Moral Relativism. It may be right but it must be wrong.

@fresco,

The naturalist mindset has an emotional commitment to normality. Question it at your peril. Wink

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs wrote:

Quote:
We certainly can test and measure our basic human values.

Can you give an example? How are basic human values to be tested and measured?

For example - say that I argue that theft is OK, provided the person I am stealing from is wealthy, and nobody is hurt. You say that theft is wrong, no matter what the circumstances. How you can you prove that your view is the correct one?

In your example there is no testing and measuring to be done, because we both have the basic value that stealing is generally wrong. This is the case with most morals actually.

To answer the specific question we turn to philosophy, now that we have a base to start from.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs wrote:

Quote:
How can science, which assumes a mind-independent reality, undermine the idea of a mind-independent reality?

If you don't understand this, and won't read up on it, there is no point pursuing it.

Pure, unadulterated bullshit. If you don't understand your own position well enough to explain it, then I can only conclude that you never understood it in the first place.

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

But Joe doesn't want to listen to the arguments which devalue "objectivity" because it pulls the rug from under his rhetorical comfort zone. He is going to cling to that rug like a dog on the end of a bone.

And still more bullshit. But I've come to expect it from you.

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@Jebediah,

Quote:

To answer the specific question we turn to philosophy, now that we have a base to start from.

again - any examples? Where in philosophy to we find the means to 'test and measure human values'?

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@joefromchicago,

Well, joe from chicago, our relationship has been short, futile and mutually exasperating, so go well, and be happy.

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@joefromchicago,

I'll match your three "bullshits" with three "woofs".

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs wrote:

Quote:
To answer the specific question we turn to philosophy, now that we have a base to start from.

again - any examples? Where in philosophy to we find the means to 'test and measure human values'?

Values are basic jeeprs. There are things like honesty and happiness. "stealing from the rich in certain situations in this hypothetical scenario" is not a value.

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@Jebediah,

well yeah. But that doesn't address any of the issues in the OP, though. And they are very hard issues, I don't say they are easy to address.

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Incidentally I think the idea of 'the minimization of suffering' is actually utilitarianism - 'the greatest good for the greatest number'.

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@ebrown p,

ebrown wrote:

1) I asked why minimizing suffering was better then any other basis for a system of morality. I

Although that happens to be (part of) what I hold to be true, it wasn't the point I was arguing at the moment. The point I was arguing started by observing that there are different fundamental approaches to doing ethics. One way is to wite a rulebook and require that people follow it. Another is to judge acts by their consequences (or by the statistical expectation value of their consequences before you commit the acts), and to set a criterium for judging how desirable those consequences are. And yet another is to assume that "people know it when they see it", where "it" is either good or evil, and deduce rules about right and wrong from polling people's intuitions.

My point is that for each of these approaches there are different amounts of disagreement between cultures, justifying differently prominent roles for moral relativism. You advocate a very high level of moral relativism. At the same time, you start by taking the deontlological approach to ethics, which would generate the greatest conflict between rules when universalized.

ebrown p wrote:

4) The Catholic Church here was offering a vision of Universal Truth based on unprovable axioms. T

Before you can offer versions of Universal Truth, you have to assume there is a universal truth to be offered. This assumption is a leap of faith in morality, but it's also a leap of faith in science. For example, one leap of faith that scientists have to take is what's called the inductive hypothesis: If the cloudless sky at daytime was blue the first N times you looked, it will be blue the N+1th time you look. (For sufficiently high values of N.) There is no logical reason to assume that. You have to take it to be true before you can do evidence-based science at all. And you cannot prove the inductive hypothesis without first assuming it: Without assuming it, the fact that the inductive hypothesis has worked each of the gazillion times we relied on it says nothing about the next time.

My purpose in this sub-thread isn't to defend my opinion about what the objective truth about morality is. It's to assert that there even is an objective truth to defend. My evidence for that is that notions of good and bad are a lot more similar across the world when you start with a non-deontological approach to ethics, and barely distinguishable when you test it with concrete, Marc-Hauser-type scenarios. This suggests, if not a universal truth about morality, a pretty universal consensus about morality if you state the moral conflict in a concrete way.

