Do you find stupidity immoral?

I don't think immorality would imply knowing something was wrong and doing it anyway. Negligence can be considered immoral as Yazata said.

I don't think stupidity would imply not knowing any better.

You can also be "brilliant" and still perform stupid acts and you can be "stupid" and perform stupid acts. You are unknowingly agreeing with me (or that aspect of the argument). It's the acts and not the intelligence (or lack thereof) behind them. I agree.

Have you considered what you are saying? You believe that babies innately know that killing is wrong? There is an intelligence level you pass where you can understand morality.

Wait, what? Didn't you just contradict yourself? You said that "no one can be so stupid as to know that killing is wrong", but then later you cite an example of someone being so stupid as to think killing is right for their child!

It's not immoral in their mind, but it's immoral to US. This is a good example of where stupidity is immoral actually, so thanks. I don't think it makes them bad people in order to do that, but it's still an immoral action to let your child die when it could have easily been avoided.

The rest of your post does little to back this statement up....

 

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I have. (Some of the digressions were a waste of time, in my opinion. But that's ok.)

Have you clearly stated what your point is and how you justify it?

To me, 'stupid' means something like 'indicative of low intelligence'. To call someone 'stupid' means that you are saying that they have weak cognitive powers. I don't believe that possession of low intelligence means that a person is bad or evil. So my answer to the question in your subject line continues to be 'no'.

I don't believe that propositions, arguments or actions can be stupid. The word 'stupid' applies to cognitive agents. Propositions, arguments and actions can be true or false, correct or incorrect, sound or fallacious. When we call them 'stupid', we seem to be saying something about the agent that stated the proposition, made the argument or performed the action. 'Only an idiot would say/do that'.

If people aren't involved in this, and if 'stupidity' (in your sense) is purely a quality of propositions, arguments or actions, then how can we talk about moral blame? Moral blame doesn't make much sense in the absence of a responsible agent to whom the blame is being attributed. People have to be involved.

If that's the case, then your choice of the word 'stupidity' might not have been wise.

 

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I wrote:

The reason I wrote that was to underline the point that the word 'wrong' has more than one sense. It's entirely consistent to say that it wasn't wrong (morally) of Joe to answer the calculus problem wrong (erroneously). Of course one would need to spell out the two different senses in a situation like that, in order to avoid the appearance of contradiction.

The attribution of moral blame here revolves around what the attributor believes that the actor should have known. The moral aspect doesn't concern the action so much as the responsibilities that the person who performed the action supposedly failed to meet.

Wouldn't an attribution of 'stupidity' actually be a defense against this kind of moral blame? If this is all about what we believe an individual should have known, then wouldn't the fact that we expect less of a stupid person make the less intelligent person less culpable? If somebody with Down's syndrome screws up, we can probably excuse the screwup. But if your doctor screws up, then that might be an occasion for accusations of negligence, precisely because we expect more of intelligent and highly trained professionals.

 

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Why in the world are you responding to something I said to another person?

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You keep talking about people when my argument isn't about people.

Where so? Anything can be stupid as long as it is illogical. Stupid is a synonym for something illogical. I don't agree with calling anyone stupid, only their actions and particular thoughts, etc.

If my argument is that the Earth revolves around the moon and the Sun revolves around us, would my argument be stupid or not? That doesn't make ME stupid if you call MY ARGUMENT stupid.

We're not talking about moral blame. Where did I even mention this? We're talking about moral actions.

stu·pid·i·ty
st(y)o͞oˈpiditē/
noun
1.
behavior that shows a lack of good sense or judgment.

This says nothing about the person. Only the behavior.

 

I don't know. I phased out when you started talking about people again. If someone did something stupid and they should have known better, it's immoral.

 

If someone did not know 2+2=4, I would consider them stupid. What does that have to do with morals?

This thread title and topic I also think of as stupid. How is it immoral?

 

The Dangers of Moral Judgment

As much as I adore Eddie Monsoon's legendary courtroom rant against stupidity, it only serves to remind that certain aspects of "stupidity" are subjective.

I will note of considerations of responsibility and capacity that seemingly normal people are sometimes incapacitated for reasons beyond their control. To wit, when it comes to our political discussions, Americans have their knives out; we're so sick of each other that we are steadily less forgiving of our partisan opponents. Of late, I've been "givin' da bizness" to one of my conservative neighbors about some disagreements betweenm our outlooks. And part of what I'm razzing him about is whether certain points in his argument are accidental or calculated.

