This only applies to law and revenge.
Animals that are being caged or eaten are not able to punish humans, therefor it is completely fine to eat them or trap them or even hunt them for sport.
If there was a creature that hunted humans, people would most likely display it as worse than the devil.
Humans are a bunch of hypocritical assholes when it comes right down to it.
They pride themselves with all kinds of moral constructs and ideas.
This is the world of false morals, the world of human culture.
Morality is whatever a morality-positing entity says/thinks/desires it to be (and conversely is not what it says/thinks/desires it not to be). There is no “objectivity” here. This is raw subjectivity, self-valuing.
Start forming continua and more objective orders of goods, start positing standards of value with respect to that vastness (historically and immanently) of morality and you ascend beyond morality, into philosophy.
Truth conditions morality, morality conditions (moral, typical, non-philosophical) life. So don’t be surprised when the world does not rise to your level. It cannot, it must not. It’s got its own thing going on, and anyway philosophy is like the high fruit on the tree, very derivative, conditional and “accidental”.
Truth does not learn to speak its own name out of some need or mandate, but just because, for a host of other “random” reasons, it just suddenly learns how to. Some of those reasons are part of a tectonic order of philosophical continuity-power, but plenty of them are not.
Philosophers must all discern between true and false. If they fail at this, they fail at many things.
Later in philosophy, we discern between true and false values.
Eventually we find true and false morality.
It’s a step by step process.
Knowing what is proper and meant to be in the universe is not a simple thing.
It is supra complex, and difficult.
Morality has never been about what we do, but about how we do it. Every parent worth their parenting has tried to make sure that their kids grew up knowing what they need to know about the world and how to use what they know. Certain things are fun, but not all the time. Once you have to take care of someone else full time, you begin to understand why you can’t still keep doing the same childish things; that is, if you care at all about the child, which some people don’t.
Morality has always been about rising above are inferior and childish playfulness to accept responsibility and to accept the consequences for that playfulness when it acted up. Not so that we couldn’t have fun, but so we could keep having fun and keep having that fun be fun instead of doing it so much it loses its flavor or harms us overly much.
Some peoples idea of fun is to hurt others. We can’t help but hurt others even when we do things for the right reasons. But that doesn’t mean we should purposefully hurt people for anything other than the right reasons and that doesn’t mean we should be rude about doing so. That’s morality.
You get those people; and I was one and have been one and will probably be one again sooner or later; that feel like they have every right to go off on the world and anybody they choose, and we do need to vent; but we do need to make sure we’re taking it out on people that deserve it, or in outlets that won’t overly harm anybody but our selves or our own things. We should not intentionally hurt each other or our selves if it can be avoided.
I do find it funny that people have often taken morality and used to make other people far more immoral just because they were out of balance themselves and made too big of a deal over the wrong things and/or with the wrong person. When we just react, there is harm; and being ‘moral’ or ‘grown up’ only means that we understand this and we only act or react in ways that minimalize that harm and seeks to repair what is broken. Morality is not doing anything to anyone else that you wouldn’t like having done to yourself. Sadly, we can be made to like just about anything. Some things we don’t like are really good for us, though.
There’s always that balance and that flux. Just can’t have one without the other; and either we can have morally-righteous people who are nothing but good, or we can accept the fact that those people have been just as bad as everyone else and that is how they learned that they should be good. It has not ever been about people forcing their morals on others, though it certainly has become that in some cases with some people. It once started with people doing things to each other and then seeing the results of it. They’d start caring about each other before they realized what was happening; when the heat of trying to survive was off for the moment and they could relax for a bit and begin to wonder in the early stages of our kind. They’d huddle close and trust in each other. But, big, overgrown children. They would often mistreat each other; see the results of it in others and then there came the time when instead of just reacting out of pettiness, one of them cried and asked ‘why’.
‘Toughen up’, they grunted, and they hit him, but he only cried more. I imagine they beat him to death; but every so often, one of them would have another kid and the same thing would happen. Sparta was built on the idea of weeding out the ‘weak’ and ‘infirm’.
To this day, people still try to run from the emotions they feel and are made to feel and try to revert to that simple ignorance; but it’s an impossibility and it’s why so many people stay in bitter negativity, refusing to ‘grow up’; and it’s why our politics and our world is the way it is.
At some point, someone or something wanted us to grow up and they started this whole thing in motion from what we were originally; that sentience building inside of us and that awareness of self and others. Morality has been seen as a survival technique and a defense; and it is. It has been seen as a ploy to lure people out of their security so they could then be destroyed. Maybe with some people, but a lot of people just want to love and to be loved, in whatever way they’ve lacked being loved in. And some people are spoiled and only want to be loved in the way they’ve been spoiled.
