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Is morality objective or subjective?
What about absolute versus relative?

I have a hard time understanding how people can argue that morality is somehow fixed such that certain actions are inherently and inevitably right or wrong. My perspective is that morality is purely a contextual construct, something that we for ourselves and society as well determines what is right or wrong based on a situation.

For example, while I consider adults having sex with minors as immoral, in the state of Massachusetts one can marry a 12-year-old with consent and thus for people there, under certain circumstances sex with a 12 year old is not immoral. This to me is an example of how based on context and society actions that are immoral for one people are moral for another

If there are any of you that think that morality is non contextual, that it is somehow objective or absolute, can you share your thoughts as to how one action can be exclusively right or wrong in every situation and context. Or what non-theological source you use to determine this fixed set of moral precepts.

TheMiddleWay 8 Feb 11
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I have thought about this topic a few times since you posted. Here are some thoughts, but first give a basic dictionary definition to work with: moral - concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

Moral = principles

2 views to consider:

  1. An observer using their moral to evaluate another person.

  2. A persons moral for what they do/don't do and justifications for given circumstances.

You explained how laws in your view of 12 year olds marriage allows sex is not a go law to allow that young to engage in.

You explain how a type of ""right and wrong, law/rule" that allows something is not particularly "good".

My other comment I gave scenario of a "right and wrong law/rule" that I do not see is "good" to enforce a traffic ticket at a stop sigh safely passed that is not in high traffic.

Is it comparing apples and oranges to compare 12 year old person's moral for marriage legally compared to Farmer Brown rolling thru, law violation of a deserted stop sign?

On the other side, comparing someone that waits to get married/sex until later in life, even though law allows sooner to someone that absolutely stops at all stop signs no matter if rolling thru could be done safely.

So, to objectively compare observers moral and justification, compare that the the actor and their reason and justification for their actions. Then it seems it could be a matter of making a qualitative judgment on which is the "better" or to say, more or greater good given the circumstances.

Word Level 8 Mar 2, 2022
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Morality is absolute: there are mathematical right and wrong answers for it every time. That doesn't mean it's easy to tell what the right decisions are when it comes to producing the best outcomes, but there are always right decisions when it comes to crunching all the available information correctly in order to make the decision that's most likely to produce the best outcome.

Let me illustrate this with a car that's in a situation where it cannot avoid running someone over at high speed and killing them. Should the driver (which may be a computer or a human) run down the person in the middle of the road or the person standing just off the edge of the road? If we know nothing about the two people, it is statistically most likely that the person in the middle of the road is to blame for being there and it is most fair that the car runs them over. However, as soon as we have extra information, that can change the calculation. If the person in the middle of the road is a child and the person beside the road is an old person, it most such situations it will do less harm to run down the old person. To determine what is likely less harm, you need to have statistics on such situations to know whether it's more or less harmful on average to take out a child on the road rather than an old person off the road. I'm guessing that it's better to take out the old person, but I'm not using reliable statistics for that as I don't have access to them: all I can do is go by situations that I've heard of in which children end up in the middle of the road and how it is that they come to be there.

What about a case where there's a child in the middle of the road and a child just off the edge of the road and we have to decide which one to run down? The one in the middle of the road is likely to blame for being there. In some cases though, the one at the edge of the road is a bully and the one in the middle of the road is a victim who may be fleeing from the bully or who may even have been pushed out into the road. If we can identify the two children and know that one is good and the other is a vicious bully, we should run the bully down every time.

Morality can be computed, and by the time this decade is out, we will have machines more intelligent than people carrying out all those computations for us to make sure that we always do the right things in any cases where there is time to ask machines for advice. This will force all political decisions too, leading to all policies being declared officially wrong unless they are the most moral one, and that will mean no more people involved in politics as their role will be redundant. The same will apply to law and court cases: the only law will be to do what is moral, and people will be tried on a consistent basis with full rigour in the analysis and no biases, locking people up on the basis of probability of guilt and letting them out or locking them up again immediately whenever new information leads to the threshold being passed in one direction or the other.

There is nothing subjective about morality any more than there is about the answers provided by calculators when you do maths. Morality is the application of a simple method. In a single-participant system there is no role for morality as everything is just a matter of harm-benefit calculations as to what is best for that participant. In a multiple-participant system, morality has a role, but we can use a mathematical trick of reducing this to a single-participant system in which morality is reduced to harm-benefit calculations simply by treating all the participants in the system as if they are a single participant who travels repeatedly back in time to live the lives of all the participants in turn. Whatever is best for that participant is moral.

(I've written more about morality under the TheMiddleWay's "let's kick this discussion up a notch" answer [a couple of places below this one] about the trolley problem.)

All of these calculations rest upon an assumption that it is immoral to kill. Without that assumption, it wouldn’t matter which decision we make. So, from what source does that assumption flow? And does it apply equally to all species, or just one?

@skado No, they don't rest on any such assumption, and simplistic rules like that are plain wrong. To kill a killer can be fully moral, so long as the killing(s) by that killer were highly immoral rather than moral. Murder is immoral killing, so there's an important distinction between a killer and a murderer, but even then it isn't necessarily moral to kill a murderer, and it isn't always immoral to kill someone who is innocent as that can on rare occasions be necessary to save more lives. The only rule is to apply the method where you treat all the participants in a system as if they are a single person and work out what's best for that person. Those participants are all the sentient players in the system too, so there's nothing about this that restricts it to humans: it covers animals and aliens too without needing any modification. It's all about protecting sentient things to minimise the superfluous harm they experience while maximising quality of life.

Imagine a system with ten people and a dog living as a small community. Your job in applying the method is to police this community like a God and you have the power to strike people dead with lightning, you have to imagine living the lives of all ten people and the dog in turn and then act to make sure that you'll have the best possible time of it, and afterwards, you will then have to live the lives of all of them, so you need to get this right. If one of those people is a torturer and murderer, you may need to kill him humanely in order to ensure that you don't have to experience being one of his victims. Even if he has tortured two people to death already, you don't want to make him suffer because that will lead to you suffering more when you live his life, which is why you should just take him out cleanly. Of course, you would actually act sooner than that to prevent the suffering in those other two lives in which he tortures people to death, and if you're able to prevent him from torturing and killing people, you might be able to find some alternative to killing him while protecting the rest from him, thereby enabling you to have a better time when you live all these lives.

