If objective morality exists, then its knowledge must be innate
Let’s start with a joke
A priest teaches a peasant about God.
Peasant: “If I did not know about God and did not worship, would I go to hell?”
Priest: “No, not if you honestly did not know.”
Peasant: “Then why did you tell me?!”
The joke is that the peasant is fully logical, and yet we know that if God is just, then the priest is correct. The solution to this conundrum lies in the peasant’s intentions. Does he have intentions of duty and goodness, or does he have intentions of self-preservation and selfishness? It is not the knowledge of God that causes him to sin (be immoral), but his original intentions.
Let’s unpack this idea some more
A bad outcome is undoubtably not morally bad if it is an honest, unintentional accident, such as accidentally running over a person that deliberately jumps in front of the car. Conversely, a good outcome is undoubtably not considered morally good (as in praiseworthy) if it occurs by chance, such as accidentally running over a person that turns out to be a terrorist. The reason lies in the intentions. Even in our justice system, accidental killing is much less punishable (if at all) than attempted murder.
Let’s wrap up with syllogisms
P1: Intention of good and evil is a necessary component of morality. As demonstrated above.
P2: There is no intention of good or evil if there is no knowledge of good and evil. You cannot intend what you do not know.
C1: Knowledge of good and evil is a necessary component of morality.
P3: It is absurd to suppose that knowledge of good and evil is taught. If it was, then who was the first teacher, and "why would he tell us?!"
C2: If objective morality exists, then its knowledge must be innate.
Peasants, I am ready for your comments.
A priest teaches a peasant about God.
Peasant: “If I did not know about God and did not worship, would I go to hell?”
Priest: “No, not if you honestly did not know.”
Peasant: “Then why did you tell me?!”
The joke is that the peasant is fully logical, and yet we know that if God is just, then the priest is correct. The solution to this conundrum lies in the peasant’s intentions. Does he have intentions of duty and goodness, or does he have intentions of self-preservation and selfishness? It is not the knowledge of God that causes him to sin (be immoral), but his original intentions.
Let’s unpack this idea some more
A bad outcome is undoubtably not morally bad if it is an honest, unintentional accident, such as accidentally running over a person that deliberately jumps in front of the car. Conversely, a good outcome is undoubtably not considered morally good (as in praiseworthy) if it occurs by chance, such as accidentally running over a person that turns out to be a terrorist. The reason lies in the intentions. Even in our justice system, accidental killing is much less punishable (if at all) than attempted murder.
Let’s wrap up with syllogisms
P1: Intention of good and evil is a necessary component of morality. As demonstrated above.
P2: There is no intention of good or evil if there is no knowledge of good and evil. You cannot intend what you do not know.
C1: Knowledge of good and evil is a necessary component of morality.
P3: It is absurd to suppose that knowledge of good and evil is taught. If it was, then who was the first teacher, and "why would he tell us?!"
C2: If objective morality exists, then its knowledge must be innate.
Peasants, I am ready for your comments.
Comments (168)
This cannot be. If the will was uncorrupted (incapable of evil) prior to the original sin, then what caused the original sin? No, instead, the will being free from the start was always capable of both good and evil (by definition of free will), and the original sin resulted from choosing evil. And as described in my post, the evil was fully known for it to be a sin. It is not so much the act of eating the apple that corrupted Adam and Eve, as though the apple contained some kind of corrupting substance, but the disobedience towards God, which occurred prior to the act of eating the apple.
Quoting Wayfarer
How can one be blamed for a bad outcome if he could not have reasonably foreseen it? E.g. You give me food to bring to the hungry. Subsequently, they die from poison that you had injected in the food. Although I am part of the causal chain of events leading to the bad outcome, how can I be blamed if I had no knowledge of the poison?
Quoting Wayfarer
The Good in christianity is no different than the Good spoken of by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or Confucius, all of which existed before Christ. The Golden Rule of ethics, which is tightly connected with the Good, "occurs in some form in nearly every religion and ethical tradition" (source).
Personally, I agree with you, but that is not what Latin Christianity believes, which, following Augustine, holds that man is corrupted by sin, the result of which is death, and the only remission of which comes from faith in Jesus Christ. I am not defending that doctrine, (although it would be interesting to see the perspective of someone who was willing to), but that is what they say.
The Church recognises 'virtuous pagans' such as Plato et al, however, I'm fairly sure that they're not 'in heaven'. Again, would be interested to hear the perspective of one more familiar with the doctrine.
(Wikipedia entry on Virtuous Pagans.)
P1 is false. Morality is a conventionally defined as a code of conduct.
P2 mistakenly presupposes that the quality of an intention is existentially contingent upon the subject's knowledge of that quality. It's not. As if an intention's being evil/good requires the subject's knowing that. It doesn't. An intention is good/evil regardless of the subject's awareness/knowledge of that. One can have evil intentions and not be aware/knowledgable that they are.
Do people intend to do evil?
What you write is correct. But this 'corruption by sin' refers to the corruption of the body, from immortal to mortal and prone to physical suffering, and corruption of the appetite such as physical and emotional passions. It does not refer to going from a state of pure goodness to the ability to be evil. Salvation by Jesus is salvation from death and removal of the original sin which we carry similar to a birth mark; but even then, we still have the capacity of choosing against good, due to free will, and picking hell over God.
Quoting Wayfarer
I am no theologian, but this idea seems absurd to me. If true, then an infant dying right after birth would end up in hell because it did not have time to 'know' Jesus.
I mean to say that it is part of objective reality, not man-made.
Quoting creativesoul
It is fitting in the sense that universal (objective) morality is assumed in my argument. But more than that, I try to prove that its knowledge must be innate for it to apply to us.
Thank you, although I stress again, I’m not writing that because I necessarily believe it, but because it is the teaching of the Christian church as I had understood it.
But I do agree with your other point, that people are free to choose good or evil - which actually is also part of Christian doctrine. (It is that freedom of the will which is actually denied by philosophical materialism.)
As for unbaptised infants - that is what ‘limbo’ was supposed to be the solution for, although as I understand it, this has now been deprecated in Catholic theology. I think it’s a vexed question. But I suppose on reflection one of the reasons that Catholics might oppose abortion, is that it prevents an infant from receiving the opportunity of salvation.
Universal and objective are not equivalent on my view.
If intention is not a necessary component of morality, how do we account for the fact that attempted murder is punishable by law? If only attempted, then there is no actual murder that occurred.
Quoting creativesoul
How can I intend to do x if I don't know what x is? E.g. how can I intend to draw a quasar if I don't know what a quasar is? I suppose I could do end up drawing one by accident, by continuously drawing random lines, but then it would still be unintentional.
That's ethics, and again those are not objective. Rather they are subject to historical, familial, and cultural particulars.
Attempted murder is punishable by law, because it is an act that we - as a community of people - have decided is unacceptable.
Yes, but not in the strict sense of picking evil for the sake of being evil. I am optimistic that most people are not made of pure evil. Rather, picking evil is done as a means to the end of obtaining another good. This good cannot be a moral good (that would be a contradiction) but ultimately a physical or emotional good. E.g. 1: Hitler knew that his treatment of the Jews was evil, and it is reasonable to suppose he did so as a relief of his hatred for the Jews. This relief of hatred is a form of emotional good. E.g. 2: I know that giving money to charity is morally good, but I am tempted to avoid it because it would result in less money for me to buy physical goods.
Doesn't God already know that? Why doesn't God just kill all the unworthy and be done with it? These word games make no sense. The God who plays wiseass word games with his creations is not the true God.
As I see it, there are only two logical outcomes: saying yes to God or saying no to God. The former is the state called heaven; the latter is the state called hell. There is one more transitional state called purgatory, which can be symbolized as the time it takes for the subject to make up his mind over the other two choices. But I cannot see limbo as a logical possibility, unless it is also temporary.
Quoting Wayfarer
This might be a secondary reason; the primary reason is simply that humans have ontological value and should not be harmed if it can be avoided.
But then how do you explain the fact that is it universal? All other things man-made seem to differ depending on time period, place, culture and so on; does it not?
Quoting creativesoul
In christianity, God is not above goodness (i.e. he arbitrarily chooses what is good and evil), but he is goodness, that is, goodness is part of his essence. This is how christians escape the Euthyphro dilemma.
Quoting creativesoul
I admit I use the terms 'ethics' and 'morality' interchangeably, as I don't know what the difference is. But how can one disagree that attempted murder is unethical? Would you like to be the target? Would anyone? If not, then it is unethical by applying the Golden Rule.
I reject the conventional definition of morality(as a code of conduct). I also reject the objective/subjective distinction, as you already know...
Ah yes! Hello again.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't disagree. Did I say that murder was sometimes not wrongful? Otherwise, accidental killing is not wrongful, as it is accidental, and killing is not necessarily murder.
I admit that this infamous tree of knowledge of good and evil does suggest that Adam and Eve acquired the knowledge of good and evil only after eating the fruit. But it would be absurd to believe that the original sin resulted from mere bad luck of committing an evil act they had no knowledge of. Even C.S. Lewis, one of the big boss of christian philosophy, is perplexed at the role of the tree itself in the event, and just ignores that part. Who am I to disagree with sir Lewis?
Quoting Wayfarer
Well upon realizing they were naked, they indeed became self-conscious.
I don't take that to be the point at all. It take it to symbolise the very advent of knowledge, it was consequence of self-consciousness, of the ability to judge for oneself - hence 'knowledge of good and evil'. Up till then, to put it in brutally brief terms, there was no 'self' in need of saving; lions and gazelles are in no need of salvation, because they have no idea of life and death. It is mere, and pure, instinct; the herds will scatter, the carnivore makes a kill, then tranquility returns. There's the 'Garden of Eden' - no chance for good or evil to arise, as no witness for it.
Speaking from an anthropological perspective, I identify the 'tree of knowledge' with the advent of tool-use, language, and human culture and society. It is only with things that can be owned, and therefore lost, and a sense of one's own mortality - the knowledge of the death of oneself and loved ones - that a sense of self-consciousness (symbolised by the figleaf) becomes a possibility. In ancient culture, this is the meaning of sacrifice - the return to the God or Gods some portion of what has been given, so as to return it to its primeval source. Loss and suffering is the existential plight of human existence; Jesus Christ represents the chance to return to the 'divine source' of being, wherein all loss, separation and suffering is overcome.
As I say, that is a somewhat anthropological and perhaps gnostic analysis, but that is how I would interpret it.
The problem I see with your interpretation of the story of the fall is that it sounds like this advent of knowledge and self-consciousness is a good thing; a natural evolution of the species progressing towards a higher state. In the christian interpretation however, the event of the fall is the reverse; the fall of a great species down to a lower state. It is so catastrophic that it took the blood of the son of God to redeem the species (and even then we will only see the effects after death).
I understand that there is room for interpretation of symbols such as for the tree of knowledge, but there is no discussing that the event is a bad one.
My own view is that there is an essential property to an immoral act, and that property is harm. All immoral acts cause harm to the one committing the act, or to the one who is the object of the act, or to both. If there is no harm, there is no immorality. When I say this I'm not saying that every harmful act is an evil, only that all evil or immoral acts cause harm.
The second component is that immorality is objective, that is, it's not subjective, or a matter of opinion, or a matter of consensus. For example, if I cut someone's arm off without good reason, there are several factors that make this an immoral act, and moreover, make it an objective immoral act. First, it's objectively true that the arm has been cut off, we can see it on the ground. Second, we can objectively observe the screams of the victim. Third, we can also witness the screams and tears of family and friends. These three reactions show the objective nature of the harm done. No opinion or consensus will or can change the objective nature of these observations.
This is not to say that we're always able to detect the harm, which is why in courts of law evidence is brought forward to show the harm done.
Intent can be tricky because while there are clearly immoral acts that involve intent, there are also acts that cause harm without intent, like accidental harm, which we can be held accountable for. Furthermore, there are evils caused by natural disasters that don't involve intent at all, yet they are often referred to as evils because of the great harm done. One might say then that while we can refer to all immoral acts as evil, not all evil involves immoral actions because they are not always the result of an agent.
Quoting Sam26
What if your spouse cheats on you and you never know about it? As they say, "what you don't know cannot hurt you". But surely, cheating is immoral.
Quoting Sam26
But these three reactions would still occur if you had good reasons to cut someone's arm, like out of self-self-defense. So if the same things are observed for both a moral and immoral case, then they cannot be the criteria to determine if the act is moral or not.
Quoting Sam26
We need to differentiate between two types of evil. Moral and physical. You are correct that 'harm' is an essential property of evil, when it comes to physical evil. For moral evil, the essential property is intention; intention of not treat others like we want to be treated. So accidental harm and natural disasters are examples of physical evil. Attempted murder and looking down on others are examples of moral evil. And intentionally cutting someone's arm for not good reason is an example of both.
