Perhaps. But you completely ignore the other possibility i raised earlier, which is someone who expresses a personal preference about his own behavior, but does not attach any moral opprobrium to someone else undertaking such behavior.
I don’t drink beer, because i don’t like the taste. I don’t play World of Warcraft, because i don’t find it interesting. I don’t fuck men, because i don’t find men sexually arousing. All of these statements express a personal preference, but contain no moral judgment about other people who do the things that i don’t do. And the reason is that i do not avoid any of those three activities about of a belief that they are in any way immoral.
OK, super. I’m not sure why you are telling me this as if there’s any clash with what I said. All I said was that when people say “[whatever] is immoral” they are simply expressing their opinion (i.e., a personal preference). You seem to think that I said the opposite (i.e., that any time someone expresses a personal preference they are making a moral statement), which I didn’t say and don’t believe.
You did suggest that the distinction between a moral statement and a personal preference is a distinction without a difference; i was simply pointing out, for the purposes of clarification, that while this calculation may work in one direction, it doesn’t work in the other. I’m glad you agree.
But a moral view is not conceptualized by the individual as a personal preference, but a universal standard. “I don’t personally like broccoli,” is not equivalent to “rape is immoral.”
Right, people think they are expressing a universal standard. But they aren’t–there’s no reality to a universal moral standard. It doesn’t exist anywhere outside of each individual’s mind. Nothing in the real world changes when someone says “rape is immoral”–they are just expressing a preference.
I’m really surprised when people like you and Der Trihs (i.e., outspoken atheists) use this morality language. It’s really just another form of woo and magical thinking–the idea that there’s some great unconscious or cosmic notion of right and wrong or whatever.
I do think there is slightly more to the statement “rape is immoral” than the statement “I don’t like broccoli,” but the “slightly more” is just more information about the speaker (such as (i) the speaker would probably stop someone from raping but would not likely stop someone from eating broccoli and (ii) the speaker probably believes raping should be illegal but probably doesn’t believe that eating broccoli should be illegal).
Derp - nix one of the ‘no’ votes. I opened this thread, went to do something else, then came back and voted forgetting it was for vegetarians/vegans only.
This is incorrect. A personal ethos is universal from the point of view of that individual, but that doesn’t mean the individual thinks everybody else shares it.
I have often said in board discussions on this subject that morality is a personal “aesthetic.” It has no objective meaning, but is merely a descriptor for personal, emotional responses to stimuli. Those responses – hence that “morality” is the same no matter who does it. Rape is repugnant to me no matter who does it, and my own aesthtic drive would compel me to stop it if I saw it. I do not have to believe that everyone else shares this same aesthetic in order to believe they are circumscribed by it nonetheless.
I say it like this. I am a moral absolutist. I, and I alone, determine what is right and wrong. Everyone else is bound by my own ethical standards, not their own. What I say goes. When it comes to disagreements with others, then I default to ego Kurios. I am George W. Bush. I am the Decider. My rules are your rules BECAUSE they are subjective to me. If I think Coors Lite tastes like ass, and someone else thinks it tastes good, I’m still right. If it tastes like ass to me, then it tastes like ass. Morality is the same way. Rapes tastes like ass no matter who does it. Others can disagree, but they can’t change my own subjective emotional responses and judgements about them.
I do not think morality has any objective meaning. I think it has a functional evolutionary purpose and that it describes real, evolved, emotional/neurological responses in the brain. We are evolved as a social species and our brains are wired for bonding behaviors, empathic responses, and other responses whic facilitate cooperative, social constructs for survival. A person with a healthy brain feels discomfort, anxiety, distress at the suffering of others (at least others whom the individual perceives as belonging to it’s own in-group). Some idividuals do not develop those responses, and those individuals are what we call sociopaths. They lack the ability to empathize or bond. Most people do share a basic set of emotional/social responses in common, though, and this allows them to agree on some basic, social moral codes. These responses are not random are arbitray. They serve evolutionary functions. Humans are evolved to survive in groups, not as individuals. If we did not have biologically hardwired impulses towards socialization (impulses that predate, and are not exclusive to, homo sapiens in primate evolution), we would not be here. Some basics of shared human “morality” are no more random or arbitrary that altruism in worker ants. We are evolved that way. It’s not magic, and “morality” can be spoken of both in terms of subjective response and social function without regards to the supernatural or a belief that it has any objective meaning.
