Brent, at Uncommon Descent, asked:
Is rape morally wrong because society says so?
Or:
Does society say rape is wrong because morality says so?
I answered:
I’m going to annoy you, I’m afraid, Brent, in my answer, but in for a penny…
“Morality” doesn’t “say” anything. People do. Collectively, people form a society, so it is reasonable to say that “society” says something – if that something is the collective mores, or precepts of a society.
So I’d say that people in a society collectively construct a shared system of moral precepts and those precepts include, in most societies, the precept that rape is wrong.
This seems to be fairly universal, probably because most societies develop a system that places a taboo on one person exploiting another for personal benefit. This is not surprising given that we are a social species and do better when we cooperate with each other than when we act individualistically.
So my answer is “closer to that first thing”, because the second doesn’t really make sense.
However, I would phrase it as:
In most societies, rape is regarded as morally wrong, because it violates the principle that underpins the continuation of a society that has potential net benefits for all.
He replied:
Sorry to take the last bit first, but . . .
However, I would phrase it as:
In most societies, rape is regarded as morally wrong, because it violates the principle that underpins the continuation of a society that has potential net benefits for all.
I’m surprised you would say this, not that it is inconsistent with your own beliefs on the matter, but that it leaves you completely open to, and obviously guilty of, WJM’s charges that a Darwinist system (system consistent with “Darwinism”) cannot condemn rape.
And the first bit last . . .
“Morality” doesn’t “say” anything. People do. Collectively, people form a society, so it is reasonable to say that “society” says something – if that something is the collective mores, or precepts of a society.
So I’d say that people in a society collectively construct a shared system of moral precepts and those precepts include, in most societies, the precept that rape is wrong.
This seems to be fairly universal, probably because most societies develop a system that places a taboo on one person exploiting another for personal benefit. This is not surprising given that we are a social species and do better when we cooperate with each other than when we act individualistically.
So my answer is “closer to that first thing”, because the second doesn’t really make sense.
Which all means that my original challenge to your system of morality, in fact, is correct and undermines it completely; there is no actual morality whatsoever.
If people of a society are the source of morality, then people of a society govern morality, and morality doesn’t govern people of a society.
And I invited him to continue the conversation here.
What Brent seems to be saying is that a morality – a system of oughts and ought nots – somehow doesn’t count as “morality” if it is constructed by a socciety of human beings.
My response to Brent is to ask: what morality can he name that is not constructed by a society of human beings?
You’ve lost me Petrushka. For example:
I’m not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that actions that cause either harm or benefit are objectively moral issues? If so, I agree, but I find it irrelevant.
If, otoh, you are saying that murder can objectively be defined as immoral, I just can’t agree in principle. There are clearly acts of killing that some would label “murder” that could arguably be found to be beneficial.
Perhaps you could elaborate a bit on what you mean.
Morality isn’t a ‘spiritual law of some sort’. Morality is conscience. If your conscience tells you you’re doing good, you’re doing good. Others may disagree but that is because your conscience isn’t theirs, and never will be.
fG
Huh? I note the irrationality of Nazi Germany economic policy and social propaganda in response to your question about whether the non-existent “Nazi morality” was “wrong” and suddenly I’m a danger to my neighbors…becauuuuse…?
The fact is, you’ve not established there ever was such a thing as “Nazi morality”, so your question is fallacious as presented. I offered a rational response under the circumstances. You’re more than welcome to try a more rational question if you prefer. That’s up to you.
The problem with all of this is that you have silently hardwired the property of objectiveness in your concept of morality. No wonder these debates go nowhere.
When you say Nazism is wrong, you compare it to some sort of moral standard you believe in (wherever you got it from), and you think it is a objective one. What is actually going on is that you are silently dropping three essential words from the sentence. The complete sentence would read ‘Nazism is wrong, in my view’.
