Need help in a debate

[Talanth]

On one of my other forums in reply to someone sayin there was nothing which was inherantly good or inherantly evil I disagreed with the turms 'good' and 'evil', saying that they were not adiquatly difined for use in logical debate. I then posted a little side track saying "Morality, however, is absolute and has nothing to do with ones point of vew." People seem to be disagreeing with me. One of the replys I got was this:

Side track: I dislike the turms good and evil. I don't think they are defined well enough to be used in logical debate. Morality, however, is absolute and has nothing to do with ones point of vew.

When you are dealing with i(supposedly) ntelligent beings capable of independent thought, opinions and free will there are no such things as "absolutes." Even moarality can be seen as a matter of opinion or cultural conditioning.

A "duty" to preserve and extend the species can be translated into forced pregancy and breeding programs or eugenics.

There are still cultures that believe "female circumcision" is an expression of morality rather than mutilation (anyone who doesn't know what this is... go look it up on google).

There are still cultures where it is morally acceptable for a husband and father to beat and even mutilate or kill the females in his life for "disobeying" him or cultural or religions laws.

There are still cultures where sex with children as young as 3 years old is morally acceptable.

No... "morality" is no more an absolute concept than "good" and "evil" are. They are all subjective measures dictated by the "will of the majority" to govern what is and what is not acceptable behavior to live within the bounds of a specific society.

Your concepts for adapting the Three Laws is an interesting one (I particularly like the refrence to the "system of life" rather than just "humanity"), but there will always be the potential for abuse and manipulation of those laws brought about by subjective interpretation and free will.


The only "absolutes" in mortal life are still pretty much death and taxes

So I was wondering what people here thought of the idea of absolute morality and, more importantly, how I should reply.

[Surlethe]

The argument doesn't follow -- he's attempting to prove that morality can't be absolute by assuming morality's defined by culture: i.e., that there exists no absolute moral code because different cultures view different behaviors as acceptable. If I were you, I'd ask why the fact various cultures accept various behaviors as moral means that they're actually moral -- see if he can answer that question without begging the question.

By way of analogy, if you accept his logic, the fact murderers exist indicates that cold-blooded murder is not immoral.

[Darth Wong]

Ask him to explain what morality is. If he says something involving "right and wrong", point out that "right" and "wrong" are correct or incorrect answers to a question, and he has yet to define the question.

He clearly thinks morality has no real definition, and therein lies the problem. But you should at least make him admit that, which in turn means that his arguments on morality are meaningless.

[Feil]

snip post

-If morality is defined absolutely, morality is absolute.
-Conformance to societal mores is absolute because it is defined absolutely.
-If morality != conformance, his point is moot.
-If morality = conformance, morality is absolute because it is defined absolutely.
QED

[mr friendly guy]

When you are dealing with i(supposedly) ntelligent beings capable of independent thought, opinions and free will there are no such things as "absolutes." Even moarality can be seen as a matter of opinion or cultural conditioning.

This is just stating his opinion, which boils down to, because someone sees it differently, it must be differently. This does not follow and it can be shown to be false by simply pointing to a culture which believes in something not true, say the Ancient Greeks with the Olympians.

A "duty" to preserve and extend the species can be translated into forced pregancy and breeding programs or eugenics.

How, especially given that observation says the human race is "extending" without the need of forced pregnancies and breeding porgrams or eugenics.

There are still cultures that believe "female circumcision" is an expression of morality rather than mutilation (anyone who doesn't know what this is... go look it up on google).

Belief does not make something correct.

There are still cultures where it is morally acceptable for a husband and father to beat and even mutilate or kill the females in his life for "disobeying" him or cultural or religions laws.

There are still cultures where sex with children as young as 3 years old is morally acceptable.

He is giving examples on cultures which have different morals. He is not saying why these differences are morally valid.

No... "morality" is no more an absolute concept than "good" and "evil" are. They are all subjective measures dictated by the "will of the majority" to govern what is and what is not acceptable behavior to live within the bounds of a specific society.

Talk about claiming victory for something he didn't do.

[Talanth]

I have just recieved a wall of text. I replied the best I could but once again I would value your oppinions.

I would also disagree with Tathaenhis asumption that morality is defined by popular opinion. In the sothern stated of america rasism was popular in the 1940s, but that did not make it moral. To clarify: I do not consider 'socialy acceptable' to be the same as 'moral', which is what Tathaenhi seems to be sugesting.

You misread me. I'm not talking about popular opinion, I'm talking about how society operates, and what society defends itself against. Consider reading some essays by Michaud Foucault (specifically "Society Must Be Defended") to get a better idea of this, and consider reading The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias to get an idea of how time changes both how people percieve and think and how they act as a society. His treatment of how what we consider to be disgusting has changed since the dark ages and WHY is a very good example of how morality changes.

