I base my morality off suffering vs pleasure. If something causes more suffering than pleasure, it is more bad than good. Best base for morality I have seen yet.(atheist, in case anyone is wondering)
Hi Killian_1_4,
Thanks for your input. I used to have a similar approach - John Stuart Mill was my guy for a long time, and I am OK with it. I also like Atheists because I know that they don’t just swallow the party line.
Ed
Hi southcrossland,
I think that the critical element in your comments is the idea that the bible is the ultimate source of all morality.
Pretty clearly I do not accept this notion. I would guess that the overwhelming vast majority of humanity, if they would bother to ponder such a thing, would also reject this notion.
In general I think that this notion, along with the belief that the bible is literally true, is an unsupportable dogmatic belief. As I understand it, even many of the older organized Christian religions do not accept that the bible is literally true.
For example, if we can trust my very unreliable memory, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America allows for either a literal belief or a poetic interpretation of some underling truth.
As for me, if I were to say whether the bible was fact, fiction, or fodder, I would chose fodder. Some very interesting, sometimes counter intuitive, and occasionally contradictory reading. There are even a couble of books like Ezra and Nehemiah, I don’t remember which one is worse, that I think are despicable.
Thanks for your response. – I enjoy your input.
Thanks for the response, but did you see how I showed that you must either accept the bible first to give creedence to your internal morality, or you must accept your internal morality first which does not nessecarily give creedence to the bible. And if it does happens to give creedence to the bible, it can come into confilct with your internal morality(then which to choose?).
It seems you are forced to pick and choose, without any grounding, what to believe is correct. I understand this is what many people do, as you exmplained, but it clearly isn’t logically sound.
Hi southcrossland,
As I understand it, you believe that there are 2 possibilities. (I assume that you believe these are mutually exclusive, though I am not certain.)
A bible first - accept the bible as the sole authority for morality.
B internal morality - if conflicts with bible arise, how do you decide?
A is apparently a simple morality, and in those cases where the bible is inconsistent the believer wins in any case.
B can also be simple. In the case of conflicts just follow your internal morality. (In real life this can be easier said than done).
I am afraid that I might be missing your point. (Sorry) Are you asking what is the basis to choose A or B?
Thanks Ed
P.S. A and B can, in theory, be rectified if one chooses a morality based on loving one’s neighbor. Though, as far as I can tell, it would require some significant reinterpretation of the Old Testament.
Hi Ed and all, been a while.
Ed, my first response, which it looks like others have made, is this: I think we can all agree that we should love our neighbors in general. However, to say that we should always love our neighbors, or love all neighbors a) equally and b) equally to how much we love ourselves, I think are points of contention. (Beyond just the fact that morality is relative, I mean – points of contention in that many people may be inclined to disagree.)
Suppose my three neighbors are Ghandi, Hitler, and Fred. Let’s further suppose that I know myself to be a moral, intelligent person, and that I know Ghandi and Hitler by their historical record, and Fred I know not at all. I will love in the following order.
Hitler < 0 < Fred < Me < Ghandi
Since I am moral and intelligent, that places me “above” (in some sense) the average person (which is how I must consider Fred, barring additional info), although I am clearly far below Ghandi. Hitler, I actively dislike, and would kill if I could.
Now, plenty of people may object to me “ranking” people in general terms - but this ranking can be made more universally acceptable by constructing a hypothetical situation in which one of us had to die. Which would it be? Hitler, obviously. If Hitler weren’t an option, I’d kill Fred; next me, and Ghandi last.
Maybe Hitler is about to kill Ghandi for not being aryan, and I have a gun, and I know that my choice amounts to, let Hitler kill Ghandi, or kill Hitler to save Ghandi. Barring considerations like “will Ghandi’s death make him a martyr and stimulate the world into action for moral uprightness”, clearly the thing to do is to shoot Hitler. This itself implies the sort of ranking I suggested above. If I have to choose between my life and Fred’s, the decision is exactly the same, albeit expected to be far less extreme.
But I think here's another way of looking at things. You say your morality stems from "love thy neighbor". I would ask, simply, "why?" Why should one love his neighbor? Think about that for a second before you read on...
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I ask because human moralities, like all belief systems, are fundamentally axiomatic. There are core beliefs at the root of any person's morality, although most of us don't realize either that fact, or the moral axioms themselves. But you can start to distinguish between moral axioms and moral "theorems" by simply asking yourself the question "why". If intuitively you start to explain why, that indicates the subject is probably a "theorem", whereas if you reaction to the "why" is a stumbling block, or a "duh" reaction and nothing more, it's more likely to be a moral axiom.
Here's how my line of reasoning might go.
"Love thy neighbor." Why? Well, I wouldn't love Hitler. I guess I expect (barring further knowledge) that my neighbor would be a typical person - deserving of life, kind, etc.
So, "love someone who you expect to be kind". Why? Well, because they'll probably do good things. Sure, everyone does bad things, so I guess I mean that they'll do more good things than bad.
So, "a moral imperative: do more good than bad." Why? Duh.
