RexDart, I’m a fan of rule-based decision-making where it is appropriate, and further to finding out just where, in fact, it is appropriate. Rule utilitarianism seems, to this poster, to be the most commonly utilized justification for morality, though most probably don’t know that they’re aligning themselves with the position.
The problems that can come to us on rule-based decision making are varied. One is simply that a set of rules is always incomplete. Another is that, in order to determine what is good and bad overall (and this is a utilitarian problem in general, IMO), we must experiment, and as arguing with any communist shows, it is easy to play the True Scotsman card and say it would have worked if only everyone did it. (And isn’t that always true? Heh!)
Any other problems? Well, besides the apparent paradoxes implicated in the link (which only go against our natural inclinations rather than showing an actual inconsistency), rule-based behavior in a moral context has the problem of determining rules in the first place. Here, even the very problem you point out has not been completely removed. For instance, if we adopt the position that “It is good to follow the rules”, then how do we determine the rules? Since human society is always changing, rules are constantly falling in and out of practice, so this isn’t just navel-gazing. A value system is still required in order to assess rules.
Any altruistic ethical system is going to have the potential to work out rather seriously in one’s disfavour. If you feel squeamish about this, I recommend egoism :).
(Note, also, that valuing everyone’s pain/pleasure equally does not mean you have to value everyone’s lives equally. A 97-year-old man dying from cancer is going to have a seriously limited potential for pleasure.)
This atheist defines the source of morality in terms of evolutionary pragmatism, or something like the “rule utilitarianism” referenced by erislover. A tribe that doesn’t steal from or kill one another will have a survival advantage over a tribe that does, and over the long term whatever psychological and behavioral wiring predisposes us toward certain habits and away from others will be reinforced and become more common, thus favoring stability.
But at the same time, the needs of simple survival dictate that your tribe must be capable of obtaining resources in times of privation, or of defending your resources from another tribe whose objective is to take yours in similar circumstances. Which is why I’m highlighting this previous quote:
I think there’s a lot of truth there, but I’m going to go quite a ways beyond it.
Where I depart from the formal statement of “rule utilitarianism” in the link, though, and “universal morality” in general, is that I don’t believe each human has exactly the same internal wiring as every other human. I believe that we produce a range of behaviors, which vary on a number of scales or measures or continuums or whatever you want to call them. We’re social animals, after all, and there’s plenty of prior examples of this kind of overall reproductive strategy, from ants (which produce drones, nurses, soldiers, mating males, and the occasional queen, among other categories) to social mammals like lions and hyenas, in whose groups the members take on recognizable roles.
From a pragmatic standpoint, then, the human tribe functions best when it has a range of dispositions. If it’s all soldiers, there’s nobody to run the farm or manage the government in peacetime; and if it’s all pacifists, they get erased when the Visigoths ride over the hill. So, in my view, you wind up with something like a bell curve, or, rather, several bell curves. To wit: Some people have a predilection towards violence, which must be kept in check during peacetime but which is useful to unleash during conflict with another tribe, while others tend to oriented more towards peace and diplomacy, which lets the tribe function during the quiet months but which must be sidelined during a time of crisis. At the same time, some people have a natural conservative bent (in the dictionary sense, rather than the political sense), which means they distrust new solutions and prefer to keep doing things in a familiar manner, while others are happier being progressive (again, dictionary rather than political) and, constantly unhappy with the status quo, spend their time looking for new and different ways to do things. Some people feel alive only when experiencing the adrenaline rush of risky activities; some people get sick with fear just looking at somebody else on a roller coaster and do everything they can to protect their personal physical safety. Some people gamble; some people don’t. Some people live creatively in the clouds; some people work practically with both feet on the ground and would never consider writing a play or composing a sonata or painting a picture. And so on.
Typically, we see that a given society is healthiest when it has all of these aptitudes available to it in its population, with an effective balance between the various dispositions. Too many of one type or another, and a society may stagnate, or overreach, or self-destruct, or whatever. Hence my supposition that evolution has designed us to produce a wide variety of behavioral and moral… not types, exactly, but predispositions.
In such a system, there will always be outliers, people on the fringe who don’t fit in. On the bell curve of empathy, for example, you can expect somebody who has none, who emotionally identifies with nobody, to become a serial killer because he thinks it’s fun to end people’s lives; while at the other extreme, you have those save-the-snail-darter types who emotionally identify with everybody and everything and who feel heartbroken when seeing a mosquito get squashed. (Take that latter example and tweak a different scale, and you might get those environmental extremists who happily spike trees, identifying with the plight of the foliage but feeling no regard for the fate of the logger.)
And always, there’s a vast middle section that may vaguely lean towards but not totally buy into either extreme, and which is willing to push to one side or the other depending on the needs of the moment. This, I think, is where the social pendulum between conservatism and progressiveness comes from; the ends of the bell curve are always the same, but the middle sloshes back and forth depending on whether there’s a general overall feeling that we’ve changed too much in a given period or that we’ve stagnated and it’s time to try something new.
