fatherphil

i think society pays a great price for drug use regardless of it legality. read above for comments on your earlier post.

fatherphil

so it would be ok to lie to a pregnant woman about the safety of getting an abortion if i wanted to influence her one way or another?

Farren

I think you're missing my point completely. It would be OK for you if you believed that was the right thing to do. It would not be OK for me if I thought that was the wrong thing to do. That's the point of personal morality. Hence my comments about precriptive, one size fits all morality.

Your example sets the situation up in such a way as to appear analogous to my story about the dalai lama but is obviously prejudicial (apart from the fact that it implies that abortion is dangerous by default, which I suspect you hold true).

But if we, for the sake of argument, assume that in a particular case a woman will be endangered by such a procedure, we must examine the motive of the person giving such advice to see if it is analogous or not.

In the example I gave, the dalai lama considers the protection of life as being more sacred than the pursuit of pleasure, and would lie to favour the one over the other. The component you don't supply in your (i assume) rhetorical question, is the motive of the person offering the advice.

Lets, for instance, assume that the person offering the advice sees that the woman lives in abject poverty and misery, and cannot climb out of it because of her own failings. Lets assume that the damage done might in her case be an inability to reproduce again. Then if the person offering the advice feels strongly that it is better that the woman damage her reproductive capability and not bring a child up in misery, it would be "ok" in terms of that persons morality to lie.

[edit] I've just realised I have another objection to the example. In the Dalai Lama's case, the hunter is denied momentary pleasure, in the case of someone having her reproductive organs damaged, the negative outcome on the other individual is permanent.

And, in any event, the entire point of the story is to illustrate the difficulty of ascribing "black and white" morality to actions which span so many contexts, like lying. The dalai lama believes the outcome (in his case one that results in the maximum sum of wellbeing among all the players in the drama) is more critical than the action. I concur.

In the rule or commandment-based concept of morality, to be adaptive the rules must endlessly be expanded to fit each and every one of the infinite subtly differing situations we find ourselves in. Fundamentalists get around this by simply not adapting. It seems preferable to me to train your intuition and empathy and react to each situation with compassion, respect and a sense of happiness than to restrict our behaviour to a far from comprehensive set of "given" homelies.

Note that I'm not saying I would agree with such a stance (about lying to the woman). I personally would not lie about known consequences in such a situation. On a tangent, I have had people lie to me to "protect me from myself", and subsequently concurred that there was some wisdom or merit in them doing so.

I'm simply saying that no one person can say with certainty

a) What social equation will have the best effect for all involved.
b) What social equation will have the best effect on any particular person, included themselves.

So a social contract that favours a (practical) minimum of interference is favourable (in terms of overall wellbeing) to one that favours an excess of such interference, the interference in question being prescriptive public morality.

This principle extends to many things, even groups of individuals. It is the reason federal systems of government, with strong local government, are preferable to strongly centralist governments like the former Societ Union. Similarly, as I pointed out earlier, it is no coincidence that a great explosion of scientific and artistic creativity in human history coincided with systems that favoured greater personal liberty.

I'm not saying that discourse about morality is worthless. But the outcomes of that discourse are important.

I may try to convince someone of the benefits or downsides of a particular standpoint, and offer others the right to attempt the same with me, but I don't consider any position (including my own) to be representative of a higher moral truth.

This is why, in several places I refer to "Good" and "Evil" in quotes. The utility of these terms rests on the assumption of objective moral truth. If you don't assume such a thing exists they lose their utility, since moral discourse can continue by referencing "benefit", "side-effect", "consequence" as desirable or undesirable outcomes of the behaviour being discussed, based on the premises shared by the individuals who are discussing it.

Abel Stable

After three pages it looks like it can be both moral or immoral- depending on the context.

Fatherphil, your position is that it is always immoral due to a social contract that you believe in & personally agree with. Since not everyone agrees with your b&w absolutes, this discussion will be a stalemate from here on out.

Whether or not you like "shades of gray"- you had better be willing to admit that they exist. Otherwise, your argument falls flat into absurdity. It is something like claiming that the colors of the rainbow don't exisit b/c you can make any color from just Red, Green, & Blue.

meritocrat

I also 'pay' for the instances in which a person gets arrested for using prostitutes or other victimless crimes.

Narcotics should be legalised.

Abel Stable

Do you know how thin the oxygen is up there? We're not talking about scampering up rocks at the state park.

