The Definition of Morality

Morality is simply the "Belief" each individual holds concerning societal interaction and norms.

 

Well I'm going to move slowly here, but only because this is the first time I've ever heard this guy Kant's name. Let's take his situation about a murderer showing up to your door to kill your buddy. We'll just assume for the sake of argument that you have perfect knowledge of the murderer and his/her intentions, and you (as the unarmed owner of the home) still decide to open the door and engage the murderer verbally. Kant gets all that for free. Seems rather far-fetched but we'll just give it to him.

I'm allowing (if not in my original post, then certainly several times since then) for the moral killing of someone actively trying to take the life of someone else. I give people a ton of moral latitude when they are certain in their minds that they are facing death at the hands of another person. But, you (as the door-opening homeowner) are unarmed and unable to kill the murderer, who may or may not actually be an active threat at that moment anyway, so you're left with saving the life of your buddy with words rather than force. If killing the murderer to save your friend's life is moral (of course once the murder has actually become an active threat), I then have a huge problem saying lying to the murder to save your friend's life is immoral. In fact, that's how I'd prefer we stop murders. Just lie to the guy and he gets arrested later. That'd be great.

Yes, you're lying to him with the intent to save your friend's life; which seems fine. I'd lie to save the life of any innocent person. I'll just tell you now, if you come to my house trying to murder someone inside of it, and I think if I lie to you, you'll go away.. I'm going to lie my ass off. I'm a little confused as to why, to Kant, a lie with intent automatically rules out moral action completely. Just as you can kill within the bounds of morality, you certainly can lie inside the bounds of morality. As I mentioned I know exactly nothing about this Kant fellow, but I'd like to think he'd lie to save a life too.

I've run out of time for the moment, so I'll have to respond this this in a few hours when I get out of class. I haven't forgotten about you!

 

Alright! Sorry for the wait but this one is a bit of a walk and I wanted to be sure I had enough time to get everything I think is relevant in. Firstly, I had some trouble with this one because my definition of morality there in the first post is so very applicable to day-to-day life, and this is just so far outside of the bounds of what I think could actually happen that it nearly monkey-wrenched the whole works. Its going to immediately seem like I'm changing the parameters of what you're postulating here, but just hang with me while I back into this thing and I promise you real answers about exactly what you've posited.

Here we go!

Like I said, this is way outside of the bounds of reality for me, because who the heck is going to continue to enjoy their sandwich to the sounds of a child being strangled? No one who is even remotely concerned about morality. Anyway, its easier (for me) to think of like this; someone (a child) is being strangled, and you as a bystander have two real options. Option A is direct, immediate, physical intervention on your part to step in and save the person's life by engaging the person doing the strangling in a fight; let's say this option results in the strangling victim's life being saved. Option B is effectively non-intervention on your part. You run, or hide, or call the police, or whatever your terrified mind tells you to do because you're actually witnessing someone's life ending and that's (*)(*)(*)(*)ing horrifying; we'll say this option ends in the death of the victim, because your passive attempts to help don't happen fast enough.

By the two rules I've set forth here, obviously option A is justified, everyone gets that. What we have not discussed however, is that option B (effective inaction) is also covered under these two rules. No one would say that a bystander who runs from crimes that could result in death (robberies, fights, active shooter situations, that kind of thing), or calls the police, or hides in a dumpster, acts immorally. Just because you have the moral right to interfere in these types of situations, doesn't mean you have the moral obligation. Running away from a gas station robbery where the robber winds up shooting and killing the clerk is not immoral. We as humans have a HUGE survival instinct, and once it takes over and says "get the hell out of here", guess what? You're laying down shoe leather like a track-star. It is not immoral to leave someone to all but certain death because you're not the one pulling the trigger. You had nothing to do with it. Think back to all the post-school-shooting interviews you've seen where people said they heard shots and they just ran for their lives. They acted entirely inside of the bounds of morality by running.

Now let's loop this back around to the hypothetical situation where someone witnesses a child being strangled by an adult, and continues to eat their sandwich (that may be the most uncomfortable sentence I've ever typed). Does this innocent by-stander with his/her sandwich act immorally by continuing to eat their sandwich? I'd have to say no. As way way way out of reality as this idea is, and as much as no one without deeply psychotic tendencies and mental illness would ever do that, continuing to eat while someone else strangles a child has to be inside the bounds of morality, because you are in no way participating in the immoral act. Just in the same way that running away from the exact same situation resulting in the child's death is inside the bounds of morality, so is any other type of effective inaction that results in the child's death.