That’s kind of a wide-ranging response, more of an overall philosophy than strictly a reply to the original question, but it’s all of a piece, I think. In my view, morality, such as it is, works the way it does because over the last couple of hundreds of thousands of years, it’s worked itself out this way.
I should clarify here, before somebody jumps on me, that I know evolution is not a consciously directed or goal-oriented process, and that it operates only by favoring success over not-success in whatever situation prevails at a given moment. It’s only with hindsight that evolution’s carving away of not-success to leave behind success can be anthropomorphized to suggest it “designs” anything.
I can’t and I won’t harm anyone beyond the fair and unfair rules which I was taught, and at least half of my upbringing is based upon practiced religious moderation.
The other half is Catholic, so I reserve the right to kill all of you.
I’m too much of a skeptic to be an atheist–after all, I can no more prove there ** isn’t ** a God than there is a God.
But, that said, it seems to me that people who don’t have holy scripture to back them up are going to tend to be more pluralistic and less universalistic than theists.
It also seems to me, that as a people with stronger pluralist tendencies, agnostics/atheists are going to have a comparative advantage in discussions on political ethics.
But (depending on who you ask) political ethics and personal ethics may not be closely related. In my mind, pluralism is more or less a fact of life, if only due to the types of natural variation in moral personality types that Cervaise describes. Therefore, political ethics are going to have to be provide the frame and canvas upon which we paint the picture of our personal ethics.
(My apologies for the puke-inducing metaphor.)
Me, I try to cleave to the proscriptive version of the Golden Rule, with a lot of caveats. Why? Some combination of inherent evolutionary psychology and social conditioning–otherwise I feel guilty.
There’s also a reality constraint, a sort of Utilitarianism-of-Rights. Sometimes (often?), if we do not indulge in minor violations of a moral rule, greater violations will occur. (Utilitarianism itself I have too many theoretical and practical problems with.)
Huh? I disagree completely. While I obviously don’t know how I’ll react in a given situation, my moral system leaves this in no doubt: it’s best to sacrifice one life, no matter whose, for two (provided all other things are equal).
I don’t distinguish that way. Why would I have to?
Like I said: never said it was easy.
It’s not that hard, really. Most situations encountered in daily life have been encountered before. Most more exotic situations can be considered beforehand. So no, no rules-based ethic for me.
I don’t understand this at all? Whence would the inconsistency come? Elaborate.
Priceguy, if you don’t distinguish between morally A) obligatory, B) permissible, and C) forbidden actions, then how do you categorize them?
Is there to be no middle ground whatsoever? Are there only to be obligatory and forbidden actions, for instance, and no options? You’d need at least that distinction, or else it wouldn’t be a meaningful ethical system. Alot of actions seem not to rise to the level of obligatory/forbidden, and IMHO would be regarded as discretionary.
This itself would make for a very good GD thread. Off the cuff, I find that idea baffling if left unqualified. At the very least, I suspect most people would draw a distinction between killing an innocent man to save the lives of two other such men and A) merely allowing that man to die to save two (act vs. omission) or B) sacrificing one’s own life to save two (forfeiting one’s own right vs destroying that of another.)
Taken to the reductio ad absurdum, you might be forced to conclude that an elderly man who no longer produces but merely consumes resources is morally obligated to suicide, thus freeing up resources in his possession for the use of others before he drains them completely.
Oh well, I’ve got 6 years 'till that jewel in my hand turns red and I have to ascend…SANCTUARY!!!
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Grey *
**Well I try to do the following.
Act only in a way that you would want others to act
Treat others and myself as ends not a means
I’m with grey, although in addition I would have to say on the subject of murder that as I do not believe in an afterlife, it would be the worst possible thing to kill someone as you are effectively sentencing them to oblivion.
I may be really thick, but I truly do not get why. In every situation you ascertain the correct action and perform it. Why would I need categories?
My statement wasn’t unqualified, I added “all other things being equal”.
No. Physical resources are not the only existing value. Among other things, the feelings of his relatives have to be considered. Him committing suicide would cause them mental pain.
However, let’s bring the reduction ad absurdum in another direction: let’s say there’s an elderly man living in a cottage in the forest. He knows nobody and nobody knows him. I do not see it as a “bad” action to kill him provided it is done painlessly (including fear and other mental forms of pain) and the action doesn’t cause other ill effects.
I personally like to turn to evolutionary psychology for most of my behavior-related questions.
