Witnessing people you believe to be moral now supporting genocide will create strange inconsistencies like that.
It is not a genocide if god’s chosen people do it!
What’s even funnier- is the amount of people in the comments here that perfectly illustrate the humor in the post without even understanding why.
Jokes on you, I don’t believe in subjective morality.
Could somebody explain it to me, please?
The humor is based on a seeming contradiction this guy’s students exhibit.
They apparently simultaneously believe:
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in a relativistic moral framework - that morality is a social construct (that can mean other things, too, but morality as a social construct is a very common type of relativistic moral framework)
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that their morality is correct and get outraged at disagreements with their moral judgments.
This isn’t logically inconsistent, but it is kind of funny.
It isn’t logically inconsistent because, if you believe morality is relative and what is right/wrong for people in other societies is not necessarily right/wrong for people in your society, then assuming that the professor and his student are part of the same or similar societies, they should share the same or similar morality. People in the same society can disagree on who is a part of their society as well as what is moral. Ethics is messy. So, it is not necessarily logically inconsistent to try to hold others to your relativized moral framework - assuming you believe that it applies to them too since “relativized” doesn’t mean “completely individualized”. And, due to globalization, you might reasonably hold a pretty wide range of people to your moral views.
It is kind of funny because there is a little bit of tension between the rigidity of the ethical beliefs held and the acceptance that ethics are not universal and others may have different moral beliefs that are correct in their cultural context. Basically, to act like your morals are universally correct while believing that your morals are correct for you, but not for everyone, represents a possible contradiction and could be a bit ironic.
A good example of relativistic morality based on culture/society:
On the Mongolian steppe, it has traditionally been seen by some nomadic groups as good and proper for the old, when they can no longer care for themselves, to walk out on the steppe to be killed by the elements and be scavenged - a “sky burial”. Many in the West would find this unacceptable in their cultural context. In fact, they might say, it is wrong to expect or allow your mom to go sky bury herself in Ohio or say… Cambridge. Instead, they might think you should take her in or put her in a home.
Now, if your professor said to you “So you don’t think Mongolians expecting their mothers to die in sky burials is wrong, but you believe me expecting my mother to die in a sky burial is wrong in Cambridge? Curious. I am very intelligent.” You could probably assume they are either a Mongolian nomad or don’t understand relatvistic morality.
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Good! In a culture that worships cops and “thought leaders”, this is two steps up from meekly accepting whatever powerful people say.
Now it’s time for:
(3) Acting on your ethical convictions towards specific goals, and learning to work with people who share them, even when their motivations or values are different.P.S. As others here have stated, (1) and (2) are not contradictory. If morality is constructed, then we all construct our own. Unless you actually WANT to be an amoral bastard.
I believe the only objective morality is that you must act without intent to harm others unless it is in self-defense.
How far in advance are you allowed to act in self defense? If you all but know they’re leaving the room to go get a gun out of the next room can you strike while their back is turned as they leave? What if it’s the neighbor who thinks you banged his wife and he’s going next door to get the gun? For most people there’s probably a distance at which the answer becomes “call the cops” but that distance probably gets a lot farther if the guy you think is about to shoot you is the sheriff’s brother. And what if you’re less sure? What if the person is clearly unhinged but it feels like a coinflip as to whether or not they’re about to try to murder you?
What about on a wider societal level? If you think a group of people is marshalling to attack you or the wider society can you attack first? Do you arrest them or even have the police violently disrupt their gatherings? Do you become a terrorist and commit an act of mass violence in the hopes that it will prevent them from attacking you or another group you consider vulnerable?
That raises the other question of whether it’s acceptable to defend others, but for the sake of simplicity it sounds like you’re not in favor of getting in the middle of other people’s fights which is fair, but do your kids fights count as your fights? Is there an age limit on that?
None of those questions necessarily apply to any particular ideology but I can think of a few ways people might and often actually have used these concepts in ways both favoring and disfavoring my own personal convictions.
And now you successfully turned a simple statement into one hell of a philophical exam.
A few years ago a coworker asked what thing is seen as normal now that’s going to be looked back on in 100 years as completely barbaric and I was like seriously? We’re acute inpatient psych nurses who have to force people to take medications, often by physically holding them down and injecting them. We’re doing the best we can, and I actually got into this field because I was that patient (my first restraint incident was my own) and I like to think I’m part of working towards that better future but holy shit does it suck right now.
