I believe in intersubjective morality, neither objective nor subjective. That is, I think all moral/ethicalmeaning is “to a subject”, to an observing individual who makes assessments anchored in the situation in which the question occurs; yet at the same time, it’s not hippie-dippie relativistic “morality is whatever you conceive it to be, it’s all just in your head” – who we are as individuals is itself rooted in a context which includes other people as well as the environment that we all commonly share as our collective context, and hence there are consequences to things and the possibility of a shared perspective (even if at any given time communication may be such that we lack one). In a sense there’s always a hypothetical shared moral perspective that we are working our way towards, and it is always emergent, or in the process of becoming, never something we’ve as of yet arrived at.
Objective morality means morality that does not depend on people to make the content of morality what it is, whereas relative morality does. I’m not seeing a third way here. So, if two people disagree over whether racism is moral, are both right, is only right, or is neither right? And why? And, if one is right, would your intersubjective stance hold that the right person was right because there’s broader support within his morally relevant community for his position than there is for his counterpart’s position? If so, that’s relativism, though perhaps not the “hippie-dippie” version that you seem to dislike. Forgive me if I’ve misstated your position.
(Bolding mine). The idea of a “shared” morality is one of the most controversial philosophic claims I’ve come across. Morally speaking, what unites your typical vegan (as in, one who’s vegan for ethical purposes and not just by coincidence) with your typical meat eater? Not a lot it would seem. And we can find starker differences. People can not only disagree over moral rules, but they can also disagree over the source (if any) of those rules, the application of those rules, and whether any rules exists at all. (See this thread, for example.) I remain dubious about a “shared” morality for want of evidence. Philosophers who believe in a minimal number of shared morals usually argue for this position by saying things like, “There’s basic moral principles that we all value, like loving others, being just, etc. It’s just that we apply those principles differently because of our different circumstances or because of our different understandings of the principles’ applications.” As has been pointed out, notably by moral relativist Gilbert Harman, there’s little ground for saying that the differences in our moral principles are always circumstantial, and it’s harder to say that the differences in our morals are based on our different understandings of the same moral principle’s application, because two different understandings of the same moral principle’s application seem awfully close to two different moral principles. Take the Nazis and the moral principle that we should love people. If we’re to say that the Nazis did value the moral principle of loving others but that they just didn’t quantify over Jewish people when populating the category of people that they should’ve loved, then we have an understanding of a moral principle’s application for them that says, “Love those inside your own group.” But is that our understanding of the moral principle’s application? No, it isn’t. Our understanding of the application of the moral principle that we should love others extends to loving people outside of our own group as well, and its forumation reads, “Love people both inside and outside your own group.” And that doesn’t look like just two different ways of thinking about or applying the same moral principle. That looks like two different moral principles, and, ultimately, moral systems that aren’t shared. And, one needn’t turn to a past or present foreign culture to find examples of different moral principles. We could probably find them in our own communities. If there’s an argument that morality is shared, (and perhaps there is) then I’d like to hear it.
(Bolding mine.) I’ll be first to admit that I wish there were objective moral standards. So, you’re right to say that I don’t want to say that genocide could ever be okay. But wanting doesn’t factor into mathematical and scientific claims, and few think it factors into logical claims, so what’s the argument that wanting factors into ethical claims? I’m not saying wanting doesn’t factor into ethics (I think it does, which is why I’m a subjectivist), I’m just exploring your objection. Could it be that morality is tied up with our interests? To explore further, why would the truths of ethical reality be mind-dependent (specifically preference-dependent, according to your above objection) but no other truths about reality be mind-dependent? Well, because ethical reality is contingent upon us and our wanting. And, noticeably, we want different things. So, your argument that genocide can’t be moral because I don’t want it to be is easily countered with the assertion that genocide can be moral because another wants it to be. That’s where factoring wanting into your ethical framework gets you.
Of course ethicists, like others, should stand on the shoulders of the giants within their field, but it’s highly debatable as to who counts as a giant within the field of ethics and it’s certainly more debatable than who counts as a giant within math and science.
Thanks for your thoughtful contributions to this thread, btw. I enjoyed engaging your ideas, and I hope you enjoy engaging mine.
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So, if two people disagree over whether racism is moral, are both right, is only right, or is neither right?