To use your example of racism in the 40s, this was wrong to US in our modern times, and to some members of that society at that time, but it was NOT immoral to THAT society. Just as eugenics was not considered immoral when it was started. People are products of their times and morality is a product of the society of that time. We can agree now that what people in the past did was immoral, but when they did it, no standards of morality covered that particular treatment. Yes, individuals may have found it wrong, but it wasn't until society changed as a whole that the ill treatment of black americans was widely considered wrong.

I'm not saying that socially acceptable means it's right. I'm saying that society dictates our moral code to us. Morals don't come from some kind of sacred, unchanging fictional place, where morals that apply to every era are the same. They are reflexive products of change and understanding. We've been moving towards a morality that focuses less on punishing people for being different and more on allowing everyone to live in peace. In my opinion this is good, but keep in mind I'm a product of my times as well. And don't be under the illusion that morality can only progress, it'd be easy enough for a more repressive society to backslide to a more repressive morality.

Nor is moral change a universal project. In a given society there will always be people who are ahead of their time, and always be people behind their time. The majority of people, however, will change exactly at the pace of society, because society is not a matter of individuals but of a conglomerate. Consider fashion - there are always people who are behind or ahead of their times, but most of us are right with them.

The changes in our tolerance of difference are not some "natural progression" of humanity but part of a conscious and concerted effort in Western countries to change how we treat each other. Think of it, children these days understand what racism is and that it is wrong. Their parents were the first generation to whom this was actively TAUGHT. As a result, the people who make up the bulk of society consider racism to be immoral, including ourselves. There are people, anachronisms, who do not agree. They are immoral by our standards, but they do not do it out of a desire to be immoral. To them (likely stuck 70 years behind the rest of us), they are acting in a way that is moral and WE are immoral for committing the horrible sin of live and let live. We, however, have more ability to enforce our morality than they do. If they had more power to enforce their morality, they would likely be the majority and we'd be the ones with the minority morality.

Power to enforce morality manifests in many ways. One of these ways is symbolic and highly visible - through the justice and legal system, and our system of codified laws and punishments. Legal systems are granted with power by the state to prosecute and punish moral transgressions by individuals and groups. Another way morality is enforced is through our own individual treatment of people who transgress. We exert automatic and significant pressure on people to conform to our moral standard. For example, if you're riding on the bus with a friend, who previously has demonstrated no sign of being a racist, and he or she starts suddenly flipping off the mouth about "damn (insert race here), they're everywhere these days", you would most likely gasp, and proceed to tell your friend how racist that was and how wrong that was. Your friend would then have to either successfully defend his or her standpoint or back down to you, and the rest of society that you represent.

Bottom line - society is what creates and enforces moral standards, and these change over time. We as individuals experience this both as people who must learn the moral code and who help enforce it. Just as ancient morality is not appropriate for our modern time (IE Leviticus from the Bible, or the Deep South of 1940), it is inappropriate to judge the people from the past by our standards completely. Yes, a lot of what they did was wrong by our standards, but keep in mind that they were products of their time and were not capable of being otherwise. Some of the things that have happened in the past were disgusting, horrifying, and downright wrong to us, but even the societies that routinely and unreflectively did things we consider to be horrifyingly wrong could not have been capable of viewing their actions as something wrong. Nothing had happened to demonstrate that, that came later.

Does this mean that if we commit atrocities, we're ok? Certainly not! We know better. Keep in mind though, just as we view the transgressions of the past as wrong, we unwittingly and unthinkingly commit wrongs now that people 100 years from now will gasp at.

To which I replied:

This quote seems to best sum up your post:

I'm not saying that socially acceptable means it's right. I'm saying that society dictates our moral code to us.

I define "socialy acceptable" to be "that which our curent socioty accepts". Therefore you seem to be saying that socialy acceptable = morality. However you also state that "I'm not saying that socially acceptable means it's right." , which is contradictory. I see social acceptability and morality as diferent methods to arbitrarily judge the subjective human concepts of right and wrong.

As far as I see it if there is an absolute definition of morality then morality is absolute. May I ask how you do define morality?

Sorry, Im not very good at this.

[petesampras]

Well, the Oxford dictionary says....

• noun (pl. moralities) 1 principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour. 2 moral behaviour. 3 the extent to which an action is right or wrong. 4 a system of values and moral principles.

Nothing in that definition allows you to derive a moral code which is not culturaly relative. What is moral is dependant on the values of the society you live in. If you want to claim the existance of absolute, universal morals you need to specify what these morals are and more importantly where you derive them from - since they would not seem to derive from the definition of morality.

[Surlethe]

I'm not saying that socially acceptable means it's right. I'm saying that society dictates our moral code to us.

In other words, society defines what is right and wrong -- in other words, if it's socially acceptable, it's right, and vice versa.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Surlethe wrote:

In other words, society defines what is right and wrong -- in other words, if it's socially acceptable, it's right, and vice versa.

