Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Felix wrote: June 19th, 2019, 2:51 pm
I was referring to the capacity for empathy which all sane individuals have, and un/insane ones lack. Morality requires empathy, and reason too, but not reason alone. Reason alone cannot dictate what is morally right or wrong, and the answers to the questions you mentioned are not strictly rational.
I'm afraid that doesn't get you anywhere. Empathy for whom --- for the pregnant woman, as pro-choicers would say, or for the fetus, as pro-lifers would claim? For the murderer, as opponents to capital punishment would claim, or for the victim, as its supporters would say?

Such questions cannot be resolved by appeals to empathy, any more than by appeals to values. They are both idiosyncratic, varying from person to person with respect to both their intensity and their objects. Moral rules with a rational basis can be understood, and perhaps even accepted, by both the saint and the sociopath, because they follow from objective premises.
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Felix
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton: "I'm afraid that doesn't get you anywhere. Empathy for whom --- for the pregnant woman, as pro-choicers would say, or for the fetus, as pro-lifers would claim?"

For both, and they are not separate until such time as the fetus can survive outside of the mother's womb. As I said, both empathy and reason are needed to make sensible moral decisions. It's not rational for the pro-lifer to presume he has more empathy for a fetus than it's mother does, for to him it is likely an ideological abstraction. Many pro-lifers are also against birth control, which suggests they are deficient in both empathy and reason.

GE Morton: "For the murderer, as opponents to capital punishment would claim, or for the victim, as its supporters would say?"

Will empathy for the murder victim bring him/her back to life? I believe our correctional system should live up to it's name and be about rehabilitation, not vengeance.

GE Morton: "Moral rules with a rational basis can be understood, and perhaps even accepted, by both the saint and the sociopath, because they follow from objective premises."

Well then, don't beat around the bush, give us your "rational moral rules" that solve these issues you've raised.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Belindi wrote: June 19th, 2019, 4:31 am
I'd maybe agree with you except for the following fact. Hume's claim that passion underlies ethical reasoning has been shown to be true.
It is true in the sense that much ethical "reasoning" is actually emotionally-driven rationalization.
Advances in neurology and its clinical application provide plenty of evidence that those who due to some accident are deficient in what Hume called "passion" and which we may call ordinary human kindness are less rational.
Well, I suspect that the suppliers of that "evidence" have concocted their own eclectic definition of "rational," which, per the traditional understanding, is dispassionate. Can you provide some cites?

"Rational: 1 based on sensible practical reasons instead of emotions"

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dic ... n/rational
GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Felix wrote: June 19th, 2019, 4:23 pm
As I said, both empathy and reason are needed to make sensible moral decisions.
Can you specify what role empathy plays in those decisions (other than to prejudice them and render them irrational)?
It's not rational for the pro-lifer to presume he has more empathy for a fetus than it's mother does, for to him it is likely an ideological abstraction.
Felix, empathy is not something one "presumes" one has. It is an involuntary, spontaneous, visceral response to suffering. It is not the product of any rational process, any more than are any other emotional reactions, such as fear, anger, jealousy, envy, hatred, etc., and it is not amenable to rational argument. Like all other emotional responses, what elicits it, for whom it is felt, and to what extent it drives behavior varies from person to person. It is for those reasons ---its subjectivity and its immunity to rational considerations --- that render it, not merely useless, but inimical to developing an ethics that one expects to be rational and universal.

The pro-lifer's empathies are no more or less irrational than anyone else's. They are all non-rational.
Will empathy for the murder victim bring him/her back to life? I believe our correctional system should live up to it's name and be about rehabilitation, not vengeance.
It should be about neither. It should be about securing justice. But that is another topic.
Well then, don't beat around the bush, give us your "rational moral rules" that solve these issues you've raised.
I've done that in another thread. Not the rules, but the premises from which rules can be derived. I left it up to the reader to determine what follows from those premises. It is here:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=15854
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Felix
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton: "empathy is not something one "presumes" one has. It is an involuntary, spontaneous, visceral response to suffering. It is not the product of any rational process, any more than are any other emotional reactions, such as fear, anger, jealousy, envy, hatred, etc., and it is not amenable to rational argument."

Seriously? You think the average pro-lifer is having an "involuntary, spontaneous, visceral response" to the suffering of some unborn fetus somewhere? :roll:

You may have given a fitting definition of pity, but empathy is a more complex feeling, and reason does play a part in it. What's more, all the emotions you mentioned are amenable to reason, if they were not, no one would be able to alter the way they respond emotionally to circumstances, and obviously people do that.

Felix: "As I said, both empathy and reason are needed to make sensible moral decisions."

GE Morton: "Can you specify what role empathy plays in those decisions?"