I foresaw this in my argument look closer at the types of harm.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
If you have good reasons to cut the arm off, then obviously it's not immoral, which is why I differentiate between having good reasons for the harm as opposed to not having good reasons.Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I also covered this, I pointed out the difference between intentional moral evil, and evil that's not intentional, like natural disasters.
Is it this? "All immoral acts cause harm to the one committing the act, or to the one who is the object of the act, or to both." Why do you say that an immoral act can cause harm to the one committing it? Note, I don't necessarily disagree, I just want to go further into the analysis.
Quoting Sam26
But you said in your previous post that the three factors you mentioned served to judge if an act was immoral. My point is that if these three factors are present in both cases when the act is moral and immoral, then they cannot serve to judge if the act is moral or not.
Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. The three factors I pointed out are what make an immoral act objective, and not subjective. There is probably no definition that will fit every single case of what constitutes an immoral act. However, one thing that seems to be a property of all immoral acts is the harm done, that is, harm without good reason. Of course here I'm talking about moral agents, as opposed to the harm of natural disasters, or accidental harm which also involves a moral agent.
It's true that the three objective factors are also present in cases of some moral actions. What distinguishes the two is having good reasons for one as opposed to not having good reasons for the other.
So what makes it immoral is the lack of justification, the harm done, and the objective nature of the act. And even in natural disasters or in the case of an accident there is also harm done. So the defining property of all immoral acts or evil (natural or otherwise) is harm. This is not to say that all harm is immoral, it's only to say that wherever you find immorality or an evil of a sort, you'll find harm.
You pointed out, and rightly so, that if a spouse cheats on you and you never find out, then where's the harm. Now as I pointed out, sometimes is very difficult to discover the harm, which is why in courts of law people bring forth evidence to show the harm done. So sometimes we will disagree about whether there was harm done; and if it can be demonstrated that there was no harm, then it would seem to follow that there was no immoral act on the part of the agent.
In your example I do believe that there is harm done to the relationship, even if the one spouse doesn't know about the harm. I also said that in any immoral act there is harm done either to the one committing the immoral act, or to the one on the receiving end, or to both (it's probably both in most if not all cases). It's my belief that anyone who commits an immoral act does harm to himself or herself. Sometimes the harm isn't clear as in the case you cited, but I believe there is psychological harm done to the person who committed the infidelity.
Conventionally, the "Golden Rule: Will (or intend) unto others as you want them to will unto you" is the absolute criteria to determine if an act is moral or not (between humans). As you will try to defend that harm is an essential property of an immoral act, I will defend the test of the Golden Rule.
Quoting Sam26
I agree about the necessity of a good reason, but what determines a reason as 'good'? We still need to find the criteria for that.
Quoting Sam26
Excluding the harm done to oneself (because it is a bit ambiguous), what about the case of attempted murder? There was no harm done to the victim because the attempt failed, and yet it is evident that the act is immoral.
Quoting Sam26
I agree. Not from a psychological standpoint but from a metaphysical standpoint. If the purpose of our existence is to be morally good and we go against it, then we harm our very existence. But this topic is beyond the scope of this discussion so we should save it for another time.
I definitely wouldn't characterize the Golden Rule as an absolute. Some people really don't care what happens to themselves, for whatever reason or cause. This rule also depends on what someone's moral code is, it assumes that we all think alike in terms of what's moral or not. For example, what if I grew up in a culture that believed that one should sacrifice children to the Sun god? One could imagine someone thinking this is a good thing, thus, not only wishing it upon themselves as the ultimate sacrifice for the good of all, but also wishing it upon others. Appeasing the gods for whatever good one thinks might come of it.
The Golden Rule itself is dependent on a particular view of morality, so it can't be the test of what's moral or immoral. Therefore, I would suggest to you that it can be very subjective. I'm not saying that it has no value, because generally it's a good rule to apply, but it can be dependent on cultural or subjective beliefs, making it vulnerable to a kind of relativistic view of what's moral or not.
Given what I've just argued, the argument in favor of your position would seem to be circular. It's as if you're saying the Golden Rule is moral because it's moral. We want to know why it's moral, or what's makes something moral or not moral. What is the essential objective property (if there is one), objective being the operative word, that makes all immoral acts wrong, whatever your intention or motive. I'm making the claim that all immoral acts cause harm, even if we can't always see the harm, which is why it's not always easy to determine if a particular act is wrong or not. However, generally we are able to see the harm, as in my example above. Moreover, my example (cutting the arm off e.g.) shows that morality is objective in most cases, that is, in most cases we are able to ascertain the objective nature of the harm.
I didn't address everything, but I think this is a good place to start.
So you object to the Golden Rule being the absolute criteria to determine morality, on the grounds that individuals may have different ways of how they want to be treated. I dispute the underlined point. It is inherent to human nature that all humans seek justice and avoid injustice, at least to themselves. I doubt that the victims of the sacrifices to the sun god ever did this willingly, or that the priests picking the victims ever picked themselves; because how can one willingly choose a condition for themselves if they think the condition is unjust? Same for suicidal people; they do not see suicide as a good thing in itself, but as a last resort to minimize the injustice that would otherwise happen to them if they kept on living.
Thus, if everyone inherently seeks justice and avoids injustice to them, then the golden rule is fitting because it results in seeking justice and avoiding injustice for all; and justice is another term for the moral good.
Quoting Sam26
This statement begs the question: If the Golden Rule is truly the test for what is moral, then it is not itself dependant on any moral views; and if it is dependant on a moral view, then it cannot be the test for what is moral. To escape the circle, you would need to back up the claim that the Golden Rule is dependant on a particular moral view. What view would that be?
Yes. I'm working on a graph that shows the relationship between morality and some other factors. I'm using paint and intend to represent my theories as a function in a 5-dimensional v,w,x,y,z-space, but I'll update that material as soon as possible.
"It's inherent to human nature that all humans seek justice and avoid injustice, at least to themselves." Excuse me, but have you been living on planet Earth? People believe all kinds of crazy things, even when it comes to how they treat themselves. Just look at those who believe that blowing themselves up will win them a place in heaven. As for the example I gave, why would you doubt that people would do this willingly, people do all kinds of things willingly in the name of religion. I agree that there were some, maybe even a majority who probably didn't sacrifice willingly, but even a cursory examination of how people have behaved in the past, toward themselves and towards others leads me to conclude you are as wrong about this as you can get. Besides you doubting that something is the case is not reason enough to believe it's true.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
That's MY point, that's exactly what you're doing? Thus, it's your argument that's circular. You didn't read my point carefully enough.
Why can't objective morality be learned through experience and reason like the rest of objective reality? Why can't I know it's wrong to kill just like I know there are rocks?
I admit I misspoke when I said that nobody sacrifices themselves willingly. You may be right that some may willingly blow themselves up, and others with them, in the name of some religion. Having said that, I want to clarify my claim about human behaviour, and show that the above fact does not harm it:
Everyone seeks justice for themselves (not necessarily for others), and avoid injustice against themselves (not necessarily injustice that works in their favour). In other words, everyone is inclined to do good to themselves.
Now, in the case of people blowing themselves up, either they see the act as (1) just or (2) unjust. (1) If they see it as just, then it fits my claim, and their error is only an error in facts about the given situation. E.g., they may sincerely believe that the people they blow up are evil people, like Nazis, where as in fact, they are not. (2) If they see the act as unjust, then it is nevertheless seen as unjust in their favour, because as you said yourself, it is likely done to "win them a place in heaven". But, it cannot be that some people willingly accept a condition that they perceive to be unjust to themselves, if a more just option exists. If you disagree, then I challenge you to find one. ;)
Quoting Sam26
My argument was not circular, because the Golden Rule was my starting point; a premise to judge if events are moral or not. I think you are now asking where the premise comes from. It is based on the metaphysical principle that all humans have equal ontological value. I made a post to defend this claim here, but I think most people will agree, simply by agreeing that slavery is immoral. So if all humans have equal ontological value, it follows that they ought to be treated with the same level of respect, and the Golden Rule is merely a practical way of ensuring it is done correctly in a given situation.
What criteria that is learned from experience can be used to judge if an act is moral or not? It cannot be the harm caused by the act, because, as discussed with @Sam26, an act causing harm can still be moral if it is done for good reasons. We yet have to discover the criteria to judge if the reasons are good or not.
Quoting Sam26
In the case of morality, the raw sense data is called Conscience. Otherwise, in general, you can search within yourself to discover undoubtable principles, such as "All humans ought to be treated with the same level of respect", or "1+1=2", or "If A is B, and B is C, then A is C".
There are at least two points that I want to make. First, an action is just or not just, not because of what someone believes, but because of objective criteria that we recognize as just. For example, we recognize that if someone murders another human, then they deserve to be prosecuted. If they are declared innocent when the evidence shows otherwise, then most people would agree that justice wasn't done. So justice is not dependent upon what one believes is just, it's dependent upon the facts. This fits your statement about an error in factual information.
The second point, and I believe this is what makes your argument fallacious, is the following: Your argument is self-sealing. Why? Because it doesn't matter whether they seek justice or injustice, because both can be subsumed under what they believe is just, not what really is just. So if what they seek really is just your conclusion is correct, but note that even if your conclusion is false, that is, it can be shown that what they sought wasn't just (i.e., what they believed was factually false), then your conclusion based on the criteria you've given is still correct. Self-sealing arguments are arguments that are not falsifiable, that is, no piece of counter-evidence would qualify as evidence against the argument. Your argument is not dependent upon facts, but upon subjective beliefs, that is, it only matters what the person believes, not what is just or unjust.
You said, "...it cannot be that some people willingly accept a condition that they perceive to be unjust to themselves, if a more just option exists. If you disagree, then I challenge you to find one. ;)" Really, all you're saying is that people don't willingly harm themselves. After all when an injustice is done, whether it's an injustice to oneself or to another, then one is harming oneself or the person to whom the injustice is done. Thus, the real question is "Do people do harm to themselves intentionally?" The answer is quite obviously yes. People smoke knowing full well that they are harming themselves, not only do they smoke knowing this, but they do a myriad of things knowing that they're harming themselves. If they do these kinds of things, why wouldn't they do things to themselves that they perceive to be unjust? All your doing is making the claim that they believe they're seeking justice for themselves, but the error of this thinking can be seen if we understand that being unjust is the same as any wrongdoing. We know that people make all kinds of immoral decisions, knowing that that their actions are immoral, and knowing that it will cause harm to themselves, or harm to others.
Quoting Hanover
I think there's a big issue lurking here with respect to the nature of 'objectivity' and it's application to ethical questions. It's a hard idea to articulate but I will give it a try.
I think Hume's 'is/ought' problem is relevant. To briefly recap, this is the observation that claims concerning what we ought to do, and claims concerning what is the case, are of a fundamentally different kind.
I would be inclined to say that 'objectivity' is mainly defined in terms of what is measurable, what can be made subject to quantification. That of course encompasses the vast domain of the natural sciences, the aim of which is to analyse and understand objective fact and to elicit data in a manner which is reproducible by any third party; which is practically the definition of objectivity.
But the issue that lurks underneath this, is that scientific judgements are by their nature made in the absence of consideration of ethical facts. To put it graphically, there is nothing scientifically wrong with the act of killing; the scientific analysis of an act of killing would be generally comprise something like a forensic analysis of a murder. As Russell said in his epilogue to History of Western Philosophy, science is silent on whether it is moral to use science to develop weapons of appalling destructive power. Whether it should or should not, are political and ethical questions; consider the shocking uses to which science was put by the Nazis. But scientific method itself is in important sense ethically neutral - in line with Hume's observation, in that it is concerned with the understanding, or at least measurement, of what is the case, not with what ought to be done.
That is not to say that science or scientists are intrinsically evil - but that is not the point. Detached from a normative framework, the best science can offer is objectivity, but objectivity itself does not provide a decisive criterion for an ethical philosophy. Having made an ethical decision, we may or may not use scientific means to pursue the consequences, but the decision itself might be made on some grounds other than it being 'objectively correct'.
As to why something is or is not moral, I don't think the question can be meaningfully answered outside of a meaningful normative framework, whether that be Christian, Kantian, Aristotelian, Confucian, or some other variety. At the end of the day, ethical philosophies have to underwritten by some concept of there being a real or ultimate ethical good, a summum bonum of some kind, towards which the 'good life' ought to be directed, and without which all such efforts are pointless. And it is the predicament of modernity that nearly all such frameworks have been thrown into question in the aftermath of Nietzsche's 'death of God'; nowadays the common-sense alternative is ethical naturalism, but that often simply amounts to a form of Darwinism, i.e. survival of the most economically capable, which is certainly reflected in the current political atmosphere in the US, for example.
Quoting Sam26
Then I would dispute that, as being too weak. There might be the ethical equivalent of victimless crimes, that is, acts which are immoral but in which no-one is obviously harmed. A moral realist might argue that such acts as illicit sexual relationships, or taking advantage of the ignorance of others in the pursuit of personal gain , and other such acts, are immoral, without there being any obvious harm.
