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[feelotraveller]

how does it stop itself from being moral nihilism without introducing a universalist basis?

Define universalist basis, in the context of philosophy, my brain and google isn't working properly.  Plus, when I said day to day survival, I meant a more general "overcoming the existential angst of daily drudgery" sort of thing.

As far as morality goes it is the idea that things are right or wrong regardless of time, place or the society that they take place in (they are intrinsically right or wrong).  For example that slavery was always wrong even going back to the ancient greeks or egyptians.  A moral relativist on the other hand is more or less committed to saying that slavery only became wrong in america some time after the declaration of independence. 

The Sartrean(?) existentialist conception of life as essentially meaningless (angst, etc) comes with a lot more baggage than simple moral nihilism.

Hm, so a couple of questions...

Are we sure - how are we to know - that morality exists at all (that it is not an illusionary concept)?  Yeah peer pressure exists, but morality...

And, if not an illusion, what makes it a property of groups and not individuals (or below...)?

That is - in more technical speechmaking - why not nihilism?  (I.e. what could moral relativism invoke to make itself 'right' whilst remaining relativist?)

I think morality is the feeling one gets about an action or an outcome: positive or negative. While this is unique to individuals to some extent (minor differences will emerge) human beings, at least in our society, have a vague but mostly agreed on "morality": e.g. people dying is generally a pity, so is pain, life should be fair to some extent, etc etc. I'll explain why.

Ofc, morality isn't a physically discernible thing like gravity or sodium, or even a rigid mathematical/logical concept like subtraction or truth that is almost unavoidable in maths/language. So moral nihilism is right in that there is no way to work out morality logically or from the universe really.

BUT: torturing old people for sport is wrong. Anyone who disagrees is damaged. Whatever they say, most moral nihilist would balk at actually doing that. So the "there is no real morality" idea, while correct in some ways, isn't very useful in the search for a definition of morality. Because something stops most people, or tries to stop them, doing stuff like torturing old people for sport, and denial of this thing, which we call "morality", is incorrect.

The first bit about feelings is the emotivist approach and one which dissolves morality (right/wrong) into likes/dislikes or feels good/feels bad.  To use your own example what is added by calling the torture of old people for sport 'wrong'?  What makes doing the right thing different from having a good meal, since they both make us feel good?

The second bit about torturing old people being wrong (unless of course we are 'damaged') is an appeal to a universalist morality (it is always wrong though some people are too deranged to see it) so that is not an answer a moral relativist can give.  But in turn the moral relativist can easily point out times and places where torture was not thought to be immoral, say under feudal society, and although the priests of the spanish (and other) inquisitions generally did not carry out their tortures for sport, it is also no doubt true that some of the nobility of that time (and the preceeding couple of centuries) did it precisely for shit and giggles.

Finally, sure morality is often invoked as a reason to do or not do certain things but that does not necessarily make it correct to do so.  The classic problem already posed several times in this thread is that the same thing can be deemed moral in one society (or more generally time and place) and immoral in another.  For the universalist the problem is then which is the real morality?  To take a real world problem is the practice of Clitoridectomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitoridectomy (often known as 'female genital mutilation' which prejudges the issue) right?  I'm guessing that you will probably want to say that it is wrong but the problem is that in large parts of the world it is thought to be commanded (I was going to say sanctioned but it's stronger than that) precisely by morality.

[Max™]

That right there is the PERFECT example!

It is easy to look at female genital mutilation and say we shouldn't do that, but circumcision is still a thing. I would prefer to have chosen that rather than have it done before I was even really aware I existed properly, then I could do so or not for my own reasons. Holding down teenage boys and snipping off foreskins would be obviously horrible, and I'm not interested in getting all ragecharged by delving into fgm more than I have in the past... but doing it to infants is also awful.

[NJW2000]

Sigh. I'm not a moral universalist. I believe that morality is of course personal. All I'm saying is that in order to get a useful general idea of "morality", we need to take an average of the personal moralities of people in society, and exclude outliers. That's the only way we can say something is "immoral" and have it mean more than "I personally disliked that action".

Moral nihilism and relativism is very clever and all, but doesn't fit well with real life, in which society has a fairly clear idea of what is "moral" in regards to harming other people.

I guess that that is emotivist. Of course, there may be no difference in the pleasure got from doing the right thing and from having a nice meal. But if something feels morally good, the way it effects others is often what makes it feel good.

I fully admit that morality is dependent on human attitudes, any other approach (for atheists, at least) is highly questionable. And yeah, if everyone thought that clitorectomy was "right", it would be "right". Morality changes as society changes. However, keep in mind that people know clitorectomy is harmful to women, they just think the benefits outweigh the negatives, and if they percieved it as Western people do (pointless or intentionally disabling mutilation) they would think it was immoral. In that respect, it is similar to circumcision, though fewer people are so set against circumcision. People often confuse different morals with different cost/benefit analyses.

But I'm just giving a definition of what the word "Morality" means working back from the way people use the word. In my opinion, it's the only definition that holds water.

[feelotraveller]

Sheesh, there is so much I want to say to that, and just about none of it nice, so I think I'll leave it up to someone else to comment, or not.      

But so as I don't come across as a total asshat let me attempt to give an aphoristic expression as to what I, personally, think morality is, just in case anyone is interested.  And I'll try my best just to leave it be from there on in...  Btw, a moral problem always consists of the intersection of at least two ethical issues.

