Um…I don’t understand the question. I believe that racism is an inherent and evolved trait in humans…and that we have the will and wisdom to try to overcome it. Racism harms people, and that is enough to call it immoral, at least at a very basic level. “First, do no harm” is an excellent first approximation to a moral code.
That’s entirely reasonable. For my part, I consider them to be somewhat independent. For instance, you can have a country that has both a very high pleasure score – lots of music and arts and parties – and also a very high misery score – slums and poverty and disease. My moral sense tells me to fix the problems, rather than emphasize the rewards. I acknowledge instantly that this is a personal value, not an objective or universal one.
I like this! I admire the entirely of your essay (trimmed only for space.) This particular idea would seem to put a value on “wisdom” – if wisdom might be defined as postponing immediate gratification in order to obtain a later, greater reward.
The person who only sees a little distance ahead will resist going to the dentist, for instance, because it hurts. But the wiser soul knows that tooth decay hurts more.
In the same way, a wiser moral person will realize that some decisions are unpleasant in the short run, but produce better results in the long run.
And, of course, as you also note, we can’t always see the outcomes clearly. What we thought was a good moral act might turn out not to be. The Prohibition of Alcohol was undertaken with the very highest of moral intentions. The actual outcome was not known in advance.
I consider myself a follower of Christian ethics, or in other words that taught by Jesus. I’m aware that there are have been many interpretations, so the best I can say is that my interpretations would probably best be described as mainline Protestant, with a dollop of dollop of Catholic influence. The Christian ethical thinkers who I’ve turned to the most–besides Jesus Himself, of course–would include G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, St. Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther, Fulton J. Sheen, St. Paul, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Thomas Aquinas, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Dietrich Boenhoeffer. My thinking also incorporates some teaching from other religious sources including, but not limited to, Mohandas Gandhi, the Bhagavad Gita, and Buddhism.
As to why, I can only say that to me it makes more sense and requires me to stomach fewer contradictions than any alternative, and I’d rather follow in the footsteps of the likes of St. Francis, St. Clare, George Fox, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and many others like them, than any alternative group.
I believe in the right of an individual to determine his/her role in society within the limits of not harming others.
While suffering can be a useful metric in determining what is moral and immoral, I reject utilitarianism because of concern that it becomes too much of a numbers game that doesn’t offer enough concern for individual interests. Further, in some situations I think utilitarian ethics can legitimize a great deal of suffering so long as an even greater amount of suffering is somehow averted. If pain and suffering is to be a valid measure of morality, I think a foundational system of ethics (deontology, in other words) is necessary to prevent larger groups from engaging in a reign of terror over smaller groups.
I’m glad my thoughts make sense, as that was more or less a stream of consciousness and I wasn’t sure if I’d thought about it so much that it stopped behing coherent anymore.
And expanding on your example of prohibition, because I see morality as looking ahead, learning, and evolving, that’s exactly why that failed. If we stick to over-arching ideas like “alcohol is bad” they end up being poor approximations of the optimal path, but if we can find more nuanced concepts, like moderation, we do a better job of approximating the optimal series of choices.
Similarly, an interesting aspect of this is that we sort of need to experiment with certain concepts to see their consequences before we learn that they’re bad. How often do kids end up doing things their parents forbid simply because it’s forbidden? Where a kid who learns about those things, learns to respect and moderate probably does better.
I consider myself Christian as well, but part of what led me to my musing above is exactly the way that Jesus taught. We see the Old Testament morality as a series of hard rules, and when Jesus teaches, he gives us a more nuanced approach to understanding them. That is, loving your neighbor was always a good way to behave morally, but if you don’t understand that very well, you need to at least not kill them, not steal from them, not lie to them, etc. And as you start to have greater knowledge and wisdom, you can start to see the greater consequences of other actions.
For example, I relate it to trying to explain morality to a child. A child might take another’s toy because he only sees one move ahead and sees the immediate gratification, so we explain it to him by trying to help him visualize another move or two ahead and tell him taking is wrong and sharing is good. But as the child gets older, if he holds onto a view that simple, he loses out on more complex values that arise from that like social contracts, trust, honesty, etc. And that’s how I relate this sort of concept to the development of religion, that we needed hard rules to make society work when civilization was young, but I see Jesus as laying groundwork for having that more nuanced view of how it applies to to an evolving culture.
So we need to replace hard rules with more nuanced concepts, and it’s these nuanced concepts that give us a better approximation of the underlying optimal path. Without a good understanding of that underlying path, when we start to encounter new situations, we’re stuck without an ability to make a good moral judgment.
And though those who are theists would presume that God either knows the optimal path or at least has a better understanding of it than we do, I don’t think approach requires that as a lynchpin. It’s really just a question of whether you’re better off learning chess being taught by a more skilled player, or if you can learn it through trial and error on your own.
