I wouldn’t necessarily say that Terrorist X has sacrificed rationality in believing that God is the arbiter. If I believed that I had divine enlightenment from an omnipotent being then I’d almost certainly rank my God-inspired wisdom as being far more important than Joe Average’s moral outrage. Lacking any kind of divine inspiration the only tool I’ve got at my disposal for delimiting good and evil is reciprocity, but the tables would surely be turned if divine inspiration stated “reciprocity be damned.” Heck, I’d probably even throw out consistency if God told me that logic really doesn’t exist, that A == ~A in the world that he created.
(Incidentally, I’d be shouting “Reciprocity,” not “Rationality.”) Again, I don’t see a breakdown in rationality in the dilemma you’ve provided. There is a way for a neutral third party to decide between the two conflicting systems: their judgment as to which moral system seems the most sound to them. Maybe they’ll say “Hmm, loinburger’s got a good point about that whole Golden Rule thing, and I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever had any flash of God-inspired wisdom that would make me believe that He’s a valid arbiter,” or maybe they’ll say “Well, I have had some major God-inspired wisdom, and that terrorist has a good point – I’ll have to educate the masses at the point of a sword.” Obviously I’d disagree with them making the second choice, but ultimately it’s their decision – they’ve got to make their own judgment as to what system is the most “rational” to them.
The neutral third party might not always be able to decide, of course. If person A says that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player and person B says that Wilt Chamberlain is the greatest basketball player, then neutral party C might decide that the conflict cannot be adequately resolved. Doesn’t matter, I’ve already said that it’s possible for two moral systems to be judged equivalent to each other.
That’s self-evident from the terms. I think that what you’re driving at is that some people may think that knowledge from source A is rational while others disagree – for example, some people may have God-inspired wisdom and so they believe that they have sound reasoning behind their particular moral system, while others may doubt the value of this wisdom (thinking that the God-inspired might be lying, or schizophrenic, or whatever have you).
You can’t. You can only be sure after the base terms have been defined. Once we’ve established that the point of the game of basketball is to win the game by scoring points, and that winning is a good thing, then the outcome is an objective certainty. But, it is no more an a priori certainty to say “Michael Jordan is better at basketball than loinburger” than to say “Michael Jordan is better at googlesnappalopolis than loinburger” – both statements are completely nonsensical until the base terms have been properly defined.
The object of basketball is to win. If a category doesn’t lend itself to victory (“Favorite type of hat” or “Eye color” or whatever), then it is irrelevant. If a distinction between two different categories does not produce a substantive change in the results (i.e. if the distinction in the categories “Baskets scored from 2 meters” and “Baskets scored from 1.99 meters” does not aid in determining which player is best at winning games), then the distinction is irrelevant and the categories can be blended. If somebody objects to this blending, then they must produce a sound justification as to why the distinction is important.
The weightings might be relevant if we were comparing Steve Kerr and Michael Jordan, but they’re not relevant when comparing loinburger and Michael Jordan. Jordan is better at loinburger at all categories.
Hard stats are an easy way to assign points to the different categories. For example, every time one of us scores a lay-up, increment the “lay-ups” category. Every time one of us completes a pass, increment the “passes” category. Etc.
Even if I used the most hare-brained categorization system imaginable, I would still be making an objective statement by claiming that “Michael Jordan is better than loinburger at the game of basketball.” Similarly, I would be making an objective statement by claiming “I have measured the length of this object with a meter stick, and have found that it is exactly 1.548734 meters long.” These are statements that anybody can be verified or denied by anybody. “loinburger’s team never seems to win any games, primarily because he is a terrible shooter, dribbler, passer, and rebounder, so Jordan certainly appears to be the better player” or “The meter stick used is not accurate to two decimal places, let alone six, so the person making the measurement was apparently incompetent and so I do not trust their judgment on the matter.”
Morals are no different. “lonburger is bad at basketball” and “Jordan is good at basketball” are statements of measurement, not mere statements of preference. Similarly, “This is good” and “This is evil” are statements of measurement, not mere statements of preference – they measure the “moral worth” of people and actions, and the validity of any moral statement can be ascertained (to some degree or another) by examining the ability of the system to categorize people/actions.