Morality is the abscence of thinking in the face of a moral problem. 

[BFEL]

Morality is the abscence of thinking in the face of a moral problem.

Perhaps I'm off base on the meaning, but from what I gather this means that, from your perspective, a "moral" pedophile is one that puts their genitalia in kiddie genitalia, because that is what they would do without thinking about what society would want them to not do.

Not saying you ACTUALLY condone that, just noting that its PROBABLY not a good idea to base your worldview around a single sentence

[NJW2000]

Bumping this because why not.

Free will or determinism, guys? Which side do you come down on? Determinist? Libertarian? Compatibilist? Hard Libertarian ?

[scriver]

I have jokingly described myself as a postdeterminist before.

[misko27]

This thread has proven its Will to Power is superior to the other thread, whose claim to philosophical influence has been proven false by events. This is truly the Uberthread, the Free Spirit of threads.

[wierd]

Aside from the random chaos injected by vacuum fluctuations, the universe appears to follow a strictly deterministic rulebook. That suggests that unless your brain has very bad error correction, you are predominantly deterministic in nature.

[Neonivek]

All I know is that the standard to be progressive is segregation based on race, age, gender, and orientation.

You want to actively boycott other cultures for their protection so that we do not steal their culture and remove their ability to express their culture for their own good, because we would see that expression and in experiencing it we would steal it.

As well that unintentional slights are full blown attacks (Microaggression) and that as a society we have a responsibility to silence and condemn people who have views that are not our own.

Now of course these people of different races, ages, genders, and orientations do not need to speak for themselves, you see if they say a word in contradiction it is only because they are brainwashed. We should be responsible for them and in no way invite them to discourse.

Which would be how current morals work if you want to be a good and progressive person who truly cares about people who aren't white cis gendered males.

[NJW2000]

Aside from the random chaos injected by vacuum fluctuations

Quantum physics, right? Ayer was interesting on that sort of thing.

But now we must ask how it is that I come to make my choice. Either it is an accident that I choose to act as I do or it is not. If it is an accident, then it is merely a matter of chance that I did not choose otherwise; and if it is merely a matter of chance that I did not choose otherwise, it is surely irrational to hold me morally responsible for choosing as I did. But if it is not an accident that I choose to do one thing rather than another, then presumably there is some causal explanation of my choice: and in that case we are led back to determinism.

Things happen randomly (quantum physics, or so it seems, works like this, I think), or they're determined. Neither are the "free will" we think we have.


I tend to think that the conflict comes from the "objective"/scientific* viewpoint - seeing everything, outside the universe - required (in principle) for determinism, and the subjective viewpoint which we actually see the world from (from inside it, missing almost everything). The two aren't compatible, but we use both to get things done.

*Naturally, determinism assumes objective reality etc but not going into that now.


Fakedit: random hiijacking much?

[Sheb]

PTW

[wierd]

The human, subjective viewpoint wants to have someone or something to blame for perceived misfortunes.

That is to say, acknowledging that humans are predominantly deterministic, and that free will is an illusion, (when viewed from sufficiently expanded vantages), leads to the conclusion that people are not responsible for their decisions-- the inputs provided are responsible for creating the framework on which the decisions are made. That means things like the criminal justice system are punishing the wrong thing for undesirable human behavior-- the humans that are misbehaving are predominantly misbehaving due to the programming they received, or the hardware they were born with. Both things they did not choose. This is a VERY unpopular position to take in modern culture, which wants to see "bad things happen to bad people, so they stop being bad." (you know, things like capital punishment, or solitary confinement, or life in prison.)

Thus, the subjective view will favor having these people removed from the major population, to satisfy that desire. This is a kind of local optima, as the removal of such people from the major population will reduce their deterministic tendency to program other humans through social interraction, and thus results in a more harmonious society-- but does so by throwing away humans who did not choose to be they way they are.

The objective/global solution observes that the instinctual desire is the result of biological programming that produces this local optima, and that using the local optima means not reaching for the global optima-- the one where the misbehaving humans are identified, diagnosed, treated, and when they behave properly, re-integrated without stigma.





 

[McTraveller]

In quantum physics, things don't happen randomly, they happen probabilistically.  Subtle but important distinction.

(To be fair, one thing I've not understood exactly is, just what in quantum mechanics is the state evaluator? That is, if QM is a die roll, what "reads" the die? How often is the die rolled? It's almost like all the die evaluate each other... or something...)

The objective/global solution observes that the instinctual desire is the result of biological programming that produces this local optima, and that using the local optima means not reaching for the global optima-- the one where the misbehaving humans are identified, diagnosed, treated, and when they behave properly, re-integrated without stigma.

I don't think you can say global/local optima - you can really only say it's an equilibrium point or maxima/minima in some parameter? "Optimal" presumes some kind of ideal state, and a pure materialist view has no "ideal", just "is".

[wierd]

Within the domain of "ideal human behavior", the solution that closest reaches the global ideal (there are no misbehaving humans; all humans behave within established parameters) is the global optima.

There may be any number of other, local, optima that are stable, but are not the closest to the global ideal. Evolution does not concern itself with ideal solutions-- only solutions that are sufficiently reliable.