Still Passionate and Confused

Hmm, to be 'jingly' it needs to use the same words in both parts:

Classical music has quality but no fun; pop music has fun but no quality.

Or to use opposites ("hard to listen to" is not the opposite of "fun"):

Dickens is boring but historical; Blyton is fun but fictional.

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tig-b.livejournal.com

thank you

I shouldn't write when I'm still half asleep!

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the-changeling.livejournal.com

Good taste is money with history. Bad taste is money with none.

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the-changeling.livejournal.com

Also, as a word quibble. Morality is not ethics, and ethics is what is being bandied about in the quote.

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There are conflicting views on the difference between morality and ethics. Some people hold that ethics is objective (for instance wasting natural resources means that they will run out sooner) whereas morality is generated by society (which includes religion as a sociological phenomenon), some that ethics is self-generated and morality imposed from outide; some people reverse both of those. And to make it worse, some define ethics in terms of morality or vice versa, or even regard them as the same (at least one dictionary entry does the latter).

As far as I can see the only way of communicating about either is for each person to define which meanings they are using, and for a discussion group to agree in advance on which definitions they are using and then sticking to them (regardless of the way any individual might use the terms outside that group). Otherwise all you get is noise with everyone misunderstanding each other.

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I incline to a modified "self-generated/imposed from outside" view; our personal ethics start out being defined by the morality we're taught, get modified as we think about things and come to our own conclusion, and in turn have a small but measurable effect on morality through our actions.

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Yet another variant *g*.

Actually, using the terms as you seem to be using them, I agree. And certainly personal implementations and perceptions of both ethics and morals are heavily influenced by external ones (and may influence them in turn).

I suppose my definitions would be something like the following:

Ethics say "this thing will have consequences" (which I may or may not like). For instance wasting resources which will limit my (and others') future possibilities; if I spend all my money on toys then I won't have any left for food. Or murdering someonefor personal gain. There's little room for argument in that sort of thing, almost all societies will agree on it.

Morals say that regardless of actual consequences something is 'right' or 'wrong'. Some people would say, for instance, that reading anything other than the Bible is 'wrong'.

To take one very variable area, what societies define as incest can be very different. The ethical case is fairly simple, to limit the chance of genetic defects, but in some cultures marrying your (deceased) brother's wife is forbidden and in others it's almost compulsory. There's no ethical/practical reason why adopted 'siblings' shouldn't marry, but it's often regarded as 'wrong' (at least one society which forbids that allows first cousins to marry: go figure). (And I knew a person who wouldn't date a friend who was regarded as a 'brother', because it would "feel wrong".)

But, as I say, there are some people who would regard the above as having ethics and morals reversed. For the sake of sanity: define your terms (STR).

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But good grief, morality is *all about* what we're told--morality is tribal.

Um. So you think that "grab all you can and devil take the hindmost" is moral if that's what you're told? Seriously?

If you do, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about morality being what you are told.

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Nice try, but it's fairly clear what I actually mean.

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You seriously appear (to me at least) to be saying that morality is what the majority of the people around you--or at least the people who had the teaching of you as a child--tells you is moral.

"...morality is *all about* what we're told--morality is tribal."

That IS what you meant by that, right?

So I think my objection holds water.

Now there are people who think that morality does work this way; I have seen people argue--to all appearances seriously--that, for example, slavery was moral when most people believed it was.

If you're one of those people we'll have to agree to disagree on whether the morality of slavery, or women's freedom, or gay marriage, is really affected by majority opinion.

But if you think morality is *not* in fact changed by majority opinion, then it follows "morality is what we're told" has got to be wrong sometimes.

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You seriously appear (to me at least) to be saying that morality is what the majority of the people around you--or at least the people who had the teaching of you as a child--tells you is moral.

Etymologically, that is precisely what morality is. I agree that the meaning of the word is evolving to also cover something like an absolute standard of right and wrong, but I believe the older meaning is still the primary one. 'Ethics' would be a less ambiguous term for the kind of absolute morality you describe.

