I am very interested in exploring the ways in which humanity develops moral systems. Deciding what is truly moral or immoral has been one of the greatest challenges faced by all civilizations throughout history.

One of the fundamental questions about the nature of morality is whether morality is objective or subjective. By objective, I mean a realm of moral values and duties that are valid and binding independent of human opinion. By subjective, I mean that moral values only exist as a function of a particular society, and can vary across cultures and time.

Some will maintain that certain acts are objectively wrong, such as rape. It would be quite difficult to imagine a scenario where rape would be considered morally acceptable. However, what I have noticed is that aside from a strong emotional detestation, there is no intellectual argument to support the claim that any particular act is objectively right or wrong. The way I see it, the things we claim are objectively right or wrong are merely an expression of our own egos, and it's very difficult to make an unbiased judgement apart from that.

Another problem among those who subscribe to objective moral truths is that there is virtually no agreement as to what these objective truths are. This suggests to me, that all of the supposed claims to objective moral truths are in fact totally subjective and completely relative to the psychology behind the person making the claim. If there were in fact an objective moral realm that is binding on all of us, there should be some way for humanity to ascertain that realm and come to some consistent conclusions about it. Yet, humanity continues to constantly struggle with crucial social moral issues where strong believers fall equally on both sides of these issues.

Personally, I used to believe in such things as “good” and “evil”, when I was younger. When watching historical documentaries about atrocities committed around the world, I was convinced, based on my emotions, that certain people and certain actions could unequivocally be said to be purely evil. I have changed my mind on this. There is no such thing as “good” or “evil”. That is a primitive, overly simplified way of viewing morality. Moral issues are complex and require deep analysis to resolve. There is never a moral conundrum that is totally one-sided. There are always multiple factors to take into consideration. To try to boil down complex moral issues into simple categories of “good” and “evil” is naïve and immature in my opinion.

That’s how I see it. What about the rest of you? How do you think human morality should be viewed?

I strongly encourage you to read texts on morality and ethics by any number of history's great philosophers, as this subject has been explored incredibly deeply by a great many wise thinkers who have put a great deal of consideration into the aspects of morality that you bring up.

Personally, I'm more interested in meta-ethics than in any of the major fields of normative (i.e. prescriptive) ethics. I believe that our unique position as social creatures capable of reflecting on how our actions impact society and the world around us means that human beings, for the most part, are naturally inclined toward "ethical" behavior*, and that most normative ethical systems are simply attempts at spelling out strict guidelines for how people independently and naturally arrive at ethical conclusions. I tend toward the belief that deontological, Kantian ethics that are fundamentally rooted in Abrahamic teachings about free will are something like trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, and that our natural inclination toward "ethical" behavior tends much more strongly toward something that utilitarians would try to describe as a correct normative ethics.

*Of course we are, no? Any ethical system that would declare that most human beings operate amorally or unethically needs to take a good, hard look at itself as far as I'm concerned.

That makes two of us.

To people unfamiliar with metaethics, here are some borrowed terms:

Semantics
Objectivism - Value terms describe irreducible value properties (non-natural properties)

Naturalism - Value terms describe natural properties.

Emotivism - Value terms express emotions, wishes, will-attitudes, imperatives, etc. Strictly speaking, there are no value propositions.
---prescriptivism

Ontology
Realism - There are (of us independent) value properties/value facts (natural or non-natural)

Idealism (constructivism) - There are (by us "constructed") value properties/value facts.

Nihilism - There are no value properties/value facts.

Epistemology
Cognitivism - We can have knowledge in questions of value (of natural, non-natural, or by us "constructed" properties and facts).
---foundationalism
---coherentism

Skepticism - We can't have knowledge in questions of value.
---general
---partial

I would have to hear more about this. Why do you think this? Humans definitely like to rationalize their own behavior, so their is deep subconscious pressure for us to regard what we do as basically OK, but that has nothing to do with whether it is or isn't in fact OK. At least by no means directly.

There may be another sense in which we are naturally inclined toward ethical behavior, a sense described by the idea that we act under the "guise of the good" -- that by and large, when we act, we are TRYING to do the right thing. Sure. But I think we actually fall quite short with great regularity, and I think an ethical theory that validates our actions a great deal may just be a subconscious attempt to get us to feel better about ourselves and our weaknesses.


