The best judge of beauty (on a particular matter) is the largest group, with the longest lasting tradition concerning it.
So ,for instance, the male homosexual act is immoral because most males would not wish to partake or watch. (I’m not gay bashing, just using the idea to try to convey a point).
I accept that taste can be changed through the use of propaganda (advertising etc), but that such propaganda will fail (after a short while) if it is not a reflection of aesthetic truth.
The fundamentally aesthetic nature of morality means that judgements such as the one which states homosexuality is immoral are basically arbitrary and/or pragmatic and therefore always subject to change as circumstances surrounding those judgements change - beauty (pardon the cliche) is in the eye of the beholder, after all. You’re correct that the closest we have to a standard for beauty is consensus, but shifts and changes in that consensus are something that occurs naturally over time, and is not necessarily a function of “propaganda” at all - at least, not in the negative or dishonest connotation that the word usually evokes.
Ok, so, are you telling me that eating caviar is… well, you get the point. I am roughly sympathetic with your OP, though I don’t see the need for the “largest group” thing, or even a judge, in the sense of a third party. Morality becomes what it is, as it occurs, anarchically, moreorless. I tend to think of morality and ethics as distinct on this very point: ethics involves consensus; morality deals with consensus. Ethics is marketing; morality is the straight goods. (and by straight I’m of course meaning not anything crooked, unless crooked is good, of course…).
I think it goes beyond that. Some things will always disgust a sane mind (child murder for instance).No one has ever needed to tell me that killing kids for fun is wrong, I know it intuitively.It just so happens that beautiful things (acts) work best for society too.
I think that long held consensus views (with regard to morals) are long held consensus views because they reflect the truth, they work because they are beautiful.
I don’t think you KNOW it intuitively, i think you FEEL it intuitively - it’s probably an evolutionary adaptation at some level - continuation of the species. But what that means is it’s still an aesthetic judgement to label it “wrong” - after all, there is no scientific basis for the conclusion that wanton child-murder is wrong, even if there is a scientific basis for an understanding of WHY we tend to think so.
I think youre putting the cart before the horse (another cliche, sorry). I think they reflect the truth and are beautiful if and because they work for us. So, as our purposes change, so do our judgments as to what is true and beautiful. Long held consensus just means that our collective judgements as to what qualifies as something “working” have yet to change.
“Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth” could be described as a long held consensus view, I imagine. So, with a full earth, what happens to “the truth” of multiple child propagation? I would say that it adjusts to the circumstances, just as morality is a situation-based phenomenon… and that situations are both largely unpredictable in their details, and not well governed by hard and fast rules. …which is not, of course, to claim that we don’t attempt to rule them, just that we use a different term when doing so, e.g. law, politics, ethics, religion,…
The truth reflected by morality is the truth for the individual in the situation. The “morality” of the child killler is indeed beyond most of our comprehension, but just because we discount it as morality on that basis doesn’t deduce that it isn’t “morality”… I see “immorality” to be the extent to which one inauthenticates one’s own best judgement by adopting an ethos which one distains (e.g. for social acceptance purposes, etc.) In reference to a woman of charitable sexuality, Nietzsche wrote somewhere that, though others saw her as immoral, he though her of the most extreme morality… same sort of point, so far as it was true, at least…
Curry works for me but it ain’t beautiful…beauty attracts us first , before usefulness.Beauty is more important to us.The highest form of beauty is beautiful morality.
Well i don’t know whether the Earth is full yet ,though i doubt it.Once the Earth is full ( if that ever happens) the statement “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth” isn’t contradictory.I disagree that good morality is situation dependent , it is never morally right to kill children for fun.
The key thing with regard to morality (imo) is that morality has to be a shared social morality to have any value. So statements like," inauthenticates one’s own best judgement" miss the point.Morality is nothing important if it is not shared.
…what, are we waiting for the Rapture? I’m guessing it’s pretty much “full enough”.
No, but it reiterates that it is situationally dependent.
The “for fun” thing is what that hangs on, and isn’t an aspect of the act itself, is it? But let’s say it is… not that I have my heart set on justifying the joys of infanticide, but here’s a situation: Disease X is about to decimate children in an extremely painful way, and we have just scientifically determined that there is a super great afterlife, especially for persons who have died violently at the hands of others. Nonetheless, because of cultural baggages, most still can’t bring themselves to kill their children, but do very much want it done. So suddenly psychopaths are valued for their morality and hired to do a nice, fun job of it… Perhaps we don’t want to dwell on the details of such situations, but they may nonetheless be possible… and, of course, we’d have to be reaching to describe them, given what tend to be our common moral intuitions.
Perhaps it is also nothing important if it is completely shared. The tension between social determinations and personal experiences is where the question of value arises. But to the individual (and mind you I don’t want to be thought to be taking an egoistic position here), the primary question is not morality’s “value”, but it’s “occurence”. Valuation is a secondary matter. What is most shared is rather that we are moral beings, who share the plight of being such.
Sure, in a sense. Insofar as we can be said to objectively “know” that something is “wrong”, we know that because we know that a majority of people perceive it as much - the rest of moral knowledge (the type of individual intuition you talked about earlier) is felt in the aesthetic sense that, say, the beauty of nature is felt. But that just reinforces the point that morality is fundamentally based in aesthetic judgements - a point on which i think we’ve already agreed.
