andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2007-03-26 05:41 pm
andrewducker) wrote2007-03-26 05:41 pm
It's not a matter of rights
I've been thinking about morality, and while I know _my_ thoughts on it, and how they got there, I'm interested in what tack other people take. Specifically, for people that believe in absolute morality I'm curious as to what their basis/reasoning is.
I've therefore simplified the different approaches down to five options:
1) There is no absolute right and wrong - all morality is subjective opinion.
For those people who believe that all moral statements are claims about the way that the speaker would like the world to be. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates as "I wish people didn't engage in homosexual acts."
2) There is absolute right and wrong - I know what it is because God/God's representatives told me.
Which includes all of those people who draw their morality from religion. And know what right and wrong are either because they've learned from religious teachers or spoken directly to a divine entity. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates as "God says that people should not engage in homosexual acts."
The problem with this approach is that you're dependent on your religious teachers not having been fooled by their own religious teachers (or _their_ teachers, etc) and that the morality wasn't just made up by someone who then told them that God said so. If you heard it direct from God then this doesn't apply, but you might want to wonder about your sanity.
3) There is absolute right and wrong - I know what it is because it feels Right/Wrong to me.
Which covers all of those people who _know_ that stoning homosexuals to death is wrong, but this knowledge stems from internal intuition and feeling, not from external sources. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates to "Homosexuality is just plain wrong. I can tell."
The problem with this is that feelings aren't terribly trustworthy, and you if you feel that something is right, while someone else feels the exact opposite then you have to question why your feelings would have a direct link to Absolute Truth and theirs wouldn't.
4) There is absolute right and wrong - I don't know what they are though.
For those people convinced that there is an absolute morality, but don't maintain that they have access to said Universal Truth. You'd never hear these people say "Homosexuality is wrong.", instead they'd say "Homosexuality might be wrong, how would we know?"
The problem with this is that if you don't have access to Universal Truth then you don't have access to anything which could prove that there's such a thing as Universal Truth.
5) I have no idea if there is absolute right and wrong.
For those people that just don't know whether morality is objective or subjective. Those people aren't actually likely to have read this far, and probably don't think or care about this kind of thing, so who knows what they'd use to justify their stance on homosexuality. They might fill in the poll though, because polls are kewl.
[Poll #954176]
I am interested, by the way, and I'd love to know more. So do tell me how exactly you don't fit into any of the above categories - if nothing else I'll delight in pointing out exactly how you do :->
I've therefore simplified the different approaches down to five options:
1) There is no absolute right and wrong - all morality is subjective opinion.
For those people who believe that all moral statements are claims about the way that the speaker would like the world to be. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates as "I wish people didn't engage in homosexual acts."
2) There is absolute right and wrong - I know what it is because God/God's representatives told me.
Which includes all of those people who draw their morality from religion. And know what right and wrong are either because they've learned from religious teachers or spoken directly to a divine entity. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates as "God says that people should not engage in homosexual acts."
The problem with this approach is that you're dependent on your religious teachers not having been fooled by their own religious teachers (or _their_ teachers, etc) and that the morality wasn't just made up by someone who then told them that God said so. If you heard it direct from God then this doesn't apply, but you might want to wonder about your sanity.
3) There is absolute right and wrong - I know what it is because it feels Right/Wrong to me.
Which covers all of those people who _know_ that stoning homosexuals to death is wrong, but this knowledge stems from internal intuition and feeling, not from external sources. "Homosexuality is wrong." translates to "Homosexuality is just plain wrong. I can tell."
The problem with this is that feelings aren't terribly trustworthy, and you if you feel that something is right, while someone else feels the exact opposite then you have to question why your feelings would have a direct link to Absolute Truth and theirs wouldn't.
4) There is absolute right and wrong - I don't know what they are though.
For those people convinced that there is an absolute morality, but don't maintain that they have access to said Universal Truth. You'd never hear these people say "Homosexuality is wrong.", instead they'd say "Homosexuality might be wrong, how would we know?"
The problem with this is that if you don't have access to Universal Truth then you don't have access to anything which could prove that there's such a thing as Universal Truth.
5) I have no idea if there is absolute right and wrong.
For those people that just don't know whether morality is objective or subjective. Those people aren't actually likely to have read this far, and probably don't think or care about this kind of thing, so who knows what they'd use to justify their stance on homosexuality. They might fill in the poll though, because polls are kewl.
[Poll #954176]
I am interested, by the way, and I'd love to know more. So do tell me how exactly you don't fit into any of the above categories - if nothing else I'll delight in pointing out exactly how you do :->
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The entuire tradition of liberal humanism and secular human rights law is devoted to analysing and elaborating on this point of view.
1 is lazy thinking. It's easy to say "oh yes , that sounds right" but harder to live with the consequences. Is it only my opinion (and maybe most of my mates) that slavery is wrong, torture is worong, female circumcision is wrong, kiling the girls and not the boys in times of hardship is wrong? Would these things be right if we paid people for undergoing them or if the alternatives (eg terorism) are perceived as worse? That's the kind of places this sort of thinking goes. I'm a cultural relativist as far as sex and hobbies (in which I include religion and possibly freedom of expression) go - but not about these kind of issues. Morality IS different from squeamishness. I may not have any but I know that much :)
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They're not just your opinion. They're widely held opinions. I hold them myself, for instance.
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1 billion people think all the things above are wrong.
100,000 (possibly in one place, possibly scattered around) think they're ok.
You're saying that's fine, just a difference of opinion. Those people aren't wrong (or immoral or amoral), just differently valued.
I think in your heart you know that what you actually think is "those things are wrong". And you're right:)for reasons discused below.
