I wing it. There’s no one-size-fits-all “X is always good Y is always bad”.
I seldom have to decide whether or not to kill someone, but I find myself doing things like rescuing stranded worms from the pavement/sidewalk, why? I sort of regard it as doing the right thing in a giant prisoners’ dilemma, if the whole of society was as honest, rational(and the other stuff) as me the world would be a better place. Well I can’t do much about everyone else but I can keep my own house in order. Maybe it’ll rub off? I really don’t know what I expect from the worms.
I think this leads to infinite regress if by “basic rule” you mean “method for determining what is good” and if by “better” you mean “more good”. You see what I mean?
Evolutionary ethics can only determine what fails to kill everyone. I don’t feel that’s what we consider when we consider moral issues. Perhaps that is all it amounts to and the rest of us are delusioned (TVAA felt this way, at least in as far as I could understand the point he was trying to make).
This can be difficult to use in most situations humans have faced over time, because it involves distinguishing “murder” from “killing,” and if you suggest that what distinguishes the two is that “murder” is “unethical killing” then you’ve run yourself in a circle.
For example, is it murder if I kill a member of an invading army? Is it murder if I kill in self-defense? Trying to pin down a word like “murder” is not always so easy, not because it can’t be done, but because we lose the universiality you just mentioned.
Yes, and then there are the *transethicists, *e.g. people who seem to be altruistic, yet have always known that they were egoists. Someday we’ll have ethical-reassignment surgery.
not at all. more good = survive. less good = not survive.
What many people fail to get is that an action that leads to a drastic gain in the short term (eg. cheating) but a very slight degradation in the very long term is still likely to be selected against and is thus immoral.
Ethical egoism: Everyone always acts in their own interests. But people disagree with me on that. If I listen, I may find out that I’m wrong. I don’t want to be wrong, that would be bad. So I don’t listen, and only assert that everyone always acts in their own interests. Only semantic gymnasts need apply.
Altruism: No one should act in their own interests, their interests are best served serving others’ interests, and therefore their needs. But this means that we need to find out what people need, and we can’t very well let them be egoists and determine it for themselves, that would be wrong, so instead we will tell them what they need and compel people to be altruistic just in case they would be immoral and serve themselves.
Eudæmonism: Whatever makes you happy is valuable, and you should pursue it. Therefore there can never be conflicts, because conflicts make people unhappy.
Virtue Theory: To be moral, over time you must act mostly morally, and that is to say, in accord with the virtues. No one can be virtuous all the time. wink
Virtue Theory 2: To be moral, over time you must act mostly morally, and that is to say, in accord with the virtues. The virtues are that which better mankind. It would better mankind if we all acted mostly morally. Acting morally is acting virtuously. Virtuous actions are that which better mankind. It would better mankind if…
The Golden Rule: People should do to others what they would have others do to them. Oh, that? That doesn’t bother me, so it shouldn’t bother anyone else.
Yes, that was all tongue in cheek.
Shalmanese
Then your criteria isn’t survival of the being, but survival of the idea. Then how do I determine which idea to follow in order to be a selective agent?
As a Dieist I believe in God. And I believe that He created the Universe and set it in motion. I also believe, as many of the American founding fathers believed, that he endowed us with certain rights. The biggest one being Freedom. Freedom to do what you want, freedom to believe what you want, freedom to say what you want, AS LONG AS IN THE EXECUTION OF YOUR RIGHTS YOU DO NOT INFRINGE ON ANOTHER’S RIGHTS.
So my ethics are simple. Does my action cause someone to lose or decrease anothers rights or their ability to exercise their rights?
I swore I read an article recently that experiments show chimps to have a sense of fair play. I can’t find the article now, though.
This leads me to believe that at least some ethics may arise naturally once a brain becomes complex enough. From an evolutionary standpoint, maybe ethics comes before religion is possible.
Well, capital letters notwithstanding, I feel compelled to point out that the phrase “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” appears in the Declaration of Independence, which has no legal weight whatsoever. As far as I know, no references to God or a Creator appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution, the true law of the land.
I don’t doubt that some (probably most) of the Founding Fathers believed in God, but even if they did… so what?
I have to admit that I derive my personal ethics from the Christianity into which I was born. But I find there is often a difference between a thought-out ethical decision and the decision I make in the moment.
Obviously, my actions and my ethical ideal are not the same.
So, what are my ethics, really?
I like your version of the Golden Rule. I’ve thought for a while that the basic flaw here is that if you’re a masochist, the Golden Rule compels you to hurt people.
Similarly, “love your neighbor as yourself” doesn’t work well if you don’t love yourself (or don’t take care of yourself).
Fair call, I knew I left myself sort of open by not going further to explain that part:)
What I meant to say, is that in any given situation (ie, a situation where I ask myself, ‘should I end the life of person x’) there was an answer, and that answer was objectively correct.
I think the idea of ethics further confuses me when thinking about it the behaviour of animals. We don’t expect animals to act ethically because they are not intellectually capable of ethical decisions. Revtim’s post about chimps having some sort of notion of ‘fair play’ may suggest they have some idea. To continue this, young children and the mentally disabled have a code of ethics, but because of their thought processes, the ethics displayed from both these groups is different from that of a 30 year old in full mental health. This makes it seem like varying degrees of ‘ethical capability’ exist - by this I mean having the mental grasp to realise something is wrong, and then make the decision to do, or not to do.
But from that I get some sort of idea as if different acceptable ethical codes exist ‘somewhere’ out there that are separated by ability, but that seems about as reasonable as asking to see God’s front door…Perhaps it’s about time I took a paper on meta-ethics to further befuddle myself
There are people who do not have a sense of ethics, and for whom murder is neither unethical or immoral. That such sociopaths exist indicates that there must be some physical basis for ethics. (They do not, in general, get taught that murder is okay.) So my choice is that ethics is not random, and not a justification, but at least partly genetic and partly cultural, and far more ingrained than just a fear of punishment.