Its terrible, its awful, its quite nearly impossible, and as uncomfortable as it is, inaction on that level is inside the bounds of morality.

Thanks for your input.

 

I can simplify it even further:

Listen to your conscience and let it guide your actions rather than trying to bend your conscience to justify your actions.

 

The manifest conflict between your intuition and your intellect is well nigh impossible to miss. Happily, in this case it's also pretty obvious that the output of your intellect is about as wrong as anything could possibly be.

 

Indeed sir! In this entirely hypothetical and highly unlikely case, my conscience is wholly at odds with my logical conclusion, I'll give you that without one moment's hesitation. But one thing I don't think you've noticed here is that is entirely the point. Let's remove the hypothetical entirely, and go with something real and tangible. Any old hot-button topic will do, but for the sake of argument let's use alcohol.

If my intuition tells me that alcohol is bad. If my life experience tells me that alcohol only leads to death, violent fights, and abuse, I might then be able to fool myself into thinking that the very act of drinking an alcoholic beverage is immoral. If I let my intuition (tainted with negativity towards alcohol) make that decision, I make the wrong decision. I may let my conscience, my intuition, my emotions or whatever you'd like to call it blind me to the fact that the consumption of alcohol is perfectly moral so long as the one doing the consuming isn't hurting or endangering anyone else. Our intuition more often than not will make the wrong decision. That's just how it is. There's far too many variables from person-to-person that color these parts of our thought processes for that to be an effective judge of morality.

It seems far better to me to have a system in place from which we can pull logical conclusions. Is this 2-condition system the answer? No. The perfect set of boundaries may have 10 items, or 1000 items, but the point is we can put words to them. We have this commonality between us that we can spell out in words that we both understand. Could this system yield some pretty crappy answers? Yes. But its better than letting our emotions override our quiet, logically-based decision making. Drawing moral conclusions and making moral decisions must not be made from the part of us that would shout down real truth.

 

It doesn't. It tells you alcohol can be abused like anything else.

It doesn't. That's a conclusion improperly drawn by your intellect.

You are conflating things that ought not be conflated. There is nothing emotional (as the term is commonly used) about intuition.

As I noted in post #24, that's not a fact at all.

Obviously you don't understand what intuition is.

 

Ya know, I see quote mining quite a lot and it never seems to help or contribute very much to the conversation at hand. I'm sorry but I just can't pull anything useful from this post. Instead of telling me what I don't understand, why not take an extra 5 or 6 minutes and explain it? Instead of saying that I am wrong, why not tell me exactly in plain English why I'm wrong rather than back-quoting something I've already said I don't understand. As an added bonus, I've laid out a decently logical argument, so if my logic is flawed, find a place in it and tell me where the logic breaks down, and then tell me how that new line of thinking would come out differently on the other side.

It just seems to me that if presented with complete ideas that rise at least to the level of semi-coherency, a thinking person would be able to deliver better than "I have a different definition for that word than you do" followed by "This is covered in the stuff you've already informed me that you don't understand and I haven't elaborated on beyond telling you that you don't understand it".

If you have real answers, I'd love nothing more than to read and discuss them after honest contemplation of the ideas, but if not, you're doomed to perpetually guarding an empty chest.

 

You missed the entire point.

Its not about an actual murderer coming to get your friend, its about what the morally just thing to do is. The point is that lying is morally unjust, doing something simply for the results of the action is morally unjust, the only thing that is just is to do an action simply for the sake of the action itself.

The larger point here is that morals has many, many, many definitions even among the most scholarly of people so to say that you can define it one way or the other is simply not true. As you pointed out, you disagree with Kant, which is fine, many people do but that reinforces my point that there ultimately is no definition of morality whatsoever. Your definition holds no more weight then what Kant believes or what I believe and in the end there is nobody who can take all of our opinions and pass judgment and say who is right and who is wrong.

 

I realize Kant most likely took an entire book making the point that doing something for a result is unjust and doing something for the sake of the something is just, so I'll not spend a huge amount of time trying to work the details of the man's logic on that one. I'll just say that I whole-heartedly disagree with Kant's assessment of just and unjust (very slightly different than morality, but we'll go with it) and leave it at that. That's not really what I think we're driving at here anyway.