Morality is the categorization of actions and persons as “good” or “evil.” Moral systems are determined to be “better” or “worse” based on how well they accomplish this task. For example, a moral system along the lines of “Everything I like is good and everything I don’t like is evil” would incorrectly categorize many actions and persons – for example, it would fail to draw the very important distinction between “intentional harm” and “unintentional harm.” This doesn’t mean that John or Jane Doe might not use such a moral system, it just means that they will likely encounter a great many difficulties from miscategorization. Similarly, somebody might use a unit of “length” that is extremely variable – they will encounter difficulties when they measure objects, but are then unable to determine the length of the object after the fact.
That’s just wrong. A basketball player is not “anything off of which you can bounce a basketball,” otherwise the stadium floor would be a basketball player, as would the referees, as would the scoreboard and pressbox and fans and backboard. The game of basketball is not some nebulous thing that you can redefine as you see fit.
I will use this in my defense if I’m pulled over for driving away from a gas station without paying. “I did not just pump eight gallons of gas, because what, really, is a gallon? For that matter, what is gasoline? If you cannot define these terms a priori then I don’t see why you’ve pulled me over.”
Do you mean “this particular debate is not meaningless,” or “I am able to will myself to believe that a particular debate is not meaningless for purposes of deriving more enjoyment out of it”?
If they had no concept of unjustified killing (presumably if they had no concept of justice) then they’d probably be varelse.
Morals can be measured, though. You can determine kind and severity. F’rinstance, an unjustified, malicious killing is of a different kind than a justified killing, hence we draw a distinction between “murder” and “killing.” Giving half of one’s money away to charity for the sole purpose of aiding the poor is of a different kind than giving half of one’s money away to charity for the sole purpose of appearing to be virtuous (in order to gain public office, f’rinstance), hence we draw a distinction between “righteously” giving one’s money to charity and “self-servingly” giving one’s money to charity. After kind is determined, you can also determine severity. Murdering five people is obviously more severe than murdering one person, all other things being equal. Giving half of your money to charity is obviously better than giving a quarter of your money to charity, all other things being equal. Stealing a million dollars from a bank is obviously worse than stealing a thousand dollars from a bank, all other things being equal. Murder is generally considered to be worse than unjustified theft, since it deprives somebody of life rather than property (life is not replaceable, property is replaceable).
Hmm. Since we’re taking hypothetical aliens, let’s take the case of Heinlein’s Martians. The Martians had no concept of murder because they * knew * that they would live on after death.
Look, you can’t derive rules about the morality of file sharing or stem cell research until you have a P2P network or someone is doing the research. We have moral dilemmas that did not exist before. Therefore, morality is dynamic. Therefore, morality cannot be absolute.
This is like debating our favorite flavor of ice cream or something.
loinburger, you are obtusely using repeated the very flaw your own argument in an attempt to explain away the symptoms of that flaw. For example:
Yes, but this severity can only be established by using our own moral map! There is no universal or objective “severity”.
No, by definition the categorization would be correct for the user of that moral system. You’re putting the cart before the horse. You can only argue against such a categorization by comparing it to your own categorization and declaring it wrong under this alternate categorization - in other words by using your own morality. There is no universal or objective way of establishing miscategorization.
Most telling of all:
Well you’ve rather made my point for me there! The way - the only way - for the third party to judge is to use their own morality. This is neither objective nor is it absolute - it is entirely an individual decision.
The fact that you couch the whole decision-making process in terms of a debate this third party has with themselves doesn’t detract from the heart of the matter - namely that any decision they arrive at is wholly dependent on their own worldview. There is no way to prove that the third party is any more correct than either of the original participants.
No - what I’m driving at is that which I originally placed in a simple little phrase in my first post. In other words: the mathematics of metalanguages shows that logical structures break down when one tries to access a system from within that system. A system cannot be both complete and consistent. There is no objective starting place for morality since that itself is a moral judgement. This whole argument is Russell’s “spoon” paradox placed in a different setting - the set consisting of sets that do not contain themselves is not well defined. Everything needs a starting point.