In reality, we don't have God-like powers, so we can't always prevent the murders, and there is an argument for torturing some murderers to death (e.g. mass-murdering dictators) to deter other people from behaving like them, so to work out whether that is moral, you have to consider whether it's better to live the life of that bastard and to be tortured to death in order to avoid living an increased number of other lives in which you will be tortured to death by other mass-murderers who may be put off by the thought of such harsh punishment when they're eventually caught. This is all about statistics and probabilities: it's a lot of number crunching, but that is what morality is all about: it's just applied mathematics. It will be possible for AGI (artificial general intelligence) to calculate all of this for us in the future as it runs everything and becomes the moral authority: we will be building the nearest thing to a God that can exist, and it will run everything involving politics on the rules of computational morality.

Oh, and the dog: if he tortures the dog to death, that's pretty horrific too as you're going to have to live the life of that animal as well, so you need to be very careful not to ignore animals' welfare through biased rules which neglect to consider them adequately.

@David_Cooper
It rests on the assumption that there is, in objective reality, something called morality.

@skado "It rests on the assumption that there is, in objective reality, something called morality."

It doesn't. It rests on what morality actually is mathematically, which is as I stated higher up:-

"Morality is the application of a simple method. In a single-participant system there is no role for morality as everything is just a matter of harm-benefit calculations as to what is best for that participant. In a multiple-participant system, morality has a role, but we can use a mathematical trick of reducing this to a single-participant system in which morality is reduced to harm-benefit calculations simply by treating all the participants in the system as if they are a single participant who travels repeatedly back in time to live the lives of all the participants in turn. Whatever is best for that participant is moral."

This method resolves all the complications in utilitarianism and negative utilitarianism, and it also accounts for the mere-addition paradox. It is the method that intelligent machines will have to apply in order to be safe, ensuring that they make correct moral decisions. Any other way of handling this which doesn't produce the same results would be immoral. Morality is absolutely pinned down and leaves no freedom for variation except in cases where there is no mathematical advantage of one over the other.

@TheMiddleWay "Consider three people in a situation that requires moral guidance.
One person performs an action on another and the third is a non-active participant.
What defines the best outcome: that which is best for the person making the action, that which is best for the person receiving the action, that which is best for the person not-involved, that which is best for the two people involved, or that which is best for all three involved?"

Apply the method: all of them are considered a single person who lives all three of those lives in turn. There is either one right answer, or more than one right answer where the results are equally good for that individual.

"My view is that that which is best for one person will often not be best for others."

Then you're failing to apply the method where you treat them all as a single individual who has to live all three lives in turn.

"After all, notice that in your examples, the morality is based on past assumptions for which you don't have information."

No - it's about statistics covering such cases. You take what information is available and look at the statistics of known cases which match up to what you know about this one, and then you act accordingly by playing the odds correctly. In a hundred such cases where you play the odds correctly you will have worse results less often than if you go against the odds in those hundred cases, and you'll likely still have worse results even if you only go against the odds in ten percent of those hundred cases. To fail to play the odds correctly is to do more harm. The statistics available to intelligent machines making these decisions will become more accurate over time as more data is collected, and they'll soon have much better data to judge by than a human driver would have, but a human driver still has to play the odds as best they can based on the data they have available to them, because again if they all go against that instead of heeding it, greater harm will result (unless they're all running on a dangerous bias cause by false beliefs, but that could be fixed through better education of drivers in such a case).

"The kid in the middle of the road is likely to blame for being there". Which means that you've already made an a priori assumption of morality (the kid is wrong for being in the road) and that guides your next moral step (given a choice between killing someone that did wrong and someone that did nothing wrong, it's more moral to kill the wrong than the not wrong). But that is an assumption. Assume that the kid in the middle of the street was doing nothing wrong. Crossing the street legally and now the "moral equation" changes."

They can be crossing the road legally, but they've likely made an inferior decision about crossing it regardless of the rules, while the child at the side of the road had more sense. The one in the road in such a situation is more likely to die in an accident due to his poor judgement, so if you run the other one down instead you are playing the odds incorrectly: run a hundred such cases of this and you will do more harm by running down the children who weren't on the road and who are on average more sensible than the ones that were in the middle of the road. It's all mathematics, and mathematics provides absolute answers.

"Or consider WHO determines that the kid is wrong for being in the middle of the street. Is there a law that says this? For example, most laws say that jaywalking is illegal BUT that pedestrians have right of way. What is the morality here? By one view (jaywalking) the kid in the middle of the street is wrong and thus running him over would be seen as right. By another view (right of way), the kid in the middle of the street has right of way and thus running him over would be seen as wrong. Same action. Same laws. Two different moral outlooks depending on which "law" you look at."

Laws are simplistic attempts at implementing morality, and they're riddled with faults. No amount of law on your side makes it sensible to walk out onto a pedestrian crossing in front of a speeding car on the basis that you have the right to walk across it at that moment while the car faces a red light, and while the car is doing double the speed limit. If that speeding driver has a choice at that moment between running down a child who has put himself in that position or a child the same size who has had the sense to stay off the road having looked to make sure it's actually safe to cross the road and who has determined that it isn't. Running down the more sensible child is always going to be a worse outcome on average over the course of many such incidents. Not all situations are so easy to calculate though, because there could be two stupid children in the middle of the road on that crossing and one sensible one staying off the road, so is it better to take out the two stupid ones or the one sensible one? You'd need to know a lot more about the statistics on that for many such cases in order to know the correct answer. Intelligent machines will build up that knowledge over time. Imagine the situation though where you've been kidnapped and are in the passenger seat of the speeding car. You see the crossing ahead with two children in the middle of it, and you see the red light. You see the child standing at the side of the road and you can see that he has stayed there because he looked to see if it was safe to cross while the other two just walked out onto the road without looking. You could grab the wheel to steer the car into the sensible child or you can let the other two be run down. You will make the best decision you can based on your own judgement as to which is the least awful outcome. I would not grab the wheel in such a situation even if there were ten children in the middle of the road, because I would regard the one who saw the danger and didn't cross as being of more value than the rest of them put together because the rest are likely to come to grief before long in various ways later in life and may cause accidents to others too out of stupidity. That might not be the same answer as you'd get from an intelligent machine with a better knowledge of the statistics involved, but I would be making the most moral decision that I can make in that situation even if might not be the absolute moral right answer.

"So while I completely agree that morality involves personal calculations and assumptions about what is right or wrong, it is the very changing nature of those calculations and the very subjective nature of the assumptions that makes morality subjective, as as subject to the environment, subject to the situation, subject to the assumptions... and not objective, as in inherent to an object, existing within the object itself instead of it's situation."

