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?
I’d like to amplify something. First of all, when I say most, I mean a preponderance. It doesn’t take more than ten or 20 percent of people behaving badly to make a crime wave.
There is nothing inconsistent with most people being inner directed and society as a whole needing the services of police.
Secondly, the tendency to behave well or otherwise is not an all or nothing thing. Basically good people can have bad moments, and the percentage varies from person to person.
We have a word — compartmentalization — to describe the ability some people have to be unobservant of their own behavior in certain situations.
If the majority of people were not inner directed, life would be hell, and there are neighborhoods where this is the dominant reality.
You mentioned research, but you failed to mention that research demonstrates that punishment doesn’t work. It doesn’t diminish at all the tendency to misbehave. It mostly creates incentives to avoid punishment by avoiding getting caught.
Murray, history and facts demonstrate that violence and crime are diminishing as we depart from theocracy. The worst places in the world are those with theocratic governments.
petrushka,
I’m serious — I’ve come around to Murray’s way of thinking here in a significant respect. Or, more precisely, I recognized that there are concepts at work in my ethical thinking which play a role analogous to the role that Murray has “absolute morality” play. I just have a very different way of going about it, that’s all.
I accept that Murray may have a valid Platonic argument, but I think it’s rubbish.
Particularly when he draws social consequences — the decline of civilization and so forth — from his interpretation of morality.
Horseshit.
If a person points at X (whatever social consensus they are pointing at, be it their hobby club, nation or local bar) to justify their morality because it is a social consensus (of that group), and then X adopts a moral position they disagree with; if they look around until they find Y (a different social group consensus that coincides with their preferred view) and so they then point at Y for the justification for their view, they are not basing their morality on social consensus, but are rather just holding their own view and finding whatever social agreements they can.
Thus, one’s moral views are not based on what some social consensus says; tone just find whatever social agreement they can for their personal views. If you claim your morality is based on what X says, then if X says something you disagree with, you must change your moral view to fit X. If your moral views are based on your hobby club society views, then if they pass a resolution condemning gays, you must condemn gays. Otherwise, your views aren’t really based on the hobby club views; your acceptance of them was conditional on the basis of how much in agreement they were with your personal moral views.
As Brent said, humans either govern morality, or morality governs people. You can’t have it both ways.
No doubt it is whatever you want it to be at the moment, as long as it “serves your purposes.”
Suppose you could dictate the laws and the utopian society you would deem absolutely moral.
Under your concept of morality, what would you have done with people like Michael Servetus and other heretics? What would be the law regarding heresy or witchcraft?
What happens to homosexuals and other members of the LBGT community?
What happens to “Darwinist, materialistic atheists”?
What happens to women who get an abortion?
What religion would become the State Religion in your utopia?
I would like to thank you for your citations of that research — all zero of them.
petrushka,
What happened is I realized that I use something similar to Kant’s idea of “the kingdom of ends”, though substantially influenced by Martha Nussbaum’s work, as a regulative ideal (in the Kantian sense).
Here’s what I mean: I take the question, “would such-and-such practice, policy, or institution be part of that utopia in which the distribution of primary goods was sufficient for the maximal cultivation of human capacities by each and every individual?” to guide and inform reflection about particular practices, policies, institutions, reforms, etc. The utopia is not itself real or possible — it is an ideal which guides what we are actually doing, and the attainability or lack thereof doesn’t matter — doesn’t affect its capacity, as an ideal, to guide ethical deliberation in the here-and-now.
Now, the question could be posed, “ok, but what grounds the ideal? What accounts for it?” And here I want to say that the ideal is grounded in the hope that those who have suffered and died in misery and oppression have not died in vain — that there could be a world in which nothing like that need happen again. The idea of utopia is itself constructed by our refusal to accept history as fate.
153 million dead by atheistic/secularist regimes in the 20th century; up to 10 million dead via religious regimes in the last 20 centuries.
I agree theocracies are bad, but history has shown that atheistic/materialist regimes are at least just as bad. What is best is a mix – an enlightened, rational, spiritual civilization that is not based on command morality, but rather on the principles of inviolate individual freedoms and rights which necessarily (by logic) demand that morality refer to an absolute commodity with necessary consequences – no, not heaven and hell, not punishment and reward dished out arbitrarily via some authoritarian god, but rather like gravity – inescapable, natural law consequences to immoral behavior that do not need to be enforced via human law.