You will probably throw a fit now, but there is nothing wrong with this. It is indeed precisely the actual state of affairs. Until the day you produce an objective morality in a way that is doesn’t first require subjective judgement to be convinced by it, morality is and will remain always subjective, and all moral expressions are only valid in the mind of the person expressing them – nobody else’s.
Which does not, contrary to WJM, equal to ‘might makes right’. But it does explain why many people will stick to their convictions even in the face of oppression by groups holding different views. You won’t find your morality anywhere else but within yourself.
fG
Unfortunate based on Lizzie’s concept of morality, I thought that would be obvious?
fG
Whether or not any particular god might condone rape is entirely irrelevant to the point that moral relativism necessarily condones rape for those that believe it is okay to rape.
How can it be “unfortunate”, if Lizzie’s concept of morality is that whatever a society condones as moral, **is** moral? She shouldn’t have any problem whatsoever with whatever any other society has deemed to be “moral”, because such practices are the moral equivalent of her own practices – under her “concept” of morality.
Her use of the term “unfortunately” belies her real view that such societies are not the moral equivalent of her own views.
Actually I think you are right. I forgot she claims that there does exist some kind of objective morality. I am curious to see how she will respond. Perhaps her objective morality is some kind of mix of her own concepts and those of society at large?
fG
“Unfortunately”, because I would hate to be raped.
Deliciously simple!
fG
WJM isn’t precisely making this claim. His claim is that there isn’t any way to adjudicate between the competing moralities of competing groups without an appeal to mass, be it the hard power of coercion or purchase or the soft power of attraction or persuasion, IF there isn’t an absolute morality to compare to. His further claim is* that because human societies have, by and large, converged on similar moral codes there must be an absolute morality they are all doing some kind of comparing to. I have always known the first is perfectly true. Not being an absolutist I have never agreed that the second is true.
*Though I can’t say I have seen him say it in exactly the way I am about to, I feel this is in his spirit.
Aardvark,
Hmm, I am not so sure Aardvark. I believe he claims that if morality is subjective, nobody has a right to try and convince, through persuasion or might, someone else that what they are doing is wrong and should be stopped. This is standard theist fare.
I disagree totally with this. It is exactly the existence of subjective morality, driven by our own convictions and conscience, that gives us the right to do so. Of course it also gives everybody else that same right! Having that right is one of the things that makes us humans, not zombies or robots. We are free to follow the path of our conscience. We should follow the path of our conscience. It is perverse to argue otherwise.
fG
He will no doubt clarify. That is my best understanding. Of course EMMV.
I mostly agree with you in your second P, although you use the word right and I don’t think that is the correct word. For the purposes of this discussion that nit is irrelevant.
So the fact that nearly all chairs support one’s bottom and back means there is Platonic chairness. Got it.
Ernst Mayr called it essentialism. I don’t know the history of philosophy, so I don’t know the history of that term.
I would answer Murray thusly:
Universal physical attributes lead to universal rules for conduct.
Brent is telling an untruth when Brent says “[t]he [b]ible doesn’t refer to rape as anything but bad”. Scripture we have cited proves that xis bible approves rape, and even orders it directly in the words of xis god.
We don’t say it, we prove it since we copy the bible words which do condone and directly order rape.
Brent’s god never once in its commandments forbids rape.
Brent’s god forbids Brent from telling untruths.
I wonder how Brent expects to get back into the good graces of xis god after telling xis forbidden untruths.
Of course, Brent almost certainly believes that a good wash in the blood of the lamb is sufficient to earn forgiveness for all transgressions, even rape, even murder.
Tell us, Brent, since you think Jesus has promised to forgive you for everything if you ask right, why don’t you go out and rape someone? Then just beg forgiveness and go on your happy way? Why not?
Why would you ever hesitate to rape, when that isn’t even one of god’s commandments to begin with, and you’re sure of forgiveness anyways?
How can there be “objective morailty” for christians who believe that a actions – no matter how heinous they appear to other humans – are to be forgiven. Rape isn’t objectively wrong, it’s only wrong if you rape and then don’t say the proper magic spell immediately afterwards “forgive me, Jesus”.