Even if you skip over the psychiatric emergencies volatile enough to warrant emergency meds there’s so much more awful shit that I don’t have any good alternatives to. I have to see every person’s full skin including removing their pants on admission. I’m as tactful as I can be, I try to make sure the staff members are the same gender (although usually the men don’t mind the nurses all being female). I try to provide as much modesty and dignity as I can, but in the end I can’t tell just by looking which ones have a knife taped to their leg until their pants are actually off. One person actually had an entire loaded gun that the ED somehow missed. I don’t make them squat and cough or put my fingers in any orifices but it still traumatizes the depressed college students who think we’re gonna heal them instead of just prevent them from dying for three days while we make sure it’s safe for them to take the sedatives they’re gonna need for the weeks or even months until they can see an outpatient psych or therapist who will do the actual helping.
Life is horrible. We do the best we can. I’ve decided my meaning of life is to reduce suffering. I don’t work in an environment that’s conducive to that but I also don’t have a whole lot of better options. There are places that are kinder but they’re not designed to handle the really hard cases and a certain amount of those will always exist. At least the more time I spend trying the better idea I have of what actions I can take that will actually reduce suffering (although luck remains a significant factor) and sometimes I even succeed!
Oddly enough, just watched Hitman, and there was a line that fits here.
I don’t see the problem. One can have unshakeable moral values they believe everyone should have while acknowledging those values may be a product of their upbringing and others’ lack of them the same.
I think you’re missing the significance of his phrase “entirely relative”.
In moral philosophy, cultural relativity holds that morals are not good or bad in themselves but only within their particular context. Strong moral relativists would hold the belief that it’s fine to murder children if that is a normal part of your culture.
I guess I’m parsing the statement as “understand it as a concept” when they mean “hold that position.”
Yes, I think that’s what has happened. He could have been clearer.
What about the last part: “viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity?”
I believe abortion is moral. I believe people who disagree are morally monstrous. I can also understand that their beliefs on whether abortion is moral or not can be a product of their culture and upbringing. What am I missing? Why is this odd?
Your approach is an absolute approach. You see another culture doing something that’s monstrous and say hey that’s monstrous but I guess that’s how they were raised. In other words, your values are absolute.
When you say “abortion is moral,” do you mean that it is never immoral? As in, you literally can’t think of a situation where it would be wrong for a woman to get an abortion?
The only situations I can imagine where abortion would be immoral are extremely contrived scenarios that don’t happen in reality.
That’s very nieve. You can believe in a woman’s absolute right to choose while also acknowledging that sometimes people do heinous things.
How is that naive and why do you believe you’re saying something different than me?
Not the person you responded to, but yes, that describes me.
I’m someone else, but yeah, I believe the right to bodily autonomy trumps quite literally every other right.
If the world’s smartest person’s survival depended on compromising my bodily autonomy for 5 seconds, I would be in my right to let that person die. If you forced it on me, I would be in my right to kill the world’s smartest person for violating my bodily autonomy.
And not just that, but I think the vast majority of people hold this opinion, but they’re either too dumb to realize it, or commit non-stop special pleading to deny it. I think that very basically, because to think bodily autonomy is NOT the ultimate right, is to think it acceptable to farm human organs as long as it’s for a sufficiently good reason.
So mother is in the 12th hour of labor, she can just morally request an abortion? What if the baby is crowning? How about before the cord is clamped or cut? What about the day before a C-section?
The mother can, at any point in time, choose not to let someone else use her body. Doing so, practically, in all your examples would result in the birth of the child.
This isn’t some clever gotcha, the point of my argument is that the child has no right to use the mothers body to survive. If someone decides not to let someone else use their body, and that means the child dies, then so be it, because bodily autonomy supercedes life.
My argument isn’t that a mother should be able to kill a child just because she feels like it. It’s acceptable to kill someone to maintain bodily autonomy, that’s my argument.
Your “clever” examples all have options where both bodily autonomy are maintained AND life is maintained, which is a double win.
It’s the kind of thing professors say when they want to go viral on some fascist platform.
Now that is funny. Its funny because its true.
For the people not getting it:
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They treat morals as opinions.
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They also treat their personal opinions like they’re the absolute best opinion.
Another way:
They think everyone likes different ice cream flavors and that’s fine. They like Rocky Road flavor. They also think anyone who doesn’t is a monster.
Convictions are one thing. But they need to be logically consistent. Saying morality is subjective but you’re evil if you don’t subscribe to my personal version is illogical.
Let’s say we decide that
moralswhat is right and wrong is decided entirely by ourselves. Then it makes perfect sense to defend your own opinions and to disagree with people who disagree with your stance on right and wrong. You chose those morals after all. It’s kinda part of the deal that they can’t apply to you alone (example: when is it just to kill?)So I don’t see a contradiction.
I guess this post is about Inability to engage with a different set of morals. But assuming that their is an absolute truth for right and wrong wouldn’t solve that issue, so I’m not sure why they brought it up.
The issue is believing that everyone has a right to their beliefs but then attacking them. It’s like in cultural anthropology: you should only judge a culture by its own internal morals and standards and not impose your outside view when studying them. Kinda like Star Trek Prime Directive.