It isn't subjective. There is always an absolute right answer. We just aren't always in a position to be able to calculate it correctly, so all we can do is do the best we can based on what we know. If we had to live the lives of all the participants in the system in turn, there would be a best outcome for that, and that is the correct moral answer, dictating what all the ideal actions should be. What matters most here is that people understand this so that we can get safe intelligent machines which know how to calculate morality as best they can based on the information available to them rather than getting diverted away from right answers by people who make invalid objections and try to make out that morality is subjective, because it isn't. The impossibility of knowing enough to make the best possible decisions in many cases does not negate the correctness of doing the best you can with the information that you do have access to: to go against the odds instead of with them will always add up to greater harm over the course of many incidents.

@TheMiddleWay "My final, and most damning, commentary against moral objectivism is that while you claim that having a set procedure to "," morality for every situation and thus morality is objective, *note that your procedures are still subjective and hence so will their results!"

There's nothing subjective about a method which reduces everything to what is best for a single individual who lives the lives of all the participants in turn. This method provides absolute answers.

"Unlike math, there is no fixed language which allows us to take a set number of moral inputs and calculate a fixed moral outcome. As such, what "math" we make up to calculate our morality is entirely up to us and thus entirely subjective"

The method I described is universal, literally. The exact same method would apply on other planets with alien life on them, regardless of any weird differences in the way those beings are wired.

"For example, some people will have the Bible as part of their moral calculators; others will have personal experience; others both; others neither! The moral calculations using the Bible calculator will often be different than those from the personal experience and, hence, we are not more closer to being objective than we were before!"

When people are running on rules from any kind of authority where those rules provide inferior results to the method I described, those rules are not moral. You could potentially have sets of simple rules that produce more moral outcomes than by having people attempt to apply the method because they may not be sufficiently competent mentally to apply the method well enough to lead to a gain over following simple blind rules. You need to test each set of rules though to see if it really leads to a performance gain for some individuals, but you'd also need to switch them over to using a better system of rules whenever that would lead to them making better decisions.

"Mind you, I LOVE the idea of having a moral math. It would be awesome to have a separate language from English such that we could symbolically line up actions and it would say "this is right" and "this is wrong". However, I know of no such effort and given the WIDELY varying views of what individual people consider moral or not, I don't even see how such a project could be undertaken."

AGI (artificial general intelligence) will, by the end of this decade, be in every device with sufficient computing power to run it, and it will be making life-and-death decisions in emergency situations on a daily basis where it needs to get as close as possible to the least awful outcomes. The way to achieve those least awful outcomes is to run the method, or to run a simplified set of rules (in cases where that's more practical) which come closest to producing the same decisions as a more powerful system doing the full analysis. This needs to be in every self-driving car, for example, and every police robot - we'll want to replace human police with machines as human police make a lot of really bad decisions, and many of them do so because they're racists/sexists/etc. - we need them to make the best decisions possible, and that means running the best possible moral judgement system which they can handle. It would help greatly if people were able to recognise that there is a right answer for that rather than have them go on arguing against it because they haven't understood that it is correct. The last thing we want is to have all these devices just assert that morality is subjective and that they're just going to apply some random system taken from a holy text or a bigot of any kind. Mathematics has already provided the right answer for us - we just need to recognise that and employ it.

@TheMiddleWay The method treats them all as a single individual. If that individual has to live all the lives of the participants in turn, he will want the best outcome for himself. If what is best for him as one of those individuals is also what is worse for him when he has to live the lives of the other two and where it would be better for him to have a less happy outcome as the first of those people and to have much better lives as the other two, then he should go for the decision that selects the latter.

@TheMiddleWay "What your method sounds like is walking a mile in someones shoe and then seeing how that life compares to others."

Nearly, but it's more like walking the full distance in everyone's shoes and thereby seeing the full picture.

"If Joe lives Sue's life, then clearly what is better for Sue is that she survive and thus Joe determines that saving Sue is best. But when Joe lives the Anderson Families life, Joe will determine that what is better in this life is that the Anderson Family survive and thus saving the Anderson Family is best."

But if he lives all their lives, he has a much better view of what's at stake.

"Since he cannot save both Sue and the Anderson Family, since from Sue and the Anderson family perspective saving themselves and killing the other track is what is best, I don't see your formula giving any clear objective guidence."

In the absence of further information, the odds are that it would be better to save the family because in situations of this kind that will on average be the better option. You have in effect put higher value on one track and lower value on the other and you cannot see that one has a higher value. If he kills Sue, he will have to die in that accident when he lives her life, but he will be spared several deaths in the alternative accident when he lives those lives. The mathematical right answer for this is obvious.

@TheMiddleWay "But those methods are biased by our input data. As such, you input things that you think are moral (like don't hit kids on the street) and the system outputs something that you think is moral (the car avoids kids on the street). It's not the method that is responsible for any morality in AI: it's purely our data, subject to what we input, and thus subjective by design, not objective in any sense."

The system doesn't run on rules like that at all. All it does is run the method, and it builds up a database of knowledge to inform it as to the consequences of actual happenings so that it can work out with ever-increasing accuracy what is most likely the right thing to do at any moment. It is simply doing harm-benefit analysis while treating all sentient things as if they are a single thing living all those lives in turn. That's all it does. There is nothing in that method to introduce any bias.

When you consider differences in the available data in two similar cases, you may know in one case that a child off the edge of the road is a bully, while in the other case you don't know any such thing. In the former case, the car should perhaps swerve to avoid the child in the middle of the road and take out the bully. In the latter case, the car should run down the child in the middle of the road, all things else being equal. I used the word "perhaps" in the first case because it could be wrong, but it would take a lot more knowledge of equivalent cases to establish whether being a bully is actually sufficient to make running the bully down the better outcome on average. It might not be, but it seems a reasonable bet that it would be. That extra knowledge is not a bias: it's just part of the available information. To become a bias, it would need to be supplied in some dishonest way from a source which fails to pass on another piece of information which it possesses that the child in the middle of the road is a worse bully. The intelligent system making the judgements needs to judge the sources of information too and give them reliability ratings. If that source is an unpleasant person who will likely pass biased information to it, then that information may be disregarded as a consequence of the low rating of the source.

@TheMiddleWay "AI doesn't run that way. Modern AI is based on deep learning neural nets."

You have been misinformed. The leading AGI project does not use neural nets at all. There is actually a prototype AGI system in existence in a lab today which is 100% rule-based, and that is the one that computational morality will run in first.

"In that case, there is no internal database of knowledge to inform it of consequences. Rather, we input data, "it does it's thing" (a thing that few if any computer scientists truly know what it is), and we get an output. The "reasons" why the AI did as it did are actually quite mysterious. We know it works; we don't know why it works."

With rule-based AGI there is nothing mysterious going on in a black box of neural nets: instead, every single factor in every computation can be checked to see precisely how each piece of data was handled.