You might ask yourself that if your practices and policies cannot build that which they are intended to because the world doesn’t work that way, what is it that they are actually building?
In a world where utopia is a realistic goal, some practices would be worthwhile and might gain ground on the goal; but where utopia is admittedly not possible, those same practices and policies may only serve to make things far, far worse.
It’s good intentions towards a more utopian world to send food and medical supplies to starving countries to feed the hungry, but what happens in the real world is that local warlords confiscate the goods and use it for their own power-grabbing ends. Thus, all you end up doing is making things worse.
Utopia is a dangerous goal to base one’s practices and policies on. Whose version of utopia? Who gets to enforce it, and how? Who must sacrifice what for it?
Bad science. Even counting your 153 million, secular societies kill a lower percentage of their populations. It would have to exceed a billion to match the historic rate of violent death.
Plus, those numbers are nearly 75 yesrs old.
No, atheistic/materialistic regimes has only existed relatively recently in the 20th century, when the population of the planet is higher than it has ever been before by several orders of magnitude. You need to factor in the deaths as a percentage of total extant population at the time, which will significantly alter the picture in favor of secular societies.
Sorry, I’m up to my eyes right now.
I did respond to your question.
I said “unfortunately” because I wouldn’t want to be raped.
Which isn’t as glib an answer as it sounds. The “objective” part of morality is harm.
Societies that don’t condemn rape tend not to regard it as very harmful.
I don’t know of any societies that don’t condemn something because despite knowing it’s harmful, they think harmful is morally right.
Torture, burning at the stake, “corrective” rape – they are all condoned because they are perceived as being less evil than the alternative.
Not doing harm seems to be a fundamental feature of what societies regard as moral.
But the can differ radically as to what constitutes harm.
While trying to argue for the superiority of theist versus secular systems by trading atrocities is absurd, trading atrocities without pro-rating for population is absurderer.
Bad logic, too:
That’s a pointless deepity. WJM may be fooling himself that it means something, but it doesn’t.
There is no referent in reality for moral “necessary consequence” “like gravity”.
Either:
One locates such a “necessary consequence” in the reaction of a god/entity above humans, which WJM now claims he disavows.
Or else:
One locates it in the place we atheists/humanists/decent human beings find our morality: in the fact that your conscience/upbringing/evolved empathy/society make you feel bad when you treat other people shabbily.
To imagine one can locate a moral force, inanimate like gravity, an impersonal natural law, floating in Platonic space, but embodied in neither god’s law nor human law … what a pointless waste of the powers of human imagination. But what better can we expect from the propagandist, WJM.
Sure
Nope.
This simply makes no sense.
The numbers are both lies to begin with, so there’s no need to get into questions of “percentage population”.
The absurdly high “atheist regime” number is basically right-wing anti-Communist propaganda (no surprise our dear WJM believes that kind of garbage and spreads it without doing any checking on whether it’s warranted) that cannot be verified by any reputable sociologist or historian of the 20th century.
And the bizarrely low figure “up to 10 million dead via religious regimes” is maybe, just barely, enough to account for Hitler’s Gott-mit-uns dead, leaving many other millions unaccounted from Europe’s previous sectarian wars, witch burnings, crusades … Also leaving out other 20th century religious genocides and mass deaths: the Turkish Armenian genocide, Franco’s civil war, partition of India/Pakistan, the Rwandan genocide, the Iran-Iraq war …
Certainly not all Abrahamic, but religious none the less; certainly not atheist/secularist.
No honest theist would play the “your side is worse than my side in killing millions”.
King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo.
It surprises me when anything I write makes sense to the irrational.
I fully intend to answer the question. If I change my mind I’ll let you know.
I did eventually find this.
Three things:
1) How do you know you wouldn’t like to be raped unless you try it? Maybe it isn’t really harmful, as Dawkins believes about molestation. It seems that Dawkins is on the leading edge of a new, more consistent, morality. How can you say he’s wrong? (Crude question, but if you are going to base “objective” morality on want, or perceived harm, then it seems you’ll have to give some things a go before judging others. Maybe all the rape victims are wrong about how bad it is.)
2) Why is it wrong to harm others? Based on what? Some people enjoy it.