However your summation does contain a grain of what I’m driving at - the fact that anyone may doubt the value of any given wisdom shows that that wisdom is not absolute since the doubter’s own decision-structure comes to a different conclusion. It’s a clumsy way of putting it, but it’ll do.
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Incidentally, on a different issue and completely irrelevant to the actual discussion:
Not necessarily. You may, for example, be a faster runner than he. You may resolve objects with your eye faster than he. These are not irrelevant to one’s basketball ability but they will not in themselves cause you to be selected ahead of him for a team.
I can think of more indirect categories too. If the game is a strictly amateur one, Jordan falls foul of the most important categorization of all - that of qualification.
Say this to yourself… “It is consistent for me to treat others in a way that I wouldn’t be treated.” Does it “feel” wrong to say that? —if so, then what moral supposition have you already made? (The “golden rule” perhaps?) And what logically justified that?
Well, let me be careful here. This use of “objective” is new for me, I am sort of trying it on to see how it fits. Morality is not objective in the sense of being independently verifiable, but it is objective in the sense of being able to be taught and applied to interaction across a population. Language is objective in the latter sense, but not the former. The latter is a sort of inter-subjective objectivity. The former directs our attention to existents outside the scope of our perception and tells us that whether or not we judge or observe it will still be the case. The latter requires our active assent in order to “exist”.
Of course, my implication was only meant to go one way.
Taken by itself, of course not. But taken in the context of demanding others’ morality to be internally and externally consistent, and rationally justified, is making a moral claim: the meta-moral claim of how a moral system should be.
The ascription of objectivity to a moral system would otherwise demand that there are statements of facts about morality (objective in the first sense) and there are statements of moral facts (objective in the second). In other words, it would make some statements about morality independently verifiable and as true as (or perhaps true in the same way as) statements of logic.
But moral statements are not derivable from a system of logic without adding in exteraneous axioms. In what sense do we intuitively verify moral axioms? In this sense I could imagine comparing moral axioms to something like the axiom of choice, itself a matter of no small debate once (and perhaps still).
Still, I should like to see such a system that doesn’t fall flat on its face. For example, do a search on Allais’s Paradox (if you don’t already know what it is) to see whether we rationally choose outcomes or not based on probability and incomplete information. Now, this is an experiment from economics, but I think it does serve to outline a very real discrepency between an objective state or objectively (and rationaly) describable state and our estimations of them. Here we run into the question: is there an objective, rational, good choice that we fail to make (or otherwise deny) or are we simply not fit for pure objective, rational, goodness? Does the tail wag the dog?
Well, bugger all this for a lark, then. If you believe that the terms “great in basketball,” “righteous,” “competent,” “intelligent,” “courageous,” and “witty” all mean the exact same thing (“Things that I like”) since these terms do not describe unique attributes and are also impossible to measure in any substantive way, then your worldview has severe problems that will most surely come to light in time. My worldview allows for uses of terms that would be contradictory in your worldview, such as an “evil genius” or a “cowardly wit.” If in fact your worldview uses terms such as “courageous” and “intelligent” to mean more than simply “That which I like,” yet you continue to insist that “righteous” means simply “that which I like” without offering any kind of justification as to why the term is different from terms such as “courageous” or “intelligent”, then you’re the one who’s being obtuse.
How do you distinguish somebody who is “intelligent” from somebody who is “stuipid”? How do you distinguish somebody who is “brave” from somebody who is “cowardly”? How do you distinguish somebody who is “great at basketball” from somebody who is “inferior at basketball”?
How are these categorization systems any different from the system used to distinguish somebody who is “righteous” from somebody who is “wicked”?
Are you willing to argue that intelligence (and stupidity), bravery (and cowardice), and greatness (and inferiority) are terms that are completely devoid of any meaning whatsoever? That there is no such thing as intelligence/stupidity, bravery/cowardice, or greatness/inferiority?
If you see no difference in kind between “premeditated murder” and “involuntary manslaughter” then I sincerely hope that you never serve on a jury. Somebody might equate the two, but by doing so they will almost certainly encounter difficulties – so be it.