Dembo: Your taxonomy may be helpful to some, but it does have some confusing elements. In semantic terms, I think we should distinguish between descriptivist and expressivist theories. Descriptivist theories may be further semantically divided into the context-sensitive and the context-insensitive on the basis of whether or not they think the semantic value of ethical terms is contextually constant. Expressivist theories can be further divided on the basis of what (besides belief) is being expressed -- e.g. emotions or states of norm-acceptance.

For any of these semantic pictures, values can be objective in the sense of being mind-independent. That's a complicated issue, but I think it's true. Objectivity is just not a semantic issue; it's a metaphysical one. And objective ethical properties need not be irreducible, and irreducible properties need not be non-natural. (The good may objectively be pleasure, which is reducible and natural.) Naturalism is also not a semantic issue.

For ontology, I think your way is fine, but it could be done more neatly: You could divide things on the basis of whether there ARE or ARE NOT ethical properties, and then subdivide the ARE category into mind-dependent and mind-independent varieties.

Cognitivism is not typically understood as an epistemological position, but rather as one in the philosophy of mind. It is not a matter of whether and how we know ethical facts necessarily, but is rather a matter of whether the basic ethical mental attitudes are genuine beliefs (especially representational ones) or not. But, yes, the categories of foundationalism and coherentism are of course epistemological ones, though there are alternatives and combinations.

Needless to say, I too am interested in these topics. I take nihilism to be true metaphysically/ontologically, but I am semantically a contextualist, and I think we can use these semantics to nonetheless get a non-ontological ethics off the ground, one founded in epistemology rather than in ethical facts.

awheio:
If I understand you correctly it seems like you interpret some of the terms through their usage outside of metaethics. For example you said "naturalism is also not a semantic issue". Well, in metaethical semantics, naturalism is a semantic issue . The word "naturalism" is of course used in many different disciplines. But in the context of metaethical semantics, naturalism is the view that a phrase like "it's morally wrong to have as a hobby the killing of innocent, non-consenting people" expresses something about the properties of the world, that is, it's an empirical judgement, and as such, is either true or false. Compared to for example the metaethical-semantic view of emotivism, where the same phrase expresses an attitude more simmilar to "boo for having as a hobby the killing of innocent, non-consenting people!", which is not empirical and lacks truth-value (is neither true nor false).

You also wrote "cognitivism is not typically understood as an epistemological position". Again my answer is: well, in the context of metaethical epistemology it is a position . However, cognitivism is also a semantic category, in which objectivism and naturalism are included.

"foundationalism and coherentism are of course epistemological ones, though there are alternatives and combinations"
Yes, there are more sub-categories and various combinations are certainly possible. And there's alot more to be said than above, and I'm not an expert on this.

I'm gonna have to look into semantical contextualism.


I agree about the guideline of one self, the vast majority or even everyone in a given time and place accepting x as moral and therefore concluding that x is itself moral is problematic because of things like our tendency to review ourself and others we like in a nicer way than we tend to review strangers and people we don't like. Cognitive dissonance comes into mind, since on the one hand we seem to have the instinct to detect possible problems in order to solve or avoid them in order to be better off. But when one of the problems are absence of knowledge, causing distress and uncertainty, especially when it's about important things like what actions are acceptable, then one way for the brain to avoid that problem is to view ourselves in a better way than we may deserve.

For example, it's far from unthinkable that one of the reasons why it would be difficult to change the mind of someone who has followed some tradition of sacrificing the first-born ones, allowing rape within marriage, going to war over religious or ideological disagreements, etc. is because that person who has spent his life being in favour or allowing of these things based tradition, absence of reflection over such actions, on religious notions of divine rule and how it's a very serious crime to ignore those rules, or whatnot, could face severe mental meltdown if suddenly seeing these actions as unacceptable and brutal to the degree most people outside of such traditions would see them.

I'm well versed in metaethics. The meanings of terms can slide all over the place, but as I see it, naturalism is just a general stance that there is nothing "non-natural" in the world, whatever that is supposed to be. In metaethics, that means that there are no non-natural ethical properties/facts. But expressivists are typically naturalists in this sense, just as descriptivists are.