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I'm okay with the word being used that way, but in my experience there is a fairly large group of people who use "morality" to refer to what for lack of a better term I will call "real" right and wrong--stuff that stays right, or stays wrong, no matter what the rest of the world things.

Do you use a different term for that, and if so, what is it?

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As I said in another thread, there is no agreement on what the terms mean. I use 'morality' to mean the (possibly local or individual) concensus opinion of correct and incorrect actions, and 'ethics' for absolutes which any rational observer will agree (if you waste resources, you won't have them later when needed; unnecessary killing (and hurting) of others is bad, etc.). But some people reverse the definitions, or don't see any difference, or something different from any of those.

The only way to communicate on that subject is to do a Humpty Dumpty and define the terms as you use them, and then hope that either everyone will agree for the length of the discussion or that they will at least remember how you use them.

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Somewhere back in the distant past I tried to claim there were "absolutes on which any rational observer will agree" and got stomped on for moral absolutism. I think I may also have said "well, yes, all right, maybe there aren't" and got stomped on for moral relativism. I may not know much about morality, but I know when I'm getting stomped on. Which is why this post was about composing Wildean paradoxes. Somewhere back in the distant past. *sigh*

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'Ethical' is quite a good term for what you mean, and in my experience there is another medium sized group of people who specifically contrast morals and ethics.

Personally I'm a fairly strict Utilitarian, so I don't have a concept of 'real right and wrong' other than 'what does the greatest good to the greatest number', and would usually talk about it in those terms: 'giving to cost effective charities is a good way of increasing the amount of happiness in the world' rather than 'giving to cost effective charities is moral/ethical'.

I'm also a Christian, so I could (much less usefully) define 'real right and wrong' as 'obeying or disobeying God's will'. Like most other Anglicans I believe we discern God's will by looking at scripture, reason and tradition. For me (and for many others who describe themselves as liberal Christians), 'reason' has primacy, and is the light by which the others are interpreted. So if something in scripture or tradition is unreasonable (and my Utilitarian principles tell me that an ethical system which causes more misery than happiness is unreasonable) then it is necessary to interpret it differently or to abandon it.

I have lots of secular atheist friends, by contrast, whose morality does seem to be based on what other people tell them and not on rational grounds. One example of this is what Peter Singer would call 'speciesism', the idea that its vastly more important to alleviate human suffering than it is to alleviate the suffering of other animals, because humans are more intelligent,* and yet it's monstrous to care more about the suffering of more intelligent humans than of less intelligent humans.

* Not because some humans are more capable of suffering than some animals. That, of course, is perfectly rational.

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I'm cool with using "morality" and "ethics" in this way, and in fact, did so for years, until (I think) I started running into the "2 point vs 5 point system of morality" thing.

And yes, your point about reason having primacy is why I think that "religion means doing what you're told regardless of what is right" is not a fair generalization. (This actually gets back to the five point system of morality (meaning ethics in this case) under "enforce submission to authority"--conservatives generally consider this part of ethical behavior, liberals don't; I don't, hence the alignment here.)

Trying to alleviate the suffering of animals is going to get you into a real can of worms, of course. Alleviating the suffering of domestic animals is comparatively easy (and one can make a real case we have more responsibility to relive suffering resulting from our actions than to relieve suffering we didn't cause) so I think it's reasonable that people tend to concentrate on that. But really, once one starts considering the suffering of, say, cottontails, as being as important as the suffering of, say, kindergarteners, what do we do? Do we keep wolves from chasing them, mauling and killing them? We would certainly defend, uh, "feral kindergarteners"(oxymoron alert) from wolves. But then what about the poor starving wolves? Going hungry is suffering too.

And at what point does an animal become simple enough that we don't need to care anymore? (2nd can of worms) Do we worry about the suffering of mice? Slugs? Amoebae? Do slime molds count as animals? What about yeast? Bacteria?

Anyway, I guess I'm seriously digressing. Sorry. While I'm bringing up issues I see with the ideas you mentioned, I don't want to suggest that I think you shouldn't mention them or anything.