Classifying “intelligence” and “stupidity” is no different – it is up to the individual. However, some classification systems will be better at distinguishing between intelligence and stupidity than other systems. A system such as “Everybody with black hair is intelligent, everybody else is stupid” will misclassify many people, while a system such as “Everybody who scores above 100 on a test is intelligent, everybody else is stupid” will still be inaccurate in many instances but would nevertheless be far more successful in classifying people based on their intelligence. If somebody sees the need to distinguish between intelligence and stupidity (it’s often quite useful), then they’ll want a classification system that works well. Similarly, if somebody sees the need to distinguish between the different intents of an action (again, something that’s quite useful to do), then they’ll want a moral system that works well.
The only way to truly demonstrate that somebody’s moral system isn’t working is to demonstrate that many people/actions that they classify one way are in fact being misclassified – thought experiments only get you so far. If my moral system were “Everybody with black hair is righteous,” and somebody with black hair began to unjustifiably kill people with malice aforethought, then (assuming that I’m capable of seeing a difference in kind between “premeditated murder” and “involuntary manslaughter,” which I realize may be too much for some people to grasp) my moral system has been shown to misclassify people, and ought to be improved to fix this flaw (unless I don’t particularly care if somebody is righteous or wicked).
If you think that all of human language is utterly meaningless, then why are you using human language to post on an internet bulletin board? Can I randomly assign meaning to your words now, since everything is completely subjective?
If you don’t think that all human language is utterly meaningless, then why are you claiming that specific terms (like “righteous” and “wicked”) are meaningless by using an argument that applies to all human language?
I have never, never claimed that wisdom, truth, knowledge, morals, etc. are absolute. I have claimed the exact opposite many times.
Barring evidence in support of such a belief, I’m not able to convince myself that I’m somehow inherently superior to everybody else. God (or whatever) has never said to me “loinburger, you are chosen, do what thou wilt” or whatever have you. Sure, I may be smarter than some people and stupider than others, taller than some people and shorter than others, but I see no way to justify a belief that any of these differences cause me to be inherently suprior, just inherently different.
So, since I don’t believe that I’m somehow inherently superior and subject to a different set of norms than everybody else, then it follows that I ought to behave reciprocally if I want to be a good person. I don’t want Joe Average to murder me (or anybody else, for that matter) – this would be a wicked act (i.e. not merely a damaging act, but a damaging act with a malicious intent) on Joe Average’s part, and there’s no reason for me to believe that it would be anything other than a wicked act were I to do the same.
Sure, if I believed that I were God or something along those lines, then reciprocity gets thrown right out the window. The reason that morality (and society) functions the way it does is because very few people actually believe that they’re God – some people might convince themselves of it for the sake of convenience, but I draw a distinction between convincing yourself of something and believing in something. (Take Pascal’s Wager, for example. Pascal isn’t really arguing in favor of believing in God, he’s arguing in favor of convincing oneself that God exists. I don’t see beliefs, or doubts, as something that humans have much, if any, control over.)
I think that we’re pretty much in agreement here, then. I haven’t been saying that there’s some cosmic force called “murder,” I’ve been saying that we came up with the term “murder” because it behooved us to draw a distinction between unjustified, malicious killing and other forms of killing (like involuntary manslaughter). Murder is always immoral only insofar as the concept of murder exists – a society with no concept of murder isn’t capable of committing murder, any more than a society with no concept of property isn’t capable of theft.
It’s more of a meta-societal claim than a meta-moral claim – consistency applies to everything, not just morals. The concept of consistency is necessary for any kind of reasoning whatsoever, be it with regards to morals or basketball (“Bill scored 100 points in the game, and Bob also scored 100 points, therefore Bill is a superior basketball player and Bob is an inferior player” is, all other things being equal, a nonsense statement). Maybe a society would be capable of functioning without any concept of logic, and maybe not – we’d probably on have thought experiments in this respect.
Verification is possible when working within the context of a language, but morals are language dependent and as such cannot be independently verified. An axiom such as “Malicious intent is the same as wicked intent” would either have to be thrown out on its ear or taken as self-evident.
