The Moral Deficit

reply to post by Maslo


I know. With that sentence, I was just illustrating that my personal morals would change depending on the circumstances, based on what I learned was "right" and "wrong".

I've been thinking about morals as a human construct and it's pretty revealing. I have a pack of dogs and observing them with these new thoughts running around in my mind is very interesting. Dogs don't have morals. They have behavior. They don't do things because it's "right" or "wrong" to do them. Their behavior is most often selfish.

I'm beginning to wonder just how necessary it is to have this moral code in life to keep us acting right...

Originally posted by batgirl
Is moral relativism moral or immoral?

Hi Batgirl,


There is a genuine moral deficit in today's society which sees as a backlash fundamentalism with its own set of moral issues: one's morality becomes dictated by dogma, making the deficit harder yet for individuals to correct since their morality is not purposefully chosen by individuals but assigned by the collective groupthink telling them what is politically correct.


Moral relativism is immoral because it calls for one to abandon one's moral references, on the basis that these would not be considered valid by another individual or another community. That your morals are not universal is used as an excuse to try to invalidate any morality, as arbitrary and subjective and thus illegitimate. Therefore it can be safely said that moral relativism is immoral, because in its call to action it leads to amorality which is immoral when one considers it from a moral standpoint.


This is because being amoral means that one refuses to take a position as to whether something is good or evil based upon one's moral values. And while immorality is in direct opposition to morality, compelling to infractions against morality, whereas amorality is merely the abandonment of one's moral compass, both tend to give way to attitudes and behaviors which can readily be considered to be immoral.


And in fact, immorality is more akin to morality in the sense that it is a form or inverse morality which is in itself a moral compass which has been selectively or systematically reversed. Amorality is further yet from morality because it warrants the destruction or abandonment of the moral compass as a wrongful tool for guiding one's thoughts and actions.


I know it is complicated but it is important to remember that while we must remain sensitive to other perspectives and alternative value systems which enable different cultures to project different value judgments about events, our only way of organizing a rational judgment about what is going on and taking any form of informed political decision is based upon how events interact with our moral references.


Are they good or evil, is what they are doing right or wrong, this is all we have to go on to establish our own responses to the world we live in. Without this we are little more than Sheeple, which might explain why much effort is being put behind Moral Relativism which is a notion which was swept away under the Sophists when Socrates came on the scene founding the field of ethics.


Cheers,


Getsmart

reply to post by Benevolent Heretic


Humans are supposed to be distinguished from other animals (e.g. your dogs) by our capacity for ethical intelligence. I must disagree with your suggestion that humans should act with the same absence of morality as other animals do. There is no good reason for why we should give up our ethical intelligence, and capacity for developing our moral reasoning and instead act like only beasts - we can and should be higher than them in our ethical conduct. I must add, other animals don't lack ethics completely - all animals evolve a basic natural ethics that guides how they cooperate and work with each other to enhance the survival of their pack and their species.

By your comment I can see that you are a moral relativist, and you don't understand what moral relativism means, and why it is not wise to adopt that anti-rational, and irrational amoral stance. You don't need to be a moral relativist to recognize the importance of evaluating one's social situation, and that is actually something that moral relativists don't generally do. As Maslo said, that is within the domain of ethics.

Ethical philosophy does consider an individual's social situation in identifying ethically appropriate conduct for that individual. Philosophy of ethics has no basis on moral relativism - it actually rejects it entirely: cultural relativism, epistemic relativism, and moral relativism are all no no's (in the the list of things NOT to do) for those that have a strong appreciation of logic, and especially science, and philosophy.

The difference between being a rational, ethical thinker and a thinker that follows the culturally prescribed morality of the day is that one by its own logic identified and chose which morality it wishes to follow while the other acts only like a cultbot that conforms to the morality others are following or demanding it follow without much thought of its own about which one proves to be the most worthy of being followed.