Furthermore, in ethical systems based on karma, there might not be any concept of a lawgiver, but they would still be regarded as moral realists. In other words, an ultimate good may not necessarily require a theistic faith.
A moral theory is a bit more complicated than what I stated. My main point is that all immoral acts cause harm to someone, and I'm going to stick with that. Moreover, not all crimes are immoral, so saying that there are victimless crimes doesn't do anything to weaken my point. So for a lie to be immoral it would have to cause harm to someone, if it doesn't cause any harm, then I would contend that it's not immoral. On the other hand, it's very difficult to sometimes ascertain the harm done, in such cases in may take knowledge of psychology to fully appreciate the harm to an individual. The harm that's done can be very subtle, and its affects might not be seen for months, years, or even decades.
The example you give of taking advantage of others in the pursuit of personal gain, will in the long run cause harm to a society, so I don't think that's a good example. However, to be fair, and it's a good point, it might not cause "obvious harm." In any ethical theory there are going to be actions that will be disputed in terms of whether they're immoral or not, or whether they cause harm or not. However, if we concentrate on those acts we do know to be immoral, I think we'll discover that what's common to them all is the harm done. Unless you can give me a counter-example, that is, an obvious immoral act that doesn't cause harm.
All of us can come up with examples where it's not clear that an immoral act has been committed in terms of harm, but that in itself doesn't hurt the argument. It says one of two things, either the harm is difficult to determine, or there was no harm. And if it can be determined that no harm was done, again, it's not immoral. I don't see how any act can be deemed immoral if it doesn't cause harm. I would say that it's analytic to any immoral act that it causes harm. The harm has to be done to an individual or individuals (e.g. a society).
I agree with your last paragraph.
Agreed. But just to clarify, the current argument is not whether or not justice is objective (it is), but whether all humans seek justice to themselves (even if they could be wrong about what true justice is).
Quoting Sam26
I don't think so. All we need to do to falsify it is to find a case where a man is faced with two options with similar outcomes, but the first one is just to him, and the second one is less just; and the man picks the less just option (assume no false perceptions). But I claim no such case exists: Who in their right mind would pick the less just option when all else is equal?
But external facts aside, the question is what do you, Sam26, observe within you? Do you not find an inclination to seek justice at all times, at least for yourself?
Quoting Sam26
Harming oneself is not synonymous to injustice. Take martyrs, or even people who practice self-flagellation. They willingly harm themselves, but do so precisely in the name of justice. As for smokers, it is explained by one of the following three reasons: (1) addiction, (2) they don't truly believe it causes harm, (3) they may believe it causes harm, but do so because they perceive that not doing so would result in a greater harm (e.g. peer pressure). None of these reasons implies injustice done to oneself.
Quoting Sam26
Maybe my position is not yet clear, because I agree that unjust people know they are unjust. This follows from the title of this discussion, that moral knowledge is innate. I am just arguing at the moment that they have no inclination to do injustice to themselves.
Quoting Sam26
Would you then say that the morality of an act is determined by the consequence? I.e., If it results in harm, then immoral; if not, then not. It would seem to follow that attempted but failed murder is not immoral because no harm was done. Do you agree?
Unless I have misunderstood your application of terminology, you seem to have constructed an argument in meta-ethics, but applied it in normative ethics and this may be the cause of some of the confusion. The nature of the properties of 'Good' and 'Evil' (properties such as whether we are born with an awareness of them) are meta-ethics, they say something about good and evil, but say nothing about how to go about achieving either. Normative morality attempts to discern how to achieve good, given that we've established in meta-ethics what 'good' actually is.
So one might be an Ethical Naturalist in terms of meta-ethics - that the truth of ethical statements is contained within features of the world outside of human opinion (although not necessarily outside of human biology), but still a utilitarian in terms of normative ethics - that the best way to achieve a state of the world (or some fixed community) that is objectively 'good', is to predict the consequences of each action and compare them.
It is possible, therefore, that determining whether an action is moral, can only be only be done in the context of the perpetrator's acquired knowledge of morality (in the normative sense) because although innately born with the concept of what is 'good' and what is 'evil', they may have no moral knowledge at all i.e. have no clue as to whether their actions will achieve or frustrate the achievement of that state.
I understand, but it's an important part of my view of ethics, there are many who view ethics as subjective and/or relative. Subjectivity which is either based on one's personal view, or ethics based on a societal view, tend to reflect a view of ethics that can be subject to change without good reason. So it's my view when talking about justice that we have a view of justice that's has some objective standard.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Your response to the self-sealing fallacy is not sufficient. If I make the claim that is often claimed by some people, even philosophers, that "All human action is selfish," and someone replies, that that claim is false because some people sacrifice themselves without concern for themselves, thus it's a selfless act. But the one making the argument can still reply that even that action is motivated by the selfish desire to be heroic. One can always point to a subjective X that makes their argument seem reasonable, that is, a product of the mind that can't be tested. Your argument does the same thing, some internal idea that seems reasonable (everyone seeks justice for themselves or innate knowledge), but has at its very core the same problem. The one putting forth such an argument could claim, as you do, that it's not self-sealing because of a "two option" choice. However, the problem is that whatever they choose, it can be shown to fit the outcome they want. Especially considering that you said earlier, that even if they choose the wrong answer, it's because they have made a factual mistake, that is, thinking something is just when it's really not. Thus, because of the way your argument is framed, it's self-sealing as far as I can tell. Sometimes it's very difficult to see that an argument is self-sealing. Your argument has all the hallmarks of this fallacy.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I never said "harming oneself is synonymous with injustice." I said that all immoral actions involve harm, including injustice. However, it's not the case that all harm involves an immoral action or an injustice. So they are not equivalent.
As for the smoking example, it's true that people get addicted to nicotine, so I agree this is the primary factor which keeps people from quitting. However, this does not explain why people, even older adults, start smoking when they know it's not good for them. I don't agree that all people who start smoking, even when they know it can kill them believe there is a greater harm that would result if they don't start (peer pressure, etc.). It's hard to know what would be a greater harm than suffering with cancer and dying. So again, I disagree with your premise.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
I don't think it's true that necessarily all unjust people know their unjust (you seem to be basing this on the idea of innate knowledge). It's only true if you argue in a circle. What is the evidence that we have innate knowledge, as opposed to knowledge gained in some other way. Your earlier examples can be explained in other ways. Besides knowledge as I understand it involves a justification, that is, good reasons or good evidence for the knowledge. How do we differentiate between what someone claims to be innate knowledge, as opposed to knowledge of mathematics. What's to keep people from making claims that their particular brand of knowledge is innate? For example, I might ask them, how do you know that you know that X is true, and thus a piece of innate knowledge? Or, how does one discover a piece of innate knowledge?
I do think the idea that there are innate beliefs may have some merit, but this only because of my study of NDEs, but I don't think we have innate knowledge. I'm not sure what counts as evidence of innate knowledge. If you point to your idea of injustice as an answer, then your in danger of arguing in a circle.
You also claimed that you're argument is only that people "have no inclination to do injustice to themselves" - this seems a bit of a departure from what you said earlier (but maybe not). I would agree that people in general want to see justice done, but that's a far cry from what your saying.
Finally, it seems to me that much of this is coming from a religious point of view, at least it seems so. I know that in the past when I was very much inclined to believe certain religious points of view, this was a belief that I heard from time-to-time, that is, the idea of innate knowledge. Even then, though, I found it questionable.
The Catholic definition of conscience:
From here. It does seem at least implicit in this conversation.
All morality is man-made. All men are nature-made. Therefore all morality is nature-made.
Many Christians, I believe, have incorporated this kind of thinking into their beliefs about God. For example, some Christians believe their beliefs about God are innate, that is, they know that they know that God exists. This seems to be a perverted view of what it means to have knowledge. They'll also use terms like objective, but it's purely subjective.
Actually if you look at the Platonic dialogues, that is their main concern; they're often concerned with knowledge of virtue, justice, courage and other such qualities. In other words, they're generally concerned with what we would nowadays regard as moral or ethical issues. But in that context, the 'is-ought' distinction I mentioned above has yet to be articulated, so they have no compunction debating the 'true knowledge of virtue', and how hard it is to attain, which I don't think you would see in modern philosophy. I think that is because the ancients didn't carve up or compartmentalise knowledge in the way we do now.
Quoting Sam26
Well, again, in Plato, the whole idea of 'anamnesis' was that the soul had knowledge of the Good before it 'fell' into worldly life. The idea of the pre-existence of the soul was anathematised by the early Church, but a similar principle could be found in their teaching of 'Imago Dei' i.e. that this was innate in humans, but obscured or disfigured by the Original Sin, but could be restored through faith in Christ.
I would also be wary of the apparently natural distinction between 'objective' and 'subjective'. For Christians, the 'revealed truth' is neither subjective nor objective, but supernatural, so neither part of the natural world (objective) nor a matter of individual opinion (subjective). In a secular culture, most of us are acculturated to naturalism, within which the division of objective and subjective is taken for granted; everything is felt to be either 'out there', in nature, objective, amenable to scientific analysis, or 'in here', subjective, a product of the evolved intelligence. But the problem with that, is precisely the one which Hume articulated, i.e. the 'is/ought problem'.
And that then gets into the whole territory of naturalistic vs religious ethical systems. There are some interesting essays on these topics currently in The New Atlantis (in a section called The Decent of Man) and also in Aeon.
Suffice to say, my general philosophy is what might be called 'pan-religious', i.e. I believe that there is a true 'domain of value' to which the moral compass is naturally drawn. Which is why such ideas as the Golden Mean, doing good to those that harm you, and so on, occur in many different cultural traditions and sources.
As a general rule I agree. Still, as regards intention and the outcome of harm in relation to the philosophy of ethics:
There’s the abstract, hypothetical scenario of a bad/evil intention inadvertently resulting in a good outcome for the individual(s) toward which the intention was directed. The question then being, was the willed act moral, immoral, or morally neutral?
I grant that this occurring would be exceedingly rare. As to concrete examples, the only one that now comes to mind is as follows: person A violently shoves person B to the ground out of malice resulting from unjustified envy; unknown to either, person C a moment prior shot a gun with intention to assassinate person B (insert bad/evil reason for the attempt to assassinate person B here); due to being shoved to the ground, person B’s life has been saved (say, for which person A then takes credit for). Has person A engaged in moral/good behavior?
One can also present the converse where the intention is wholly good but inadvertently results in a bad outcome.
I'll admit that I presume we all have a guttural answer to both, that the bad intention makes the person guilty of wrong and the good intention makes the person not guilty of wrong. To me this speaks in favor of innate awareness of right and wrong in relation to will, from which action is commonly upheld to proceed.
For me this isn't a difficult question to answer, at least in theory.
Quoting Sam26
Hmm, think of the same scenario of perceivable behavior but with a different set of imperceivable intentions: Person A violently shoves person B to the ground (this being the exact same act with an identical degree of harm upon person B in crashing to the ground) but, in this version, the act is performed with the intention of saving person B’s life from the assassination attempt of person C. The discernable outcome of harm (and of a saved life) remains the same; the sole difference now is in the private intentions with which the act of shoving person B is performed by person A.
Here, I presume, we’d both uphold the same outcome of harm to person B in being violently shoved to the ground to be a moral act on the part of person A—this solely due to a different intention, and not in outcomes of harm.
To me, then, the justification for ethical or unethical behavior does not reside in the behavior and its outcome but, rather, in the realm of willed intention in carrying out any given act. Though, I again acknowledge, typically the two (the intention and the physical act) are associated; hence, we typically discern the imperceivable intention(s) of another via the perceivable behaviors that they engage in.
For me much of the nature of ethics is dependent on the nature of being human, or the nature of the reality in which we live. I believe that persons have intrinsic worth, and it naturally follows that they have intrinsic value. I do agree, if I understand you correctly, that generally we do have a moral compass, but we might disagree with where this originates. At least two possibilities come to mind - first, we learn by interacting with others within a culture of value what constitutes an immoral act; or two, who we are at deeper level (metaphysical level of being) shapes our morality along with the learning that takes place within a culture. I'm not religious, so my metaphysics isn't shaped by a religious view. However, I do believe that the essence of who we are isn't confined to a body. You would have to read my thread on consciousness to get a better perspective of my view, and how it would impact morality. But in some ways, my view is even more complicated because some or all of the harm we experience in this reality isn't harm that is carried into the next.
I also don't associate immoral acts with sin, that is, sin is a religious word that carries religious connotations. In fact, I don't believe in sin in terms of an act against God, which is deserving of punishment, or that it's something we need to be saved from. In the sense that evil is equated with sin, I would disavow evil too. However, in general terms evil as I use the term is just another word for the harm done to others, whether by an agent (accidental or intentional), or that which occurs via natural disaster.