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Great combo of OP username and thread title, by the way. What else would you expect to be the name of the person who’d start such a thread? Anyway… to answer your question, although perhaps not as you intended it to be understood…
It is possible that both are right, in the sense that it may be possible to get to the moral truth of the matter from either person’s current point of view without either of them having to negate a substantial portion of the axioms from which they derived their current perspective and position. (Without, in other words, a whole lot of backing up and changing-of-mind for either one of them). For that matter it is possible that they are both wrong, concurrent with both being right, in the sense that they may both possess important aspects of the moral truth without either of them possessing the entire package. In real life no one ever possesses the entire package and it’s important to remain aware of that.
They may both place a high value on human life and a sense that it is important to focus on the greater good. They may both be repelled by unnecessary cruelty to other animals, for that matter. They may in fact only differ in some small respects pertaining to how they perceive the typical acts of slaughter and their sense of the moral components of land use as it impacts upon the greater good.
Well, if both people are right when they disagree over whether racisim is wrong, then I believe you’re advocating moral relativism. Racism would be morally right relative to the relevant person, and it would be morally wrong relative to the relevant person. Or, if there’s an objective moral truth to the matter (as in, only one moral truth to the matter that applies to all), then one of them would have to change her mind and negate at least one of her assumptions, though perhaps not a substantial portion, and it wouldn’t matter how many views we used to get to that objective moral truth: assuming moral truths are objective, there’d still just be one right answer despite the many routes or perspectives we used to get there.
I hope I don’t sound like I’m picking on you, as that isn’t my intention. I make this point because you seemed to say that your system of ethics is neither objective nor relative, and, as I said in my previous post, I’m not seeing a third way.
It’s certainly true that some people share the same moral ideas, but I don’t think it’s true that there are universally shared moral ideas. (If the latter conjunct isn’t part of your claim, then forgive me for shadow boxing a nonentity.) In fact, I think we have to “water down” morality to general statements like, “Do good stuff instead of bad stuff,” to force universally shared moral ideas onto the world. For instance, in order to make the moral idea that we should value human life a candidate for a universally shared moral idea we would have to heavily qualify it with so many nuanced stipulations (to cover the many conflicting beliefs derived from it) that it’s really not much of a principle at all, or it ends up merely being the equivalent of, “Do good stuff instead of bad stuff.” Because I see the content of moral ideas as being both specific and specific in morally important ways (as in, “Value the lives of both Jews and Germans”), I wouldn’t call something general enough to count as a universally shared idea a moral one.
Well, if both people are right when they disagree over whether racisim is wrong, then I believe you’re advocating moral relativism. Racism would be morally right relative to the relevant person, and it would be morally wrong relative to the relevant person. Or, if there’s an objective moral truth to the matter (as in, only one moral truth to the matter that applies to all), then one of them would have to change her mind and negate at least one of her assumptions, though perhaps not a substantial portion, and it wouldn’t matter how many views we used to get to that objective moral truth: assuming moral truths are objective, there’d still just be one right answer despite the many routes or perspectives we used to get there.
I hope I don’t sound like I’m picking on you, as that isn’t my intention. I make this point because you said your system of ethics is neither objective nor relative, and, as I said in my previous post, I’m not seeing a third way.
It’s certainly true that some people share the same moral ideas, but I don’t think it’s true that there are universally shared moral ideas. (If the latter conjunct isn’t part of your claim, then forgive me for shadow boxing a nonentity.) In fact, I think we have to “water down” morality to general statements like, “Do good stuff instead of bad stuff,” to force universally shared moral ideas onto the world. For instance, in order to make the moral idea that we should value human life a candidate for a universally shared moral idea we would have to heavily qualify it with so many nuanced stipulations (to cover the many conflicting beliefs derived from it) that it’s really not much of a principle at all, or it ends up merely being the equivalent of, “Do good stuff instead of bad stuff.” Because I see the content of moral ideas as being both specific and specific in morally important ways (as in, “Value the lives of both Jews and Germans”), I wouldn’t call something general enough to count as a universally shared idea a moral one.
