From: Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Date: Sun Jan 04 2004 - 21:07:46 MST
"Jef Allbright" <jef@jefallbright.net> writes:
> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>> "Jef Allbright" <jef@jefallbright.net> writes:
>>> I'm not talking about concensus morality here. In fact it is
>>> certain that the moral advice of a higher intelligence would not be
>>> widely accepted if communicated directly, but humans will be
>>> persuaded by the indirect, but tangible fruits of following its
>>> direction.
>>
>> What if there are no answers that yield obviously superior results for
>> society? There is no answer, for example, to the meat question -- and
>> yet there is great rage among some about killing and eating
>> animals. Many thorny moral questions have no objective answer, which
>> is why they are thorny in the first place.
>
> As you clearly state, there are no simple answers to what we call "moral"
> questions. These issues are context-dependent and the terminology we
> customarily use confuses by presuming absolutes that can't be attained.
> Discussion and understanding would be improved if we all talked in terms of
> goals and utility.
>
> My point in presenting the "arrow of morality" concept is to find out
> whether we can agree that with increasing wisdom (intelligence and
> knowledge) comes increasing morality. If we agree on this, then we can work
> together intentionally to improve our part of the universe.
I don't think that any amount of wisdom or intelligence can answer the
meat question or a myriad of other questions, because they have no
answers. I'm not sure there is an "arrow of morality" here, just a
tendency of more intelligent creatures to find themselves in
increasingly complicated situations that they need good rules of thumb
for.
> The statement "morality is subjective" often carries the implication that it
> is therefore meaningless to compare or evaluate the relative morality of
> various actions.
Yes. It is. There is no test that will provide units of moral
measurement.
It is not meaningless to ask "will humans that cooperate with their
fellows rather than trying to kill them have a greater chance of
survival" -- that has a measure on it and can be tested, at least in
theory. Asking "is it more moral to leave other humans alone or to eat
them" is meaningless, as there is no way to ascertain an answer except
via definitionalism.
> This strikes me as very similar to the post-modernist view
> that reality is ultimately subjective and all points of view are therefore
> of equal value.
"Value" is subjective. Reality isn't, since one can test what is real
and what is not. (All of reality might ultimately turn out to be a
simulation, but that's another story and in no way invalidates tests
of the reality of particular propositions within the context of the
simulated system.)
The folks you speak of in cultural theory and the like start with a
reasonable sense of ideas that they get from other fields and then,
largely because they're ill equiped to understand them, misinterpret
them and come up with ridiculous conclusions. (What do you expect
though -- they're largely in English departments -- they're not
philosophers.)
> I'm not implying that you espouse the po-mo point of view -- far from it. I
> would suggest, however, that it may be more useful to say "morality is
> context-dependent" than to say "morality is subjective".
It is not per se context dependent (though for some persons it might
be) -- it is subjective. There is a difference. To some people, the
"right thing to do" doesn't change with context -- but what "the right
thing to do" is shifts between person to person. Thus, subjective, but
not (necessarily) context dependent.
-- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
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