madviking
north american scum
morality makes less sense with a deity imo
Does morality work without a deity?
- Thread starter thecrazyscot
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warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Borachio
Way past lunacy
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Don't moral people want to be moral because they think it's right to be so in and of itself?
Perfection
The Great Head.
Morality certainly is an evolutionary product and there's quite a lot of theory behind it (Interestingly enough the work of John Nash plays a crucial role), I suggest you check it out because it's pretty interesting.
The basic reason is that if you're nice then other people will tend to be nice back and if you're a jerk people tend to hurt you.
Of course how one gets to that state from no cooperation is non-trivial and there certainly are conditions where it doesn't occur. One thing that helps is the fact that you tend to be related to those around you, so when you help them, you're helping spread the copies of your genes inside them.
I can suggest some books if you like.
Morality is not just an "inconvenience."
Why do you think I'm so absolutely against killing and eating cats? Are you suggesting it's because I'd find it "inconvenient" to go to all the work of butchering and preparing my pets (or any other cat) for the supper table or hiring someone else to do it for me? Are you suggesting that I only refrain because it is illegal here to treat cats like that?
If so, that means you must consider me one of the most vile people on the planet, refraining from killing my pets because I don't want the inconvenience.
I refrain from killing them because I love them, I am responsible for their well-being, and even if I didn't and wasn't, I still would not kill them, because for me, it is MORALLY WRONG.
There are other things I also don't do, not only because it's legally wrong, but also because I wouldn't do them anyway, for reasons of morality.
And even if something isn't legally wrong, it's still morally wrong. Adultery, for instance. I happen to think it's morally wrong. If you can't be faithful to the person to whom you're married, have the decency to get divorced before you run off to someone else.
I didn't need any bible or church to tell me this. Life experience was quite sufficient.
Perf - could you suggest a layman's guide, actually? I'm just thinking about finding another book to read. I remember a bit on this in one of Richard Dawkins' books - it might have been The Selfish Gene, if only because I've somehow managed to lose my copy of that.
Valka - that all seems a bit circular to me. Morality is more than a matter of self-interest (or not) because some things are morally wrong? You haven't given any reason why having morality is preferable to not having it.
EDIT: I suppose I'll have to have a rummage around, then!
Valka - that all seems a bit circular to me. Morality is more than a matter of self-interest (or not) because some things are morally wrong? You haven't given any reason why having morality is preferable to not having it.
EDIT: I suppose I'll have to have a rummage around, then!
Perfection
The Great Head.
Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene is the classic book on the matter.
You know what? I never took any philosophy classes in college, nor did I ever do independent study on it. Or law. So don't expect any academic-type posts from me on this. And don't expect statistics, charts, or anything else like that, because that's not how I think.
I state what works for me, based on personal experience, and empathy and compassion for others, and you can add in justice, ethics, and honor. For me, some things are the right thing to do, and other things are the wrong thing to do. Some things fall into "moral grey area" territory that depend on circumstances. But at no time do I base my decisions on whether they'd add or subtract to/from my chances of getting into some sort of afterlife. This life is the only one I've got, and there aren't any second chances. It would be a shame to waste it by not at least trying to leave something positive behind.
As for why morality is preferable to no morality? Maybe a non-social lifeform can exist without some sense of right and wrong. Take dandelions, for example. Some people hate them, actually get hysterical about them. As far as we know, the dandelion doesn't ponder its own existence and should it go to seed on someone's lawn, or should it refrain, for the sake of the homeowner's blood pressure. It just gets on with its life cycle and doesn't worry about anyone else. I do wonder if a dandelion feels pain when it's picked or killed by a lawnmower blade... but we just don't have enough information yet on how aware plants are.
Humans are social animals, and so are other species. If humans had never developed any sense of "this is right, but that is wrong" I doubt we'd be sitting in front of our computers today, talking about it. Our species wouldn't have survived anywhere near this long.
That morality is a concept is something we wont disagree.
However, as the one more heavily defending utilitarianism here, I gotta say that I would love to read your non-utilitarian approach.
Regards
.
madviking
north american scum
i never thought valka would be an aristotelian
Perfection
The Great Head.
As an aside may I pick your brain here for some more info because I'd like to explore utilitarianism further. Do you have a preference for certain utilitarian philosophers or theories? What have you found to be most informative on the subject and what have you found to be most true?
How do you propose slaying the utilty monster? What do you think of the mere addition paradox?
Ah, CFC; I miss the unexpected challenges I often get here, though I don't have the stamina to carry on as I did in the past.
It's somewhat paradoxical, but this is a good post to bring up paradoxes.
All right, we could even dwelve into ethical systems other than consequentialism as well. Deontology, perhaps? Or virtue theory?