Cognitivism is typically understood in metaethics as the view that the states we describe as states of moral/ethical belief are COGNITIVE states. This is logically independent of whether we use ethical language to express these cognitive states or not, although obviously cognitivists tend to be descriptivists, and their epistemologies tend to be correspondence-based.

But, yeah, this stuff is pretty messy, and I'm not as fresh as I would like to be. But I've been working on metaethics in one way or another for maybe 7 years, and it remains my philosophic focal point.

Edit: Of course, one can always search "metaethics taxonomy" on Google or wherever and get a lot of helpful classifications. But usually, these are imperfect and leave out some interesting possible positions (in particular, the position I think is correct...).

Without getting into the lengthy technical mumbo-jumbo and seeing as your question was vague, morality is based around what's humane and what's inhumane and that boils down to something as simple as the human instinct telling you stabbing someone isn't ok or stealing someone's car isn't ok. What is humane? Not killing animals for no purpose for example. Dropping people into a vat of acid as shown by isis is inhumane. Personally I find it rather simple and the whole self detachment and study of "why do have morals" unintentionally negating and obstructing the essential and important feeling of right and wrong. It's not a choice we feel sickened when watching a man or woman have their head sliced off. To feel otherwise is a conditioned behavior or related to mental illness.

There are certain individuals out there--however long they live it will make no difference--who will never be able to even understand this line of reasoning (or even its mode of dialectic, to broaden things a little, mind you). Subscription to X or Y scruple, or even an entire moral system of distilled elements, often elides to a great extent common sense reasoning. In my conversations with people where I take the opportunity to undertake a devil's advocate once in a blue moon, the primary justification seems to be an ipse dixit type response on grounds that by virtue of this recognition in the first place, their position becomes inherently unassailable, and I would submit that neither of these considerations are true; that even if one of them as true it wouldn't mean that a different opinion couldn't make things a little more interesting (a concept that often has particularly worrisome consequences for some caught in similar patterns of dichotomous reasoning and the like), if uncomfortable for certain interlocutors.

A share of individuals unfortunately approach similar dialogues in a "that's just the way it is" (often paired with a weak, hackneyed ad hominem argument as an additional retort, truly failing to understand that the goal here is not to "win" but to discuss) rather than an actual conversation, or sometimes as I best view them, a chat. No need for "hurt" feelings over opposing opinions in such contexts.

Perhaps my favorite morality-pertinent "problem" in the tradition of great philosophers that you all have briefly touched upon is David Hume and his "is-ought" problem. Very thought provoking indeed, and if I could just get one person to properly understand it in a real face to face conversation I would feel a little better about the general (intellectual) future and curiosity of humanity.

Indeed, some cultures around the world condone rape for whatever reason, and to them the act is deemed morally right for the reasons their culture upholds.

But let's think of it a different way. Is it morally right to exploit someone? Exploitation happens all over the world - for example, exploitation of developing countries by developed countries - but is it right? Some might say that the workers in developing countries have jobs and an income, which is good on the surface until you see the conditions they (don't) have. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, right?

Rape, then, is exploitation of a woman's body for no other reason than a man's aggressive nature, his uncontrollable urges, or his lust for inflicting pain, terror, hurt, shame, superiority. Rape is sex without consent. Can you imagine a scenario where rape is acceptable, regardless of ethnicity, religion, class, or socio-economic status? I can't.

I think rape is morally wrong, no matter how you slice it.


I don't know, man. I think actions can be construed as nothing but "evil," even if the intentions or motivators behind them, are good. Does a suicide bomber that kills hundreds of innocent people not have "evil" intentions? He might morally think what he's doing is right, for all sorts of different reasons, but the fact remains that he has killed lots of people. I can't find a moral reason to excuse him for his actions, despite whatever awesome intentions he had behind committing the act.

Psychopaths don't have the link between moral judgements. So to them, murdering someone is the same as, say, cutting in line at a supermarket. Do we hold them morally responsible for their actions, even if they don't believe they've done anything wrong and can't be convinced of that? Do we abscond them of the consequences for their actions? These are loaded questions, I know. Do they have definitive answers?

These philosophical topics are endless and have lots of back-and-forth. I doubt we will all agree on one solid answer on this forum.

