Can anyone challenge any of this? It seems like indirect evil is much more easily forgiven than direct evil. And there are some things that totally don’t make any sense to me. Some examples:
*We consider our troops heroes even if they are fighting a war that’s indisputably morally wrong and it’s a volunteer army.
*We despise people who abuse and neglect cats and dogs yet we feel no guilt about cruelly factory-farming animals for our meat fix. Also most people have nothing against people who hurt for sport.
*We consider pedophiles worse than war criminals even though most people seem to be okay with physically abusing children to some extent as punishment.
*Even though pollution indirectly kills people via cancer and other diseases we don’t consider pollution to be murder by poisoning.
*Why are violent and hurtful acts tolerated/seen as good if they are in retaliation when there is no threat to be neutralized?
*Most of us don’t seem to care that our Nike shoes are made by child labor, yet we would demand the death penalty or life in prison for someone who was directly putting children into slavery.
*Why exactly is it justified to love your family more than your friends? If the argument is blood is thicker than water, does that mean that adopted children should be loved less than birth children?
*Why are we supposed to care more about another American (or fill nationality in here) than a person from another country?
Is morality completely arbitrary? Is it meant to weed out those who don’t fit in, rather than those of poor character? Why do we have morals anyway?
I disagree with many of your statements (for example, I don’t consider troops heroes for fighting the current war, but I do consider them heroes for signing up to the military in the first place). I’m not going to go through them one-by-one, but you are doing an awful lot of generalising.
Not true. I’m an unapologetic omnivore, but I do care how the animals are treated. I buy my beef from Laura’s or from a farmer friend who raises Angus, because they both treat their animals well. I buy cage-free, free-range poultry and eggs. I’ve never bought lamb or veal because I don’t believe in separating babies from their mothers and slaughtering them. I only eat dolphin-safe tuna.
We are not fighting a war that is indisputably morally wrong. Not even close. We didnt want either war; they were thrust on us. An example or an immoral war would the Japanese invasion of China or the German invasion of Poland.
It’s the product of religious and legal rules that were put in place throughout history to keep societies functioning, with millennia of random fermentation.
It’s the result of what people found important in the past, sometimes for rational reasons, sometimes for purely physical reasons (sex drive channelled into marriage, etc.). And then the priests and the lawyers got involved.
Keep in mind that we are simply animals. ‘Morality’ is based in our social primate nature. We value first, family (most of all the safety and happiness of our own children), and second, tribe or nation. The plight of people we can’t know or see is simply less real. The fate of the ‘enemies’ of our family or tribe, we often rejoice in… Looking at it this way, I don’t see them as contradictions.
Soldiers are people who have agreed to sacrifice their lives for our country, they do not choose which wars to fight in. The sacrifice can be honored even without agreeing with the war. A war that is indisputably wrong has never occured in this country. Even WW1 was not indisputably wrong.
Factory farming provides us with meat, hunting provides both meat and recreation. Cruelty to cats and dogs serves no purpose. Also there is an expectation that people take care of pets, cruelty toward pets breaks this expectation. I agree that most people are irrational about cats and dogs.
Raping children harms them for life, small amounts of physical punishment do no lasting harm. If it is effective it may even benefit the child long term.
Pollution is a byproduct of the industrial revolution which has led to a huge increase in standards of living for billions of people. Poisoning someone is just murder and has great harm and no benefit.
Fear of punishment and retribution makes people act less violently in the long term. A society where bad behavior was not subject to retaliation would be a much more violent and dangerous society.
Giving someone a job is different than slavery. People with jobs can buy food, medicine, shelter, etc. These are all good things that having a job can provide.
There is no justification needed, loving your family is a biological reality. If someone does not love there family there is something wrong with their family or something wrong with them. If they do not love their family and they have a normal family it is probably that they are incapable of love and a dangerous person.
Humans are social, that means we self organize into groups and depend on each other for survival and other needs. It is natural to prefer those in one’s own group over those in another group.
Morality is not arbitrary. It is an emergent phenomenon that results from an interplay between biology and society. It is designed to produce the most livable communities for the most amount of people.
Since I mentioned it elsewhere this morning and it’s on my mind, I was recently ticked off by a thread in GD where people were ridiculing an opposing idea.
In a web site purporting to fight ignorance that is the most stupid, counterproductive persuasive method I can think of.
Are they just playing or blowing off steam? Perhaps. Then it’s a misuse of a potentially powerful forum.
Life is just chocked full of these damned contradictions. Learning to live with the incongruous is a challenge.
I don’t consider people in the military heroes (and don’t understand their decision to join at all), but surely if they joined before the current war, this reasoning doesn’t apply at all?
I don’t really know anyone who’s unconcerned about factory-farming or hunting.
Really? I’ve never heard that. Nor do I know anyone okay with physically abusing children in any way (spanking was recently outlawed in NZ, there was some fallout, but in the end it was a law only enforced on those who were abusing their children).
Murder = intent, no? This is manslaughter or negligence.
Where are they seen as good? Again, I have no experience of this. IME they’ve universally been seen as bad, and “the bigger person” lets things go.