That’s the exact opposite of objective: that’s Pay To Play. It’s two completely separate sets of rules, one for the heathens who don’t know how to pay for god’s forgiveness with the right incantation, and the other set for the christians who do everything they want on Saturday night and then pay their tithe and earn back their forgiven status on Sunday morning.
That is actually how I resolve it too. All humans have a common evolutionary ancestry. Our history is universal. While variation is great, our morality will have many universal characteristics. This is something I have wanted to make an OP about but only today have seen the ‘NEW’ button for.
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Speaking of which.
And as a Nazi would say, it is unfortunate other societies do not gas jews, because the Nazi hates jews. Under your concept of morality, your views are morally equivalent.
Aardvark said:
Not exactly. There is no way to claim a principled adjudication (other than appeal to mass) without adopting the premise of an absolute morality (whether one actually exists or not) to appeal to. For example, the concept of inviolable human rights depends upon a similar moral premise. Whether or not such an absolute morality actually exists is irrelevant to the point that one must adopt such a premise in order to have a principled means, other than might makes right, to arbit the value of different social values, and also to have principled means of standing against one’s own society on moral grounds.
No. I’ve never made that claim. My point is that whether or not an absolute morality actually exists, unless we posit that one exists, we have no valid principle by which we can condemn any act as immoral. All things are permissible and only might can justify any right under moral relativism.
Petrushka said:
Unless one premises this as a maxim that represents an absolute moral rule with necessary (governing) consequences, there is no principle that binds me to it, nor any principle by which you can hold me to it. It’s just one opinion out of countless equal, subjective opinions.
faded_glory said:
No, I point out that the only principle that can justify trying to change the moral views of others boils down to might makes right, or as aardvark say, “… the hard power of coercion or purchase or the soft power of attraction or persuasion”. There is no logical principle available to discern what “the better” of two ideas is, when “good” itself is limited to what any individual idea claims. There is no external arbiter under moral relativism to attach a rational argument to. All one is left with is trying to convince Joe that vanilla ice cream tastes better than chocolate. It’s all subjective.
Sure we do. Consensus and law.
A further point: no sane person **acts** like a moral relativist – only sociopaths do this. People will, on the one hand, claim that morality is a social construct, but then take a stand against a currently accepted moral standard. They are thus abandoning their principle of morality-by-social-consensus and moving to “individual-as-arbiter-of-morality. If extended as a moral principle, this means that either **any** social moral code is acceptable, or **any** personal moral code is acceptable. Otherwise, hypocrisy.
But, nobody (nobody sane, anyway) actually acts that way. We all feel there are moral principles that are right and true no matter what any individual says, and no matter what the law says, and no matter what the social consensus says. Some of us would fight to the death for these principles, or at least put ourselves in harms way to stand up for them.
But what is the justification for such behavior under moral relativism? What is the justification for moral outrage or condemnation from the relativist point of view? There is no principled justification – just hypocrisy, where how one behaves is in contradiction to what they profess to believe. If you believe there are no moral absolutes, you have no business condemning anything in the Bible whatsoever, nor anything any religious zealot does in service of their own personal, or social moral good.
I don’t know the history either. What you called “Platonic chairness” can also be called “the essence of chairness” or “the essence of being a chair”. Essentialism is the belief that there are such essences.
I meant besides might makes right, of course.
I didn’t say might makes right. I said consensus and law are valid arbiters of morality.
Disagree.
We all act like moral relativists — which we are.
No sane person acts like the ridiculous theist caricature of a moral relativist.
Consensus & law = might makes right.
Nobody sane acts like they actually believe morals are relative.
petrushka, law can be excluded. Law is simply a result of consensus. Consensus is a synonym for mass. The soft power side of the formulation above.
Sure they do. I accept people in my neighborhood who believe eating pork is immoral, some who believe drinking alcohol is immoral. I no doubt live among unrepentant adulterers and fornicators, people who have lied and stolen.