What is morality beyond what we can reasonably define as both bad and good?
I partially agree with your definition of moral and immoral.
There are moral basics (golden rule, knowing virtues), then there is advanced morals (ideal worlds, planning).
I say planning is an advanced form of morality when it is done with an understanding of many values.
If we could plan an ideal world, and agree on an ideal world, it wouldn’t be hard to make it.
But, human nature is what it is. That’s a big issue.
indeed; which is why it becomes high time that we begin addressing human nature and addressing each person individually.
Recently, I read a post on the wall of facebook complaining the cruel actions of eating dogs in India. The reporter described the facial expression of the burnt dogs as plainful. That reminded me the facial expressions of the burnt pigs, chickens and ducks. They are all the same. Another piece of news I saw in a television programme reported that a crow cry before being killed.
I always suggest that human being are “animals” with higher intellignce.
Teru Wong
The End will never be an end
Rise to the level of is so different from seeking justifications for, in any context and I’d philosophers derive their legitimacy from choices between good and evil, and seemingly have by now lost that, a morality adrift in a see of contradiction,
It’s not surprising then, for Kierkegaard to seek solice in an aesthetic of higher morality
But does this really work to warrant it? Polany seems to have thought so tacitly. Any comments would be appreciated, and
It may be again an unfounded concept, however convincing on an apriori basis.
One could say that morality is just an illusion.Both bad and good do the same and they only differ slightly with how they do it. There is a world of difference in that slightness, but it remains slight from the perspective of the objective bystander who keeps his peace; but then he’s blind to the fallibility of his own morality for choosing not to get involved.
One could go so far as to state that with or without ‘morality’ our species would continue to thrive and survive, and surely it would; but the more that time passes, the more of a difference we would see with our species. Without ‘morality’ we would become bloodthirsty killers; logical some times, but at our core we would only use logic to support what we did; if we felt like defending it at all instead of just killing those who decided to speak against it. And surely there would be no greater truth than that brutality at that point, as any ‘truth’ would be smashed against the rocks and/or forced to defend itself with its own brutality.
With ‘morality’ we still kill each other with kindness, for the brutality still exists in the world and we often hurt our selves more than we need to by trying to be moral in a world that is filled with immorality and we think we see it all around us, when it all becomes moral based on so many standards of both our perception and reality.
One could claim that kindness is just an illusion before we die; sent to calm us. Maybe so, but why shouldn’t we die calm and at peace? Even if some angry species comes to destroy us in their own brutality; would we not then be able to gracefully perish knowing that we at least managed to save ourselves?
One could claim kindness to be the greatest deceit ever for it comes with brutality and uses brutality to drive itself home against peoples wishes to feel it. It can drive guilt and insecurity into even the strongest of men and can rid them of their reason when faced with a foe that plays the victim only to stab them in the back when they show him mercy.
One could claim that in the darkness of space, nobody can hear our screams or cries for help and that we’re all alone in the darkness; no hope.
One could say a lot of things and pass them off as truth, as certainly all of this is truth and yet it is not a horrible truth as it gives us reason to be that light in the darkness and shine anyway, regardless of sense of reason or hope.
Certainly the stars shining in the heavens above us gave us incentive to create our own blazes in the dark and to brave the monsters that might be there just to look at and wonder what might be out there. In the dim history of our kind, when we were afraid to go out at night for the things that hunted there that could see us when we couldn’t see them; we found the courage to see the stars and dream of a better life.
In the small hours when we weren’t fighting to survive or fighting each other for survival or fighting other animals so we could eat and survive; or fighting the elements so we could raise crops to take down and feed and survive; we wondered and we dreamed and we continue to do so to this day. Against all odds and against all ‘sense’ and ‘reason’ we continue to survive and continue to find hope within ourselves and within our own species; within every species on our planet; and up in the stars in the sky we still look to wonder what’s out there and what might be some day. What could be if we just keep daring to dream.
Morality is nothing but a dream to give rise to something better than the darkness that truth once was. Morality is what truth wishes to become. When we have no more fights left to fight, we have found that we will create new fights and fight our selves; and when those fights have all been won or lost and there is no one left to fight those fights; only those who wish to live in peace while seeking the same stars we’ve always looked to, what then?
