problem of ethics

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

this is sort of a rant but i still want to discuss the topic.

im taking an ethics class and in the beginning of the class probably the first day the professor introduced ethics as being the only field that no one can be right.

then… the other day i was watching southpark, the episode about the otters and the humans going to war. basically the moral of the show was something similar to “no one opinion is ever right”.

does this frustrate the shit out of anyone else? what happened to knowledge? what happened to truth? it feels like were in a society where we are so concerned with not upsetting other peoples beliefs that we won’t even debate to the full extent a conflict. to the end. to the full comprehension of something.

ethics as far as im concerned is so under developed that its useless. if everyones wrong then why have morality? why have legal systems? why have social contracts in the first place? its created and encouraged ideas like carpe diem and idiots who take it so far to the extreme that they endanger the lives of people around them.

or is there really no answer and we as humans are so ridiculously flawed that we cant even understand the topic itself?

2

What is wrong (ethically) with endangering the lives of the people around us?

3

We have forgotten that love/freindship is an objective foundation of ethics, as Aristotle showed.

Truth is consensus in this day and age.

4

exactly. i have no idea. go stab someone. see what the hell i care.

5

aristotle? what book or text or whatever. id be interested in reading that.

what do you mean by truth is consensus?

6

I don’t think it’s the only field…

7

hey cba1:
you’re right, moral relativists are annoying.

gemty

8

I havent read those books in some years, but he speaks about the moral activity and in particular freindship between man and woman (philia) in Nicomachaen Ethics and Eudemian Ethics.

I mean that what is deemed to be truth in todays world is not truth.
http://ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1843655&highlight=#1843655

9

One of two choices will always yield more benefit than the other.

10

then humanity is even worse off than i imagined.

11

to what extent? do you think weve made any progress?

i dont think weve made any ethical progress. we do more harm to each other by not killing things and pretending things are headed in the right direction. i say this as if we should be saving ourselves from inevitable destruction yet im in no position to really claim that survival is important.

so truth provides no purpose though as you said (i believe or something to that extent in the other thread). my question of what does is still lingering.

12

Hi cba,

By mere chance I happend to grow up in a circumstance and manner that allowed me to avoid accepting the beliefs and “reasoning” of society. Since I can remember ive been questioning everything, and since my first introduction to logic, I would like to think that I have dilligently followed logic wherever it may lead me, with no pre-conceptions or reservations about the conclusions I reached. Logic has always been one of my most prominent measures of value, in that, if I feel like ive reached a conclusion logicly, than I am happy to accept that conclusion. So let me tell you now about the conclusions my logic has lead me to in regards to ethics.

“does this frustrate the shit out of anyone else? what happened to knowledge? what happened to truth? it feels like were in a society where we are so concerned with not upsetting other peoples beliefs that we won’t even debate to the full extent a conflict. to the end. to the full comprehension of something.”

First let me say that I very much doubt fear of upsetting people is the reason we have not reached a difinitve system of ethics. Quite the contrary, often my “anti-ethics” conclusions are quite contravercial and upsetting to most.

So, now, let me tell you about my first ethics class. In this class, my teacher would go over a system of ethics, such as utilitarianism, and then he would criticize that system. He went through several systems of ethics, and criticized them all in similar fashion. He would argue that the system of ethics under discussion would conclude that certain actions were right or wrong, and yet those conclusions could not be so. For example, with utilitarianism, he argued that according to utilitarianism, it would be right to kill a bum who was useless to society in order to harvest his organs and use them to save members of society that were more important. He went on to say that this cannot be a right action, and so Utilitarianism must be wrong. This is the way he argued against every system of ethics we considered…

Dont you see something wrong with that? The reason given for why the conclusions were wrong was moral intuition… It feels “intuitivly” wrong to kill a bum to harvest his organs for more important people without his consent… huh?

That just doesn’t seem very logical to me… Why? Because how the hell do you justify intuition? And here is where relativity comes into play. Consider the fact that upon investigating people from diffirent areas of the world, you will find a great many diffirences in moral intuition… What some people in America find intuitivly wrong, people in the middle east have no problem with… intuitivly… Moral intuition apears to be, in a great majority of cases, completely relative to the individual… So its not like moral intuition is universal. So then how do you justify it? You cant… if a moral intuition could be logicly justified than there wouldnt have been an apeal to intuition in the first place.