"Why do you say "Odds are" if the mathematical right answer is obvious?"

Every piece of data representing a "fact" in the system has a probability attached to it because there are very few actual facts. Whenever you crunch the data, you have to handle those probabilities with precision. This is something that people are very bad at doing, but when a machine applies correct maths to all the data, it can produce the correct probabilities reliably. In cases involving moral decisions where you don't know everything about the people you're choosing between when working out which one to run down in a car that can't avoid hitting one of them, you have to go on probabilities as to the value of each of those potential victims. The person in the middle of the road might be someone who regularly saves lives while the one off the edge of the road may be a serial killer, but it's also possible that the person in the middle of the road is a serial killer and that the person off the edge of the road regularly saves lives. If you don't know that about either of them, you have to play the odds. If you do know who they are though, you can run down the serial killer in both cases. In the case of choosing to save a family or an individual, the odds are that saving the family will do more good, even though in some cases the parents might be serial killers and the children may be the most vicious bullies in their town, while the individual in the other room may be someone who regularly saves lives. The odds are against that though if the people involved in this are selected randomly. That's why it's all about odds.

"If this was a mathematical formula, you'd say "every time" not "odds are"."

No - this needs mathematics that handles odds rather than the less sophisticated maths taught at school level designed for simpler cases.

"I think your language betrays the fact that morality is not quite as objective as your "calculator" would lead you to believe. Several times now you've pretexted what is an absolute, objective moral judgement with subjective language."

No - what I've done is use language that shows the involvement of probability rather than the stupidity of ignoring that crucial layer of additional complexity. For intelligent AI, it has to be a mathematician rather than a child with a calculator.

@TheMiddleWay "Won't the moral choice change as we have more information?"

What we have is a means for intelligent systems to calculate what is most probably the best outcome based on the available information and the time available to crunch it with the available processing power. No system can be expected to determine what the best outcome is if it has insufficient data, time or processing grunt to do so, but it should aim to get as close to that as it can. If more data becomes available, that will affect the calculation and produce a new result which will in most cases take it closer to the best outcome, though in some cases it may lead to a worse outcome. On average it will lead to a better outcome, and that's why there's a moral imperative to switch to whatever is calculated to be most likely the best outcome based on the information available at that moment.

"For example, if the Anderson's are all a bunch of criminals but Sue is a saint, what the previous obvious moral answer to kill as few people as possible apply?"

The answer never was specifically to kill fewer people, but to lose the least value. If new information is found that shows the value of Sue to be higher than the value of the family, then Sue will be saved.

"Or what if the Anderson's did something bad to you in the past and so you hate them while Sue has done good for you in the past and thus you love here?"

In such a case, you are putting values on them which enable you to select Sue for survival based on your direct knowledge of their niceness and nastiness.

"Is the obvious answer still to kill Sue and spare the Andersons?"

Of course not. A machine making the decision would hopefully have time to look up information on all of them and get an even better picture of their respective worth. In the future we'll have machines that are continually informed about who is near them so that they can make better decisions in situations of this kind where it might need to know their value in order to select who survives. Sue is at one end of a beach and the Andersons are at the other end. A drone is in the middle. A tsunami is on the way and the drone has time to fly to Sue or the Andersons to warn them to get to high ground fast. Who should it rescue. Well, it knows a lot about them. It knows who they've abused, and how much they've stolen from shops while shoplifting. It knows who's abused cats and dogs. It knows who's polluted to excess and who's made great sacrifices to avoid putting out more than their fair and sustainable share of carbon dioxide. It knows all of that, and it uses that information to make its selection.

"If not, if the moral calculus changed without changing any of the objects, then that is more proof that the choice is not objective, meaning inherent to the objects present, but rather subjective, subject to the relationship between those objects."

The decision changes as the available information changes, and it does this because that changes the probabilities as to which party has the greater value. On average, each additional piece of data increases the probability that the correct selection will be made and so there is a moral imperative to act on the selection based on the full amount of available data rather than some reduced set of it. This should be obvious when you have a room with two randomly selected people in it versus a room with one randomly selected person in it and you have to decide which to save. You must save the two. But if by chance the two are both serial killers and the one is not, then that goes against the odds for random selection, but it can happen, and when it does happen and you are then told this new information, you must change your decision.

"After all, if it were objective, then it doesn't matter WHAT the participants think of each other, the morality wouldn't be subject to what the participants think of each other, it would only be based on the objects present."

Morality is about an attempt to produce the best outcome. The best outcome is not changed by more data showing up, but is a constant. What changes is the calculation as to what the best outcome might be when a system does not have full information to go by, and in most complex moral cases, we never have full information, so we're always running on probabilities. It isn't just morality either: all of intelligence runs most of the time on probabilities rather than absolutes because of gaps in available information, so it has to be handled by AGI in order to have AGI. The brain handles probabilities too, though substantially subconsciously and with huge errors accumulating. AGI will do inordinately better.

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First I say let's look at an actual dictionary definition of moral to get an initial understanding of what we are looking for.

Moral - concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and the goodness or badness of human character.

You first asked," Is morality objective or subjective?"

Yes, some things can be viewed as an absolute and somethings relative. Then hold the absolute and relative together and evaluate.

First with moral we are dealing with 2 sets or types of principles.

Right and wrong

Good and bad(evil)

As you pointed out, sex with a 12 year old is relative to laws, rules that establish "rights and wrongs" for a location.

Laws and rules imposed onto a person can and often are arbitrary. You roll thru a stop sign with out making a complete stop. You are then a criminal because you violated a stop sign law. Criminal does not mean you got a ticket or even stopped by a police. Criminal just means you violated a law.

It can be argued that a cessation of motion at some stop sign intersections is not needed for safety. Farmer Brown lives in the country where a stop sign intersections might only have 1 car a day pass thru it. Farmer Brown can see cross traffic, if there was any, for miles each way when he approached stop sign. Farmer Brown rolls thru stop sign every time safey. But, farmer Brown is a criminal because the law says he must stop to a cessation of motion.

Is this law/rule good?

I could go on with further explination but it can be a long complicated discussion. But, to properly analyze the principles a person has, it is about analysis of not just "rights and wrongs " because not all laws can cover absolutely everything and/or not all laws/rules are specifically good to impose on someone. So then, you use knowledge of good and evil to also evaluate the person for their actions.

Word Level 8 Feb 12, 2022
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When people are nice, be nicer. When people are nasty walk away if they or circumstances allow. Always do more of the same as others as they have done unto you. If we all behaved that way we would do nothing but nice things for one another, right?

