Am I crazy for thinking that every action has consequences?
RR seems to be drawing a very hard line between personal consequences and consequences in general. That seems very odd to me. Just because I don’t directly experience the consequences my actions have on others, that doesn’t make those consequences any less meaningful.
Asking that the codes of morality be clear and entirely agreed upon is just bizarre. Of course the public does not agree on the question of whether SUVs are immoral, or even adultery. But at different times and in different circles is disapproved of in many instances, and is usually condemned by prevailing moralities, usually with much hypocrisy. But it is nonetheless held forth as a central tenet of how civilized people get along in proper society, and the further outside the elites, the less this is held up. (The SUV thing is new, but can be compared to how the public at any time values economy and environment).
The fact is that people aren’t going to agree and see these things as black and white. Getting along with people is not a black and white issue. We fail at morality, and we fail at law abiding too, for pretty much the same reasons. That doesn’t mean that law or morality are worthless concepts and to be dispensed with because they are not near perfect. Without a generalized compliance and lip service, human beings cannot live together in the polis, and we all know from our Aristotle that outside the polis there are only gods and monsters. Aristotle answered the OP’s question a long time ago: there are only monsters outside of societal norms.
Randianism is the philosophy of people who feel superior and beyond the constraints of what the rest of us concede is a necessary morality to get along and make social structures workable. Rand was a sociopath and her followers validate sociopathology based on the straw man arguments she made in works of fiction.
Plato wrote all of his philosophy as fiction also, but there was a reason that Plato is regarded as the father of Western philosophy and Rand is a bad joke. Plato generally explored all the arguments all his characters made genuinely the best arguments they could for their positions and ultimately Plato’s stalking horse, Socrates, concluded that nobody really knew, that the truth was just shadows on the wall even to the enlightened.
i) Your hypothetical involves LHoD telling Bob, “action X is immoral.” So I think the idea that LHoD knows that Bob did something immoral is kinda baked into the scenario, no?
ii) I allowed for that in my first variable: how strongly does LHoD feel about the immoral act? Additionally, I never said that the judgment would be based solely on one single act. If you do only one thing that LHoD thinks is slightly immoral, he will probably think slightly less of you, even if he does not show outwardly. If you do a dozen things that he thinks are slightly immoral, he’s probably going to start reacting to you in overtly negative ways.
You seem to have misconstrued my argument. Certainly, if you commit an immoral act in absolute secret, there will be no consequences for you. But I’m not talking about that. I’m responding directly to your argument that, “I think action X is immoral” is a meaningless statement. It is not. The statement lays out the standards for what the person considers to be acceptable behavior, with the clear implication that if he knows someone violates those standards, there will be some level of repercussion. Whether you care about those repercussions, or whether you can prevent that person from knowing about those repercussions, are a separate issue.
Yes, that’s because they’re hypothetical examples. That does not change the fact that, if you act in a way that another person considers immoral, that person’s opinion of you will be changed for the worse.
A consequence that you do not care about is still a consequence. Because I didn’t study hard in math class when I was in high school, I will never be a rocket scientist. I never wanted to be a rocket scientist, so I don’t care about that consequence, but it is still a consequence of my actions.
I’m certainly OK with letting the hijack drop, but just for the record, my argument wasn’t that objective morality ‘ceases to exist’, it was that you hadn’t demonstrated any such thing in the first place.
And as for the OP, morality is a judgement; that judgement is, in cases thought severe enough to warrant codification, encapsulated within laws. Without moral judgement, there would be no law, which I don’t think is a stable state for society to be in – thus, morality is necessary for society. ‘Legal’ and ‘illegal’ are judgements analogous to ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, just that the rules for deriving those are explicitly written down and not simply due to social consensus; that you can do something immoral and have it be without consequence doesn’t mean any more that morality doesn’t exist than that you can do something illegal and get away with it means that the law doesn’t exist.
Going back before the hijack.
It seems to me that moral systems are based on the sense of whether an action is proper or not shared by most of a population. They get codified since the variation in a population means that some people will not share these principles. But the morals get expressed in many different ways depending on the circumstances of a given population. Murder is against our shared moral code, except in war, and there are plenty of societies where the principle does not apply to those outside the tribe. We don’t put our elders on ice floes, but there might be societies where not going on an ice floe at a certain age is immoral.
So I kind of agree that a person from society X saying that an action inside society Y is immoral might well be properly met by incomprehension.
The person inside the society who does not share the morals of that society, perhaps for physiological reasons, is not really any different from the person outside. There may be consequences, but I agree that this isn’t fundamentally important.