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@jeeprs,

Actually, that's called Negative Consequentialism/Utilitarianism. I would describe myself as more of a negative utilitarian, simply because I find that slight sufferings hold much more utilitarian weight, on the negative side, then do slight pleasures. This is how I justify the 'rape' scenario used to attack utilitarianism. Then again, even as a regular utilitarian, it wouldn't be hard to conclude that the victim of a rape would be hurt far more then the rapist's pleasure, both immediately and overall.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs wrote:

well yeah. But that doesn't address any of the issues in the OP, though. And they are very hard issues, I don't say they are easy to address.

Let's start with acknowledging that there are some objective moral facts and work from there then. This is what people actually do when they come up with solutions that actually help people. I'm not sure what the moral relativists do except ignore their own beliefs whenever they aren't preening themselves about how intelligent/non-xenophobic they are.

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@Jebediah,

what is a moral fact ?

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@Jebediah,

Quote:

Let's start with acknowledging that there are some objective moral facts and work from there then. This is what people actually do when they come up with solutions that actually help people. I'm not sure what the moral relativists do except ignore their own beliefs whenever they aren't preening themselves about how intelligent/non-xenophobic they are.

PS is right. What is a 'moral fact'? Why is it wrong for a rich country to invade a poor one and enslave its citizens? There is no scientific reason. Surely you've been through enough debates on the forum to know that science does not recognise ethics or morality. The 'scientific picture' of the world is one of brute facts and brute forces, mass being moved by energy, chemical reactions and stellar explosions. There is nothing moral in any of it. Any morality we cling to in this context is surely one of our own devising, and hence the problem. In the olden days, there were indeed such things as 'ethical standards'. Ultimately, they all went back to the Bible; this was the meaning of 'revealed truth'. Take that away, and try rebuilding from scratch, and where do you start? Where do you lay the foundation stone? Which science do you appeal to?

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I will add to that, that from a Buddhist viewpoint, it is essential that morality and ethics be based on the individual's free acceptance of the reality of moral law (dharma). You cannot really compel others to accept your standards, but this does not mean that any behaviour is acceptable. Obviously some behaviours are exceedingly harmful to those that engage in them as well as to others, for example, sexual promiscuity. In the Western nations, there are now serious arguments that sexual promiscuity is a civil freedom, and that pornography is a matter of free expression. This is certainly ruinous. But there is a risk that if you try and impose censorship or regulation of such behaviours through legislation then you go to the opposite extreme of a theocratic dictatorship.

I personally think the situation in the advanced democracies is beyond redemption in many ways. The only way out of the maze is for citizens to recognize moral behaviours and adopt them accordingly. Provided ego is using civil rights as a pretext to indulge in illicit pleasure, then the culture is at risk and many will suffer. This is the nature of the world that we see today.

Quote:

The history of modern political and social doctrine is, to a large degree, the history of Western culture’s long, laborious departure from Jewish, classical, and Christian models of freedom, and the history in consequence of the ascendancy of the language of “rights” over every other possible grammar of the good. It has become something of a commonplace among scholars to note that—from at least the time of Plato through the high Middle Ages—the Western understanding of human freedom was inseparable from an understanding of human nature: to be free was to be able to flourish as the kind of being one was, so as to attain the ontological good towards which one’s nature was oriented (i.e., human excellence, charity, the contemplation of God, and so on). For this reason, the movement of the will was always regarded as posterior to the object of its intentions, as something wakened and moved by a desire for rational life’s proper telos, and as something truly free only insofar as it achieved that end towards which it was called. To choose awry, then—through ignorance or maleficence or corrupt longing—was not considered a manifestation of freedom, but of slavery to the imperfect, the deficient, the privative, the (literally) subhuman. Liberty of choice was only the possibility of freedom, not its realization, and a society could be considered just only insofar as it allowed for and aided in the cultivation of virtue.

The Pornography Culture, David B. Hart, The New Atlantis, Number 6, Summer 2004, pp. 82-89.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs wrote:

PS is right. What is a 'moral fact'? Why is it wrong for a rich country to invade a poor one and enslave its citizens?

