| |
|
»
»
|
|
| |
Re: I think we can have an objective moral system.
|
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 02:49 PM |
Religious people always claim to have an objective system because they have a single and unchanging book they can look to for answers. But, if you aren't religious, can you have an objective moral system too? If yes, what bases should we use for it?
Any system of inquiry based on something we assume to be objective, that assumption is called an axiom. There's a lot of axioms in philosophy. For example, science is based on many axioms. One axiom is that the universe is consistent so that we can learn from experiments. That axiom is foundation to science but cannot be proven in itself.
Axioms exist all over the place. But one thing axioms tend to have in common is that they're supposed to be self-evident. Such as, 2+2=4. Mathematics is entirely axiomatic, it's based only on axioms and nothing else. Yet, unless you have brain damage or are just really dumb, it's incredibly difficult to reject that 2+2=4, because all the axioms math is based on is self-evident.
So If I were to create a moral system from an axiom, I wouldn't just arbitrarily choose a book like religious people do. I'd want to base it off of something more self-evident, something most mentally healthy people in the world would agree upon.
The axiom I would like us to think about is this.
Would you agree that it is immoral to needlessly harm someone? Given the person is not bothering you, they are not taking anything from you, you have plenty of resources yourself. There's absolutely no justification for harming them, yet you choose to do so anyways.
Would you agree that that is immoral?
Let's take another scenario. Would you agree that it is moral to needlessly help someone? Let's say someone crashes their car and they are hurt and you pass buy them. They aren't a friend or family member, they aren't a boss, you know you won't get any rewards. You will gain nothing from helping them, yet you choose to do so anyways.
Would you agree that that is moral?
Your answer to both is probably yes, because for most people this is self-evident. Needlessly helping people is moral, and needlessly harming people is immoral.
So why don't we make this our axiom? We will define morality is improving someone's well-being (helping them), and immorality as decreasing someone's well-being (harming them).
Once we do this, we can easily put an objective system in to play.
Well-being is a bit fuzzy on what specifically constitutes it, but we all have a sense of it. Look at health. There is no objective way to determine whether someone is healthy. But we all can recognize health vs unhealth because we have a sense for it. In the same way, we can all recognize levels of well-being.
Such as, it's pretty self-evident to us that someone who is starving in Africa has less well-being than Bill Gates.
So we all can make moral decisions using this axiom in our day-to-day lives since we all have a sense of well-being.
This axiom can be extended even further, however. We have many methods of measuring well-being. This can be useful for many things, specifically for the fact that we can objectively prove or disprove something to be moral with science.
Imagine if someone says "spanking is moral because it helps kids learn self-control". Someone else says "spanking is immoral because it reduces kid's mental health and they can learn self-control just as well via other teaching means".
It's pretty clear that if the latter is right, then spanking would be objectively immoral because it would needlessly reduce the kid's well-being.
And, in fact, we can use science to answer this question. We can do studies and research to determine if (1) spanking does indeed teach a kid self-control, (2) that same lesson can be taught just as well via other means, and (3) spanking does indeed reduce the kid's mental health.
The answers to these questions would objectively tell us whether spanking is right or wrong. You could prove its morality using evidence.
That's why I think this moral system is superior.
1. It's based on self-evident axioms, just like all fields of science and science itself. 2. It allows for us to have objective answers to moral questions. 3. It allows us to study the morality of an action using the scientific method, making morality in itself a branch of science.
This is my stance on morality. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 02:51 PM |
tl:dr but I think I know what you're trying to say. Here's my argument from the other thread.
>you can't have morality without religion. Do you disagree with this? if yes, it's probably because you say "I'm not religious but I have morals." >You get those morals from society. "Yeah, but we don't need religion for that" >Technically you're right. Morals come from nature and the preservation of our species. "Then why don't we just follow that?" >Ok. Let's make a list of morals that you have to follow for your health and for the health of the society. "Glad to see we could agree on that." >Yep. Hey, life is kinda boring sometimes. Let's make a holiday where we do something every year. "Ok. That will break up the monotony of everyday work. Good Idea!" >Hey, look at these forces of nature. How do we explain that? "Hmm... I don't know." >We don't have modern science, and all we know is ourselves... so how about we come up with stories to explain them easily to people to the best of our ability and observations? "I guess so. I mean it's the best we can do."
