If Mort Divine ruled the world

I hope it isn't a begrudging "fucking teachers"... :D

There's so much written on moral philosophy and the critique of morality that's worth exploring. You can probably find a lot of it online now. Nietzsche's book is one of the most important for moral thought in the twentieth century. Additionally, several analytic philosophers have written on ethics.

You were right to point out at the beginning that I'm allergic to morality. I'm wary of claims to objective morality because such claims are often used to justify horrific acts, even if these claims don't begin that way. For example, the Nazi treatment of Jews was considered a moral issue (there was a book published on this in 2014: Nazi Ideology and Ethics). The Spanish Inquisition was morally directed, as were the Crusades. The Islamic treatment of women and gays that you've discussed a lot on this forum is also fueled by morality. Obviously, we can say that many of these moral outlooks are misguided, misdirected, or just flat out wrong; but unfortunately, because of its very personal, internal quality, there's no way to prove one morality over another. So it ends up reducing to force. If I can force my morality on you, then that morality must be the right one.

Morality deals in absolutes, ethics deals in situational circumstances. If you have a personal morality, or think it's innate, I have no problem with that. I get nervous about arguments that look to enforce absolute morality in an institutional or social manner. Morality, when institutionalized, is the stuff of monarchs and despots; ethics is a democratic discourse on just treatment of individuals. The scary thing about ethics is that, because it's not absolute, there can certainly be violent and ugly misuses of ethics; but because they aren't absolute, there will always be the opportunity to improve them.

Anyway, sorry to keep harping on this.
 
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I think that's also part of why I might prefer morality as a concept to ethics, because there are many things that I would deem immoral regardless of the situation.

Also, I think ethics are also prone to misuse like morality is as you pointed out, for example justifying an immoral act by claiming the situation called for it. One might say the actions of the Nazis weren't only justified with appeals to morality but also with ethical logic that bends and flexes depending on the situation and it's requirements in the minds of the actors.

But anyway I cede, I was confused or retarded or something, I meant innate. This comes from growing up in bush communities where there is barely any governing and certain moral actions are simply expected of everyone. It's faith-based yet surprisingly consistent, so it felt like an objective position when really it wasn't.
 
That's not what I was trying to say. I was making a point about CIG's reference to morality beyond social discourse.

I tend to think that when people talk about secular morality, they're actually talking about ethics. If morality is innate, or personal, then the only way to effectively communicate it is ethics--a discourse that establishes conventions for social justice and responsibility. Beyond that, it doesn't really matter much since I don't have access to anyone else's interior moral compass. All I can do is engage them in discourse, and that gives rise to ethics.

If we discount ethics and attempt to qualify morality on its own grounds--that is, as an innate, or personal, sense of right and wrong--then we encounter a question: what gives rise to this innate sense of right and wrong? Secular moralists will say that you don't need religion in order to experience a sense of morality, and I would agree. But then, I can't access your interior sense of right and wrong anymore than I can access my cat's thoughts. I can, however, participate in ethical discussions over the institution of right and wrong in our social order; I can't do that with my cat.

My point is that bypassing ethics (social discourse) and elevating morality as a practiceable, or actionable, sense on which to base social institutions necessitates some kind of religiosity: it demands not that we argumentatively or logically prove/know each other's morality, but that we believe in it--that we have faith in it.

So to clarify, I don't think you need spirituality or religion in order to explain a personal sense of right and wrong (I would argue that such personal senses probably arise from a mixture of socialization and the biological/cognitive capacity for empathy); but I do think you need it in order to implement or institutionalize morality sans ethical discourse.
 
I think I understand where CIG is coming from and agree with him that morality is like a form of common sense. While I do not believe it to be objective (Ein's #1 trigger word, lol), I believe that the mind of every sane individual at least has a moral compass that points in roughly the same direction. I also think it would be a mistake to discredit a generalized morality as a concept just because it can be corrupted, or because violations of it can be justified. While morality may be a vague concept with more grey areas than black and white ones, I still feel as though there is some universality in the concept. I realize than I am injecting emotion into my stance, but isnt morality just an emotional and visceral response

Einherjar86 said:
I tend to think that when people talk about secular morality, they're actually talking about ethics. If morality is innate, or personal, then the only way to effectively communicate it is ethics--a discourse that establishes conventions for social justice and responsibility. Beyond that, it doesn't really matter much to me since I don't have access to anyone else's interior moral compass. All I can do is engage them in discourse, and that gives rise to ethics.