Why did you choose this as an example? Why do you think it has anything to do with morality? Why did you say "wrong for a rich country" and not "right for a rich country"?

Quote:

There is no scientific reason. Surely you've been through enough debates on the forum to know that science does not recognise ethics or morality. The 'scientific picture' of the world is one of brute facts and brute forces, mass being moved by energy, chemical reactions and stellar explosions. There is nothing moral in any of it. Any morality we cling to in this context is surely one of our own devising, and hence the problem. In the olden days, there were indeed such things as 'ethical standards'. Ultimately, they all went back to the Bible; this was the meaning of 'revealed truth'. Take that away, and try rebuilding from scratch, and where do you start? Where do you lay the foundation stone? Which science do you appeal to?

jeeprs, this is just an anti-science thing from you. I was saying it was common sense. And it is. You can test an measure common sense if you wish, but it just sounds like you skipped over everything else I said and acted like I was suggesting we derive morality with a ruler and and scale. Although ironically justice is often depicted as holding a scale.

I think it was in the same post that I pointed out the difference between facts like "the sun is bigger than the earth" and "slipping and falling off of a cliff is scary".

How can you suggest that morality is of our own devising? Aren't you aware of your own instincts?

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@Jebediah,

But instinct is not a sufficient basis for an ethical society. Besides many of the instincts we have are moulded by culture, and the culture was originally created by an ethical code which is now in the process of being discarded. Leave people to their own instincts, you end up with 'Lord of the Flies', which is what, incidentally, that book was about.

I am not anti-science, I am anti-scientism. Somebody above was pontificating about how 'science rationally tests its views', etc, as opposed to Catholicism, which just imposes unthinking dogma on everyone. This is the common view of the secular intelligentsia, and that is what I am reacting against. It has nothing to do with science, it is a philosophical issue.

You will notice that in the secular society religious views are OK so long as they are privately held, kept out of the town square, and most of the secular philosophers will guard this principle with great vigilance. But does this mean that if I uphold an ethical law based on a spiritual principle, that it is a subjective issue? You see the implication? We are always moving towards a position where the secular theorists will say 'well you cannot prove [such and such an axiom] whereas we, with our Scientific Method, can provide evidence for our view'. This argument has already been provided in this thread. And I think it is a fallacious argument.

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Quote:

But instinct is not a sufficient basis for an ethical society.

I'm going to stop you right there. This thread is about moral RELATIVISM. This thread is about whether we in america can say that when in Iran they condemn a woman to death by stoning for adultery, they are wrong. In this case the non-relativists applied enough public pressure that the sentence was canceled. Were they wrong to do so? Tell me they were wrong to do so.

You aren't talking about moral relativism at all, stop blatantly strawmanning me.

(I should not that I am using moral relativism as it is normally used to avoid confusion-->i.e. the Iran example above. There are positions sometimes called relativism or some kind of relativism that simply say that different countries can have some differences, this is clearly common sense, everyone knows that your family has different rules than your friends, and that you can do some things at a bar that you wouldn't at a funeral, and countries and cultures are just on a larger scale).

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@Jebediah,

Quote:

I'm going to stop you right there. This thread is about moral RELATIVISM. This thread is about whether we in america can say that when in Iran they condemn a woman to death by stoning for adultery, they are wrong. In this case the non-relativists applied enough public pressure that the sentence was canceled. Were they wrong to do so? Tell me they were wrong to do so.

Of course, nobody should be stoned to death for adultery, or for anything, and the Iranian theocracy is indeed barbaric, and repressive. But does that mean adultery is morally permissible? Is it a matter of individual conscience?

Actually what comes to mind is the Biblical parallel, where Jesus intervened to stop a woman being stoned to death for exactly those reasons (bearing in mind this was 2,000 years ago.) 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone', he said. But as I recall, at the end of the story, he also admonishes the woman "Go, woman, and sin no more".

I too am talking about moral relativism. The OP says 'there must be hard and fast rules'. I am asking: whose rules?

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Moral Relativism. It may be right but it must be wrong.

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