Universal Morality

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Is there a such thing as a system of ethics or morals that one can blanket over all living creatures as a universal constant? Is there even a such thing as an absolute morality? What about an act that by its very nature is objectively “wrong”, and whose wrongness has nothing to do with anyone’s gut feeling?

There are two different kinds of absolutes (I think there are two there might be more). The first deals with truth, where either a proposition has a binary yes/no, true/false conclusion. An example of an absolute truth would be to say not that 2+2=4, but to say something like:

Saying it like this sheds the proposition of its linguistic relativism where “4” in one language theoretically might not be the same as our “4”. Same goes for the “2” and the “+” and “=” symbols. Its the math behind the concept that is the absolute truth. The sting of characters and symbols “2+2=4” is true relative to our own personal terminology.

The second kind of absolute deals with morality and right and wrong. Saying that something is absolutely “wrong” means that it is being categorized as being wrong under ALL circumstances, societies, species, dimensions, and days of the week.

–Killing: Ok in war. Not ok for personal gain. No absolute on killing. Wrongness is relative to governmental status and purpose.

–Porn: I like it. You do not. No absolute on porn. Wrongness is relative to your own liking of porn.

–Inter species sexual relations: Ok for horses and zebras, lions and tigers to interbreed. Not ok for humans and dogs. Each set of creatures contain not-like species. Wrongness is relative to the degree of which one separates humans from other creatures. No absolute. (whether or not the pairs of creatures are able to produce offspring is irrelevant, what matters is the differentiation between the species)

–Putting grandma in old folks home: Ok in united states. Would be severely frowned upon in some countries. Wrongness is relative to geographic location and specific to societal norms. No absolute on putting grandma in old folks home.

–Stealing (taking someone’s possession without their permission): Ok for police to take possessions after they arrest you. Not ok to steal some ones car. Wrongness is relative to powers of authority. No absolute on stealing.

–Smoking pot: Ok if you have a prescription for it. Not ok if you simply just like it. Wrongness is relative to specific legislation passed upon marijuana consumption. No absolute.

–Working on Sunday: Ok for me. Not for a Christian. Wrongness is relative to religious doctrine (or lack thereof). No absolute.

When does a personal pursuit of happiness go from being ok, to something that is considered wrong? If your answer is something like “whenever people get hurt” then you must also consider war and alcohol consumption and rock climbing to be wrong too. If your answer is “whenever the act is socially deviant” then you are saying that the “wrongness” is relative to a particular society’s norms and not universally wrong.

I hope I don’t come off as totally sounding like I think there will never be discovered a universal moral ethical code. I just haven’t found one yet.

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I don’t think so because morals and ethics are relative to begin with. If there is a God dictating absolute morals and ethics, then maybe one could argue the case. However, one can argue that it always depends… “Depends on what?..” Depends on the relative situation or individual… and then we are back to the same place… Relatives leaving no room for absolutes. All systems have cracks anyway. :wink:

3

There is no such thing as “objectively wrong”. Wrong for whom or what? Wrong and right are completely relative.

4

There won’t ever be a “universal moral ethical code”. There can’t be!

5

There could be a universal ethic moral code…one so sophisticated that it tracks all of the brains functions and thoughts as well as actions etc. But this system would take place in the future where when one is born, he or she is already programmed to this tracking.

In reality to get everyone to agree on what is moral and ethical would begin and most likely end in defining what moral and ethical means in a universal sense. They wouldn’t even get passed “being good”

I like your working out of whether there can be a universal moral code though and i’m still wondering thinking about this myself.

Can there be a morally subjective objective within one own’s frame of mind?

Do we deviate from what our subjective contains and what our subjective objective mind believes to be objective outside of self?

Do we really have a sense or grasp of the objective. Is ‘feeling’ objective to humanity? with variations of feeling among other organisms?
There will always be exceptions to what is objective to some even if it’s just stated in words but do they really think just objectively as everyone else? and are saying the contrary for another reason?

What we use to communicate in words is far less meaningful then tone, facial expressions, body communication, etc that perhaps we should only speak by these levels of comm. in some situations instead of thinking " i need to say something here because this is how we communicate formally" Are these gestures of communication objective?

And then can we(everyone) agree they are objective?

Nice post and good responses as well.