Does that sound reasonable?
For an entertaining take on moral universalism in a sci-fi setting, here’s an story of first contact between humanity and two species with vastly different moral views, with sound evolutionary and/or philosophical groundings.
(Somehow I don’t see this getting on Star Trek)
So is the moral of your post that we should agree with the morality of blondes with big tits and ex-cons if we want to get along in society? 
In the most settled part of our morality–things like don’t kill other people–there’s quite a bit of black/white. At the edges, there is a lot more gray. It seems to me that Rand Rover was talking about the gray since the law already dealt with a lot of the black/white stuff. Your comments address the gray only indirectly in that you generalized about the pieces that are black/white.
Really? Who knew? :dubious:
RandRover, I counter that apart from the smallest of minutiae, all of our “moral principles” are direct extensions of “generalities” that nearly every human society has agreed cause too much trouble to be tolerated. Even when you get down to the “don’t be a jerk” level, a lot of these actions are viewed by the majority as wrong because they unfairly deprive someone of something, even if it is simply enjoyment of life. As such, there ARE consequences to breaking the rules even if you don’t care about them. Society has collectively decided that it is the severity of the infraction, not the committing of it, that is cause for formal consequences.
Let me use an example: Bob steals things. Most of the time it’s nothing major. Bob eats other peoples lunches from the fridge, takes their office supplies, and often takes credit for things which he had little or nothing to do with. Since it is hard to prove that Bob does these things, and the value of them is laughable, we don’t consider what Bob is doing illegal. We don’t see a need for a formal punishment by society. We generally refer to such things as unethical or immoral. So you could make a loose case that: Not all immoral actions are illegal, but nearly all illegal actions are immoral.
However, Bob’s actions are NOT therefore consequence free. Bob’s co-workers know that Bob is the issue. Management doesn’t care about the things that Bob does; after all he does not eat *their * lunch, nor does he take the supplies he steals home. Moreover his credit stealing does not faze them either, they merely care that the job is done, and reward whoever did it. So Bob is free from formal repercussions from his employment as well. Where Bob is punished is at the social level. Because Bob chooses to engage in actions that most of us view as immoral/ unethical/ wrong, he is essentially on his own. Nobody will help him on projects unless they have to. He cannot ask for favors of any sort, nor will anyone share with him. When the office orders out for lunch, Bob is not included. This is a real and measurable consequence. It can negatively impact Bob’s performance, which hurts his chances at job retention, raises, promotions, and the like.
All actions have SOME consequence, it is a matter more if you are willing to bear them should you choose to indulge yourself in behaviours that most people view as wrong.
Now rules that truly have little or no consequences, I agree, have no real value and should only be followed if you see fit.
Let’s take another example. One that’s not a major infraction so doesn’t get to the level of illegality. But it’s definitely an action.
Trolling on a message board.
I’ll just make the assumption that most people on this message board think that it’s wrong. (You can refute that if you like.) If so, is the behavior immoral? In some cases, short of banning, people have made fairly successful careers here out of what some would consider trolling, despite the fact that many would agree that it’s wrong. (wrong is such a harsh word though).
Is trolling on this message board immoral?
If one moves to another message board, could it become moral if it’s accepted practice?
I’m not certain that it would be. Trolling is a unique behaviour; It is generally considered to be socially inappropriate, but it is not a behaviour that is unable to be dealt with adequately. They can be ignored, banned, or relegated to a punishment zone via software. I suppose that if at it’s base it is malicious, and intending to cause misery rather than cruel humor then it could be considered immoral/ unethical. I think that intent plays a major part in that definition though.
Missed the edit.
re: trolling
I also wanted to add that to make my definition of unethical, it also has to be personally directed. I think that is what takes it out of the realm of mean-spirited fun and into the demesne of immoral behaviour.
For example: I go to a country music board and post that people who like Garth brooks are all mental degenerates. I’m trolling the culture, not any one poster. Now suppose instead I lurk for a while and discover that a poster there recently lost a child in miscarriage. So I troll, and post that the baby must have strangled itself with it’s own umbilical cord from having to listen to Garth Brooks music, and if you weren’t such a fat, redneck, retard you wouldn’t have lost it.
See the difference? One is designed to annoy a lot of people and have some fun at their expense. Since it is shared culture, it can’t get too malicious. The latter is a vicious attack at a grieving person and is definitely designed to cause them harm for my amusement. The first might be a little mean or unethical, the second is absolutely immoral.