ETA: perhaps what you have in mind with your intersubjective ethical system is group relativism on a large scale, maybe even a kind of global relativism that takes into account the consensus of the world’s majority’s perspective. If you’re advocating global moral relativism, then there would only be one moral standard (or one set of standards) and morality would evolve with us, but it still wouldn’t be objective, because our perspective would provide its content.
Voyager
The discussion has moved on, and I don’t want to do a line-by-line on your post #51, so let me just sum up my position like this:
Terminology
I maintain that for most people “morals” and “ethics” are interchangeable terms, and the choice of one over the other is a matter of taste or fashion, not semantics. I think you and I agree that, among socially-conservative biblical fundamentalists the fashion leans towards “moral” rather than “ethical”. But it doesn’t follow that their consistent use of “moral” implies that they make any semantic distinction, and I see no evidence that they do. The fact that they accuse atheists of lacking morals doesn’t mean that they think atheists are highly ethical. It just reflects the fact that they generally use “moral” rather than “ethical” when talking about judgements-about-how-one-should-act.
Morality/ethics and rationality
It seems to me that, given a set of premises, we can evaluate the arguments constructed on those premises as either rational or not. We can’t necessarily evaluate the premises themselves as either rational or not, particularly in matters of morality/ethics. For example, is it rational for me to assign a high moral value to truth? You cannot demonstrate the moral value of truth, except by appeal to other moral values which are themselves undemonstrated. All moral/ethical positions are ultimately unsupported by evidence; given this, I’m not sure of the value of attempting to categorise them as rational or irrational. (The arguments constructed on them, yes, but the starting premises, no.)
Is it rational to believe that, for example, the preservation of human life is the greatest moral value, before which, in the event of conflict, all other value must give way? It’s an absolutist moral position, it’s completely unsupported by any evidence, it’s not a position that everyone shares, and yet it doesn’t seem to me to be particularly irrational. Or, at least, that doesn’t seem to me to be a meaningful critique of it.
And it doesn’t seem to me that it suddenly become irrational if I remove the preservation of human life, and insert some other moral precept - say, respect for the Golden Rule, or the minimisation of suffering.
And I can’t see that it suddenly becomes irrational if I insert an explicitly religious precept - acknowledgement of God, or observance of God’s will. Sure, you can argue that God, or the will of God, is unevidenced, but all the other precepts we plugged into that framework with were equally unevidenced, so that doesn’t seem to me to get us very far.
I think we’re on stronger grounds if we use rationality to critique not people’s fundamental moral premises, but the arguments constructed on them. We can fairly say that it’s irrational for someone to argue that homosexuality is abominable because, and only because, Leviticus says so if, at the same time, they do not accept the abominability of everything else so designated in Leviticus.
But it might be closer to the truth to say, not that their position is irrational, but that it’s unarticulated or unexplored. It is in fact the case that most people who regard homosexuality as abominable do not also regard shellfish and mixing fabrics as abominable. Therefore, they don’t accept the absolute authority of Leviticus. Therefore, their reason for regarding homosexuality as abominable is not, in fact that they accept the absolute authority of Leviticus. Therefore, there is something else at work here, shaping their moral/ethical judgments. We need to ask them what thing it is that makes them regard Leviticus as normative with regard to homosexuality, but not with regard to diet or dress. And until we name that thing, and examine its role in the argument, I don’t think we can say that the argument is irrational.
(I strongly suspect that it is irrational, because I think “that thing” which leads them to view homosexuality as abominable is probably homophobia. But that could be just my prejudices and preconceptions about biblical fundamentalists at work, and it would be ironic to rely on my own prejudices and preconceptions to denounce others as irrational.)
I don’t think you’re deliberately failing to follow my reasoning, but you do not seem to be following it, nonetheless.
a) There isn’t an objective “thing” called “racism” about which to have attitudes in the first place. There is, instead, Susie’s notion of what the abstraction called “racism” consists of, and Debbie’s notion, and James’ notion and so on. Then on top of that is Susie’s moral opinion of Susie’s notion of racism, which she’s attempting to discuss with Debbie, who starts of (of course) discussing her own moral opinion of Debbie’s (not Susie’s) notion of racism. To further complicate matters, the thing she is disagreeing with when she disagrees with Susie is not Susie’s moral opinion of Susie’s notion of what racism is — it’s Debbie’s impression of Susie’s moral opinion of (what Debbie assumes to be the same as) Debbie’s concept of what racism is.
