Can anyone really BE a moral relativist?

Goes to motive. Check criminal law for details..

Two men A and B commit the same act X of dropping a bowling ball on your foot.

A did X on purpose. B did X by accident.

A's act was wrong. B's act wasn't wrong. But it wasn't right therefore either.

Being nice to your neighbor and talking to them is doing good. Not doing anything is simply not doing anything.

Motivation again. One isn't motivated not to kill. One just doesn't do it because they have no motivation to kill. But to kill you have to be motivated. As I said before, an act is moral or immoral according to motivation. And people don't neglect to do things out of motivation.

We're talking about self-congratulation for moral action. And that's why nobody claims credit for not doing things. Because it's not a moral act to do nothing.

Relative morality says what you chose to do is only right for you. In other words, no moral principle exists to justify it. If you generalize to saying it was right given my circumstances, you're saying it is right for anyone under those circumstances. And that makes you an absolutist. Thus the OP..that noone can really be a moral relativist, otherwise what's the point of moralizing/idealizing your action? You universalize the moment you morally judge something. Which means you say my action was more than just my preference or rational choice. That it was the right thing to do. "Right" meaning right for anyone placed in your same situation.

People wouldn't feel guilty or have a conscience if they believed their actions were obligated to an objective principle? How does that follow? Ofcourse people feel guilty for not following principles. What other way is there TO feel guilty?

 

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GAWWWD! I was just about done responding to you Balerion, and I pushed the wrong button and lost the whole damn thing! Give me till tomorrow. My eyes are getting tired. @#$@#$@#$$@##%%

 

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Similar thing happened to me yesterday. Had the post completed, pressed the button, and discovered my internet was out. Back button didn't help me.

Take your time.

 

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My problem was suddenly I was way down on the thread page and I thought the edit part was gone. Then I back buttoned it and then it was really gone. Apparently in computerland backbuttons only work whenever the hell they want to.

 

Again, if you look at the things called moral by religion, each one was designed to optimize the group, not the individual. The first commandment is about being only one God. If we have more than one version of God, or no god plus god, there will be social conflict. The group is not optimized. It is not about magic but science.

Ethics is where we include the needs of the individual. Freedom of speech is not moral but it is ethical allowing all POV's. The group has enough surplus capital, which in this cases is tolerance. But that tolerance can get depleted and the group can suffer; yell fire.

Large government is immoral because it is wasteful and redundant therefore uses too much resources. But ethically, we can support big government up to a certain point or until the economy suffers.

One does not need a lot of morals to optimize the group. This is why there are only ten commandments. But ethics take up volumes or tens of thousands of pages because it is a means to waste resources, not optimize them. Any dummy can be wasteful. Illegal aliens are immoral since they act like thieves sneaking into a country. But ethically, people feel the need to allow this; rich country.

An interesting application of morality is that historically the rich got to be immoral. One reason this was allowed is they can afford to pay their own way and thereby would not deplete group resources. The hunter would add resources. The divine right of kings allowed kings to decide on life and death. Thous shall not kill was waived, because he could afford to kill in ways that help to optimize the group. In modern times, the poor want this too, but add to social costs; this make it immoral.

I look at moral and immoral as meaning group optimized or not. Ask yourself what optimizes large groups and you will find that religions used objectivity to define sets of objective criteria. Ethics are not objective but benefit by emotional appeal and spin. Ethics is relative due to being subjective.

 

Abject nonsense. Some of the greatest conflicts humanity has ever seen have been between believers in the same god.

 

I just had to post about this this morning. Last night I dreamed I was singing the old Pete Seger/Byrds' song "To everything , turn turn turn, there is a season." That song is actually based on some verses in the Bible:


Ecclesiastes 3

King James Version (KJV)

3 "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

9 What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?

10 I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.

11 He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."

In a weird turn of events it appears the Bible here was supporting moral relativism, God or "heaven" being the moral relativist here. Now I don't place any special revelatory power in my dreams. And I certainly don't believe in the Bible. But I DO think dreams express unconscious issues we are trying to process. Maybe relativism has a more solid basis in myself that I have admitted. It's worth reconsideration on my part. Frankly, I think there's some happy medium somewhere between absolutism and relativism. But I just haven't found it yet.

 

But you can only infer what the motivation was from extenal signs. You can't know what the internal motivation really was. If B apologizes and seems to feel bad, you assume he did it by accident but he might only be pretending. There is no way to tell from an acton itself what the motivation was for the action, so motivation is not a useful means of determining what is moral.