This is an old discussion. It used to be referred to as Natural versus Revealed religion.
Revealed religion would be the kind found in church or the faith taught by philosophers and spiritualists of whatever religion you were following. Those people looking for answers beyond the self evident. Prophets, etc.
Natural religion would be what we now refer to as morality. A set of rules for behavior that seem self evident by themselves, without the need for a specific set of rules defined by the church, or any church.
Your post, Human Action, is a description of what was called Natural religion.
It is an interesting subject to research if you have time.
MIT offered a philosophy class in Ethics which I took. they did not offer a morals class. I think you find that kind of thing in churches.
The classic example of a non-rational justification is that morals come from God and so cannot be questioned. The claim of universal morals which we’ve seen in this thread seems to have no rational justification either, given the wide range of moral codes throughout the world and throughout history.
I agree that ethics discussions need to have premises, but those premises are usually clearly stated and can be argued.
Here’s an example. In debating health care, the two premises are that individual liberty - meaning reduced government involvement is most important versus the reduction of suffering is most important. People build arguments based on these and come up with totally different positions - both rational based on their premises.
A moral view would be that God wants us to reduce suffering of the poor, which would lead to healthcare for everyone. Since God wants it no competing premises are acceptable. While I for one like where that premise leads, it is not a rational one unless god comes down and makes his wishes clear.
Looking at the link, it would seem that scientific advances knock the legs out from under most of natural theology. For instance, one of Paine’s justification for a deity was the structure of the solar system. But today we know that no such deity is required to explain it.
Don’t the morals of natural religion change over time? Even if we think we can get morality from observing nature, our conclusions might be drastically different. We see from nature that animals can feel pain, which might cause us to take up vegetarianism as the moral choice. But we also see that nature has seen fit to cause some animals to cause great pain in others, so that we can see that nature has no call on us to eschew meat.
It seems to me that, like in most moral arguments, you choose your endpoint and then find justifications for them. The same holds for ethics, of course, but there you have to show your work, and you have a harder time claiming that your premises come from God or nature.
I noticed you said “chosen goal”, as opposed to a discovered one. Do we choose that goal? If so, I think you’re a relativist. <--------That wasn’t meant as criticism.
So, was your previous use of the term *goal * meant to be understood as a false belief on our part, or a useful fiction for organizing society, or as an actual goal (albeit one that might have changed)? I include the last option (that of an actual goal), because previously you said that our goals are derived from our innate morality, which makes them sound like real teleological goals.
(Bolding mine.) What does **best **mean in this context? Are talking about “best” in terms of prudential self-interest or something with normative force? Also, is this process of estimating these goals the necessary antecedent to our choosing them? I ask about choosing, because earlier you said that goals are chosen. If, indeed, you’re referring to our making estimations in order to then choose moral goals, what criteria are we using to make these estimations?
Does this mean that morality doesn’t have one single goal or that it doesn’t have a permanent goal (set of goals), of that it doesn’t actually have a goal at all? If the third option, then was your talk of goals earlier meant to be understood in a metaphorical sense? And if your talk of goals was meant to be understood in a metaphorical sense, is it also the case that your talk of morality was equally meant to be understood metaphorically?
It sounds like you’re saying that reducing suffering must either be balanced with other (perhaps conflicting) innately valuable goals, or that reducing suffering must be prioritized beneath some other more important innately valuable goal(s), such as fairness. If I may trouble you, do you have a rough approximation for which principles must be either balanced with or prioritized above reducing suffering? Was my guess about fairness one such principle?
Cool. I’m glad you have a moral outlook that “works” for you. I suspect you believe in a variant of Divine Command Theory, which teaches that X is good/bad because God says so. While it’s no secret that your view isn’t in vogue in academic philosophy these days (mainly due to the possibility that God could morally order us to do something horrendous), so much the worse for academic philosophy if your view turns out to be true.
If I understand you correctly, I think you’re saying that racism is objectively wrong across the board for everyone. Meaning, our thoughts, beliefs, and cultures don’t make racism wrong: it’s wrong even if our thoughts, beliefs, and cultures favor it. It also seems like you’re saying racism isn’t okay for some but not okay for others. That’s usually what’s meant by objective morality.
I have this problem. Overall, I’d define my morality as empirical utilitarianism. We should do what works without worrying too much about why it works and our goal should be to promote the greatest good for the greatest number.
But then I run into problems. There’s well-known thought experiments like the runaway trolley or the involuntary organ donor which puts utilitarian theory to the test in “real world” situations - and I usually find myself supporting the non-utilitarian side of the debate.
If I had to try to resolve this seeming paradox, I’d argue that a minimum set of individual rights need to exist in order to promote the collective happiness of society. And to defend this, I’d fall back towards the empirical side of my morality - such a premise seems to work.
I think I disagree with this argument. It seems to be saying that all morality is a subset of religion. I’d argue the opposite - that religious morality is a subset of general morality.
