Someone called the a “teleological suspension of the ethical” once. I can’t remember who.
Good, as you define it, seems to mean, “that which has at least the property of not violating the harm principle”. If you’re defining it that way and asking for an example of good harm, then you’re not really asking us anything are you?
I think if no one cared about the baby, and harming it would save your life, and your life was quantitatively more valuable than the kids, that some people would say it’d be the right thing to do to kill the kid. These people would be utilitarians. While their formulas can lead to crazy conclusions, the fact is that when you’re weighing out an ethical dilemma, you have no choice but to do it the way they do. It’s hard wired. Now you’ve just gotta come up with the definitions you’re going to use to make your description sound. Not too hard really you’ve already somewhat tentatively defined “good”, and I can see you’re thinking about the harm principle. This is central stuff.
Sam Harris would explain that if you concede that any society (in which one person trusted another) would be morally superior to a society in which no one trusted anyone else, then you admit to a moral truth … hence there is at least one.
And if we work for a world in which there is more trust - say, where you giving your word and a handshake is as good as a legal contract …then we will all be better off for it.
Can we agree that characteristic of a moral person is that s/he is honest, principled, up front, and fair-dealing?
The statement of mission and values of The Institute for Global Ethics reads as follows, under the caption, VALUES:
"As an institution dedicated to the advancement of ethics, our core values are important to identify and imperative to adhere to in all we do. Through our research, we have identified five core ethical values that show up in any human culture, regardless of race, age, religious affiliation, gender, or nationality. As such, we strive always to be:
Honest and truthful in all our dealings
Responsible and accountable in every transaction
Fair and equitable in each relationship
Respectful and mindful of the dignity of every individual
Compassionate and caring in each situation"
These core values mentioned above are among those generated by the system of Ethics offered in the Unified Theory of Ethics.
Compassion and empathy come naturally. It is easy to see what another person needs, or how to act in a given situation, if there is no concern about a invented self to get in the way. Perhaps the greater part of true morality is simply stopping all the harm that we normally do, rather than taking on any great and noble deeds; that is, the harm that comes from having a false sense of self.
It’s a matter of culture, you don’t know your history, people have discriminated and killed summarily. Compassion and empathy is a modern western invention on a broad scale, only few would use it in the middle east, and specially in feudal Japan it was unheard of. You simply doesn’t know what you are talking about.
That’s not evidence of objectivity, in any sense of mind-independence. If I concede that a language in which sentences are consistently constructed allow for clear and nuanced meaning more efficiently than those in which word order is random and unimportant, I’m not “admitting to a grammatical truth” in any significant way.
I agree with Humean. What Sam Harris is referring to is a good, pragmatic reason to use morality, not a moral truth itself. It is then a meta-ethical claim, and not a moral truth.
I am not a threat. I am not a threat because I cannot conceive of the possibility of anything other than this. I am not interested in changing anything. You are talking of people wanting to bring about a change. At the same time, everything around them and inside of them is in a flux. It is constantly changing. Everything around is changing; yet change is not wanted. That’s the problem. Unwillingness to change is really the problem and it’s called tradition. It’s dubbed ‘unwillingness to change with the changing things,’ a great tradition.
Why did you leave out the crux of what I said the problem was?
It is not that I am a doomsayer, but rather that anything that is born out of division in men will ultimately destroy him and his kind. So I don’t dream or hope for a peaceful world.
The inevitability of war is in you. The military wars out there are the extension of what is going on all the time inside you. Why is there a war waging inside you? Because you search for peace. The instrument you are using in your attempt to be at peace with yourself is war.
There is already peace in man. You need not search. The living organism is functioning in an extraordinarily peaceful way. Man’s search for truth is born out of this same search for peace. He only ends up disturbing and violating the peace that is already there in the body. So what we are left with is the war within man, and the war without. It’s an extension of the same thing.
Our search in this world for peace, being based upon warfare, will lead only to war, towards man’s damnation.