CONGRADULATIONS, YOU JUST INVENTED RELIGION |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
22797062
|
  |
| Joined: 31 Dec 2011 |
| Total Posts: 735 |
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 02:51 PM |
The reason you cannot have an objective moral system is because all meaning is derived subjectively. Let me explain my stance. Every species that's ever developed self awareness must have seen it as an evolutionary culmination, rather than one of many possible, but not inevitable, courses; of which the implications are still not known, and never will be known.
The only definitive answer is failure, because it's an end. By contrast, there's no ultimate success. Just a tentative ongoing trial of one's ability to survive: a wait for the other shoe to drop. What is the measure of success in a species? reproductive? technological? cultural? Species not even dimly aware of themselves, driven only by instinct -- bundles of nerves and the muscles that respond directly to the stimuli received -- have nevertheless survived for eons. They're neither happy nor sad, and will never build cathedrals or toaster ovens. They've done well without developing a sense of self, for there was never a force strong enough to unsettle them from their niches.
Nothing -- the predators, the elements, wars with other colonies or similar species, and all of the myriad parasites and microbes -- could interrupt the continuity of their lineage. Highways of crocodiles, rivers of beetles, torrents of cockroaches, oceans of bacteria, have all found satisfaction with their trades, even if they know of no alternative -- and lack any conscious sense of what they do now.
What if all self awareness does is make one realize their inextricable role in something that could just as well have continued without it? What happens when the ingenuity of abstract thought is no longer engaged by the urgency to find novel ways of survival? What happens then?
To the development of the species, we have an ideal in mind. It's often just a vague intensification of western progressive culture, flattened, homogenized, and turned inward until it's reimagined -- not as one of many courses of the tangential, random development of a culture, but as an inevitable point in the perfection of human relations and physiology. This benefits the culture itself; to justify a pattern of useful traditions and ideas that served some practical purpose. Most people live in a realm of imagined potentialities and ideals, not the ongoing realities and the cyclical events which preceded them. Their morality is not what they do, but what they believe in. Their society isn't what's before them, but what they hope it will be. It's both an explicit reaction to perceived shortcomings in a society, and a tacit endorsement of aspects taken for granted as obvious.
Perfection as an ideal assumes such a culture can exist objectively, and that the idea is even meaningful or coherent. But, how does one chart, say, the course from primordial grunts to a versatile language, and prove objectively that one is more perfect than the next? More accurate words? Nicer sounding phonemes? We have to answer by whose account it's better. There are a ton of qualitative differences one can point out legitimately, but you're ultimately left with a loose end; that you have to make the subjective choice of what you value, and admit that it's only within that framework that something more abstract than survival becomes meaningful.
You can roll the historical dice until the cows come home, but you won't end up with a sequence of events identical to that which developed the cultures we know. We are doing things this way, but we could just as easily be doing something else, and we wouldn't know any better. Where progress in western culture is often seen as an advance toward tolerance and intellectualism (for liberals, anyway), there are other cultures (or subcultures) that admit entirely different ideals; like piety, class distinction, hierarchical family structure. They continue in spite of seeming backward to western progressives because enough people within these respective societies are either adequately satisfied with them, or cowed by them, so that they don't bother advocating change, or they hold tenaciously to traditions they hope to keep ad infinitum.
