How do we discern the difference between right and wrong on earth?
You figure that:
- Everyone wants the best of everything
- However there’s a limited number of resources and so everyone’s personal desires conflict with everyone else’s.
- So a system is needed to provide a framework that coordinates everyone in such a way that they get as much as they can without denying others of too much.
And then you use logic and trial and error to work off of that to create a set of rules. “Right” is following the rules, “Wrong” is breaking them.
And once you get that answered, how do we discern the difference on the moon? In space? On Mars? Is there a different method to use when in an airplane?
Is there a topic to be debated here?
Basically, we try to be fair, to make the world into something that as many people as possible like while doing as little harm as possible to the minority who disagree. And we pay attention to what works, and what doesn’t.
So, laws against rape and murder are right, because people don’t want to be raped and murdered - including would-be rapists and murderers. Laws for public education are moral, because they benefit society as a whole. But laws suppressing, say, Catholicism are wrong because most people don’t want their religion suppressed, and because such laws tend to be very bad for society in general.
And a few points before anyone brings them up; I see no reason to think that there’s any “objective morality”; I regard collective self interest and fairness as at least as good a base for morality; assuming there is a God him declaring something moral doesn’t make it any more moral; and “objective morality” is irrelevant anyway. If objective morality existed and, say, decreed that murder was good, I’d still oppose it; if it decreed that helping the sick was bad I’d still do it.
What’s with the sarcasm?
Do you think the question better belongs in another forum? Which one? That’s what the report button is for.
Just seeking some clarification from the OP. From his scant post, I’m not sure what the issue up for debate is.
Natural selection. Groups of individuals who have a tendency toward consideration and cooperation will generally out-compete groups of individuals who have a tendency toward undifferentiated theft and murder. Naturally, to a great extent, groups of individuals with a tendency toward internal cooperation and consideration, but no compunctions about stealing from or killing total strangers, are likely to out-compete groups of individuals who are cooperative and considerate toward everybody, known or not. (You can argue whether this selection is biological, and deal with the fact that group selection is controversial, or primarily cultural; but the key point is that the better a group of individuals hangs together, the better it will do when facing other groups.) This describes the situation at the dawn of rudimentary civilization, where these groups have at most a few dozen people. Over time, the group with which one should be cooperative and considerate has tended to expand beyond strict tribal relationship, to a wider “tribe” of strangers linked through geographic coincidence or cultural likeness, and the groups of individuals who can so adapt will discover that a few thousand people who are willing to look out for one another, even if they don’t actually know one another personally and act according to the recognition of some signal, will out-compete a group of a few dozen or hundred. Fast forward many millennia, where nation-states of many hundred thousand or even millions of people have rendered this expanded tribal membership into a decided abstraction, and it becomes necessary to codify the behaviors that were formerly unconscious and second-nature, and to enforce the taboos that were unthinkable to break. This is called “religion” (or more properly it is one of the several functions served by religion). It’s a side effect, perhaps a necessary one, of the hardwiring of our socially-oriented pattern-seeking brains combined with the demands of our complicated world.
That’s where moral laws come from.
Brilliant post. And I mean that quite sincerely. You nailed ethics in fewer words than most people would take to, figuratively, clear their throats before explicating their view.
Personally, I think “objective morality” exists – and D.T. just defined it. That which imposes on each individual to act in a manner that he would wish to have others act towards him in.
It’s the core statement of moral codes as different as “mere” Christianity (in the Lewisian sense), Confucianism, and modal Paganism (with things as nebulous as Christianity and Paganism, it’s necessary to weasel the statement a bit, but the Golden Rule and the Rede are as close to basic to the two faiths’ core ethics as it’s possible to get in minimal words.
Thank you.
Everyone? Speak for yourself.
Well our perceptions of “best” might vary, of course.
Why? Why do we try to be fair? What is the rational reason that we should be fair to everyone? Is it progress? is it something else? Why should we not just look out for number one? Is it the belief that if we are fair to others they will be fair to us? Should we be fair to those who are not fair to us?
Im not saying that we should not do these things, for I do these things. I am curious as to your rational reasons for the this belief.
Because that’s the only way for everyone to be sure that they or those they care about are treated fairly. And because otherwise, you have no way to argue when those you exploited get the upper hand and crush you. Unfairness as a strategy only makes sense if you assume you will always be on the winning side.
Because a society composed of people like that wouldn’t survive.
Being fair to those who are unfair to you involves retaliation, so yes. And it’s more of matter of being sure that if you aren’t fair to others, it’s a near guarantee that they’ll be unfair to you.
I think the best answer combines those given by Der Trihs and Cervaise–our moral sense is basically a rational matter of enlightened self-interest, but the calculation, like many other complex calculations, is to a considerable degree already done by natural selection and hard-wired into us (as well as “programmed into our software” by our parents and peers as we grow up)*. In theory, one could imagine an intelligent sociopath who has to constantly calculate for himself what his enlightened self-interest is (“I could hurt people and take their stuff, but then all the other people would band together and lock me up or even kill me, so I won’t do that”), but for the vast majority of us, we have an innate capacity for empathy with our fellow primates (which can be sufficiently well-developed that many of us are even affected by the suffering of non-human animals which diverged from us countless generations ago), and an innate desire to incur the approval and avoid incurring the disapproval of the other hairless bipedal apes.
*I would say our “moral sense” is like our capacity for language–we all have an inherent biological capacity for such, but the specific language we speak or moral code we follow are the products of whatever culture we find ourselves born into.