What you’re describing is called rule oriented utilitarianism, and it’s usually contrasted with act oriented utilitarianism. Rule oriented utilitarianism obligates us to follow a set of rules that generally maximize happiness and reduce pain, whereas act oriented utilitarianism obligates us to evaluate the consequences of each act according to the possibility of its maximizing happiness and reducing pain. Accordingly, rule oriented utilitarians believe that moral institutions (such as rights) are necessary for the kind of long term results that we should seek to bring about, and they treat exceptions to these institutions as dangerous slippery slopes which, if permitted often enough, might undermine the kind of morally worthy consequences that the principle of utility would have us pursue. John Stuart Mill is usually considered the founder of rule oriented utilitarianism, and he argued for it along empirical claims that you might support. FWIW, Jeremy Bentham (Mill’s godfather) was the founder of act oriented utilitarianism.
I would have to argue in favor of a rule-oriented approach, with room for exceptions, because of the vast differences in the way individuals assess the moral value of actions.
The extreme of either is unpleasant: too much regimentation stifles creative thought…but I don’t want to endorse an approach where vigilantes can act as their personal perception of “the moral good” prompts them.
Rule utilitarianism coupled with exceptions has many advocates. Also, many critics. Advocates favor it because it seems (to them) to balance rules with real world applications of those rules. Critics of rule utilitarianism coupled with exceptions allege that either these exceptions must be generally recognized as legitimate by a significant group (in which case, the “exceptions” aren’t actually exceptions, but just qualificaitons for a complex rule), or if a sole person (or a minority) decides what constitutes these exceptions then the rules don’t seem to have much practical force, as generally individuals don’t get to decide when rules apply to themselves.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to limit creative thinking to limit behavior. You can support a utilitarian rule that allows moral thought experiments to be discussed without also supporting a utilitarian rule that allows moral thought experiments to be tried.
All that tells me is that they preferred the word “ethics” to the word “morals” in the title of their course, which is fine if, as I contend, the two words mean the same thing. It doesn’t prove that the words have the distinction in meaning that you claim.
Um, one of the standard textbooks used in seminaries is “Christian Ethics” by Georgia Harkness. Wikipedia has an article on “Christian Ethics”, but none on Christian morality - that redirects to the Christian Ethics article. Wikipedia does have an article on “Secular Morality”, though. By contrast, at my university, the undergraduate degree in philosophy was a BA in Mental and Moral Science (which you took in the School of Mental and Moral Science). Sam Harris is the author of “The Moral Landscape”; Richard Dawkins likewise speaks frequently of secular morality. There is a popular talk by Christopher Hitchens, widely available on the Web, entitled “the Morals of an Atheist”. Daniel Dennet, the secular philosopher consistly prefers “morality” over “ethics” in his writings. Mark Hauser, the evolutionary biologist, is the author of “The Moral Mind” and the creator of “The Moral Sense Test”. And other examples abound.
In short, I don’t think either academic or popular usage supports the distinction you claim for the words.
Yes, but an example is just an example; it cannot prove itself to be generally true. It’s not difficult to find religious approaches to morality which do not rest on an appeal to authority/commandments, or indeed secular approaches which do.
But you can have a non-religious moral position which assigns value to reducing suffering but no value to liberty; that would have exactly the same outcome. And, given the starting premise, this would be a perfectly rational outcome, wouldn’t it? Conversely, you can have (and of course we do observe) widely-held religiously-based positions which assign value to both reducing suffering and maintaining liberty.
You seem to be suggesting that a moral position which assigns value to only one of these things is “not a rational one”, whereas a moral position which assigns value to both is rational. But that gives rise to two questions.
First, if this is true at all, isn’t it true regardless of whether the individual offers a religious account of his values and preferences, or not?
Secondly, why is it true? It’s not clear to me that valuing one thing is irrational, but valuing two things is rational. Ultimately, there’s no rational compulsion to assign moral value to anything, is there? Absolute moral nihilism may be unnattractive to us, but I can’t see that it’s irrational. In your example, the religious thinker’s reason for assigning no moral value to liberty may not appeal to you, but your reason for assigning moral value to liberty may not appeal to him. Why is your reason rational, and his irrational?
FWIW, this is the second semester that I’ve TA’d for an undergraduate ethics course, and my college’s ethicist uses “morality” and “ethics” interchangeably, as do most philosophers. In fact, just last night I was researching moral anti-realism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the go-to site of academic philosophers (but be forewarned, it isn’t written for the nonspecialist), and I saw the two terms used identically, as is usually the case in the literature.
I suspect you believe in a variant of Divine Command Theory, which teaches that X is good/bad because God says so. While it’s no secret that your view isn’t in vogue in academic philosophy these days (mainly due to the possibility that God could morally order us to do something horrendous), so much the worse for academic philosophy if your view turns out to be true.