It's not a matter of rights

[andrewducker]

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 :->

Comments

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

Most of your argument, particualrly your dichotomy between absolute and subjective, rests on the assumption that "we" are not part of the universe; that the inside of our heads is somehow a seperate and distinct territory from the rest. For example, to quote you:

"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"

The work that this distinction does in your argument is to set up two distinct territories: an "outside", really existing, absolute and immutable universe Where The Real Things Are; and an "inside" subjective world where things are absolutely relative unless based on the immemorial certainties of "The Universe", which is out there, distinct, seperate.

Having established this essentially Cartesian ontology, you then elaborate an epistemology in which knowldege can only be derived from logical dedcutions from obesrved physical laws describing The Universe, the cold hard thing "outside" us. Of course, this mode of knowledge formation will only allow of a very limited kind of physics and maths. Finding nothing else there, morality is inferred to be "inside", and "subjective".

In fact, its interesting to look at the work you make the word "subjective" do. First of all it maintains this distinction between inside and outside; between the Absolute and the absolutely relative. Indeed, "absolutely relative" is the main sense in which you use it, so that if something is not found "out there" and Real, then it must be "inside" and of less truth value. Thats the other bit of work you make "subjective" do; its denotes a kind of devalued knowledge, inadequate in comparison to the Better, Real Knowledge about things Out There. As such "subjective" has both an epistemilogical and moral function in your argument.

Which is all fine, quite a few people live in that universe, one where Substance and Subject are considered as different kinds of things, different realms. Personally, I don't. I think there are problems with it, a whole suitcase full of which are packed into your statement "Colour is a property of the light itself". Suffice to say that the amount of blood spilt over that sentence is enough (for me) to empirically infer that your position is neither obvious nor unproblematic.

No, I live in a world where the distinction between inside and outside is untenable, where the most remarkable thing is not that Substance and Subject are seperate but that the former somehow became and continues to become the latter: that subjectivity is a property of the universe, all our knowledge of the universe is mediated through it, and the moral world is part of that.

Or as Fiona Apple put it.

“He said 'it's all in your head' and I said 'so's everything' but he didn't get it.”

Of course you are the centre of the universe Andrew. How else could you see it?

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[andrewducker]

I'm clearly not explaining it properly, clearly.

Yes, the things in my head are part of the universe. But the attributes which I put on other things from the inside of my head are not part of those other things.

Objects have length. They have mass. They have colour. These are intrinsic properties of the objects.

They do not have a morality. Or rather, _I_ have a morality, but it refers to my opinions of other objects, not to the objects themselves. When I say "That person is evil." what I am saying is "I object to that person (or their acts)." - the statement doesn't actually refer to the person/act themselves - the object/act/person doesn't have a morality intrinsically, it's extrinsically assigned to it.

So yes, I, absolutely, _have_ morality. But it's part of me, not part of the things I assign it to. The error people frequently mistake is to think that morality is part of the object rather than the subject.

Is that any clearer?

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

no, really, you are very clear...all i was doing was elucidating the ontology and epistemology implicit in your position, which is still at work here: with all the extrinsic vs intrinsic; subject versus object; fact versus value.

Im not even saying its wrong, just, in its take on morality, a culturally relative, classic white-male-western position, and certainly not the only game in town.

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[andrewducker]

Of course it's not the only game in town. People believe all sorts of things that are wierd and unprovable.

And the position that you fed back to me in your last comment is not at all the same as the one in my response. Which is why I started over.

Because I'm not trying to claim that things in my head don't matter or exist (which is what you seemed to think, from your response). Merely that they are in my head.

And yes, I believe that there are facts, and opinions on those facts. So far as I can tell this isn't even slightly a strange view. In fact pretty much everyone believes this to be the case. The arguments generally come over which beliefs are factual and which are value-based.