It’s determined by a collective poll. A given cohort being polled frequently disagrees with a different cohort, and that’s where the debate about exactly which behaviour is right and wrong begins.
Is there an underlying reason for the notion that anything is right or wrong?
Yes. Our common evolution generates two frequently conflicting drives to improve reproductive fitness: Self-interest (the survival of me) and common interest (the survival of my reproducing cohort). Selfishness and altruism are both potential survival advanges. The underlying reason that most societies consider regular eating of their babies to be wrong, for instance, is altruism.
There is a great deal of sentient intelligence layered upon what is in our genes, but the drive to have right and wrong at all is essentially biologically driven.
Here’s how I see it, in a nutshell:
Everyone has universal rights, that’s right, universal. I have a right to say, do, or think anything I want up to and including killing you, raping you, or preventing you from exercising YOUR rights via oppression. However, you and your kin and everyone completely unrelated to you ALSO have these rights, if we all take these rights we’re at a bit of an impasse and NONE of us are very happy. So we sit down and negotiate, I’m willing to, say, give up my right to kill you for your plate of food so long as you agree not to do the same to me. And we move on to the next topic until we have something that vaguely resembles “I won’t do shit to you that I don’t want you to do to me.” However, sometimes people violate this contract, so we as a group decide you’re dangerous and exercise our rights to infringe upon your rights (subsequently imprisoning you, forcing you to do unpaid labor, or in extreme cases killing you). Then we get broader and do something similar between countries, who are a collection of people that may have different social contracts, and when we feel that their contract is dangerous to our contract… we exercise our universal rights again, which is war. The “moral laws” are simply to prevent people from doing stupid things that make EVERYONE’S life miserable, and explicitly spelling out consequences so we don’t go TOO far when someone inevitably breaks it. Of course, sometimes we screw up in interpreting the contract, or its differences, or make up shit about someone else’s contract leading to things such as weird laws no one can make sense of (which are often overturned) or wars we never should have had.
In a somewhat paradoxical sounding summary: we limit your rights to protect them, because if you can rape people they can rape you - and that’s no fun for anyone, is it?
As for our government? Well, once “some people agreeing” gets infeasible (too many people) we decide to choose someone whose idea of what infringes upon our rights is relatively similar and use him to act as our proxy in negotiating with other proxies so we don’t have to mess around with agreeing with some-odd-million other people with slightly different ideas. Is it perfect? Hell no, our mind can’t even legitimately process that many people as actually being human, much less having valid rights, but if you can’t negotiate with a few guys who negotiate with a few guys… etc… think of how hard it would be to negotiate with a single king (who has to try and work for as many people as possible, and usually ends up using his definition), or 1 million other people (all having a different idea of their definitions). This system allows us to agree with our fellow tribe primates (friends and families, a small body) as to what goes, while having slightly more powerful bodies remain small and try to fight for our self interest in their newly appointed “tribes” moving up the line to the international level.
There’s also the biology part, but that’s my 4:50 AM incoherent philosophical ramblings on the subject.
Absolutely. Well put.
The problem with morality, from a philosophical point of view, is that morality is often defined as “what we ought to do”. Then, since people frequently disagree about what we ought to do, it follows that morality is subjective and (to many philosophers), arbitrary. Ipso facto.
But I think this simplistic definition doesn’t capture what people really mean by morality, and why they feel so strongly about it.
There’s a clear biological basis, for instance, in why we feel a strong sense of disgust and outrage about many immoral actions.
But then, from these simple instincts we must decide what actions actually are for the common good, or not (which is what our instincts are basically geared around), and then decide which action to actually do (in other words: morality is just one of several factors that comes into our decision-making process).
Throw in the vested interest that society obviously has in morality, and you get a very complicated and interesting subject. But not a subjective one.
Why don’t you stick around this time, and give us your opinion on the subject?
Or it at least wouldn’t do as well as a more cooperative society, and would get out-competed by one. If you have to spend a lot of time making sure people aren’t cheating you, that’s time you’re not spending in doing something else. In the “everybody looks out for number 1” society, people would spend a lot of time trying to figure out how someone is cheating them in a deal, while the people in a more cooperative society have that time available for other pursuits. The cooperative society can have more financial transactions than the selfish one, because each transaction doesn’t have the overhead of having to research it as carefully to make sure you’re not being cheated.
Just think how much time, money, and people the “everybody looks out for #1” society would have to put into something like computer security. That time and money, and those people, could be used to do something else in a society where attacks on computer networks didn’t happen. In a real cooperative society, where most people don’t hack others’ computers or networks because they wouldn’t like their own hacked, you have some people working on computer security, but fewer than you would if everyone thought it was OK to hack someone else’s computer network if you can. Those extra people and resources can be put to other uses.
>You figure that:
>1) Everyone wants the best of everything
>2) However there’s a limited number of resources and so everyone’s personal desires conflict with everyone else’s.
>3) So a system is needed to provide a framework that coordinates everyone in such a way that they get as much as they can without denying others of too much.
This seems to me incorrect or at least misleading about the motivations of people’s interaction with the law, both interactions where the law limits the person and interactions where people want to influence what laws are created.
I think many people want there to be laws because they feel a sense of fairness, not just because they want the laws to favor their access to limited resources. The desire to be kind or to cooperate or to contribute to the welfare of an overall society is not a “want” in the sense used here. So, laws are not just a means of regulating our mutual competition, though some may at least be that.