3) You’ve still not answered the other part of the overall challenge, which is that you have no recourse to actually condemn rape in another society. And the accusation stands, systems of morality consistent with “Darwinism” have no coherent way to condemn rape.
But I’ll ask again: Is rape wrong, even within the society that condones it?
Your answer so far is that it is not, but is morally acceptable.
Brent, your remarks here are strong evidence that your moral compass has been thoroughly degaussed. Apparently, you are incapable of conceiving any reason to behave in a moral manner other than I’ll get my ass kicked if I don’t—which strikes me as a working functional definition of sociopathy. So at best, you’re arguing that religion is needed in order to keep a lid on the bad behavior of sociopaths… but sociopaths can abuse people within a religious culture just as easily as they can within a secular culture. And considering the sheer number of people who have convinced themselves that their own abusive behavior is okay on the grounds that whatever-form-of-abuse is A-OK in god’s book… well, let’s just say that it’s not at all clear what advantage religion-based morality has over secular-based morality.
Yes you can, if you think about it in a less simplistic way.
Individuals govern their own morality. People have their conscience that tells them what is right and wrong. Conscience is an individual property, not some cookie-cutter commodity that looks the same for everybody. People don’t normally change their views on what is right and wrong just by simply checking them against ‘society’ and adjusting them where they find differences. In essence, individuals govern their own morality. It is part of who they are. Of course people may gradually over time come to different views on morality but this is a slow process caused by life’s experiences and the reality of getting older.
However, very importantly, people are not born with their moral concepts installed ex nihilo. Individuals are shaped and formed by growing up in society, by their parents, teachers, friends and family, by events that happen during their formative years. So clearly, the prevailing morality when someone grows up does govern, in a significant way, someone’s moral views.
There is no contradiction here for anyone who can see past simplistic slogans.
fG
OR THIS!!!
It is one or the other. Lizzie said morality is about “ought”. I agree. But if people are supposed to be the arbiters of ought, then it would be tantamount to saying we ought to do what we want to do. But the moral code we actually have does not say this. It says we ought not to do what we may very well otherwise want to do (or the opposite). Survival of the fittest, right? That’s what a “moral” code would look like if left up to society. Barbarism would be the rule. And how should you counter this? For barbarism often is the rule when groups of men get together and decide their own morality.
I commend you. Now ground your moral obligation in a coherent fashion so that it actually has teeth, and you’ll be on your way to rejecting naturalism and materialism, as you should.
How touching of Mr You’d-like-rape-if-you-gave-it-a-try Brent to hope that any decent person would ever care whether Mr You’d-like-rape-if-you-gave-it-a-try Brent commends them or not.
Why, it’s almost as if he thinks he’s still relevant in a discussion of morality, in spite of his total failure to be a moral human being. Poor dear
That is nonsensical. If a rape victim reports that it was bad, it was bad. Unless you think they are lying. And I am perfectly capable of not wanting to be raped whether or not it would turn out to be a wonderful experience – how, in any case, do you know I haven’t been? I’ve hard that shrooms are a wonderful experience, but it’s not one I want. The harm lies in being forced to experience something one has not consented to.
In that case it is arguably not harmful.
Yes, I can, because as I keep saying, moralities are constructed by the members of a society. I am a member of human society, and my view is that rape is harmful. That is my contribution to the morality of human society. I hope that eventually the view is sufficiently shared to be adopted universally.
In my view, yes. That is why I argue that it is in any society of which I am a member, and thus contribute to the construction of a shared morality.
Try expressing that in the active voice. Who accepts rape morally? Some people, certainly; and as a result, some societies. I do not, and I hope that my view becomes even more widely shared than it currently is.
I mean it about the active voice. I think this is where a lot of these discussion break down.
I answered that I do not accept that rape is moral. Therefore I do not accept that rape is moral. That others do is an unfortunate truth, but I hope to persuade them.
Some posts moved to Guano, as anticipated.
Please remember the site rules, and recall that they are not there because I find such posts morally unacceptable, but simply because the exercise here is to discuss things without breaking those rules.
I’d like to include a ban on the passive voice, too, but Guano might overfill 🙂
How do you know you wouldn’t like dorian ice cream unless you try it?
I don’t see the difference based on your account of morality.
I live in a society where it is okay to ask how women know they wouldn’t like rape if they don’t try it. You’ve already said it’s okay for me because my society says it is permissible.
