What ever happened to right and wrong?

Great Debates
21

I highly recommend reading (at least the first half of) Richard Posner’s The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory.

To sum it up briefly, he says (and explains why very well) there are no absolute morals. There is no absolute right and wrong. Sure, “murder” is always wrong because it is defined as such. But “treason” is not per se wrong. Did the Nazis who spied for the allies (and thus committed treason against Hitler’s Germany) do something wrong? That depends upon whose point of view you take. A vast majority of Nazis would think it wrong and highly unethical (and punishable by death).

Each society defines “right” and “wrong” in different ways. In america it is wrong to eat a cat; in china it is perfectly fine. Anyway, Posner answers the question posed in this thread better than anyone else I’ve seen try.

22

Kalt, that can’t be right. If I’m understanding your summary correctly, every society has its own moral code that is shaped by the exigencies of life in that society/culture rather than by the intuitions of a transcendental morality of some kind. Neverthless, I submit to you that we certainly we can judge moral principles, on at least two grounds. First, functionality: i.e., whether the principle is adaptive. In that sense, a moral principle can be good or bad. Alternatively, we can judge moral principles on empirical grounds; e.g., whether virginal sacrifices do in fact prevent droughts.

Some ethical precepts, I think, are universal. But defining these norms is very difficult, because in doing so we risk being dogmatic or parochial.

Why does Posner talk about this? Why are many lawyers – especially conservative lawyers – moral relevatists? It’s all because of complaints about the Warren court, the charge that the Supreme Court, in constitutionalizing abortion, for example, was imposing its own values upon the majoritarian political branches. Bork, and Posner, think that this is wrong somehow – that the Court shouldn’t impose its moral views on others, because morality is relative and the polity should be free to divine its own moral code.

Here’s the punchline: that argument means that some value choices must be legitimate. Otherwise, if all value choices are subjective, then it could not be said to be wrong for the court to impose value choices on the rest of society.

I mean, sure, in any kind of heterogenous society, disagreements about morality and values are inevitable. People will come to different conclusions when asked to make moral judgments; this is a function of irrationality (people don’t think things through), conflicting self-interests (the desire to conflate self-interest with “good”), and the difficulty in assessing/weighing evidence, as shaped by people’s different personal experiences (e.g., I never see babies so don’t think fetal life is precious).

Therefore, the government shouldn’t be dogmatic in making moral choices. But that doesn’t mean that we as a society must retreat to the formalistic minimism espoused by Bork, Posner, and other relevatists. That’s just ducking the hard questions.

People have tried to answer these hard questions. One group (with which I pretty much agree) kind of goes along with what SentientMeat was saying. Moral judgments are justifiable if they are Pareto superior, to borrow a bit of economists’ jargon (i.e., make at least one person better off and no one worse off). But the status ex ante must be justifiable as well, in that there is equality in the assignment of basic rights and duties. I guess as a corollary I’d say that social and economic inequalities are just if and only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, in particular the least advantaged members of society.

23

erislover, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to have to add that to my signature line!

-LA

24

Could someone give me an idea of a Gray Situation?

-LA

25

“Once something’s been approved by the government, it’s no longer immoral.”

  • Reverend Lovejoy
26

Mr. Hand: All good points, and as you probably know, Posner is the “law and economics” guy. The thesis of this book is basically morals are all relative, and courts shouldn’t be imposing morality on the populace anyway, so using econimics (what decision provides the maximum economic benefit to society?) is the only rational and pragmatic thing to fall back on.

“Moral relativism” is a term the religious right loves to use as a pejorative, but if the human experience teaches you anything, it is that morality is all relative. There’s always an exception, and an exception to the exception, and different groups will always disagree on what is objectively moral. Of course they’re all wrong - nothing is objectively moral (unless it is defined as such).

27

Kalt. No. I am going to change your mind about moral relativity right now or die trying. Well, not die. But at least post a few times.

Relevatism is, if I understand you, consists of three propositions:

  1. To say that something is morally “right” means “right for a given society/culture.”
  2. “Right for a given society/culture” is to be understood functionally.
  3. It is therefore “wrong” for people in one society/culture to condemn the values of another society/culture.

The propositions are confused; they equivocate between the use of the words “right” and “wrong” (compare the the usages in (1) and (2) with (3)). Just because societies/cultures have differing attitudes and values doesn’t mean one society/culture cannot judge another society’s/culture’s values.

Does this make sense?

