What is your fundamental moral compass?

The human race wouldnt be here if men didnt have the instinct to protect women. Long vulnerable pregnancies and years before children can keep up with the tribe necessitate someone helping to feed the woman. It is also a way of ensuring your genetice survival if it is your baby you are helping to protect.

If civilisation falls over you just watch them come running back to daddy.

It is called revenge.

debate

I didn't read all the posts. This one I stopped at because people have told me that very thing- You CAN'T save the world. No, I can't and trying to help others is NOT saving the world. There is nothing wrong with kindness and if someone has the ability to help others in times of need then there is nothing wrong with that. I like to help if I am able to whether they live here or in another country. Also, if I see or hear of something that I feel is wrong, instead of complaining about it, I do what I can to change the situation. Basically my morals come down to:
Kindness
Helping
Changing

I work to know myself well enough that I have some power to limit the damage my dark side does to people around me.

I'm not convinced...it also goes against my moral compass.

Children I get.


People younger than me I get (I have had more chance at life, so die already)

Parents I get.

The women thing (and I know you think it universal, but I think in practice that's not wildly demonstrably not so) may be an evolutionary behaviour, re species survival.


We are currently a planetary infestation, so I don't find it relevant, rationally, any more, and I'd have a different moral compass.

There you go. What a moral compass that represents. Always points towards the high ground.

The word "fundamental" is in the thread title. Orwell dealt with that. The rest are style choices. I tell people not to read 1984.

I appreciate that such a statement will be popular in what is, essentially, a secular, materialist conversation.

However, be that as it my, my vapidity I mean, we do have the dilemma Plato discussed in his Euthyphro. Is "good" good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good? If the former then the Christian has the Ten Commandments as a fundamental moral compass. But that leads to the idea that morality is a product of arbitrary will and obedience to morality is a mere obedience to authority. If the latter, God commands it because it is good, then God loses His omnipotence and morality is independent of God's will in which case knowledge of God is irrelevant.

It follows that the Christian synthesis (Aquinas) requires that the precepts of Christian morality have to be taken on trust as given and true and therefore all discussion is pointless. Or vapid if you prefer.

It also follows that if discussion of morality (philosophisings on moral fundamentals) can lead to a formulation of a moral theory then there is no role for religion. One might say that the thread here is a obtuse attack on Christianity and leads to equal rights of anybody to choose any morality they want. That notion is contrary to Kant's rule that morality must be universal as it cannot but lead to anarchy in morals. The Epicurian, the Stoic, the Christian, the Moslem, the Sadist, The Libertine, etc etc, have an equal right to act by their own morality until laws are formulated to prevent them doing, as they must be in a complex society, and then it comes back to obedience to political authority and God has been exchanged for Man and not simply Man but the Man who holds power this month or year and who is, from the argument above, entitled to choose his own morality.

The Materialist Theory of Mind (D.M.Armstrong--an Aussie) blows all this out of the water with its insistence on the totally conditioned individual, whose conditioning includes being conditioned to believe it is not conditioned, and that the delusion that free will can ever exist is incomprehensible. As the Marquis de Sade concluded.

From this it follows that the defence of free will resides in acceptance of religious authority and that anybody who imagines themselves to have free will is fundamentally a religious person. The materialist philosophy excludes such a notion as silly.

The fundamental questions are: is morality grounded in self-love or benevolence and are moral judgements the product of reason or sentiment?

The dilettantes may make all the noise they want about being motivated by benevolence and reason, such as referring to opponents as "vapid" but it makes not the slightest difference to the topic of this thread however entertaining it might be or how satisfying and pleasureable. Or efficient.

I think so.

All of the people involved want to live, presumably. (If the old lady is wearing a sign saying "I have terminal cancer and am on my way to an assisted suicide," that would make things a little bit easier yet).

Balance comes into it re: weighing one life vs. ten, and also how many people are likely to be affected by those deaths.

I'd hate to choose to kill anyone but when doing nothing kills ten, I consider the doing-nothing to be agency.

Discrimination against people for not being cute. The ethical way to prioritize, if you have to, would of course be to draw straws. But nobody's perfect, so we have to live with an unfair human nature that accords special privileges to women and children.

Which streetcar dilemma? There are countless variants of it.


Sorry for proselythizing, but your responses in the American wealth thread suggest to me that you're pretty much a utilitarian. You probably would agree with most of what Peter Singer writes in The Life You Can Save

Nevermind, got it.


In general, I would divert it into the old lady. As a utilitarian, I approve of choices to the extent that they cause the greatest happiness for the greater number. By driving the train into the old lady, I prevent the same unhappiness to a greater number. Therefore, that's what I should do.

The case gets interesting if we are talking about a crowd of newborns -- a few hours old, say -- without any grown-up parents holding them. Assuming that the killing is painless, I theoretically ought to kill the babies rather than the old lady. Unlike her, they don't yet have the self-awareness and rationality to know what's going on. Lacking that, the prospect of being killed cannot cause unhappiness to them. Moreover, rationality and self-awareness is what gives us humans a privileged status in the universal calculus of suffering and happiness. Hence, killing newborns by driving a train into them is morally equivalent to driving it into a crowd of chicken. I wouldn't kill an old lady over a crowd of chicken -- they, too, lack rationality and self-awareness, which the old lady possesses.