b) I am asserting, in a broad general way, that IF communication were sufficiently good and there were enough time for it to take place, eventually all the people with widely differing moral opinions would come to understand each other and there would be at least moderate consensus. That “IF” looms large though, sufficiently large to render this a hypothetical situation that will always be something we can, at best, make clumsy progress towards. We have new experiences faster than we can communicate them.
c) Neither moral truths nor any other kind of meaning, anywhere, about anything, is objective. Nothing has meaning intrinsically, but only to an audience; no observer observes things except that they observe them from a perspective. Meaning, in other words, is an interactive phenomenon. But “interactive” means not that meaning inheres in the observer and not at all in the “thing” being observed — it means that it inheres in the relationship between observer and observed.
d) Hence there really is an existent societal phenomenon that has been widely observed and given the name “racism”; it isn’t something that “only exists in the mind of the beholder” (subjective) but it also has no objective meaning apart from how it affects all of the observers from all of the perspectives from which it can be observed and experienced. None of the people experiencing it (in one fashion or another) can be said to be “wrong” when they speak truthfully of their experience of it, although their understanding may be (heck, always IS going to be) incomplete.
Do you now? Or at least have some understanding of what I’m asserting? I am indeed saying it is netiher objective nor subjective. (I’m also saying that about everything else.)
That there don’t happen to be doesn’t mean that universally shared moral ideas can’t exist as a hypothetical construct. In my hypothetical construct the barrier to their existence isn’t the “wrongness” of any observer nor a moral relativism that says “x isn’t wrong, it’s only wrong to YOU”, but rather the overwhelming complexity of communication.
I would liken the church to a family (a really big family with its share of black sheep). If you have a good relationship with your parents and find that they generally give you good advice, and then they set you up with a blind date… do you go?
You’re right. 
I confess that I didn’t follow your reasoning, and I also confess that I still don’t. Though, I’d like to! If I could trouble for you another response, then I’d be much obliged.
And here’s where I make another confession: I didn’t understand any of the above (as in, I didn’t understand how it fits with what we’ve been talking about), and, because I didn’t understand any of the above, I’m going to break it down into two separate sets of propositions by re-quoting it and then commenting on each set.
The combination of these propositions leads me to infer that racism is either relative or subjective (or, both, if I’m making a distinction without a difference), and at the very least I have trouble figuring out how moral truths could be something other than either relative or subjective themselves, if the instantiation of moral properties (known in philosophic parlance as “moral facts”) are contingent upon relative or subjective notions. In other words, how does your earlier claim that your ethical system isn’t “hippie-dippie relativism” fit with the above two propositions? If your position is that an intersubjective ethical system isn’t relativistic, then I’d like to know how you’re using the term relativistic. Also, the term intersubjective. (See final paragraph for how philosophers use the terms.)
Further questions that I have pertain to the next set of your propositions:
I agree that, if true, the above leads us to believe that moral discourse (which is presumably necessary for shared morality) is difficult to say the least, and I see how the above point transitions with your following point below:
And this question springs to mind: does our limited ability to communicate our moral ideas affect our moral obligations? I ask because it seems that an “ought” statement necessitates a “can” statement. As in, if I morally ought to do X, then it’s within my ability to do X, and likewise, if I ought not do X, then it’s within my ability not to do X. I think the principle of linking “ought” statements with “can” statements is important, because it seems unfair to the extreme (and subsequently objectionable) to hold someone morally accountable for circumstances outside his range of control. Moreover, I think the principle of linking “ought” statements with “can” statements is pertinent to our conversation, because your perspective seems to have two important underlying premises, with those being: 1) we ought to be moral; and 2) understanding another’s moral discourse is necessary for us to be moral. If 2 is a necessary condition for 1, and if I’m right about linking “oughts” with “cans,” then we’re able to understand moral discourse as much as we need to in order to be as coextensively moral as we’re obligated to be at any given point in light of our understanding of another’s moral discourse at that moment. The conclusion I reach is that we could never blame any of our immoral decisions on our not having understood another’s moral discourse, because we’d be able to both understand as many of another’s current moral beliefs as we needed to in order to be as moral as we were then required to be at that time based on our then-limitations of our then-understanding of another’s moral discourse and because we’d have the potential/ability to increase our understanding of another’s moral discourse for as much as we were morally obligated to increase our understanding. Is that a conclusion you also reach? If not, why not? I ask because, when I previously asked about two people who disagreed about the moral status of racism, you responded with:
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(Bolding mine.) What do “wrong” and “right” mean in the above proposition? If the terms are short for “morally wrong” and “morally right,” then that could be a problem for your position, because the above proposition implies that it isn’t their fault for being morally wrong (peradventure that they are), because they were working with an epistemic handicap, one which you’ve now partly attributed to a linguistic handicap. Namely, they didn’t sufficiently understand the other’s moral discourse to have the necessary moral information that they needed. But, if as I say, an “ought” necessitates a “can,” then they ***could *** have had the necessary morally relevant information (as well as the necessary understanding of the other’s moral discourse for said information) if they were at all morally obligated to have done or believed anything. Whence any moral pass and/or grounds for moral tolerance for want of understanding? (If you don’t believe in moral passes and/or grounds for moral tolerance for want of understanding, and if I’ve wrongly projected such a position onto your posts, please forgive me.)