When our conflicts turn from brutality to friendship and playfulness; is that such a bad thing? Some people seem to think so. People keep trying to be better than each other; to be great. But, to be great, you have to make other people be less than mediocre. Now, when I came into my current life, I began to realize there were a lot of people being mediocre all so a few people could be great; and I realized those great people weren’t as great as I thought. Now I realize they were greater than I thought, but still not as great as they should be; and all of those people not being the great people they were inherently that were equal with all others caused me to become greater than I should have had a need to be when all I wanted to do was live in peace and have friends and get along with people; but that became an impossibility once people realized they could get a rise out of me. My fate was sealed before I was even out of kindergarten.
If people were to just accept mediocrity and accept the fact that all of us are special and so none of us are; yet all of us are still special in our own way; our species would be a lot better off and we wouldn’t have these people trying to be power-hungry and we wouldn’t have need for people like Christ or any of the other humbly great people who have come along to try to help us. We have forced them to be what they were against their will just because some of us wanted more than our own fair share of good things.
We have always had enough good things to go around until someone saw fit to start hoarding those good things when they ran out; before they really realized what ‘addiction’ was. What is most peoples concept of morality save their own deluded bias of perfection without understanding the sheer number of people that such a moral person must hurt and face down. And when they scream their pain without morality and cry about how we have wounded them, then our own morality is our enemy because we want to sympathize with them. And since they do this, they expect others to do this; worst yet, those who won’t do it at all and are informed of it start being paranoid and jumping at shadows and accusing people of it that they think are doing it and then get accused of it themselves because they’re told they wouldn’t suspect other people of doing such things if they themselves weren’t doing it; which shows the brutal cunningness of mankind.
Morality, to me, simply means using all of the tools at our disposal with great restrain, so that we never hurt more than we have to and we try to help as much as we can without hurting the other person too much. With no real difference in good or bad save perception; then it becomes a matter that things done with negative intention or malice are wrong and immoral, while those done with good intention or without malice; even if they turn out for the worst, are moral.
The fact that both serve the purpose of pushing our species forward is of small consolation. People have often said the ends justify the means and I agree; as long as people don’t forget the ends and what they had hoped to accomplish. Morality becomes at that point becoming the bad guy just so that others could be the good guy; and that has worked a lot over the ages as each generation judges the ones that came before them that gave up trying after a while and gave in and yet it served the purpose of allowing the new generations be the good guys before eventually learning how it turns around on them. We are now getting to the point where it doesn’t take a full life-time for people to make this transition.
What do we do at this point? We keep going. Those people who tried to be the good guy only to realize how it all worked against them inevitably became the bad guy hoping to bring good around them, or just losing hope and giving in to negativity. They go that route hoping that someone will eventually kill them and they tell themselves they’re having fun all the while in the back of their twisted mind they realize just how twisted they’ve become and can’t stop themselves. They go that entire route only to get killed by others or to die of some disease or another because they hardly live to an old age.
The fact is that some people start out as this just because some other kid is being the good guy and they think he’s doing it better than them and so don’t even bother; like that movie Megamind.
Except, in our current age; those people don’t really die, because there are a lot more rules in place. All people are made to work within those rules or be made into criminals; whether bad or good; which shows again morality and intelligence on the side of humanity to be coming up with these ideas. But, it doesn’t work, because they just become brutal in a new way without really directly killing other people, but still causing a lot of deaths.
And so they go the whole route of that until they get tired of it and realize it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be once they start getting older. Some of them try to continue being that, but they start making more mistakes and their lies start coming out.
I have yet to see such a person make their way back to positivity. On my own part, even though I gave way to negativity here and there, I inherently tried not to because I was taught the bible at an early age and had it hammered into me to do things right. So, I didn’t fight; I didn’t try to hurt others; I often became sad at their pettiness or stupidity and I often found solace hanging out with people twice my age because they were more my pace. Now, I find myself more at home with people three times my age, because of how much more they know of life; some of them; than a lot of these young people do.
In our modern society, there isn’t any real motivation to be moral and yet in this day and age we see our greatest acts of morality at the same time as our greatest acts of immorality; only the greatest because of the grandness of scale in comparison to past points in history; just the same as God is only greater in magnitude than us compared to our scale of existence. We are very much like the Gods, but on a much smaller scale and with far less power; yet the same amount of power within our own scale if we just figure out how to utilize it properly; and therein comes the morality that I believe in. Balance. Knowing when to act and what act is most appropriate for the situation.
