Jinto

Alright, let's go with this. Murder is acceptable. Therefore, murdering you is acceptable. It is also desirable for thou art annoying and full of shit. Therefore, if murder is acceptable, then I should kill you.

Are you absolutely sure that murder is acceptable?

*Remember kids: Argumentum ad baculum is not a fallacy when the guy you're talking to thinks murder is acceptable.

Nowhere357

Is this really that complicated for you?

All I can think of, is that you are unaware of what "reason" and "empathy" means.

I am. I am responsible for forming my own opinions. I wonder, who is resposible for forming your opinions?

I can say you lack emotional empathy, if you behave in a fashion that demonstrates you have no emotional empathy.

If there are moral absolutes, then by definition they apply to us both. Therefore, my applying moral absolutes to your free thought cannot violate your morals. Unless of course your morals are wrong. In either case, you have contradicted yourself.

Is this really that difficult for you?

Please provide definitions for "reason", "empathy", and "morals". Failure to provide definitions will indicate that your position is in fact without merit.

long winded fool

So morals are not absolute just as long as they correspond to logic and reason? How is logic and reason any different an absolute authority than the word of God?

DRFseven

Notice what people accept.

Social conditioning begun with internalization of parental opinions of right and wrong characterized by feeling.

Quote:

is there an absolute standard for what is right and wrong.

No.

Nowhere357

I haven't explored the idea that there are "absolute" morals. My first thought is that means morals exist outside of our minds, which I doubt. But maybe it can mean something else.

I don't even know what "absolute authority" means.

Logic and reason and empathy are what we use to understand the world, and our place in it. I don't believe the xian god exists, although I accept the possibility of higher powers.

So by "the word of god" I assume you mean the bible. Any morals in the bible came from man, and so came from reason and empathy.

long winded fool

By absolute authority I mean some objective basis for judging right from wrong. Not just whatever one feels like, but something to always refer back to for the correct answer whether your emotions and empathy pulls you in one direction or another. The most common absolute authorities might be the commandments of a particular deity, (say the christian god) and logical reason. Are rape and murder wrong becuase God says so, or because reason and logic tell us that this behavior is ultimately far more detrimental to all involved and to society in general than it is temporarily beneficial for a single person? In either case, they are ultimately absolutely one way or the other. Wrong/immoral or right/moral. If logic is my absolute authority, I might still be mistaken in my logical assessment that murder in a certain case is wrong, but this doesn't change that fact that it must be either wrong or right, in spite of my faulty perception. The same goes for if God or religion is one's authority. I might be wrong in my labelling, but I must assume that I'm absolutely right in my assumption of the possibility of accurately labelling and judging a belief or behavior. When logic is an authority, morals are just as absolutely open to critical judgement as when religion is one's authority. The existence of absolute morality does not imply dogmatism. If there is no absolute authority from which to judge, however, then no behavior can possibly be accurately labelled wrong or right.

Nowhere357

If emotions and empathy are unclear, we still have logic and reason.

Killing people is wrong. What about self defense? Is it wrong to kill, if necessary to protect your family?

I think in early human history, rape was an important survival strategy - it helped diversify the genetic pool and prevent inbreeding. If that is true, was rape still wrong?

I've argued elsewhere that morals refer to actions. So maybe I agree.

Then the morality must be the same for everyone, and I'm not convinced that is the case.

For example, is it best to protect our country at the expense of the world, or vice-versa? Might not the correct morality change with time, with different cultures, etc?

I'm not yet convinced either way, but I will say that even if there is no absolute morality, we nevertheless can determine right and wrong. I will have no problem seeing the difference between mother Teresa, and Hitler, for example.

I think my position right now is that morality is not the same as right/wrong. morality refers to actions, while right/wrong refers to opinions or justifications of those actions.

Looked at this way, it's clear that killing people is not moral (due to reason and empathy) while at times it may nonetheless be the right thing to do.