If we discount ethics and attempt to qualify morality on its own grounds--that is, as an innate, or personal, sense of right and wrong--then we encounter a question: what gives rise to this innate sense of right and wrong? Secular moralists will say that you don't need religion in order to experience a sense of morality, and I would agree. But then, I can't access your interior sense of right and wrong anymore than I can access my cat's thoughts. I can, however, participate in ethical discussions over the institution of right and wrong in our social order; I can't do that with my cat.
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While there may be a bit of grey area, I think that the mind of every sane individual at least has a moral compass that points in roughly the same direction. It is an undefinable abstraction, a visceral response with an appeal to one's emotions, so there are bound to be some discrepancies from one person to another. But I would have a hard time believing people could organize to the level that they have already without a significantly large portion of universal common ground. An analysis of genetics might be able to provide a non-emotional backbone to this argument, but at the moment I realize that this stance is no stronger than speculation. I theorize that the answer to the question of what gives rise to this innate sense of right and wrong is inherently biological, most likely with ties to survival. Humans survive in this environment in numbers, and to gather numbers there must be some sort of innate compatibility.

You can probably argue that ethical discussions were just as pivotal in the context of survival, which is entirely true. However I think it is evident that every human civilization has a significant amount of common ground with the rest of mankind. This imo shows evidence that there is common innate morality in everyone.

Einherjar86 said:
My point is that bypassing ethics (social discourse) and elevating morality as a practiceable, or actionable, sense on which to base social institutions necessitates some kind of religiosity: it demands not that we argumentatively or logically prove/know each other's morality, but that we believe in it--that we have faith in it.
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As a significant social construct, I would agree that morality itself would not be enough to be practiceable. It worked enough for humans to survive before the utilization of language in a society, but appealing to morality itself is not enough to invoke more than individual justice. However, without some sort of innate morality a system of ethics would fall on it's face before it can gain any lasting traction. Some sort of faith is inherent in both scenarios you present (be it ethical points agreed upon by social discourse, or the assumption that everyone is already on the same page).

As far as subjecting other animals to the concept of morality, why not? There are many animals in the animal kingdom that possess consciousness and dont merely react in a pre-programmed way to their environment. What is it that dictates kind behavior within their familial/pack units? It might be a bit primitive, but many animals exhibit organized social behavior that imo looks like a rudimentary form of morality.
 
EternalMetal said:
As far as subjecting other animals to the concept of morality, why not? There are many animals in the animal kingdom that possess consciousness and dont merely react in a pre-programmed way to their environment. What is it that dictates kind behavior within their familial/pack units? It might be a bit primitive, but many animals exhibit organized social behavior that imo looks like a rudimentary form of morality.
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I'm curious what you mean by animals possessing consciousness. My feeling is that some animals "sort of" possess consciousness (which is what Daniel Dennett says about animals), but we can't say that they possess consciousness as humans do.

And that would be why, in my opinion, we can't accuse animals of being immoral. If morality is personal, and animals can't even communicate their morality to us, then it makes no sense to accuse animals of being immoral. As far as ethics go, they may have social structures of their own; but they don't have the capacity to participate in our social discourses. We can have our own ethics about the treatment of animals, but there's no social contract between animals and humans that enables an ethical responsibility for animals.
 
All animal activity is a function of practicality it seems.

EternalMetal said:
But I would have a hard time believing people could organize to the level that they have already without a significantly large portion of universal common ground.
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This is why the tale of Moses is such tripe, if there were no shared moral understandings of right and wrong before Moses retrieved the stone tablets, they wouldn't have even made it halfway to Sinai to find out what they aren't and are allowed to do.
 
CASSETTEISGOD said:
All animal activity is a function of practicality it seems.
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Almost, I'd say; but there are compelling examples of animals doing shit just for the hell of it.

For instance, there have been reports of dolphins saving humans from sharks. Not sure what the practical impetus is there.

For me, animals are an indeterminate issue. They're often more complex than we give them credit for, and yet there's no way to extend to them a kind of agency that we construct for ourselves. For me, I try to think of all organisms on a spectrum of intelligence, of which consciousness is only one form. Other animals can be just as intelligent as humans (if not more than), but unfortunately the communication barrier makes the question of ethics interminably complicated.
 
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Good point. Could it be that, similar to how sharks mistake humans for other animals, dolphins also mistake us? That might make sense in a community-animal context. But either way animals are definitely strange and complex things.
 
There's "quite a response" to millions of controversies. Pepsi chooses to back down, while Trump chooses not to. It's not exactly censorship we're talking about here.
 
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Sorry, tried to reword it, but I assume by "they have won" you were referring to some form of censorship.
 
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