Nowhere357

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the disparity in our drug laws.

Cocaine - a drug common for white upwardly-mobile citizens - carries substantially milder penalties for use, then crack cocaine - a drug common in the black, poverty-striken ghettos.

The latest round of goverment anti-drug propaganda campaigns has been pretty amusing. Does anyone really buy into that stupidity? Smoking pot supports terrorism, legalizing pot means it'll be sold at the laundromat? I know my kids see right through them, and lose respect for our government as a direct result.

The issue should reduce to personal freedom, choice, and responsibility. I think America still has a lot of growing up to do.

Majestyk

Society pays a greater price for criminalization. But this thread is about morality.

• So;
  
• Is self-inducing a state of utopia that lessens the ability to function, moral? No.
  
• Is using time and money to find gratification at a theme park while, fully aware that fellow human beings are suffering from violence, disease, and hunger, moral? No.
  
• Is spending time in front of a television while, ignoring your children, moral? No.
  
• Is taking a productive, decent, and otherwise innocent, human being and destroying their life by, depriving them of liberty and housing them with a population of violent sociopaths where each day brings the possibility of brutality, moral? No.

fatherphil

majestyk, how black & white of you.
farren, i think you avoid the similarity of scenarios because they don't quite jive with your mindset and you set about explaining it all away. the virtues of shades of grey. i could easily say that it would be just as wrong for me to lie to the pregnant lady as the lie to the hunter would be.
abel, could you admit that some things are black or white?

Farren

Yes but in doing so you would be demonstrating my point (that legalistic moralities of necessity either expand endlessly or fail to adapt or show any regard for context).

You're taking an concept (lying) that has conceptual singularity but is a physically infinite set of behaviours, done in a physically infinite set of circumstances.

In other words you're saying, because I've got one label for it in my mind, everything that label describes is exactly the same thing in the physical universe. Huh?

My entire line of reasoning is reasoning moral beings who start with, for want of a better term, a legalistic framework of morality find themselves having to endlessly embellish and refine those laws to meet circumstances they hadn't considered in the formulation.

I doubt even you will claim that you would tell the truth, for instance, to a violent man who wanted to hunt down and kill a woman for a trivial slight, say. Faced with such difficulties, the rule-oriented moralist finds themselves forced to codify an endlessly larger set of rules and retain them in mind in order to keep their rule based morality.

This problem finds expression in actual law. There are rationalisation processes that allow the reduction of special circumstances into categories, but the general trend to date is, and will continue to be, a greater and greater set of laws and human society becomes increasingly complex.

It also finds fairly extreme expression in the two of the Abramic religions, Islam and Judaism. In Hasidic judaism, life is regulated by such an enormous set of rules that one must practically waste half ones life achieving even a fraction of the morality required to be a good practicing Hasidic Jew.

Now if the focus is shifted to intention (what in law would be called the "spirit" of the law), the practice of living as a moral being becomes infinitely simpler.

Sure, you can formulate arbitrary codes of behaviour for yourself as you go a long, but the critical distinction is that your past self advises your future self, rather than dictates to your future self - which is what happens when people adopt stances like "I would NEVER do X" (without specifying context), or "Its ALWAYS WRONG to do Y" (once again, without context).

I sincerely believe that you can chuck out the entire ruleset and be a moral being, simply by:

1) Developing empathy for all living things (once again the dalai lama concurs with my thoughts. He believes we can develop empathy with insects). This equips you to enact (3) below, more easily.
2) Loving yourself (not being vain, which is loving your status, but loving yourself as you would love another)
3) Loving others.
4) Living in the present. This makes all of the above vastly easier. And it makes regret, recrimination and anger dissolve quicker.

To get back to the drugs thing. Like lying, which is only singular in your labelling of it, drug use and experience respresents a vast range of behaviours and experiences.

So some guy, like me, comes along and says, hey, I've had some great experiences with drugs, that didn't screw me up or hurt anyone, and the drugs in question weren't addictive. And you say, "But you've broken a social contract!". And I say "I didn't sign that, I've never seen it before". And we're back to square one.

Except that you're the one attempting to posit that simply by living in the same society, I am beholden to your morality, without regard for the actual effects and consequences of the drug on me, the importance of my own happiness, or a demonstrable illustration of its effect on you. This seems to be to be the less reasonable position.