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| quote: | Originally posted by trancaholic
Ah, arctic. For some reason I expected Renegade to be the one who would pick at my post, but at least I was right on the nationality  |
Yeah, he beat me to it. 
Anyway I'm not going to focus on everything in this topic, but just a couple of things:
| quote: | I don't think that philosophers have yet found a way to explain morals without involving either mysticism or utilitarianism - which in the extreme becomes religion and government.
[...]
So, no, I don't think that you can come up with any source of morals, which do not in some way relate to religion or government. |
I disagree on two counts. Firstly, if you're examining the origin of specific moral beliefs held in a society (i.e. "murder is wrong", "charity is good" etc.) then government and religion are two sources of these beliefs, but the sheer quantity of moral beliefs that we all possess that differ from any government or religion we've encountered should be enough to suggest that these are not our sole sources of moral beliefs. Secondly, if you're suggesting that government and religion are the origin of morality (that is, our "moral imperative" as a species) as a whole, then again I'll have to disagree. Morality is necessarily humanistic in nature - it was created by, and applicable only to, human beings. Our moral imperative was responsible for the creation of the systems of morality found in government and religion, not the other way round.
Or, as Arctic put it:
| quote: | I'd argue that laws are simply a reflection of a societies morals. Whatever the society or the people in power believe - that's reflected in the laws.
They don't se the standard for morality - they reflect the standard. As for religion, even the most devout religious people don't follow the moral laws set down in their holy books. How many Jews & Christians do you see who go about murdering witches or giving away all of their possessions to help the poor? |
(By "moral imperative" I don't mean imperative in the categorical / hypothetical Kanitan sense, I'm referring to the inherent compulsion we have to make moral judgements. That is, our "moral imperative" is our intractable instinct to make moral judgements about human behaviour.)
Now the origin of this moral imperative is an open question - I believe that there is a naturalistic explanation for its existence (i.e. we developed it to allow for the formation of the early tribes / societies that were necessary for our existence earlier on in our evolutionary history - I think that Tit0 has the right idea here) whereas you may wish to offer a more divine explanation for it - but the fact is that it exists, and we cannot escape the fact that we have to, as part of our nature, make moral judgements. (The exception here is where neurological damage exists, which just further advances the naturalistic case for the existence of such a moral imperative. If damage to a certain part of the brain can restrict one's ability to make moral decisions - where most other thought activities are unharmed - then surely the case can be made that moral judgements are nothing more than a neurological and behavioural pattern of thought. See the famous case of Phineas Gage for instance. Also here's a very good article that I reccomend you all read about the possible neurological and psychological origins of our moral sense.) In any case, the fact is that we are deterministically bound to making moral judgements, so the only question of importance is about whether there is any way - given the somewhat arbitrary nature of the creation of our moral beliefs - to judge whether any moral system is more "moral" or more "right" than any other.
Of course, the issue here is that weighing up the merits of differing moral systems is a moral judgement in itself. If I were to say that the morality of humanists is better (i.e. more moral?) than that of Christians, then that is a moral judgement - I'm drawing on my own moral spectrum to evaluate my own moral spectrum: caught the circular logic yet? 
Of course this leads to a situation in which judgements and evaluations of moral systems because difficult, because we're judging that moral system by another moral system, which in turn needs to be judged by another moral system to be made legitimate and so forth. This leads to a situation like the one Arbiter described:
| quote: | The truth is that there is no such thing as good morals, there are only my morals, and your morals, and his morals, and her morals. There is nothing inherently "good" or "bad" about any of them. We call morals we like and that are similar to ours "good" and we call ones that we don't like and aren't similar to ours "bad." But these words are opinions, not facts.
Saying there are "good" morals is like saying green is the "best" color. In reality, there are only your favorite morals and your favorite color. |
Of course this doesn't mean (as is the charge often made against humanists) that we have to accept every moral system as inherently equal or equally meritorious, but it does mean that we have to rethink the way we approach morality. Instead of thinking in terms of "ought" (morality ought to be like this - which is, as I have said, a moral judgement in itself) we need to start thinking in terms of "is" (this is way morality is). As such, we can now create an epistemological view of morality, starting from the premises that we all have a moral imperative and that we all hold certain moral beliefs as a result. This forms the "subjective" side of my moral theory, now comes the "objective" side (like Hume, I'm a compatiblist).
As I see it, there are two fundamental flaws in the most common approaches to constructing a moral system:
1) The notion that "correct" moral beliefs can be deducted via reason (that if we think long and hard enough, the "right" mode of action will be revealed to us) and that modes of action can be thus be evaluated and modified based upon these "higher", rationally formed, more "general" principles of morality (the top-down approach).
2) That morality should be considered as a logically perfect (or at least self-consistent) system and/or that any system of morality that fails this consistency test can be rendered invalid as a result. Mortality, it must be remembered, is not inherently rational or logical in nature.