There are a lot of practices that don't translate across cultures, that each sees in the other as barbaric or profane. But since it's only a comparison between one culture's values and another, and not an absolute benchmark, the variation illustrates that the outcome of cultural development is rather arbitrary. An individual's right not to be the property of another, for instance, isn't universal. For it to become barbaric to own another person, one must first decide -- consciously or not, individually or across the history of a society -- that individual freedoms are important. Not everyone agrees. Without a universal arbiter of cultural absolutes, one is stuck with the awareness that, aside from the physiological demands that motivate and loosely direct them, the values we see as essential and obvious are ultimately indefensible objectively. Gods, and their ultimate judgments, are a convenient way to shut down the discussion, but it's plain that their invocation just legitimizes a culture's traditions without explanation.
This raises the question of whether there's a determining factor beyond opinion to which one can defer as a guideline. A fundamental basis of modern western society, for instance, is the individual's right to self-determination. A person could not legitimately be owned by another, and a person should be able to pursue their desires to the extent that they don't infringe on the said freedom of another (ideally, in theory). Again, the view is a choice, not an evolutionarily determined absolute. It may have come about because it serves the species in general, but there are other ideas that might have done as well or better.
It's assumed that we'll inevitably become more civilized, more genteel, more intellectual: that our physiology will direct itself toward our vanities, and beyond its current weaknesses and mediocrities. Nothing suggests that this assumption is justified. Evolution isn't a constant progression toward someone's subjective ideal, but the adaptation to environmental pressures. Features appear randomly through mutation, and more often than not they're a hindrance to survival. It's only when animals of a species sharing specific genetic traits die, or otherwise fail to contribute to the gene pool, that the remaining animals that survive and produce offspring see their own successful features propagated and amplified.
If human ingenuity has circumvented the factors leading to natural selection for fitness, and adaptation to a natural environment, faster than it has been able to artificially correct harmful genetic mutations, then the contribution of these frailties affects the species as a whole. To the extent that humanity has made natural environmental pressures (natural culling) irrelevant, it must do two things: find a way to alter itself physiologically according to its own ideals (e.g. the correction of genetic diseases; but there are other more controversial elective alterations as well), and find a state of equilibrium for the controlled environment on which it depends. One that can be sustained according to the needs of the species (and any other species necessary to this environment). If either the genetic makeup of the species becomes too mediocre by the lack of environmental pressures, or the environment reverts to a state that abruptly reintroduces such pressures, the position of the species will become tenuous.
In other words, many of us would not survive as wild animals. Whether we like it or not, we're conditioned to live in the world which we currently do, though factors like pollution have outpaced our ability to compensate genetically.
Dualism supposes that the mind/soul/consciousness and the physical body are somehow separate and extricable entities. In this scenario, everyone you've known still exists somehow, and so their thoughts, experiences, feelings, and perhaps even their ongoing companionship, are maintained. The prospect of second chances, or a purer existence liberated from illness, circumstances, and vice, are also appealing. But the appeal of something doesn't influence its veracity. The model of the brain as the home of the mind has far more evidence than the nevertheless widely accepted idea of the soul.
If you abandon the idea of dualism, any reference to the dead in the present tense becomes meaningless; as does any reference to oneself beyond death. You/they no longer exist physically, and so everything that distinguished yourself/them from inanimate debris is permanently gone.
Monists wanting meaning sometimes find it in the thought that they will live on in the memories of the people they've affected in their lives. But this thought is only a comfort until the moment the lights go out. The entire experience ends. It's an asymmetrical prospect; you won't be aware of someone remembering you because "you" no longer exist. The memories themselves are stagnate; a fetish slowly distorting, and ultimately fading from existence. All of your contemporaries will also die, and with them will go any direct memories of you.
If you've left a mark on the world, your work will continue to exist. But again, "you" won't, so it's only a thought to make the inevitable and permanent condition seem less grim as you advance toward it.
For both dualists and monists, it's the continuation of one's existence -- literally for dualists, and figuratively/symbolically for monists -- that provides comfort. Perhaps it emerges from the microcosm of our genes which, albeit unconsciously, make every effort through their particular species/vehicles to continue their own existence. From the first self-replicating molecule, to the single-celled organism, to every animal on earth which would evolve from this common ancestor, all have the same goal: to multiply, assuring the gene's continued existence. Goal is the wrong word. Even compulsion is wrong. It's just a physically determined inevitability. Particle A crashing into particle B, according to physical principles, reacting to motions and trajectories already in place since moment zero.