In this scenario person A has committed a moral act, remember my position is that not all harm is immoral, that is, if you have good reasons for the harm, and in this case person A does, then it's not immoral. Intention although important is not always the deciding factor. One can have good intentions and yet still commit an immoral act, as in accidental harm that should or could have been foreseen. In this case it's clear that person A committed a moral act by preventing a greater harm. There is also an important point here, that is, that all immoral acts have the property of harm, but not all moral acts lack harm, some do some don't.
Say a person is clumsy and accidently knocks over a book on the coffee table while walking. Do we blame them for so doing? Of course, if the item is both one of great value to us and becomes destroyed in being so knocked over, many of us would feel heightened degrees of anger at the occurrence and, some, will then readily blame the individual for the outcome.
I’m not claiming that this isn’t a murky area for both philosophy and for law. I do however maintain that where there to be intention in so knocking over the item, regardless of the item’s value to us, the scenario would now become drastically different. So I yet uphold the importance of intention to ethics.
Quoting Sam26
I find myself fully agreeing with this. I should add: especially when "property of harm" encompasses intention to do harm.
Well after a lot of soul-searching, I think I do accept the reality of sin, although I know it's a tremendously unpopular view to take. I am a Buddhist convert, and in most Buddhist literature, you will read that Buddhism doesn't contain the concept of sin. But I don't think that's true - read older translations of texts and commentaries, and the word appears frequently; there are several Buddhist terms, including asava (outflows) and klesa (defilements) which provide an equivalent. However, the cardinal error of humans is not sin, in Buddhism, but avidya, ignorance (which I'll come back to).
My understanding of the etymology of 'sin' (as there are several) is that it is derived from the concept of 'missing the mark'. So that has a connotation of a cognitive error, a mistaken judgement. (The other etymology has something to do with 'blood' and is more common amongst the mainstream Christian denominations.)
I think a lot of the reason that the idea of 'sin' has been rejected is because it has been contaminated (pardon the irony) by Calvinism, for whom it is this kind of dreadful cosmic miasma, the only escape from which is via unquestioning faith in the dogma. (Not for nothing has Calvin been dubbed 'the Ayatollah of Geneva'.) Whereas, in other readings, although sin is evil, it doesn't have the absolute nature that it is accorded by the Calvinist idea of 'total depravity'; I think overall that Catholicism and Orthodoxy have a much more balanced view of human nature.
The cardinal difference between the Buddhist avidya and the Christian 'sin' is the former is cognitive, whereas the latter is volitional. The former is a mistake in the understanding; the latter is the inherited consequence of the original sin, and a corruption of the will, about which we can do nothing other than believe - we can't even will what is good. But both concepts speak to what I regard as the fact of innate human moral insufficiency, whether due to 'beginningless ignorance' or 'original sin'.
I think that nowadays, the concept of sin persists, albeit in a different guise, namely that of guilt - and that long essay I have linked to is one of the better philosophical essays of 2017 in my view (and notice the audio version provided, I listened to it on a long car trip recently.)
In the case of the book, my contention is that it's not necessarily an immoral action. It can become an immoral act if the person who accidentally destroyed the book doesn't make reparations, that is, if they ignore the harm done. The harm in this case is the destruction of the book, which is property that belongs to someone. If the person doesn't have the means to make reparations they should do all they can to make it right. This is a more complicated situation than the other examples, but I believe it can still be fit into this moral code. Also, in this situation your idea of intention becomes very important. If for example the person doesn't have the means to correct the situation, what matters is the intent to do so, that's what corrects it to some degree.
Quoting Sam26
Can you exemplify something of this nature. I can't think of any example right now.
Nitpicking here. To me this example presents a choice between two alternatives. One alternative is that of paying attention to the road, which you know to be ethical, at expense of short-term loss of ego’s pride (or something to the like). The other is that of focusing in on an argument at expense of being attentive to where you’re driving. The individual, given the presence of this choice between now momentarily sensed alternatives, is culpable for the decision made. This is so strictly due to the willed intention to pursue the second alternative at the expense of the first. So we find the individual at fault for vehicular manslaughter on grounds of what the individual intentionally chose. As you say, same enough with drunk driving, or with talking on mobiles while driving, etc.
I think something without intention would be running over a person due to a momentary instance of vertigo, or epilepsy, etc., that was unforeseeable. While proving that such was the case can be exceedingly difficult, were it to in fact be proven to have been the reason for the momentary lack of attention given while driving, would the outcome then still be considered an immoral act by the driver? Here, there was no conceivable intention on the part of the driver that could have been alternatively acted on which would have prevented the accident.
Likewise with a blown tire that deviates the car’s trajectory.
I’m personally OK with there being a difference of opinion in relation to how much of this ought to be considered intentional (by which I mean volitional). I again was nitpicking.
Ditto.
The issue with intention that has not been addressed is that they are constrained by their position in an infinite future. Your examples all focus solely on what the perpetrator 'intended' to be the immediate outcome of their action, Consider person A in the example (pushing the would be assassination victim). Person A's intention might be to harm Person B (immoral), but maybe to teach person B a lesson for some act of harming another perpetrated by person B (A is now moral again? depending on your view of punishment), but person B's act (for which he's being punished) was part of a war to overthrow an totalitarian dictator (A is immoral again), but the totalitarian dictator was only trying to bring stability after the overthrow of a particularly evil tyrant (A is back on the good side) ... and so on.
It's not that any of these facts might be considered 'newly come to light', I'm specifically suggesting that they might all be known to both A and B at the time of the pushing. Now is A moral or immoral for pushing B. Do we take the outcome A intends immediately, one step removed, two steps ... how many? A may well intend there to be several outcomes of his action. In fact A would be something of an idiot if he were to presume that his action was going to have one single, clear, and entirely exclusive outcome. SO which of these do we use to determine A's intention?
We could then add in some contemporaneous consequences that A can foresee. What if A knows that C is aiming a gun at B? He really wants to harm B by pushing him to the ground, but doesn't want to see B killed. Now is he moral or not?
Your 'intentional by neglect' examples (drink driving, carelessness), which you've branded immoral by intent are similarly time-constrained. How far into the future do we expect people to predict the consequences of their actions? It's easy to determine (using the 'intention' model) that drinking and driving might expose other road users to danger and so one's intentions in doing so are immoral, but what about paying taxes, giving to charity with multiple and long-lasting consequences? How far into the future are the outcomes (or possible outcomes) of our actions by which others judge what our 'intentions' were? What point in the potentially infinite distant future do we take to be the 'final' state of the world A is trying to achieve by his actions?
These problems are essentially the reason why virtue ethics persists, even though you're focusing on intent you still have a consequentialist ethic because you're using the consequences of the perpetrators actions as a means of determining their intentions, it therefore suffers from the same problem as all other consequentialist ethics, what point in the future do we use to judge?
All your examples simply change the facts of the cases. If you change the facts, then the outcomes are going to be different. Moreover, there will always be examples that are more complicated, which involve what people know, what people should have known, or even possible future outcomes.
My particular brand of ethics is definitely not a consequentialist view, that is, that it's based on some fact or facts brought about by someone's acts or intentions. My particular brand of ethics is more closely related to a deontological view, which are based on rules or principles. Thus we have a duty to act a certain way. For example, one might say we have a duty to act in a way that brings about the least amount of harm. Thus, if you were hiding Jews in your attic during WW2 and the Nazi's came to your home and asked if you were hiding Jews, your duty would be to lie. First, because the action of telling the truth would lead to murder, thus telling the lie would lead to the least amount of harm. In fact, Kant might say that the Nazi's have no right to the truth because of what they intend to do, because of the evil they will commit.
The problem with any theory, including ethical theories, is that it's difficult to find one that covers every possible scenario. All we can do is try to live as closely as we can to certain principles, and make the best decisions we can based on the information we have.
The two consequentialist theories that come to mind are utilitarianism and hedonism, which in my humble opinion are not good ethical theories. However, trying to put forth a theory of ethics in this thread would be further than I want to go, at least for now. All I will say is that for me the best possible ideas of ethics are principle, rule, or duty based.
I don't understand how this is not consequntialist. You seem to be deriving the ethical rightness of an action from it's immediate consequences. I can see how you are filtering consequences by intent (only that subset of actions leading to harmful consequences that are motivated by the intention to bring about those consequences are immoral) but the whole ethic still relies entirely on the judgement of consequences and so still suffers from the same problem. Consequences for whom, and for how far into the future?
I tend to agree that Ethics needs to avoid consequetialism in general (personally I'm a virtue ethicist), but your use of 'intent' here necessitates a level of understanding that I think is unobtainable.
So, what if the home owner has been threatened with violence by the Jewish family if they reveal their whereabouts? The home owner might still not want the Jews killed but also fears for his own welfare either way, how do we now determine his intent to decide which is his moral course? He, like most people in the real world, will have more than one outcome in mind as a result of his actions, with more than one timescale applicable to each.
That being the case, determining if an action will cause harm becomes necessary (harm to whom and for how far into the future?) as does determining intent (what if a person intends multiple outcomes?).
Have I still misunderstood something?
Hello. I’m having a hard time understanding your position, at least as things currently stand.
Taking things one step at a time, as regards intention: My reading of your post(s) leads me to presume you disassociate intention—i.e., volition, or will—from sentient action … be these actions of the body or solely of the intellect (e.g., the planning out of bodily action). Action devoid of will, to me, equates to inanimate, entropy-driven (this at least at the macro scale) activity. Were a large bolder to hit a loved one due to extreme wind, I do not find the bolder culpable precisely because the bolder did not will this to be. Where a human (to me, a will-endowed being) to hurl a large bolder toward a loved one, I would then find the human culpable precisely because the human did will this to be.
How can ethics—of any variety: virtue ethics or otherwise—be upheld when the element of volition/will/intention is not considered paramount to the issue?
As a more precise example, to me, a will to anything, happiness and/or flourishing included (i.e., will to eudemonia) necessarily holds will—hence intention—as a prerequisite. Eudemonia in the absence of will to me is nonsensical. If there’s belief that eudemonia does not require will for its being, how then does one make sense of eudemonia in the absence of intention to both better optimize it and maintain it?
I’ll address issues such as those of forethought in light of both short- and long-term durations after I can better understand, hopefully, this perspective of ethics not grounded in intention/volition/will.
Yes, you are on to something! I was not all that familiar with the term meta-ethics, but the way you have described it makes sense. Described as such, you are correct that my original post is merely about the source of our knowledge of the moral good; which is meta-ethics. The focus was not on the essence of morally good intentions and acts; which is normative ethics. This discussion was brought up later on, almost as a tangent; and to this, I claim that the Golden Rule is a sure way to test the moral goodness of an intention and act. While the two topics are related insofar that they deal with ethics, the claims are not dependant on one another.
I also agree about the views that morality is objective, and that predicting the consequences of an act is a good way to determine moral goodness, as this method follows from the Golden Rule.
Quoting Inter Alia
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that although we may all have theoretical knowledge of the moral good, we may lack the knowledge of the right course of action in a given situation. That may be, and this is where the Golden Rule becomes a useful tool. How should I act? The same way I would want others to act towards me in the same situation if the roles were reversed.
I completely agree.
Quoting Sam26
Well, in theory, we could always ask the individuals whether they have an inclination to seek justice for themselves or not; but I see your point that this is not practicable to do in a large scale. Much like for intentions, we cannot be certain about inclinations from mere observations. However, we have a few solutions left: (1) reasonable claim, and (2) empirical data by observing ourselves.
(1) Reasonable claim: For a given behaviour, it is not more reasonable to assume that the person was seeking justice rather than injustice to themselves?
(2) Empirical data within ourselves: I already asked, but do you not personally have an inclination to seek justice rather than injustice for yourself?
Quoting Sam26
It must be so, because if they sincerely did not know that their act was causing some harm, then it would be an honest mistake; which is a mistake, but is not unjust.
Quoting Sam26
Specifically regarding morality, I summarize here the argument from my original post, which has yet to be refuted: if knowledge is necessary for intentions, and intention is necessary for moral language, then knowledge is necessary for moral language. And we know it cannot be learned from observation, because as Mr. Wayfarer stated earlier, we cannot entail 'what ought to be' from 'what is'. Therefore, either moral language does not exist, or if it does, then its knowledge must be innate.
Generally speaking, there is a test to determine if a knowledge is innate or not, but let's save it for another time, for the sake of keeping this post somewhat short.
Great discussion. I want in. Is either harm or intention essential to morality? Consider the following cases.
(1) Harm without intention: a rock falls on someone. This is not immoral.
(2) Harm with intention: A person intends and successfully kills someone innocent. This is immoral.
(3) Intention without harm: A person intends but fails to kill someone innocent. This is still immoral. I personally would not appreciate this. Would you?
(4) No harm, no intention: A rock; that's it. Clearly not morally bad, and yet, also not morally good.