Hold there, hoss! No need to make personal attacks on my character. Personally, I am more than happy with my own moral code and, as it happens, I firmly believe in a “do unto others as you would be done unto” philosophy. Like you, I feel that it is a rational approach. It’s certainly a utilitarian approach - I think that such a code applied universally would maximise “happiness” on this planet.
What I’m trying to do here is get you do see that just because a moral system makes sense from your or my viewpoint, that does not qualify it as one which is inherently universal. If we want to make such an extreme claim as that, we need damn well to be able to rigorously and logically back it up. But I know that try as you might, you will not be able to do such a thing. I know this because Goedel, amongst others, taught me such a thing nearly a hundred years ago.
And you persist in using circular arguments. You cannot say that you know your moral system is correct because it allows you to distinguish the righteous from the wicked because they are only defined to be righteous because of your moral system. Someone with the opposite morality would define those same individuals to be wicked.
And yes - intelligence can be highly subjective too. Since you like sporting analogies so much - and since being English I have no time for or knowledge about basketball - I’ll use a footballing one. Paul Gascgoigne is one of the greatest players these shores have ever produced. His reading of the game was exemplory. His speed of thought on the pitch to assess the situation and play just the right ball at just the right time was inspiring. Having played the game a fair bit myself I can only assure you that it takes great intelligence to do this. And yet off the pitch this was one of the most benightedly stupid people you’ll ever come across. So much so that to this day his name is synonymous with being an idiot. So was he intelligent? Well - that depends how you define intelligence. I trust you see the point.
What is your evidence that a rational moral system is the way moral systems should be? —that you disagree with those who would say otherwise?
Also, I think I am continually bombarded with proof of my inequality with respect to others in so many respects. I work with people far more intelligent than me in some respects, and far less intelligent than me in others. Are these inequalities somehow supposed to all equal out? —but how do I know to value all these different traits appropriately without begging the question of our supposed equality? TO this you say that [you] are no better or worse, just different, but this is, I think, missing the scope of your own application of morality. We are objectively different, hence we should be valued the same? How the heck does that work? You say you are no better than someone else, but that estimation is one from a moral code already. Does the tail wag the dog?
If there is one thing I basically find little evidence for it is human equality. We are similar, sometimes close, but not so much so that I would consider a claim to egalitarian morality logically justified based on evidential claims. IF it is at the dinner table, someone brought it there.
Well, that comment would apply equally well to any word. They all refer to some kind of distinction we’ve found useful, either gramatically, ontologically, or experimentally. But what is important here is not that everyone has the word “murder” defined as “unjustified killing” but rather where they derive their justification from.
No personal attack was intended (unless you’re referring to me calling you obtuse, but hey, tit for tat as they say). If you can see the difference between premeditated murder and involuntary manslaughter, then you’re able to see why I think that “morals” are not meaningless statements equivalent to “I (dis)approve of this, do so as well.” If you couldn’t see the difference, though, then there wouldn’t have been much point to continuing this debate – our worldviews would have clashed far too much for debate to have any kind of meaning, IMO.
I’ve said from the get-go that morals are not universal nor absolute – it would be impossible for them to be so (my belief was based on the fact that many “righteous” or “wicked” actions are too ambiguous and/or contradictory to be rigidly classified, but Goedel serves to justify this belief just as well if not better). “Righteousness” and “wickedness” are no better (and no worse) defined than intelligence/stupidity, competence/incompetence, bravery/cowardice, greatness/inferiority, etc.
If somebody truly believes that he/she is God, and as a result sees no need to reciprocate with me, then his/her morals are obviously going to be different from mine and still be internally consistent. The only way to distinguish between two such worldviews is to measure their effectiveness – somebody applying a worldview such as “Hair color is the only thing that matters in a person, so people with black hair are righteous” will likely find that there are black-haired people in the world who have malicious intent, and will probably want to adjust their worldview/moral code as a result. If the never find any malicious black-haired people, though, and if all people without black hair are malicious, then their moral code is sufficient – why would they change something that works?