That should be obvious: the person who lacks empathy tends to be emotionally indifferent to how their decisions and actions affect others, they will think only in terms of what is beneficial to them.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
Belindi
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton wrote: June 19th, 2019, 8:21 pm
Belindi wrote: June 19th, 2019, 4:31 am
I'd maybe agree with you except for the following fact. Hume's claim that passion underlies ethical reasoning has been shown to be true.
It is true in the sense that much ethical "reasoning" is actually emotionally-driven rationalization.
Advances in neurology and its clinical application provide plenty of evidence that those who due to some accident are deficient in what Hume called "passion" and which we may call ordinary human kindness are less rational.
Well, I suspect that the suppliers of that "evidence" have concocted their own eclectic definition of "rational," which, per the traditional understanding, is dispassionate. Can you provide some cites?

"Rational: 1 based on sensible practical reasons instead of emotions"

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dic ... n/rational
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ns-easier/ You may also look up the famous case of that poor man whose forebrain was injured by a tamping rod used in a dynamite explosion. Phineas Gage. He was like many cases like lobotomy (leucotomy) whose moral judgements were weakened.

https://www.verywellmind.com/phineas-gage-2795244

It's unduly cynical to attribute much ethical reasoning to rationalising. The better way to reason includes self knowledge as another variable.
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Sculptor1
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Sculptor1 »

Belindi wrote: June 20th, 2019, 4:33 am
GE Morton wrote: June 19th, 2019, 8:21 pm

It is true in the sense that much ethical "reasoning" is actually emotionally-driven rationalization.



Well, I suspect that the suppliers of that "evidence" have concocted their own eclectic definition of "rational," which, per the traditional understanding, is dispassionate. Can you provide some cites?

"Rational: 1 based on sensible practical reasons instead of emotions"

https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dic ... n/rational
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ns-easier/ You may also look up the famous case of that poor man whose forebrain was injured by a tamping rod used in a dynamite explosion. Phineas Gage. He was like many cases like lobotomy (leucotomy) whose moral judgements were weakened.

https://www.verywellmind.com/phineas-gage-2795244

It's unduly cynical to attribute much ethical reasoning to rationalising. The better way to reason includes self knowledge as another variable.
It seems to me that ethics is nothing if it is not fundamentally a rationalization of generalized felling.
Emotions particularly concerning how you feel about other people in your community lies at the very heart of and motivates all, systems of morality. So morality is a consequence of an evolved and natural system. Ethics studies these tenancies and codifies emotions into ideas and rules.
GIven that I think Morton has no real appreciation of morality.
GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Belindi . . .

In your previous post you wrote, "I'd maybe agree with you except for the following fact. Hume's claim that passion underlies ethical reasoning has been shown to be true."

I responded, "It is true in the sense that much ethical 'reasoning' is actually emotionally-driven rationalization."

The Scientific American article you cite supports that response. It substantiates my claim that empathy, like other emotional responses, interferes with rational decision-making.

Consider carefully the findings reported in the study. A person whose emotional responses are not impaired is more likely to allow 25-50 people on a plane to die of Ebola rather than kill the carrier to prevent him from boarding the plane. He is more likely to allow 5 people to be killed by a runaway train than to push one person onto the track, which would kill that person but also stop the train before it reached the 5 people. As the article notes, "Some neuroscientists theorize that the choice ultimately comes down to a moral tug-of-war between compassion and cold reasoning."

Precisely. And rationality sometimes loses that tug-of-war.

Given the findings of your own source, how can you claim that emotions facilitate, or even are essential to, ethical reasoning, when they are plainly inimical to it?

Or do you think allowing 25 people to die, rather than one, is the more moral decision?

You wrote, "Advances in neurology and its clinical application provide plenty of evidence that those who due to some accident are deficient in what Hume called "passion" and which we may call ordinary human kindness are less rational."

Your cited article shows the opposite: That those with ordinary passions, and who are unable to subordinate them to reason, are less rational.

There is a complication with the studies cited in that article, however. Though the article claims that persons with VMPC damage lack empathy and compassion ("Because of their brain damage, they have abnormal social emotions in real life . . . they lack empathy and compassion'"), those are not the emotions evoked in the cited studies. Those studies involve scenarios where the subject is asked, not merely to choose between one death and multiple deaths, but to actually kill that one person. There are many other psychic inhibitors to killing a person than empathy and compassion, namely, strong cultural conditioning, fear of punishment, and anticipation of guilt ("Will I be able to live with myself if I do this?"). There is a strong difference between choosing who will die from an external cause, and being the cause; many would choose the deaths of 10 people from an external cause over personally killing one person. That, too, is an irrational, emotionally-driven decision.