That was always one thing about conventional ethical relativism I never understood; in that regard, it makes no sense becaues what society are they thinking of when they say society's social mores = moral?

Society isn't always one monolithic structure, but rather a conglomeration of myriad subsocieties and cultures. Which "culture" is the one that defines morality? The one in power over everyone? Might makes right?

[Surlethe]

That was always one thing about conventional ethical relativism I never understood; in that regard, it makes no sense becaues what society are they thinking of when they say society's social mores = moral?

Society isn't always one monolithic structure, but rather a conglomeration of myriad subsocieties and cultures. Which "culture" is the one that defines morality? The one in power over everyone? Might makes right?

I guess the most commonly accepted one; however, the most commonly accepted one is often the one which is, in fact, most powerful -- witness Christianity in the West, for example.

The terminology used in this sort of debate is often confusing; just yesterday, I was shooting the breeze with one of my professors, and we were talking about Ender's argument in another thread about the ethics of creating an AI. He ran circles around me (figuratively, of course) because I was mixing up the terminology -- I was, in essence, claiming that there exists only one moral code. In fact, moral absolutism is nothing more than the claim that it is possible to judge between different codes of ethics and find one which, given a purpose, is best at that purpose.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Well, if this helps, Surlethe, from my limited studies in ethics, you typically have two major normative positions--the relativists and the objectivists. Absolutism is a form of objectivism, but it need not be the only form. There's another form called situational-objectivism.

For example, Kantianism is typically described as a form of absolutist-objectivist ethics, while Utilitarianism is a situational-objectivist philosophy. Both are similar insofar as they believe ethics can be "discovered." They both believe ethics is objective on two levels, and hence, they use objective as a double-meaning word.

In the first sense, they believe, as I said above, ethics is something that can be discovered. In the second sense, they believe that people, if they can at least create arbitrary, subjective principles, there can be conclusions as to what ethical systems are able to accomplish the defined goal best. Kantianism, being absolutist, does this through duty/intention based decision-making, while Utilitarianism does the same largely ignoring as a fundamental tenet intent, instead focusing on situational measurment of consequences (or sometimes rules and their consequences).

In terms of the normative school of relativism, there are two major forms I know of--Conventional Ethical Relativism and Ethical Subjectivism. The former is collective and based off of social norms. It's typically attacked because it confuses the concept of cultural relativism and ethical relativism. The latter is a form of individual relativism, where it's not the collective, but the individual himself who makes up moral codes.

While I agree that if we set a goal, we can objectively tell what serves that best, I am not sure how to defend the first definition of objectivism, I.E. morality is discovered like other natural principles. I don't see how that's true, since morality I see as a type of abstract tool humans use like they use other tools. As a tool, ethics has a unique purpose like a paintbrush, language, math, and hammers. Ultimately, it seems as if the definition of morality is subjective and arbitrary, but so are the definitions and purposes of other tools, but few question those; it just wouldn't be useful to do. Hammers are defined as X for Y purpose. Ethics is also defined as X to serve Y purpose. Although, in the end, I don't know how we metaethically "justify" the initial choosing of the criteria without begging the question, but that deals more with metaethics instead of normativism, which isn't concerned with such things.

Sometimes I think people look at ethics the wrong way, like it's a science or form of mathematics. Those people tend to treat abstract concepts like concrete entities that exist or float around waiting to be discovered in the real world instead of being invented. That seems to lead to absurd ideas that position X is true in ethics like the 2nd law of thermodynamics is naturally true.

I will try to get together some information on metaethical theories of morality if you want. I have to do some scrounging. That's not really my field of interest, since it seems to be a long of verbal gymastics. On one side, you have those who say there's no objective (as in universally correct) justification for any ethical system, since they are all perceptions of what is right or wrong, based on inhernetly subjective valuations. You cannot have an objectively correct value statement (according to them). They link ethical taste to physical taste. Emotivism is related to it. They say all are metaethically neutral in truthvalue, much like in aesthetics.

Then I think there's another school that sets the default at all are automatically false. I don't see how that works at all.

[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Edit: My apologies for the addition.

I think that most moral "facts" make sense when you talk about ethics as a system of Hypothetical Imperatives in the sense used by Immanuel Kant. It makes sense to say that X is objectively true if Y is the goal.

If you want Y, you ought to do X, would be a moral, but factual observation. But you must assume the axioms or core criteria first, which might not be facts at all, but rather subjective values and feelings.

[Talanth]

Just for the record:

This quote seems to best sum up your post:

I'm not saying that socially acceptable means it's right. I'm saying that society dictates our moral code to us.

