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!
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.
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.
I’ve been a College and University prof for the past 6 years. I’m in my young 40s, and I just don’t understand most of the people in their 20s. I get that we grew up in really different times, but I wouldn’t have thought there would be such a big clash between them and me. I teach about sound and music, and I simply cannot catch the interest of most of them, no matter what I try. To the point were I’m no sure I want to keep doing this. Maybe I’m already too old school for them but I wonder who will want to teach anymore…
Nah, I’m early 30s, but grew up around 20th century media, competitive parents when it came to game shows, and a weird expectation to just know pub trivia.
Took me a while to realise I’m the outlier and still am. Just the other day I was talking to some old colleagues and had to spend energy convincing them that the things they were talking about in the Simpsons are mostly movie or TV references and even then mostly just Kubrick, Hitchcock and a considerable amount of Steven King. They just have no idea how unoriginal most modern/contemporary media is. Not even in a bad way, just in an homage/artist replicatong the old masters etc.
But it’s really strange for a generation with the biggest access and connection to human culture is somehow just as bubbles/silod as ever.
Algorithms, mate. Algorithms…
That is the same sentiment my music teacher had 15 years ago and the same sentiment his music teacher did before that. I don’t think it’s illustrating the times as much as just that teaching is a tough and thankless job and most people aren’t interested in learning
I could get that at the grade school level, but at the university/college level those students are choosing the music classes. To be that disengaged for a course you picked is a bit different than a student who is forced to take a course.
That being said, if the course is a requirement that does change things a bit.
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree with this. I’ve always said to myself that I didn’t want to fall into this old-versus-young rhetoric, but I think the situation is different. The world and technologies are changing faster than our ability to integrate them. The world in which my father lived wasn’t that different from his father’s, and neither was mine. But young people, born into the digital age, have been the guinea pigs of social media and the gafam ecosystem, which seems to have radically altered their ability to concentrate (even watching a short film is a challenge), as well as their interest in learning. They see school, even higher education, as a constraint rather than an opportunity. I have the impression that they don’t see the point of learning when a Google search or ai answers everything, and that retaining things is useless. That’s my 2 cents…
I’ll chime in and say that math teachers have said similar things about calculators/graphing calculators for 25+ years. This is most definitely you getting “old”. It’s okay—it happens to all of us.
As far as attention span, that has been an equally common refrain—going back to people complaining that radio has reduced kids attention spans.
Interesting points. I don’t think calculators are equivalent to having the sum of humanity’s knowledge, AI, and infinite content in you pocket tho. There’s a limit to how much fun you can have with a calculator… The same goes for attention in class. Not so long ago, if the class bored you, you had to wait while scribbling in a notepad. Now you can doom scroll anywhere anytime. These kids have been test subjects for ipad, youtube content and smartphone,I don’t blame them, I blame capitalism who made them addicted to social media and their parents who didn’t protect them.
I also want to add that I have some great students, invested in their studies and super bright. It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
I teach chemistry at a college and I don’t think it’s any different than the past; it’s just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).
There’s tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it’s even shorter for teens and males in their early 20’s), and that’s remarkably consistent across generations. I don’t think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that’s fine. It’s just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.
Pretty much. I think a lot of the anger over phones is that it makes it real obvious when someone doesn’t care what you’re saying. You’re right that you used to look out into the classroom and couldn’t really tell who was focusing or zoned out
As someone who is young but old enough to remember when boredom was a thing let me tell you boredom sucked. There wasn’t really anything to it worth keeping. Yeah sometimes I go for a walk and have a think but that’s intentional. Being bored when you’re stuck in line or something is just painful and has no redeeming qualities
100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that’s more in the “I’m done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner” sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren’t careful.
Calculators, computers, either way the kids going to finish looking at BOOBS.
We all do.
I’m pretty sure it’s always been the case that most students didn’t care, because they’re forced to be there. I don’t even remember being awake for the majority of precalc because first period is just too early in the day.
Maybe. But when you go study sound tech at college, I would have believe you would be interested to hear about sound stuff… Especially since the application process is pretty heavy and only half of the applicants get in.
I’m not sure that tech is really changing all that fast. In the 1990s a good desktop computer had 40 MB of HDD space and 2 MB of RAM. In the 2000s the hard drives were already 1000x as big, and people had hundreds of MB of RAM. That’s a massive amount of change in just a decade. In the early 1990s nobody had heard of the Internet. By the 2000s it was everywhere.
Sure, these days a low-end phone has much higher specs than that. But, has the phone-using experience really changed much in the last decade? Even the last 2? Specs have gotten better, but it hasn’t really opened up new ways of using the device. Yes, in some ways things are still moving quickly, but it’s always been like that. Some things change rapidly, other things slow down.