Again, insofar as i understand you, i think this is the flipside of the same point i was making, which is that we can have scientific knowledge of WHY we make certain moral judgments, but that the judgements themselves have no basis in science - at least, insofar as science is opposed to aesthetics.
Curry is beautiful in the sense that it tastes good (to you) - it is a pleasant (ie good / beautiful) aesthetic experience for you to eat curry, - in other words, curry, as you said, “works for” you - and it is that which attracts you to it.
As a sentimentalist, I’d agree with the overall thesis of the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice. However, since propaganda was discussed, it is worth pointing out that all developed sentimentalists also include education in their philosophical schema since how our innate morality/aesthetic sense develops is heavily dependent on what we’ve been taught. Even if Cook Ding can make a dish that is pleasing to all people, that doesn’t mean that businesses like McDonald’s do not exist. So then we’re stuck trying to resolve which virtues are innately beautiful and which virtues are beautiful because various other factors have occluded our proper vision of them.
That is the crux of the problem. It is usually resolved in one of three ways: a majoritarian appeal to the local tradition , such as we saw in the OP; an authoritarian appeal to particularly wise (usually deified) figure and the tradition surrounding them; or a megalomaniacal appeal that the philosopher themselves has a pure and clear vision of the world. Sometimes there is mixing-and-matching as well.
On top of that, we have to consider how virtuous our innate tastes really are. For example, a foodstuff containing roughly 60% simple sugars and 40% fat is something that we are biologically programed to absolutely adore. Could we describe a diet that primarily consisted of such a foodstuff as virtuous?
well put title. Just like love is forever abstract.
You see, the soul is independent of the physical world, but has side effects in th physical world. Hence they measure the side effects of ghosts. Hence each section of the brain is designed to react and respond to the soul’s spacific energies.
Well, especially in a western-postmodern context wherein different people within the same (at least geographical) community can have wildly different moral narratives, and additionally that there isn’t really any overarching moral structure (i.e., no social institution that engenders and enforces specific moral ideas - e.g., a unanimous religion - as opposed to law), it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about morality without falling into some level of relativity - anyone else cringing already? I think it’s a fair presumption to say that morality is in some very important ways a form of art, but the difficulty is in trying to establish criteria to judge whether or not an action is beautiful without having to resort to, “…at least for us, but you can believe whatever you’d like”.
I don’t actually think we have any innate moral leanings, but as mimetic mammals, we pick up on shared ideas of what is/isn’t “moral” very quickly. I hate to bring a highly politically charged subject into the mix, but you also have to keep abortion in mind (a widely accepted practice) when talking about killing babies as entirely immoral; now we have made some pretty shocking distinctions between what is and isn’t a baby. (That being said, I don’t mean to suggest that abortion is moral or immoral, only that seeing a fetus as a non-human is a very new concept - who knows what else may happen.)
Getting to my point, however, we don’t really need shared morality within a community anymore because it simply doesn’t/can’t exist except in fairly small circles (if even that). People in the same communities are always going to end up coming to some level of moral disagreement. Some rather existential ideas seem to have been mentioned in the thread and I think it’s important to note, with existentialism in mind, that in the modern western world people are very isolated - especially morally. So we’re mimetic mammals being “thrown” into morally ambiguous communities (even within a family unit) with very little grounds to claim one moral idea superior to another outside of feeling that it’s the right sort. Further, one can adopt a moral narrative completely foreign to their community through history - by reading, for instance.
I don’t mean to ramble on, but I just wanted to point out that this situation is really very complex.
p.s. For the record, I don’t even like existentialism. Ugh.
I don’t know if relativity is the conclusion we ought reach from that. By the looks of your post, neither do you. I think what is necessary is a parsimonious approach that recognizes the functionality of moral edicts. Viewed through the proper lens, many of these seemingly disparate moral concepts are actually entirely familiar. Caroline Walker Bynum’s “Holy Feast, Holy Fast” is a great text with respect to examining this sort of issue. From the modern perspective, purposefully starving one’s self to death or willingly feeding on excreta is about as alien as it gets. But Bynum places these things into a broader context and does so in a manner that a modern reader can’t help but agree with the people (usually women) doing these things. It is like the inverse Rand, where you read the book and are like, “Yeah, Yeah! Objectivism!” then you think about it for twenty seconds outside of the book and realize it is completely batshit insane. Which consequences are best is dependent on context and culture. And deontological systems, don’t get me started, they are all over the place. But the human spirit can’t effectively be boxed into either category, so should we expect a universal sensibility to adhere to them?
Sure, but this isn’t a new debate either. Infant abandonment and the like is quite ancient. Worth considering.
I agree that the modern liberal tradition which posits that we are autonomous, self-determining actors is rife with problems. But I think most of them are academic and not actual. Alienated though we may well be, communities still form. And since most interactions happen within that community, a comprehensive morality does exist for all of us, for all intents and purposes. Trying to extend those communities beyond their reach, especially through things like legislation, usually ends in disaster. But that is also because social morality is a function of economic conditions, so those who can afford the pigouvian disincentive brought about by the legislation will be disregard them.
