Jamie_L

A lot of morality discussions seem to eventually come around to this accusation against some forms of subjective morality:

But suppose murdering someone will benefit the individual. If the individual can get get away with the murder, why shouldn't they?

The follow-on accusation is that if your moral theory doesn't have an explicit negative result for the individual in question, it fails as a moral system.

Is this really true? Can't a moral system solve this problem practically without needing an explicit consequence for the individual?

For example:
Suppose we have a moral system based on societal and individual self-interest and their inter-relationship. It has a whole list of do's and don't's. These include don't's that cover the above situation (don't kill anyone, even when nobody's looking). However, the reason for this rule is general: it is wrong to murder in any situation because society works better that way, and each person is generally safer if everyone behaves that way. There is no explicit explanation of 100%-certain negative consequences for someone who commits murder.

Now, society takes this system, and uses it to raise it's kids. The kids grow up with an intuitive/emotional/empathic moral sense based on this system. Given that, when a situation arises where they could benefit from killing someone, they decide not to because it just "feels wrong". It goes against their moral sense. They will feel guilty about it, and just generally don't want to do it.

So, practically, even though these people could gain by killing someone, they don't. The "why not kill someone?" problem is answered, even though there's not a clearly defined reason why the individual will be worse off if he kills the person.

Isn't this a functional moral system?

Jamie

ManM

Jamie_L,
The fact that a person would not kill does not provide a reason why he should not kill.

And if such a person believes that morality is based on self-interest, they are acting in a manner that is inconsistent with their beliefs.

It functions until a skeptic begins to ask "why?".

Gallimore

Yes, this question ails me, too. I suspect an increasing number of people nowadays have begun to detect something nugatory about our moral system. The public attitude about infidelity, for example, has taken an impassive turn. This is ok, as long nobody knows. I think people have realized that our apparently functional moral system doesn’t depend on a kind of objective principle. If our moral system depends our subjective moral sense, then it is weak.

Why do we have a moral system? To impose order on civilization. Yes. But we’ve evolved to notice that order can be kept while doing immoral acts (S’long we’re careful.)

Jamie_L

I guess that's part of my point. Does it matter if the individual has a reason that applies to him alone if the individual chooses not to kill? The end result is the same.

Furthermore, the morality described does give a reason. The reason is, society is more stable and safe if nobody kills. Individuals are less likely to get themselves into trouble if they don't kill. So people shouldn't kill.

Why? Suppose a person has agreed to this moral system because he believes it supports his self-interest. Where is the inconsistency in living by the moral code he adopted?

Furthermore, suppose a person is RAISED with this moral system. It becomes part of his emotional make-up. Then violating that moral code causes internal stress which is not in his best interest.

And religious morality works until an apathetic or short-sighted person says "so what?".

Jamie

tronvillain

If murdering someone will benefit the individual and the individual can get away with the murder, then they should murder that someone. In fact, they probably will. Why aren't people being killed all the time? Well, for starters it is rarely apparent that one "can get away with the murder", so the potential benefits of murder generally do not outweight the potential penalties. Of course, there are many other obstacles to murder being "beneficial" to the individual: fear, guilt, empathy, disgust, and so on.

99Percent

Jamie_LBut suppose murdering someone will benefit the individual. If the individual can get get away with the murder, why shouldn't they?

The only way someone can get away with murder is if nobody finds about it. In effect its an occultation of the truth. That is why it is immoral. You can't live a moral life if you are living a life of lies.

The follow-on accusation is that if your moral theory doesn't have an explicit negative result for the individual in question, it fails as a moral system.

There is a lot of confusion about this. We individually have a moral code because we can't fully determine exactly qhat are the consequences of our actions, not because we know the consequences of certain actions. If it were so, then we would robots following predetermined laws of cause and effect, very boring indeed.

Suppose we have a moral system based on societal and individual self-interest and their inter-relationship. It has a whole list of do's and don't's. These include don't's that cover the above situation (don't kill anyone, even when nobody's looking). However, the reason for this rule is general: it is wrong to murder in any situation because society works better that way, and each person is generally safer if everyone behaves that way. There is no explicit explanation of 100%-certain negative consequences for someone who commits murder.

I don't understand what you saying here. You say there is no explicit explanation in societal terms why 100% certain negative consequences if someone commits murder when there indeed is one - you go straight to jail or even executed by society itself.

[ November 21, 2002: Message edited by: 99Percent ]</p>

tronvillain

99Percent:
Actually, you could probably "get away with it" even if many people find out about it - an example of this would be moving to another country and changing your identity.

