Posted by alexandra_k on May 20, 2005, at 5:53:50
In reply to Re: The difference between eating meat and rape, posted by so on May 20, 2005, at 0:10:43
> I think you are saying torturing babies is wrong because it's wrong, not because most people think it's wrong.
Thats the idea, yes.
If most people thought it was morally acceptable - then most people would be wrong ;-)>It is a tempting and popular notion, but I don't find it the only way to see things.
Actually, it is an unpopular notion at present. People don't like moral realism (there are universal, objective moral truths) because they think it leads to cultural insensitivity.
> It might be that inhumane behavior weakens a society, so immorality is a set of behaviors known by the informed to be threatening to social structures. But that wouldn't be wrong is wrong because it's wrong ... that would be wrong is wrong because it keeps people from getting what they want e.g. stable societies.Ok. So on this view you might say that the 'good' is stable society. Anything that promotes stable society is morally acceptable and anything that works to the detriment of stable society is morally wrong. This could be your candidate of a universal moral law. It is a little like utilitarianism where morality is about 'the greatest good for the greatest number of people'. They then need to say more about the greatest good and more about how we are supposed to work the stats (figure out the greatest number). You would need to say more about what a stable society is. If you can think of an example of 'inhumane behaviour' that didn't negatively impact on societies stability then your theory might run into problems...
> I would prefer to live among people who hold against the torture of babies for any reason,Lets say you are held at gunpoint...
'Torture this baby - or we will torture fifty babies'.
What should you do?
If you torture the one baby then you have done something morally wrong (if it is a universal law that torturing bables is wrong)...
But if you do not torture the one baby then you will have allowed 49 babies to be tortured when you could have prevented it...
The point is: is it always wrong to torture a baby or can we think an exception. In this case it seems that the morally right desision would be to torture the one to save the 49.Thats why there is the 'for fun' clause.
To rule out the above objection...>and I am willing to use violence to have my way in that particular matter.
Hmm.
Heard of the saying 'violence breeds violence'???>Nonetheless, I was born into a world where babies are allowed to suffer for no apparent reason, and their suffering can be described as nothing more than "natural", as described on death certificates citing "natural causes". I don't think many of us would conclude, however, that nature is immoral.
Of course not. Nature isn't a moral agent. It can't be a moral agent because it isn't even an agent in the first place. Only moral agents are held morally accountable for their actions.
> All we can say conclusively is that probably a majority of people throughout history have considered it wrong to severely torture a baby for fun, or to let babies suffer needlessly when it can be avoided.Sure. But you can't derive an ought from an is. It doesn't follow from any completed description of the way the world is - what people should and shouldn't do. Sometimes people do do wrong. That seems to be a fact.
> To understand the difficulty of saying anything is anything, we first have to understand that our very language is a construct -- something we made up. We can say an object has a certain portion of carbon because we have described carbon, and declared quantities by which it is a consistently measurable concept. But right and wrong, no matter how definative we might hope those ideas to be, are just that -- constructs describing the right or wrong way toward a certain goal. And that goal is something we choose to construct, unless beliefs about a supernatural entity having goals for our lives are in fact truths.
Yes. We do need to choose our goal.
It is arguable whether ethics requires a goal or not. Utilitarianism considers that there is the goal or the desire to 'achieve the greatest good for the greatest number'. Kant didn't like this line. He thought desire / goals had no place in ethics. He thought that ethics was about REASON. He thought that immoral actions were inconsistent in that the moral agent does something that they could not will to be a universal moral law (they could not will that everyone do to them what they just did..). He thought ethics was solely a rational affair.With respect to words...
It is true that we arbitrarily attach words as 'name tags' to things. Some of our words don't seem to refer to anything in the real world, however. Some of our words... like god etc... it can be hard to tell.I think that right and wrong
Good and bad are relative to goals.
But that being said - If I had the goal to kill as many people as possible then we would tend to say that that is a morally reprehensible goal. So maybe goals can be morally evaluated too.. Maybe Kant was right and right and wrong is purely a rational affair...I don't know...
I'm no ethicist.
>However, there is far less concensus around any morally absolute standards than there is around basic science.Just as much.
I dare say. Just as much. Basic science is more controversial than you might think...
> All we can say for sure is that you and I prefer people not to torture babies for fun,But I want to say more than that.
I want to say people SHOULD NOT torture babies.
That torturing babies for fun is morally unacceptable.
Not just 'my preferance is that you don't and your preference is that you do and I can't tell you what to do and everyone is just entitled to their own opinion...'.
Nope.
IMO that is a little too tolerant...> then back to your meat eating quandry, which I did not appreciate being compared to rape,
I prefer the racisism analogy myself... Perhaps I should stick to that one...
>It's not that lack of compassion is bad,
??? Are you sure?
>but rather, that if we want certian things such as peace among people, we do best to expand our capacity for compassion.
>But that's only if we want peace. It doesn't make peace right.Thats a different claim from the one I was making. That claim assumes that morality is dependent on our having certain goals / desires. That wasn't what I wanted to say.
My thought was that there may be an inconsistency between:
Thinking internet hunting is wrong AND that hunting IRL is morally acceptable.
Thinking what people *do* do shows us something about what people *should* do AND considering that things people have done to be morally unacceptable (with respect to individuals and also cultures - e.g., the holocaust)
Thinking racism is unacceptable AND speciesm is acceptable (with regard to the interests of other races / species being taken as seriously as our own).>Declaring it right might win a few converts,
My aim isn't to 'declare it right'. That is too easy. I declare it right you declare it wrong and we haven't gotten anywhere. I try to argue for why it is inconsistent to go one way on one case and a different way on another... If you want to engage you need to come up with some reason why the cases are relevantly different...
>but it might also alienate warriors, hunters and carnivores. Espousing the benifits of peace might more likely persuade swing voters.
I'm not trying to win votes.
Just trying to get people to think...Maybe there is a defensible difference and I just can't see it...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:498173
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20050509/msgs/500232.html