Example: I believe that IP is a direct contradiction of nature, sacrificing the advancement of humanity and the world for selfish gain, and therefore is sinful.
Edit: pls do not downvote the comments this is a constructive discussion
Edit2: IP= intellectal property
Edit3: sort by controversal
This is a bit meta, but I believe morality is objective. Actions have objective moral worth; epistemological disagreements about how we know the moral value of an action are irrelevant to the objectivity of goodness/badness itself.
Don’t just tease me like this, what’s the objective standard? And like I’m totally following along, but i still want to know what the disagreements are.
I just like ethics and want to hear what you think.
Personally I go for deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).
Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis for murder, stealing, etc.
The classic argument against Kantian deontology is “if the nazis come searching for the jews at your house, is it still wrong to lie?”
And if we use your procedure: “if everyone always lies, then the nazis will know who is hiding jews,” the lies won’t be effective, and therefore the action is self-contradictory. Thus it is wrong to lie about harboring jews from the nazis.
But if we reword it to “if everyone always denies hiding jews, the nazis will not know who is or is not hiding jews,” thus it is not self-contradictory, therefore it isn’t wrong to lie about harboring jews.
Yes, there are problems with the categorical imperative. Another problem: what if two moral duties are in conflict? A third: can’t we phrase the same action under different descriptions in a way that yields different results?
There are objections to every moral theory because this is philosophy and we rarely reach a consensus on topics this large. These problems are indicators of epistemological grey areas. They do not, in my opinion, entail moral nihilism.
Can you talk me through the experiment setup to measure or observe that morality? I’d like to confirm it.
Reposting my response from above:
Personally I go for deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).
Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis for murder, stealing, etc.
I agree that some things can be objectively immoral, but I think there’s a lot of grey/subjective areas too.
Is it objectively immoral to not spend 100% of your free time helping others?
What about choosing to have kids instead of adopting?
Turning someone’s life support machine off after they’ve been declared braindead?
Killing a serial killer in an act of self defense?
I can see your perspective, but I would argue that these are epistemological grey areas, not moral ones. Again, just because we don’t know whether something is true/false or good/bad doesn’t change the objective value of the fact.
Of course, for non-normative facts about the world, we have the scientific method to help us to move toward the truth. (Note here that the epistemological problem reappears, albeit in a lesser form, as we cannot be sure whether science has reached the truth; the scientific method is always open to new and contradictory empirical evidence.) Recall, however, that most of human history lies before science. Left to our own observations, we believed in such theories as geocentrism and the four humors. Hopefully ethics and aesthetics will reach a science for determining the objective value of normative facts.
Except that the objective morality of things is completely meaningless if we have no way of knowing it, so it is at least relevant.
I wouldn’t say we have no way of knowing, just that we disagree (often on edge cases). But people way smarter than me spend their lives thinking about these things and form convincing arguments is support of definitive answers.
To draw a parallel, most of human history we observed the world and reached conclusions. Mostly we were wrong but sometimes we came pretty close. Then we discovered the scientific method, which allows us to move closer to the truth over time. (Note, though, that the epistemological worry reappears, albeit in lesser form, as the scientific method must always be amendable to new empirical evidence that contradicts highly confirmed theories.) My hope is that philosophy will discover a science of normative facts, giving us an agreed upon method for determining moral and aesthetic value.
So you kinda agree that even if morals objectively exists that we can’t measure them with reasonable precision?
We’d have to have a strong grasp on the hard problem of consciousness. So there is no good reason to espouse objective morality in this day in age.