posted
In college, I took a science and ethics class. We had long sheets to fill out to determine values, find options, and weigh them. Solutions that would work well for one person or group would not work well for another. But it brought into stark reality just how fuzzy the ideas of good and evil are. Does the good of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Or is it the other way around? The honest answer is usually, "It depends...".
Ethics are not simple. I have learned in my life that it is important to gather as much information as possible, realize that you will never have enough to fully know whether you chose rightly, keep your ultimate goals and beliefs about yourself in mind, and then come up with several acceptable options. Choose one. And live with it and its consequences.
Perspective is crucial. There are stories like that.. "That's good. No, that's bad..." so you must do the best you can from where you are.
I try to make my decisions based on the kind of world I want to live in.
Posts: 3141 | Registered: Apr 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
I assert that there is nothing "good" about doing something I prefer, that only benefits me. That is receiving a payoff for my behavior. I have my reward. I can call it good, but need not insist anyone else do so. If I make a choice that benefits another, that begins to be good. If I make a choice that benefits many, I guess that would be gooder.
Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
"I guess I don't know what you mean by payoff."
Sure you do. It's a reward -- either garnered by you personally or society at large -- that's a consequence of sticking to a certain ethical system.
In the Mormon ethical system, one of the rules is that you can't consciously behave a certain way only because you want the reward. That doesn't mean that it's not still a reward. In fact, the mere fact that you mentioned that rewards only go to people who aren't consciously working towards them indicates that it's exactly the same sort of payoff system, albeit with a nasty Catch-22 built right in. (That's why I found it funny.)
Consider what you've just said: if you make a choice that benefits yourself, it's not good. If you make a choice that only benefits someone else, that's better. But if you make a choice that only benefits someone else in the short term with the full awareness and expectation that it adds to your "good points" and makes it likely that you'll get a reward down the line, that ceases to be good again. To you, then, it's the motivation behind the act that determines how good it is -- which is very Kantian, by the way -- and you equate "goodness" with "altruism." Neither of these two things are inherently givens; they're products of a belief system to which you already adhere.
posted
A payoff after death or a payoff before death is still a payoff, especially given the way Mormons look at the afterlife.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
But I don't know what the payoff will be. Trusting that it won't be something horrible is part of my relationship with God. I mean, a forever family? Think about that. Half the people don't even want to spend this life with their family. To mangle Sartre, "heaven is other people".
Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
But if you really believe, for example, that you don't want to get stuck with your relatives in the afterlive, and yet believe that continuing on your present course will produce that result, why do you do it? What benefit do you actually expect?
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
She probably trusts that being with her family will be heaven, even though it might not seem like it when she's with her mortal and fallible family.
Posts: 1002 | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:When I use the word "arbitrary" in this context, I don't actually mean to suggest that these decisions are made completely at random, based on a whim or the roll of a die. What I mean is that they are decided on the basis of factors OTHER than logic or empirical evidence. Such a nebulous ideal as "the right thing for a human to do" is impossible to completely nail down to a hard, scientific foundation, and because of that, to some degree or another, unprovable human judgment must enter into the equation. Such judgments are, by their nature, arbitrary.
That last sentence is the crux of this problem, and (I believe) one of the most dangerous popular postmodern beliefs out there. I have warned in the past about relativism and any other belief system that contains the notion of human judgement as arbitrary should fall under that warning too. Here's why:
The only things that matter [i]directly[i/] to us in the world are the nonmaterial, nonscientific, matter of human judgement - happiness, suffering, love, rightness, wrongness, etc. Other things matter, but only indirectly. For example, the laws of physics might matter, but only because understanding the laws of physics will result in more happiness, a better society, more goodness in the world. Furthermore, because these are the only things that matter to us, we base all our decisions upon these matters of human judgement. Everything we do is, in fact, dictated by what we judge to be valuable.
But, if what is valuable is arbitrary, not based upon logic or empiricism, then there is no right answer in regards to what we should value. Even more than that, there is not even any way to TALK about what we should value, because there is no objective foundation from which two different people can share to jointly come to a conclusion. All arguments about what is good or bad end up being no more productive than arguments about which flavor of ice cream tastes the best. Thus, discussions about values are not useful, and are even offensive. (After all, if your views are as arbitrary as mine, where do you get off telling me my views are wrong?)
This is fine when it comes to individual decisions like the best flavor of ice cream to buy at the store. But when it comes to national decisions, we must agree on what to do, and thus must also agree on what to value. In a democracy, we base this decision on numbers, but we do so with the assumption that people will discuss ideas with one another and that the best values will naturally rise to the top. If values are arbitrary, however, then that makes no sense. If values are arbitrary then there is no best value system, and there is no way to dicuss which values are best. The best will not rise to the top, and instead, some arbitrary value system will rise to the top, based on which population groups have the most babies, or what ideas get the most media attention, or what is taught in schools.