What I'd really like to get to is you and I. I can't ask Kant questions about what he thinks, but I can ask you. Do you, personally, agree in the broadest of terms with the assessment of morality I put forth in the first post of this thread?

 

Not at all.

I hope I have showed that morality cannot be defined so what you posted would be irrelevant and is simply your opinion of what is moral. What I believe is that society decides what is morally correct and that may fall in line with your views or it may not.

In certain regions of the Middle East it is morally just to stone a woman for adultery and you would say that is wrong whereas I would say that each society is allowed to decide for themselves what is just or not.

Now if our society disagrees with theirs then we also have the option of trying to change their ways as they have the option of trying to change ours but to say that one side is right and the other is wrong simply cannot be done.

 

I think I have to fundamentally disagree with you here. I don't think morality is based on things as lofty as race or ethnicity. It is undeniable that there are some religions have as part of their practice things I would classify as barbaric bordering on inhuman, but these are taught practices. These are learned ideas. When we are born, I don't think if left to our own devices the vast majority of the human race would end up throwing a woman accused of showing her ankles in public into a hole and throwing rocks at her until she dies. I believe this in exactly the same way that I believe racism and bigotry aren't stock equipment when you're born. You learn these ideas. I believe our default setting as human beings is far closer than these two rules here than it is to murdering racist bigots.

I believe there is a universal morality that nearly all people can agree to.

Also as an aside I find it just slightly unsettling when I say "Hey we really shouldn't hurt the people around us unjustly" and someone responds with "Yea screw that noise".

(Obviously I'm having a little fun with that last bit there so please no one take that as an indictment upon anyone's character lol. Its just a joke, I'm just horsing around. )

 

I wholeheartedly disagree and this is THE main point that is discussed between political scientists and has been for centuries. What is the human State of Nature?

Are we generally good or are we generally bad? It is the classic Locke v. Hobbes debate. I happen to think that people are not good, they will act out of self-interest if given the opportunity while people such as yourself think people are generally good.

There is no right answer but the way you believe set's you on the path of what you will decide is morally right. For instance, people such as yourself tend to lean towards liberalism while people like me tend to lean conservative.

 

Morality is a system or doctrine for deciding what's right and what's wrong. What you've offered one such system. Other folks have different systems. *shrug*





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First things first. If you believe in subjectivism in regards to morality, your moral philosophy can't go too far with becoming inconsistent or nihilistic. Whatever you think morality to be might be applicable to you, but unless there is uniformity and objectivity, your morality can't leave your conscious. It only has authority for you and no one else. That is a pretty vapid realization. Most of us really believe in objectivity, we just don't want to admit it or want to use it when convenient. Any discussion on morality must start around these ground or else the discussion there after will probably prove to be circular and ineffective.

 

I don't know where you get the idea that could be done in 5 or 6 minutes - or 5 or 6 hours, or 5 or 6 years - when the recipient of the explanation is sufficiently disconnected from his humanity to declare with a perfectly straight face that eating a hamburger while watching the murder of a child is moral.

You have drawn a conclusion which is most charitably described as spectacularly idiotic on its face. You're welcome.

There is no need of that when the conclusion to which that "logic" has led you is a monument to abject insanity. Your failure to see that can only be due to an emotional investment in the validity of your two sacred cows - er, I mean, premises, along with the idea that morality can be codified in the first place; and until such time as you find it in you to write off that investment, you cannot be reasoned with on this subject.

 

Well, if you'll entertain another question, allow me to pick your brain a bit. I don't know where you are actually from, or where you live (and I'm not asking, no worries haha) but the odds that you live in the same community as I do with the exact same set of social mores is highly unlikely. But, think back through your life for a moment. Think of every single person you've ever come in contact with; and not just the one's you've talked to. I mean every single person you've ever passed on the street, every person you've ever ridden the bus with, every person you've ever sat beside at lunch, or at a movie, everyone. Odds are the actual number of people reaches into the tens of thousands. I'd imagine its just about the same for everyone (more or less).

The odds are these many, many thousands of people have origins all over the world and have been brought up under just about every set of social parameters we could both imagine. So, if there is no commonality between peoples, what kept every single one of those people from producing a blunt object of their preference and stove-piping your head in? Or mine? What force has kept every person I've ever met from stabbing me until I stop moving? Why has not one of these amoral beings given in to their baser instincts and ended my, or your, life? With reason or without reason, it doesn't actually matter.