In order for a species to evolve social behavior, altruistic instincts must be encoded into it that facilitate the creation of cooprational groups. These insitincts would include not killing others, etc. Note that these instincts should extend only to your own social group, ie your tribe. There is no reason why you shouldn’t go out and kill people from the other tribe. They are your competitors, after all. The fact that they are members of your species is irrelevant. Your primary concern is to get your kids to survive, and that task depends only on the survival of your own group. What has happened over the millenia is that we’ve come to incorporate more and more people into what we subconsciously consider our social group (for various people, it could be your social class, your nation, your race, and, hopefully, for most people nowadays, even other races).
Despite all of these altruistic instincts, one clearly sees the conflict. Evolution happens to the INDIVIDUAL and your primary goal is the survival of your children, so you have to be in constant decision whether that goal be better accomplished by conforming to self-interest or by being altruistic to the group (who will be altruistic in return). The optimal behavior is a combination of these two conflicting interests. This is why people haven’t evolved to be perfectly moral. They’ve also evolved to lie, to cheat, and to steal, and to try not getting caught while doing it.
What we consider “society” is in large part an expression of group-centric instincts (as opposed to our individualistic ones). The society’s codified laws or unwritten social norms are going to be the ones that benefit the group. Therefore, society will tell you not to lie or steal. This is what’s best in the society’s interests, but not necessarily your own.
From here, you can philosophize all you want. It’s always fun to see conscious creatures take their subconscious instincts and explain them in terms of rationality and logic. They do this for everything, both good and bad. Both for when they wonder why they have morality and for why they want to kill off someone else. (That is, logical arguments for why you feel bad about killing your friend are no different from scientific arguments for racial supremacy. The point is that this is how you subconsciously feel. Stop trying to turn these feelings into logic. If you try this, you’ll run into many logical fallacies, like trying to define murder. You can’t define murder, therefore you can’t logically define who you can or can’t kill, and therefore your logical arguments are worthless. You may try really really hard to make them work, but just give up. We instictually want to kill in some circumstances and don’t want to kill in others. Beyond trying to observantly figure out what those circumstances are, there’s nothing more to say, and certainly nothing to say in terms of logic about what circumstances we should want to kill in.)
One caveat, however: instincts are by no means refined enough or updated to form the basis of the moral code of the complex MODERN society. Instincts give you the basic 10 commandments stuff, but thought-out legislation has to decide on the finer points on what’s good and what’s bad for society. (For example, when killing should be allowed and when not. Note how this is somewhat arbitrary and not bound to logic.) This is actually perhaps not exactly what most people mean by ethics on this thread, but it is an important consideration. For example, gambling. You’re not really doing anything to anyone else (hence the golden rule doesn’t apply) but legislators have to examine the issue and decide whether society (or rather their governed region) would be worse off by having this institution. Christians who decided that this is bad were probably thinking like the legislators are now.
As for people disputing that animals have ethics: you guys are wrong. I realize that your views are based on the opinion that ethics is some sort of higher human faculty like Art or Beauty or Reason (blah), but it’s not.
On a tangent, i hate it how Christians start claiming that if it wasn’t for religion, we wouldn’t have morality. It’s not even like it was God who taught us right from wrong! It was the damn tree! God didn’t even want us to eat from it, so why the hell are these people now saying that we have to go to God to get our morality. God would have liked us all to be amoral and without society (since society requires morality to exist). Frankly, god doesn’t want us to get together and do anything collective or grand. Note the tower of babel.
bastard >:O ! If i want to accomplish anything in this world, i don’t see why i gotta go to him.
In a continuation my musings, however, i can’t help but ponder:
I bet god has a point that when we create society, we’ll just end up killing ourselves with a nuclear war or some other means. I say we gotta prove him wrong!
As for those accounts of citydwellers in different countries not helping ppl and etc., i need to make an important poinit. If a guy’s having a seizure, i wouldn’t think it to be too important or something i can do something about. He probably has them all the time, anyway, and i guess he’ll stop it after a while. I’m no docotor, but that’s what i would be thinking, and this thinking would easily translate to, “this is a car packed full of people, so i guess someone else will end up doing something.” Ditto for rape, since i would be scared for my own well-being as well. On the other hand, if someone was bleeding or got shot or something like that, then the situation would seem very different to me and more pressing (frankly i’m not exactly sure why) and i would be more inclined to do something about it. I wish studies would be conducted which examine these nuances of the issue.
I don’t see why murder can’t be defined, even within the framework you give, murder could simply be the killing of a member of your social network. If we add the notion that once someone commits murder they are no longer a member of the social network, various punishments including the death penalty become available for our use.
If murder can’t be defined, good luck with defining “evolutionary psychology”.
Nothing is bound to logic. Or maybe everything is. Maybe that’s another thread. In any event, logic requires things to be defined for use, it doesn’t define them. It expresses the ability to manipulate defined concepts while retaining the truth of their relationships. Note logic doesn’t define truth, either. It simply allows us to manipulate truths and express their relationships without changing their truth. Valid arguments follow the rules for manipulation; sound arguments are true. Logic only cares about the former; humans care about the latter.
