(To quote some posts from that thread, but removing the user names) :
Most people would probably agree that certain things are wrong no matter what the historical timeframe they take place in - murder, rape, etc. But at the same time, many would probably say that some other things are subject to the societal views of their time, and subjective (the most frequently cited example is, if the future world is vegan, what if they condemn us for eating meat?)
So where is the boundary line between “Thing X is always wrong, no matter when” and “Thing X was only considered wrong by people of a certain era?” What things are only wrong for one era but not for others, and what if future people argue just as vehemently, and with as much sincerity, that [insert commonly accepted practice today] is wrong, just as vehemently as we today say that murder and rape are wrong?
IMHO the big difference between the two quotes is that the first person doesn’t believe that moral standards exist in any objective sense, while the second person does. According to the first view, there are no “things that are always wrong,” in a moral sense.
One moral that seems to transcend culture and time is that the more useful someone is to your culture, the more prohibitions against mistreating them. Those less valuable have fewer prohibitions.
So killing a highly valued craftsman, soldier or politician who keeps your tribe operating is verboten. Killing a thief who threatens the tribe is justice. Killing someone (or an animal for that matter) from another tribe who has no use to you or your tribe is barely noticed.
So that is one consistent moral. The more useful someone is to your tribe, the more protections (legal and social) they get. The less useful, the fewer.
This would make sense since we all depend on our culture for survival and the more useful one is to our culture the more we’d defend them out of self interest. I have more self interest in defending a successful businessman or soldier (who keeps my tribe humming along) than I do in defending a gang member (who threatens my tribe) or a snail (who is irrelevant to my tribe).
Morality is a human construct (actually, I think that was the title of a GD thread a million years ago). In nature, whatever you can get away with that supports your own procreation in the short term, and your species’ procreation in the long term, is fair to both victor and vanquished.
So, if you consider humans to be animals and just another child of the universe, then morality is simply a crutch for the weak, and the strong should do as they wish according to their own interests. In that system, slavery is never wrong as long as it serves the short and long term aims of the slaver. This thought process is alive and well among the human population throughout the world.
Self-preservation requires concessions from the strong, however. I think that’s where morality comes from–everyone agrees to certain constraints on behavior to keep the weak from growing desperate and overpowering the strong, and to keep the strong from expending too much energy on keeping themselves strong. Everyone digs a little bit of peace. The concessions required of the strong change as society and its collective sensibility changes–morality changes. It is important to embrace this, I think, because otherwise history becomes a seething mass of rampant immorality and anarchy if you try and understand it with modern sensibilities. And history MUST be understood given it’s utility as a scry into the future.
Coercion is always wrong, in principle, even if it’s not always avoidable. Likewise the intentional infliction of pain and suffering.
I don’t think mores change from generation to generation so much as the collective understanding of exactly what is going on in a given situation changes from generation to generation.
In the 18th century, slavery was probably accepted as inevitable and unavoidable by a large percent of the population in our culture. Not because they thought it was OK that people coercively enslaved people, inflicted pain on them to break their resistance or punish them for disobedience, and inflicted the more horrible pain of a life stripped of self-determination and of the severing of family bonds and seeing awful things happen to the people they cared about, etc. But because they didn’t see any obvious way to remove those things from the experience of slavery, nor any realistic way to end slavery itself.
We currently accept war, participation in war as military personnel, collective participation in war as a nation, etc, for similar reasons: it’s not that we don’t think it horrible and tragic, but we think it is entirely unrealistic to talk about a world that has no more war, and we consider an ability to wage war when necessary to be essential for the survival of our nation and hence our culture.
Cue up similar considerations of things such as women’s equality (or lack thereof), sexual harassment, racism and segregation, child abuse and neglect, ethnocentrism and ethnic hostility, religious intolerance and bigotry, homophobia and heterocentric bias, etc etc. — and you see the same kind of patterns.
Murder of someone valuable to society (king, rich person, highly skilled person) = very serious punishments
Murder of someone or something useless to society = non issue. Stepping in an ant is murder, nobody cares. In many historical societies killing a random stranger from another tribe isn’t a huge deal.
Murder of someone who threatens society = you’re a hero. Soldiers are considered heroes and executions are considered justice.
Rape too. It depends on who did the raping. When women are considered property, whoever owns them can rape with abandon. But anyone else and it is rape. So a husband can rape his wife but a stranger cannot rape her.
I’m not sure if rape was ever considered ‘heroic’ the way we consider murder heroic. But it’s definitely not always considered legally or morally wrong.
Theft too. Same as rape, it is wrong depending on whether the person you are stealing from is valuable to society.
At root morality and legality are biological and sociological constructs we devised to help ourselves and the social group we are a part of and dependent on to survive.
Yeah, in this indifferent universe in which nothing matters, life forms that survive and replicate will exist, those that don’t won’t. Where does the “should” come from, though? The strong SHOULD subjugate the weak? Why? I mean, let’s stipulate for a minute that they do. But that doesn’t make it good or bad, it just is.
The reason human morality exists is because human beings are a social species. Some creatures can’t tolerate other members of their species. If an American badger sees another badger, it will attack it and drive it away. The only time they don’t fight each other is during mating season. But humans aren’t like that. We are obligated to be social, because of our biological and evolutionary history.
And so when you have humans fighting against each other we notice an interesting thing. Two not so tough guys can beat up a tougher guy. If the two guys cooperate, they’ll kick the crap out of the other guy and become co-alphas. Except how exactly do these guys cooperate, in an indifferent and morally nihilistic universe? They have an inborn instinct to cooperate, it turns out. Hu-mons feel “emotions” such as love, hate, sorrow, and so on. The so-called “emotions” are chemical reactions in the human brain that cause them to act in certain ways. They help each other, they fight each other, and so on. The ones that work together survive and reproduce more successfully than those that don’t.