But other than not harming others, what absolute morality is there? Not harming animals? The environment? Maybe. Anything else?

long winded fool

I do think that the morality of certain acts change in specific situations, however I think that morality would still be absolute since it would be equal for any person in a given situation at a given time. It doesn't change based on personal opinion. I don't think you can simply label a general act moral all the time in all situations. I think that you can take a given situation, analyze all of the variables involved that you can and then make a judgment on whether or not the act given the situation was immoral. Because I'm not in possession of all the variables means that my understanding of morality is incomplete. This means that a behavior that I see as immoral could possibly be moral. It doesn't mean that because the person committing the act thinks it's moral that it is moral. To find out I must get information on the situation and the goal of the person committing the act. Critical analysis can determine if the act is immoral. In many cases, the person labeling an act as immoral has looked more closely at the act itself than the person doing the act.

Absolute morality is not necessarily dogmatic. I often compare morality, (a human concept describing an abstract understanding of applied reason) to the laws of physics (a human concept describing an abstract understanding of how the universe works.) While the laws of physics are thought of as absolute, no one knows all of the laws of physics, and no one even knows if the ones we have are correct and truly absolute. We don't have to be dogmatic about physics. Having an open mind is how we discover new laws. All we absolutely assume is that they are not subject to individual interpretation, that is, they don't change depending on what we want them to be. Only our description of them changes, (for the better, we hope.) They are absolute in the sense that they are there to be discovered and that's all. When things 'defy the laws of physics,' what they are really doing is obeying a law of physics that we don't completely understand. Morality is the same way. No one's personal understanding of morality is absolute, but right and wrong things are black and white in the same sense that logic is black and white. Misusing logic can lead you to a wrong conclusion. While you are entitled to this conclusion as people are entitled to their respective moral beliefs, the conclusion is nonetheless wrong.

Since finding a contradiction is much easier than proving no contradiction can ever exist, labeling a behavior objectively immoral is much easier than labeling a behavior objectively moral. (I would think the latter would be impossible.) So "morality" really consists solely of limiting our behaviors as they appear to be immoral. Since people don't like limiting their options, they tend not to critically analyze their behavior and feel threatened by those who do. They often decry that morality is subjective to the individual. From a legal standpoint I think this is wise to a limited extent. From an intellectual standpoint, this is completely wrong. People should not be judged for their moral beliefs, but their moral beliefs ought to be judged for what they objectively are. We ought not to assume a thing can't be objectively known just because no one is really sure about what it is. This is what "subjective morality" does. "Nobody knows, so who are you to judge right from wrong? There is really no such thing. Let me do what I want to do and I'll extend you the same courtesy." This sounds nice, but it is not logical. Tolerance is good: Do whatever you want and believe whatever you want, so long as you don't do anything that seriously conflicts with the majority's current understanding of morality. This is a virtue that reflects a non-dogmatic belief in objective morality. Intolerance is bad: only do whatever I think you ought to do, period. This reflects a dogmatic belief in objective morality. Indiscrimination is also bad: do whatever you want, whenever you want, regardless of the opinions of others. This is a virtue that reflects a belief in subjective morality.

I don't know if my personal view of morality is right, however I do know that morality which conflicts with mine is either wrong, or my morality is wrong. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Tom Sawyer

lwf,

You raise some very good points, but i have to disagree with the idea that morality is black and white the same way that the laws of physics are black and white.

The difference is that the laws of physics exist totally independently from us. They are an aspect of the universe and would go on doing the same thing regardless of what we think of them. Morality, on the other hand, is invented by us to give a guide to our behaviour and allow us to function in groups. There is no external guide to it and it is made up by the group even though various members of the group may disagree with it and those morals can and do change over time.

Take the example of dropping large bombs on a couple of cities and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Most people would say that that act is immoral. However, if by dropping those bombs, you brought an end to a long war that was costing millions of lives, then many people would say that while it's sad that those people had to die, a greater good was brought about and more lives were saved, so that made it a moral act. Many other people would still say that it is still an immoral act and the end does not justify the means used to obtain it.

This isn't a case that one side is simply mistaken. They are both right, according to their own point of view, and neither view is necessarily more valid than the other. It's not the same as debating the laws of physics, where the universe does actually act one way, but we just don't know enough of the details to say what that way actually is.