If the above judgements are correct, then it follows that harm is not essential, where as intention is, unless there exists a case where morality exists without intention.
A few things to note:
There's a few things to unpick here, but they mainly centre around the contention that;
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
and
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
We have no proof that 'True' intentions exist, indeed, if you are of a physicalist, or materialist persuasion, the evidence from neuroscience is very much that we do not have one true motivation, but that multiple desires compete to find a course of action that satisfies them. Think of an animal which desires both to not be eaten and to eat. It finds a patch of grass near a predator, it might choose to eat there with one eye looking out, or eat but only for a short time. It's action is determined by the balancing of two desires, which is the 'True' intention? Humans, are, if anything, even more complex. So already (2) is looking shaky. We know the innocent person gets murdered (outcome is 'Bad', we don't want to live in a society where innocent people get murdered), we may well be able to determine from the evidence that the person intended to kill them, but did they do so because they desired to create a society where innocent people get murdered (the 'Bad' outcome of all this)? How could we know? Maybe they did so because the person stole from them and they considered stealing an offense punishable by death. A society with no thieves in it would be 'Good' (at first glance) would it not? Was this his 'True' intention, and he's simply very stupid or misguided as to what such a society would really be like (lots of innocent people dying by mistake, for a start)?
I won't continue to list exceptions, the point I'm making is that these 'complex' scenarios are actually real life, and there's a very sound reason for it to do with our theory on Meta-ethics. If everyone actually knows what 'Good' is and this knowledge is not just arbitrarily placed in the brain for no reason, then they must at some level be motivated to do 'Good' and avoid 'Bad'. I'm a monist and an atheist, so for me 'Good' is put there by evolution, but I would argue the same is true for theists and dualists, 'Good' must still be there for a reason and so we must still at some level be motivated to do it. Making pretty much all of our action the result of more than one desire (intention) competing, just like the grazing animal.
Leaving the difficulty of assessing 'True' intention to one side for a moment, we have the complication of determining outcome. You say that "...it follows that harm is not essential", but this does not quite get us out of the mire that consequentialism leaves us in. We must still, by this 'intention/outcome' based system, determine what the outcome would have been in order to rule that (3) is immoral and obviously we are using what the outcome actually was in case (2). So we still haven't answered the questions - outcome for whom and over what timescale (how far into the future), which become important the more complex the situation. I'm not sure I see the value in an ethical theory which only works for the simple cases, but which breaks down in more complex ones because the amount of knowledge required becomes to great.
In summary both the 'do unto others...' and the intention/harm rules share the same problem, they use only the accumulated knowledge of the person determining the action. In simple situations this is perfectly adequate, which is why both seem fine when used in such cases, they give us the answers we were expecting. But as soon as the cases become more complex, the knowledge of one individual starts to look inadequate, their ability to see into the future to assess all consequences, their ability to take into account the effect of their actions on multiple people over multiple timescales. This is why societies have, over millennia, evolved guides that are much more generalised, ones which seem to work in the long term, but which require a bit of a leap of faith to an extent, that everything will pan out OK if they're followed. These are the 'Rules' of rule utilitarianism, the 'Virtues' of virtue ethics, the prima facae 'Duties' of deontology. Personally I'm a virtue ethicist, but I would argue, as above, that at least one of these generalised approaches is required, an aim for our actions that has nothing to do with the immediate outcome, neither the actual one, nor the one we 'intended'.
It's not that will/intention is not allowed for. Personally I'm a compatibilist, so I don't actually believe in free will, but that aside, what I'm saying is that because intention is not a single thing, it cannot be used to judge the morality of an action. No-one intends one, and only one, outcome for any action, they might have an immediate outcome in mind, but hope that leads to a whole chain of events, they might be satisfying two or even a dozen different desires at the same time by their actions, which one are we going to use to judge them by? Someone might assassinate an evil dictator, they want the evil to stop but are also quite keen on the glory and notoriety their action will bring, are they right for ridding the world of an evil man, or wrong for killing someone just to gain notoriety? What if they also quite like the whole mission/killing thing (like in a video game), their family are encouraging him so he will make them happy by doing so, he personally has suffered under the dictator's rule so he'll get revenge. Some of these motives are morally acceptable, other aren't so how would we use will/intention here to judge? That's essentially the point I was making, not that we have no will, quite the opposite in fact, we have lots of will, much of it contradictory and competing.
Although your 4th example is not an example of something immoral, it's is an example of a natural evil, which does cause harm. Thus, not only do all immoral acts cause harm, but all evil, immoral or natural cause harm.
This often (but not always) occurring competition of vying intentions in one single mind is very well explained by David Hume in his Bundle Theory of the Self. It’s a theory I’ve deeply abided by since I first read his works back in University days. Yet one must recognize that health is greatly dependent on there being a unitary functionality of mind, of the mind’s total bundle of intentions. The further one deviates from this, the unhealthier the mind is (typically) appraised to be. While this is a very complex issue, I do modify Hume’s theory to include a singular first-person point-of-view—the “I” its often labeled—which at times engages in its own chosen intentions and which—I would argue—is itself, at least in part, a dynamic, unified composite of the mind’s lesser intentions. It’s a big topic though, at least for me.
In terms of how we would then use will/intention to judge ethical issue, we’d judge what the first-person point of view either actively choose (here, between alternatives) or else engages in (here, by not rejecting its unconscious mind’s intentions—e.g. emotions which goad—but, instead, becoming unified with these intentions; e.g., one feels pangs of envy and, instead of rejecting them as wrong, one then becomes envious and acts out due to so being).
At the end of the day though, this enters into an entirely different topic: that of how the mind works. So we can find a working common base, are we in agreement that ethics is contingent on the presence of will? If not, please furnish examples where this is not the case, so I may better understand.
To your direct question first, I'm afraid the answer is no, although I realise such a fundamental shift in axiom might end this otherwise fascinating conversation. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a compatibilist, so I don't even really believe in free will, but I certainly don't think morality requires it. All I'm interested in is how to guide people's behaviour to help bring about the society that I firmly believe all people (of sound mind) would want to live in. I personally believe this universality of meta-ethics results from the evolution of a social species, but it is also evidenced in the coincidence of moral objectives in all societies (even where actual opinion on how to achieve those objectives might differ widely). I'm not sure how it got there is very important, so long as we agree it's there.
So, given that we all want to live in this (very) broadly similar type of society, we need a set of behaviours which are going to achieve it in the long-term. In small hunter-gather groups living in stable savannah environments it's possible (though by no means necessary) that evolution could instil the appropriate behaviours also, in addition to the objective, but as soon as the environment changes, the group changes, or both change, we are left with just an objective and no instinctive means of achieving it.
All of our actions have wide reaching and multiple consequences sometimes continuing into the distant future. To expect any one person to determine what they are each time they make a single decision is absurd, even whole societies would find the task a challenge, so society develops generalised guides as to the sort of actions that will probably lead to the society we're aiming for in whatever environment we find ourselves in - Virtues. Being virtuous is my morality.
Nowhere in that do I see the need to determine the 'true' will of the person taking the action, society wants that person to act in a certain way for the good of the community as a whole and is justified in taking steps to encourage them to do so, I don't see any reason why they should care whether the person is intending the outcome we're all trying to avoid or not. This kind of thinking is a left-over from the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism (or any other similar religion) where it's all about culpability and punishment, where it is necessary to be sure someone intended the harm. I don't believe in all that, so I do not need to know the intention of the person, I don't need to know if they freely engaged in some immoral act fully aware of the consequences, or whether they did so out of ignorance, I just don't want them to do it, and will take whatever steps are necessary (and are themselves moral) to prevent them from doing so.
And you maintain that this interest is devoid of your intention/will? I find it hard to believe that you do.
The discussion is so far pleasant to me as well. Been thinking about it and I can’t overcome the sense that you’ve been equivocating the meaning of “will/intention/volition” in you previous posts—to paraphrase, in some stating that there is a multiplicity of intentions/wills in each being and in other stating that there is no will. Because of this, I’m having a difficult time making out what you mean.
Yet this reminds of a case in point scenario: the interpreted meaning of words we use to express beliefs is itself contingent on our appraisals of the speaker’s intentions. As one example of this, whether the speaker is sincere, very subtly sarcastic (such that we don’t notice while others do), or (successfully) deceptive in what they say is not contingent on the phenomena commonly available to both speaker and interlocutor; instead, it is at least partly contingent on the non-phenomenal intentions of the speaker (and, partly, the abilities of the interlocutor to discern these intentions). BTW, unpleasant (or, at least at times, unethical) as the latter two possibilities of sarcasm and deception are, they nevertheless do occur in some human interactions. As another example: Whether “senses” in the one phrase, “good senses are quintessential to a moral life,” addresses a) “the physiological senses via which perception of phenomena occur”, b) “the intellectual capacities for understanding—which was once termed as nous in Ancient Greek, form which the term noumenal is derived”, c) “pragmatic worldviews otherwise expressed as perspectives of common-sense”, d) “the capacity for interpersonal emotive faculties such as those of empathy, i.e. for feelings (but not of the tactile kind) which are interpersonal (as in, “I feel you”)—or e) even a conflation of all these previous meanings—will be fully contingent on i) what the speaker/writer intends by the word “senses” and ii) what the listeners/reader interprets the speaker/writer as intending by expressing this word.
Other examples are possible.
Whether will (intention) is metaphysically describable as “free” or not: How does one justify any interpersonal interaction if the issue of intention is to be completely done away with? (… this both on the part of all others and on the part of one’s own self—as in, one’s own momentary intention to further interact in a pleasant discussion)
I’m hoping this subject matter might better pinpoint our own stances in regard to will/intention.
So your position is that an immoral act is always harmful because the person that causes the immoral act always harms themselves. In your view, is the act immoral because the person harms themselves, or do they harm themselves because the act is immoral? If the former, then how do you know they harm themselves? If the latter, then what makes the act immoral besides intention?
Otherwise, I agree that harm is essential to physical evil.
I'm glad you're still interested.
As I wrote earlier, I'm a compatibilist which means I don't believe in free will, not I don't believe in any kind of will at all. So I have never (intentionally) stated that there is no will, only that it is not free. A person may exhibit several desires for both long and short term outcomes, but they will all be the result of previous thoughts, which in turn are the result of previous thoughts and so on until you get to the first thought which is the result of a genetic instruction to fire the first neuron etc. It just 'feels like' we're making free choices and I think that feeling is really important to acknowledge and make use of in our discourse (hence I'm not a determinist). Your example with language lays out perfectly why I think talking as if 'will' were free is so useful even if we might ultimately believe it isn't.
So, that aside, I'm not claiming that people's actions are not driven by will/intention/desire, but that we don't need to know (and probably can't know) what those will/intention/desires actually are behind any given action in order to judge it moral or immoral.
Quoting javra
In much the same way as we talk freely about someone's 'choice' even if we think that all of their thoughts are simply the result of a deterministic chain set in motion at some incomprehensible 'start of time'. We presume someone has intentions behind the interaction, we come to terms with the fact that we cannot possibly hope to understand what they all are, but that with a very large margin of error and a bit of (hopefully) charitable guesswork we can move on by telling our own little story about what their intentions were, safe in the knowledge that we're telling ourselves a story about what our own intentions are too. I'm no psychotherapist, but I'm pretty sure the whole discipline would be out of business if we all had an absolutely comprehensive and flawless understanding of our own intentions in any given action.
If there is no harm done when one acts, then I don't see how an act can be called immoral, i.e., what would make it immoral other than the harm done? Also, in an earlier post I showed how intent is not necessarily a feature of an immoral act, the example being an accident where one didn't intend to cause harm, but harm happened nevertheless. Most immoral acts that people commit are intentional, but not all, is what I'm saying. This is the point of calling some immoral acts accidental, it's an accident because someone didn't intentionally set out to harm someone, as opposed to intentionally doing something to harm someone. This is clearly seen in a drunk driving example, or even in an example where someone is not paying sufficient attention to what their doing. In each example one is held accountable for their actions in spite of not intentionally harming others.
Since I believe that all immoral acts have the property of harm, that is, that harm is necessarily a property of an immoral act. Thus, both your questions, ("...is the act immoral because the person harms themselves, or do they harm themselves because the act is immoral?") are answered in the affirmative. I've already explained how intention isn't necessarily a feature of an immoral act. The latter part of your question is essentially the same as the former. It's the same as A=B and B=A.
What's essential to a moral act is not essential to an immoral act, and it's here that people are getting confused. All moral acts have the necessary feature of intentionality, but not all immoral acts. Why? Because one cannot accidentally do what's morally correct. What makes moral actions praiseworthy are their intentionality. If one does the right thing unintentionally, then it's not a moral action, but it can be called a right action. Although it's the case that all moral actions can be called right actions, or correct actions, not all right or correct actions can be called moral actions. For example, I can choose to turn right, which is the correct choice if I want to go to Boston, but whether I go left or right is not a moral question.