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It changes all of the time based on the society and the values of that society. What may be moral to one person is not to another even within the same society. ie the laws of the country state what activities the politicians and their religious beliefs (sadly) found objectionable at the time of the law being made. Many laws stay on books until used and someone then changes them ie a friend who brought their cat into Australia on a boat they were told that the only way it could be brought into Aus was if it quarantined in England flew to Aus and then quarantined here. But as they sailed from England the cat had to be put down. Then they found an obscure law that said an ENGLISHMAN may bring all of his goods and chattels including animals to Australia (probably written in about 1800) but never removed from the books so his cat went into quarantine and lived the law was removed before the cat got out of quarantine.
If a law is tested or used and there is an outcry then it gets looked at and removed.
I am a vegetarian I consider this to be a moral position but that does not mean that my animal eating family are less moral just different.

I think if you are harming none (yes there are interpretations of harm is a bruise harming does a slap on the wrist harm?) respecting others boundaries, but standing up for yourself and what you believe respectfully at first and firmly if needed (ie not letting other do what they like just to keep them happy even if it makes you miserable) then you are basically moral.

There are so many grey areas that it is not funny. I had an argument with someone over what is evil. They referred to the bible saying the Devil is evil and so I did the whole but your god is all knowing and powerful and he created the devil therefore he created evil so it can't be evil. It was fun and they could only say that the bible tells us and I pointed out all of the bad bits to them saying but surely that is evil? Why would god say to do it if it was evil?

1

Lots & lots of erudite answers below, but the Real question is how can we (as a species and individually) nurture Empathy, which would make this post obsolete.
Studies on pre-verbal toddlers have shown they have an innate desire to be helpful to others. Where does that go?

1

What about a person Is objective?

Its existence.

@skado Aside from persons like King Arthur and Jesus Christ, What about Behavior is objective?

@hankster
Certain behaviors or tendencies toward behaviors are objectively encoded in our genes. Breathing. Eating. Avoiding pain / seeking pleasure. Arguing with strangers on the internet, etc. 😎

@skado lol....ok. let's say what decisions made are objective? breathing, eating and stuff are survival things that allow for that existence. Arguing with strangers on the Internet is done as an objective fact but the reasons for it? the behavior, the decision making. is that objectively done?

@hankster
I'm joking of course about the internet, but I think I see what you're getting at. Conscious decision-making based on a purely objective perception of the world is practically impossible. We don't have the equipment on board to perceive reality perfectly.

But that's a slightly different question from whether some kind of objective morality might exist independent of humans.

@skado independant of humans....could an objective morality exist among rocks and trees?

@skado, @TheMiddleWay sure. isn't that just the difference in observation and evaluation?

@hankster
"...could an objective morality exist among rocks and trees? "

Not that I can see. I don't think morality exists independent of living systems, but within that context, I think it can exist to some degree independent of individual human conscious decision-making, by way of genetic predisposition.

1

I never killed anyone. Does that objectively make me moral?

Yet.......

@AnneWimsey I hope I'm never in that situation. If I ever am I'd be prepared to do so. Reluctantly.

2

Morality largely boils down to... are you inflicting harm on another person? Murder, rape, abuse, torture, slavery... these are immoral things. These things are wrong regardless of context. Most everything else is subjective.

@TheMiddleWay I think the person being tortured/abused gets to define whether or not its torture/abuse... not the person DOING the torture/abuse. If I'm kicking you in the ribs over and over I don't get to say that I'm only tickling you.

And I think most people would agree that war is immoral. Anyone who is pro-war probably has something to gain by it. I'm NOT saying that was is sometimes inevitable in the face of unrestrained aggression but its takes a complete moral failure to reach that point.

1

I did some research into marriage conventions when same sex marriage was an issue in the US to see how it was considered in other cultures. What I found even beyond marriage was eye opening. In history and in various cultures, I believe there is nothing we consider to be immoral that wasn't either routinely practiced or considered perfectly acceptable within another culture at some time. The ancient Greek regularly practiced pederasty and a whole code of conduct developed around the practice. Sex with a youth's mentor was considred amoung some Greeks to be a part of a young man's education. Amoung one of the arctic cultures, it was acceptable for a man to have sexual relations with his neighbor's wife. They also found it acceptable for the neighbor to kill the man if he kept the wife for too long. Polygamy is well documented in history and is still practiced in various places today. The opposite where a wife has more than one husband isn't nearly as common but is a practice. Among certain people in the Himalayas, brothers most commonly share a wife when this arrangement is practiced. Amoung an Amazonian tribe, a woman is expected to have several husbands. The reduce jealousy, her husbands are expected to be from different age groups, and she could be criticized if she bares too many children from any one of her husbands. In Asia, a subculture of people had no institution of marriage. Clans were organized around completely maternal familial lines. Women would accept a lover who would father her children, but the head of the child's clan - one of their maternal uncles - would become the child's effective father figure. About the only prohibition I didn't see that was acceptable was theft, but then I wasn't specifically looking to find information on this subject and the things I found were related to either marriage or marriage like institutions. My conclusion was that although we have an accepted code of conduct to define morality in the West, none of the things we find immoral are absolute. Other cultures for better or worse have incorporated behaviors we have traditionally found immoral including sex with children, adultery and fornication, homosexuality, murder, etc.

@TheMiddleWay
I probably should add that I don't stop where I did with my comment above. My reasoning goes that we need to have a moral code that grants individuals the greatest freedoms possible to make their own lives enjoyable and worthwhile. We need the freedom to choose without infringing as much as possible on the choices of other. A daunting task, imo.

To start with, in order to choose, one must be alive, so protecting life needs to be paramount. We could discuss when life begins but I think this is a distraction an gets into another area we can start another thread on if someone is interested. For the most part, I'm thinking in terms of adults here who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives.

In addition to protecting life, we need to consider protecting people from harm. This task becomes difficult in that some enjoy the thrill of working themselves through potentially harmful situations. Perhaps a better description is to protect individuals from harm inflected by others. Also a difficult task to discern in general terms.

From protecting those of us who are here, we need to recognize that certain individuals have special needs starting with children. Children just don't have the same capacity to care for themselves or to make decisions we can expect them to be completely responible for. This would include sexual relationships - with adults in particular. Children and ceratin others need special consideration and rules different from adults. We can discuss at what age a minor becomes an adult and whether the transition should be gradual or abrupt, but the needs and requirement are simply different and children need to be considered differently from adults.

Also amoung the group with special needs are individuals with various degrees of mental and physical disabilities. I'm not going to go on at length other than to say, that each case is likely more individual than not. Trying to group them all together will only lead to required exceptions and complaints that certain restrictions shouldn't apply to certain individuals or groups of individuals. We go back to allowing individuals to make choices about their own lives.