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Or, let’s assume that your above use of “wrong” and “right” don’t refer to that which is “morally wrong” about racism and that which is “morally right” about racism, but let’s assume instead that the terms refer to that which is “factually wrong” about racism and that which is “factually right” about racism. With this reading of your terms, the two who disagreed over racism might not be morally wrong, but they might be factually wrong, despite their clear beliefs to the contrary. Though, interpreting your use of “wrong” to mean “factual wrongness” about racism seems to also be problematic for your position, because you say:
Then how would factual wrongness about racism (when factual wrongness is defined as objectively being wrong) be possible apart from a purely relativist stance (which you seemed to deny earlier)? How could I be wrong about what I think of/about racism if there’s no objective standard by which to assess mine with? If your answer is, “The community’s thoughts about racism are the standard,” then that’s (in addition to seeming to be a necessarily objective claim since that’s “just how things are”) a relativistic notion of truth in general. (And, of course, any moral truths would be a subset of relative truths of this general body of relative truths.) That’s what “relative” means, mind-dependent reality, and its meaning doesn’t change when we increase the number of minds that we suppose reality to be relative to. Rather than discovering truth (moral or factual) as mind-independent reality would have us do, we’re creating it for ourselves (either as individuals or as a group) as mind-dependent reality asserts that we do.
I like this, and generally apply it to any organized body of thought. If you try it, and it works, then it may be a good fit. If you try it, and don’t like the results…keep shopping.
By and large, in this advertising-suspicious age, we tend to distrust any organized body of thought that claims exclusivity. “This is the only way forward.” “This is the one true church.”
While an excess of relativism may not be a good idea, an excess of exclusivity is also worrisome. “Smorgasbord” Christianity is sometimes derided, but, frankly, I prefer it to the stricter, “You must accept all of this, or else none” variety.
Yikes! I’m arguing two different ways at once: one is, find a way of thinking you like…and the other is, create a way of thinking you like!
It’s always tempting to me to go with this, but the problem is, a very, very large number of blatantly evil actions can suddenly become moral due to “intent”. Things like eugenics, or racial segregation, or racial purging can be justified by good intent.
You have to remember, there are terrorists who believe that killing innocent people is doing a service to their country, god, or some other system. There are people who think we should kill the Jews because Jews are evil and making the world a much worse place. I’m sure many assassins were acting out of a place of what they believed to be their moral duty.
There are always sociopaths, people who act for their own benefit and don’t care about the morality of their actions. But most people who do or believe amazingly evil things do so because they think they’re doing the best they can. Sure, oftentimes it’s not completely pure. Pride can be involved – people who do unethical things because THEY want to be the one with the power to make the world better – but a lot of times they still want that power to do something good.
I’m not sure how I feel about the concept of ethics, but it’s complicated and I’m always loathe to accept any given paradigm because when presented with various scenarios, almost all of them break down eventually, though admittedly some only break down in outlandish scenarios. The “what if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity would prosper beyond your wildest dreams if all black people were killed” kind of scenarios, but I still like to do sanity checks from time to time, and so far my conclusion has been “just fucking wing it because you’ll never come up with a system without holes.”