If you TRULY believe everyone is entitled to their own morals, then you’re breaking that when you criticize someone else’s. After all, they have their own morals system and you’re perfectly fine with that. Your morals can only include your actions. If you believe that your morals are objectively the best, you’re no longer thinking the first thing anymore. It’s subjectivism vs objectivism.
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Everything in moderating or something. I’m not an ear doctor
Subjective morality is self evidently true, but that gives us no information about how to live our lives, so we must live as if absolute morality is true.
We only have our own perspective. Someone else’s subjective morality is meaningless to us, we aren’t them.
Is he saying the first point is wrong or just that it conflicts with the second?
That it conflicts. He’s saying that if you believe that morality is relative and every person/culture has the difficult task of defining their own, it’s ironic to be so aghast when people have reached different conclusions than you.
It seems like that tension between those things (which I’d expect are natural intuitions that many people experience) would be a foundational principle in ethics. Is it? Is that the joke?
There are many people in the world who don’t believe in moral relativism, and those people can somewhat easily argue that their view is the right one, and that people who disagree with them are wrong. You see this a lot in religious fanatics. They have a kind of internal consistency, and there are ways you could attack it, but there is a simple message.
But you also see people who think that moral relativism is a better worldview, but in the next sentence they will get upset that people disagree with them, which shows that actually they aren’t accepting of moral relativism unless it’s to their benefit. And they don’t see this contradiction. It’s this final point, this failure to realize their own words undercut their own professed views, that’s entertaining.
as someone who never studied ethics academically, this was also my guess.
This, we sadly have people who believe that open-mindness is a virtue, as long as you’re open-minded in the exact same way as everypony else.
There are two opinions: mine and wrong.
Setting aside the unshakeable part, morality should be somewhat rigid. While relative, that doesn’t mean morality can or should change on a whim.
They conflict. The first one is a form of moral relativism (that how you should act morally depends on your culture/upbringing).
The second one is a form of moral absolutism (that there is a specific morality you should live by)
Basically someone saying there’s no right answer while also saying they have the only right answer and everyone who disagrees with it is bad.
That it conflicts with the second viewpoint.
I’m not quite following. From my recollection meta ethics deal with the origins of morality, with absolutism being that morality is as inherent to nature as, say, gravity is, and relativism that morality is a social construct we have made up.
Is it hypocrisy to acknowledge something is a social construct while also strongly believing in it?
If I grew up in the 1400s I’d probably hold beliefs more aligned with the values of the time. I prefer modern values because I grew up in modern society. I find these values superior but also acknowledge my reason for finding them superior ultimately boils down to the sheer random chance of when and where I was born.
I don’t believe he’s commenting on whether morality is actually absolute or relative, but rather pointing out the irony that those who strongly believe it’s subjective are appalled by the seemingly logical consequence that individuals reach different conclusions and disagree.
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Absolute truth must exist, because if it doesn’t, “there is no absolute truth” is absolutely true, which is a contradiction.
Kind of, right? You’re making strong assumptions about the meanings of words. A lot of continental philosophy has been written about this subject.
Obviously truth is absolute. The question is whether morality is absolute or relative.
You should look into Godel’s incompleteness theorem.
I first encountered it in Hofstadter’s incredible book.
You arent the decider of what truth is though, especially for others.
You don’t agree that there are universal truths? Like the earth is spherical, the sun provides us light, and lemmy.ml is full of tankies?
What is light to one is dark for another. Whats pain for one is gain for another. Everything is relative and through the lens of your own perspective, experience, and bias
I’ll take that as a ‘no’
Ill take yours as “I dont get it”
I mean, in the same vein, I can completely break reality if it can’t stand a contradiction, watch:
This sentence is false.
Even if all morality is subjective or inter-subjective I have some very strong opinions about tabs vs spaces
Morality is, and always has been, built entirely upon empathy. Understanding how someone else feels and considering the greater implications beyond yourself is the fundamental building block to living a moral life. If you’re willing to condemn the world to your shitty code just because the tab key is quicker, you’re a selfish monster who deserves hyponichial splinters. See also: double spaces after a period.
My morality is built on furtherment of mankind technologically, with weights assigned to satisfaction and an aversion to harm. Here are some examples on how to apply this logically and without any emotion, empathy included:
- It’s kind of like not really believing in human rights but supporting them anyways because the people who oppose human rights are destructive and inefficient.
- Humans are animals. We must act according to our basic wants and needs in a way that maximizes our satisfaction, or else we are acting against our own nature. However, we must do this in a way that causes no harm, or we have failed as a collective species.
- Diversity is a must because exclusivity is a system which consistently fails every time is has ever been tested.