Somebody with the opposite morality whose morality is still internally consistent (“I like murder so murder is good, it is okay for everybody else to murder as well, and those who do not murder are wicked”) and was still the norm (the entire society has the exact same morality) would still not have a morality that works. Even if we assume that the person would feel absolutely no moral outrage or indignation at having one of his/her loved ones murdered, or having somebody attempt to murder them, then the hypothetical society still has the problem that it would quickly fail to function if everybody murdered everybody else. It would be no different than a society that reversed the terms “intelligence” and “stupidity,” where those who were creative/competent/etc. were given menial tasks and those who were close-minded/incompetent/etc. were put into positions of power – it is quite likely that the society would stagnate and slowly die off, or perhaps cease to function entirely. If such a society existed and flourished, then more power to it – more likely the society would have to rework its value system.
He was “great at footballing,” “excellent,” “intelligent with regards to footballing,” “intuitive,” whatever. Unless footballing were the most important aspect of a society (if skill at footballing determined one’s general worth as a human being, f’rinstance) then making a general claim that somebody was intelligent based solely on their skill at footballing (and flying in the face of all contrary evidence) would be dubious at best. Certainly not absolutely wrong, since intelligence is no more absolute than morality. But you certainly wouldn’t make the man Prime Minister and expect him to competently manage the government, you wouldn’t make the man a university professor and expect him to competently teach a class on theoretical astrophysics, you probably wouldn’t bother asking his reasoned opinion on anything whatsoever unless it regarded footballing. If you brought him to a party, introduced him and said “Paul here is one of the most intelligent people alive,” and he proceeded to behave in a stupid manner (giving unreasoned opinions as though they were God’s writ, proving incapable of understanding the flow of conversation, drooling in the punch bowl, whatever) then quite likely everybody else at the party would thereafter question your judgment with regards to matters of intelligence and stupidity. Perhaps your classification system would still work for you (if you considered footballing to be the only matter worth discussing), but your use of the word “intelligent” would cease to have any kind of meaning for everybody else.
Somebody who wants to justify their moral system has to do so rationally – “justifying” something means “to give reasons for” something. If somebody doesn’t want to justify their moral system then that’s their perogative, although they run the risk of using a vastly inferior moral system by doing so.
It’s not so much that a rational moral system is better than an irrational one, it’s that a rational justification for anything is better than an irrational one.
By referring to somebody being a “better human being” I was referring to them being a “more righteous human being” – I ought to have been more clear. Somebody might be more intelligent or less intelligent than I am, but unless there is a direct causal relation between somebody’s intellectual worth and the value of their intentions (their moral worth) then intellectual this inequality doesn’t matter. The same holds true for other inequalities – wealth, speed, height, wittiness, etc, all lack a causal relation to moral worth.
Different people may have equal moral worth, my point is that inequalities in other aspects of people do not result in an inherent moral inequality. Somebody is more moral/immoral based on their intentions and actions, nothing more – somebody who is consistently moral has greater moral worth than somebody who is consistently immoral, just as somebody who consistently has sound intellectual judgment has a greater intellectual worth than somebody who consistently has unsound intellectual judgment.
Humans certainly aren’t equal, but with regards to inherent moral worth these other inequalities amount to mere differences in humans, not inequalities. Unless there is a causal relation between one or more disparate aspects of humans (their intelligence, or their height, whatever) and the moral worth of a human, then I see no reason that those who are more/less intelligent or more/less tall (or whatever) follow an inherently different moral code from one another.
An inconsistent justification is illogical and therefore irrational, and is thus inferior to a rational justification.
loinburger, we seem to be running in some strange circles here. Let me see if I can state something more clearly here, at least on my end.
Clearly, justification takes some form. That “moral justification” should take the form of “logical deduction from axiomatic assumptions” is better than “I base my morality on how I feel about issues as they come or as they are framed for me” is itself to value one set of decision-processes over another. The gap between reason and reasonable, you might say. I don’t find you speaking gibberish just because you haven’t completely presented an axiomatic theory of morality, complete with its own symbology. Because I think such a request is not reasonable. But I think you should be able to do it, or outline it, in principle if you feel that is how morality should be.
So let us say, by hypothesis, you have done this. You stand there with your literal book of moral proofs and derivations from inter-subjectively palatable axioms, and I stand here with a picket sign that says “It’s wrong because I say so!”
