Oh 100%, but despite the indifferent void that is the universe we still have our pale blue dot full of life that cares about other life as if there's morals, and nothings gonna stop that from being true. Look at all the absurdly violent systems that need to exist to keep people from following their morals and instead forces them to be selfish or perish. Only a matter of time before humanity wins and then its star trek from there on. :bloomer:
Yeah that's certainly a thing. The way I see it, people talking about objective morality declare it to be something that's determined by a god or other being that has power over what happens in the universe, but that's exactly what humans/living things are, because we are all (imo) material beings in this reality that can shape it just like a higher power. That's why (imo) morals are significant to life on earth, and its important to treat them as something with cosmic levels of responsibility to uphold or abolish.
I guess my argument is that discussing whether they are objective or subjective is missing the point that we can shape the world regardless and should be responsible about that.
This is ultimately an assumption I can't prove but I believe in a very deterministic reality right, which to me means that free will doesn't exist as something outside or above the influences of life experiences or the environment surrounding a person. If the universe held randomness then your actions could be utterly meaningless if they get erased in the soup of randomness, which is far more terrifying of a reality than one where you have agency in the events of the world, even if your agency is informed by things exclusively out of your control. So i guess this is my personal Russell's teapot.
With this in mind, when choosing a moral system to work to enforce, punishment for going against this moral system is an absurd notion. (imo) belief in moral systems that also assume free will is what leads to all the fucked up justifications for why the moral system is being breached. Hierarchies in a general sense are the best example of this, because they place certain things below others based on either free will or inherent qualities that are beyond anyone's control, like punishing poor people for being poor because surely they'd have just pulled up their bootstraps if they were worthy of wealth, or eating sentient life is fine because might makes right or human tastebuds take priority or any other ridiculous reason btw :im-vegan:.
So i guess calling living things god-like moral actors is a bit misleading because what I mean is that living things have both the capability to greatly impact the reality around them, while also being results of the reality themselves.
This all ties back to my first comment about "caring for other things" being whats special in this world despite the indifferent void that is the universe, because living things have the power to shape the universe while also not being guilty for it, just responsible The existence of evil people in the world in my mind then becomes a cosmic tragedy rather than some evil to be battled triumphed over with moral superiority, but is still just as important to fight for change in.
And if you are one of those people (who are supporting bad systems if im understanding your comment right) I don't blame you, and so am I because I also contribute to capitalism and other things throughout my daily life. But my hope is that teaching everyone who is like that how it is still evil, and this evil is dependent on things that can be improved starting right now, would lead to a truly anti-hierarchical and empathetic system for fixing the world we live in.
So: "I believe in a universe that doesn't care, and people who do."
the best one is really a case by case basis, but deontology is operational enough in general, if it's enough for doctors opening up patients and ending their lives, it's enough for me
You should probably also consider what the actual moral dilemmas that you face are for all the talk of the trolley problem have you ever met anyone who was in one
I mean morality doesn't exist without a consciousness to apply a framework to it
yeah. There is no way to have objective morality without a god or guiding power of some sort. It's just opinions about how best to achieve good, whatever your definition of that is.
There is a possibility of finding morality within this reality.
Is that not at least a good start?
yo you might like Kohlbergian stuff, basically seeks to explain moral development in psychological terms at a more human level, it may help in dragging ethical considerations back into the realm of what applies to real humans
Beyond that, I have a relative who is more than interested in ethics and morality, and they generally do not like utilitarianism because 1) pleasure isn't universally good, it requires specific contexts in order to be valuable, there's no reason to value it universally and 2) making an immortal sentient computer box that can masturbate itself indefinitely does not add infinite meaning and good to the universe
Genocidal utilitatian longtermist policies are made by people who make a lot of assumptions about living, and they're probably all wrong.
For instance, there are people who consider intergalactic spacefaring civilizations millions of years in the future, and many of them are aware of several possible solutions to Fermi's Paradox, most of them involving a Great Filter. But one possible solution to Fermi's Paradox is that if a society gets wise enough, they realize that they would rather last as long as they can rather than just have continuous exponential growth. So they move towards a more steady state, and aren't really invested in whether there are foreign advanced lifeforms or not. They recognize that having 20 billion of their species is not inherently better than having 10 billion of their species; in fact, the 20 billion might be worse because it would be harder for people to recognize and appreciate each other.
There are things that are valuable beyond just how many of your species there is. Reactionary ideologies like social Darwinism contend that the individual's goal is to maximize its number of progeny (or share of descendents, in a limited world) at the expense of every other being, and that all beings are fundamentally in conflict with each other over this. It's surprising just how much thought is foundationally based on this.
Our duty is to spread and perpetuate progressive ideology, which says that individuals with differences can delight in and enrich each other, and that we can have a society that is fundamentally based on everyone looking out for everyone else, rather than each person looking out merely for themself. One thing that follows from this is that you don't have to clear out all of nature; you just take what you need to live well enough, and leave the rest as is- maybe for your viewing pleasure, maybe for science, maybe for potential useful things that emerge, maybe for a spiritual sense of primality, or maybe just because you let things be what they are wont to be.