  • Joe
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Here is another one:

–Homosexuality: Ok for one person. Not ok for another.

How can one call the act of homosexuality “wrong” though? I would back the claim that homosexuality in most cases is possibly impractical towards the procreation of the species (sure there are cases when the partners are infertile; or they do not want to have children anyway). But how the fuck does it make sense to call it “wrong.”

Sure maybe it goes against some unscientific notion of the “wiring of our brains”; but wrong? Really? Or is it just that you don’t like it?[u]Define “wrong”. Can something be inherently “wrong”, or can something only be “wrong” in a relative sense (relative to social norms), or can it only be “wrong” in the sense that an individual person (or a few individuals) just don’t like it.

"If you have this many smilies :smiley:, and you bring in this many more smilies :smiley: :smiley: , you end up with this many smilies: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: "
This statement is wrong.

“God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”.
Sure God “made” Adam and Eve. But would Adam and Steve be “wrong”? I don’t think so.

Like it or not, we are animals too, living in our own society. Just because non-humans can’t communicate with real humans, that does not mean that there are similarities between natural instincts. (If you want to use the “god made humans in his image” argument then first please prove god exists to do such a thing). Natural instincts are what we are born with. If we are born with a natural attraction to those members of the same species that are the same gender, how can it be labeled “wrong”?

Sure you could say the same thing about any sort of natural urge. Kleptomania is a mental disorder. If it is something you are born with, and you steal something, it wasn’t a choice you made, was it “wrong” in a universal sense?

If you want to compare different human societies, consider some tribal societies. When it is time to migrate, if there are any elderly members of the tribe that cannot make the trip, they are left behind. This is the norm for some tribes. They all accept it as what needs to be done because an elderly person would slow them down and make it hard for the entire group. Americans don’t do that, and I don’t think Europeans do it either. The point is that one society thinks it is necessary, the other would condemn the act. Are we wrong to put grandma in a nursing home? Should we leave her to die like a tribal society would? Why not?

Ask yourself “why not?” and see if you can come up with a better answer than “just because.” The moment you reach a “just because” type of answer in a line of “why?” questioning, you’ve hit a brick wall of subjectivity. This goes for anything. Pretend you are a little kid who wants to know more. All they ask is “why?” Why do we have a dining room table? Because we need a place to eat dinner. Why? because we need food in our bodies to become strong. Why? Because mommy and I want you to be big and strong. Why? because we need you to take care of us when we get old. Why? Why? why? why? why? just because.

7

Airex and joekoba,

Let me first ask, Do you believe that morals and ethics are relative?

If you do, then why the search for universals? If they are relative to begin with, you’re not going to ‘make’ them objective or universal.

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Firstoff, Possiblity [a] Morals and ethics come from yours truly, god. If you dont believe in god then you dont believe in morals.

Second Possiblity [b] Its other option is Perspective. Live is all about perspective, I am trapped in a room with another man, only enough rations for 1, from my perspective it would be the right thing to do for me to live is kill him or restrain him and keep the food for me. but from his perspective he would do the same. There is no right and wrong. Just survival.

9

Do what you will.

10

Well, of course as everyone else has noticed, there’s little evidence to support the assertion that any sort of action, in and of itself, can be considered objectively right or wrong. It’s similar to the problem of identifying what is ‘deviant’ within a given society; the same action may deviate from the social code at one time and place, and be perfectly acceptable at another. The key thing to get about this, though, is that then they’re not quite the same action, right? Ethics is about the particularity of the social situation; the only moral absolute is respect for the other, which can be thought of as a sort of ‘singular imperative,’ though like the categorical imperative it is without objective force.

But of course just because something has no objective force doesn’t mean that it exerts no force on us at all. Our perceptions and our feelings color our reality to such an extent that the idea of there being an objective ‘reality itself’ independent of our observation is already something of a paradox. I can’t see how guilty your actions make you feel; I only know if you express this to me, and in fact your speaking to me is a constant undoing of the static-image within which I represent you. In order for this relation to the Other to be authentic, we can’t be allergic; we have to be open, welcoming, hospitable. This is closer to what morality means than some sort of ‘universal code’; the code is just not being allergic to difference, to Otherness. An ethical relation to another person has got to be based in a sort of non-violent passivity, a dialogue which engenders peace. In fact, we ought not to tie this here to law or culture, as the face to face human relationship is a relation which is infinte, and precedes law and culture and indeed language itself. This is why ethics precedes ontology; this is also why ethics (the relation to the infinite other) is also the pure form of metaphysics (a desire for the absolutely other.)