Why is your morality better? Does your book tell you this? —Then it begs the question. If it doesn’t, then is your book really complete? That is, if your estimation of this being better than that is not one derived from morality, what is it derived from and how do you distinguish the two?
Doesn’t matter? Clearly a more intelligent person in general will be more moral under your system by virtue of the fact that they can reason better.
Ah, well, here comes the mother of all long-posts…
The only axiom is that a reasonable justification is inherently better than an unreasonable justification, which is self-evident. This is not to say that all justifications must adhere to logic alone – emotion also plays an important factor in morals, for without feelings of love, guilt, indignation, righteousness, pride, maliciousness, etc. there would be no basis for morality.
As such, a claim such as “You ought not to do this because it makes me indignant” is reasonable at face value. However, emotions can be quite fickle, and so somebody may have to qualify their indignation in much the same way that somebody may have to qualify another emotional response (like anger or fear: “I don’t see why this makes you so angry, why are you behaving like this?” or “I don’t see what there is to be scared of, why are you acting frightened?”). The perpetrator, or a third party, may therefore make a counter-claim such as “I doubt the sincerity if your indignation, I think that you are feigning outrage solely to gain the upper hand” or “I don’t see how indignation is appropriate here, I wasn’t being malicious (or) I wasn’t causing harm (or) you’re being over-sensitive (etc.)”. If the supposed victim wants to qualify his/her value judgment, then he/she must then back it up with some additional justification (“You were cackling, so your actions were clearly malicious” or “You planned this out, clearly this was no accident” or whatever have you). If at some point the perpetrator responds with something along the lines of “Yeah, so I was being wicked, bite me,” then they’re either adhering to a worldview in which the opinions of others have no value (either in general or in specific cases, like if somebody who is known to bitch and moan for no apparent reason claims to be indignant) or else they’ve chosen to behave immorally. If at some point the supposed victim realizes that his/her emotional response was inappropriate to the situation (“I now see that you didn’t mean to spill your milk”) then the conflict is resolved.
The axioms that I adhere to are “I am not inherently more righteous or more wicked than anybody else” (from which I get reciprocity), and “There is no absolute truth, and there is no absolute moral code” (which implicitly eliminates a Divine Source for my morals). Other aspects of my worldview are “Humans may or may not have souls, but the existence or non-existence of souls cannot be demonstrated in any meaningful fashion and so the question is irrelevant” and, related to this, “There may or may not be an afterlife, but the existence or non-existence of an afterlife cannot be demonstrated in any meaningful fashion and so the question is irrelevant.” I’m not claiming universality to these axioms, and if anybody were able to give a sound justification as to why any of these axioms is wrong then I’d have to rethink my worldview. None of these is self-evident.
So in a nutshell, immoral behavior is “behavior that causes moral outrage in others,” insofar as we consider the moral outrage of “others” to be valid. If somebody decides that they simply don’t care if they cause moral outrage in others, then they’re being immoral, unless they can justify that somebody’s moral outrage isn’t reasonable (“They misread my intent” or “They’re feigning outrage” or “They’re presupposing [insert aspect of worldview here] for no good reason” or “I am God”).
The point is that “reason” can vary from person to person, but generally not by very much. A != ~A across the board, for example. Most people don’t really believe that they’re God. Etc. When reason completely breaks down, then moral discourse also breaks down – if somebody truly does not consider intent to be at all important, then their system of morality (if they even have one at all) will be so fundamentally different from everybody else’s that they most likely will not even be able to function in general society. Most children do not yet understand intent, for example, and so they are generally not regarded as being as competent for moral discourse as adults. As they gain more life experience, children almost always learn to distinguish between actions based on the intent of the action, so morals are definitely something that you grow into. Part of what comes with the turf of being reasonable is being able to recognize that not everything can be proven, that not every aspect of your worldview is necessary accepted by everybody else – f’rinstance, in an abortion debate in which I recently took part, there was a difference in worldview as to whether humans have a spirit/soul/whatever, but both parties involved (those claiming that humans have a spirit and that abortion is thus wrong across the board, and those claiming that there’s no evidence for a human spirit and that abortion is thus acceptable until the third trimester or so) recognized the difference in worldview, so while the disagreement continues the moral outrage was retracted on both ends. It is possible to claim that somebody is being unreasonable in a debate, but such claims must be qualified the same as any other claim (for example, if somebody is clearly being inconsistent by claiming that their word is law and nobody may voice dissenting opinions, then either they are being irrational or else their worldview is so conflicting with the norm that communication with them is meaningless). It is an extremely drastic step to claim that somebody’s opinions do not matter (that somebody is unfit for communication), though, and ought to be avoided whenever possible – debate becomes meaningless when dissenting opinions are summarily rejected solely by virtue of the fact that they are different.