I have a warm place in my heart for Kant's Categorical Principle. Whoever read what I wrote so far in this thread will see the influence of John Stuart Mill as well.
I also like the concept of temperance that comes from Epicureus (though obviously his more transcendental ideas are not much of my liking) as a regulating principle, and perhaps as the basis for my response to some of your inquiries.
I don't think there is one. Bits and pieces are taken to form the whole, and everything contributes. And though I am predominantly an utilitarian, I don't think any system work alone, and different ethical modalities may contribute to a cohesive system.
By having more than utility as my guide.
This question is, actually, very similar to one I already answered here. What to do when the "moral majority" sets out to demand a certain behavior at the expense of a minority? Well, the majority is not exactly the "utility monster", as its demand is based in power, not in an alleged superior allocation of resources, but the comparison is useful for what I defended in this thread as I did conceive trans-utility as the "statistical trends that emerge from the sum total of society experiences".
So, for the concept in this thread, or at least from my posts, one could argue that the majority will, as the conveyer of the trends that denote the elected behavior, is a form of the "utility monster", after all, it is where the "most utility" accumulates.
However, we don't allow the ravenous beast go rampant, by looking at the individual acts that enunciated the trends. We (majority) value the overall notion of freedom, by acknowledging that most individuals prefer freedom. This desire plays in the individual level, and than this value, and this scope of that value, becomes the strata of the larger, overall, concept.
By electing this value in the micro scale as a rule that cannot be broken even in the interest of the majority (because the overall value makes no sense unless translated in an individual value), I know I am flirting with deontology instead of utilitarianism - and it is hardly surprising that a view of someone who lives working with law would include a degree of deontology - but I hardly consider this a problem, because I never defended utilitarianism as the singular source of a coherent system of ethics, but just a a guide to the election of values, as most of the theistic difficulty with secular ethics is with the issue of how we can differentiate right and wrong without divine orientation.
I feel that this mashup I am proposing, while solves not the problems with the ethical theories individually conceived, does alleviate the criticisms to both in application. How we know right and wrong? Through the cogent experience of that is pleasurable/useful and harmful (utilitarian); once known, setting this as a value or rule, as the scale dictates, of mandatory observance (deontology) prevents that cold calculation of results makes us loose perspective (thus the idea of electing human centrality).
In other words, there is no Utility monster if utility is a guide, not a goal. Getting "the most utility" becomes less enticing this way.
Really? All I have to do is solve the "repugnant conclusion"?
I will answer you, but don't expect a solution... If I had it, I'd probably be a world-renowned philosopher.
Anyway, I think of this as an inadequacy of language to represent what is really going on; kind like those drawings that try to represent the curvature of space-time before matter as a sheet where you put a bowling ball over. There is no way to represent a four-dimensional hole coming from all directions, our cerebral acuity breaks down trying to visualize it, so we make due with crude representations.
The problem really only exists as we try to represent "quantities of happiness" algebraically/trigonometrically - what I understand, and acknowledge as important in a quest for a precise description of ethics - but I am not sure this discussion even is proper because I don't know we can "quantify" happiness at all to fit in our graphs.
Nonetheless, I think we can exist with some impurity in our concepts. Just like math does not break down because there are infinities bigger than other infinities, something that sounds nonsensical (but can happen because math is a language, a construct, not a part of the structure of the universe), utilitarianism does not break down because we caught an very abstract way to enact a seemingly nonsensical result.
Such is the nature of human constructs, they are always tarnished by our frailties.
Regards.
It's somewhat paradoxical, but this is a good post to bring up paradoxes.
All right, we could even dwelve into ethical systems other than consequentialism as well. Deontology, perhaps? Or virtue theory?
I have a warm place in my heart for Kant's Categorical Principle. Whoever read what I wrote so far in this thread will see the influence of John Stuart Mill as well.
I also like the concept of temperance that comes from Epicureus (though obviously his more transcendental ideas are not much of my liking) as a regulating principle, and perhaps as the basis for my response to some of your inquiries.
I don't think there is one. Bits and pieces are taken to form the whole, and everything contributes. And though I am predominantly an utilitarian, I don't think any system work alone, and different ethical modalities may contribute to a cohesive system.
By having more than utility as my guide.
This question is, actually, very similar to one I already answered here. What to do when the "moral majority" sets out to demand a certain behavior at the expense of a minority? Well, the majority is not exactly the "utility monster", as its demand is based in power, not in an alleged superior allocation of resources, but the comparison is useful for what I defended in this thread as I did conceive trans-utility as the "statistical trends that emerge from the sum total of society experiences".