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And at what point does an animal become simple enough that we don't need to care anymore?

I think we care should about animals/people in proportion to how much they're able to suffer, and to appreciate being alive. When the decision is a life or death one, that includes how much they will be able to appreciate being alive in the future (this is why I place a high value on the lives of human embryoes/foetuses).

With bacteria and yeast, all evidence we have suggests these abilities are at zero, or something very close to zero.

Animal suffering that isn't caused by human beings is, as you say, a massive can of worms. But part of Utilitarianism involves spending your time and money on the most cost effective interventions, and at the moment I can't think of any way of preventing non-human-caused animal suffering which is definitely more effective than all the ways we have of preventing human suffering and human-caused animal suffering.

If we were living in a Utopia where all humans lived blissfully happy lives where they didn't hurt animals at all, I could see there would be some thorny issues (perhaps we should prevent all carnivores from breeding until they die out, while managing the ecosystem to make sure that doesn't cause disaster? perhaps we should genetically modify them so they can live on plants?) but since that isn't ever likely to happen, I'm not too concerned about it (though it's vaguely interesting to think about).

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I think we care should about animals/people in proportion to how much they're able to suffer, and to appreciate being alive.

So moral status based on central nervous system development as a rule of thumb. Okay. This seems reasonable. Indeed more reasonable than treating chimpanzees as though they had the mental capacity of slugs.

And I agree that it makes more sense to spend our time and energy where the improvement in happiness will be greater, and thus wild animals interactions with each other should be beyond the scope of this inquiry at this time.

I think where I depart from utilitarianism is that there are some things I think are not okay even if they would lead to a net improvement in happiness. Murdering one person with a particularly fortunate (or unfortunate) tissue type in order to provide replacement organs for two people (or ten people) who will die without them, for example. I just can't make my gut happy with that. Greatest-good-of-the-greatest-number-wise it seems to make sense, but...no.

So the fetuses thing for me--well, of course in one's own personal decisions one can put oneself at any disadvantage one likes--but in practice in society this works out to either we force pregnant women to carry unwanted fetuses to term to produce unwanted babies or we don't. And I can't get past the unfairness of enslaving women, (and only women) to save fetuses, and only fetuses (we don't enslave people to be hooked up to Uncle Walter to act as Uncle Walter's kidneys, even if Uncle Walter will die without it), to say but so many more people will be alive, and some of them will be happy--let's do it.

(For that matter there is the issue of who gets tapped to support the unwanted babies; they will be something like 25% of the birth cohort, at least in the US.)

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I just can't make my gut happy with that. Greatest-good-of-the-greatest-number-wise it seems to make sense, but...no.

It doesn't make sense to me in Utilitarian terms either, primarily because of the fear it will cause among the general population that they or someone they love will be singled out to provide tissue for others. Also because the survival rates for people with organ transplants aren't great and because it would be unecessary if we simply moved to an opt-out system for organ donation rather than the current opt-in one.

I don't think there's any clear cut Utilitarian answer to what the legal status of abortion should be (other than really obvious things like 'it should be legal if the mother's life is at risk').

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pbristow.livejournal.com

This is exactly why the phrase "moral absolutes" was invented: To distinguish the idea that there *are* any moral absolutes from the observation that in practice, different communities live by different - sometimes *radically* different - sets of mores, and that when you step back and look at them all, it's actually very hard to decide what makes any one set more valid than another. There may in fact be an absolute morality, to which all human moral frameworks are at best merely the best approximations we could achieved at the time, and at worst grotesque distortions... (That absolute framework may turn out in fact to be defined by "God's will", I am obliged, as a theist, to point out. =:o} ) But that's jolly hard to prove.

Moral people are those people who make the effort to act in accordance with the mores (or, colloquially, "morals") that they hold and profess; immoral people are those who act (for whatever reason) against or outside of the mores/morals they hold and profess. And amoral people are those who neither hold nor profess any mores/morals at al. And the morals we, as individuals, hold are shaped by the culture we grow up in, only starting to deviate significantly from the local cultural norm as we grow in self awareness and sense of responsibility (that is, those of us that ever do! =:o\ ), and reflect on what our morality is and what perhaps it should be.