Accidental? Well, ninety-nine percent of the drunk driving arrests and convictions are of people who accidentally drove under the influence. At some point, there is a question of whether the ignorance or other lack required for an outlook and subsequent behavior to seem rational and appropriate is acceptable.

To wit, take the idea of compromise. Now prescribe a formula for compromise.

• A and B have a dispute. A decides that the best resolution is to abandon his own preferred outcome and attend the resolution B prefers. B then complains that A is refusing to compromise.​

Now, at what point does ignorance become stupidity?

Meanwhile, I have a child currently in the throes of a dangerous chemical bath called puberty. If you ever want to see willful behavior that is actually out of an individual's control, look around at the parents you know, find one whose kid is about a year into pubescent development, and try to have an important discussion with the kid. And if we should be tempted to think such a context is unimportant or beside the point, remember that some people hinge thereupon the question of whether or not it is appropriate to beat the hell out of a child for disciplinary sake.

And I have worked in the public school system with children on alternate learning spectra. Anyone who ever in their life complained about special education students being smart enough to take advantage of the rules can sit down and think on this point for a moment; it may be willful, but you cannot prove culpability.

The point of these comparisons are to remind that we will punish annoying children, but that behavior is sometimes lauded in adults.

There are times my kid just can't help herself. It might be the most obviously useless fight in the world, but she literally can't stop. This is expected; it is an occasional behavioral result that is out of her control.

And the little boy who flashed that evil grin before chomping down on M's arm in the middle of a physically dangerous temper tantrum that presented potential accidental threats to other children? Trust me, as deliberate and willful as that bite was, nobody present held him accountable as if he had genuine discretion.

My daughter? She is, technically, temporarily handicapped by the natural processes of her body and brain; I must account for this in assessing her behavior.

That little boy? He is, technically, permanently handicapped by the natural processes of his brain; I must account for this in assessing his behavior.

An allegedly normal adult who is incapable of recognizing right and wrong, black and white, yes and no, wet and dry? If he should wish to acknowledge a specific impairment that results in declarations that the truth is found in the opposite of what is observable—effectively, that what you observe is false, but indicative of real truth—we can certainly account for this in assessing his behavior.

But in the end, here we find the question of whether stupidity is immoral. I would go so far as to say yes, but only by limiting stupidity to include acts of will. Even then, though, there remains a massive gray area, in no small part because of the difficulty we encounter in determining acts of generated will from willful acts resulting from factors entirely beyond human control. That is, we cannot affirmatively account for every potential consideration in defining culpability, which is the key to assigning a moral value to stupidity.

 

In regards to the OP subject i cannot say that being "stupid" is worthy of regarding it as immoral, i find " stupidity" to bemore annoying or in some cases entertaining than "immoral". I tend to agree with FG's post, Moral and Immoral are just subjective labels that only have any real merit or value when they are ascribed as so by the humans of a society/culture. Beyond the emotional attachment or charging of these words they are meaningless without any context or humans to give them context. It would be fallacious to believe that these words on their own have any intrinsic or inherent value without people.

 

I'm going to say to you as I've said to Ripley, Yazata, wegs, and that emoticon dude. Have you read the thread? Because I've talked about a lot of this stuff to a tee earlier in the thread.

 

I'm going to say to you as I've said to kwhilborn, Ripley, Yazata, wegs, and that emoticon dude. Have you read the thread? Because I've talked about a lot of this stuff to a tee earlier in the thread.

 

Ah, thank you. Two people agree with this argument then. I agree with what you say mainly.

 

You asked a question in the first post of the thread, i answered. Reading over the material of the other posts i choose to refrain from addressing them since they are not relevant to my interest as a whole. I fail to see how you could have a problem with a a fellow forum's user answering the question stated by you and not getting involved with the discussion of other posters. Now if another user's post struck me as interesting or conflicting with me i would actively participate and engage, however in this case this did not occur(outside of my response to you obviously) You could say that I'm more of a passive observer of the threads here on this site, reading and watching the discussions(or arguments) unfold before me. There were numerous times that i found myself instigated by my own paradigms to call out other posters but refrained after mental deliberation told me that doing so would be a needless and pointless expenditure of time and mental energy ( Have you ever tried taking rationally talking with a crank?). That is my drawn out explanation to your critique. Have a nice day, live long and prosper.

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