People don’t emotionally understand what isn’t blatantly spelled out. And there are differences of degree between sweat-shop slavery and modern human trafficking. But again, a lot of people do care.
You love who you love, be that friends or family. You don’t need to justify it.
quote]*Why are we supposed to care more about another American (or fill nationality in here) than a person from another country?
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I don’t know whether Americans really believe this, but in NZ and London I haven’t had this discussion with anyone who did.
We have morals for social cohesion. They can take wrong turns pursuing that aim, but as far as I can tell, that’s their ultimate purpose.
And as top of the food chain, one of the perks is, we can give value to things for whatever stupid reasons we want with out justification.
For example, it’s OK to kill tuna because they’re tasty. It’s NOT OK to kill dolphins in the process because they are cute. If for some reason, we killed jelly fish in the process of killing tuna, I doubt there would be a market for “Jelly fish safe tuna”.,
Yes. They’re for social cohesion and not really to prevent suffering or promote happiness. They’re meant to safeguard the genetic lineage and nothing more noble than that, when it comes down to it.
They can still opt out of a war that is wrong. Do you think Hitler’s troops were heroes too then, and should have gone along with the Holocaust since their “country” called them to do so? Is “just following orders” a valid excuse?
We don’t need to eat meat for nourishment anymore. And how is “recreation” a justifiable reason to kill another living creature? I’m sure a lot of people who practice animal cruelty do it because they are bored. It’s not a justification.
Severe physical abuse also does life-long harm (I was physically abused by my stepfather) but we don’t condemn it nearly to the same extent.
Pollution is also robbing our descendants of their livelihood, and causes thousands if not millions of people to die painful deaths from cancer. While in the past we didn’t know better, the suppression and propaganda against green energy is every bit as harmful to people as acts of genocide.
Only because most people demand payback for crimes done to them. If we were a forgiving species, yes we’d have the occasional act of violence by a deviant but it’s not like the evil would simply run amok. A lot of countries in Europe do not sentence people to live in prison yet they aren’t being overrun by murderers.
Making 2 dollars a day is hardly a “job”. Personally I think these people were better off subsistence farming than they are working in these awful factories. Of course neoliberals believe the ends justify the means and that their drudgery is essential to build up their country for future generations, ignoring the fact climate change might cause the planet to become much less livable. Also use of things like the poverty line is misleading because they tend to overestimate progress. Saying that “millions have been lifted out of poverty” can often mean they are making $1.60 rather than $1.15. Yes they might be slightly less materially poor but that says nothing about their freedom or how much of their culture and sovereignty they may or may not have lost.
I understand it’s a biological reality, but morally speaking it doesn’t make any sense to love your family more than anybody else. I admit I do love my family the most, but only because most people are unloving and my family are the only people who really care about me aside from a few friends.
I live in Oregon and I have no social connection to someone from Florida. I use the same money but aside from that I’m no more like them than I am like a Mexican or an Australian. There’s no rational reason I should care more about them just because they are American.
Actually, members of the Einsatzgruppen could opt out if it was to much for them according to Robert J Lifton.
Your insistence of comparing US troops with Nazi German troops is hateful and immoral in itself. It is willfully trying to mislead. Lying to try to prove a point is wrong.
GD is not about purporting to fight ignorance, and never has been. GQ is our fighting ignorance forum. CCC/SR also has a heavy ignorance fighting bend. IMHO has certain ignorance fighting topics that are banned from GQ. The rest of the board is about the community, and not fighting ignorance.
As much as it might be nice to have a forum where people debate things in order to figure out the truth, GD is not such a forum. There’s no incongruity unless you assume a purpose that doesn’t exist.
Incongruities on this forum more take the form of saying one thing when you like a person, and another when you don’t. The reason isn’t hard to understand, either: some people are just here to argue with things they don’t like. People have an innate tendency to want to confirm their own ideas rather than change them.
Some morality is based purely on emotion and tradition, which is why some moral values are not universal. Others are based on logic and reasoning, and those tend to stand up to scrutiny better. To take some of your examples:
***We consider our troops heroes even if they are fighting a war that’s indisputably morally wrong and it’s a volunteer army.
*We consider pedophiles worse than war criminals even though most people seem to be okay with physically abusing children to some extent as punishment.
**
The first is an emotional response to what happened to our soldiers after Vietnam and the ensuing backlash. The second is an example of moral panic that defies any reasoned arguments. To be exact, we regard stranger pedophiles as the worst human scum, whereas your dirty uncle is just a guy the kids should stay away from.
Most of your examples are arbitrary and we should be constantly thinking about those things. Especially the one about Americans regarding ourselves as more important than other people. Our government should be looking out for our interests because it represents us. But American people shouldn’t be selfish and consider our own desires more important than other peoples’ needs overseas. We have things very good here, yet we constantly begrudge other peoples’ jobs that we think belong to us, preferring instead to send them pennies of charity. While that may make us feel good about ourselves, American companies employing them does a thousand times more good.
Iraq may not have been indisputably wrong, but its rightness/wrongness balance falls way over to the side of wrong, especially when you consider that the nation (US) was fed a steaming platter of lies to justify it. If it was “thrust upon us”, the thrusting was coming from inside the administration, not from some palpable external threat.