On the first point, contrary to what Kant and the rationalists thought, no amount of contemplation will bring you to an inherently correct moral principle or axiom. This is because, a la the second point, morality is not inherently rational (from a neurological perspective, it originates in different parts of the brain to where we process logical decision making - more closely tied to emotion than rationale) and because it makes no sense to believe that specific actions should be dictated by general, universal axioms and principles. In Eastern philosophy, general moral principles are derived from specific actions ("murder is wrong because we shouldn't kill Billy without any good reason") rather than the other way around in western philosophy ("we shouldn't kill Billy without any good reason because murder is wrong"). As Satre pointed out, there are many circumstances in which no system of morality or general moral principle is going to assist us in our moral quandry. Here he cites the example of a young man torn between fighting for his country and staying home to care for his frail mother. In this situation, as with many others, no Golden Mean, Categorical Imperative or Hedonic Calculus is going to be of any assistance to him. Each man must create his own moral stance for himself, ex nihilo, by committing to a decision in cases like this. By making moral decisions like this, man defines his own morality (and, by extension, himself) and creates for himself a moral system by which to act (from the bottom-up). Although simply expressed here, this subjectivist method of the creation of moral principles and convictions forms the basis of Satrean and most existentialst morality.
As a side, on this point trancaholic:
| quote: | | I'm curious: What's the difference between a humanist and an existential atheist? The former label lands more dates? |
A humanist generally believes in the principles elucidated in the Humanist Manifesto:
http://www.americanhumanist.org/about/manifesto1.html
It's merely a system of morality that takes human beings as the basis - the beginning and end - of morality.
An existentialist is someone who concerns themselves with exploring the nature of human existence (the conclusions they end up with differ). An atheist is, obviously, someone who doesn't believe in God. Most atheists are humanists of some sort and vice versa (though it isn't always the case). Existentialists can be humanists, atheists, both or neither. Satre, for example (although he distanced himself from both existentialism and humanism later on) was, in many ways, all three.
Anyway, the problem that Satre always battled with when confronting morality this way (as a subjectivistic, humanistic conception) was - as I explored before - that it became difficult reconcile the beliefs of the individual with the beliefs of the "mit sein" (the "others"). Satre, as with many other subjectivists, proposed the notion of "inter-subjectivity" to explain how pseudo-objective standards of morality could come to exist, and how they might be enforced within society. From what I wrote somewhere else:
| quote: | | Inter-subjectivity is merely the notion explaining how differing subjective moral stances may be arbitrated through negotiation and compromise. In this sense, if there are agreed codes of conduct held by members of a society, these codes may be formalised in the form of laws and so forth. Inter-subjectivity may be confused for an objective moral imperative, in that merely because humans generally desire similar things (which is natural being from the same species with undoubtedly some natural imperative towards societal constructs) there may be some illusion of an objective moral imperative at work – that is that morality may be “objectified” as something from which concrete moral principles may be drawn. |
So the problem with the concept of inter-subjectivity is that while it preserves the sanctity of individualistic morality and allows us to create objective standards of behaviour, the objectivity here is entirely illusory. All we've done is taken our subjective beliefs and democratised them - whatever the majority of society believes, that is what is reflected in law (generally). This perpsective fuels a sort of runaway cultural relativism - that the beliefs of any given society must be moral so long as the majority of citizens in that society hold them to be moral. Inter-subjectivity means that we have no real ground upon which to criticise a society, or an individual living in that society, for an action they commit so long as the action is sanctioned by that society. So if a society believes that racial villification is wrong, for instance, then if we adhere to the principles of inter-subjectivity we have no objective way of criticising this stance. The objective morality is, in this case, the one that the society has decided upon so - as a subjectivist - we would have no way basis upon which to describe the racial vilification in this society as "immoral".
But the problem with subjectivity is that it suggests the individual is and should be the sole dictator of his own actions. That is, that in establishing his own system of morality, he has created for himself a legitimate moral system upon which to act. But this perspective mistakes the purpose of morality - it isn't a method of action it's a method of acting amongst other people. A man alone on a deserted island needs no moral code by which to act as there are no people there to be affected by his actions and any other action he commits, by definition, falls outside the scope of morality. So when we view morality this way, we (or should I say, I) end up with one simple conclusion: morality has nothing to do with the way we act, it has to do with who we act upon. The old maxim "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is dead. Why should my own personal moral standards (how I wish to be treated) be projected upon someone else, when they already have there own standards on how they wish to be treated? The new maxim is, therefore, "do unto others as they would have you do unto them".
In recognising this - by turning the traditional view of morality around - we have preserved the sanctity of individualistic morality while creating an objective basis upon which to act. In short, the very principles we have developed as part of our own morality over the years become the objective moral standards by which people treat us. We each, by necessity of our moral imperative, create these moral principles and the sum total of these subjective principles and the actions they both implore and necessitate form the objective part of morality: morality as a quantifiable system, universally applicable to all human beings.
There are flaws with this theory, of course. It isn't necessarily logical, rational or necessarily self-consistent. But note - as I said before - that morality isn't logical, rational or self-consistent in nature (how many of your own moral beliefs, for instance, can be completely justified ab initio?) and that my aim is not to devise a perfect system of morality (as most philosophers have tried to do) but rather to examine morality as it really is. And in doing this I have come to the conclusion, and I hope you'll agree, that for all the centuries and millenia of rumination upon man's moral condition, it's nature and how it might most perfectly be expressed, the entire foundation of all moral action can be summed up in one simple line:
Treat people as they wish to be treated.
Now go forth and spread the word.... 
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http://eschatonnow.blogspot.com/
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