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Edited by die wily:
6/3/2013 8:02:27 PM
7
Establishment of a General Moral Theory?
Here's what I've got:
What strikes me as a tautology is that the placement of moral value is dependent on the preferences of the placer. When you establish empirically that the placer and his preferences have been molded by the history of Earth, you realize that humanity has a fundamental, inbred desire to aid through action both the personal and general perpetuation of humans and human-like things.
We also have, through simple action, grown general modi operandi -- the justifications for which are, at their very most refined, contingent purely on the empirical data we have managed to accumulate -- for satisfying our fundamental human biases.
Some of these policies, like rogue tree branches, take needlessly indirect paths to light or turn uselessly back around on us. These policies are "evils" to diagnose, correct, and in severe cases, amputate. This process of diagnosis is morality, and this process of correction is practical agency.
Thoughts?
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11 RepliesEdited by Bolt: 6/3/2013 8:23:31 PMBased on the faulty assumption that morality serves to perpetuate the species. The only textbooks you'll find that in are on mysticism. While Evolution (your "molding") does select for actions that benefit the species, the things that benefit the species aren't static. Consider bisexuality; there are a number of anthropological explanations given for why it may be beneficial to a society (extra-help, alliances, etc.). However, when the AIDS epidemic occurred, it is clear that "moral acceptance" of bisexuality got a lot more people killed. It's analogous to why sickle-cell anemia in Africa invalidates eugenics. By any normal definition, it's a disadvantage, yet because of malaria, only the people that had it survived. Eugenics only makes sense if we can always know preemptively what will be beneficial, which we can't. There can never be a general morality because there can never be a general set of beneficial traits (general in the sense that they can always be beneficial). Only if we become prophetic, or powerful enough to be unaffected by changes in our environment, could we begin to seek perfect morality or perfect genetics. Of course, we can already see that the question is moot, as we would have already found a set that defies evolution, and if it was possible to tweak even one thing in that set, we'd have multiple sets of evolutionarily "perfect" morals, making the notion of the existence a "general" set clearly false.
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While cogent, your scrutiny of ethical syllogisms is subject to strong critique in the form of Cartesian rationalism and possibly and more narrowly the application of solipsism brings your claims of metacognitive development into question. That said if we defer to the use of Wittgensteinian truth-tables to analyze the possible arrangements of logical possibilities from said postulates it might verily be revealed, should we discard the epistemological objections, that such propositions are tautologous after all.
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I hate not having a really expanded vocabulary.
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I think morality could possibly a mechanism designed by "nature" that enables a sort of stability within our species. We, as humans, are seemingly the most complex life forms on Earth, and so morality ensures that hugely dynamic nature doesn't grow into something that may lead to our downfall. The thing is, humans in general tend to only look at reason within our projection of reality, and not a "universal" one. The more and more complex an organism gets, the more complex the "mechanisms" required to stabilize that organism gets. However, these "mechanisms" do not always work out efficiently. We are rapidly evolving our view of the universe, and that in itself may adversely affect the "mechanism", and hence the subjectivity of morality may end up dividing our race. But, this is simply just an idea. EDIT: I'm pretty sure this has already been covered, but here it is anyway.
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1 ReplyMorals are subjective, there will never be a common ground among people.
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1 ReplyAren't you the smarty that reads String Theory and Quantum Mechanics texts before bed time. In response though, there will always be those that are in the positions of power to assign to society what is morally good and bad, an equality like otherwise just won't be possible with how humanity acts as a whole.
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I like cheese.
