It’s “progress” from the point of view of the patriarchs, though, which I think is the point.
I don’t believe in objective morality. Morality is a human concept, and it’s boundaries are solely what humans decide they should be. That doesn’t mean I believe all moral systems are equally desirable, it just means I’m not mistaking my own personal preferences for how things ought to be as a universal truth. I’m a very strong supporter of LGBT rights, at home and abroad. I would very much like to see the anti-LGBT regimes in places like Russia and Saudi Arabia replaced, and would view such a replacement as “progress.” But that’s an entirely anthropocentric value judgement. I value gay rights, and I perceive any increase in support for gay rights as progress. Another person, who despises gay rights, would see an increase in homophobia as progress. Neither of us is objectively right, because there is no objective truth behind morality. That doesn’t stop me from regarding that guy as an immoral shithead, and most likely, vice-versa.
So you do not believe in objective morality but you will think the other guy is an immoral shithead.
On what basis do you do that? The other guy feels the same so no one is right? Your moral superiority in this is a fiction you feed to yourself and nothing more?
I am honestly asking and not trying a “gotcha” because I struggle with an answer to this for myself.
I have settled on a neutral metric that resolves the basic dilemma consistently across the board. It may not fit well in some cultures, but I consider it the most elegant.
“Evil” is marked by power. “Good” is marked by getting along with others. Actions that serve to arbitrarily enhance the power of one person or clique over others (either without their consent or through deception) trend away from the ethical. The greater the power that is involved, the further from morally acceptable the action is. But any situation must be well-understood before a reasonable judgement can be made, because humans can be kind of elaborate, opaque and unpredictable.
To that, I would add foresight: if the long-term result of an action is likely to be troublesome, the short-term gain should not necessarily be viewed in a positive or neutral light.
Put these two things together and I think you can establish a baseline framework for making moral judgements. But this framework is still not really without cultural bias. If it would upset the locals, caution is advised.
If we take an evolutionary perspective, it’s clear that morality evolves (imagine that!) over time. Our closest relatives share some very basic moral concepts with us, but differ from us pretty dramatically, too. Our common ancestor with chimps and gorillas was almost certainly not like us. Whatever sense of morality we have (and it’s not the same across all human populations), it got to where it is through natural selection. You’d have to postulate an outside agent, like God, to conclude that there was some absolute morality that existed apart from what we are as a species. And who is to say that we’ll be the same species 2M years in the future?
We can try to be as objective as possible and observe our species as if we were alien biologists or sociologists, and figure out what some common tenets of human morality exist across all populations, but there is no reason to think that those tenets were valid in the past or that they will be valid in the future. Or that they would be valid for some other sentient life form with a different evolutionary history than our species.
I don’t think all morality could be relative. Maybe it’s just my bias as a human?
I think the prohibition against doing harm to other humans, for a bad reason or for no reason, is not removable from our morality without ruining the whole thing. I think we argue and change our minds about what is a bad reason to harm someone, and about what is or is not harm, but I don’t think the basic prohibition can go away.
Besides being trite, I think that is overly simplistic. What I am saying is that without power, one cannot offend, so one metric for assessing the moral value of an action is to examine the action’s power dynamic. If an intended effect would be to amplify the imbalance of power, that strongly pushes the moral measure of the act toward the negative.
And fuck this “absolute power” noise. That is not a thing.
It is trite because your wordy rhetoric was trite. I just made it more succinct.
This is just a succinct way of saying, “If an intended effect would be to amplify the imbalance of power, that strongly pushes the moral measure of the act toward the negative.”
That I had already said we would continue to argue about what constitutes a good reason to harm someone, and you seemed to think I had said I was against ever harming anyone for any reason.
I’m a hypothetical “natural humanist.” Power is just an evolutionary means of survival and if an individual accruing it is most likely to survive then his descendants will be in a better place because of it and humanity will be ‘better.’ Similarly, just getting along with others is a survival strategy and if getting along well makes us less likely to pass on their genes, then it makes getting along well an immoral act.
Letting down my mates and my country are insignificant. Them feeling let down is no harm to them. Have you ever seen me fight? If you did you’d know it doesn’t matter whose side I’m on, the war will turn out the same either way.
And I don’t give a shit what anybody else says about God, so that’s out as well.
So the most wrong I could do is fight, and the most right I could do is not fight.
According to the PhilPapers survey, most philosophers are moral realists, i.e. they hold that ethical judgments express genuine propositions that may be true or false.
You’re thinking of J. L. Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.
I’ve known several philosophers from my days in academe and they were more morally and ethically inclined than most people, every one. The moral nihilists work in business.
Yes and no. Even if there is no objective morality, a person can still be objectively right or wrong about some of the factual beliefs that their morality is based on—like if they despise gay rights because of a mistaken notion of what homosexuality is or what gay people are like.
Your evolutionary perspective, is, IMHO, the absolutely right way to look at it.
Morals are not supposed to be arbitrary rules that are enforced for the sake of capriciousness. Morals are supposed to serve society in making it funcion more cohesively, and with less misery and violence overall. Morals that are detrimental to the smooth and efficient functioning of society generally lose favor, and eventually die out, though not always quitely. Morals that do not yet exist can come about and become part of social understanding if they are useful.
The morals that are laid down in religious texts are, IMHO, written by human beings in an attempt to get other human beings to behave. The philosophical justification that following a moral code improves the lives of everyone in a civilization, even if it is at a cost to some individuals, is a hard lift for bronze age farmers and shepherds. Saying, “Because God said so.” is a much easier explanation.
The problem with morals written down in religious texts is that they are written down in religious texts. They are hard to change and modify to adapt to changes in society and also technology. They stop serving to improve society, and instead, cause it to stagnate and prevents growth.