My book is better insofar as I’m better able to qualify my moral claims than you are (“you” being the hypothetical you). You say, “I say that it is wrong,” and somebody responds, “Yeah, so what, why should your opinion mean any more than anybody else’s?” What then? Your system might still be perfect in your own mind, sure, but for purposes of prescribing actions to others it’s absolutely useless (since nobody takes it seriously, unless there are extenuating circumstances e.g. if you had the ability to blow up the world), and for purposes of being a viable worldview (I’m assuming here that you are assuming an inherent moral superiority to everybody else, otherwise why should “I say that it is wrong” mean any more to you than it does to anybody else) it won’t get you very far – you’ll find it difficult to function in any kind of meaningful fashion, since your worldview has caused a communication breakdown with everybody else. Your system has failed to do what a moral system is supposed to do – help society function and help one function in society.
Not necessarily. I’ve seen some of the most intelligent people consistently lie to themselves, and I’ve seen some of the most dunderheaded people be able to see reason with little effort. It’s not so much a question of “who’s got the Ph.D in logic,” it’s more a question of “who’s coming to the table with the fewest presuppositions.” In some respects, it’s worse to be intelligent if arrogance comes with it – intelligent people can sometimes be so sure of their own intellectual superiority that they never listen to dissenting opinions.
I should add that even if morality in its most basic form does come down to a statement of preferences, this doesn’t necessarily mean that such statements cannot or ought not to be justified. Using an analogy of a film critic, if a film critic’s entire claim as to the worth of a film were “I (dis)liked this film” then he/she would quickly be out of a job. Sometimes an opinion can be taken at its face value without additional explicit justification, but in almost all such cases there is actually an implicit justification at work (if, for example, I ask somebody whether they liked a particular film, and I know exactly what kinds of films this person likes and why he/she likes them, then “I (dis)liked this film” is sufficient since they’ve implicitly justified their statement of preference if I assume that their taste in films hasn’t drastically changed). “I disliked this film” is a much different type of claim than “I disliked this film because it was too predictable,” just as “This action is wicked” is a much different type of claim than “This action is wicked because you have caused malicious harm.”
Short and sweet: loinburger, you seem particularly hung up on the idea that:
[good morality structure] <=> [allows one to function in society]
How do you intend to prove this?
My point is that every time you take a step back, I query the new starting point. I can do this forever, because there is no critical flawless step one. One always has to take something on faith, so no morality can ever be said to be “primary”, so to speak.
On the intelligence front: I simply disagree. I was trying to illustrate that there are many different types of intelligence and to raise one above another is to use one’s own set of worldview filters in deciding what is important. Aptitude in any particular area can be tested and ranked, intelligence we can’t even properly define.
pan
NB: I didn’t take offence to having “obtuse” thrown right back at me (though actually I called the specific tack you were taking obtuse, not you yourself: “you are obtusely using repeated the very flaw your own argument in an attempt to explain away the symptoms of that flaw”).
No, I actually rather objected to statements such as “If you see no difference in kind between “premeditated murder” and “involuntary manslaughter” then I sincerely hope that you never serve on a jury”. Not that I strongly object, but I do want to suggest that there is no need to relate such statements to me personally. If you meant your “if” in a generic rather than specific sense, without emphasis on the “you” (something that is unclear in the statement), why not simply say “if a person sees no difference…” etc instead?
On my actual point, I should probably point out that even mathematics itself rests on a few axioms that have to be taken on faith. So why should morality be any different?