And so two guys cooperating kick the ass out of one guy. Four guys cooperating kick the ass of two guys. Eight guys kick the ass of four guys. And so on and so on. To compete against your fellow man in a ruthless Darwinian morality-free nihilistic universe, you are obligated to cooperate with your fellow man. And the internal mental states that hu-mons feel when they decide to cooperate are called “morality”. You love your baby. You love your wife. You love your kids. You love your mom. Guess what, hu-mons who loved their kids survived and reproduced more often, the ones who didn’t might have survived but they didn’t reproduce, and now it is normal for a hu-mon to feel the hu-mon emotion of “love” for their children. Hey, in lots of species this emotion is non-existent. Plenty of creatures lay a bunch of eggs under some leaves, and then scuttle away and never look back. But hu-mons are not one of those species.
And so on and so on. Morality doesn’t exist outside of the human or animal brain. But it does exist inside those brains. Morality is how we cooperate, and keep track of people who don’t cooperate correctly according to our lights, and therefore we should stop cooperating with them. Bob didn’t help with the mammoth hunt? OK, no mammoth steak for Bob. Sucks to be Bob, he should have joined the group. Those people over there in the strange tribe that never share mammoth steak with us? Yeah, go ahead and kill them all. Wait, they teamed up with a third tribe and are ganging up on our tribe? Sucks to be us. We should have figured out a way to cooperate with them instead of fighting them, now we’re all dead.
Morality is the mental technology that allows individual A and individual B, and group A and group B, and super-group A and super-group B to cooperate successfully.
Kant proposed, among other things, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” (The only trouble with, or perhaps it is a positive feature of, such a strong imperative is that is not easy to apply it in practice in trivial cases and to eliminate personal biases like what you want.) It easily follows that slavery is always wrong.
I ramble, and so I forgive. I could be wrong, but I believe what I actually said was: “the strong should do as they wish according to their own interests.” They should cooperate if it is in their interest to do so. Sometimes it is in my best interest to subjugate the meek, other times it is my interest to build them up (especially if I notice some other Strong person cozying up to the meek people local to him…maybe he’s plotting on me and I need to plot back. And, Hm…whether I’m putting my boot to some necks, or my gold in some folks’ pockets, I’m still subjugating either way because I’m bending others to my will. Funny old world. Damn. Maybe sex IS always rape–but who is raping whom? I should go have beer now.
The difference between you and me is that I realize every human being is one of the “meek”. That powerful warlord? He’s a mortal man just like everyone else, the only thing that makes him strong is that his soldiers agree to obey him. And sooner or later he’ll end up food for worms, maybe early like Alexander or at 105 surrounded by children and grandchildren. Or that mighty-thewed Barbarian? Same deal.
Vanity of vanities.
I mean, I understand. It feels good to have high social standing among your fellow hu-mons, that’s what I was talking about. It feels almost as good to pretend to yourself that you have high social standing.
Morality is absolute, but ethics are situational, and humans’ understanding of both is imperfect, and has changed over time. In the 19th century, a lot of people thought that slavery was morally acceptable. Those people were products of their time, but those people were also wrong. OK, so they were wrong because they were products of their time. Still wrong, though.
I do believe power is only as strong as those willing to obey it. And I do believe some individuals are better than others at convincing people–by means ranging from threat of force to subtle mental manipulation–to do their bidding. As this applies to this thread, Morality is a system that tempers the more abusive applications of power. Environmental, technological, and social changes necessarily alter what is considered abusive, and therefore, Morality changes. From time to time, and from situation to situation.
But I have to ask, what is the conceit behind “Hu-mons”? It’s not terminology I’ve seen before.
*If *we buy that “morality” is simply the scoring system for cooperation, then that raises the implication that aliens capable of complex cooperative societies would also have morality.
But would it necessarily be the same? As we’ve seen, morality is subject to fashions, and although human nature is pretty eternal, socially acceptable morality moves even over a single lifespan. So there’s certainly no reason to expect the aliens will match our particular morality *du jour *on the day they show up.
But it does seem likely that if, ref the OP, there is any kind of central core of immutable morality, we’d share it with these critters.
Damn if I’d know what it would be. Beyond the rules of Tit-for-tat: Trust, but not too much. Retaliate quickly and proportionately against cheating. All the rest is details.
well look at same sex relationships… for 2 thousand years they were normal … then for another 2 thousand they weren’t now were swinging back to them being normal so who knows what the opinion will be in another 2k years
Sometimes during these discussions we have Aspergery posters who can’t seem to understand normal everyday human social interaction.
It amuses me to treat them like a stereotypical alien who can’t understand the strange behavior of the Earth-Men.
Tell me again about the strange Earth emotion you Earth-Men call “love”. And then you can show me the strange Earth custom you Earth-Men call “kissing”. Is it true that on your planet you Earth-Humons do these things all the time?
If you believe in moral facts then you might believe humans discover their nature over time, in the same way humans discover more about math or physics.
Most philosophers are atheists and moral realists.
One argument against the idea that humans possess accurate moral knowledge is that our moral intuition and rationality are the result of evolution, and there’s no reason to suspect these faculties evolved to precisely detect moral truth, as opposed to spreading genes, which explains why people place a lot more moral worth on those closely related to them by blood, as one of many examples. Whereas something like math is much more directly related to survival, because knowing if one or two tigers are chasing you is a valuable distinction.