I do not advocate smiting honor killers, even though I despise their actions.
Sane people accept differences of opinion regarding the list of behaviors and which bag they belong in. Sane people accept the need for law as an arbiter of differences.
Exactly so. Seconded. So either you and I are not sane or William is wrong.
See, Aardvark, this is what I mean. We have no business to condemn anyone.
WJM, our business is driven by our conscience. Just like yours. It is all anyone ever needs. Dressing it up in the white robes of the assumed Creator of the Universe makes not a iota of difference.
fG
Yes, it’s a horrible world at times. Yet, personally, I find that adding religion into the mix only makes things more divisive. And given your recent statements at UD religion is all you have to offer. All you can articulate anyway.
Consensus & law = might makes right.
Sounds like most of human history to me. And the priests with their bogus “revealed knowledge” sat atop a pile of bodies. Whose side would you have been on William?
Yet the difference now is that a persuasive speaker who skilfully makes their case can start to change what right is considered to be. And that’s not you, by the way.
Might is not all it once was in these days of videophones.
For example, it’s quite unbelievable that segregation was so common in the lifetime of many alive today in America.
Yet today there is a president who is a man of color.
What happened in between? Did somebody bring a revelation down from the mountain? No.
Did consensus & law makes right? Eventually, but first the people had to change.
A dictionary is descriptive, not proscriptive.
Was what you claim as an “objective truth” really that when no being above the level of tube worm strode the earth?
If you had free reign over the world for a year William what would you do? What practical ideas do you have to fix “might makes right” and who would benefit? Who would lose?
Give us a few ideas!
I disagree. Law is the embodiment of morality. Consensus has become the dominant method for producing law.
When I say consensus I do not mean everyone agrees. i mean everyone consents to be ruled by law and by the means of making law.
I can recall a slogan used in the Jim Crow South (USA) to the effect that you can’t legislate morality. Which meant that even if segregation was immoral you could not enforce a law that required races to like each other. Or something like that.
Nonsense. Legislation is the current, secular way of implementing moral codes. It’s objective in the sense of having a well defined set of procedures for creating and enforcing laws. The laws are themselves objective in the sense of being written down so everyone can see them. The words are the same for everyone.
But of course Murray and others want some platonic morality.
Rubbish. Theocratic morality is the ultimate in might makes right. It is either based on the might of god or the might of priests.
It is irrational and fickle.
Rubbish. Consensus and law = “for the people, by the people”. Not perfect, but capable of improving. We’ve seen the theocratic alternative. We see it today in countries governed by theocracies.
It’s what we got away from in the founding of this country (USA). It’s what nearly all countries aspire to. There’s a reason for that. it’s a superior way of implementing morality.
Is this UD thread an example of what flows from “absolute morality”?
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Murray is talking about Platonic essences rather than laws on stone tablets.
So absolute or objective morality is philosophically equivalent to chairness or circleness. An ideal.
So what does that buy us?
We can define a Platonic circle in several ways. We can list the attributes that form the fuzzy cloud of chairness.
What does that buy us in the realm of morality? Tell us how we would behave differently.
I’ve never said otherwise. I have in fact said almost exactly the same thing. But this is irrelevant to the argument. It’s a non-sequitur.
The argument is about whether or not one can rationally reconcile their moral views/behavior with their fundamental worldview premises.
Then there’s no argument.
If one believes that there are necessary, inescapable consequences to behavior, they tend to behave more morally and ethically than otherwise. IOW, the more one thinks they are likely to be caught and/or suffer negative consequences, the less likely they are to commit immoral acts. That has been substantiated via research.
Degrading the cultural perception of absolute morality and necessary consequences erodes moral and ethical behavior in society. One doesn’t really need an advanced degree to understand the dangerous slippery slope of moral relativism.
Not with those that do not care if they are hypocrites.