I define "socialy acceptable" to be "that which our curent socioty accepts". Therefore you seem to be saying that socialy acceptable = morality. However you also state that "I'm not saying that socially acceptable means it's right." , which is contradictory. I see social acceptability and morality as diferent methods to arbitrarily judge the subjective human concepts of right and wrong.

As far as I see it if there is an absolute definition of morality then morality is absolute. May I ask how you do define morality?

Its contradictory because of your own definition of it, not because of my definition of it. Take a few courses in sociology, and perhaps you'll better understand the nature of society. Your confusing society with social acceptibility, society is much more than that.

As for how I define morality, morality is the code of right and wrong that societies and the individuals that make them up hold to be true and live by. Morality changes over time as people gain new understanding of what is and isn't good. Will you accept the idea of "enlightenment", that society has become more enlightened with time? Because that's kind of at work here, but keep in mind we can backslide too. "Progress" is not guaranteed.

My own moral code is fairly simple. I attempt to refrain from causing deliberate harm to anyone else, unless it is necessary to protect myself or my loved ones. I also try to reduce the chances that I'll cause harm through ignorance by attempting to become more alert and sensitive. If I cause harm inadvertantly, I generally try to atone or "make up for it", if I discover what has happened.

My definition of what is right and wrong therefor centers around the notion of harm. For example, I don't sleep around not because sex is wrong or having multiple partners is wrong, but because doing such a thing would hurt the person I love, and THAT is wrong.

This is highly situational. What causes harm or hurt can vary from one person to the next highly. This means that I must actively negotiate right and wrong in my life, which is not always easy. I try to live mindfully, but I acknowledge that I am not perfect. I make mistakes too.

[Talanth]

My reply:

Its contradictory because of your own definition of it, not because of my definition of it. Take a few courses in sociology, and perhaps you'll better understand the nature of society. Your confusing society with social acceptibility, society is much more than that.

Simply saying 'you are wrong' is unhelpfull at best. Please provide some actual information with your arguments rather than expecting me to automaticly bow down to your wisdom. To begin with I know precisely what the definitions of 'society' and 'social acceptibility' are: a 'society' is a group of people living together in a more or less ordered community, and 'social acceptability' is precisely what it says on the tin. Not very dificult concepts if I may say. Which leads us back to the origional problem that if you define what is moral as 'that which is socialy acceptable' (as in 'what socioty accepts to be moral) then you are not able to say that

I'm not saying that socially acceptable means it's right

because quite simply you just have.

As for how I define morality, morality is the code of right and wrong that societies and the individuals that make them up hold to be true and live by. Morality changes over time as people gain new understanding of what is and isn't good. Will you accept the idea of "enlightenment", that society has become more enlightened with time? Because that's kind of at work here, but keep in mind we can backslide too. "Progress" is not guaranteed.

I accept that what socioty accepts to be moral will change over time, and that the behavior that this socioty accepts will change as the socioty changes. I accept that sociotys can become both more and less enlightened. But I do not accept that this has anything to do with the definition of morality. Even the fact that you use words such as "progress" and "backslide" asume that there is some scale indipendent of the socioty in question against which the level of 'enlightenment' is measured!

On a diferent point I find your definition of morality lacking. Saying "morality is the code of right and wrong" is akin to saying "the question is a decision between true and faulse". It's plain to see and gives no information as to what the actual question is. As we have both already stated socioties have their own code of what is acceptable or not: the socioties own 'moral code'. But a moral code is not morality. A good and enlightened moral code may aproach true morality: it may reach the stage where there is very little that is considered right in that code which is immoral, or vis versa. But Social acceptability is evolutionary, and so can (I think) never reach true perfection.

My own moral code is fairly simple. I attempt to refrain from causing deliberate harm to anyone else, unless it is necessary to protect myself or my loved ones. I also try to reduce the chances that I'll cause harm through ignorance by attempting to become more alert and sensitive. If I cause harm inadvertantly, I generally try to atone or "make up for it", if I discover what has happened.

That seems a good code to live by. My own was origionaly based on my scout oaths, which left a surprisingly deep impression on me. "I promise to do my best. To do my duty to God and to The Queen. To think of others before myself." I decided that the 'good turn every day' was too open-ended to be of much use. The rest of my code, appart from my origional rant, is based on rights and duties. Basicly if I think I have a right to something then I must uphold that right in the people around me. So if I have the right to own property then not only must I not steal (and thus deny anothers right to own that thing) but I must stop other people from stealing as well. After all thinking that I have more rights than others is just plain arrogant.

This is highly situational. What causes harm or hurt can vary from one person to the next highly. This means that I must actively negotiate right and wrong in my life, which is not always easy. I try to live mindfully, but I acknowledge that I am not perfect. I make mistakes too.

I agree. As my Mother says: life isn't just black and white, it isn't even just shades of grey. It's never easy to see the whole kaleidoscope, much less all the consiquences our actions will have on it, but that's no excuse not to try.