you could even see what the average person would term as highly moral cooperative behavior in a society comprised solely of organized sociopaths–all that’s required for the semblance of morality is sufficient intellect/instinct to understand that “you and me can get more done than just me or just you”, and even wolves get that.
So roughly, yes, any moral behavior is better than no moral behavior, as long as we’re defining “moral behavior” as “behaving in such as way as though you believe it is wrong to bring harm to other members of the in-group or the in-group as a whole”.
This is getting close to a related subject that I’ve wanted to throw into GD for a while, but I haven’t been able to get a good OP together. Something about universal morals, and a definition of moral behavior. For example, if the dominant intelligent species on this planet were descended from lions instead of [apes][our pre-cursor, since we are apes][whatever is the proper way to say this], would it be considered moral to, for example, take over a family by killing or chasing away the current head of the family, and then killing all the babies? That seems ridiculous to us, but you know what, chimps don’t do that either. If we were descended from lions, though, that sort of behavior could result in complete acceptance (“how else could Leo expect Elsa to become fertile?” “Did you hear about Simba? He took over Scar’s pride and then didn’t kill Scar’s babies. I think that kind of behavior is deviant and Simba shouldn’t be allowed to marry Nala.”).
Anyway, it’s something about universal morality, whether such a thing could exist, etc. It always seems to come down to the Golden Rule, but, you know what? Bonobos seem to live out the Golden Rule, too.
/hijack
RS
Personally, I’m quite certain that most of our “universal” morals only apply to us because we evolved as a social species that lived in multi-family groups long before we became human. Lions are pretty much organized by having one or two males with loads of females and children. That sort of organization means all other males are purely competition. Humans and chimps and wolfs don’t work like that; we more or less need the support of other non-related individuals.
Yes and no. The Golden Rule - as far as humans is concerned - on the most basic level seems to apply only to the people in our “group”. Tribal peoples traditionally have little qualms about killing any strange male they happen to meet, for example. The golden rule applies to the people you expect to meet regularly (or has friends that you might meet later). Of course, in societies as large as ours, the only working interpretation is that everybody you meet is in the “group”.
I agree. Part of being human is being heir to a set of behavioral instincts that made it possible for us to live in small tribal bands. All moral systems ultimately are grounded in our instinctual sense of things like “fairness”, “justice”, “loyalty”, etc. (Although different moral systems may attach different weight to these impulses, or systematize them in different ways.)
A different type of sentient animal that had evolved within a different sort of social organization would have different morals. A human idea like “kindness” might seem monstrous to such an alien, and we would seem like monsters for using it as a guide to our actions.
I think this is part of why we have such an affinity toward dogs. Their brains are wired such that they inhabit a moral universe similar to ours. Other animals, not so much.
If there is no natural, absolute morality, then there is no natural, absolute “better than.”
Actually I somewhat disagree. Not that they might develop such a system, but that it would be moral even for them. On the contrary, I think moral behavior for the lionfolk would be for them to overcome their instincts and develop a system that doesn’t involve killing competitor males and children then raping the females, because no one involved wants that to happen to them. No one wants to be the male who gets killed, or has his/her children killed, or to be raped; that behavior is against their collective self interest.
To use human examples, despite having instinctive impulses towards murdering and robbing rivals, moral rules against murder and theft are probably the most common such rules we have. Why? Because regardless of what our instincts tell us to do to other people, almost none of us want to be the murder victim or the person robbed, therefore it is in our collective self interest to make up rules that go against our instincts. And wile I don’t think that morality is objective in the laws-of-physics style, I do think that it can be judged as better or worse according to how well it serves the collective self interest.
In fact, the lion-people’s development of civilization might start when the non-dominant males organize themselves, perhaps allying with the females to impose a new system where they aren’t the losers or dead and where the females don’t lose their children. Or if the males are too aggressive towards each other to organize, they might end up like the hani of CJ Cherryh’s Chanur books; a society where the unorganized males fight each other for breeding privileges but the females run everything else.
The basic problem with your idea I think is that lions aren’t alien enough, at least when it comes to the consequences of the behavior you are talking about. They still want to live, they feel pain, they care for their offspring. I think a better example of alien morality would be sexual age of consent laws. That’s something that people feel strongly about morally speaking, but at the same time would vary greatly between species. Sex with human children is wrong because human children are not built physically or psychologically for it. Given how they use sexual acts for casual social contact however a bonobo derived species might consider not having sexual contact with children bad parenting, like refusing to hug them or show affection would be among us. A species that transferred important substances to their offspring by sex (the way human mothers boost the infant immune system with breast milk) would likely consider not having sex with children outright abusive. A species that exchanged genes sexually but reproduced by fission into two smaller mental and physical copies would consider the idea of “age of consent” for sex or anything else bizarre. And a species that reproduced involuntarily by spreading and breathing in spores would likely consider age irrelevant and the idea of consenting to sex weird or outright threatening - it would be entirely too much like saying “I don’t want you breathing my air”, the kind of comment that gets punctuated by gunshots
True. However, it’s quite clear that there is no natural absolute morality. As has been pointed out above, male lions that take over a pride kill all the young. Is that moral? If not, why not? What about ant warfare, or any of the multitude of cannibalistic species?
In other words, as I have stated in this thread a couple of times already, morality for humans is the morality that works for humans. And we can certainly find objective measurements for what works for us as a large-group, fairly intelligent, social animal. The golden rule is a prime example of a near-universal principle of human morality.
Sure, but that would IMHO only happen once the lion-people start really organizing themselves into larger social groups first. Traditional tribal humans really don’t appear to have been very peaceful at all. Same goes for chimps. Raiding & killing between tribes is positively common. Within the tribe/society is where thing like the golden rule apply. Outside of that, our uglier aspects can quickly become dominant, even to this day.
And IMHO that is in part because their morality is in many ways is inferior to ours. Not because it violates some cosmic law, but because it serves their collective self interest and desires worse. Nor by the way do they themselves necessarily disagree with me; I’ve read translated quotes in the past from tribesman expressing admiration over a society where the murderers don’t get all the women and goodies, and where being murdered is a rare way to die. And I rather suspect the women would prefer not to be raped on a regular basis.
I think I would have to agree with you on that.