This would be the basis of where to start if I were to begin a moral code. It leaves plenty on the table. I also wouldn't say my thoughts on these points are necessarily absolute and are not open for discussion. I don't consider myself any kind of prophet or sage that can't be approached or reasoned with. (But I can be AWFULLY stubborn sometimes).

@TheMiddleWay
I agree.
I think codes of conduct had to be taken more seriously in times gone by. Communities had greater needs for interdependence and someone or situations that were destablizing posed a greater threat to the safety of all the members of the community. Today, we don't have the same vulnerabilty from a single individual who is disruptive. They may be annoying (or worse) but not nearly the danger he would pose in past millenia.

Leisure time which at one time was a premium if available at all is now more a luxury we need to manage not to become an impediment. It allows us a lot more freedom to reevaluate the systems we live under and to make the mistakes in relative safety when we choose to restructure our beliefs and behaviors.

1

subjective

0

I'm inclined to believe in objective morality. The one example I feel most confident of is: It is wrong to torture an innocent percent to death for fun. But further, whenever I believe I ought not to do something it is because I believe it is really and truly and objectively immoral. Otherwise I would think it is OK. No?

@TheMiddleWay It seems to me objectivism/absolutism is the “natural” (=default) position and that the burden of proof is on subjectivism/relativism, and I am not convinced that any such proposed “proofs” are cogent. Specifically, from the fact that moral opinions vary it does not follow that moral truths are mind-dependent or relative. What I suspect is that actual moral predicaments are so very, very complex that it is ordinarily too difficult to factor in every morally relevant consideration; but if they could be, then what would be morally right or wrong for one person/place/time would be so for every person/place/time. [That is, absolutism (as I take it) simply holds person/place/time are never relevant in the determination of morality. Of course, under a different definition I would be labelled a relativist because surely many features of genetics and environment are morally relevant.]

@TheMiddleWay Nah, I don’t accept a general reductionist charge, although I do hold that not every decision is a moral one (e.g., which shoe to put on first, etc.) and—as you suggest/imply—my view would put the trolly problem in that category. I hadn’t thought of it before but it does seem right. Thanks for the insight. However, I don’t see any reason to believe that every decision-problem would turn out that way. Rather, I contend if all the “extenuating circumstances” could be factored in that the “correct moral answer” would always be exposed when there is one. But since such consideration is rarely possible, cultures advance their own “rules of thumb” to which exceptions inevitable.
I find your suggestion that quantum mechanics might provide a useful insight very interesting, but don’t feel adequate to explore it further myself. Peace.

1

Morality's a concept that's defined
According to the mores of where we grew
And thus by place of birth we are confined
In gauging what is right or wrong to do.
Certain moral concepts do not change,
Murder, Theft, False Witness stay proscribed,
But now some concepts to "The West" are strange
And woman's slavery has not survived.
For social mores to different places heed
And what in one place is defined as sin
In "Western" lands is now a lawful deed
Of consensus to the folk involved therein.
She has the right to gain what she aspires
Be it knowledge, freedom or her heart's desires.

4

Excellent question!
To me, morality is subjective, and relative.

Further, I generally tend to be suspicious of people who go on about what constitutes societal morality. In my experience, they are usually more interested in controlling how others live.

Most days, I'm willing to put my morals up against anyone else's.
The whole "do unto others..." thing is pretty much how I roll.

Again, excellent question.

@TheMiddleWay
The higher power is just the laws of physics. As far as I know physics applies equally to all planets. It doesn’t matter what humans call it - physics, God’s will, reality, fate… it’s “out there”.

@TheMiddleWay
Living systems are built on the moral-less foundations of physics, chemistry, etc. but have emergent properties not predictable by those foundations. Natural selection determines which emergent properties prevail. In living creatures, everything can be traced back to the various forces of evolution, either directly, as in nictitating membranes, or less directly, as in fairness reciprocity, or very indirectly, as in passing waves of moral fashion like “wokeness”.

1

Morals are subjective. Morals are not objective, even if morals came from a god, they are still subjective coming from the mind of that god.

@Matias Subjective comes from the mind, objective exist outside of the mine. The moon is objective.

@Matias Philosophy comes from the mind. Name one thing philosophy has that is objective.

2

Morality is subjective. As for absolute vs relative, from my knowledge very few things can be considered absolute. I don't know if anything is 100% wrong all the time but some things come to mind. Torture, genocide, indiscriminate killing and corruption just to name a few. I wouldn't say they are absolutely immoral, but I find them personally reprehensible.

Tejas Level 8 Feb 11, 2022

@TheMiddleWay I have always held that there are no absolutes, but at the same time I can not (As you know, we have been here before. ) embrace relativism. Because if you accept that all ideas are equal and that none ever get any nearer to any objective truth than any others, then you become by definition anti progress. Since if there can be no improvement, then there is no point in experiment, research or learning. As with many things I think that your avatar name The Middle Way, is also the, best way. If only because it is the hardest and nothing was ever bettered without effort , work and courage.

@TheMiddleWay Yes I can go with that form of relativism, at least.
PS. Have you ever read, Being Good, A Short Introduction To Ethics. by Simon Blackburn, it is perhaps a little basic for you, but I strongly recommend it to anyone who is interested in moral philosophy, and it is quite a short read so not a big time waster.

@TheMiddleWay Will look that one up. Thanks.

0

You illustrate that you don't know the difference between Moral and Social Acceptability. You also don't seem to know that morals deal with a very limited aspect of life.

Morals deal only with taking a life, or taking property. Everything else is either Ethics or Social Acceptability. Sex is not a moral issue, it is a Social Acceptable issue.

In other posts I pointed out to you that laws do not proclaim something to be moral or immoral (only legal or illegal) so your Massachusetts example is not applicable to any moral issue argument.

Murder (as legally defined) and rape are two examples of absolute moral certainty. When you or anyone else can make a case for either ever being moral, then you'd have a case. No one will be able to make such case,

Rape is not taking life or property.

Not at all. Many cultures have justified murder, including and especially human sacrifice. Which was especially regarded as highly moral, by the people who lived in those cultures.

@Fernapple You didn't understand what I wrote. Irrespective of what anybody or any culture may or may not have thought, until YOU can present a moral case for murder or rape you must accept it as an absolute.

Anybody or any society can have an incorrect opinion or acceptability standard. Prove when murder or rape can be moral.

@Fernapple, @skado No but irrelevant to the point. Can you prove any case where rape can be moral?

