making it "moral"

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

this will be a slightly different take on the “is homosexuality or suicide moral” question…

is smoking “moral”? or is “unhealthy” food moral?

all this talk about morality on the other threads threads misses the fundamental philosophical point that in order for something to be called “moral” (or “ethical” or “right” ect.) one must define exactly what moral et.al. is. “moral” standards of behaviour tell you how you are “permitted” to act and usually give convincing reasons for restricting actions… yet many remain unconvinced…

when examined from a particular literalist “christian” point of view, homosexuality can be considered “immoral”… take away that interpretation of the bible and that type of morality loses its foundation. different interpretations of the bible lead to different moral stances. but morals do not have to come from the bible- in fact most certainly do not.

when someone says “your action (homosexuality, adultery, theft, ect.) is immoral” they mean that your action is not acceptable to my standards. when one argues that your standards are not the standards that everyone must adopt they are often accused of being a moral relativist (the position that all moral systems are equal) when this is not necessarily the case… one finds a moral system, how they believe everyone should behave, for their own reasons- some think their god set the rules, others think society sets the rules, others think that they themselves set the rules…

this distinction brings me to my question: which standard of morality should be adopted? which set of rules does one adopt?

one could argue that god doesn’t exist or that agreement on god doesn’t exist so any godly moral is instantly suspect…

one could argue that setting the rules for oneself is evil or wrong (which is because of another moral judgment based on another pre-existing moral standard) …

one could argue that society should set the rules, but as with god, agreement within society about what is right for society never occurs…

now you may think that of course it is society who is the arbiter of right and wrong in the interests of society… society “knows” what is best for society… great… which brings me to my question…

is smoking or “unhealthy” diet “moral”?

one could argue that in the interests of society, it is not…

one could argue that society takes on the cost of medical care for its members… american advocates of “universal” health care have already banned real butter from movie popcorn, and are suing and taxing the “right” to smoke out of the reach of most people… to these people, it is immoral to smoke, it is not acceptable, it is wrong so they artificially jack up the price of a pack of fags through taxes in an attempt to make somking less frequent…

smoking costs society fortunes in medical bills… and the exact same argument against “unhealthy” food can and is being made… watch your “freedom” evaporate all in the name of universal health care and equality…

now I am certain that some of the liberals reading this are saying “yeah! right on! power to the people, free health care for everyone!” freedom for everyone… free love, peace… groovy baby, yeah…

whooops… wait a minute…

free love?

no, no, no… it isn’t free love… do you know how much antibiotics cost society? do you know that free love leads to syphillis, herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia… that raises health care costs for society…

to say nothing of the expense of treating aids…

for the good of society (and for the expense of universal health care,) free love, promiscuity and homosexuality must be stopped just like smoking…

-Imp

2

(From Yes, Prime Minister, broadcast in the mid 80s)

PM - It says here, ‘‘Smoking-related diseases
cost the NHS £165 million a year.’’

Cabinet Secretary - Yes, but we’ve been into that. It has been shown that if those extra 100,000 people had lived to a ripe old age, they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security than they did in medical treatment. So financially speaking, it’s unquestionably better that they continue to die at about the present rate.

PM - When cholera killed 30,000 people in 1833, we got the Public Health Act. When smog killed 2,500 people in 1952, we got the Clean Air Act.
A commercial drug kills half a dozen people and we get it withdrawn from sale. Cigarettes kill 100,000 people a year and what do we get?

Cabinet Secretary - £4 billion a year. 25,000 jobs in the tobacco industry,
a flourishing cigarette export business, helping our balance of trade, 50,000 jobs related to tobacco - newsagents, packaging, transport…

Just thought that some of you might like to consider this little dialogue excerpt, it’s from a very good series…

3

It could be argued that homosexuality, drinking, smoking, chastity, and “unhealthy” food are all immoral without resorting to some religious texts.
They are immoral because they prevent the enrichment of the human species and its continued survival.
If everyone were to become either homosexual or chaste (think of the Shakers in Maine), humanity would disappear in one generation. Therefore, both are immoral.
If everyone were to become totally promiscuous, diseases would wipe out the species in a few generations.
If everyone were to start drinking, smoking, or eating “unhealthy” food regularly, we’d become, well, America…Then we’d die of some stupid illness because of thsoe unhealthy choices.
All of that is just from Kant’s Categorical Imperative. We could also weigh these choices on Mill’s Utilitarianism and come to the same response.