11

Life (quality and quantity) as an ethical absolute

ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewto … highlight=

excerpt-

The sufficiency of life as a basis for ethics proven thusly:

Only man may be moral or immoral, thus ethics pertains only to human beings. The core concern of ethics is the moral or immoral behavior of man.

Life is shown to be the principal foundation of ethical inquiry and to be a sufficient benchmark in determining value in that those things that are considered to be moral are conducive to human life (in quality or quantity) and those things which are considered to be immoral are antithetical to human life (in quality or quantity).

One need only survey human history from Hammurabi’s code and the Decalogue, to the hedonistic school of Greece and that categorical imperative of Kant to see that the underlying concern is life itself and those things which are conducive to life in general or in particular. Hence, life is the foundation and cornerstone of ethical inquiry.

The more moral action is that which may be shown to most profit life in quality and quantity. In this way, those things which are antithetical to the quality or quantity of life (murder, substance abuse, resource hording, etc.) are seen to be less moral than their dialectical counterparts (life creating or saving actions, proper substance use, just and equitable resource distribution, etc.)

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[size=150]…My discussion of a similar topic from an earlier post.

(Anonymous Atheist 1) writes:

“What are the morals we should follow? Whose morals are correct? How do we agree upon a common set of morals? or even what are morals?”

(Anonymous Atheist 2) writes:

"Atheism is making real progress with destroying religion.)

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

V:

Hi and thanks for your posts.

You’d like to get rid of ALL religion and replace it with human morals - but without any trace of God?

But you can’t decide on whose morals are the correct one’s to replace the religion based morals?

The Short Answer:

Destroying others always destroys peace.

It destroys your peace as well as the inner peace of the one’s that you destroy.

Look to the ‘God of Inner Peace’ and the ‘God of Nature’ for moral and ethical values.

Even if you dump Yahweh, you can never dump these two Gods and live a flourishing, healthy peaceful life.

See:

jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/ … opic=342.0

The Long Answer:

There is no answer no matter how long you make it that gives an absolute answer, for we will always come up with exceptions to the rule with this subject.

The question of universal morals and laws are the subject of numerous college classes and even with a Ph.D., it still depends on the person and their spiritual health when they answer such a question.

The arguments always seem to be around Moral Relativism vs Objectivism vs Determinism vs Emotivism vs Ethical subjectivism vs Moral Absolutism and around and around they go.

Add a few more components to the equation, such as Universality, The Golden Rule of Reciprocity, Natural Law Theory, listening to the God of Inner Peace, Greater Good vs the Greater Right, Flourishing of the Species Theory and ‘Might Makes Right’ and people can get really stuck in analysis paralysis.

What is the best answer?

There is no best answer, other than it is a mix of all these in that yield us a ‘best fit’ equation to morals and ethics to live by.

All these concepts requires the individual to have thinking ability and a ‘conscious’ supported by spiritual values to come to the best fit for the circumstances at question. Humans have a conscious since they do not run solely by instinct as animals do. Without a spiritual based conscious they would turn to self-destruction.

This is a good topic to study up, for without having a feel for how this all works and without the fear of religion to keep humans in check, humans soon turn into monsters that sink to levels even below that of the beasts. You see, religion are humans brand of prepackaged morals. One just hopes that the various religious sects did a good job in developing the packages.

With atheists, many a time they lack spiritual values and are run by ill will, fear, hatred and a bloated ego. This goes for theists as well, so I am not singling out atheists as a problem. It just goes to illustrate that whether religious or not…it takes more to live a life at peace than belief in God or freedom from God.

I discuss some of these issues here:

jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/ … ?topic=4.0

jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/ … opic=318.0

jesusneverexisted.org/jne/forum/ … opic=380.0

You will never get people to agree on anything. Some are sick, some are well and the rest are somewhere in between. And some of the well ones get sick on other days and d it is the same with the sick ones.

The best we can do is to live ‘our life at peace’ and help promote peace within others.