If there is no moral commonality, and most people will act in their own selfish interests, wouldn't the odds be greatly in favor of one of the huge number of people you've met offing you for whatever reason they deemed appropriate?

Yea I think this line of conversation has entirely broken down now haha. I will say however that the correct reaction to a logical conclusion you disagree with isn't "Well I don't like it, so its wrong". You actually have to find something logically or factually wrong that you can articulate, rather than just dismissing something that might very well be truth. Truth is more important.

 

Morality is any claim or statement of the form "you ought to x"

 

Which has nothing to do with me, obviously, since my reaction is to note that your conclusion is, as you obviously know yourself, objectively idiotic. This being the case, your correct reaction would be to stop and wonder what impelled you to believe anything so preposterous, let alone say it out loud.

Actually I don't have to do a damn thing.

Please, I'd have to be a disgracefully credulous cull even to consider that possibility for a NY second in this case.

Not to you, it isn't.

 

Well sir, I leave you to the impenetrable close-minded certainty that you enjoy inside of your own mind, and bid you luck wrestling the idea that offering an entirely absurd set of circumstances may not yield the answer you unilaterally predetermined to be the correct one.

Once again, thank you for your input. It was a heck of a ride.

 

Declaring that immoral assumes certain things, however.

A: That you are in a position to do something about it. What if you can see it but can't get to it, because it's visible, but behind locked doors that you have no access to.

B: That you are CAPABLE of doing something about it. What if the guy doing the choking is 7'1", and 374 lbs of solid muscle? I don't know about you, but absent the help of about 12 or 15 other people, I would be incapable of physically interfering with such an individual, and might end up being his next victim merely by making an inevitably ineffective attempt to try.

I agree the concept is somewhat esoteric, and no "normal" person is going to sit and continue eating a sandwich whilst watching a child being choked to death. I certainly would not. But what I WOULD do about it is totally dependent on variables that are way too numerous to come up with an exhaustive list of "acceptable" actions. For example, if I'm armed, the fact that the guy is 7'1" and 374 lbs of solid muscle becomes somewhat irrelevant. But what if I'm not?

 

The fact that we as a society have created punishments for those actions. It has nothing to do with morality.

That was an easy one to answer.

If you take away laws and punishment then you have three things that can happen.

1) Everyone starts looking out for their own self-interests at the expense of others if need be.

2) Everyone comes together in a giant Kumbaya moment and works to make the world a better place.

3) You have factions of like minded people that develop and start competing for control with the strongest gaining the upper hand over the rest.

You seem to think that option 2 will be the likely result of peoples inherent morality, I do not. You can see examples of the true nature of people everywhere you look, go to the shopping mall and see people cutting out others for that parking spot, or shoplifting......what I believe would happen if you remove laws is that society would break apart into the good and the bad with the bad winning in the short-term because of their ability to do whatever it takes to survive.

My neighbor has a dog that whines incessantly all night long. I have tried to speak to him and reason with him but he does nothing. If there were no punishment for action I would peek over the wall, shoot his dog, and proceed to make that man understand the error of his ways.

That would not be the moral thing to do but it would happen.

 

Actually it doesn't assume either, but I'm not nearly dumb enough to try to explain it to a professed unrepentant serial adulterer.

 

Hmm.. Laws set forth by governments and courts are the main factor controlling the actions of the people. So that's why no one smokes pot!.. Wait.. Damn..

Haha but in seriousness I think you have it exactly backwards here. I don't think the law against murder is 100% of every person's decision to not become a high-speed death machine. Have people used the legal consequences of murder to talk themselves down in the heat of the moment? I'm sure they have and I'm glad for that, but we don't murder because its immoral, not because its illegal. If it were legal tomorrow to kill without cause, I don't think you (the 'you' typing, not the imaginary 'you' I like to use so much) would hop on the back of a jeep and go mow down everyone in sight with an M-60. It just wouldn't happen. Your neighbor's dog is a slightly different story..

If making things illegal made people not do them, we wouldn't have murder at all (or drunk drivers, or drug users, or domestic violence, or rape, or any other number of illegal things). The reality here is that the VERY small percentage of people who lack the same moral barrier to senseless murder that the rest of us posses don't then give one warm rat turd about what a court has to say about it. I can't imagine legality enters into their thinking at all except for the fleeting moment they tell themselves "Doesn't matter I wont get caught". Even the death penalty (which by-the-by I am opposed to, but you wont find that shocking at all I imagine haha) isn't a strong enough deterrent to stop murder.