Should Morals Be Judged In A Cultural Context?

[Felix]

Spectrum: But is also a fact that the majority of humans has the self-conscious ability to deny the fact of mortality and many [more than 70%] believe God will grant them eternal life in heaven, physically and spiritually. Some believe they will continue to live as other forms [higher or lower] of life.

You are assuming that people actually believe what they claim to believe. From my experience, many or perhaps even most members of religions do not really believe in the metaphysical tenets of the religions, it's more of a social support group than anything else.

[Spectrum]

Spectrum: But is also a fact that the majority of humans has the self-conscious ability to deny the fact of mortality and many [more than 70%] believe God will grant them eternal life in heaven, physically and spiritually. Some believe they will continue to live as other forms [higher or lower] of life.

You are assuming that people actually believe what they claim to believe. From my experience, many or perhaps even most members of religions do not really believe in the metaphysical tenets of the religions, it's more of a social support group than anything else.

Wonder where you are pulling your info from.
I have been on to this issue for a long time and my understanding is the following;



Americans’ belief in an afterlife is very stable across the decades, showing little variability since 1944.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathleen- ... 87538.html
The % is around 70%++ and relate to all Americans.

Those polls that confined to believers only the % is higher. See this where the minimum is 80% in relation to believers of specific religion and sects.



As for a Muslim, it is a precondition a Muslim must believe in life after death, otherwise one cannot be qualified to be called a Muslim.

Naturally there will be believers who do not take their religion seriously e.g. for social reason or marrying into the spouse's religion, etc. but this % is insignificant.

Personally I have read of many polls where the majority of religionists believe in "life" [physical or spiritual form] after death.

[Gertie]

Iapetus

Apologies for the delay in replying

However, I do believe we can provide a shared foundation for discussing the purpose of those lines, and Harris encapsulated it neatly in the formulation 'the well-being of conscious creatures' (which notably extends beyond our own species and isn't reliant on notions of 'moral agents').

I agree in principle, with you and with Harris. The great redeeming feature of the concept of, 'the well-being of conscious creatures', is that it encompasses sentient animals as well as humans. The massive weakness, as I see it, is that the principle can be interpreted in so many ways that I am unable to see how any ‘objectivity’ worthy of the name can be drawn from it. My personal view is that Harris is very strong on research into brain function and its implications for belief and ‘morality’ but very much weaker about translating subjective morality into anything of broader significance.

Agreed in that I see an inevitable clash in trying to find objective rules which will universally apply to subjective states, which are key to the welfare of conscious creatures. If we take an extreme example, there's no point giving votes to monkeys (unless you're in the banana business) on some universal rights basis. We can take it as a rule of thumb, a grounding, but it's not a one-size-fits-all practical solution, no moral rule book can be. The subjective nature of consciousness, the impossibility of objectively measuring subjectively experienced harms and benefits against each other, means we're stuck with muddling our way through when things get complicated and blurry imo.

I would say that what gives this notion a proper grounding is the fact that consciousness brings into the world qualiative states, Subjects with a quality of life....So that conscious entities can suffer, be happy and everything in between. And that this Matters to those Subjects, and that they lose something of value to them if they die. (That's the grounding on which torturing and killing a child, an adult or a dog rests).

Not sure what you mean by this.

I'm saying that it is the possession of conscious states, experiencing, which is the thing of value you lose when you die (so if I'm alive but irreversibly brain dead and you switch the life support machine off, I lose nothing of value). And while I'm alive and experiencing, it's the qualiative nature of my conscious experience which is of value to me, whether I'm suffering or happy, flourishing or not flourishing - my quality of life. That's what my welfare boils down to, what is of value to each of us. And a good quality of life will mean different things to different people, hence I prefer the platinum rule. So my own personal morality can be summed up as 'Try to be kind', rather than do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, tho the latter mostly works.

I'm toying with the idea it might be better to just let go of the idea of morality, with all its baggage (including subjective vs objective, Good vs Evil), and use Goldstein's notion of Mattering instead. Stop worrying if something is objectively moral or not, what a 'moral agent' is - what we should be worrying about is what Matters to the well being conscious creatures, regardless. Harm matters, having enough to eat and thrive matters, fairness matters, etc. What do you think?