I'm not personally aware of anyone who's made a moral case *in favour* of slavery, and I've only ever heard the feeblest of arguments as to how the keeping of slaves *as it was practiced in Europe and America a couple of centuries ago* could be considered even neutrally compatible with the dominant moral framework of the nations and communities concerned, even at that time. (N.B. Slavery as understood and practiced in the ancient world is a whole different ballgame, as is slavery as practiced in modern S&M circles...) What I *do* know is that in a world where slavery was being practiced by those with the power and opportunity and incentive to do so, and the benefits were being enjoyed by millions of other people who had at best a passing awareness of what was going on, it took time for people to (1) recognise that there was moral case against slavery, (2) spread the awareness of that moral case; (3) push for a change of law to force those who were involved to stop doing it. And it's worth noting that for many, the crunch point was not a philosophical notion about the rightness or wrongness of "owning" a human being, but the growing awareness of what exactly was happening to those human beings in the process of being taken into ownership and transferred from their original location, that made them reject the slave *trade*, and consequently resolve to give up slave ownership as a necessary means of stopping the trade and its practices.

Edited Date: 2011-06-29 11:34 pm (UTC)

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Oh absolutely people have made a moral case *in favor* of slavery--the very popular one at the time was, in fact, that slavery was the only way to indoctrinate the slaves in the "true religion" (pick flavour of choice) and thus save their souls, and thus slavery was ultimately to the benefit of the slaves.

I don't share this view, of course, and I suspect most people in the modern world don't anymore, but it certainly looked to me as though the people making that argument at the time were sincere.

And people in the modern day sometimes argue, not that slavery is moral now, but that slavery was moral when most people thought it was. Another view I don't share, though it sounds like perhaps you and the_alchemist do, though the point of disagreement sounds to be more over what "morality" means, than over whether slavery was actually, um, "right-as-opposed-to-wrong" Uh, whatever word you use for that.

And sure, if we postulate "morality" means "whatever most people at that time and place think is right" rather than "what really is right" then the contention that "morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told" makes no sense by definition.

Since people don't often say things that they realize make no sense by definition, the possibility arises that the speaker of the original quote meant something other than "whatever most people at that time and place think is right" by "morality."

Whether you call that "right" or "ethics" or "good" or whatever, I don't know. But whichever term you use (if you recognize the concept as valid at all) should probably be substituted for "morality" in the first part of the quote and, (altered to the adjective form) "right" in the second part of the quote. At least, if one wants to get at what the speaker was trying to say.

At that point, one may still disagree with what the speaker was trying to say, but at least one is not battling a phantom meaning.

For myself, I think I don't really fully agree with what the original speaker was trying to say. I would say "Do what is right. Religion may or may not agree; paying it mind costs time and energy. It takes time and energy to do what is right." Then I would write that out in a circle so the end comes right before the beginning.

Specifically, I do not agree with the original speaker of the quote that religion *necessarily* requires doing what you're told even when it's not right. Some liberal religions place the values quite the other way.

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"Do what is right. Religion may or may not agree; paying it mind costs time and energy. It takes time and energy to do what is right." Then I would write that out in a circle so the end comes right before the beginning.

'Religion' isn't a thing or a person you can 'pay mind to'. And no-one is born with a sense of 'what is right', it is something that is built up gradually, influenced by things on this (non-exhaustive) list:

- parents
- friends
- teachers
- the media
- things we have studied, formally or informally
- religious scripture
- our gut instincts
- books we have read
- our own experiences
- the reported experiences of others
- the teachings of religious leaders
- our desires

Pretty much *any* of these, religious or non-religious, can result in a morality that is either good or bad from a Utilitarian perspective (which is the only vaguely objective measure I can think of). And pretty much all of them take time and energy to pay mind to. So there is no reason at all to single out the religious sources of information as being somehow different from the others.