Hitler only needs to say that, in his society, killing Jews was not only acceptable, but morally necessary. I don’t understand what the war was all about, then.
And if society governs morality as you say, then why not say that discrimination against blacks is actually alright? It was, once. Let’s round them up and chain them in the factories. All we need is a majority of people and then it is completely fine, right?
No, you don’t live in such a society.
Stop that.
You’re behaving badly and you are without excuse.
Lizzie, that is one thing I feared. I of course have no way of knowing your personal history or whether you have endured a rape. I of course sincerely hope that isn’t the case, and apologize if there is anything even remotely close to that experience in your past.
It is clear that you are not going to speak plainly.
Your position leaves you guilty of allowing rape in a society where it isn’t seen as immoral. Your desire to persuade is an admission that you think your morality is better than the other (where rape is allowed), and which commits you to an objective standard of what a proper morality is, whereby you may arbitrate between the two.
The “rape is morally acceptable” society will have the same perspective about you, that your position is morally inferior to theirs. Who decides?
Of course I don’t, but I could, which is the point. If I did, who decides which society has a better morality?
Translating your post into e-prime:
I live in a society where many people regard it as okay to ask how women know they wouldn’t like rape if they don’t try it. You’ve already said that you permit it for me because in my society many people permit it.
Hitler only needs to say that, in his society, people permitted the killing of Jews because they considered it morally necessary. I don’t understand why we went to war, then.
And if society governs morality as you say, then why not say that society should approve discrimination against blacks? At one time, people did approve that. Let’s round them up and chain them in the factories. If a majority of people of people approve of it then everyone will regard it as completely fine, right?
As I think you will see, rewriting the passage without use of the word to be forces us to specify the subject of the verbs.
This reveals the hidden assumptions behind your questions, and, I think, makes the answers obvious.
Deal with it, christian. Hitler is one of you.
Your kind of people applauded him for removing the Jesus-killers. Christians just like you ran the trains, ran the ovens, said grace over lunch, and went home to tuck their kinder in with nightly prayers confident that they were doing your god[‘s will. Same god, same Jesus, same bible, not an iota of difference between them and you. Of course you don’t understand what the war was all about; because by your rules, the good Germans were doing nothing wrong. They’re all in heaven now, aren’t they? Jesus’s grace upon them, right?
If you christians want to pretend that you have some special access to “objective” morality, then you first have to prove that you’re one iota better than your brethren guarding the camps. If you are not one iota better than them, then your vaunted “objective” morality is worthless bullshit. What worth has a so-called “objective” morality which fails to tell all you good christians not to kill the Jews?
None. Worthless.
That is a typical theist’s failure to understand morality.
You can stop here. Few people – if anyone – does anything close to what you are describing above. It certainly is not a reflection of what I wrote. Societies do not justify a given morality; societies establish the moral framework from which individuals develop their moral models. As such, the rest of your paragraph is nonsense.
Of course they are. The whole reason that a few Nazi party leaders were able to have over 6 million Jews put to death. The followers adopted the social models created by Hitler and Goebbels. But of course, part of the reason the Nazi regime was overthrown was because there were actual Germans whose moral models were derived from other social circles and those models conflicted with what Hitler put forth.
On what do you based this wild assertion? As it doesn’t follow the actual evidence of human behavior, I’m going to reject your opinion here as just plain old erroneous.
It isn’t so simple William. Again, everyone has multiple societies providing bases for moral models. We build our moral models throughout our lives as we get exposed to more and more societal perspectives. No one’s moral model is static and many times we find ourselves in situations where one societal structure (say the Good Old Boy network of the Navy) conflicts with other societal structures (say your liberal social group) and we then must adjust our models one way or the other. We may find that some societies are incompatible with other societies and drop them – say the Klu Klux Klan and the NAACP – and we drop one in favor of the other. In doing so, our moral model shift based on that decision, not the other way around.
And you likely will, unless you are also a part of some society that is pro gay, in which case you may decide that the hobby club is not a good basis of morality. Interestingly, this is currently happening on a global scale with conservative Christianity. Many young people are leaving conservative churches because they have been exposed to societies that are pro-homosexual and pro-homosexual marriage. Thus when the conservative churches continue to condemn homosexuality and create a moral message that homosexuality is a sin and is wrong, many of their young members find themselves in moral conflict. And many are now resolving that conflict by deciding that the church is wrong.