There are 3 components necessary to live a happy life: CONTENTMENT, LOVE or COMPASSION and GRATITUDE. When we realize that happiness is there for the taking and it is independent from our circumstances it someday may sink in that there is nothing stopping us from being content and happy RIGHT NOW!

The choice is your if you have had enough pain. Examine which of these components is missing in your life.

As James Allen wrote in As a man Thinketh:

“To think well of all, to be cheerful with all, to patiently learn to find the good in all - such unselfish thoughts are the very portals of heaven; and to dwell day by day in thoughts of peace toward every creature will bring abounding peace to their possessor.”

Early records for moral codes goes back to Egypt with the 42 negative confessions. Scholars think the 10 commandments came from these. Yahweh also dictated over 600 other commandments and rules for the Jews to live my. So, even in the old days, it was a tough job trying to follow the rules.

Nowadays we can take courses that deal with morals, values and making laws but when you finish them you are sometime more confused than when you started.

Does this mean we should chuck the whole thing and give up?

No, for is we gave it no thought we would really be into deep trouble.

We have to do with morals and values the same as we do with life. We live it the best we can albeit imperfectly and do this until the day we die if we wish to flourish.

I heard a story one time in a Yoga lecture that illustrates this point. “Range is of the ego - Form is of the soul.” The only thing we need to be concerned with is how is our form when it comes to our practice and our life.

Here is a sample college level course on ethical values

Facts and Values
Lives to Envy, Lives to Admire
Foundations of Ethics—Theories of the Good
Foundations of Ethics—Theories of the Right
Thoughts on Religion and Values
Life’s Priorities
The Cash Value of a Life
How Do We Know Right from Wrong?
Cultures and Values
Questions of Relativism
Cultures and Values
Evolution, Ethics, and Game Theory
The Objective Side of Value
Better Off Dead
A Picture of Justice
Life’s Horrors
A Genealogy of My Morals
Theories of Punishment
Choice and Chance
Free Will and Determinism
Images of Immortality
Ethical Knowledge
Moralities in Conflict
Conclusions

Sample college level course on natural law:

The Philosophical Approach
The General Nature of Ethics
Law, Nature, Natural Law
Principles of Natural Law Theory
Greek Ideas of Nature and Justice
Aristotle’s Clarification of “Nature”
Aristotle on Justice and Politics
The Stoic Idea of Natural Law
Biblical Views of Nature and Law
Early Christians, Nature, and Law
Roman, Canon, and Natural Law
The Thomistic Synthesis
Late Medieval and Early Modern Views
Hobbes and Locke
Natural Law and the Founding Fathers
Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant
Can Rights Exist Without Natural Law?
The Question of Evolution
The Paradox of Cultural Relativism
The Problem of God
Current Applications—Jurisprudence
Current Applications—Bioethics
Current Applications—Social Ethics
The Eternal Return of Natural Law
All Course titles Teaching Company

You will find just one area as a foundation for this subject will not do very well. For as much as I like natural law as a guide to living right. We can see the Nazis used the same natural law argument to purify the races when they came to trial.

Sound crazy?

In nature doesn’t the strongest survive?

Balance is of the utmost importance with our quest for truth. The Nazis left out the God of Peace in their calculations and had to pay the price to this God when judgment day came along.

The Greeks used to teach harmony and balance in the Trivium in their schools. In the ‘tenants of reason’ they went into much details with the subject of harmony breaking it down into proportionally, prudence, balance, fitness and aptness. Not subjects you hear a lot of nowadays.

Proportionality and harmony would be most welcome subjects taught nowadays. So do not do as many of my atheists friends do when they try to think with ‘manacled minds’ of self imposed prejudice. For the best fit with morals and laws we need to a balance many areas as one thing only goes so far with giving us a good life.

When judgments have to be made, mistakes can and will happen the best we can do is give it an honest effort with rational thought. The ancient Greek philosophers knew that when passion rules the mind, that the only job left for reason is that of the subservient task to find cleaver ways to satisfy the passions. They called it “putting passion before reason.”

Both these areas of passion and reason where the foundation of much philosophical discussion of ethics and virtue with the ancient Greeks. Once we put passions before reason we are using prejudice as the foundation for our building plan, and sooner or later anything built on lies will fall. Rationality hopefully can leave the personal prejudice out of the picture.