It must be said that one's view of what makes an act immoral is essential to whether or not harm is a necessary property. For example, if I believe that all immoral acts proceed from what people decide is immoral, then harm is not an essential property of all immoral acts. However, if one believes that what makes something immoral is the property of harm, and that harm can be shown objectively, then it can and does follow that harm is an essential property of immorality. Calling something immoral doesn't make it immoral. Some religious people think that dancing is immoral, given their ideas about gyrating bodies leading to sexual contact.
Another important point of what makes something both immoral and accidental is responsibility, I'm held responsible for the act of driving drunk and causing harm to someone or myself, because of what I could have reasonably foreseen in terms of my actions. Thus it not about intention, but about what one should have known about certain actions, and thus we are responsible for actions taken that could lead to harm.
There is an error. 'Because' has the word 'cause' in it. My question could be rephrased as "Does harm cause immorality, or does immorality cause harm?". "A causes B" is not the same as "B causes A". But from what you said, it sounds like you mean "harm causes immorality".
Quoting Sam26
I see your point, but want to show you that intention is still the root cause of all immoral acts, including immoral accidental ones. Let's consider the example of harm caused by drunk driving. Yes, the person did not directly intend to harm the victim by driving drunk. But did he have the intention to avoid harm? Logically, either the driver (1) intended to avoid harm as the end goal, or (2) he did not.
(1) The driver had the intention to avoid harm as the end goal: If he could foresee the act of drunk driving as having a harmful outcome, then he could not have made the decision to drive drunk, because this would contradict his intentions. Conversely, if he could not have foreseen the act of drunk driving as having a harmful outcome, then he could still make the decision of driving drunk without contradicting his intentions. But then he is not responsible, because as you said, immorality necessitates responsibility; and responsibility necessitates being able to reasonably foresee the outcome. Therefore the act is not immoral.
(2) The driver did not have the intention to avoid harm as the end goal: If he could foresee the act of drunk driving as having a harmful outcome, then he could still have made the decision to drive drunk, without contradicting his intentions. Then he is responsible; then the act is immoral.
Conclusion: although the person may not have the direct intention of causing a harmful outcome, the intention of avoiding harm or not as the end goal is still the necessary root cause to an act being immoral or not.
Hit 'Reply' on several posts from different people.
It looks like we’re at an impasse.
As you reaffirm grounds for doubting that we can ever be aware of each other’s intentions/will, I again reaffirm that our interactions—including our capacity to in any way communicate on this forum via words—is in part always continent on our ongoing awareness of each other’s intentions/will. And, at this point, I don’t much know what else to add to the conversation.
I’ve not addressed your statements of not believing in freewill because I’ve so far found the issue of the will’s metaphysical freedom to be irrelevant to the issues at hand—though, of course, as with most everything, it is in some ways interconnected.
Also, (for what its worth) wanted to mention that in my own experience the official term for lack of belief in freewill is one of “(causal) determinism”, this being an incompatibilist stance.
Lastly wanted to mention that--to my mind at least--you seem to be spot-on about my own internal will/intentions in regard this this issue of will’s metaphysical freedom: I due uphold that both (limits-bound) freewill and (a less then absolute) causal determinism co-occur, and my intentions are those of arguing in manners that conform to my current beliefs regarding the reality of freewill. To me this is due to our innate abilities of awareness regarding other’s will/intentions; and is not a mere coincidence.
Sorry we couldn't come to an understanding. I thought you meant "harm causes immorality" when you said the following:
Quoting Sam26
I.e., if harm makes an act immoral, then harm causes immorality. I understand you don't mean "harm causes immorality every time", but maybe that "harm is a necessary cause for immorality".
Ah! yes, thank you. In other words, unjustified harm is an essential property of immorality. I got confused when he said that it was both, that harm causes immorality and immorality causes harm, where as in this case, it is actually neither.
I really like this simplification (ive made a post about it before) as it cuts through so much pseudo moral chaff and clarifies moral dilemmas.
It sounds like you equate 'will' or 'intention' to 'desires', 'inclinations', 'emotions'. But if this was the case, then the term 'courage' would be meaningless, because is means "the will to do something that goes against one's inclinations."
It also sounds like you equate moral success with the success of a society to survive. But does it follow that a society built on slavery is morally successful, so long that everyone survives?
Does it follow that attempted murder is not immoral?
I would say attempting to murder someone is immoral because of the possibility of harm it entails (which is why we morally and physically police it).
I've tried explaining this several ways, but it doesn't seem to get through.
Got it. What about a case that involves no harm, either potential or actual, such as this?
Two employees have the same skills and seniority. I give a big raise to one, and none to the second one. This seems unjust; and yet I did not harm anyone.
I understand. So your view is that harm is an essential property of immorality. But this still does not explain how an attempted murder, causing no harm, is immoral. I think you have answered previously that harm is always done to the immoral person, but what reasons do you have to believe that?
What right do we have to be treated equally by our employers? So long as an equitable minimum standard is met, giving a random unearned raise to someone seems morally praiseworthy even though whoever missed out might feel some emotions about it.
The "seems unjust" bit comes from the jealousy and anguish that a person feels when they have less than those around them or less than they expect/want. It's a peculiar and somewhat light manifestation of "harm" but it's pretty much hard-wired into us. It's even manifests in monkeys..
If the employer gave a raise to one person and not the other, and the person who did not receive an unearned raise never found out, there would be no harm and so it wouldn't be immoral (in fact you could call it charity/praiseworthiness on the part of the employer).
Yes, I do, but that doesn't cause any problems for the definition of courage if you also accept the point I've made about multiple desires competing, Courage is when the desire to help out-competes the desire to remain safe.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
This, however, is not a fair characterisation of what I've said, nowhere have I mentioned mere survival as the measure of a society's success, in fact I've specifically stated the exact opposite, that everyone already knows what is a 'Good' society as an evolved instinct (in exactly the same way as we know what 'Good' food looks like and are disgusted by the opposite) so a society built on slavery is something everyone would recognise as wrong. ask the next five year old you meet whether they think chaining someone up and making them do what you tell them is wrong, then ask them if they think unemployment benefit should be reduced. I guarantee they will have a definite idea of where we want to be, and be very uncertain about how to get there. Morality in a nutshell.
This is basically the case that I'm trying to make against consequentialism. From where did we acquire the crystal ball with which we determine that the other employee "never" finds out. Never can be an awfully long time when it comes to the consequences of some actions. Given that there are no crystal balls in the real world, what is the use of a moral code which requires one. We must judge the morality of the Boss's action on the basis of what might happen? Well, who the hell knows what might happen, the employee might find out, he might not, he might spend the money on drugs and become addicted, he might go to the pub to spend his raise and get run over on the way there.
Looking for the actual harm done by each individual act sets up an impossible task in the real world. Every action will result in a vast number of consequences stretching far into the future, some will cause harm, others will be of great benefit to society, are we going to weigh them all each time we make a moral choice?
We weigh as many as possible. Similar to chess strategy, due to emergent complexity we cannot make confident predictions far into the future (we cannot be certain that the strategy we choose will be successful in the long run). And yet, playing chess is all about accounting for as many variables as possible, to devise the best strategy we are able to devise. This, I posit, is the essential moral game that in the end all moral agents and frameworks (read: broad strategic approaches to moral concerns) attempt to play.
Yes but chess strategies are hardly ever in the form of "when the Queen is here, move you pawn here" they are in the form of generalised strategies exactly for the reasons you give, chess is complicated.
Real life is even more complicated and so requires even more generalised strategies like virtue ethics, or prima facae duties, assessment of individual actions by reference to our 'best guess' as to the consequences or intentions of the perpetrator are doomed to be forever mired in ambiguity.
We face a choice at each moral dilemma, try to work through all the possible consequences of my actions and sift through all my competing desires to see which one is genuinely motivating me, or rely on the millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of culture (to which I have previously applied my rational criticism) to provide me with a guide as to the sort of behaviour that might work.
Maybe you have a much greater faith in your ability to rationalise thousands of variables in an instant, but I'd choose the latter any day.
Objective morality, if it exists, does so without care to people’s intent.
I’m hearing, If you believe in objective morality, than you believe in God, and you believe in predestination. (Including being created with innate morals and intentions). So the question isn’t if it’s true, but if it fits into Christian context to be without innate morality.
Is that what Christians believe? Some? All? Is it a sin to sin if you didn’t know? Isn’t this a theological question?
Referencing Christian dogma to argue if Christian dogma exists is circular logic. Literally.
From another POV I think of indigenous people who believe laws (morals) came from a diety (dieties) and are meant to be taught to children; because it’s assumed they don’t know.
Specific moral dilemmas though, they are analogous to specific situations on the chess board. We make broad rules of engagement as heuristics, but we also analyze specific situations to improve our outcomes still. The best strategic approach is a comprehensive one.
Quoting Inter Alia
If you create a hierarchy of desires as a main moral heuristic, I won't say it seems ineffective, but it's still a strategy with human welfare as an inexorable end goal. If I could in fact calculate and prove the most robustly moral course of action in a given case, would you not adhere to that course of action?
Absolutely, I just doubt your ability to do so better than the general prescription that thousands of years of cultural and biological evolution plus a good long reasoned decision about general virtues would give. No offence, I'm sure you're very clever, but it takes more computing power than either of us have just to see a few moves ahead in something as simple as chess, let alone real life.
Let's take another example, let's say that the person is incapable of feeling empathy, and as such there character and/or their psyche is not affected by this act. Moreover, there is no detectable harm done, then I would say that the act was not immoral. It's not immoral, not only because there was no detectable harm, but it's probably not immoral because this person's brain is not normal, that is, they're impaired in some way. It's still a crime, but the person may not be morally responsible (at least in theory).
Finally, it would take a lot more writing to flush this out completely, but I think my point is made.
But that's what virtue ethics is. Planning to murder someone would harm your character because the sort of person who would murder someone isn't the sort of person we want our society to be comprised of. But how do we know this? Not by measuring the harm of the situation in question, we've just ascertained that even if all the would-be murderers were completely incompetent we wouldn't want our society made up of them. We 'know', because millions of years of evolution and cultural education have taught us that would-be murderers are not good people to make a society with.
Given that we just 'know' that being a would-be murderer is bad we now no longer need to know whether murdering your business rival would do any harm, we do not need to predict the outcomes, we do not need to assess our motive, being a would-be murderer is bad, planning to murder your business rival is the sort of thing a would-be murderer would do so don't do it. Moral dilemma solved without recourse to any crystal ball gazing or psychoanalysis.
It is that people are harmed (or rather society's well-being is harmed) I completely agree with your definition that immoral behaviour has to produce some harm, I would even go further and say that it must harm some other person (the suicide of a friendless individual with no family would not be immoral despite the harm done to themselves.)
What I disagree with is the notion that it is advisable (or even possible) to work out the net harm that some action or other might bring about in order to determine its morality. We must instead rely on general rules (my preference is cultivating virtues, but there are others) which have evolved over thousands of years to provide us with a good guess as to the net harms from "that sort of behaviour"
This means that for any individual action its morality is judged, not by the harm that might be caused, but by the extent to which it cultivates and expresses the sort of virtues we think might be good.
It's like a shortcut, if you will, one necessitated by the complexity of individual circumstances.
Individual actions are moral because they express virtues, virtues are what they are because they avoid harm (or do good, whichever way you want to look at it).
Sounds like utilitarianism, JS Mill variety. Is it?
I definitely agree with the idea of cultivating virtues. There is much more to the story than what I've written, I was just having a hard time demonstrating that harm is a property of immoral acts. Moreover, in terms of harm, moral action is different altogether, so we're closer than you might think. I also agree that moral action is much more than just avoiding harm.
I am surprised that you do not see injustice in this scenario. If your 1000-employee company gave everyone a Christmas bonus every year except for you, would you not be upset, and rightfully so?This behaviour is called discrimination, which is defined as "unjust treatment of different categories of people or things".
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This contradicts what you said earlier here about potential harm. On the same rationale, if your spouse cheated on you and you never found out, then there would be no harm and so it wouldn't be immoral either; but this is absurd.
This does not agree with the definition I stated. I courage is defined as "the will to do something that goes against one's inclinations (or desires)", then courage cannot itself be an inclination or desire. Maybe you don't agree with the definition, and believe that courage is in fact a desire? But courage is praiseworthy; and there is nothing praiseworthy about submitting to our desires.
Quoting Inter Alia
Understood. So I am still at the point of understanding your position. Could you then describe to me this definite idea of where we want to be, with respect to a good society?
Hello. I have a couple of questions.
Why do you claim that if morality is objective, then God exists, then predestination exists?
I am assuming that you are not a theist; and by extension, that you do not believe in objective morality. Does it follow, in your view, that Hilter was not objectively immoral?