4

Ah… morality… remember the first contact with the notion of morality you had?

"It is wrong to do to others, what you would not like to have done onto urself… "

The above is using the “make believ” everyone-was-like-you notion… and through that gives you some kind of exagurated relationship with the whole of mankind… So by your actions you are not only atributing but DECIDING what kind of society you live in…

Everyone wants to live… therfor it is almost universaly accepted that murder is wrong…

Everyone wants to keep what they have… theft is wrong.

but smoking… hmmm… people disagree…

The basis for morality is prefrence… it is subjective by definition… there is no objective standard… even if god existed and had told us what to do… it still will depend on a persons desire to please god…

Those areas on which we can agree are often those areas where our instinctive prefrences are relevent… such as murder… wantng to live is an instinctive prefrence… wanting to posses objects/territory is an instinctive prefrence… ect…

Smoking or NOT smoking… is NOT an instinctive prefrence… the individuals prefrence regarding smoking is entire dependent abon that persons past expereinces in which that person has come to assotiate either positive or negative emotions to the notion of smoking… OR deems smoking bad via principles the person has adopted…

Homosexuality… even if it is an instinctive prefrence… it is not universaly shared by all humans… therfor it is not something on which we can agree…

I think you all get the picture…

5

Hello Impenitent,

Thank you for the interesting thread. You wrote

Here is an exactly defined moral rule:

Any human female between the ages of 18 and 50, inclusively, may be made to serve as Polemarchus’ sex slave.

So is that it, Impenitent? All I needed was that exact definition? I must agree, it does simplify “all this talk about morality.”

I expect that you’re going to reply that an exact moral definition is a fundamental requirement, but it’s only one requirement among many. In any case, I can just about guarantee that tacking on those further conditions will turn any succinct and exact moral definition into a gooey heap of muck.

Next,

One could trump most any normative rule-set by simply asking, “Why should I do that?”

“Why should I want to act so as to maximize utility for the greatest number of people?”

"Why should I act according to the maxim by which I will that my action should become a universal law?”

But the primal question asks, “Why should I act as though human life matters when there is no underlying, non-circular, rationale for the belief that human life ultimately matters at all?”

And even if there were some underlying rationale, you could always ask, “Why should I be rational?” We’re forever telling criminals how their actions involve double standards. And they’re forever throwing it back in our faces, “Why should I care about double standards?”

There is no possibility of our adopting hard and fast normative rules. The reason is that morality is a seat-of-the-pants invention based on our individual and collective sense of compassion. It’s what Pascal was on about when he wrote

“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.”

Collective morality works as well as it does because we’re all built according to the same generic blueprint. John Searle once remarked that we’ve no more reason to expect that your mind and my mind function differently than we have to expect that our kidneys function differently. This is why you and I both both tend to cry when someone we love has died and why we tend to laugh at the same jokes. Imagine how tough Chris Rock’s job would be if each of us had a vastly different sense of humor? This same commonality applies to our sense of compassion. This helps explain why our subjective moral standards match as well as they do across the spectrum of humanity. And yet, a shared sense of compasssion is far removed from an identical sense of compassion. This bit helps explain why we’re so often at odds with each other

We’re bound together as humans not by reason, not by duty, but by a fuzzy and irrational emotion that we’ve come to know as compassion. On such a foundation no hard and fast moral edifice may be constructed.

Regards,
Michael

6

So if one is incapable of compassion, and therefore no longer a moral agent, is he also not human?

7

dasnichtege wrote,

Hello dasnichtege,

Have you been reading Derek Parfit? If not, you might care to check out Reasons and Persons, in which he explores the issues you raise at length.