So, for the concept in this thread, or at least from my posts, one could argue that the majority will, as the conveyer of the trends that denote the elected behavior, is a form of the "utility monster", after all, it is where the "most utility" accumulates.
However, we don't allow the ravenous beast go rampant, by looking at the individual acts that enunciated the trends. We (majority) value the overall notion of freedom, by acknowledging that most individuals prefer freedom. This desire plays in the individual level, and than this value, and this scope of that value, becomes the strata of the larger, overall, concept.
By electing this value in the micro scale as a rule that cannot be broken even in the interest of the majority (because the overall value makes no sense unless translated in an individual value), I know I am flirting with deontology instead of utilitarianism - and it is hardly surprising that a view of someone who lives working with law would include a degree of deontology - but I hardly consider this a problem, because I never defended utilitarianism as the singular source of a coherent system of ethics, but just a a guide to the election of values, as most of the theistic difficulty with secular ethics is with the issue of how we can differentiate right and wrong without divine orientation.
I feel that this mashup I am proposing, while solves not the problems with the ethical theories individually conceived, does alleviate the criticisms to both in application. How we know right and wrong? Through the cogent experience of that is pleasurable/useful and harmful (utilitarian); once known, setting this as a value or rule, as the scale dictates, of mandatory observance (deontology) prevents that cold calculation of results makes us loose perspective (thus the idea of electing human centrality).
In other words, there is no Utility monster if utility is a guide, not a goal. Getting "the most utility" becomes less enticing this way.
Really? All I have to do is solve the "repugnant conclusion"?
I will answer you, but don't expect a solution... If I had it, I'd probably be a world-renowned philosopher.
Anyway, I think of this as an inadequacy of language to represent what is really going on; kind like those drawings that try to represent the curvature of space-time before matter as a sheet where you put a bowling ball over. There is no way to represent a four-dimensional hole coming from all directions, our cerebral acuity breaks down trying to visualize it, so we make due with crude representations.
The problem really only exists as we try to represent "quantities of happiness" algebraically/trigonometrically - what I understand, and acknowledge as important in a quest for a precise description of ethics - but I am not sure this discussion even is proper because I don't know we can "quantify" happiness at all to fit in our graphs.
Nonetheless, I think we can exist with some impurity in our concepts. Just like math does not break down because there are infinities bigger than other infinities, something that sounds nonsensical (but can happen because math is a language, a construct, not a part of the structure of the universe), utilitarianism does not break down because we caught an very abstract way to enact a seemingly nonsensical result.
Such is the nature of human constructs, they are always tarnished by our frailties.
Regards
.
Neither did I. Would you care to explain this, please, since I gave up about halfway through a very long article on Aristotle, to see what you might have been talking about...
madviking
north american scum
it's not precisely aristotelian, but having analytic, a posteriori virtue ethics is something along the lines of aristotle's philosophy.
I think the best way around the utility monster is simply to point out that opinions change when the facts change - if there were a utility monster, utilitarianism would be unable to respond to it, but there isn't.
Give me one reason to call someone moral if it isn't of their own cognition.
ParkCungHee
Deity
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2006
- Messages
- 12,921
Well, that actually isn't an factual statement.
It reveals the other problem of Utilitarianism: You have no actual way of measuring or converting human happiness.
What is the conversion ration of a junkie getting their fix to someone not getting their cellphone stolen?
Can you actually prove your happiness comes anywhere close to that felt by a serial rapist catching his latest victim?
Also, remember that while you can doubt the Utility Monster, there are people who are demonstrably Utility Traps: It's almost certainly unethical to aid someone suffering from Chronic Depression, because they're likely to see strongly diminished returns on happiness.
Good points, well presented. Mill had the argument about 'higher pleasures' and it being better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, or Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied - though I can't really get behind that one; it sounds far too much like snobbery to me.
There's also 'rule utilitarianism', which seems to resolve the junkie problem - if everyone acted according to the rule 'do not steal', everyone on aggregate would be happier, so it is wrong to break that rule in any given circumstance when it would make somebody happy. I agree with the measuring problem, though: but I always took it closer to the Golden Rule than anything else. If you believe that what you're doing is going to cause more unhappiness than happiness (or going to do something to another person that you would not have done unto you) then you should stop and think.
There's also 'rule utilitarianism', which seems to resolve the junkie problem - if everyone acted according to the rule 'do not steal', everyone on aggregate would be happier, so it is wrong to break that rule in any given circumstance when it would make somebody happy. I agree with the measuring problem, though: but I always took it closer to the Golden Rule than anything else. If you believe that what you're doing is going to cause more unhappiness than happiness (or going to do something to another person that you would not have done unto you) then you should stop and think.