Morality is still just an illusion, and yet the difference between the ‘moral’ and the ‘immoral’ is still a world of difference and yet none at all. Both are needed, but one is liked more. It is the way it is. Now none of us really like each other even though we do and it’s all kind of blurred itself out and i like that, because it’s finally time to go on with the damn show after the conclusion of the current Act. Next will be the Fourth Age of Middle Earth; after the fall of Sauron and the loss of the Ring of Power; when those wizards and older spirits go off into the distance while the common folk are left behind to live in peace and comfort and secure in their own abilities and without fear of the dark things that rest in mens heart for lack of having a source to guide them. We will return to better times; except it won’t be so much of a return as it is a new beginning.
Morality is about the how - not the what, ascending above inferior playfulyness, accepting the consequences of the occasional descent, and hurting others politely for the right reasons.
Unless they deserve it.
Morality is about imposing on others one’s personal standards of preference - which could be anything.
Those who know what morality is about.
That’s how it was built, but how was it destroyed?
Slight differences matter.
We would devolve without morality’s evolutionary impetus.
From what?
Show caution in kindness, be fierce in your politeness.
You wanted to live in peace, but it wasn’t in your nature.
If we were to start doing this now we will be better off. If we had been doing this since an earlier time we would already be better off, but how early would have been ideal?
People planned this?
The ends justify the means, even if ill-intended means, so long as those ends are good and neither they nor the intended ends, whatever they may have been, are not be forgotten.
And of course the ends need not always be justified:
Morality is balance and knowledge.
When we looked at the stars, but this time, we’ll have no more need to dream.
Lol, I love being verbose, but thank you for translating. 
What is a “false moral” ?
It is a moral that is not a true moral. A true moral being something that we know; a false moral being a perversion of what we know.
A true moral is a moral that is true (that we know is true), and a false moral is a moral that is false (that we know is not true, is a perversion of what we know is a true moral)… um, ok.
Give me one example of each.
Ok. Say someone attacked you and you responded to defend yourself. That is a right moral.
Now say that you attacked someone else and they defended themselves and you killed them and claimed it was in your defense that you did so. That is a false moral.
Helping someone in order to save your soul is false morality. Though that kind of all or nothing thinking (it’s not morality if it’s tainted by anything self serving) is also false morality.
What if you didn’t defend yourself? What if you turned the other cheek? Would that also be a right moral? If it is false, then what is false about it?
If it is right, then is defending yourself less right? Is it false?
Isn’t that just lying about what happened? Or are you admitting that you struck first?
What is self-defense? If someone comes at you with a gun, then stabbing him with a knife is self-defense, isn’t it? Or do you have to be shot before you are allowed to stab him?
Very good question. It depends on the circumstances. I find a ‘tough but fair’ approach to work the best. I turn the other cheek until I see it just being taken advantage of to keep me knocked down and to keep the other person on top of me. I personally fight for equality in a lot of the things I do. Each person must judge each situation by the merits of that situation and they should seek to remain as unbiased as possible. The extent to which you defend your self also depends on the situation.
The first if the person is cunning; the second if a person is honest and just trying their best to work through their problems. A person who lies is harder to reach. If a person pulls a weapon out on you, whether their intent is to use it or not, you have the right to defend yourself as long as the threat is there. Obviously you wouldn’t defend your self if someone was just pulling their gun out to show you. At the point of being threatened with death, your only response to that is to either accept that death as handed to you, or to fight for life. Against men, we can fight for life and win; against nature, no. Mankinds stupidity is trying to fight nature instead of each other. And, fighting each other instead of the darkness within each other.
It should never get to the point where someone pulls a weapon out on you. That is the whole point of raising our children properly and nipping these things in the bud before they even get started. Our job is to fight that first fight so well that no other fights will need to be fought; but if we fail in that, then our job becomes to learn as much as we can so we can win; if we still live.
And, it’s not just about winning. It’s about winning the right way. None of us ‘win’ at life if you want to look at it that way; we all die in the end. It becomes a matter of how we choose to live.
People asking this kind of question don’t seem very insightful.
Some moral systems are crap and don’t help us in the real world.
Some moral systems do help, and some help a lot.
Does this make it immoral for a religion (scripture writer, say) or religious leader, to explain or stress the karmic, afterlife or other benefits/disadvantages for the doer of being good/kind/compassionate etc.? It’s good you bring in the point about ‘all or nothing thinking’ as it relates to this, but then I wonder why it would be wrong to do something to benefit yourself when it involves helping someone but presumably is not wrong when choosing what food to eat? And I mean, that is pretty much your only motive. You could bet on the Orioles or you could send some money to some charity. It all feels rather distant, but you decide to choose the latter for reasons of Karmic or getting in good with Jesus. I can understand how this is not a great act, but I can’t see, in either system, why it would be a bad act. (it also seems like many followers of the Buddha and Jesus ((and more)) agree, not that this proves anything).