Now you may ask why, if it has no objective meaning, would I care about it or want to follow it. I would say that I also know that shit does not objectively smell bad, but knowing that doesn’t make it stop subjectively smelling bad to me.
The former is not a moral statement. It references only superficial sensory responses. It does not trigger the particular set of emotional responses we tie to “morality.”
Not liking broccoli also does not trigger any response at all if somebody else eats it, while rape triggers no matter who does it.
Dio, what did you mean exactly when you said upthread that “An action is either unethical or it isn’t.”? Because your previous post seems contradictory to that.
Rand Rover, I’ve linked you multiple times in the past to discussions of the philosophical underpinnings of belief in objective morality; I’ve never seen any evidence that you’ve actually read about this, and given your claims that it’s superstitious woo, it’s pretty clear you have no idea what you’re talking about. What provokes you to continue to discuss matters of which you remain stubbornly ignorant?
Also, LHOD, you may want to take a gander at the end of this thread, in which you fail to answer several fundamental arguments I made against your position. Looks like you are the one doing the ignoring here bub.
My use of the phrase “in that circumstance” may have been a poor choice of words, I should have said “in that culture”. What I was trying to get at is that the cultural difference between vegans and subsistence hunters lead to the two groups assigning different values to animal life. It’s their culture (killing and eating animals from birth) that makes the difference, not the specific circumstances. Maybe not the best example…
Heh–I certainly did not. I eventually got called away from the thread due to real life, but others adequately answered the rather trivial objections you raised. In any case, there are two different arguments you make:
Objective morality has no existence.
Objective morality has no real consequence in the world.
Neither one is true, although the first one is far more debatable. It’s the first argument you appear to be making in this thread, and given that even a cursory understanding of the underpinnings of nontheological objective morality answers the silly arguments you’re making here, it’d be helpful for you to educate yourself before talking.
You are mistaking my disagreement with something as me being unaware of its existence. But “you just don’t understand” makes a convenient argument for those without the ability to explain, so your use of that argument is understandable.
OK. I guess I just don’t see the point of thinking about whether other people’s ideas about what is moral and what is not are internally consistent. I can like eating romaine but not iceberg even though some people may say that’s inconsistent since both are just lettuce.
In the same way, I think someone can believe that it is unethical for them to eat meat but not for others to do so. Basically, I think that once someone starts thinking in terms of whether an action is ethical or not, all logical consistency goes out the window–they are in la-la land.
On the contrary: if your points against it displayed any knowledge of the theory behind it, I’d be willing to argue it directly with you. But you’re operating on the level of “Anarchist conference? Hur hur hur…how do anarchists organize?” or “Military intelligence? Hur hur hur…isn’t that an oxymoron?” In other words, you display profound, repeated ignorance of the topic at hand. It’s not my job to educate you on the fundamentals, and I don’t have any interest in discussing the subject with you until you perform some autodidacticism.
Of course they’re just opinions - but they’re different kinds of opinions. Saying that ‘this is based on my personal ethics and this is based on what my tastebuds appreciate’ doesn’t mean that I reckon there’s a higher power guiding anything - it’s a way of describing the kinds of opinions we’re talking about.
Blithely writing them off as the same thing, just personal opinions, is like claiming that ‘big’ and ‘small’ are the same because they’re just words. Sure they both fit in that category, but beyond that there are differences.
Lots of people dislike the taste of liver, but you’re likely to go to jail for eating liver unless it was a human one. Imprisonment is a pretty big real-world consquence of whether the consensus is that an act is immoral rather than simply disasteful.
There are lots of others; to pick just one example: I wouldn’t vote for someone who advocated slavery but I wouldn’t care if his favourite TV show was Dog the Bounty Hunter.
I think you just proved my point–using “moral language” just says more about the speaker’s attitude about their opinion.
And the part about going to jail is a complete non sequitur–you can’t go to jail for doing something immoral (you’d need to do something illegal to do that).