Jragon: One of the best explorations of contrived morality was in Ursula K. LeGuin’s story “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas.”
Here’s a link… Warning, pdf format.
It’s a brilliant and haunting story about a world where nearly everyone is happy…because one sacrificial victim is made to suffer. As you say, “The ‘what if it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity would prosper beyond your wildest dreams if all black people were killed’ kind of scenarios.” LeGuin takes it and does…scary things.
And here’s where I make another confession: I didn’t understand any of the above (as in, I didn’t understand how it fits with what we’ve been talking about)
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Let’s work on that part first. Here’s what was going on in my head.
You had asked (farther upthread) about the following situation:
I was approaching the “disagreement” existing between these people as if I were walking into the room where they were having their disagreement, in order to discuss with them (and you) whether one of them is right, both are right, or neither of them is right.
I was saying that, first of all, the apparent disagreement is not (merely, necessarily) over “racism”, as if both parties did indeed share a perspective on what racism itself IS but Susie thinks racism is immoral and Debbie is disagreeing with her about that. Before we even get to that, I observe that Susie has her idea of what the word “racism” actually means; Debbie has hers; each may assume that “racism” is a non-complicated self-explanatory term and that therefore the other party is thinking of it in the same way, that what Susie means by “racism” when she says it is immoral is the same thing Debbie means by “racism” when she says it isn’t.
Because they aren’t entirely aware that they are working with different notions of what racism itself is, Susie attempts to argue with Debbie about Debbie’s moral opinion of racism, to argue bout what she finds wrong with Debbie’s moral opinion. But as I listen to them I realize that Susie is assuming that Debbie’s moral opinions are being applied to HER (Susie’s) notion of what racism itself actually is. And I listen to Debbie defending her moral evaluation of racism and I realize she doesn’t grasp that Debbie’s criticism is based on the misconception that Debbie has put that moral evaluation on Susie’s concept of racism, which is a different thing. So they’re arguing past each other, more than with each other, if you see what I mean.
Do you see why that is relevant to the question of “are both right, is only one of them right, or is neither of them right”?
Right about what?
Each of them is possibly right about their own experience of things, what they individually mean by racism and from the perspective that they’ve experienced it. For now, let’s pretend that (unlike Susie and Debbie) I have a gift for actually discerning what they mean, that I “get it” from each of their perspectives, and that it looks something roughly like this:
Susie (“racism is immoral”): Racism means institutionalized oppression on the basis of race, such as it has historically existed in the United States against black people, dating back to slavery; racism is where you are systematicall disempowering a group of people so as to keep them down; the perpetrators of racism may not, individually, understand the ways in which their racist behaviors play a part in that but racism itself is still immoral. The ignorance of the perpetrator isn’t irrelevant, necessarily, but there’s some moral obligation to listen to people trying to talk about racism, and to care enough to bother to understand; ignorance is not an across-the-board excuse that gets the perpetrator morally off the hook. It is never not immoral to oppress individuals by oppressing the group to which they belong, so racism is always and inevitably immoral.
Debbie (“racism is not necessarily immoral”): Racism means treating people differently on the basis of their race, pure and simple. I can see where it should always be suspect and it can definitely be immoral under a lot of circumstances, but consider affirmative action. You’re treating people differently on the basis of race to make up for a situation, and the situation itself was immoral and, at least until some parity is achieved, I think it’s a reasonable policy and it isn’t immoral. In fact it can be more immoral to argue that we can’t ever use non-race-blind considerations because to do so would be ‘racist’ and ooh that makes it automatically bad.
So now you call me on the cell phone and say “So, AHunter3, my good mediator, what’s the verdict? Which one is right? Or are they both wrong? Or are they both right? And if they’re both right, are you saying morality is subjective?”
And I answer, “They are both right and they are both wrong. If I could get them talking to the point that they are actually understanding each other’s real points, I think they’d probably agree with each other, maybe not right away but eventually. And no I am not saying morality is subjective.”
And you say, “Are you saying that morality is OBJECTIVE, then?”