28

Yes, and there are relativists who argue just that: the limited relativism we’re forced to accept to resolve philosophical problems doesn’t entail total equivocation. Richard Rorty, in my experience, but others as well.

29

hansel, I’m sorry, but that’s just a little too cryptic for me. I don’t understand what you mean. Could you explain a little more, using little words? (I’m not that bright.) What does Rorty say? On what basis would he defend moral relativism?

What I’m trying to say is that moral relativists simply cannot justify their position based on diversity of opinion about moral judgments. In one well known parody of that view, imagine a medieval discussion about the shape of the earth. Some say it’s flat, some say it’s round, some say it’s a turtle riding on a turtle, or whatever. One cannot conclude from this dispute that there is no fact of the matter about what the earth’s shape is.

30

Bork as moral relativist?!!? That’s a novel interpretation! Have you looked at his book “Slouching Towards Gomorrah”. Bork is about as much of a moral relativist as I am a conservative/libertarian. He may adopt this argument of “judges not legislating” and all that good stuff when it suits his purpose (i.e., he disagrees with what they are proscribing) but he ain’t no moral relativist by a long shot! [In particular, I think that Bork likes the morality of the general public / legisative branch more than academia and the judicial branch simply because on social issues, their morality tends toward the Right. Don’t worry, when it comes to economic issues, he’ll preach another tune.]

31

Actually, on second thought I would put it stronger than that: Bork would probably say that it is the moral relatism that has infected the courts that make them so bad…i.e., that they try to define these things like “right of privacy” that prevent society from rightfully legislating morality.

32

jshore, I’ll happily concede the point that Bork wouldn’t call himself a moral relativist. He certainly does use the phrase as one of his favorite invectives for the Warren Court. But when somebody says something alone the lines of the following – “the court is imposing its values on other, and that’s wrong because people disagree about morality” – then I call him a relativist.

The “right of privacy” stuff is Bork talking about Griswold, a 1960s case that revived substantive due process jurisprudence. These sorts of decisions involve judges making moral choices. Bork doesn’t like this. Many judges don’t like this, if only because it means having to make tough choices.

A common problem for judges is that they’re faced with what they believe to be a substantive immorality in the law. Laws requiring slavery would be a great example. What to do? They’re faced with a moral decision: does correcting this moral defect in the law justify upsetting the formal morality of the law (i.e., the idea that laws “fit” together in a coherent fashion, such that today’s decisions follow from precedents). When upholding the formal system despite its substantive immorality (e.g., upholding as constitutional laws premitting slavery), judges use three responsibility-mitigating mechanisms to exaggerate how foreclosed their decisions where.

  1. Elevation of the formal stakes. Because the initial moral question (whether slavery is moral or immoral) is usually a hard one, judges therefore perceive the formal values of the law (e.g., the coherency of the law) to be increasingly important because that is the path of least cognitive resistance.

  2. Retreat to a mechanistic formalism. For example, maxims such as “fidelity to law,” “adherence to authority,” and “stare decisis” frees judges from having to make politically difficult choices.

  3. Ascribe responsibility elsewhere. The separation of powers argument (e.g., “if slavery is unjust, let the legislature abolish it”) also helps judges to deny personal responsibility for making unjust decisions.

How many of these three things describe “original intention” jurisprudence?

33

The argument you wrote out above is a common refutation of relativism, but it doesn’t always work. In particular, it assumes that there is a superior position from which we can say that it’s wrong to judge other cultures just because our own judgements are relative to our culture. In other words, it assumes that there is a moral perspective from which we can judge our moral perspective, and pronounce it right or wrong. But given that assumption, there actually is some foundation for making moral judgements that transcends culture, and so we are justified in judging other cultures. That’s a contradiction, ergo, relativism is self-refuting. It’s not that the diversity of moral opinions makes them all justifiable, and hence, all equally sound; it’s that, in the case of the Earth’s shape, there is a fact of the matter to which we can appeal, but in the case of morality, there is no fact of matter that will settle the argument (and arguing that last point opens up realms of philosophy that won’t be settled in this thread).

Rorty’s argument is that 1 and 2 are correct in a perfect sense–from our limited, human perspective, our moral judgements are relative to our cultural assumptions and circumstances, and those are accidental (this is largely the standard existentialist argument). If you accept those assumptions, then you can’t judge your own judgements, since any second-order judgements you make are still from that relative perspective. You can’t escape from your perspective to make an absolute pronouncement on the morality of your moral judgements.