A problem arises, however, when different interpretations conflict. Imagine the mother beating her child to death to drive out evil spirits. I think she is crazy and she doesn’t. She may, in fact, still be applying principles of the Golden Rule and empathy. She may well understand that the child would suffer agonies but that she would be helping her child in the long term because, by driving out the demons, that child would not longer suffer agonies in the after life. That was also a justification for burning or drowning heretics. I think that burning heretics is crazy but, then, I don’t believe in an after-life and belief so often determines action. My condemnation of the woman for beating the child would be based, at least in part, on my lack of belief in demons. Joan of Arc heard voices. Did they come from God or was she schizophrenic?

My view is that when it comes to societal rules we should go with secular tolerance, because that's where all belief systems should be able to find common ground of reason, fairness and acceptance. So you can believe what you want, worship what and how you want, but when your actions bring harm to others (the well-being of conscious creatures), society has a role in protecting its members, and the common good. Where you draw the line is of course the tricky part, but those are easy examples.

Many countries have found their way to secular tolerance, after millennia of bloodshed, some haven't. It's an idea which is under threat everywhere right now, with the rise of extreme right nationalism and religious sectarianism.

I like Rawls' idea of the Veil of Ignorance as a good societal-scale empathy and fairness prompt. And it helps to address an inbuilt problem with our social impulses, because those caring and cooperative neurobiological mechanisms evolved to suit living in small tribal groups. So while they work well with kin and up close and personal, they lose power with distance and have to become more intelluctualised and institution/rule dependant. And in our massive inter-connected global societies our tribal instincts are more apt to be triggered, Us vs Them. Especially when resources are short, or perceived to be under threat from outsiders. Hopefully as we better understand how these mechanisms work, we can get past some of the problems they throw up...

This is something we can all understand, extrapolating from the personal to the universal, and thereby provides 'rule of thumb' guidance for Mattering, which then entails Oughts.

Anyway, we need to fill the Morality is Dead gap with something people can feel is real meaningful to coalesce around, in the way we used to around religious prescriptions.. In a nutshell I think Harris' 'Welfare of Conscious Creatures' and Goldstein's 'Mattering' might offer a pointer to being able to come up with a new philosophical model of Morality which could be universal in principle, if not in detail. But at least it offers an understanding of why quantifying the qualiative will always be a messy biz. And Rawls gives us a mechanism for implementation.

The ‘oughts’ is another problem but I have enough on my plate at the moment. I don’t want to get into that.

Fair enough!

-- Updated May 4th, 2017, 4:29 pm to add the following --

oops should be quotes around your last sentence - ''The ‘oughts’ is another problem but I have enough on my plate at the moment. I don’t want to get into that.''

[Felix]

Spectrum, Opinion polls should not be taken literally. Opinions are not beliefs, hope is not faith. If people really believed in life after death, they wouldn't fear death, would they?

People say they believe in all sorts of things, but if they won't or don't live by those beliefs, can we trust that they actually believe them? I don't think so. As an example, Christian "right-to-lifers" who claim to be protectors of the unborn and hold human life sacred and yet support wars that kill and maim any number of innocent babies and children.

People adopt religions for various reasons but I just don't see fear of death as the primary one; it's "out of sight, out of mind" to most people.

[Lark_Truth]

I guess in short you are saying just because a bunch of people all living together agree on some moral rules doesn't mean that they are right? I would agree with that, it's a well known fallacy called appeal to popularity. I think popularity often has some moral value but it's not a system and is often wrong. So if that's what you mean then I agree that society as whole can't correctly define morality.

Exactly my point. Thank you.

Polygamy is something that we and society do not have a perfect understanding of. Somehow God does, and He knows how it should be and who should practice it.

I'm a little confused by your explanation. You are saying that God told you to practice Polygamy so therefore you know it to be moral. But that the church stopped that practice in 1889. Is not the church then immoral?

I would think that not practicing does not mean that someone is immoral. I've done some research and apparently to the Mormon church - even in the advent of polygamy - monogamy was still God's standard of marriage unless God give a commandment for certain people to practice polygamy. A man couldn't just decide that he wanted to take more than one wife. So it probably wouldn't be immoral for a person to not practice polygamy unless they were going directly against God's commandment to them. The Mormon Church isn't immoral because it doesn't practice polygamy anymore.
Now can we please talk about something other that polygamy that pertains to this thread, I've exhausted my knowledge on plural marriage.