Political ideologies posit a thesis which, through struggle, becomes an antithesis, and so on. These are philosophical inventions devised to give life some coherence and direction. Life may have started arbitrarily, it may have been put together by accident. Man’s efforts to give life direction can only meet with frustration, for life has no direction at all.
But this does not imply that the missiles are on their way, that doomsday is just around the corner. Man’s instinct for survival is very deep-rooted. What I am saying is that all this sweet talk of peace, compassion, and love has not touched man at all.
What keeps people together is terror. The terror of mutual extinction has had a strong and ancient influence upon man. This is, of course, no guarantee. I don’t know.
Then you’re dealing with some noumenal shit. Noumenal shit is noumenal shit and it’s got a definition. Where it identifies with it’s definition, it does not identify with the things that aren’t it’s definition. That’s why we can be certain that it’s noumenal shit, because it is what it is.
I don’t know of any objectivity that is mind-independent. Do you?
If, for example, you tell me that night follows day, I understand that human beings interpret lighting conditions and other events in their own individual ways. And they assign concepts to these conditions …using their minds to interpret and to assign.
I brought up Sam Harris’ views on moral truth to see if we Forum members could at least agree on that. I am in the process of constructing an open source theory of Ethics and it helps in engaging others to help in the project if they aren’t all cultural relativists who say “anything goes…”.
What’s the title of this thread?–Oh, there it is, right in front of me! Objective morality! I got a bit confused because people got to talking about ethics. Morality and ethics are different, to me. Imm, morality dictates ethics. If you believe it’s somehow ‘immoral’ to kill any living creature, ethically, you wouldn’t work as a pest controller using pesticides. If you believe that it’s morally ‘wrong’ to kill another human being, ethically, you wouldn’t volunteer to go to war.
If, however, your morality includes the greater good for the most people, your ‘ethics’ could include the idea of corporatism to meet share holders’ expectations; genetically altered food products to meet the demands of world-wide hunger; false advertising to ‘spur’ the economy.
Somewhere along the line, the difference between ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ has been blurred.
That’s largely what objectivity means. Not wanting to do philosophy by wiki, but: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(philosophy “A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are “mind-independent”—that is, existing freely or independently from the thoughts of a conscious entity or subject.”
If someone shares his opinion that it is night, while the sun is high in the sky, then people tend to say he is objectively wrong - his opinion does not override the facts of the world. Which, we assume, would be that way whether we were there to observe it. If he says that Mark Rothko’s paintings are beautiful, we don’t tend to take such a hard line. The fact that we use language (which is mind-dependent) to form statements (mental activity again) doesn’t make everything mind-dependent. Or if it does, the thread title is very easy to answer.
I don’t know many people at all who say (and mean) “anything goes”, even self-identifying moral subjectivists. Moral objectivism entails that moral statements are true or false independently of the judgements of people. Like the statement “the earth goes around the sun” is true regardless of whether people know it or not: that morality is discovered, not constructed.
So far we as humans have been constructing various justifications for our actions before and after we do them. How much discoverable morality is there to be discovered? How does one go about this discovering? The hope is that you don’t have to go to any authority outside of yourself; that there is a propensity in us all to see life as a good thing. That hope is a good thing, has to be realized first. Life is a precious and valuable experience in itself. But we have somehow been spoiled because of some defect in that which guides us and the hope of finding a way out has become elusive. Some form of something good has to be there in us that doesn’t fade away and die. And a good way to begin looking is with hope. Don’t allow hope to be only a token of our failure to get the results wanted. Hope will continue to be just that unless we couple it together with action so that the hope will be completed.
Morality exists within motive, not the act. So if someone wills to harm a child for the fun of it ,that is evil …and we all know it.
Evil, at heart, is the will to destroy that which we know is (at least potentially) good. Child murderers know they are doing evil, only idiot relativists excuse their acts.