That's the ethics of the case, and utilitarianism is very clear about them. But in practice, it would shock my conscience to follow through with this; I probably wouldn't. Does that mean I can't overcome the biases of my society and time, or does it mean there's an overriding ethical principle that I missed? I'm still working on that one.

Just as a test of literary wit why doesn't someone try one that's a bit more far-fetched when I did my quick version on self interest.

The one with the good looking lady and the hobo is only for amateur wits. So there's two routes to take for a start. Two hoboes or two good looking young ladies. The baby in the pram in a pink bonnet sucking on a comforter and the Wall Street banker. (Not in a turban.)

This dinner table conversation needs some kick in it. It isn't very amusing to sit listening to variations on the theme "I am wonderful". One might have a moral duty to be amusing. Rabelais certainly thought so. It might go round the table starting to the right of the Cliqueon Quick '84--a fine vintage, and each turn adding on a variation to the last turn's variation on the similarities between the previous choice facing the driver of the street car. It only takes practice. Perfecting variations on how wonderful and clever one is not only takes up precious time which might be used practicing one's wit but it's excruciatingly boring.

And if you practice and get good at it just think of how many social occasions you can get thrown out of. You might be surprised at how much more amusing are those who have discovered that they are no big deal.

Is a 40 mile round trip to get a pizza morally acceptable? Or a 1,000 mile one to fish off the Florida Keys? Assuming the oil doesn't come ashore which is sloshing around in the region due to the demand for cheap gas being what it is. Maybe for pizzas too.

Is it morally acceptable to be "Green" if you don't know whether green policies will cause the greatest good for the greatest number and might, even, do the opposite.

But the world has seen a great deal of evil stemming from that idea. It's the standard political slogan of left-wing politics. Any means may be used to secure good enough ends. The ends being deemed good enough by the operator.

As I understand utilitarianism it is hedonistic. It calculates happiness as "the" good. As the babies are only experiencing bliss they cannot be happy. Happiness is a conscious experience.

The old lady can be happy and thus the happiness calculus, desire satisfaction, saves her.

The ethical principle you might have missed is that there are other considerations besides happiness which might be said to be "good". Value of a life for example. On that it's no contest and the old lady gets it. So what you missed was that utility doctrines are not valid guides to moral compasses.

Another consideration is economic. The old lady gets it with that one too.

And your correct sense of letting her have it is due to the success of our society's conditioning of you, Thomas, which derive from its rejection of utilitarian philosophy. If we were all utilitarians we would applaud you for killing the 10 kids and saving the old lady. BTW--had they been baptised?

Intuitionist philosophies and common-sensism also reject utilitarianism on the grounds of its ultimate incoherence and its attempts to reduce human life to simple and manageable proportions which is another propensity of the left-wing politician. Not that those philosophies don't have problems.

Value of a life to whom? The babies' lives have no value to them; they're not in the business of valuing anything yet. And in any event, "value of life", if taken seriously, would require that you kill the old lady over a crowd of chicken as well. Am I correct in assuming that you wouldn't do that? If so, by what principle does the life of an old lady have value and the life of a chicken doesn't?

The principle that we say it does. There can be no other. That man has dominion over nature.

Thousands of organisms are killed just digging out the foundations of an extension outside the dining room French-windows. When not only is there no old lady's life to bother about but it is a common occurence whereas the runaway streetcar is not. If we don't have dominion over the animals we are catatonic. Besides, it says so in The Bible, the teaching of which is based on the scientific fact that without that dominion we are lost. The discovery of the scientific fact leads to the Biblical doctrine and not the other way round.

The doctrine pre-empts confusion. And undermines those who might seek to make a nuisance of themselves on the basis that one organism's life is to be respected equally with all others, once they reject Biblical authority, which is a position often suspected of being taken for the precise purpose of it facilitating making a nuisance of oneself. Which behaviour pattern is much more common in cities than in rural districts where the ploughing of vast praries kills millions of organisms. Maybe billions. And to provide cheap food for city dwellers who cannot feed themselves. To say nothing of the poisons in the pesticides and even the fertilisers. All of which is being done now all over the place and not an old lady nor 10 infants in sight--ever and hence useful as a mode of moral excellence display which the equality of organisms most definitely isn't. That last actually being embarrassing.



The utiltarian gospel of "good" as happiness justifies bear baiting.

going by your greatest happening reasoning, wouldn't it be better to save the chickens? likely more people will be made happy/healthy by future omelettes/souffles/frittatas and future chicken soup than will be saddened by the death of one old lady

That's imaginative Beth. The happiness calculus is fiendish. If all ten chickens live a full egg producing life that's a lot of recipes sorted out and much smacking of lips. Think of the scrunchy meringues. (No don't).

There's old ladies in Africa too.

The old lady might be sat on a $2 million will with two sons each with two or three kids.

A utilitarian has only one choice it seems to me. 3 years eggs and two hard pressed families getting a $1 million apiece against one old lady. It's no contest if its painless. Even some pain might be acceptable as long as it's not a lot.

I read that Eskimos offed their elderly as a matter of course. They have probably ceased now they have been Christianised. I hope so.