First of all, in this case, Im discussing reality in the philosophical sense, not as in daily language when we talk about our physical surroundings.
To say that there is a meaningful reality implies that the world we perceive is the material reality. However, this is actually the most idealist position you can take, as all of our experiences come through human subjectivity, and you are claiming that is somehow material. In this world view, there is a "material world" that is static, mechanistic, and then there is "human agency" that is free and dynamic, which is somehow separate from the "material world".(totally not an arbitrary idealistic division) This is pretty much how most people view the world, but once you even examine it a little it all falls apart because of its many obvious contradictions and limitations.
For example, think of human subjectivity as the camera, and "the rest" as the things in the picture. Vulgar materialists would ignore the camera, while actual materialists would take it into consideration. Tbh this example in itself is pretty reductionist, and there really is no "true" materialism, but you get the point. Vulgar materialism bad. And something something dialectical materialism good, I don't have the time to get into that.
"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" basically
The world we perceive is actually just a representation of the real. The Marxist version of this is the concept of superstructure, the societal reality we create by participating and reproducing a mode of production (the base). Basically the engine of human reality that is built upon the real, but has no ability to change what it real, only the societal perceptions of it.
I think it's usually denoted as real (nature) vs Real (superstructure), but I'm just a layman.
I'm pretty sure that Marxism takes scientific realism as an assumption
phenomenology is not equal to marxism, though marxism is definitely a form of systematics so it does have to account for the whole picture, but I think we can safely say that subjectivity is already incorporated within the greater incentives and contradictions within relationships of production and capitalism
what I mean is that marxism is able to zoom in and zoom out at will. It shouldn't stay zoomed in or stay zoomed out, it all depends on what we are trying to accomplish.
sure but there is an implicit critique of phenomenology in marxism, that what matters is not so much the lived experience (as in perception) but what is behind it (the relations of production), which I think is more correct and which matters if we are talking about morality
as I said, as a systematics, and by going behind the perception to the cause of it, it diminishes the importance of phenomenology, also explicitly with the concept of false consciousness and I guess maybe also commodity fetishization, I didn't not say it said it did not matter however
who is saying you can mathematically quantify moral actions? like, I know utilitarianism might claim that, but I don't necessarily agree with utilitarianism.
I am by no means an expert nor particularly well educated, but:
spoiler
There is reality, and then there is reality as we perceive and describe it to one another.
There is "existence" or "reality" that is outside of the window of human perception and description. (As for myself, this is what I call Truth or True Existence or True Reality. Existence outside of the corrupting influence of Human perception.) After the last human dies out, there will still be an Earth. After the Earth is consumed by the sun, there will still be a Sol system. Long after the Sol system is drawn into the center of the galaxy, there will still be a universe; regardless of whether anything is there to perceive it and describe it or not.
Is it wrong for the sun to consume Earth?
No, this is the result of natural processes that are beyond our control. No consideration is made whether it is "right" or "wrong" for stars to consume their orbiting bodies over time.
We may ascribe attributes (like whether a thing is good or bad) to this reality in order to effectively communicate it to other people and establish/act upon our common experience of reality, but these attributes are not "reality" as such; it is how we signal "reality" between one-another. While these attributes "make things real" to us as they allow us to factor them into our understanding of existence and describe it to others, they are mere symbols/representations of that Truth.
No, reality isn't moral in my estimation.
I still think socrates had it right and that moral weakness isnt a thing. If the people are educated and know themselves they will naturally do the correct moral thing. It's only ignorance that breeds moral evil.
Buddy have ya heard of this little thing called addiction?
Socrates' model leaves no room for a human psychology that is evolved instead of created. The truth is that people aren't in 100 percent control of their own brains and bodies. His (or rather Plato's) model also assumes that it's moral to follow the mandates of your society.
No, I think addicts are definitely doing what they think is right although it isnt in accordance with societal bourgeois law obviously. They mightve even started using as a rational response and defense mechanism to overwhelming pain, emotional or physical. I think socrates would probably encourage them to seek out self-knowledge and treatment if their addiction is preventing them from being their best, and I dont think he would dismiss them as morally weak or incapable of making that choice for what would probably be in accordance with good-living.
Obviously he wasnt perfect cause we have developed in terms of ethics in the intervening 2500 years, but I think he was still pretty right.
I think you're seriously underestimating the mindset gap between what Socrates, or any Greek citizen, believed about ethics and what we do. Even the famous stuff like the Crito reveals a completely alien notion of what the state is in peoples' lives. Furthermore, Plato, who actually wrote the character of Socrates, definitively didn't believe self government was best. He believed the poor and stupid should be ruled by a class of intelligent philosopher kings.
"His (or rather Plato’s) model also assumes that it’s moral to follow the mandates of your society." now it depends on what type of society but I can see that, like soviet psychiatrists did with sluggish schizophrenia
reality is that humans are genealogically, collectively, self constructed, so of course reality's sense of moral is always slipping into the past and reality (as much as its moral) is at odds with the most current version of morality, see Exxon versus environmentalism.