Okay, so DOing something isn't really that hard after all. It doesn't require any saintly sacrifices. But where do you draw the line between "being nice to your neighbour and talking to them" and doing nothing? If I say, "Hi," to my neighbour once in twenty years, does that count as "good"? What's the minimum number of words you need to say to distinguish between doing anything and not doing anything?

Sure we are. We're motivated by fear of the consequences. It's a motivation to do nothing instead of something.

No, relative morality says that in different circumstances the same act may be moral or immoral. Killing ten peple might be immoral in most circumstances but if you kill them to save twenty, that might be considered "more moral". If we have to decide which of two acts is "more right" or "less wrong", we are exercising relative morality.

No you're not. Relative morality has nothing to do ith woo-woo general principles. It's about actually deciding what's right or wrong in this situation at this time. It's definitely not about deciding what somebody else should do in a similar situation at a different time. It's how morality actually works on a daily basis.

No we don't. The key word is "feel". We feel guilty. We don't drag out the rule book to decide whether we "should" feel guilty or not. It's visceral. We feel it like we feel pain.

 

Ofcourse you discern motivation. If the guy was a stranger or a friend and it obviously slipped out of his hand then it was probably an accident. If the guy was someone that had it in for you and tossed the ball, then yeah it was on purpose.We accurately infer motivation all the time. It's how our court system works.

Saying hi! and chatting every time you run into each other would be good action. Just acknowledging you with hi! as you would any stranger isn't good action. It's just standard etiquette. This isn't rocket science.

Maybe you are. I'm not. I don't even think about killing anyone. Nothing motivates me to do it. Therefore nothing is required to de-motivate me to not do it.


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And in choosing one act as moral as opposed to another you are saying everyone in that same situation should do the same. Otherwise it isn't morality. It's just what you choose to do for your own reason.

Woo woo? Is this what this is about? That absolutism supports some sort of supernaturalism.? You should brush up on ethics. Alot of people believe in absolute moral values without positing a magical source for them. And yes it is about deciding what other people should do. Or else you wouldn't think of it as THE right thing to do. You'd just call it my choice and be done with it. Rightness and wrongness are objective properties that transcend one's own choices. There is no such thing as a private moral principle.

A principle doesn't have to be a rule. In fact the best ones go beyond rule-based morality (legislating morality again). A principle can rest totally on a felt value, for instance that humans deserve equal respect regardless of who they are. If you hold to this principle, you do indeed feel guilty if you violate it. How can you not?

 

The thing I've been trying to stress - though not too clearly, I'm afraid - is that you can be a moral absolutist and I can be a moral relativist and neither of us have to be in conflict with each other. After all, most of the things you've said about human responsibility are things I fully endorse. That's probably the biggest reason I'm a liberal; it's the only political philosophy that seems to give a crap about your fellow citizen. I do believe we should all be treated equally, and that we all have qualities that are inherent to our humanity. The difference between us - and seemingly the only difference between us, morally - is that we disagree on where the morals come from. But, honestly, do you see that as a problem? I really don't. I don't demand that you view things my way, and don't ask you to accept my ethics as valid, just as I wouldn't accept yours if I found them lacking. So the only really important thing is whether we agree on the actual principles, not whether or not they're objective. Don't you think?

 

In that case, there's no such thing as "morality" because nobody does that. We ask ourselves, "What's the right thing to do right now?" We don't project that decision on anybody else. Choosing to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing is morality.

Well, to "alot" of us it isn't. When I choose between right and wrong, I am not making any pronouncements for anybody else. I might think that other people make the wrong choices but that isn't a universal pronouncement either.

What you're saying isn't that I can't be a moral relativist. What you're saying is that my decisions about right and wrong have nothing to do with morality at all - that "alot" of us make decisions of right or wrong that have nothing to do with morality.

You're just misunderstanding what morality is. Maybe English isn't your first language?

The don't think of it as THE right thing to do. I think of it as the right thing to do. That isn't projecting it beyond the present situation. It's my choice of the right thing to do in the preent situation.

Think of it as a Venn diagram. Each one of us has his own private moral principles. Where our circles overlap, we have group moral principles. The largest area of overlap is the morality of our society.

I personally don't feel that humans deserve equal respect; I think they do. If I step on somebody's foot, I feel bad. I feel their pain (psychologically, not physically). It's called empathy. I can't feel something abstract like respect. I don't feel guilty for disrespecting somebody.

And I don't project what I do feel onto anybody else. If I feel that I have done something wrong (i.e. I feel guilty), I don't assume that everybody else should have the same feeling.