I find no evidence of any innate personal moral views. All moral views come from some society as far as I can tell.
I don’t have to have it both ways. A society is not a person.
I’m thinking of doing an OP on this.
Reading through the morality discussions here has led me to speculate that Moraling (neologism) is a faculty similar to language. It is inborn; it varies somewhat from individual to individual; bits and pieces of it occur in other social animals; and it doesn’t really appear in the absence of social learning.
Like language it can be analyzed, formalized and taught, but like language, the strongest and deepest learning is informal and is the “automatic” result of social interaction.
I propose a new verb: to moral.
Moralize is already in use and has negative connotations.
To moral means to emit moral behavior, to behave toward others with regard to consequences, potential harm or benefit.
Oh! Okay, Neil.
Who decides? Each society. There is no absolute arbiter of “better” morality. It appears that you would run wild raping infants if you weren’t imprisoned by an external arbiter in which you believe, but for most folks that’s not a problem.
We all do, and in doing so we contribute to it.
William J. Murray,
Fair enough, but as I made clear, I don’t treat a utopian society as a goal to be achieved; I treat the concept of a utopia society as a regulative ideal — it’s a way of fleshing out and making vivid an absolute moral principle. Basically, it’s a way of building embodiment and sociality into the Kantian notion of a kingdom of ends. And I want to rescue the idea of utopia from its liberal critics, like Arendt, much as Russell Jacoby did in his “The End of Utopia” and “Picture Imperfect,” both of which had a huge impact on me.
In the case of someone who thought that homosexuality was inimical to human flourishing and therefore morally wrong, I’d start by asking them what it is about heterosexuality that makes it conducive to human flourishing. I would conjecture that they would say something about intimacy, about caring for one other, and about the inexplicable synergy between desire and respect that we call ‘love’.
Then I would challenge him or her to defend the claim that the goods of heterosexual relationships — those things about heterosexual relationships that makes them morally valuable — aren’t found in homosexual relationships.
I think that the tendency to deny that the goods of intimate and caring relationships between members of the same sex rests on a bad phenomenology of sexual desire and its expression. I don’t see how else anyone could conflate homosexuality with bestiality or pedophilia, since the goods of mutual and caring relationships are manifestly absent from those kinds of sexual relations.
I also think that pretty much anyone would allow a distinction between cultural taboos and moral prohibitions, so the goal would be to show that the belief that homosexuality is immoral rests on a conflation between the two in this particular case. And then the question is, what’s the criterion of demarcation? I think that Kant’s categorical imperative does a pretty good job of indicating what makes something a genuine moral prohibition, instead of merely the violation of a cultural taboo: if someone is being treated as an means only, instead of as an end in him or herself also.
So, for example, I would want to ask someone who thinks that homosexuality is morally wrong how it is that homosexual relations count as using another person as a means only, and not also as an end in him- or herself. And if the person I’m talking with doesn’t like my appeal to Kantian ethics as a basis for distinguishing between cultural taboos and moral prohibitions, then I’d ask him or her to propose another one that withstands mutual rational scrutiny. And so on.
Now, there’s the further question as to what grounds the authority of the categorical imperative itself, and whether that is consistent with the sort of liberal naturalism that I endorse. And I have thought a lot about those issues, too. But that’s a distinct topic from how I would appeal to the categorical imperative and to the intrinsically valuable goods of mutual and caring relationships to argue against someone who thinks that homosexual relations are inimical to human flourishing.
I haven’t caught up on this thread yet but I had to say; after I left yesterday I thought this–only men could think they were entitled to use rape as the rhetorical football of their how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguing.
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After a quick skim.
Brent,
You do realize you are talking about something real in the world, right? There are a lot of women who can tell you, unequivocally, that rape is objectively harmful. A few men too. If you want to argue that harm isn’t objective to an organism with a central nervous system then you really ought to go to eBay and look for some mirror neurons. You’re running low.
Our wonderful brains evolved, in part, because they allow us to sense harm, evade it, remember it, and use that remembrance for future avoidance. We also have the ability to detect pain in another living thing. The two together are a perfectly legitimate basis for developing a shared code of conduct* among the basic units of society, also known as people**. Certainly our sensory apparatus has flaws but for its most basic, important task, the avoidance of harm, it is incomparably objective or it wouldn’t have any value.