Different people are more influenced by different subsets of them, and that's fine, but - crucially - if [it were the exhaustive version of the list and if] there were a person who didn't pay mind to any of them, that person wouldn't have any 'sense of right' at all.

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If religion is not something you can "pay mind to" then we're good, right? Except you consider everything beyond "do what is right" to be unnecessary because it refers to actions that are not possible?

And "religion can result in a morality that is either ethical or unethical" is pretty much my point. It's not a useful guideline--it's right sometimes and wrong sometimes, and the yardstick you're using to judge whether it's right or wrong is something else anyway, so why not cut out the middleman and go straight to the something else?

And I wasn't recommending ignoring all the other things on the list, so we're good there too.

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If religion is not something you can "pay mind to" then we're good, right?

I'm not sure what you mean. I meant that I dislike it when people write about 'religion' as though it were basically a list of commandments that people can obey or ignore. In fact it's a much more complicated and amorphous set of things including relationships, communities, actions as well as words and beliefs.

You can pay mind to what religious books say, what members of your religious communities say, what a particular inner voice of yours which you have labelled 'God' says, but you can't pay mind to what 'religion' says, or to what 'Christianity' or 'Islam' says.

Except you consider everything beyond "do what is right" to be unnecessary because it refers to actions that are not possible?

I really don't understand what you mean by this. Sorry! Can you rephrase it?

... so why not cut out the middleman and go straight to the something else?

What is the 'something else'? I don't think there's anything which is an adequate yardstick of the type you describe.

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In fact it's a much more complicated and amorphous set of things including relationships, communities, actions as well as words and beliefs.

Except that relationships and communities don't require religion; they can just as well be built around something else--a common interest or culture, for example. So I don't think of them as "part of religion" but more as entities that accrete around many different things, one of which is sometimes religion. At which point the religion part of religion, for me, is religious words and beliefs--many of which turn out to be commandments of one sort or another.

What is the 'something else'? I don't think there's anything which is an adequate yardstick of the type you describe.

The something else is:

- parents
- friends
- teachers
- the media
- things we have studied, formally or informally
- our gut instincts
- books we have read
- our own experiences
- the reported experiences of others
- our desires

And

-our own good sense about what hurts and doesn't hurt people (and to a lesser extent animals) and what are fair and unfair ways to behave. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is actually not too bad as a rule of thumb.

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Except that relationships and communities don't require religion ...

Of course not, but nor do words or belief. There are religious and non-religious relationships, communities, words and beliefs. It seems really arbitrary to decide that religion = religious words/beliefs but not religious relationships/communities.

Similarly, why do you single religion out as a 'middleman', but not teachers, parents, media, gut instinct etc.? It seems unreasonable to give it a special, lower status.

As for 'our own good sense about what hurts and doesn't hurt people', doesn't that come out of all the intermediary things we've been listing, sometimes including religion?

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Blink.

Maybe I'm not getting this because I've never been a part of a religious community. But isn't the aspect of a religous community that makes it important to its members the fact that it's a community? I mean, you know the people in your church because you happened to all go to the same building once a week for a long time, and hey, great, a bunch of them turned out to be compatible, personality wise, and then you worked on some projects together and now you've known each other for years and would help each other out in a heartbeat, and of course who doesn't value that?

But couldn't you get the same effect if what drew you to the same building and got you working on the same projects so you got the chance to become long term friends, was something that was not religion?

I see religion as a middleman because to me it looks like a middleman. I see all kinds of different indications of that; most often people using it to justify hurting people, and people who avoid doing that by choosing to discard the hurting bits. Some of them go to the effort of finding bits in the religious teachings that can be interpreted as telling them the hurting bits don't count--but what made them know those were hurting bits and look for a way to discard them?

As for 'our own good sense about what hurts and doesn't hurt people', doesn't that come out of all the intermediary things we've been listing, sometimes including religion?

Well, religion has never helped *me* know this. And I feel like I've done a reasonable job so far and I've never felt any lack. And I've never seen anyone else helped by it while I was observing. And I've certainly seen people misled by religion in this department. So that's why I think what I do.