I'm a utilitarian (if you didn't already know or it wasn't apparent by this point). The "duh" questions for me are things like "why should we value happiness, contentment, quality of life?" Duh. We just should. It may be that "love thy neighbor" is an axiom for you, but I would be curious to hear the result of your "why" procedure, since I wouldn't be surprised after all if there was another moral axiom behind it.Hi Twiffy,
God Damn it’s great to hear from you!
I like your analysis very much. Not even any buts…
To answer the question why, I will be straightforward and without my natural instinct to “tidy upâ€.
I believe that I have the capacity to love, and that exercising this capacity makes me stronger. I believe that the social group to which I belong benefits from this exercise. Finally, I think that loving is some sort of inherited, perhaps mutated social herd instinct.
It seems I can’t help myself; I did tidy up a little. Mostly just grammar.
So what do you think? Should they lock me up?
Ed
Thanks Ed, it’s good to be back! Due to a nasty bout of the flu I find myself with more time on my hands than usual… mixed blessing.
Ok, so here’s what I take from this.
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You should love because loving makes you stronger. Thus, you value becoming stronger. Why?
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Similarly, you value the social group becoming stronger. Why?
If they lock you up, they should come for me too…
How’s math going?
-T
Hey Ed,
Yea, I was wondering how you decide what comes first in determining your morality. If you don’t believe one holds primacy over the other(internal or bible), then it seems your choices would waiver arbitrarily between them. If you believe internal morality comes first, than you don’t really need the bible. If you believe the bible comes first than you have contradictions in itself, but more specifically when it comes to using your internal morality, as you have said it suggests using, sometimes despite itself.
Hey Twiffy,
I don’t believe “the ranking” situation hurts the love thy neighbor morality, it just appends it . It’s just a subset of beliefs for deciding the best choice when all choices oppose what you initially value. I agree with your questioning of the “stronger”.
Southcrossland,
Well, I wouldn’t say the “ranking” viewpoint hurts “love thy neighbor” (LTN) exactly - but it does bring up the question of whether (in Ed’s system) LTN is always true, or only sometimes true.
Good example: if someone asked me if I believe that murder is wrong, of course I’d say yes. But when I ask why, it ends up boiling down to my axiomatically valuing quality of life and happiness. If my axiomatic values are other than “murder is wrong”, there’s a good chance that there will be exceptions, however far-fetched… and sure enough, there are. If I could go back in time and murder baby Hitler, I would (unless I had reason to believe that somehow the holocaust caused more good than harm).
So this line of questioning certainly won’t hurt the validity of LTN as a general moral belief, but it could possibly hurt LTN as a moral absolute.
(That may seem like a trivial difference to you, but I think in practical terms, it’s actually enormously important. Take pro choice vs. pro life debates, for example. One side is saying “a woman has the right to choose” and the other side is saying “the fetus has a right to life”. They treat both of these positions as moral absolutes – and for some individuals they may be, but I’m pretty confident that for most people, they are not axioms, but rather “theorems”, and as a result may not be true in some cases, including the case of abortion. The fact that these people treat these moral ideas as absolutes has caused a large amount of grief, and is a very unfortunate intellectual failing.)
Hi Guys,
I have been out of it for a couple days with some sort of bug. Actually took a day off of work, which is very rare for me.
I like the conversation taking place between the two of you, but I am not sharp now so I will just watch.
To Twiffy:
In your sentence 1 I don’t think that the word “should” is appropriate. I would think of it mathematically. A exists And A has property B. If I needed to answer why I think I would resort to your Duh.
Sentence 2 is a little more interesting to me. I think that I was evaluating it from a Darwinian point of view. Basically the “herd†would do better. I think that this is why the net result is so similar to Utilitarianism.
As for the great passion of my life, mathematics, I have been writing a paper on the different forms of arithmetic (Formalism, Logicism, and Intuitionism et al). It is nine pages so far, and I am to the point where I need to prove that they are homomorphic. I am so frickin old and senile I am not sure I can do it. Would you be interested in reviewing my proof?
Thanks Ed
An orangutan teaching the group how to use their new tool..
Tool use is not unique to man…neither is moral behavior.
What is unique to humans is language…and the encoding of reality, including morality.
Morality is common across all social species.
Altruism
Tolerance
Cooperation
Compassion
Sacrifice
All found in many species.
Do we not judge a wild animal’s intellectual abilities based on its acts of compassion
What is not found in any ohter species, other than man, are amendments to moral behaviors.
Let’s use ‘ethics’ to differentiate them form naturally selected moral behaviors, attitudes, demeanor…activities.
This subtle difference is what confuses morons…allowing them to dismiss morality as nothing but another social construct.
You know, like race and gender.
Morality is not exclusive to humans…..all social creatures have the moral attributes, associated with altruism, compassion, cooperation, tolerance, bonding, …Necessary for all cooperative strategies to remain effective.
No god required.
God enters the picture to impose amendments to moral instincts, so as to allow more complex man made systems to emerge and to remain effective.
Universalizing morality is such an amendments that contradicts our instincts.
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