Remember that in practice (and this is where pragmatism comes in) for people to be sanctioned for holding these values they generally have to PUT THEM INTO OPERATION. It is not necessarily absolutely immoral to think that faggots are evil (an issue of freedom of expression). It IS absolutely immoral to then torture them (or Christians, or Muslims) as punishment for their lifestyle (an issue covered by Art 3 of the ECHR, basic right not to be imhumanely treated).
A real civil rights lawyer would argue that freedom of expression is as fundamental as the right to life and the right not to be tortured. but I'm not so sure. No one can live as an autonomous and happy human being if they are in constant fear of their life or of terrible treatment. Therefore to threaten or inflict that without reason is absolutely wrong. I am not an expert on this - there are books and books on why many people have felt fundamental rights exist and which rights are fundamental. Read some of them before you take the easy/cool way out.
And no, morality is not a popularity contest either. In some cases the relative figures might be reversed.
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You made several statements about how X _is_ absolutely wrong. But with no reason behind it, or argument as to why your beliefs are logical or anything more than your own personal opinions.
If you want me to believe that morality is absolute then you have to give me more than "If it's not then people can do bad things."
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Oh, and I did. I studied morality at university. There's no absolute logic behind it. You have to, at some point, state axioms and work down from there. Those axioms are, by definition, subjective.
At no point is morality built into the universe. You can't detect it, it doesn't come from anywhere except the inside of people's heads.
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higher primates occur naturally as part of the universe
ergo morality occurs naturally as part of the universe.
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Tell me you don't seriously mean that.
I mean, I can take it apart if you want me to, it's clearly fallacious, but I'd rather you told me you were just playing devil's advocate.
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Your argument is equivalent to:
Liking Woody Allen movies occurs naturally in film buffs.
Film buffs occur naturally as part of the universe.
Therefore liking Woody Allen movies occurs naturally as part of the universe.
Which is technically true. But doesn't mean that there are natural laws involving Woody Allen. It merely means that people have an apparatus that allows them to make critical judgements, and that some of those judgements happen to involve Mr Allen.
You're conflating a human ability to make choices with the basis of those choices being itself a natural law. Which is a natural human thing to do. If I didn't like homosexuals (to go back to my original example), I'd like to think that this was because there was something intrinsically wrong with homosexuals, not just that I was wired by my nature/nurture into a dislike of them. But the morality is in _me_, not in the universe outside of me.
Compare that to, say, colour. People have an apparatus for detecting light and making decisions about it. They can spot "Red" and "Orange", and those are natural intrinsic properties of light (insofar as they are semantic shortcuts for describing particular frequencies of light - the frequencies themselves do exist, and can be detected using mechanical means). Colour is a property of the light itself.
If I declare a liking for Red and a dislike of Blue, on the other hand, while I might like to think that Red is a better colour than Blue, that superiority is only in my relationship with the colour, not in the colour itself. The ability to make the choice is a natural part of me (and thus a natural part of the universe), but there is nothing about the universe that makes Red better than Blue, any more than there is anything about the universe that makes kissing babies better than hugging them. In fact the whole concept of "Better" doesn't really apply to colours, or to morals. Things are better _for_ something, or superior _at_ something.
If I want certain outcomes (more babies, for instance) then I can make pragmatic decisions. And (most) people have certain inbuilt prejudices. But just because they've been built into people that doesn't make them any kind of absolute. It's not like people are the centre of the universe.
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Lacking a device to measure morality, and as logic can only transform statements, not generate them from nowhere, what would you derive it from?
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It would be hard to find a leg to stand on for the pro-breeding-children-for-food camp, since it would be difficult, expensive, not healthful (diseases transmitted from eating human flesh), slow, ineffective (you'd have to feed the breeder, and the birth cycle is too long to be worth it), as well as morally repugnant. Since the effects are horrible and the benefits non-existent, it would be pretty obvious that this would be an absolute wrong.
Murder, on the other hand, has compelling pro-arguments in some situations, so it would not be an absolute wrong. Perhaps if more restrictions were placed on it (murder without good reason).
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And one of your arguments against eating children being moral is that it's morally repugnant.
All of your other arguments would work just as well against eating blowish. Which is silly, but not actually morally wrong, I'd say.
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Err, no. I don't see how that follows from "You could logically state that something is an absolute wrong if there are no compelling and reasonable arguments in its favor." It would make more sense to say that everything is right until overwhelming evidence shows it's wrong.
And one of your arguments against eating children being moral is that it's morally repugnant.
I don't think moral repugnance is a logical reason for declaring something an absolute wrong. But that also doesn't mean that the natural reluctance of our species to kill it's own young doesn't exist, either.
But it's a contrast to something like killing another human, which the vast majority find to be morally repugnant, but which is occasionally necessary (self-defense, war, capitol punishment are obvious areas in which it becomes clear that there is too much grey area to be considered absolute.)
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You say that "Something is... wrong if there no...arguments in its favour." which is exactly the same as "Something is wrong unless proven right." (assuming that it's proven right by arguments in its favour).
I agree that there are common things across cultures that people generally find repugnant. That doesn't make them absolute though - just commonly held.
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That would be more convincing if the vast majority of things didn't have arguments in their favor. It is quite difficult to find anything that has no argument in its favor.
That doesn't make them absolute though - just commonly held.
I specifically said that didn't make them absolute - but it made them a counter argument, along with being unpractical, unhealthy, and the rest of the list.
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Or perhaps I believe in some sort of evolutionary morality - that any species that does well must have a similar morality because that's what works, and you could call that absolute morality because it's the only one that can ever survive.
Sadly, the more I think about that, the more I think that the evolutionary morality is at odds with what I'd like it to be. So maybe I'm a subjective moralist after all...