I’d like to discuss the moral dimensions, if any, that might be bound-up with the question of continued human survival. You see, my wife and I made a conscious decision early in our lives not to have any children. And so I wonder if in your view that I might be guilty of murdering the child, or children, that I might have had? Of course, you’d probably agree up-front that not having a child isn’t quite the same as having a child and then bashing it’s little brains out with a claw-hammer. But let’s not be so gruesome. Instead, imagine that I have a way to instantly and painlessly cause my living child to cease living. Now suppose that I did have a child, but his having turned out to be a brat caused me to have a change of heart. And so I zap him with my painless brat eliminator and go back to my childless life. Would this be a moral act? Surely, you agree that is a rhetorical question. Painless or not, zapping the brat amounts to murder. There is someone that I have harmed.

But what about not having the child in the first place? Who was harmed by my decision not to have a child? In other words, is it possible to harm what doesn’t exist? If so, then even if I chose to have only one child I would be guilty of harming a second hypothetical child. And if I had a second child I would be guilty unless I chose to have the third, and so on. In order to remain innocent of harming the unborn my wife would have to remain pregnant throughout her entire childbearing years. And given the new possibilities of artificially implanting multiple eggs, wouldn’t I be morally remiss if she didn’t bear the maximum possible litter every time?

And what if we had decided to have a child but I carelessly lost my testicles in an accident following a night of drinking. Would I then be guilty of involuntary manslaughter?

And suppose further that I am so late for a date with the girl that I was destined to marry that she went off in a huff, vowing never to see me again. My being late ended the life of my could-have-been child with her no less than the above cases. What level of murder charge should I face for pissing off a prospective reproductive mate?

All of which seems crazy enough. But let me back up to answer the original question. I say that it is not possible to harm what does not exist. Even the local DA’s office is reluctant to file a charge of murder without a body. If I am guilty of taking away a child’s life then where is the body? In fact, I am no more guilty for not having one child as I am for not having fifteen or twenty children.

But if I am correct in my argument then your argument concerning the continued survival of humans falls apart. If my not having children harms nobody, then if everyone on this planet did the same they wouldn’t be guilty either. And yet the human race would quickly come to an end; a prospect that you consider to be immoral. Thus, by my argument it appears that the distant survival of the human species is not a moral concern.

And finally, if I am not guilty for not having children then I don’t see how we could hold that prospect against a homosexual or lesbian couple. It occured to me quite a long time ago that as far as reproduction is concerned my wife could have been man or else I could have been a woman.

Regards,
Michael

8

Obw wrote,

That’s a good question, Obw,

No, to be human signifies that one belongs to the Homo sapiens species. Not having compassion in this sense wouldn’t be much different that not having a arm or a leg.

It’s a good question because lacking compassion, a human is not a fully a person. The philosopher, Eliot Deutsch, wrote

“A person is not a given, but an achievement.” Persons and Valuable Worlds

Regards,
Mike

9

nope… not many… only two, and without the second, the first doesn’t matter… you have the first… your idea of what you believe to be moral, and the only thing missing is the power to make the world as you deem fit…

might makes right…

but even this misses the point of the thread…

-Imp

10

Polemarchus,

It’s always pleasant when you decide to drop by. Two great posts.

11

Impenitent wrote

Thank you for your reply, Imp,

I believe that you’ve painted yourself into a corner. First you said that the fundamental requirement for something to be called moral is that one must define exactly what moral is. In your second post you added that might makes right.

But if might makes right, then all this business about the “fundamental philosophical point” that one must “define exactly what moral is” only amounts to gibberish. If might makes right then there is no fundamental requirement to define anything. Step one of your two-steps to morality is wholly superfluous. Surely, you recognize this, Imp.

Regards,
Michael

12

I am not sure if I agree with this thesis. I have two arguments to offer against it;

b[/b] Viewed in a purely ‘externalist’ sense, many kinds of collective human behaviour which we call ‘moral’ are also exhibited by other species. Hence if all humans share it because of a shared generic blueprint, you would expect the behaviours to be different in degree with the difference in this blueprint between us and other species. A stronger argument might even say that, in order for your thesis to be true, the difference would have to increase proportionately. This though evidently seems to be false on both counts. Other species exhibit altruism and other ‘moral’ characteristics, even though their ‘blueprint’ is very much different to ours. And there seems to be no proportionate relation whatever. Therefore, if this counterexample is valid, your thesis is false. Which is to say that you have picked out the wrong cause to attempt to explain the observable fact in question.