I don't know what "meaning" means to the individual. Self awareness would seem to have come about as all features of life do: random mutations that proved useful in our survival and propagation. A happenstance that serves our masters, the genes, and produces the subject: the animal aware of what it is and what it's doing, so that it can do it better. But with self awareness being an emergent quality of complex organisms, and cells being mindless little machines, made of big molecules we call DNA, there's no room for deliberate intent at that level.
Most of us are compelled by physiological desires: survival, dominance, reproduction. Aside from the other two, dominance is important because genes don't just "want" to survive in general, each "wants" to survive to the exclusion of others (a motive we often consciously mitigate or deny). Beyond serving that end, it would seem that self awareness is what engineers call "feature creep," a gimmick with a lot of superfluous features.
Like looking for meaning.
We've established, by the existence of evolutionarily stagnate creatures, like the tiger shark and the dung beetle, that evolution toward self awareness is not inevitable with time; nor is it necessary to the survival of most species.
The human evolution of self awareness and the capacity for abstract thought came about randomly, and held because it helped the species survive.
The capacity for self awareness and abstract thought are not going to improve over time without outside pressures killing off all but those with the most pronounced of those qualities.
Cultural evolution is arbitrary, subjective, and not guaranteed to improve over time. Improvement itself also being subjective.
Self awareness and abstract thought have helped the survival of the species, but don't exist toward an end beyond the will of mindless genes. This leaves us with an overdeveloped capacity to question our roles in a purpose simple enough to be dealt with, thoughtlessly, by marmots and weevils.
The value of the mind can only be subjectively weighed by the mind itself. Which is a conflict of interest.
|
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 02:52 PM |
| OP obviously knows his sh*t. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 02:56 PM |
HOLY TL:DR M8
But it's not important that we're just self aware animals. What matters is we are the dominant species, and we are the most important thing on earth. If you disagree you can bury yourself and let some plants use your energy.
We are here. We want to survive. We give ourselves purpose. These are facts, and it does not matter if life could continue without us. All thoughts about humanity should focus that our species is the only thing in the universe that matters until proven otherwise. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 03:01 PM |
@super
No, you're nowhere near correct.
@227
By that logic, we cannot have math, medicine, science, etc, either. All those systems are not objective, they are subjective, because all meaning is derived subjectively.
So that would mean all the principles and assumptions that underlie the scientific method, medicine, mathematics, and any other field of inquiry are simply subjective opinions and not objective truths.
There is some truth in that claim, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
Yes, it's subjective that 2+2=4. The principles that underlie math are all subjective. But they are self-evident, meaning it is practically impossible for us to disagree with them, so we all agree 2+2=4.
They are subjective but so difficult to deny that they are essentially objective.
And once we agree upon the axioms underlying mathematics, then 2+2=4 is the logical conclusion. It becomes an objective truth.
|
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
22797062
|
  |
| Joined: 31 Dec 2011 |
| Total Posts: 735 |
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 03:03 PM |
| Morality is subjective but scientific experiments can be objectively replicated so it is different. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 03:08 PM |
Come on You don't really need page stretchers to explain concepts
"The Sauza so malo...", and then she said "You need to grow up." |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 03:09 PM |
@john >you're wrong 10/10 argument |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
|
| 19 Jun 2015 03:19 PM |
@227
You are ASSUMING that replicating something proves it's true.
@super
Yes, that was a 10/10 argument. Please actually read the context before replying.
He made a prediction about what he thought my post is about without reading it. I told him his prediction was incorrect.
There's no more I need to explain.
That is the full extent of the argument. |
|
|
| Report Abuse |
|
|
| |
|
Zytelk
|
  |
| Joined: 09 Mar 2012 |
| Total Posts: 8524 |
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
»
»
|
|
|
|
|