The point here is this… When the validity of ethical systems are judged by other ethical systems, you go no where, because you are just begging the question. What justifies that system you use to judge others? So, ethics fails in this case. How else can you judge ethical systems then? I can think of one way, that being consistency. If contradictions are contained within a system of ethics than this is a logical problem for that system. Unfortunatly, there are plenty of diffirent consistent ethical systems out there, even more so, I can make up a system right now and make it consistent.

Where does that leave us? Logic cannot be used to compare consistent ethical systems. We are left with no logical way to justify any one system over another. Ethics has no conclusion…

I am happy with this conclusion, because I feel it is logical. I know you are unhappy with this conclusion. The question is why? What makes you believe that this state of affairs is unsatisfactory. Now, I want you to note that there are several ways one can come to have a belief. Logicly arriving at a conclusion and adopting it as a belief is only one way. So if it is not logic that leads you to be unsatisfied, I ask you to try and figure out what causes your disatisfaction.

13

I say that truth is the good of intelligence, its’ finality.

Also I believe there is an objective moral ground, which is metaphysics (that of Aristotle). In fact, I think metaphysics should more oft be named metaethics…

14

The answer to your question is consensus. At least when you speak of morality. Ethics is another question - there the answer is taste.
Consensus of tastes defines a set of ethics that is called ‘culture’.
Morality is the set of beliefs that serves to preserve this culture.

15

because i think that is also inconsistent. we have commonalities as human beings right? we know what it is to be a human being and we can assume each human being has similar characteristics. as similar beings we all have similar logic. we can take logic and explain it to anyone. thats why math is universal. if we can all logically think the exact same way (similar to math) then why is ethics so subjective? i dont think it is. i think theyre all very similar. if you look most cultures have practices for the same exact things just performed differently. that could be carried on to infinity making everything in humanity incredibly similar…

but on top of that. legal systems are the defining characteristic of a society. as we move to a global legal system how do we enforce ethics? how would someone convince a radical muslim not to fly planes into buildings?

on top of that… i want someone to find a human being who doesnt fear death or pain because clearly we base a lot of our ethics on that.

16

hah im similar to that. thats the only aspect of metaphysics that interests me. that and overall purpose. i agree though. maybe you should create a new philosophical field.

17

The difficulty with a realistic philosophy is that everything is tied together, because reasoning in this area is not univocal but analogical. One can abandon certain aspects with univocal reasoning , which is not the case with analogical reasoning, since we are dealing with transcendentals, being and good, so everything is intertwined… Metaphysics (of being qua being) concerns and touches everything. One must thus be very rigorous, for an approximation which may seem innocuous at the time may have unimaginable consequences down the line. That is the particularity of metaphysics, the real one, not that of Descartes or Hegel. The term explains the beginning as much as the beginning shed’s light on the term, really just as much, and that is precisely the difficulty of this science. #-o

18

Ethics is, indeed, a very non-conclusive subject, because of the reductio ad absurdum based on a feeling of what is wrong and what is right which most people have tends to be such an effective argument. The question to ask should be: where does this feeling come from? And, in my opinion, the answer is simple: upbringin. Because, after all, people are still animals, and they start avoidin doing something once they’ve learned that doing it leads to punishment. In most cases, the learned rules, such as “don’t hit others” and “don’t take things which don’t belong to you without permission”, become such an integral part of the individual that it is impossible to stop them affecting one’s thought. This is how we acquire the intuitive feeling for what can and cannot be done - just like dogs learn not to bite.

Sadly, this acquired feeling leads to the fact that any moral theory can be argued against by the simple fact that it’s results don’t “feel” right. That is the animal that reason cannot overcome, no matter what.

((As a siden note, moral relativists, and especially cultural relativists, can always be asked whether, had Germany won World War II and produced a culture whose members considered that they had the right to enslave, rule and torture all non-Germans, would their moral view be as valid as ours?))

19

i wouldnt say its upbringing really. i think its more basic than society like innate biological outlook of the world. ive never seen a puppy that was innately viscious. never. rough maybe but never intentionally mean. human beings are ammoral just like all animals. we learn what to include and exclude. i dont know… theres more to say but i dont know what else.

20

Because all “truths”, scientific or ethical, are not absolute, as h_d hints, one has the free will to choose what best fits his/her own personal development. Put in an absolute ethic and it takes away one’s ability to discover or create. Because we exist in time and its consequent change, truth can be personalized. This does not mean that it becomes relative or meaningless. Ethical truth is a social proposition. If I were a hermit, whatever I did would be amoral unless I had been convinced that what I did had to be judged by some ancient stone tablets or historical, social consensus of values. Ethics considers “shoulds”. Thinking persons consider “Why should I”. The answers to these considerations are always personal.