But in this case, the harm is an effect of the act, and so not part of the act itself. Another way to look at it, is that if you are caught, then you could defend yourself on the grounds that the act is not immoral until you are put away, because no harm is done to yourself or your loved ones before you go to prison.
Quoting Sam26
I agree, but this harm is again an effect of the immoral act, and so does not make the act immoral. In other words, the person is harmed because the act is immoral; and would not be harmed if the act was not immoral. And so, we have yet to determine what makes the act immoral in the first place.
Quoting Sam26
Your logic is circular. In this example, you claim that not feeling harm after committing an immoral act is not normal, thereby implying that the act is the criteria to determine how we should feel. But on the other hand, you claim that harm is the criteria to determine if an act is immoral or not.
You're right, I misspoke.
If the person who did not receive a raise never found out, there would be no actual harm to speak of (the intuitive pull of your example comes from empathizing with the emotional upset feeling of being neglected that we can readily imagine). It may not be immoral either way.
I don't think it's necessarily immoral (whether they find out or not). If bonus were distributed by dice rolls and one person just so happened to roll snake eyes, would that still be immoral?
Giving bonuses to all employees but one is a dick move, to be sure, and the neglected employee really ought to use what leverage they have to lobby for fair treatment. They have the right to quit though, not the right to an un-promised or unearned bonus. So long as the agreement between employer and employee are met in terms of payment for services rendered, could an employee really lodge a complaint to the labor board that their employer did not give them a bonus that they were not obligated to give?
Emotional harm is sometimes tricky to deal with because we often feel injured when in reality we have not been. Not being given a bonus that you were never promised is not an injury; your co-workers getting one and not yourself might be insult, but not injury.
My main point is that the example you have given depicts a kind of harm that is so indirect (compared with other examples of harm) that it loses moral importance (If I give everyone in a room a hug but one person, and they feel neglected, have I harmed them?). I would say that an employers freedom to give away un-promised bonuses however they choose is more important than an employees desire to gain unearned money or not feel somehow excluded.
Unjust discrimination based on gender or race carries the intent to damage or hinder individuals, but what about random or arbitrary discrimination?
Can the owner of a company decide to give a bonus to specific employee without having to give one to everyone else to abate their jealousy?
You have misunderstood what I said. "Courage is when the desire to help out-competes the desire to remain safe.". The two competing desires in that sentence are 'the desire to help others' and 'the desire to remain safe', courage is the virtue of the former outweighing the latter.
That there is nothing praiseworthy about submitting to your desires is essentially where you and I differ. What is praiseworthy is selecting those desires, the following of which is beneficial for society. I am a Monist so I do not believe it is possible to be motivated by something other than desire. This is simply a belief system and if you do not share it then we will never agree.
Anything innate has to be, definitively the subject of all basis of knowledge.
What if we asked the question "was this attempted murder unethical?" Re-framing the question in terms of a past incident seems to cause more consideration for detail. I suspect that is part of the process that assesses an incident and sorts it into the category 'attempted murder' along with a tick for 'bad' or 'good' depending on judgement of that incident.
Then the stack categorized as 'attempted murder' can answer the question is it ethical as though it computed the proportion of good/bad ticks.
Here is the missing piece in the puzzle: we were designed to play a part in the scheme of creation, like dogs. Also like dogs, humans are intellegent and programmable. Something (we call them gods) plucked us from our habitat and taught us “right from wrong”. This is the knowledge of good and evil that brings....guilt. Guilt is what severs our connectivity with the divine. This is why sacrifices were implemented. It doesn’t undo sin, it absolves guilt. This is why FAITH in Christ absolves all sin. When you believe that you are forgiven you have no guilt so you can connect with the divine and renew your role in creation.
When you connect to the divine or cosmic consciousness it is enlightenment or being “born again”, spiritual birth.
Those who do not reach this state think religion is what saves you. Most religion is corrupt and is run by individuals who know that people are programmable and use this to their advantage. The fact is that Yeshua/Jesus/Christ is Divine and has intellectual property rights to everything here on Earth. It’s not going to be like some Renaissance painting when He returns. It will be more like Star Wars. Seek and you will find truth. This is the truth that sets you free.
At the end of this age, the planet will reset, like it has before. Christ will pluck His followers out and implant them in new vessels. Everyone else will be spirits without vessels. It is the vessels that allow us to sense the physical world and experience pleasure. Without it we will be just stuck in a void. This is hell.
I want to clarify that the emotional pain is an effect of the immoral event, not a cause. I.e., the victim feels upset because the event is immoral, and not the other way around, that the event is immoral because the victim feels upset. As a mere effect, the emotional pain cannot be the criteria to determine if the event was immoral. It must be something else, like the fact that the treatment is unequal among employees.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
The employer is free to act this way in the legal sense, but he is not "morally free" to treat different employees with different levels of respect. I.e., the unequal treatment remains immoral, even if there is nothing the employee can do about it.
If "helping out others" and "remaining safe" are both nothing but desires, and there is nothing else to influence our behaviour, then it follows that the behaviour simply follows the strongest desire. But then there is nothing praiseworthy or virtuous about the behaviour, because desires are involuntary.
Quoting Inter Alia
Are you saying here that we have the power to select between desires? If so, then this power cannot itself be another desire, but something above it. Do you agree with free will then?
Are you asking if the knowledge is within the subject? Yes, knowledge is always in a subject, for only subjects can know things. However, the knowledge is about objective moral goodness.
What would be the criteria to determine the good or bad ticks?
Quoting Steve
You make it sound like the gods were the cause of our guilt, which in turn separated us from the divine; and then another god, Christ, removed our guilt. This seems counter-productive.
Quoting Steve
Is it real forgiveness, or merely the belief of forgiveness which removes the guilt? I think the former makes more sense than the latter.
Not at all, 'remaining safe' and 'helping out others' are just two desires among hundreds, the top of which is always 'living in a healthy and co-operative society' (or something like that, difficult to put these things into words). Then you have all the data regarding the actual situation in which the courageous act takes place. Your frontal cortex has to work all these things out, interpret the data of this particular situation see which of you desires 'should' come out on top, given your larger, more holistic desires (like 'living in a healthy co-operative society'), based on all the data about the circumstance. That's usually a very difficult feat. You're being praised for getting it right. Just like you can praise a child for getting 4+4 right. It doesn't mean it was ever not 8, 4+4 is always 8 and always will be, but knowing it's 8 in difficult circumstances is a praiseworthy feat.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Why not. I desire the chocolate bar because it will taste nice, I also desire to be thin because that will feel nice later on. Which do I choose? Well, I also desire to be the sort of person who is able to choose long-term objectives over short-term pleasures (and to show this quality to my community). So a decision between two competing desires is made by reference to another desire, a desire about what to do with competing desires. it's not hard at all, people just don't like to think they're that mechanistic so they reject the idea, and they're absolutely right to. Aside from as a short-term intellectual diversion, it would be a disaster if no-one thought they had free-will, it's a necessary deception, but a deception nonetheless.
When most people read the Bible, they suffer from cognitive dissonance. Because they can’t wrap their heads around what it actually says, they blend it with accepted theories and that becomes their beliefs. It is an incomplete collection of writings pieced together, ignoring gaps and events.
Here is the message that most people overlook. Creation in its original form was balanced. There was natural selection and population control. It’s just like a healthy body. The hormones keep everything in check, sometimes causing change and other times suppressing it. All of this is accomplished by a “master gland”, the hypothalamus. It controls the endocrine system and the brain controls the nervous system. They work different systems effecting eachother in the same body. Yet, something, our soul/spirit, is lord over both of those. Let’s say the universe is like the body of the Holy Spirit and everything is created by its will. Like a baby in the womb, expanding and following design, stem cells obedient to our spirit creates this vessel, intricate, systems within systems. Organs are masters of certain functions all obeying their superiors. So too within the universe are superiors all trying to maintain cosmic homeostasis.
In nature you can clearly see how there are unwritten rules that are obeyed. Wolves don’t kill for sport. There isn’t gluttony. You don’t have to teach a dog how to be a dog. Everything comes preprogrammed to do a function. They all obey natural law by being tuned into the Holy Spirit. A dog can poop where he wants and eat what seems right. When we take a dog and teach him right from wrong (poop outside) we reprogram him. The fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is GUILT. Guilt is what causes a dog to hide if he does “bad”. When we reprogram him we pluck him out of nature like something did with us. We are no longer attuned to the Holy Spirit. When you are forgiven and become attuned it’s like you are connected to a cosmic consciousness. Everything is explained. This is what maybe called enlightenment or spiritual birth.
In short, we are forgiven, however it is more important that we believe we are forgiven. This is what eliminates guilt.
I do think morality has an objective aspect, and that there is broadly speaking such a thing as natural law. That is to say, that because human beings are a certain way, and the world is a certain way, then there's always going to be an objective set of possible conditional rules that get you from any given ideal to its implementation, and the general guiding ideals of most societies form a basket of closely-related ultimate goals, e.g. survival, flourishing, happiness, virtue, etc., from which particular sets of rules will fall out as likely to achieve those goals.
But I don't think it's necessary for the knowledge of (whatever society's best guess is at that) set of moral rules to be innate in people, it can be something that evolves at the level of cultural evolution (as rules are are tried and sifted, societies that follow some rules are successful and others who follow different rules not so much) and is then inculcated into members of the society as they grow up.
However, that doesn't also mean that there can't be some innate, instinctive element. That much is shown by evolutionary psychology, which reveals that there are some commonalities even at the pre-verbal level.
IOW there's a certain measure of free play in the way that societies can make up rules and follow them or not, but a lot of the rules societies make up will tend to follow some core guidelines that just occur to people naturally (as natural Schelling Points that can then form the basis of more conscious, articulated forms of assent, and be discussed and argued about).
Knowledge is not related to moral goodness, just veracity. Morality and goodness are wholly subjective.
I apologize for the delay in responses. I have been very busy lately and will not be as responsive on the Philosophy Forum, possibly until the beginning of next year. I do however intend to get back to you at some point.
Cheers.
-Samuel
So the feeling of guilt is what makes us no longer attuned to the Holy Spirit, and thus the removal of the feeling would make us attuned again, is that correct? What follows is that the feeling is a false feeling because we are not truly guilty of anything. But then the Bible is counter-productive, because you claim it gives the message about the feeling of guilt, but then it also teaches people that they are sinners, thereby feeding the feeling of guilt on whoever reads it.
Is it the individual's survival, or survival of the species as a whole? If the former, then your morality can be reduced to the survival of the fittest. If the latter, then would you judge a society where humans are farmed like animals in order to increase the population growth, as a morally good?
I think you are close to the mark. Let's make the distinction between principles of morality, and then moral rules. The first principles are things like "do good and avoid evil", and "all humans have equal ontological values". These are innate. From there, we can deduce second principles like "do unto others as you would want them to do unto you", and "treat everyone equally". First and second principles are unchanging.
Then, we can deduce more detailed moral rules like "don't kill, steal, or lie". These rules are relative to the situation, and are judged good or bad based on if they meet the principles, for a given situation. Since situations are numerous, complex, and changing, then moral rules can evolve to account for the evolving situations.
Does it follow that Hitler and the Nazis were not objectively morally bad during the Holocaust, and that they were simply the minority in terms of opinion on the treatment of the Jews?
As already mentioned the ideas of morality is a man made concept. Unless you personally believe there are inate ideological preferences of right and wrong that dictate the universe, then someone can’t simply choose between good or evil. Because that persons definition of good or evil would depend via the perspective instilled into them and the environment they were born into.
Hitler, hence, saw he that he was doing good by wiping out the Jews because that was within his own morality. Now for your and my own sense of morality he did bad? Absolutely! The killing of others goes against every instinct I own.
***However! If we as people grew up in a world where killing other people was deemed ok via international moral agreement then what would we know to suggest otherwise? Obviously that won’t ever happen, but slaves used to be a massive part of the international economy untill after the mid 19th century. (Still is in some parts) but this was simply due to the fact that the majority of people during the given time period thought that slavery was “Within morality”
This can easily be applied to many other principles such as homosexuality, marriage, and basic human rights. All of these concepts have evolved from a majority’s sense of “morality” because ever since the scientific revolution in the 19th century, the modern society’s of today have more or less developed in such a way that promotes progressiveness and change through the introduction and scientific proof of new ideas and concepts.
Henceforth someone’s intentions of doing good could be another persons definition of evil. Which then begs the question. Who’s in the moral right? And one cannot simply say that of in the majority, because what if the majority’s sense of right is to Kill and there’s one person that says otherwise?
I agree with Charleton, “Morality and goodness are wholly subjective.”
Exactly!!
The German people brought Hitler to power, and his establishment determined that Jews were evil and the society would be better of by proscribing homosexuality; and promoting eugenics by removing racial diversity and disability.
Hitler and his staff thought they were at the start of a new world and were acting morally correctly. It is evident that the majority of the German people supported him and were willing to die for that cause.