Well, no being has survived past the 150 year mark regardless of their moral system so its kinda pointless talking about the survival of a being in that manner. What people really mean by survival is the propagation of their genetic line. the survival of any beings genetic line is intrinsically tied with that of his society.
And your also mistake a moral system from moral reasoning. A moral system is more or less useless in the long run because inevitably new circumstances pop up in which your system is not prepared to handle. You need to apply moral reasoning in order to formulate a new set of morals for such a situation.
How do you pray towards ramadan when you are in space? Is it kosher to eat GM food with pig genes inside them? As you can see, secular reasoning systems are far from unique in terms of this sort of ambiguity.
In fact, it has a huge advantage over religious morality since the reasoning system is well defined. I suspect a large part of the evolving religious morality is created by looking at our current moral system and trying to induct the reasoning behind it. Starting with a reasoning system and constructing morals on the fly to suit the situation seems like a far better way to go about it.
I’ve had the same thought. If primitive humans (and pre-humans) hadn’t had some basic, ingrained notions of ethics, the species wouldn’t have survived.
As a species, we’re ill-prepared to make it if it’s “every hominid for himself.” We can’t run very fast, we’re not very strong, and our teeth and claws aren’t much good for defense. Only by working together in some sort of cohesive social unit can we compete in the world. Helping others, treating others fairly, and avoiding unnecessary harm to others are all essential elements to creating that kind of society.
I would humbly suggest, Shalmanese, that any moral system which didn’t include moral reasoning (the process by which it occurs, the values it holds) is a rather poor one.
Yes, and evolutionary principles are a non-starter for any particular moral agent.
I need to know what to morally do right now because I don’t.
To find out which of these is moral, I must see which one is selected for.
Selection takes place aggregately, in the long term, if at all.
It just says that it is immoral to cause pain. One wonders if masochists consider it pain as I or perhaps you would.
The universiality of a moral code is in inverse proportion to how useful it is. Increased understanding and qualification of the code promote a less ambiguous use, but lose any claim to universiality. I would cautiously suggest this is the thought behind absolute morality: because they don’t want to lose the universiality of a code upon specification, they must therefore impose it on others.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want that done to me…
There are plenty of instances where murder can be justified by the murderer. The state murders people through the use of the death penalty. Is the state a sociopath? A law enforcement officer can murder you if he/she thinks that their life is threatened and will be given the benefit of the doubt as to whether the threat was real or not. In both of these scenarios the entities are believed to be operating under the highest ethical principles.
I think ethics are learned and I also believe your ethics change depending on the situation that you’re in. You may not believe in killing but you may decide to kill if your life or the life of a loved one was at stake. You may not believe in stealing, but you might steal after every other means of obtaining what you want or need has failed and you will create all the justification to make the act okay.
Yes, and it subtly changes the idea from a prescription (do unto others…) to a proscription (do not do unto others…). Therefore, as a masochist, that “golden rule” does not compel me to hurt others, although it does not prevent me from doing so.
I still think the Golden Rule has a basic flaw in presuming that each human being will treat him/herself in a similarly healthy way.
(This appears to be one of the flaws cited by opponents of Rawls’ Theory of Justice, which I mentioned earlier.)
I’m not totally clear on how to parse this paragraph, but I think the issue of universality is very important.
Is it possible to have a “universal” moral code? Or do we have a kind of “free market of morality”?
I know a few devout and more-or-less fundamentalist Christians who have the refreshing view that they evangelize by example. Their take is that if their way of life is superior, it should be attractive to others without having to impose it.
Similarly, M. Scott Peck in A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered makes the claim that if his “community-building” approach is applied to corporations, and if those corporations become more successful, then that would be the proof of its value in that setting.
But as in any kind of “market”, you will have those who want to land-mine the playing field (how many metaphors can I get into one idea here? ). So you have those who take the “live and let live” (LALL) or “laissez faire” approach and those who have a “no holds barred” (NHB) or “catch as catch can” approach.
Which is superior? The LALLs who want to set up some rules that seem fair to allow most folks to coexist with their own ethical systems? Or the NHBs who will use any means possible to impose their ethics on others?
And (as it seems always happens in philosophy), we LALLs are faced with the conundrum: preventing the NHBs from imposing their will, is imposing our will on them, which is what we were against to start with…
you missed my point, I was saying that the evolutionary perspective is pure moral reasoning from which a moral system can be generated on the fly. Religious morals however, comprise largely of a moral system with a few moral reasoning rules tacked onto the end.
sigh your still not getting it. Of course we can decide what to do now because we know how evolution works and we have scads of historical and experimental data to work with. We may not get it right 100% of the time but at least we can work on it. For starters, virtually every universal religious code can be found to have deep grounding in evolutionary neccesity. Thats a good base to work from if we trim it up a bit. However, theres also a desperate need for a new set of morals that religion is ill-equipped to deal with. For example, this has been the first time in human history in which we can wipe out the entire world, either deliberately through WMD or inadvertantly through pollution. How do we deal with such responsibility? For once, its become desirable to have less people rather than more. Do catholics understand the reasoning behind their no birth control argument and can they apply it to this new situation? I would say that the religious systems are going to continue to have more and more problems as the morals we developed as cave-dwelling apes stop suiting us. Sure its not perfect but what else is going to step in to fill the void?
). So you have those who take the “live and let live” (LALL) or “laissez faire” approach and those who have a “no holds barred” (NHB) or “catch as catch can” approach.