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

between the subjective and the absolute, between fact and value, most of human life is lived:

Psychology, anthropology, the wisdom of ascetics, of therapists who have helped people overcome suffering; the wisdom of those who have gone through extreme suffering; the wisdom of all those who have spent time trying to help people get better or to better themselves; wisdom as distinct from knowledge; the embodied wisdom of social institutions that mean there are many many hard to remove barriers between you and me and barbarity; the Sittlichkeit of daily life; the emerging science of the Social Mind that clearly shows we are, from the word go, wired to be intersubjective, co-dependent, co-operative; that there are better and worse places and societies in which to live; the feeling you get of guilt when you know you have treated someone badly; the Law; sociology; social psychology; politics; ethics; virtue; social cognition; embodied cognition; self harm and self care; the moral development of children; trying to be a better person, a good neighbour, friend, lover...

i really could go on and on. I know of almost no-one who would say all of the above, none of which can be based on Absolute Fact, is entirely subjective, or that there are no ways of making meaningful distinctions within these bodies of knowledge and wisdom. Its where we live, and knowledge of that habitat, knowledge of how to live, of how to treat oneself and other people, is what I understand as Wisdom. I've got a lot of respect for it, and I know it when I see it....

but hey, maybe I'm just a big softie at heart. Maybe I should be waiting for proof before I start shooting my mouth of to myself, my clients and friends about how they should treat themselves and other people. After all, who am I to be spreading the inside of my head around the place? What do I know? Apparently nothing...

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[andrewducker]

I think you misunderstand me. I'm tilting myself against the absolute, the "Right" and the "One and Only Answer" and thus in favour of the answer that works for the individual, the subjective and the intersubjective, the one that can be taught from person to person and adjusted to fit the uniqueness of each of them. I'm against the idea that there is one true morality that we must fit to, and in favour of the idea that there are many different approaches that we can find value in.

In saying "There is no Answer." I am also saying "There are many answers, find the one that fits you best."

I'm not an idiot you know. None of what you've said is new to me, and I've agreed with narly all of it. I really don't see why it is you think I don't, because I haven't said anything to the contrary...

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

hey, i know you are not an idiot, i just cant resist a good dichotomoy, thats what gets me tilting

but more than that, a lot of what i said was new to me, it was useful, for me, to work out the distinction between knowledge and wisdom; to realise that the latter has become de-valued as a form of know-how; to think about what happens when you apply the criteria of science to the ethical life, and how the unworkability of doing so has meant that there has been hardly any Ethics in philosophy from the enlightenment onwards; how ethics was shunted into religion and has since foundered with it etc etc


Its not tham i'm disagreeeing or anything, its more like its been a useful forum to work out what I think, using your texts as a spur and sparring partner. I'm now trying to work out how wisdom and knowledge are in turn distinct from understanding, which has lead me back, as usual, to Judaeism and to the textual exegises of this:

"By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures." (Proverbs 24:3-4)

Next stop Kabbalah. so thank you :->

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[andrewducker]

I agree entirely on the point of ethics being abandoned. People hit "It's all subjective" and stop there, rather than trying to rebuild ethics as something useful if not True (if you see what I mean).

A lot of people seem to be stuck thinking that if their point of view isn't Right then it it's valueless, whereas we ought to be trying to teach people that their opinion is important in and of itself (insert about 5000 caveats here regarding the stupidities that occur when people take this too far - i.e. Sokal's "Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity").

And yes - sparring is incredibly useful. I have to remind myself that the point of arguing is not to win, it's to help all parties think about the problem.

As a side note, I spent large amounts of the last couple of days feeling twinges of fear whenever an email arrived. Leftovers from days of horrifically hurtful arguments, but nowadays thankfully under control and diminishing, rather than controlling my reactions. Feels like quite a positive step.

Re: "At no point is morality built into the universe"

[andrewducker]

To phrase that first sentence differently:

Yes, there are all sorts of beliefs about morals. But most of them start from incoherent positions and don't actually have good arguments to back them up.

I spent a lot of time in confusion regarding the whole area, triggered by some study of it at university. It took cutting back all the way and starting over at "What do we mean by the word morals" and building up from there to clear things up. Doing so also highlighted how much argument in the area was because people didn't actually seem to know the answer to that question.