We might not come to an agreement, but should that really be the metric? There is benefit in just becoming aware of new (or personally forgotten) ideas and the different takes and re-explanations of them. For instance, I've just looked up Hume's is-ought problem as recommended above and found it very valuable. So that's a definite thanks to kseville for the heads up, and not an 'ought-to-thank' at all.

One aspect I'd like to mention that hasn't been explicitly stated yet is that morality is dependent upon the culture that defines it. There is no 'objective' morality, as it is described at the outset by the OP, apart from the fact that a culture or society 'progresses' from one state to another. Any morality defined by that culture is used to serve this progression, sometimes in competition with other moralities serving this very same progression. In short, morality is built-for-purpose.

I can appreciate more simple reasonings but I'm afraid it seems like you're pretty much is handing over the problem of if and how we can know what's moral to if and how we can know what's humane. Since the same problems like disagreements between times and places, and difficulties of reaching a objective justification for a claim about what it means to act and be moral/immoral remains when discussing what it means to act or be humane/inhumane.

The OP wrote: "what I have noticed is that aside from a strong emotional detestation, there is no intellectual argument to support the claim that any particular act is objectively right or wrong. The way I see it, the things we claim are objectively right or wrong are merely an expression of our own egos, and it's very difficult to make an unbiased judgement apart from that."

I interpret that as this thread not being so much about giving examples of what oneself, many, or most people would consider or feel to be moral/immoral, but more about what specifically makes it moral/immoral. Regarding your examples, how are they inhumane and why is the feeling of right and wrong in these cases worth upholding as indications of humane/inhumane and moral/immoral when feelings of wright and wrong in other cases are not? I think that sort of thing is more what the OP is after.

And are these feelings really, as you call them, essential? Do you mean that in the sense of they are essential for someone to be a human? If so, it opens up a new can of worms.




About the above mentioning of rape and "some cultures". Jurisdiction is to a degree indicating of a society's views on what's moral/immoral and it's only in very recent decades that even western countries made rape within marriage illegal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_r ... al_changes (I know it's Wikipedia, but still...)

And going back to volutetheswarth's common sense-type of reasoning. Would this mean that in very recent decades alot of western populations where mentally ill or something?

MikeyC brought up exploitation. And along that line it's thought-provoking to consider past changes and think about what may change in the future regarding views on what's moral. In the past, slavery in the traditional sense was considered acceptable. Then alot started considering it unacceptable. Then there are ideologies who reason around concepts like wage slavery or regular wage-jobs by and large being unacceptable (reasoned around ideas of socio-economical exploitation and inequality) even though societies by and large consider them acceptable today. Perhaps something like the now traditional and considered acceptable work-buyer/work-seller relationship will in the future be considered unacceptable.

Obviously we wont get far with speculations like these. This was just to point out the problems of mentioning Act x and let the entire reasoning be around feelings and that those who don't feel like that have something wrong mentally. And as stated, I think the OP is looking for, to borrow from Boston: more than a feeling.

Notice that nihilism and emotivism are compatible. That is, the view that there are no value properties/value facts is compatible with the view that when people say that x is moral/immoral, they are expressing something like "hooray/boo for x!", "I want/don't want Act x to be done", and such, be it in a extremely more intense manner than in many other cases of expressing emotions, will-attitudes and such.


I agree that threads like these should not depend on whether there will be an agreement. Oh and Hume is somewhat of a favourite of mine.

So there's no universal, prolonged morals?

Imagine in 150 years the world's population is 15 billion, and the governments/leaders/insect overlords tell us that killing people is now legal to stem the population increase. Would that make it morally okay to kill someone? Could you do it? Or would our long-standing thoughts of "killing people is not okay" be upheld?


I was thinking more along the lines of the Middle East or some Asian countries where rape usually ends with the woman's death for "shaming" the family. Is that a practice that still occurs? As for marital rape, I would like to think that men in Western societies would already know that and it would be intrinsically "wrong" to do that, no matter what the law says (or didn't say). Is that a moral? Something that men simply shouldn't do because it's wrong, even though it wasn't specifically entered into law?


Good point. In the past certain things were acceptable where we would now find them abhorrent. I suppose at the time it was considered the right thing to do, such as black slavery. So what changes? Is it our morals that change or our knowledge of the world? Epistemologically, you might say we have improved, but morally, have we improved or just changed? You have me thinking now.