Frankly gut feeling (admittedly probably heavily informed by my parents when I was too young to remember) and my own good sense pretty much do it for me, I think, though the concerns of my community have sometimes drawn my attention to issues I hadn't considered, and people's discussion of issues have sometimes made me look at them a different way.

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Also, you come across as sneering at me here. It's the "nice try" and the "fairly clear what I actually mean" parts that give me that impression.

We have a long history of disagreeing over this issue, but I was not intending to sneer at you, and would like the same good will in return.

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I'm sorry. I was irritated because, in the first place, I thought--and still think--that you were intentionally affecting to misunderstand me with the aim of (re)starting this argument. If I'm wrong about that, I apologise, but I do believe that the meaning I was assigning to the word "morality" was reasonably clear from context--that it is tribal, i.e. what the tribe believes. I explained my position on that in a comment to Keris above.

The other reason I was irritated was that the original purpose of the post, which I also made quite clear--a reasonably harmless and potentially amusing word game--is now completely lost and all that's happened is more Arguing About Religion, or Morality, or whatever.

No sneer intended, but did we really need to go round this again?

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No sneer intended, but did we really need to go round this again?

Alas, this is precisely what I was thinking about your post in the first place.

Assuming bad faith on other people's part tends to lead to bad feeling. Even when it occurs to me you may be acting in bad faith yourself, I try hard to keep that out of my writing, because I may be wrong, and if I am, accusing you of something you didn't do in no way helps the situation.

If you want a harmless word game, you can certainly have one. Just come up with a starting example that is not also a hot button issue for you and the people around you.

You can even still have a harmless word game; it's not like you can't post again (though you might give it a week or two for the sediment to settle, and think of an example involving, oh, say, ladybugs (birds?) or ash trees or something else that doesn't make people mad.)

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the-changeling.livejournal.com

Hmm... If you've been raised to believe that women who commit adultery should be stoned to death, you believe you are being moral when you stone them to death.

And in some cases, not just acting morally, but acting on God's command. Being God, at that moment, the ultimate in morality.

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pbristow.livejournal.com

If the tribe all agree that "grab all you can and devil take the hindmost" is the right way to do things, then that is a part of the morality of that tribe... However much another tribe (or you, or Zander) may look on aghast.

Morality shifts and changes with history, as people's understanding of what is real and what is important and how they interact changes. To a medieval European, it was immoral to let a witch live; to a modern European, it's immoral *no*t to let them live. Both could give you strong arguments as to why; The main difference is simply that we (generally) no longer believe the witch's actions or existence will do any significant harm.

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We disagree, then, on what morality really is. That's okay--nebulous words like "morality" are often hard to pin down. But it's important to be aware who means what when they use the word.

It's true that wrong beliefs about the physical world often mean the action that looks like producing the least harm at the time turns out to be what I think of as immoral--causing more-than-the-least-harm. This is why I think learning the truth about the physical world is, in some ways, a moral issue. Not bothering to try risks mistakes--honest mistakes, but made out of laziness about learning about the real world--that hurt people.

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pbristow.livejournal.com

Agreed on the not-bothering-to-try-to-learn point... Provided the person in question has got as far as *realising* the connection between learning the truth and doing the right thing. =:o}

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lewis-p-bear.livejournal.com

Not sure why you regard religion as anything but a sop for those afraid of the dark invented by bunnies who worked out a way of working indoors and avoiding heavy lifting.

It was fine for keeping the surfs in order but has long since outlived it's usefulness.

If we must have fantasy I go for the Easter Bunny.

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I've stated my position on religion many, many times in these pages, and I can't right now find a way of restating it that doesn't bore me rigid and won't get me into another godsawful argument. Give me a few days, and I'll try and have another go at it, but I suspect your preconceptions and mine are too widely separated for there to be any meeting of minds. I'll just say that I don't automatically look down with a sneer on people I never knew, and leave it at that.

"Serfs," by the way. They didn't make waves...

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Well, according to one of the religious books a Son of God did actually calm the waves, or "keep the surfs under control" *g*.

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