Always remember…“honor dies where the interest lies.”

Laws are advertised as reason without passion, but usually fall short of their goal. As the truth is that which does not change and man made laws always seem to change.

3 Components of Rationality

1 - Rationality requires reflection.

2- Rationality is the ability to anticipate consequences.

3 - Rationality requires adherence to certain standards.

This being able to ‘rest satisfied’ is something the perfectionists lack with their rationality and why they will never be at peace until they stop collecting concepts and start using the concepts of peace generations.

We can examine our actions to see what useful tools for finding peace we offer to others. This evaluation says a lot about our own practice of generating inner peace. When you practice peace promotion with others you will reap inner peace promotion. When you practice destroying others peace, you will reap self destruction of inner peace.

I suggest any atheists wishing to find inner peace within their life adopt the creed of the atheists (their version of prepackaged morals) and become secular humanists as a good first start.

The ‘informal creed’ of atheism.

An Atheist loves his fellow man instead of god. An Atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now – here on earth for all men together to enjoy.

An Atheist believes that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction, and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it and enjoy it.

An Atheist believes that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment. He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church.

An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said.

An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man.

He wants an ethical way of life. He believes that we cannot rely on a god or channel action into prayer nor hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter.

He believes that we are our brother’s keepers; and are keepers of our own lives; that we are responsible persons and the job is here and the time is now.”

atheists.org/Atheism/

“The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles”

• We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

• We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

• We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

• We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

• We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

• We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

• We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

• We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

• We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

• We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

• We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

• We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

• We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

• We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

• We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

• We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

• We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

• We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

• We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

• We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

My vote?

Personally I am not here to save anyone’s soul…well, maybe my own soul if I got one.

I ‘save my soul’ by practicing what I preach when it comes to living by the rules of the God of Peace and the God of Nature.

But if the vote was up to me. I vote to keep religion. For it is the fantasy and delusions of atheists that atheism and freethought alone will fix all our woes.

Maybe someday in the next millennium things will be different. But if the trends keep going with our chemical laden foods and stressed lifestyles we will only get worse and not better.

All we have to do is look at alt.athsism to get glimpse of what the world would be like if religion did not exist…scary.

People will always need something to concentrate their minds on as they live to avoid thinking about death, so religion plays an important part of this fixations.

The defiance based atheists use hate of theists to define themselves and to fixate on with their thoughts. So really the two camps are dependent one each other…who would the theists try to save if it wasn’t for atheists?

“Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right.”[/size]

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No kittens die from my masturbations. The values we impose on the universe are not the workings of the universe; they are our personifications of it. The only pragmatic value I can see these days is that if we don’t learn what ecosystems are, we will die of ignorance.

14

Ahh, that was a good thread… worthy of a return.

Ethical systems are innately subjective imho, it’s a question of establishing the baseline.

15

There is no universal morality. What one man considers ethical, his antithesis considers terrible, and vice-sersa. It’s not a matter of one being correct and the other not, although you could consider one more noble than the other.

16

Ecology is universal morality.

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Universal Morality: The uniting force seeking redemption from time - the process of assimilating the individual within the group or the particular into the general - the harmonizing of two distinct temporal flows.

18

I think The Universal Declaration of Human Rights presented by the UN General Assembly sums it all up.

19

Morality is a human construct. When you want an answer to a questions, always think of the opposite. For instance, when we talk about morality, we are talking about morality for humans. Would morality exist without men???

The answer is no, so morality and the existence of morality is not something scientifically observable and therefore must be invented by man. Thus if it does not exist indpendent of man, it is not universal.

Now we further drill down, who are the men that determines what is moral? The church. So what is moral today is what the church deem to be moral.

The morality of one group does not always apply to that of other groups because people are different.

When you speak of universal morality, can you give me an instance of universal morality. Often an example is proof the concept is false. so if you can’t show me an example, then your concept is wrong, but if you can then you are substantiating your concept.

20

What about acts such as murder or rape (killing for pleasure, intercourse without consent and/or with goal of procreation)? I don’t think that just because one person thinks that murder is right and another person does not think it is ok that that means there is no universal stigma of right/wrong on it. Same goes for rape.

Is it just a coincidence that the overall majority holds murder and rape wrong? Or is there some natural instinct that governs all?