Now, exactly why should I be concerned with living a "moral life" as you define it? If I do not find "living a life of lies" a significant burdern why should I refrain from doing it?

Jamie_L

Yeah, I struggled to try to put into words what I was thinking. Let me try again.

We're discussing the wonderful hypothetical: why shouldn't person X kill person Y if they KNOW they can get away with it.

The religious morality says there is always a direct cost to the killer because God will punish them, or they will damage their crucial relationship with God (I think that fits ManM's vision of morality better). The arguement goes that a subjective morality like the one I described is deficient because it doesn't have a similar consequence for the person who knows they can kill and escape legal punishment.

Jamie

bd-from-kg

Jamie_L :

On this point I seem to have a fundamental disagreement with most of the people on this board. I think that this is a definitive objection to any moral system to which it applies. It simply doesn’t makes sense to say “You have a moral obligation to do so-and-so, but of course you have no reason to do it, and I don’t expect you to do it.” The purpose and function of a moral system is to provide guidance (of a certain kind) about what to do. Thus when you tell someone that they ought to do something, you are claiming to offer them guidance as to what decision to make. To then turn around and say that they really have no reason to do it is completely incompatible with such a claim. Similarly, if you try to work out what the “right thing to do” is, your reason for doing so is to help you decide what to do. If you started out with the assumption that any conclusion you reached would have no practical implications regarding what to do, the whole exercise would be completely pointless.

It also doesn’t make sense to say “You ought to do such-and-such, and you have a reason to do it, but the reason has nothing to do with (i.e., it doesn’t flow from) the fact that you ought to do it. It just happens that you have an independent motive for doing it.” If there’s any point to moral reasoning and moral pronouncements, it has to be that the fact that it’s the right thing to do must in some sense provide a motivation for doing it.


At this point you’re raising a completely different question: the question of whether society can get along without morality. What you’re saying is that perhaps we can indoctrinate our children into acting irrationally – i.e., to sacrifice their own interests to others’ simply because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking and acting in the desired way, even though they have no rational reason to do so.

This won’t work, for a number of reasons. First off, the brainwashing can hardly be effective enough to have a lasting effect over an indefinite number of generations. At some point (probably sooner rather than later) they’ll realize what’s been done to them. At that point they’ll resent the people who did it bitterly and do everything in their power to fight off the conditioning they were subjected to.

But suppose not. Suppose that the brainwashing were completely successful and lasted indefinitely. In that case you will have succeeded in subjecting future generations to your will. You will have induced them to behave in certain ways, not because they decided freely, after reflecting on the matter rationally, that it was how they wanted to live, but because you decided for them that they would act this way for reasons they (necessarily, for the conditioning to be effective) will never know anything about. This is deeply, profoundly immoral. What right do you have to treat billions of people – all of mankind, in fact – as objects, to deprive them of the right to make such life-defining decisions for themselves, to play God with the entire human race? If being purely selfish is the rational way to live, people, as rational beings, should be able to live in a purely selfish way. Depriving them of this ability is to turn them into something less than rational beings. And this (IMHO) would completely outweigh anything that could be accomplished in terms of “social harmony” and the like.

Besides, if self-interest is the only rational motive for doing anything, why would anyone want to bother to set up such a system in the first place? “What’s in it for me?” It seems to me that you have to assume that the generation that sets up such a system has an irrational desire to “do good” rather than to seek their own self-interest. If so, it would seem that we must depend on pure luck and hope desperately that such a system is established someday even though there is no rational reason whatever to expect it to happen. This is your idea of a plan?

At any rate, none of this has anything to do with the philosophical question of whether a moral system should contain, as a part of itself so to speak, a reason for adhering to it. If it should, the fact that a given moral system does not provide such a reason is a serious (I’d say fatal) theoretical objection to it. A society may be able to “solve” this problem practically, but the moral system would be helpless to do anything about it, for the very reason that it would be unable to provide a motivation for anyone to do anything at all.

MadMordigan

but the moral system would be helpless to do anything about it, for the very reason that it would be unable to provide a motivation for anyone to do anything at all.

I am of the opinion that we do live in a world without an objective morality. Society is populated by thousands, if not millions, of discrete subjective moral codes. The fact is we dont share subjective morality with a great number of people within our society.

So what?

I can't distinguish between a person who doesn't kill me because he is morally opposed to killing me, a person who doesn't think I have enough money in my wallet to justify the energy it would take for them to kill me, or a person who just doesn't think they could get away with it. As long as they are not killing me, society's intersubjective morality is functioning.