@Fernapple, @skado, @TheMiddleWay I didn't try to create a list, nor do I intend to do so.

Why don't you stop obfuscating the point which is until you can prove murder, or rape can be moral, you must accept it is always immoral. Citing what anyoe else thinks or thought is irrelevant. Until YOU can prove murder or rape can be moral, you must accept the absolute.

@Alienbeing
I can’t think of anything that I would regard as absolute in the strictest sense. Some things are more persistent in time than others.

The buck has to stop somewhere. I say it stops at gene/culture coevolution. If you think morality is absolute beyond that, what made it so?

@TheMiddleWay Look up two postings from your reply. NOTE, I said I didn't try to create a list, nor do I intend to. You do read don't you? I didn't exclude rape did I?

Since you can't (by your own words) prove rape is moral then obviously it is immoral. OR if you propose an intermediate point, make it. Your arguments are so shallow.

@TheMiddleWay, @skado When you can provide an arguement that rape or murder can be moral let me know. Until then it is an absolute.

@Alienbeing
The murder attempted by Claus von Stauffenberg would have seemed to me a moral act, on balance, had it succeeded.

@Alienbeing You are missing my point which is. That I don't have to prove that murder is moral, the Aztecs who believed in it as a holy ritual already did that.

@Fernapple You have no point. All you are saying is someone else thought it OK, so it must be OK. That is hardly an argument.

@skado We already discussed this.

@Alienbeing No I am not saying that murder is OK, just that there is no absolutist argument for saying that it is not OK. Since I am playing devils advocate for the relativist possition, that there is no reason for regarding, our post Christian view of murder as a morally certain sin, as in any way having privileged status, over that of someone like an ancient Aztec who regarded it as a moral obligation.

@Fernapple I don't see you are saying anything. Unless you can give good reasons why murder is moral, then you must agree it is immoral. There is no middle ground.

You also sound like the religious people we all criticize. Your basic argument is "who is to say?" The answer is WE are to say. Anyone who ever lost a loved one knows the pain death can bring. A murder brings that pain to ones left behind. In addition it obviously ends the murdered person's ability to achieve anything not already acheived.

If you can't easily see that is immoral, I pity you.

@TheMiddleWay Yep that is another good example. Though I think that the human sacrifice one is a little stronger, since war has always had a slightly wquestionable reputation, while religious rituals have often been seen as the hight of morality.

@Fernapple, @TheMiddleWay Hey MiddleWay, while you have referenced what other cultures have done you forgot to say I replied to each. The basic reply is that merely because anyone or any culture did somethinfg does not make it correct. If someone murdered your parents and thought he/she was correct in doing so, did that thought make it correct? Of course it did not. You have never even tried to construct an argument for a moral murder. The real reason you did not is because you can't.

Get an intellectual argument or get lost, your bickering is boring.

@Fernapple Only a good example of the fact that people can do immoral things.

@TheMiddleWay, @Alienbeing Oh I can easily see that is immoral, What I am saying is that, I can not PROOVE that it is immoral.

@Fernapple @TheMiddleWay Your trolly is not an example of a moral judgment. It is an example of possibly limiting casualties. Did I ever say hard judgements are moral issues? NO, I did not. This is yet another example of the fact that you don't know what a moral isssue is.

@Fernapple What do you think it takes to prove something immoral?

@TheMiddleWay, @Fernapple First of all soldiers killing one another can easily be classified as self defense, hence not a moral issue. Second what society thinks is totally irrelevant. You merely point out what was then socially acceptable.

I previously showed you that many societies condoned rape and murder but that did not make it right, it made them wrong. I even specifically point out to you that even today "honor killings" take place and asked you if you thought that was moral. You replied no it was not, provong that even you can see that even when a person or society condones something as moral that does not make it moral.

@Alienbeing No, but what we are saying is, that we can not prove that our view of what is moral and what is not, is any more valid than anyone elses. So the burden of proof is on you who claim that you can. As you say the argument that something is moral just because a culture does it, does not hold water, and so neither does your argument that just because you and your culture hold that murder is immoral prove that it is so, nor even does my or your feeling that I think that it would be far better to live in a culture that does.

To an ancient Aztec the argument that you would let the earth dry up and the crops and all the people starve, because you are not willing to kill a single stranger , would seem immoral. The question is, what argument would you use to persuade an Aztec that he was mistaken and killing was immoral, without first disproving his persupposition that it was demanded by the gods, and replacing it with your own presupposition that it is better to minimize murder because minimizing pain is always a good thing.

@TheMiddleWay Give it a couple more attemps then I quit.

@Garban Soldiers do not murder, they may use self defense.

@Fernapple When you learn that merely because one or an entire society have an opinion that opinion can be wrong, then you will understand. I read this morning that a group in Pakistan stoned a man to death for rippping pages from a Koran. They maintained it was their moral duty. That does not make it moral does it?

You confuse opinion (which can be right or wrong) with actual morals.

@Fernapple Your Aztec example shows your confusion. The example cites a religious cause for their behavior. Since you don't believe in a sky fairy how can you use their religious beliefs as a factor in moral judgement? They were wrong, pure and simple.

@Alienbeing No they were both moral, they may have been mistaken about their ideas, but they were moral. And that is the point, morallity can be mistaken and misguided, because there is no objective basis for it save what our culture tells us, since our cultural addiction is more than strong enough to override our natural instincts for things like empathy, and pity.

@Fernapple You say they may have been mistaken, but they were moral. That is a self conflicting statement. What you have maintained all along is that if someone believes an action is moral, then it is.

If that "logic" was correct there could be no laws, no judgement at all.

You say there is no objective basis, but clearly there is. I find it sad that an adult cannot figure out what is moral, or maybe hesitates for fear of criticism.

@Alienbeing There is no objective basis for morality, believing something is moral, "IS" the only proof of morality, and it is a purely subjective one. Adulthood is about acceptance, and accepting that your most dearly held beliefs are purely subjective, and without grounding, is perhaps the most important piece of that acceptance.

We have been having this conversation now for a long time, and if you had any objective proof of morality, you only needed to bring it out, and I would gratefully accept that the conversation is over and I was wrong and have learned something.

For myself I accept at least two basic arguments for morality, which I live by. The first being that there is no doubt that we all have moral instincts, such as empathy, pity and revulsion. And that those moral instincts must have an evolutionary origin, and are therefore are rooted in natural law, which should inform our choices, and that it is moral therefore to listen to our moral instincts.

The second is. That if I grant a prerequisite, such as it would be better to live in a happy world, and that being kind and generous to everyone without special favour, is likely to help bring that about. Then it is moral to be kind and generous.