The inhibition against killing another person present in most of us serves us well, for the most part. But in certain "lifeboat" situations it can lead us to morally outrageous decisions.
GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Sculptor1 wrote: June 20th, 2019, 5:57 pm
Emotions particularly concerning how you feel about other people in your community lies at the very heart of and motivates all, systems of morality.
They certainly do not --- at least, not systems which claim to be philosophical (i.e., rational). Emotions play no part in the ethics of Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, et al, or such moderns as the utilitarians or Rawls.
Ethics studies these tenancies and codifies emotions into ideas and rules.
No it does not, for the most part, though there is currently an interest in "moral psychology," which attempts to derive ethical principles from anthropological or neurological facts. All such efforts run headlong into the "is-ought" problem and commit the naturalistic fallacy.
GIven that I think Morton has no real appreciation of morality.
What I have no appreciation for are the numerous idiosyncratic, inconsistent, non-rational, emotionally-driven vernacular moralities that govern most people's beliefs and behavior.
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Felix
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Felix »

GE Morton said: "Given the findings of your own source, how can you claim that emotions facilitate, or even are essential to, ethical reasoning, when they are plainly inimical to it?"

That's a cockeyed interpretation of the article.... The brain damaged individuals described in that article did not make ethical decisions, they were incapable of doing that, they made strictly utilitarian and insensitive decisions. Lacking empathy/compassion, they had no qualms about killing someone outright (even their own child!), as opposed to knocking them out or using some other nonlethal approach.

GE Morton said: "Your cited article shows the opposite: That those with ordinary passions, and who are unable to subordinate them to reason, are less rational."

No, all it demonstrated is that emotionally dead people make efficient killers, that's hardly surprising.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
Belindi
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Belindi »

GEMorton, you quoted :
Consider carefully the findings reported in the study. A person whose emotional responses are not impaired is more likely to allow 25-50 people on a plane to die of Ebola rather than kill the carrier to prevent him from boarding the plane. He is more likely to allow 5 people to be killed by a runaway train than to push one person onto the track, which would kill that person but also stop the train before it reached the 5 people. As the article notes, "Some neuroscientists theorize that the choice ultimately comes down to a moral tug-of-war between compassion and cold reasoning."
The point was that the person who is deficient in normal empathy will have less or no difficulty with the trolley problem. It really is better all round when people find moral problems very hard to decide .How terrible if moral problems were all diminished to utilitarian problems! Government ministers are paid big salaries to administer utilitarian solutions and this payment is justified , as except for special cases most of the time they have to simply look at the numbers and to hell with their consciences.
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Sculptor1
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

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GE Morton wrote: June 20th, 2019, 11:11 pm
Sculptor1 wrote: June 20th, 2019, 5:57 pm
Emotions particularly concerning how you feel about other people in your community lies at the very heart of and motivates all, systems of morality.
They certainly do not --- at least, not systems which claim to be philosophical (i.e., rational). Emotions play no part in the ethics of Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, et al, or such moderns as the utilitarians or Rawls.
Yes they do.
Were it not for emotions there would be no reason for any of it.
Al these characters impose a rationality to morals, but why have any morals at all?
Why would you care about yourself, the community or how people get along?
Why not just die?
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Sculptor1
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by Sculptor1 »

GE Morton wrote: June 20th, 2019, 11:11 pm What I have no appreciation for are the numerous idiosyncratic, inconsistent, non-rational, emotionally-driven vernacular moralities that govern most people's beliefs and behavior.
Well duh. Priceless. LOL

Your problem here is that reality is just not good enough for you.
But the answer is staring you in the face.
Take a leaf out of Hume's book and all your confusion will just vanish. Then you will understand why the world is so full of "numerous idiosyncratic, inconsistent, non-rational, emotionally-driven vernacular moralities that govern most people's beliefs and behavior."
Because emotion underlies ALL moral and ethical systems
GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Sculptor1 wrote: June 21st, 2019, 6:49 am
Were it not for emotions there would be no reason for any of it.
That is true, but not for the reasons you think.
Al these characters impose a rationality to morals, but why have any morals at all?
Excellent question. We need morals because some rules of interaction are necessary when when thousands or millions of independent, autonomous individuals with different interests, different goals, different beliefs, different values --- i.e., different minds --- occupy a common territory. Conflicts are inevitable, and unless there are rules of conduct aimed at preventing or resolving them, the society dissolves and Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes ensues.

We don't develop moral rules because everyone loves their neighbor. We develop them because they don't.

To amplify on my answer to your first point: Yes, without emotions the whole issue would be moot. But, you see, emotional responses --- likes, dislikes, tastes, preferences, values, emotional reactions to any given phenomenon, differ --- wildly --- from person to person. Everyone values something, but not the same things, or to the same degree. So any workable moral system must take those differences seriously, and devise rules that are value-neutral, but that allow all agents to pursue whatever they value, without interfering in others' efforts to do likewise, as far as that is possible.
GE Morton
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Re: Are we forced to accept moral relativism?

Post by GE Morton »

Sculptor1 wrote: June 21st, 2019, 6:53 am
Your problem here is that reality is just not good enough for you.
You're right about that, if the "reality" you have in mind is the current slew of non-rational vernacular moralities. Just as the then-current vernacular belief systems regarding cosmology (geocentrism), medicine (disease is caused by evil spirits), agriculture (crop failures are punishments for our sins) were not good enough for Galileo, Pasteur, et al.
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