Nope. Consensus = might of the majority. Law = might of the government in enforcing rules. Theocracy = might of those in power supposedly representing the authority of god. All of these are nothing but might makes right when you boil them down. IOW, if consensus says, rape is good, it is good. If the law says rape is good, then it is good. If god says rape is good, then it is good. Then, on the next day, if they all reverse their view, rape is bad.
Nothing but might makes right in all three cases.
William, moral relativism does not demand acquiescence to societal morality; moral relativism is merely the acknowledgment that different societies evaluated morality differently.
To say that a moral relativist must accept a given society’s moral majority is absurd. Any moral relativist is free to protest and argue against social codes he or she disagrees with. I personally find “moral codes” against homosexual marriage repugnant and have protested and voted against such “defense of marriage acts”. I also recognize that those who find homosexuality immoral are acting on their societal moral structures. Fine. That they hold homosexuality and homosexual marriage to be immoral doesn’t mean I can’t try to get other members of society to see morality my way.
And if pigs could fly, bacon would be more expensive.
Murray, I have to say I find your concept of morality loathsome.
Perhaps not for the reason you might expect.
I find it loathsome because you think people are mostly motivated by fear of punishment, whereas My friends and family are mostly motivated by love, and spend most of their “moral time” wondering how they can be helpful. Even to strangers.
I suppose the difference lies in what our mothers were like.
Differences of opinion are why we developed governments and laws. They have proved so superior to theistic law and morality that only a few countries cling to them.
I never said it demanded any such acquiescence. Please read more carefully.
It’s not absurd if they offer “social consensus” as their basis for “what is moral”; it’s logically inescapable, even for a moral relativist.
People are free to do whatever they want whether it is rational or irrational, whether what they are doing is rationally reconcilable with their worldviews or not, whether they are being big fat hypocrites or not. So? The question isn’t what they can do, but rather what they can rationally justify via sound principles and reconcile with their worldview premises.
Yes, you are free to use various forms of might to try and get your way in the world, but why bother calling it “morality”?
Basically, what everyone is saying here is that they cannot reconcile their moral views with their worldview beliefs, and they don’t have to. And they’re right – they don’t have to. But there’s really no reason to call it “morality”, when all it really is is just doing whatever you want and not having to rationally justify any of it., even though it means you’re hypocrites every time you feign moral outrage.
I mean, under moral relativism, who cares if they’re being a hypocrite, right?
That’s all completely true.
You keep saying that and you continue to be wrong. There is no conflict at all between my worldview and my moral views.
Rubbish.
You don’t even know what my concept of morality is. I’m just reporting to you what the research indicates in response to your question about what is to be gained from an “absolute” concept of morality.
Your moral outrage over the facts of what changes behavior in people is laughably hypocritical and dismissible as feigned naivete.
The fact is, people in general are motivated by such things. There is quite a bit of research that demonstrates that morality and ethics degrade when one is conditioned by the ideas of moral relativism and by the idea that they can get away with bad behavior, and such behavior changes for the better when people are conditioned with more absolute and traditional ideas of morality and consequences.
There’s nothing to find reprehensible in this; that’s just the facts. People are flawed and often petty and behave badly. Perhaps you and those you know are saints and you all operate off of unconditional love as you work the light of your beautiful beings into this world, but the rest of us have some pretty flawed and base natures we have to contend with. Your utopian ideas of the nature of human behavior is dangerous. The history of the world is full of really bad things that very large groups of people will do to each other both under command morality and moral relativism, which is why both must be avoided.
This is just the Fallacy of the General Rule by way of a strawman of “societal consensus”. There are many societies, William: family, school, nation, state, community, global, racial, hobby group, fans of sporting teams, etc. There is no internal contradiction between society being the basis of morality and individuals engaging in moral models that conflict with other societal moral models. People bump up against that all the time and they reconcile their moral underpinnings in a number of ways. None of these is inherently irrational, contrary to your insistence.
Well, I guess if the facts, history and research isn’t on your side, there’s always insults and rhetoric.