[Spectrum]

Spectrum, Opinion polls should not be taken literally. Opinions are not beliefs, hope is not faith. If people really believed in life after death, they wouldn't fear death, would they?

People say they believe in all sorts of things, but if they won't or don't live by those beliefs, can we trust that they actually believe them? I don't think so. As an example, Christian "right-to-lifers" who claim to be protectors of the unborn and hold human life sacred and yet support wars that kill and maim any number of innocent babies and children.

People adopt religions for various reasons but I just don't see fear of death as the primary one; it's "out of sight, out of mind" to most people.

I have raised the above as new thread in the Religion section. I am not responding in detail yet [not wasting my efforts] until it is approved because none of the many threads I raised have never been approved since a long long time ago.

[Eduk]

Now can we please talk about something other that polygamy that pertains to this thread, I've exhausted my knowledge on plural marriage.

haha You answer too honestly and too straight forwardly and with too much, apparent, good nature, I just can't argue with you

Let's just say that I don't find that Religion solves the problem of 'it's just a bunch of people with a consensus'. For example morally I prefer a general system with rules which can be changed (with new evidence) and which can be applied to a wide variety of specific cases. For example the Golden Rule is a pretty good rule. But I don't think following rules (even good ones) is in and of itself moral behaviour. Moral behaviour requires empathy. It's possible to be a moral person and make moral acts without being able to explain why they are moral for example

[Lark_Truth]

Eduk, you are an extremely smart person.
You are right, morality requires empathy.

Question: Would morality be *anything* that is healthy and good?

[Eduk]

lol

Question: Would morality be *anything* that is healthy and good?

It all depends on how you define healthy and good really. For me that is a bit vague. There are situations where violence is morally the correct thing to do for example. I believe you can commit moral acts which would be very bad for you short term, perhaps even very bad for the people you loved or even the whole human race long term but maybe good for life (in the whole universe) long term. I can't think of moral acts which would not qualify on one of those three levels (ignoring reasonable mistakes of course). I would prefer to talk about fairness, equity and equality. And about the process of how reasonable claims are made according to formal logic and the scientific method.

[Lark_Truth]

That is some really good points, Eduk. It has never occurred to me that violence can sometimes be justifiably moral. You have a definite point there.
But what I meant by my question was - besides violence - is what is generally considered moral (ie dress standards, drug intake, language, etc.) that which is good and healthy for people.
For instance, most people I think consider pornography immoral. I have heard of scientific studies that prove that looking at pornography is bad for one's brain. Is something like this what justifies the health benefits of being moral?

[Eduk]

I don't think of dress standards as being a moral concern as such. To me they are that consensus of people thing, can anyone actually say why wearing x,y or z is better or worse other than in terms of societal standards? (which we already agreed aren't good enough reasons to call something moral or immoral). Now of course jumping out from behind a bush and flashing a young girl for some odd sexual perversion is clearly immoral but being a naturist is a totally different thing.
Drugs are tricky. We all take drugs all the time, just depends which drug and in which quantity. For example I wouldn't say drinking coffee is moral or immoral. It's a nice thing to do (for me) but am I harming myself or am I enriching my life. Perhaps both in very small ways, acceptable ways. Of course you can drink too much coffee at which point you are entering territory where you harming yourself and that could be called immoral (there are of course degrees of morality). Now you could talk about smoking tobacco which is clearly more harmful than coffee and has a larger effect on others. Again quantity must be a factor, an occasional cigarette could hardly be called immoral but maybe 20 a day could be called slightly immoral (again it may be a price you are willing to pay, it's only slightly immoral and even that is debatable). Moving on to heroin or meth which have more life changing effects, these stop you from functioning. I dare say some people can be functional heroin addicts but even this could hardly be called a good thing. Like jumping off a cliff and surviving doesn't justify your decision to jump off a cliff. This is certainly immoral behaviour of significant harm to yourself and those around you, not just in number of years of life but in the quality of that life. Having said all that you need to be careful how you judge people, a heroin addict isn't necessarily an evil person that needs to be written off, for the most part they need help.
Bad language is again just a social construct, it says little about morality. Of course it depends how you use it, if you are deliberately offending people then that is an issue. To put a different perspective than what I think you meant you could say that being lazy and not learning a good vocabulary was immoral, again it's a matter of degrees.
Porn is another tough one. It reminds me a little of Kinsey who over intellectualised sex and ignored his own nature. Intellectually it might be fine for your wife to have other partners but I can't see that many people would cope unconsciously. Of course this is not to say that it didn't work for Kinsey, perhaps his nature was different, this is entirely possible. Sex is a very primal and complex issue. Why we even have sex (biologically speaking) is unknown. Is it moral or immoral, that is hard to say. For example most people will go a little (or a lot) crazy if they don't have sex. I would have to say this one is too complex to answer easily In general I don't think porn is a great thing, it's not really enriching anyone's life, is it immoral? That would depend on the individual. It's certainly not moral, at best it's neutral
I've probably digressed too much from your question
In summary no I think good and healthy is not a good enough definition overall. That's not bad, it will get you a long way, but it's not everything. For example it's healthy to eat an apple but not exactly what I would call moral (maybe a very tiny amount) Really the key point I've been trying to make is that good and healthy is too open to interpretation, a definition of morality requires more precision than that I think.