1b. One response (on your behalf) to (1) might be to say that we cannot reduce our normative moral theories to externalistic or behaviouristic descriptions. Rather than address this point directly, I would simply propose, in response, that this is exactly what you are proposing when you assert your central thesis. As such this defense is not available to you.

b[/b] Another thing which I observe about your thesis is that, in the history of philosophy, it has been asserted by different thinkers at different periods - even though the observable ‘subjective moral standards’, which are supposedly determined by some biological necessity (or at least overwhelming predisposition), have themselves been different at different periods. For instance, Cicero gives exactly the same argument in his De Republica, and in my opinion it was as historically ignorant then as it is now. Biologically the human race has remained largely the same over the last 3000 years. But I would have thought that the changes in moral standards were exceedingly obvious. Therefore it is not true that the one is determined by the other - as the only kind of truth is necessary truth.

So I have shown in both a biologically horizontal sense (in relation to other species), and a biologically chronological sense (in relation to humans in the past), why I do not think your thesis is very plausible. Thoughts?

Regards,

James

p.s. Good to see you again, Polemarchus. I hope you will suffer to endure the style of my response - I am testing out my “gun-ho analytical cowboy” approach, otherwise known as the “John Searle method”. Cheers. :slight_smile:

13

Ike and Mike think alike.

A linkto my final post on Homosexuality.

14

Well said,
Thrasymachus

15

corner? I don’t believe it is a corner… I’d call it a basic position from which to stand… my position is that might is the means to the end (makes right). undirected might makes nothing… direction comes first and that direction is via the definition (or the moral standard of the one weilding the power.)

-Imp

16

Imp asks:

In view of the phrase “my standards,” I think it is wise to distinguish between ethics and morals. Both reflect the question of right and wrong but from different perspectives. Where ethics is concerned with individual character and an intellectual awareness of why a position on right and wrong is taken, morals is concerned with societal custom and an acceptance that a perception of right and wrong is something to be obeyed not from intellectual awareness but a faith in the value of societal custom being somehow a reflection of higher knowledge initiating with a subjective perception sometimes defined as “God’s will”.

So IMO, the question of smoking is more an ethical concern than a moral one. Does the good of the joy of smoking outweigh the damage it does to both oneself and others? It is your sense of ethics or character that will decide this.

I believe that in many cases such as with sex, morals came into being as a natural result of the loss of conscious concern for the effects of sexual energy on the development of human perspective. Over time this concern for perspective or wisdom became secondary to the striving for “results” so the interest in the objective psychological effects of sex energy became the concern only for a relative few. However the subconscious awareness that there was some vague internal reason for concern beyond normal ethical considerations allowed it to remain as morals in some form regardless of how perverted from the emphasis on “results.” From this perspective, such morals are the natural degeneration of objective knowledge concerning our striving towards qualitative human perspective in the direction of the origin of “meaning.”

17

Impenitent:

I don’t think there is any fit definition, just like there’s no fit definition of ‘thought’, or of colors. Since we’re all here humans, we can point at morals. We can say “You know that feeling you get when you…” or “Remember that time your mom was really mad when…” and get whomever we’re talking to oriented towards the kinds of things we want to talk about. I think any actual definition of ‘morality’ will feel very insuffecient- things like “Morality concerns what we ought to do” come to mind.

 I think the biggest aim is coherency. What many people try to do, what I certainly try to do, is see where changes to our moral behavior will lead in terms of permissive/restrictiveness of other behaviors. So, if we allow [i]this[/i], will that set the stage for allowing [i]that[/i]. Or, does restricting [i]this[/i] make sense in the light of other, similar things we permit.  When it comes to broad moral statements about what all moral precepts must comform to (say, survival for example) I think all we can be is observers.