- The death penalty is taboo not because life is sacred but because one person deciding the importance of another’s life is intellectually bankrupt and only leads to a spiral of violence.
- All life is meaningless, full stop, which gives us the right to assign whatever meaning we like, and having more technology, with equal control over it by each individual person, gives us the collective power to make more choices.
I will not be taking any questions, meatbags
So, empathy like I said.
Why do you value the technological advancement of the human race? How do you determine what is advancement, and what is regression?
Why place emphasis on satisfaction and aversion to harm? How do you determine the relative levels of satisfaction and harm except through empathy?
I apologize for breaking your comment down into quotes.
So, empathy like I said.
Incorrect, it can be entirely selfish and rational, because helping others also helps you.
Why do you value the technological advancement of the human race? How do you determine what is advancement, and what is regression?
I thought I explained that pretty well. Life has the meaning we choose, technology gives more choices.
Why place emphasis on satisfaction and aversion to harm? How do you determine the relative levels of satisfaction and harm except through empathy?
I also explained that. It’s the most efficient method. It is the time-proven way to accomplish the goal of furtherment of technology, and satisfaction is also our primary motive as animals. All methods which fail this simple test, whether or not they avert harm for others, inevitably fail on a societal level. How we measure it, satisfaction and harm, is by actually measuring it via communication. Humanity has developed means of quantifying happiness and wellbeing, of assessing the wants and needs of individuals and society as a whole.
I feel like I’m just repeating myself.
Morality is, and always has been, built entirely upon empathy. Understanding how someone else feels and considering the greater implications beyond yourself is the fundamental building block to living a moral life.
Stoning people to death for mixing fabrics was based on morality too.
Who did that? Jewish people who wore mixed fabrics were unclean and had to cleanse themselves. Who murdered people for that?
Oh no, my half remembered example of overly violent reactions to breaking moral traditions might not be literally accurate!
Did religions include extremely harsh punishments for breaking moral codes? Yes. That is the point even if the details aren’t exactly right.
You can hold to an ethical code while breaking your moral code. This seems to be an example of that, and my frustration with ethics codes of many professional societies/organizations. You can be entirely ethical yet still spend your life crating efficient life ending tools.
Nah, the probibitions against mixed fabrics, and who can be considered holy, and how to pray and to whom, all of those are edicts designed to exert control. It has nothing to do with morality.
The correct answer is to map tab to spaces in your IDE.
This is gonna get out of hand.
ANNNND
Fuck you, nuh uh
People who use tabs are monsters
<overly dramatic threat of violence here>
Tabs are the one true way! All those who blaspheme against the might tab will be regex’d into compliance.
Vertical or horizontal tabs? And I don’t mean browser tabs.
Tabs. F alignment for aesthetic purposes
My heart goes out to those who suffer with poor editors where this is a problem. I do empathize with them. It’s important to love others and help. That’s the code for my life: love others. Except vim users. Straight to jail.
As I have learned today: “tabstospaces”: true
Yeah, that’s because moral relativism is cool when you live in a free and decent society.
The irony is that you can afford to debate morality when society is moral and you’re not facing an onslaught of inhumanity in the form of fascism and unchecked greed that’s threatening any hope for a future.
But when shit hits the fan, morality becomes pretty fucking clear. And that’s what’s happening right now. Philosophical debates about morality are out the window when you’re facing an existential threat.
They used to be the case that just calling your political opponents evil was oversimplifying. But these days? They literally are just evil in the most cruel ways imaginable to the point where there’s nothing to debate, and people who do so are doing so in bad faith most of the time. I think that’s another dimension of the situation, a poorly moderate websites like Twitter make it so that people are constantly in a hostile environment where good faith cannot be assumed so you have to learn to operate in that kind of environment
And the evil guys are yelling that the other side is evil, while the other side is too good to call anyone evil 😔
I think the person replying to you actually just outlined the point the post made. You can frame all of these views for both sides, and could let two people on both side argue about who is actually trying to be cruel.
As much as I’d agree so much evil shit is going in, it’s a good point about how perceptions from others don’t change our own views lately and we aren’t even interested in discussing them. I also understand your point of there being no reason to try discussing them, but that’s the view the people on the other side have had for the past 9 years now, and that’s why we’re where we are. I’m not American but I truly wonder if there’s a way that people can capitulate to each other without having to start a civil war.
When the other side is doing stuff like Mass deportation ASMR videos you’re past the point where it’s a reasonable debate about the exact level of income tax or whatever. Actual cartoon villains wouldn’t dare behave this badly
I mean yeah, the democrats are violent, authoritarian, and and generally awful.
True. Just ask someone from Gaza
Yeah, things have hugely improved in Gaza since one of the most powerful countries in the world got rid of their “democrats” in government.
Ohnowaititstheopposite.