If that’s the case, then all you have is your societally limited moral perspective. According to Rorty, it’s one of our culture’s virtues that it distrusts the rightness of it’s moral judgements. It’s a recognition that societies can be wrong, as slaveholding societies were, as Nazi Germany was, no matter how right they thought they were. If we admit the possibility of error no matter how certain we feel, then perhaps we can avoid the worst moral errors due to hubris. It’s a spur to evolve morally, because we’re aware that future generations may look back on us and say “how could they have been so blindly wrong?”

For Rorty, the thought process is this: our moral truths are not necessarily their moral truths. We can think that they’re wrong, and have careful, detailed, eminently justifiable reasons for thinking they’re wrong. But ultimately, there is no absolute authority to which we can appeal to convince them that they’re wrong, or to justify our own action against them. We can do our best to convince them with our reasons or our rhetoric, but there’s no final tribunal that will judge us correct and them wrong. If we go to war against them, then we have attacked them for our own (hopefully best) reasons; our own moral perspective may push us to that. But we can’t justify it on a cosmic scale. That’s the human condition, and accepting it isn’t a reason for the kind of pathetic relativism against which you argued above, mainly because it’s all we’ve got.

34

I’m not sure that I understand this. Why can’t I make second-order judgments? What if I come from a judging society, a society that judges other societies? How can anyone say that I’m wrong to do so (assuming that indeed I come from a judging society and my judgment is correct within the parameters of my society’s morality)?

If I understand you correctly, Rorty suggests that one reason we might not want to get carried away with these second-order judgments is because of the risks of error and hubris. But that’s not a call to abdicate from making these judgments – that’s a call to be very, very careful in doing so. Societies may make wrong moral decisions, but I’ll bet you that people in slaveholding societies know that it’s wrong to hold slaves and that people in Nazi Germany knew that their government was making immoral choices as well.

35

Stealing bread to feed your starving children.

36

Well, yes, you can judge other cultures all you want–you just aren’t doing so from some absolutist perspective, some privileged position of moral judging; likewise, when someone tells you that your/your culture’s judgements are wrong, they’re making an argument from their own limited perspective. Rorty’s point is that our limited perspectives should inspire caution in us; they shouldn’t keep us from making any judgements at all. You can make second-order judgements, they’re just not really second-order, even if they sound that way. I’m sure there were Germans who abhorred the Nazis, and Southerners who were abolitionists; Rorty would call those people visionaries, since they prefigured beliefs that became dominant.

In one sense, what Rorty wants us to do is to accept full responsibility for our actions; to accept that we’re not God’s chosen, or superior rationalists, or somehow in touch with the fundamental order of the universe. By accepting that, we give up the kind of self-certainty that Islamofascist terrorists have when they blow themselves up in a crowd, or the kind of righteousness that the Enlightenment colonizers of Africa had when they tried to remake tribes into British/French/German/Belgian satellites. When we do something on the strength of our moral convictions, the consequences are 100% our responsibility. We can’t excuse ourselves with “God told me to do it” or shallow rationalizations based on “the natural order of things”. There’s only us, and what we think we should do, and we can be wrong.

37

I like your post.

God sums it up nicely, “love your neighbor”

To do loving acts and deeds, to speak loving words, this is right.

Any harm of any kind is wrong, it is black and white, and simple.

Love
Leroy

38

That’s not what she said, Leroy. She said “it is wrong to cause any creature more suffering than is absolutely necessary”. In other words, it’s okay to cause some suffering, if that suffering is necessary and minimized as much as possible.

39

I disagree;
harming a tapeworm to cure the host
harming a rabid dog to remove the risk of attack and injury
harming a gun wielding maniac in order to save his child hostages…

Sometimes causing harm is necessary to prevent (what we subjectively consider to be) greater harm.

40

didn’t read the whole thread, but this is my personal standard reply to this question:

there is right or wrong, according to insert faction here’s standard.

because this is a philisophical question and therefore man-made, ignoring the implied qualifier makes it meaningless**

just for fun i’ll make some bad examples:

old person(op) is dying, miserable, his family is dead and he is unable to commit suicide, so is happy for the release

op wanted to die and is filthy rich anyway so he’s happy to help your mom who he knows to be a good person

it’s illegal, and the police aren’t happy

op had tried to kill you because you’d killed his family.

cough really bad example, but there’s simply more than two sides to everything…

** there’s a word for an impossible loop like those created in time travel, just can’t remember it. anyone?