If someone's view of morality conflicts with your own, it may mean that one of you is immoral. However, it may mean that you are both moral (or both immoral) and simply seeing the situation from differing points of view, neither of which are necessarily more valid than the other.

njhartsh

Hi, LWF.

Like Tom Sawyer, I find your comparison between the laws of physics and an allegedly absolute moral code to be deeply flawed. In physics (and indeed in the natural sciences generally) we are attempting to explain the nature and behavior of something we all agree exists--the physical universe around us. Outside of Cartesian skepticism and The Matrix, no one actually disputes the objective existence of the world around us. Physical sciences are therefore not terribly controversial on these kinds of terms.

The normative universe is another matter entirely. Your posited theory of morality claims to relate to an objective reality whose existence (on this thread anyway) we certainly do not all agree upon. The very existence of absolute moral laws for you to aspire toward or seek or examine is precisely what's in question.

A clear way to show the difference between these two is to think about experimentation. When confronted with a question relating to the physical sciences (How many protons are there in an atom of hydrogen? How does an animal cell copy itself? What happens when you mix vinegar and baking soda? Is this a dagger I see before me? Is that door open?), the general method of finding an answer is fairly clear: we take whatever observations we can of the objective state of the universe (e.g., we look at the doorway and reach for the knob), and then we can often come to some very strong and pragmatically undoubtable conclusions from the data we observe.

What absolute moral source can we ever consult to find out whether a given action is moral? Tom Sawyer suggests a relevant moral question: is it moral to "drop[ ] large bombs on a couple of cities and kill[ ] hundreds of thousands of innocent people"? Forget for the moment the variables about outside justifications or whatever; just identify for me a single absolute source I could turn to to answer the question.

It's worth pointing out that "God" is not such a source. As Plato and/or Socrates proved millennia ago, a deity, like any moral actor, is in fact a subjective source of values. If God told you to bomb that city, would that make it right? What if God admitted that there was no justification for the bombing besides "I said so"? (Of course, there are also massive problems with the authentication of any alleged God-spoken moral rules; but the absolutist case is baseless even if we ignore that.)

Like it or not, all sentient beings are left to our own devices (beliefs, urges, learned behaviors, etc.) to decide what's right and what's wrong. There doesn't seem to be any way to avoid this. It appears to me that many people abdicate this responsibility to eons-old "holy" books that they claim contain relevant "absolute" morality, but (1) any beings that created the ideals set down in those books are themselves subjective actors; (2) it is often vastly doubtable whether the books in question were written by anything but our fellow flawed human beings; and (3) the supposedly "absolute" moral codes in all such books I'm familiar with also frequently happen to be disgusting. My moral code requires me to reject a very large proportion of the normative content of the Bible and the Qur'an.

I strongly disagree. My moral code contains numerous actions--such as loving other people and working to produce justice--that are both affirmatively moral and indeed, in some cases, imperative. (Please avoid the triviality that any "Thou shalt..." rule can be restated as "Thou shalt not fail to....")

But it seems to me entirely unclear how we ever (even in theory and presuming omni-everything gods on our shoulders) could know the slightest bit of "what it is." Why posit the existence of something that is absolutely and entirely unknowable?

I've lost count of the number of times that moral absolutists have charged this about subjectivists. Please, before you continue with that canard, find me a real-life subjectivist who thinks it's a priori unacceptable "to judge right from wrong." If you've noticed, we do a lot of judging of stuff. (I happen to work for a court.)

There are, of course, moral nihilists who do in fact allege that moral statements are entirely meaningless. But that's not subjectivism--subjectivism merely alleges that morality is entirely dependent upon individual sentient beings' beliefs, feelings, etc. Please note that this doesn't mean that "right" and "wrong" don't exist--quite the opposite! Such normative terms just have similar epistemological status to concepts like "beautiful," "ugly" and "delicious."

I'm sure I'm not the only one of your opponents on this thread who feels entirely comfortable imposing certain subjective moral principles (such as "it's unacceptable to kill Nathan's sister") upon another person even if she disagrees with my principles. You appear to think this is untenable. Why? On what standard? What is it about subjective judgments that makes them necessarily inapplicable to other people?

- Nathan