*also known as morality, though that term is so encumbered and fraught with baggage from its evolution over the last:
100 million years of mammalian development,
10 million years of primate development,
1 million years of hominid development,
100,000 years of sapient development,
and 10,000 years of civilizational development,
that it really has no value anymore. It means too many different things to too many people and has become a partisan tool of attack on top of everything else. (Disclaimer: numbers are vague estimates only; no effort was made at hyperaccuracy. Hyperliteral Pedants will be flogged by His Noodly Appendage.)
**I dimly recall a joke made by Dr. David Goodstein: the basic unit of energy is a photon, the basic unit of matter is a proton, the basic unit of electricity is an electron, and sociologists have recently announced they have discovered the basic unit of society-the person
You’re not actually responding to what I wrote.
Brent, let me try this again. You wrote:
This is a false dichotomy. What is happening in reality is not either/or, but a process of mutual interaction and influencing. We enter the world with our own distinct personalities, but as we grow up we are shaped by our environment and life’s experiences to become the persons we are. Our morality is no only governed by our character but undoubtedly also by these external factors which include the prevailing moral concepts around us. So in this way, morality governs people.
On the other hand, once we are grown up and make a mark on the world around us, we do influence its concepts of morality. For most of us in tiny, imperceptable ways, for a few in dramatic ways, but either way, our moral concepts influence society around us and we are part in bringing about the changes in morality that we observe over the centuries. So in this way, people govern morality.
This is not black and white, either-or. This is a continuous process of mutual influencing at various scales. I am surprised you seem to be unable to recognise that this is how these things work.
So yes, we can have it both ways.
fG
Not only could xe run wild in the absence of xis fear of god (which xe misnames “objective morality”), when a human asked Brent to refrain from raping, xe would feel perfectly justified to answer “How do you know you wouldn’t like to be raped unless you try it? How do you know that infants wouldn’t like to be raped?”
Xe’s already testified that’s what he thinks is appropriate. We don’t need to continue the thought experiment to further imagine what xe would do. We already know: You’d-like-rape-if-you-gave-it-a-try Brent told us.
This is a common way that fundamentalist sectarians demonize secular society; they get this drumbeat from their pulpits and Sunday school classes. We see this frequently from ID/creationists wanting to eliminate evolution from the science curriculum during “politically expedient times”.
Here is that angst expressed by a woman in a letter to the editor of a local newspaper during the heat of an election season.
Among fundamentalists, secular society is evil by definition; i.e., according to their reading of a holy book. Any other rationale for moral behavior is “Satan talk.”
petrushka,
may I exchange email with you?
moc.liamg@liefp.reinrod
Beautiful.
As I’ve said from the beginning, if people are the source of the moral code, then people govern morality, and morality does not govern people.
I don’t see how this has been adequately addressed. All that is being said, essentially, is that, well, yes, people are the source of the moral code, but that’s not a problem. It is a problem.
But let me continue.
In the naturalistic view which is championed here on TSZ, morality arose naturally, and doesn’t refer to any other source than those people who decided upon it. How did they decide that one way was better than another? According to those here, by what was beneficial for society. Fine.
My next question, however, is how was it decided what was good for society? This is a very important question. If what was good for society was the basis for morality, then morality itself couldn’t have been the resource for deciding what was good for society. But you may say, no, it is not morality, but human flourishing that is good for society. The problem with that is you’ve just snuck in a moral value judgment, that the flourishing of human society is good. So you’re still trying to have morality as the basis for morality, which obviously is nonsense.
What this means is, morality is arbitrary; it could have been different. Morality could have developed to be the complete opposite of what it is now. It’s no good saying, “well, it doesn’t matter, we have our morality how we have it, and that’s it.” If morality is arbitrary, then there is never a high-horse to get on.
If morality could have been different, then some people’s reaction to my question to Lizzie about rape was too over-the-top. If morals could have been completely reversed, how is it that anyone can be really outraged by anyone else’s action? By what standard? “By the current socially determined morality”, you say. Right, the arbitrary one.
If there is no standard whereby to determine what is morally acceptable, then we only have tastes, and our “moral outrage” is no better than screaming at someone that vanilla is better than chocolate.