[Spectrum]

lol
It all depends on how you define healthy and good really. For me that is a bit vague. There are situations where violence is morally the correct thing to do for example. I believe you can commit moral acts which would be very bad for you short term, perhaps even very bad for the people you loved or even the whole human race long term but maybe good for life (in the whole universe) long term. I can't think of moral acts which would not qualify on one of those three levels (ignoring reasonable mistakes of course). I would prefer to talk about fairness, equity and equality. And about the process of how reasonable claims are made according to formal logic and the scientific method.

I understand Morality and Ethics are very loose terms. I believe your definition of 'morality' as above is ineffective and dangerous to humanity.

To allow for situations where violence is morally the correct thing to do is very bad start and open a floodgates for any one to justify violence based on their own subjective interpretations.

My Morality and Ethical Framework and System is such that 'morality' is the 'Pure' aspects and 'ethics' is the applied aspects.

In such a system, we must set the absolute or ideal Moral Principle:
Violence is always morally wrong.
This is merely a guide and not enforceable, but what is critical is it starts off as a deterrent and something that is negative, i.e. morally wrong.

Whilst the above is ideal, in reality human nature is vulnerable to violence and there will be a % humans who will commit violence. This aspect will be dealt with Ethics - the applied aspect of morality.

With my proposed system, before we deal with the applied aspects, i.e. Ethics, the effective point here is the person who had committed violence has to admit,
"violence [confirmed] regardless of degree is morally wrong in the first place and that he had committed a moral wrong."
Such an approach is to educate, bring to awareness and a deterrent in general.

Then the Ethical and Judicial system will deal with the actual acts of violence committed to decide the person who committed the violence should be punished or not.

Thus to be effective, we cannot promote the concept that certain violence can be morally right or correct. This must be an oxymoron.
We must start with the Moral Principle; all violence [to be defined appropriately] must be morally wrong at all times without exceptions.

There is no such thing as 'certain violence are ethically right or correct'.
The Ethical and Judicial system is there merely to judge how morally-wrong [variance between ideal and practical] is a particular act of violence, and thence to establish fair justice based on established ethical rules and judiciary laws.

The objective of my proposed system is thus to deter, discourage and prevent violence or whatever is morally wrong.

[Eduk]

Spectrum if someone unreasonable commits violence against you then you have a moral duty to protect not just yourself but those whom you love and by extension random strangers. Of course you could be wrong, it might be that the other person is correct to commit violence against you and those you love. But you can only do the best you can do. No one can ask for more than that. A system of all violence is wrong will end with violent people taking what they want until everyone is violent. A rather self destructive situation.

[LuckyR]

A couple of things:

We don't get to make up the definitions of labels. Ethics are the codes of conduct determined by various groups (and thus are fluid both geographically and through time) and morality is one's personal code of conduct, which (by definition) is individual.

Separate from that, assuming a common definition of "violence" almost no one would accept a total non violent code of conduct, for numerous and self evident reasons.

[Eduk]

Spectrum seemed to be saying violence is always wrong? I may have misunderstood?
Also I disagree with your definition of morals. The whole planet could agree that a particular action was moral and the whole planet could be wrong. They would of course call it moral. It would be in the dictionary under moral. But it still wouldn't be moral.