 

Yes..and we DO agree on the principle of equality as well as tolerance. There is in this sense a great moral conscience behind relativism itself because it says we SHOULD tolerate other people's ideologies and moral principles. My question is how far to go with this. Do we say that because terrorist morality dictates flying planes into American skyscrapers that we must respect that morality as just as valid as our own? Do we say the Nazis had the right to incinerate Jews and take over Europe because they had the right to their own morality? My very belief in tolerance and equality entails that I believe intolerance and discrimination are just plain immoral, and on a universally human basis. It seems to me that moral relativism taken to extremes will simply deny the existence of immorality and crime altogether since we certainly have no right to impose our own morality on those who have different moralities. I was talking to a vet at the VA this morning and he mentioned gang members who are respected as "triple strikers" for taking out three people in a drive-by. I said how ridiculous, that a morality could be based on taking life. Am I wrong to impose my moral values on gang members as well? This seems to me to be a major dilemma for the moral relativist. What do you think is the solution?

 

I'm quoting this first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry under "morality" to show that objectifying an action as good or bad IS morality. And when you objectify, you necessarily DE-subjectify. You say, "This act or motive or person has such and such properties for me and for everyone else." If morality DIDN'T do this there'd never be any agreement about what is we should do. Everyone would be running around doing this and that with no appeal to a common principle that we could all agree on. That wouldn't be a moral society. It'd be a society of anarchists..sociopaths..amoralists.

"Morality (from the Latin moralitas "manner, character, proper behavior") is the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are "good" (or right) and those that are "bad" (or wrong). The philosophy of morality is ethics. A moral code is a system of morality (according to a particular philosophy, religion, culture, etc.) and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness." Immorality is the active opposition to morality (i.e. opposition to that which is good or right), while amorality is variously defined as an unawareness of, indifference toward, or disbelief in any set of moral standards or principles.[1][2][3][4] An example of a moral code is the Golden Rule which states that, "One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself."--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality

 

I guess I just don't see tolerance as a quality of relativism itself. Maybe that's the heart of our disagreement. I totally agree that if it were, one could make the case you're making now, it's just that I don't see it as being the case.

To me, relativism itself doesn't have any qualities. It's kind of like the difference between there being one universe and there being an infinite amount of universes: It's not that we think those other universes should be considered equal to ours, it's just that we recognize their existence. But maybe that's not what it means for everyone? I can't really speak to that. All I can tell you is that it certainly doesn't mean that to me, and I don't feel any inner conflict as a result, so maybe that could make you feel better about it. Again, that's up to you.

 

Your own Wiki quote doesn't say anything about objectifying or subjectifying. It doesn't support your position in any way.

We argue about what we "should" do because we all have different ideas of what we should do. That's what relative morality means. There simply is no agreed-on set of principles, even if we wish there was.

Yes, that's what we have. We don't have a "moral society". We have a society in which some actions are moral and some are not - and we don't always agree which is which.

It would be a society which includes anarchists, sociopaths and amoralists. That's what our society is. The ones wo conform more-or-less to the group standards of morality are not considered to be anarchists, sociopaths or amoralists.

Incidentally, a sociopath is somebody who acts against what society thinks its best interests are. The specifics of sociopathy necessarily vary from one society to another.

 

We're not talking about a man who thinks it justified to kill communists or gays. We're talking about a man who thinks it justified to kill THIS person right now. The justification may be that he hates communists or that he hates gays or that the person is about to chop up a child with an axe. Every moral decision is an individual decision. He may have an overall moral code which serves as framework for his decisions and his own moal code may conform to the broader moral code of society but all of his actual moral decisions are necessarily individual.

That is not the nature of morality. Your own Wiki article doesn't support that position.

 

Having trouble with the concept of "objectify" I see. Here's what it means:

"To turn into an object or to cause to have objective properties".

Now since to call an act or intention or person "good" or "bad" is to cause those to have objective properties that are experiencable by anyone, morality objectifies value. It says the property of goodness or badness exists in the act or intention or person themselves. I thought that was obvious.

Wow we do? I don't remember anyone arguing over whether 911 was good or bad. I don't remember anyone arguing whether the Sandy Hook school shooting was something that should or shouldn't have been done. And I must've missed out on all the philosophical debates happening among people in coffee shops and on the news shows as to whether the Boston Marathon bombing was justified or not. I don't know what kind of universe you think you live in, but it ain't the one I'm living in.

A society made up of a vast majority of moral people all agreeing on the same morals IS a moral society. The few violators, such as sociopaths and nazis and terrorists, we call immoral criminals and lock up in prisons. Surely you know this by now.

Our society is not a society of sociopaths and anarchists and amoralists. It is a society of moralists--the vast majority of which do the right things that everyone else agrees is right. Those who refuse to conform to the prevailing morality by committing crimes we sequester FROM society in prisons. They are NOT part of our society.