And I answer, “No, I’m not saying that either. It’s intersubjective. All attributions of moral ‘wrongness’ to racism depend on understanding what it puts people through and caring about that. It depends on the subjectivities of people but not just the subjectivities of the person holding the moral opinion; and the person holding any moral opinion can be factually wrong in a number of ways when it comes to correctly grasping and taking into account the experiences of other people in order to perceive what racism puts people through. Racism, like any other ‘ISM’, is a generalized pattern and evaluating it morally means saying it is ‘bad’ (or not ‘bad’) for people in general, not just to or for the individual person making the moral judgment.”
This is the type of scenario that causes me some concern. Sometimes all it takes is one charismatic leader who firmly believes in what he is preaching to make others feel the same way. A morality based on a higher authority tends to take this out of the equation for the most part.
HoneyBadgerDC: ??? How? I don’t see why a morality based on a higher authority is really much safer from horrible distortive practices. I can accept that it might be harder to change the actual wording of the authoritative dogma – but it still is entirely possible for an activist leader to re-interpret it to change it to his purposes.
Jesus came along, made some parables, Paul took them and ran with them, and suddenly it’s okay to eat pork. They can even claim that they are “fulfilling” the law, not negating it. But in practice, they negated it.
“Thou Shalt Not Kill” – believed in the very heart by a great many people who also support capital punishment.
Morality from a higher authority is not safe from manipulation…and I don’t think it is even relatively “safer.” It seems that evil knows how to have its way.
I’m a follower of an objective morality based, primarily, on the Golden Rule - that is, reciprocity: the recognition that other people are actors in their own right and not merely objects. I believe that such a morality is inherent in the nature of concious beings - it is certainly the case that most human philosophies and religions have adopted some variant of the Golden Rule as significant.
While there is no way of proving such a matter, in my opinion such a morality is unlikely to suffer from significant distortions - leaving aside absurd interpretations of the Golden Rule (for example, ‘what if you happen to be a mascochist?’)
A good point - just because we all want Indiana Jones to come on the scene and kick some Nazi butt doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.
There’s a school of thought that says, “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is lawful,” and I’m inclined to agree with it. If there is no god (or if he does exist but doesn’t particularly care about us, as in the Clockmaker Hypothesis), then there is no morality; there’s only in-my-interest and not-in-my-interest. One can make a compelling argument that committing genocide (or even just being kind of a jerk) is not-in-my-interest, but that’s not the same thing as saying it’s morally wrong.
On the other hand, if god does exist and is involved in our daily lives (as is alleged), then I don’t see how morality can be other than objective. The sky is blue, whether I like it or not; objects fall to the earth at a rate of 9.8 meters per second per second, whether I like it or not; and murder is wrong, whether I like it or not. (Though that still leaves room for personal preference and social convention - for example, driving on the left side of the road is not intrinsically wrong.)
The trouble with that is that catholicism derives its strength from its logical consistency; and if you try to swap other things in, you run the risk of introducing inconsistencies.
But this leaves open the possibility (in which I and many others believe) that we, as humans, create our own morality, and then, as a group, follow it and compel others in the group to follow it. It’s not much different from electing a tribal chief. We pick one, and now he’s the boss.
Western Civilization picked certain tenets, and they are now our morality. Everything is no longer lawful. Rape, murder, arson, theft: out.
What does it matter if this is not “objective” or God-ordained? It works. We choose our morals, the way we build everything else in our civilization: from scratch.
Depends on the God. God might not care. “You kids settle things among yourselves: I’ve got some supernovas I need to take care of.”
I suppose, but this approach, in itself, risks “foolish consistencies.” Catholicism suffers from this, for instance in its opposition to contraception, which is inconsistent with the moral causes of individual liberty, reduction of poverty, and being a good caretaker of the planet. The Catholic Church should long ago have reversed its teachings on this, and is in danger of becoming an absurd relic because of it. Such a reversal would not invalidate the Church’s stance on numerous other issues, and, rather than weakening the Church, would strengthen it.
Yes, allowing individuals to make up their own minds on issues would weaken the Catholic Church’s idea of top-down hierarchy. But it has yet to be determined if this rigid structure is morally good. Too much central control diminishes personal liberty. Quis custodiet… History shows this pretty clearly in the eras of really bad Popes.