I may respond to some of the other things when I have more time.

But just for the record about the law thing: I meant that looking at the jurisdiction of different times and places may tell us something about what the people in those societies considered moral/immoral. I'm not saying that morality itself, if granting its existance, has anything to do with what people put in law books. It's also worth mentioning that the thing about jurisdicition indicating the views of populations is probably more true for democracies than other societies, since in dictatorships there may very well to a higher degree be laws that even the vast majority are opposed to. But of course over time laws may form people's views of what's moral/immoral, especially since it's not a rare thing for someone to have the view that the very breaking of a law is itself immoral. And just think of how many people who get accused of acting immoral defend themselves by pointing out that they are not breaking any laws or acted according to the law at the time of the act. That's simmilar to the "just doing my job/following orders" defense people sometimes use when being accused of acting immoral.

Likewise, I also consider rape to be morally wrong. But the problem is, how do we answer to the reality that rape occurs all the time in the wild? Can we say that a male lion is objectively, morally wrong when it forcibly copulates with a female? Can we condemn an animal simply for acting on its primal, natural instincts? "Rape" is therefore an invented term that only can apply within a functioning society that has a governing body that makes law. It has no meaning in nature.

There are morals that are shared across many cultures and time periods, but that does not make them 'objective'. I daresay that there's a case for a Darwinian aspect to this where morals that are more successful in providing for safer, more cooperative, societies are the ones that continue on whilst other morals cause societies to die away.

One such example of a long-standing moral would be the 'do unto others...' moral which has existed in various forms throughout various ages and in different regions. This particular moral, in contrast to your example, is not mandated by government or by a ruling elite (in fact it is frequently transgressed by our leadership cohort), but is instead practiced by the wider population as part or the normal course of existing. It contributes to the safety of people and helps people work together to get things done.

Your example of a government sanction for murder would be in direct competition with this long-standing moral. The sheer affront and damage to the long-standing moral it would cause is enough to render it not a moral at all, or even 'amoral'. We are already on the 'do unto others...' course of morailty. We can see what it has done for our civilisation for thousands of years. We'd be fools to give that up in a hurry. But hey, what morality does foolishness play under, eh?

I don't think I would describe the golden rule as long-standing, at least not if "standing" means that it's actually being followed and not merely a repeated phrase. And I have no problem with that since it's a very flawed rule. Also I find it hard to believe that the character traits which the rule is meant to guide us to wasn't pretty much always in human society anyway. If so, the rule is more of an incomplete description of human society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Ru ... _others.22

I think this is a completely wrong starting point, because there is no issue of truth here (unless we're solely discussing religious moral codes which do rely upon revelation - and ways to correctly "interpret" it). That's how the subjective/objective dichotomy - a fruitless one which needs to be discarded - comes into sharp focus.

In the most basic sense, morality has to do with how people interact and how they live and produce together. If people lived in a certain way whereby there would be no kind of family unit as basis for inheritance, and if women were subjected to comprehensive oppression and exploitation as mere breeding stock (there's other counterfactual conditions here but no need to go into that), sure rape would be a completely normal occurrence and definitely not part of that community's "list" of unacceptable behavior.

I'm pretty sure various famous religions incorporate notions of family and yet also incorporate oppression and exploitation of women, and allow rape within marriage, and overall has a very woman-unfriendly way of dealing with rape and other crimes and acts. I may be misunderstanding but I don't see the connection between family unit and rape.

The connection has to do with conditions which would make that counterfactual scenario plausible. And the scenario in turn has the purpose of making it clear that talk about objective morals makes little sense.

The family as an inheritance unit, whereby possessions and especially productive possessions are passed on (while individuals are also cemented in their social role that way) in a certain way would have to give way in the scenario to all women basically being common breeding stock for an entire community of men (say, a nomadic people who procure most of their living by pillage and conquest). That way the question of rape wouldn't even arise as it would be anything-goes. In short, I'm not mentioning notions of family, but actual familial living and all that it entails.

Damn, I thought I had the forum set up to automatically lock all threads made by GuiltySpawn? Looks like this one snuck through.

OP, spend some of your free time on Google scholar researching academic papers on antisocial personality disorders and cognitive neurology.