A sociopath is one who has no moral conscience and so cannot judge right from wrong. For the relativist the sociopath is a normal functioning human being just doing what he wants to do. To society and the rest of the world sociopathy is a disorder.

 

You're assuming your conclusion. In fact, we call individual actions by individual people "good" or "bad" and we do not have agreement (consensus, objectivity) about what is "good" or "bad" in every specific situation.

I do. The first thing I heard was, "What the fuck!?" and the second thing I head was, "They had it coming."

Sure, your other examples may be almost universally accepted as "bad" but that doesn't mean that you can infer a consensus in every situation. Look it a more ambiguous situation: If you have to decide between saving two lives or three lives, which is the "good" decision and which is the "bad" one?

There's no such thing as a moral society. A so-called "moral society" is still capable of committing vastly immoral acts. Nazi Germany was made up of a vast majority of moral people. America committed a lot of immoral acts in Vietnam. And I'm talking about acts that were judged immoral after the fact by the people who committed them. Yet, at the time they commited them, they considered it their "best" choice.

That's the No True Scotsman fallacy: you're claiming that we're a moral society and that anybody who isn't moral isn't part of our society.

Well, like it or not, they are. Anybody you "socilaize" with is a member of our society. If you talk to somebody at the bus stop about the weather, he's part of your society - even if he's a murderer out on day-parole.

A sociopath is one whose moral decisions don't conform to society's standards. He puts his own sense of "good" and "bad" above the "greater good". Most of us do that sometimes but those we label as "sociopaths do it "too often".

Sociopathy is a social disorder in the same sense that going through red lights is a traffic disorder. It isn't inherently "good" or "bad"; it just messes up traffic/society.

 

We don't? How do we communicate then if we don't have a common understanding of what good and bad means? If someone says "He was a good man" everyone generally knows what that means. We assume the objectivity of the property of good or bad by our reference to it. That's just the way it is.

I didn't. But then I wasn't hanging out in forums where trolls and anonymous conspiracy theorists tend to gather either.

Very very rare situation. We're talking the usual predominate attitude by a society at a certain time. Society is known by its majority sentiment, not by the psycho defections of a minority of malcontents.

Societies can be deluded by immoral politicians and leaders and propaganda. It doesn't change the fact that they are predominately a moral society.

Prisoners are part of society? Not MY society.

I don't socialize with prisoners and criminals.

When we act according to moral principle we are ALL acting according to what we expect everybody to act according to. There is no "moral rightness" in an act if it is just for you. Otherwise why idealize it as "right"? Like ordering a double espresso latte. You just do it cuz that's your preference, not because it's the "right" thing to do.

Pathologization of behavior IS a universal objectification of bad or wrong. IOW, it is a bad state for anybody to be a sociopath. That's why we try to treat them. To get them "better". Psychology immoralizes everything it labels "disorder" or "illness".

 

Everybody has his own idea of what a "good man" is. Some think it's a man who went to church on Sundays. Some think it's a man who treated his family well. Some think it's a man who stood up for what he believed in. Most probably think a "good man" is basically somebody who doesn't do anything specifically bad.

You are talking about a predominant attitude. You are making that assumption. Your own Wiki article doesn't even talk about a predominant attitude.

The fact that there are ambiguous situations, no matter how rare, is why morality must be relative. A rigid, fixed moral structure isn't capable of handling the exceptions.

There is no majority sentiment. We're all malcontents to some degree, or at least we ought to be. Reforms can't happen without malcontents. Some malcontents are labeled "criminals" and some are not. Some criminals may also be quite content.

According to you, they'd have to DO something to be moral. Accoring to me, standing by and watching immoral acts may or may not be immoral. Which is it? Was Nazi Germany a moral society that did nothing to prevent immoral acts? Or did the people just make the best decisions they could under the existing cirumstances?

How do you know? How do you know that guy isn't out on bail or out on parole or on his way to court to be sentenced? How do you know that guy doesn't have a crimnal record?

You're trying to demonize criminals and make them out to be different from you but the fact is that "they" look just like "us" because they are us. They happen to have made moral decisions that don't conform to the moral preferences of the society that they live in.

You keep repeating that but you haven't backed it up. Your own Wiki article doesn't back you up.

One more time, we are not idealizing it as "right". We are deciding that it's the right thing to do right now. Tomorrow, we might decide it's the wrong thing to do.

It's the right decision at the time. Five mnutes later, you might decide it was the wrong decision.

We make "right" and "wrong" decisions all the time. Some of them are characterized as moral and some are not. Very few of them are idealized for all society and all time as you claim.

So illness is immoral?