This is bad! And the reason it is bad is that there IS a best values system, and it is observable. It may not be provable to those intent on rejecting it, in the way that "pain hurts" could never be proven to someone intent on arguing their pain doesn't hurt, but it is nevertheless observable in a similar way that we observe that our pain hurts. I can see, quite clearly, that killing an innocent to steal from them is morally wrong, and so can you.
But our society has bought into the alternative theory - that there is no best, that there is only most popular. And this means the best will not rise to the top.
Getting back to this thread, I think the things Geoff was talking about are methods to artificially circumvent that problem. Liberals and conservatives instintively feel like there is a 'best' moral system, and they want THEIR morals to rise to the top, even if they consciously believe at the same time that there really is no best morality. And so, they try to justify their views without appealing to being the best morality, by skipping over that part of the argument. They say "X is more healthy", which actually means "X is more healthy and health is good", but by simply equating health and goodness, they avoid having to make the more difficult moral judgement. By not raising the question, most of the audience will assume the conclusion they want, and not bother questioning it.
It is a rhetorical device, and a slightly dishonest one I think. It is also one that is by no means exclusively liberal. Conservatives might say things like this:
"Flag burning is un-American, so let's ban it!"
In this case, "un-American" is a replacement for good and evil, just like "unhealthy" was. So, it is not something that splits liberals and conservatives. Liberals may be a little more concerned with avoiding good and evil than conservatives, because they tend to be more in touch with postmodern relativist styles of thought, but it is something that is rampant in both Red and Blue America.
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:I can see, quite clearly, that killing an innocent to steal from them is morally wrong, and so can you.
Xap, any moral theory can handle the easy cases. Can you see quite clearly that economic policy X is morally wrong?
Most of the difficulty isn't in judging what an individual person should do in a particular situation, although there is widespread disagreement about certain types of behavior in such situations. The true difficulty arises when we try to decide how much compulsion should be used to try to get others to the right thing, or how society should be structured so that moral wrong X happens less frequently.
The tricky part is that people of good will and intent can radically disagree about millions of such individual decisions. Throw in different beliefs about non-moral issues, such as the effect of tax cuts, or the root causes of poverty, and you have an almost infinite number of possibilities, all stemming from very similar understandings of the same basic morality.
posted
Tres! I was wondering when you and your qualia would come around...
quote:This is bad! And the reason it is bad is that there IS a best values system, and it is observable.
Okay, show it to me.
quote:It may not be provable to those intent on rejecting it
"The invisible, immaterial dragon in my garage may not be provable to those intent on rejecting it."
quote:in the way that "pain hurts" could never be proven to someone intent on arguing their pain doesn't hurt
Of course pain hurts. Your nerves shoot a message to your brain informing it of damage. This intense message causes your brain to send a message to the muscles what ever extremity is being damaged, jerking them away from the probable source of the damage. Our conscious mind reflects on this, often over and over. The nerves may continue signalling that the damage has been done and the extremity is no longer whole. A host of really negative ideas occur to our conscious mind as a result. This is pain. Of course, you aren't talking about such a physiological description of pain. You want pain to be some ineffable something produced in the brain. It's silly, as I've repeatedly told you.
quote:I can see, quite clearly, that killing an innocent to steal from them is morally wrong, and so can you.
Yes. But whether that "seeing" is contingent upon Platonic morals out there somewhere or upon the structure of our minds, cultures and physical environment, there is much room for debate. What is self-evident to you, that there MUST be a cosmic morality, is to me far from having been proven.
Posts: 5663 | Registered: Jun 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
It occurs to me, Paul, that our formulation above isn't sufficient to actually evaluate moral codes, because while we might agree on rationality as a required element, different perfectly rational individuals may not agree on what actions are good or bad. So we still have to figure out what it is we are going to use as a criteria for determining what is good or bad.
Posts: 5663 | Registered: Jun 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Well, yes, but that's not what I'm getting at. We weren't arguing that moral systems are based upon rationality, but that the *best* of them would have rationality at their core. We're talking about how to construct a moral system more than we are how to describe existing ones (though that is a necessary and worthy task as well).
Posts: 5663 | Registered: Jun 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
"t occurs to me, Paul, that our formulation above isn't sufficient to actually evaluate moral codes, because while we might agree on rationality as a required element, different perfectly rational individuals may not agree on what actions are good or bad. So we still have to figure out what it is we are going to use as a criteria for determining what is good or bad."
To me, the question to answer has always been "what is the purpose of a moral system. Why do we seem to require morality in our lives?"
Again, to me, the answer has been "to maintain a sense of stability in our lives, and prevent as many harmful interactions as possible." Where harm is defined as actions that cause physical or emotional pain or suffering.
Posts: 4112 | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
In fact, the mere fact that you mentioned that rewards only go to people who aren't consciously working towards them indicates that it's exactly the same sort of payoff system, albeit with a nasty Catch-22 built right in. (That's why I found it funny.)