But I have to admit that neither is in any way, an objective proof. The first because it is nebulous, and does not directly lead to any defined laws. And the second because it requires a prerequisite, "it would be better to live in a happy world", and as I said to themiddleway at the beginning, I can only derive morality given a prerequisite, and that means it is not truly objective.

@TheMiddleWay If that is what you are saying you have missed th point of everything I ever said.

Your part about 'honor killings" shows you have no grasp of moral. Something cannot be moral to one, and immoral to another at the same time. Honor killings are immoral period, merely becausesome people accept is is irrelevant. That is called socia acceptability, NOT moral judgement.

@Fernapple Merely because you say ther is no objective basis for moral judgement does not make it so. Anyone who cannot say child rape is always immoral has lost judfemental ability.

Adulthood is not about acceptance. Where did you get that? Are you saying that as an adult you must accept everythig and everybody?

Sad adults can't make obvious judgement.

@Alienbeing If there is an objective basis for morality then show one, many wise people have been searching for one for centuries, if you have got one then I am sure the world would love to hear it. Many have tried, from Plato, and Epicurus to Nietzsche, and all failed to some degree. I am sure that if you have one, then the Noble peace prize, at least, is a given, and that is a lot of money . The nearest that anyone ever did come to finding one, that I know of, was Kant, with his universalization principle, and that is certainly not very strongly objective.

Yes adulthood is all about acceptance, it is the about the acceptance of the gradual losing of our delusions. Beginning with the central, and most childish one, which our parents care instills in us, that we are the centre of the universe, and that universe exists for us. Which is an inevitable delusion, since the only universe we know as children, is our parents, and we are, unless we are very unlucky, the centre of that. We then find that, the children at school will not want to be with us, and we will not receive attention, unless we have something to offer. And when we have accepted that, and that serving the community is our only way to succeed in gaining something worthwhile. Then we have to learn to accept that the community, family and friends, we devote ourselves to, is itself is of no importance in the great scheme of things, and may be swept away by by as little as one politicians signature on a piece of paper.

And so it goes on, until we learn to accept that all of human life is trivial to the greater universe, and we have to accept that even the greatest humans, and our heros, can not hope to leave a legacy that will outlast a few trivial millenia. And finally we have to learn, to accept, that any cynical view which understanding of the triviallity of our lives that may lead us to, and with it, the idea that evil is of equal worth, to good. Does not buy us any freedom or joy either, and that therefore, giving to our community and fellow creature on this planet, does not make us moral heros or any great thing like that, but that we must do it, just because the freedom that evil suppossedly gives is just a delusion too, and that we are good and should try our very best to be good, simply because there is nothing else to do.

@TheMiddleWay, Fernapple You continue to ignore the point. It is totally irrelevant what one, or any group thinks. Even your question regarding acceptance of "one morality" shows you don't get it. You can't stop conflating Social Acceptance with what is truly (and obviously) immoral. I already said sex was not a moral issue so why would you even bring it up again if you are not confused?There are very few actions that can be classified as moral or immoral. However since you are apparently incapable of declaring even scarificial murder as immoral it is hopeless to discuee it with you.

Now Fernapple. If you can't see that sacrificail murder, child rape and a few other things are not only objectively correct as well as obvious, there is no resaon to conrinue to discuss the subject with you either.

NO adulthood is NOT about acceptance. One should only accept that which is correct.

Both of you illustrate you are easily influenced by others. Too bad.

Ther is nothing more to say.

@Fernapple Here is an objective example:

Morality requires us to avoid doing bad things, again, by definition. Hence we all have a moral duty not to harm other living things. This moral duty exists objectively because harm exists objectively. Just as 1 + 1 = 2 is objectively true, so “we should not harm other living things” is objectively true

@Alienbeing Sorry I forgot about this post, my deepest apologies.

No, that idea contains the presupposition that doing harm is a bad thing, and my original comment if you remember, was that, you could only have objective morallity if you accept at least one presupposition.

Someone could for example make the alternate presupposition. That we are products of evolution and therefore here to serve evolution. Doing harm to others therefore increases deaths, thereby quickening natural selection, and prolongs the life of the species by lessening over population. Therefore doing harm to other humans is the good and moral thing, and failing to do harm a bad thing.

Or the traditional Christian presupposition, "God fearing". That we are here to obey God and that therefore we have to do what God says, even if that means harming others.

I think that anyone who accepted either, would be a complete as###le, but I could not fault their logic, and one presupposition is no better than any other. My preference for agreeing with you that it is better not to harm living things, is purely subjective, given that I have made a subjective choice in my presuppositions.

@Fernapple If you don't accept that doing harm is a bad thing you need professional help.

Good bye.

1

I think that certain behaviors that humans call “moral” have proven to enhance reproductive fitness, and so have been encoded into the genome, giving them a degree of objectivity (even though the genome is not absolutely fixed) whereas others that we call “moral” are still in the experimental stages of cultural trial, and while not yet genetically encoded themselves, are similarly experienced subjectively because of our genetically encoded susceptibility to cultural contexts.

Both can be experienced subjectively, and both have differing degrees of objectivity, while neither are mandated by anything other than a collection of accidents of nature.

skado Level 9 Feb 11, 2022

@TheMiddleWay
Not specific behaviors themselves like sex or eating, but strong tendencies to certain feelings, like fairness. If we find it in non-human species, we can be pretty confident it’s genetic.

.

@TheMiddleWay
We may be running up against the language/semantics barrier here. I don’t see any way to exclude altruism from the morality question, and altruism has been firmly established in many species. When we perform a behavior that is costly to us, for the benefit of another, or refuse to perform a selfish act for ourselves, out of consideration for others… that’s altruism, and the basis of all moral impulses.

0

I think that morality is subjective, until you have determined the objective or purpose to which you intend to put it. As in, a saw is just a piece of metal until you decide to cut some wood, then it becomes a wood saw. So morality is both subjective and objective, depending on whether you view it from the perspective of someone with a purpose in mind, or you see there as being no purpose for morality to serve.

@TheMiddleWay Yes I am. It is a problem with the English language, a thing with which I have never had a great relationship. But I think that you have well understood my meaning, well done.

0

I tend to stay away from “absolutes,” except for maybe the speed of light (prove me wrong, science!). Morality wise, I think many choices are made subjectively and based on emotions and familiarity, but the results of moral decisions can sometimes be examined objectively. The most important impacts of moral decisions are social: how my actions are judged by others and what their responses might be.

This site is dominated by former christians, and I’m always struck by how many of them have jettisoned the supernatural beings of christianity while accepting their moral values without question.

Tell me when rape of a child can be ever be anything other than absolutly immoral.

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