Let's not forget that the US has a death penalty, which is morally repugnant in most civilised countries.
What I meant to articulate was such that killing without a basis, without meaning. Meaningless killing so to speak. If we lived in a world where such a standard was morally thought to be ok then who are we to say one standardized moral is above another based off the premise that in a world where meaningless killing is deemed ok, then we as people would have a completely different moral compass as opposed to now, because we wold not know otherwise.
Also leads back my previous argument, suggesting the majority cannot always be right.
What if we perhaps say completely reversed the world.
In the sense that there was a world in which existed such that hitler helped and cared for the Jews. Gave hospitality and provided for them, protected them?
And then the rest of the world, lived in a morality that suggested otherwise, that Jews were horrible people and should never be cared for. And this idea/notion is there because that is what we know and the caring of Jews is so completely opposite to the majority’s ideology concerning the people group that hitler must be wrong? Now we, me, and most sane people of THIS world would side with hitler in this specific scenario.
But then wouldn’t we be siding with the minority compared to the majority of the civilized people of that world thereby making us in the moral wrong?
To demonstrate why the P3 doesn't work: It is absurd to suppose that knowledge of anything is taught. If it was, then who was the first teacher, and "why would he tell us?!"
I appreciate that you guys are consistent in your belief system, that if morality is wholly subjective, then Hitler and the Nazis were indeed not objectively morally bad. I also appreciate that you believe they were morally bad, according to your personal moral system. Now I will attempt to refute your claim that morality is subjective, in two ways.
(1) While it is good that you are of the opinion that Hitler was morally wrong, even if it is a strong opinion, it is nothing but a mere opinion if morality is subjective, and is no stronger than the opinion that chocolate is the best flavour of ice cream. Now according to our moral system, we should be tolerant of others' opinions for subjective topics, as is the case with the flavours of ice cream. But then there is a contradiction because on one hand, our moral system does not tolerate immoral acts, and on the other hand, it says we should be tolerant of subjective differences.
(2) Justice among humans can be roughly defined as "equality in treatment". Under that definition, Hitler and the Nazis were clearly unjust, for they did not treat Jews as equal to themselves. Now, can it be possible for justice to be morally bad, and injustice to be morally good? These statements seem to be as contradictory as "a squared circle".
That is precisely my point, that if moral knowledge cannot be taught, then we must acquire it through observation of our own innate knowledge of it. Unless you are suggesting it can be observed elsewhere?
Quoting BlueBanana
Knowledge of most things can be observed empirically. Once observed, then it can be taught to others who did not observe it. The absurdity is valid only for morality, because other than through innate knowledge, we cannot observe morality directly; only acts which we then judge to be morally good or bad. But then this judgement presupposes a moral knowledge.
In this case, that opinion, whilst never provably wrong, can be shown better or worse. Evidence can be brought to bear demonstrating that some moral code is less likely or more likely to bring about 'good'. Even Hitler (if you can bear to read any of his disgraceful writing) thought he was going to make a better world, where the expulsion and extermination of the Jews would be a sacrifice which would lead to a world where everyone (remaining) would be better off.
The 'world where everyone will be better off' is still the goal, something innate (even in monsters like Hitler) still drove him to make a 'better world'. He was just massively wrong about how to get there. This is not my opinion, it is demonstrably an objectively justified theory. I have evidence which can be brought to bear that exterminating a race will not bring about a world in which the remaining humans will be better off, thus I can justify a valid theory that Hitler was objectively wrong.
Yes.
Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
Unless we can observe the moral values without making the judgements ourselves.
Yes this might lead to needing to redefine morality but given how there's no consensus on that anyway I don't see that as an issue.
This is not a disproof of the subjectivity of morality-- in fact, it is the opposite. Your logic is deeply flawed. The contradiction you think to be so crippling to the philosophy of subjective morality only presents a problem if you actually presuppose that morality is objective!
Additionally: Occam's Razor, please.
Are we required to make more assumptions by asserting that moral codes, which can differ vastly among countries, ethnicities, and even communities, are sets of taught acceptable behaviors and views, coupled with a genetic legacy for survival in social groups; or that human beings are somehow endowed from birth with a natural understanding of such abstract and hotly debated concepts as "good" and "evil," which somehow exist in the physical world-- perhaps as a field, like magnetism?
Occam's Razor can be a dangerous tool in the wrong hands, what seems simple depends entirely on one's presuppositions. If we had to 'invent' a new force field to contain morality then I agree it would be much simpler to see if we could arrive at an explanation without it, but we don't. You even mentioned in your comment the "genetic legacy". How is that not 'innate' which is the exact wording of the OP?
Now what seems simplest? We have agreed that there is a genetic legacy that codes for some moral behaviour, we also know that the basics of morals are remarkably similar across cultures (prohibitions on the killing of innocents, proscriptions to help those less fortunate etc.). How is it not 'simplest' to assume this innate genetic code is responsible for all morality until proven otherwise?
You've made the same error that practically everyone opposing the OP has made despite it being pointed out in the thread already. There is a difference between Meta-ethics (what is good and bad) and normative ethics (how to achieve 'good' and avoid 'bad'). There is no 'hot debate' about whether murdering innocent children is 'good' or 'evil', none that I'm aware of. If you've spoken to even a single person who thinks such a thing is 'good' I should seriously consider having them seen by a criminal psychiatrist immediately.
What there is 'hot debate' about is how to achieve a 'good' society, there is also considerable debate around the edges of the definition, but that's just a sorties paradox. How little hair does a man need to have before you call him bald? How many sand grains constitutes a pile? We can argue about the edges of most definitions, but that doesn't make the definition is entirely subjective, we all know that someone with a full head of hair is not bald without having to know exactly how few hairs would be needed before we can call him bald. We all know what a pile of sand looks like without having to know at what point it would cease to be a pile should be remove one grain at a time.
Similarly we can all know that some things are 'good' and other things are 'bad' without having to have an answer to every ambiguous case.
I apologize for any misunderstanding. I accede that there are, of course, many similarities among moral codes between cultures. Perhaps I over-emphasized this point, but there can also be significant differences: for example, in the Western world eating the dead is considered disgusting and perverse, while in other parts of the world it would be considered immoral not to do so. And I agree with @Samuel Lacrampe in a very loose sense that to some degree, humans are born with a quasi-'moral-compass'. What I disagree with is his claim that "it is part of objective reality, not man-made." It is a biological phenomenon entirely. I am not confusing "meta-" and normative ethics: I am suggesting that there are effectively no "meta-ethics" at all. I have, in fact read the OP, and understood the distinction between the two areas from the beginning:Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
My issue is not with the above statement. It is with the OP's assertions about the nature of morality. Quoting Samuel Lacrampe
This is sort of like saying, "It's absurd to suppose that language is taught! Who invented it? Why would he teach us about it?" That is simply not the way that ideas are spread. Morality is an emergent social phenomenon. It is less taught than it is learnt: we observe what is considered acceptable behavior and pattern our behavior accordingly, which for the most part comes naturally to us: we are social animals, and most of our species has a fairly strong empathetic connection to other human beings.
Those human beings classically deemed psycho- or socio-paths, however, have little to no sense of empathy. In other words, they clearly lack a natural sense of what is considered good and evil; but even so, without the sort of emotional cognizance of moral "facts" that most of us have, they can understand morality and ethics on an intellectual level. Some may go on to become serial killers or violent felons, but others become successful, productive citizens. This would suggest that on some level, we adopt a moral code not because we recognize it innately as somehow "right," but because it makes our lives much easier within the context of our community.
I used the word "subjective" thoughtlessly to describe morality in my previous post, claiming that one of @Samuel Lacrampe's statements was logically less an argument against "subjectivity" than for it; while I do believe this to be the case, I do not actually side with the subjectivists. To clear things up:
Quoting Gene Myers, WWU
This obviously does not reflect my views on the subject. I agree to some degree with relativism, which suggests that morality is cultural, but relativism tends to be overly dismissive of moral universals.
Morality is inherent to a variable degree in most individuals, but cultural values can also have a strong influence.
If morality is objective-- universal-- where do you draw the line between good and evil? How do you solve the Trolley Problem?
That is right. Moral principles, like "do unto others as you would want them to do unto you", and "treat everyone equally", are innate. Then in practice, acts are judged either morally good or bad by checking if they abide to the moral principles or not, for a given situation. Since this is relative to the situation, determining the morally good course of action can sometimes be challenging if the situation is complex. Nevertheless, morality is objective as actions can be judged objectively against the moral principles.
Hello. You are correct that my argument (1) does not disprove moral subjectivism. However, it does showcase the consequences of believing in our western moral system in a subjective way, namely, that it is contradictory. And there is no need to presuppose the objectivity of the moral system to see the contradiction; just logic. In other words, either the western moral system is objectively real, or it cannot exist, even in a subjective way, without contradiction.
Quoting Pseudonym
To add to this statement, the Golden Rule "do unto others as you would want them to do unto you" is called that way because it "occurs in some form in nearly every religion and ethical tradition." Source.
Quoting bioazer
Yes; your hypothesis that our moral sense is merely a genetic tool used for survival is insufficient to explain the complete moral sense. Do you agree that your moral sense tells you that the following acts are immoral?
(1) Cheating on your spouse, even if it is guaranteed that he/she never finds out about it.
(2) Turning a nation into farming animals for quick reproduction, and thus securing the survival of the species through sheer numbers.
(3) If your own survival is guaranteed (by, say, super powers), then all acts become moral because the end of surviving is already met.
Finally, what do you reply to a person that says "I don't care about the survival of the species, and so don't act towards that end"? You cannot say they are objectively wrong, if you do not believe in an objective morality.
Golden Rule.
Quoting bioazer
As I said in the OP, intention of good and evil is a necessary component of morality. As long as your intentions are not evil (don't violate the Golden Rule), then there is no moral mistake, only possible rational mistakes.
...that's why I pointed out the significant influence of culture.
(1) Yes, but I was raised in a society in which monogamy is valued.
(2) and (3) I think that you might have understood me in my "genetic tool for survival" claim-- I am talking about empathy, a real biological phenomenon; your given examples have nothing to do with how empathy works. Levels of empathy vary by individual, but the vast majority of the human race feels emotional distress when they see that another is in pain, the same way we feel nauseous when we see someone vomiting. This is natural for social animals. But again-- the amount of empathy one feels depends entirely upon the individual, and some individuals lack it entirely. They have no intuitive understanding of what is considered right or wrong, and no qualms whatsoever about harming other human beings.
...so the Golden Rule is the plumb line between good and evil, huh? How does that apply at all in the Trolley Problem? Whatever happens, you are still running people over with the trolley, no matter how altruistic you might be-- does "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" really apply here?
What about war?
It is certainly not true that people will always want you to do unto them what you'd like them to do unto you, which is why rape is a crime, but that's besides the point, really. What is your reasoning for using specifically the Golden Rule? What line of reasoning led you to that "objective" conclusion?
You need to be careful here. Many Autistic people struggle with empathy, they (possibly) have fewer mirror neurons that neurotypical people and so find it harder to emulate other people's emotions or predict how they would feel. Autistic people, however, are some of the nicest people I've ever worked with. They make the most unbelievable faux pas socially on a regular basis, but I've never experienced a single malicious act from any of them (I've not exactly worked with hundreds mind).
If there is an intuitive, biological drive to be kind, moral or consider the well-being of others, I think empathy is the tool it most often uses, not the drive itself.
Your explanations are incomplete as they only push the mystery one step back. (1) Why is monogamy valued? (2) and (3) Why do we feel empathy? For both questions, the answer can be 'justice', which completes the explanation.
Quoting bioazer
If you did not place the people there, then you are not morally responsible for the outcome, because your intentions were not bad, and you did not fail the Golden Rule. If you did place them there, then you are morally responsible, because that was your intentions, and these failed the Golden Rule. After that, one may argue that we should choose the path that saves the most amount of people; but this is once again a rational problem, not a moral one.
Quoting bioazer
See the Just War Theory. War is sometimes the right thing to do, as would be the case when going to war against the Nazis. Its underlying principle is still justice, as indicated in the name.
Quoting bioazer
You misunderstand the term 'rape', which is defined as non-consensual sex. By definition, nobody wants to be raped. The rapists themselves cannot consent to rape, because that would be consenting to non-consensual sex, which is contradictory.
Quoting bioazer
As stated in a previous post, 'justice among men' is defined as equal treatment. The application of equal treatment can be found objectively, and therefore justice is objective. Then the Golden Rule is simply a derivation of the concept of justice, and is a practical test that ensures we act justly.
But indeed people are born upon the right religion and knowledge of right and wrong are innate.
This is why for example, right religion is perfectly in accord with the natural law and there is no disagreement between them.
Just FYI, the dialogue is (adapted) from Annie Dillard.
Eskimos weren't/aren't particularly bad as far as I know...? :)