 As far as who sets the rules and way, I think you've done a good job showing that there is no inarguable position. But all of these things, especially religiously founded morals, depart from ethical talk at all sooner or later. That is, if I want to justify basing morals on the Bible, I must necessarily talk about the credibility of the Bible, which is a whole other subject. That's when we get to is/ought issues. Despite the gulf between them, a moral set-up will sooner or later need to be 'based on' defendable facts.
18

It seems to me that any attempt to define with any specificity that which is moral is to dive into the swamp headfirst. It isn’t that one cannot construct a carefully defined ‘moral’, but how that plays out in anything but the construct is the question. There may be (and are) group notions of morality, but only in the most general sense. Ask a group of ten people about a specific issue and what is their ‘moral’ position, and you’ll get thirteen answers.

Any appeal to an authoratative moral position does rely on force in the short run, but eventually must pass the test of cultural acceptance. The link between our natural compassion and our consensus ethics/moral position is vague and loosely constructed. Show me a hard and fast moral precept and I’ll show it’s exact opposite - in any cultural grouping.

JT

19

Hi James,

It’s always a pleasure to hear from you. Thank you for taking the time to post your points of contention. In your the first point you wrote

A critical assumption of your argument assigns a linear relationship between the percentage of shared genetic material and resultant behavior. In fact, the relationship is wildly nonlinear.

“…for any given region of the genome, humans and chimpanzees share at least 98.5% of their DNA.” Science, Sept. 4, 1998, #281, p1432

In other words, it’s only the remaining 1.5% difference in DNA that accounts for the totality of the difference between men and chimpanzees. Minute differences in genetic structure radically alter the resultant organism.

In your second point you wrote

Yes, morality has changed, as all things must. And yet one only need cast their mind back to the carnage of the recently passed century (I’d suggest Jonathan Glover’s, A Moral History of the 20th Century) to think that morality hasn’t changed as much as we might have wished.

More obvious, perhaps, were the changes in human language, aesthetics and the development of science during the same period. And yet these novel creations were all products from a brain archetype that dates back 50 to 100 thousand years. Would you, likewise, ask how this ancient brain archetype could determine the design and launch a remote controlled probe to the planet Pluto? The problem, I think, is that you’re asking how one thing is determined by the other. My reply is that one was not determined by the other, the one was enabled by the other.

I would remind everyone that my stance points to compassion as the raison d’état for morality. But compassion isn’t secreted from the heart, such as bile comes from the liver. As with language, compassion is mostly (though not entirely) learned. And such things can be learned because humans arrive pre-programmed with a unique ability to learn them. Humans speak many different languages, but the salient fact is that ideas expressed by each of these languages are translatable and almost instantly recognizable as human sentiments. So it is with our sense of compassion. It varies from place to place and time to time, and yet I instantly recognize and feel it; as in this ancient passage from Homer’s, Odyssey

“…and Calypso went out to look for Ulysses…She found him sitting on the beach with his eyes ever filled with tears, and dying of sheer home sickness…As he spent his days on the rocks and on the sea shore, weeping, crying aloud for his despair, and always looking into the sea.”

Who of us could read this and not share Calypso’s compassion for Ulysses? Who of us could not remember a time when they were sick with a longing for what they loved? These sentiments transcend time, culture and language. Doubtless, the love of some ancient Roman farmer for his wife, son or daughter was in no way inferior to the love I now feel for my wife and little nephew. Love, compassion, jealousy, homesickness…these mark us as members of a family. Such things always have and always will bind us together as brothers and sisters.

“The enemies of compassion hold that we cannot build a stable and lasting concern for humanity on the basis of such a slippery and uneven motive…The friends of compassion reply that without building political morality on what we know and on what has deep roots in our childhood attachments, we will be left with a morality that is empty of urgency – a ‘watery’ concern, as Aristotle put it.” Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion and Terror”, Daedalus, Winter 2003

Finally, I’d like to quote Colin Talbot, from his, The Paradoxical Ape (I wouldn’t have chosen the word “disposition,” and I would have used a qualifier short of “universal”)

“Moral dispositions rather than specific moral rules are what are universal, and the same dispositions can be represented in a wide variety of different specific rules.”

Best,
Michael

20

Gee, great insight,
Socrates

-Thirst