I agree that people’s ability to concentrate has been affected. The fact that “attention” has been turned into a kind of currency means that people seem to have lost the ability to focus on one thing for an extended period. That’s something that’s unique to the last 1-2 decades. But, I don’t think people’s interest in learning has changed. It’s just that the traditional way of learning in a classroom is much harder if your attention span is shot. It was never easy, most classes were always boring, but people could get through it because they were still able to focus for extended periods.
School was also always a constraint for most people. People who could go to school for the love of learning rather than as a means to an end were always a lucky minority. If you were really lucky you got a teacher / prof / teaching assistant who could make things interesting. But, in most cases they droned through the required material and you tried to absorb it.
I agree that now that searching the Internet is easier, certain methods of learning / teaching are outdated and haven’t been adapted yet. Memorizing facts was always stupid, but at least when it took a while to look it up in a paper encyclopedia you could just vaguely see the value. But, these days it’s so obviously absurd – yet that’s still what a lot of teachers focus on. It’s not to blame the teachers though. They often don’t have the freedom to change the way they teach, especially today now that there are so many standardized tests. But, memorizing facts about history, for example, is just ridiculous in a world where looking up those facts even with a vague search like “french guy who tried to attack moscow” will take you right to Napoleon.
Some of the most useful classes I ever had were the ones that taught me to analyze and understand information. For example, a philosophy class on analyzing arguments and identifying logical fallacies has been incredibly useful, and only more useful in an age of misinformation and disinformation. Then there were engineering courses that taught how to estimate. Science courses that taught significant figures and error analysis is extremely important when you have calculators / programs that can spit out an answer to dozens of decimal places when the values you supply are approximate. These sorts of things are incredibly useful in a world where a magic machine can spit out an answer and you need to think about whether that answer is reasonable or not.
Looking at music, there’s so much that I’ve learned outside of school that I never learned in school. I stopped taking music classes at the end of high school, and wasn’t all that interested in music for a while. But, since then I’ve become more interested. And, there’s so much that’s not easy to learn just using the Internet. Like, trying to understand the circle of fifths, or the various musical modes, or how to spot certain pop/rock songs as using various 8 or 12 bar blues patterns. I’m lucky because I have a friend who has a PhD in musicology who is willing to chat with me about things I find interesting and want to know more about.
Anyhow, my main points is that I don’t think that kids today are really any different from any other kids throughout history with two main exceptions: their attention span and the immediacy of information on the Internet. Concentrating in school has always been extremely hard, but at least when I was young I hadn’t been trained from age 3 to doom scroll. That means that staying focused through a 1 hour class, which was a chore for me, is a near impossibility for a kid weaned on a smartphone or tablet. As for memorizing, even when I was young, memorizing facts seemed like a waste of time. But, these days it’s clearly ridiculous, but the approach to education hasn’t fully adapted yet. Really, kids in elementary school should be learning how to fact check, how to cross-verify, how to identify misinformation, etc. But, even if teachers know that, they’re boxed in.
Best of luck to you though, it’s good that at least you want to jam information into some brains.
For me personally, life stress and exhaustion are bigger focus inhibitors. I agree that school is largely obsolete and I don’t really blame kids for checking out
I think this is less time-specific, and more just people not being terribly interested in learning.
For example, a professor who specialized in virology was explaining everything about how pathogens spillover between species, using a 2010s ebola outbreak as an example. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time because it was as fascinating as a true horror movie, and yet other students were totally zoned out on Facebook a few rows ahead of me. While the professor was talking about organs dissolving due to the disease and the fecal-oral (and other liquids) route of ebola, which wasn’t exactly a dry subject, lol.
Rinse and repeat for courses on macro/micro economics, mirror neurons, psychology classes on kink, even coding classes.
Either I’m fascinated by stuff most people find boring, or a lot of people just hate learning. I’m thinking it’s the latter, since this stuff encompassed a wide range of really interesting subjects from profs who were really excited about what they taught.
I miss them a lot, I used to corner various profs and TAs and ask them questions about time fluctuations around black holes, rare succulent growing tips in the plant growth center, and biotechnology. It was fun having access to such vibrant people :)
Do a class about sounds of tiktok reels that will be a hit.
I actually do sometimes incorporates memes and stuff from tiktok and other social media in my classes.
I wonder how much of that is a change in who is going to college and why, and what the requirements are. More people are being funneled into colleges that previously would have gone directly into the workforce or into an apprenticeship. Is your class a gen ed? Gen Ed’s have really expanded and if you listen to bleeding hearts like me it’s a good thing because it exposes people to new things, but I think it’s actually so poorly managed that people end up taking the classes they think will be the least rigorous regardless of their actual interest just to get them over with.
Hah! Cool to see Henry pop up on my feed. I knew this guy back when he was a grad student. And as somebody that also teaches ethics, he is dead on. Undergrads are not only believe all morality is relative and that this is necessary for tolerance and pluralism (it’s not), but are also insanely judgmental if something contradicts their basic sense of morality.
Turns out, ordinary people’s metaethics are highly irrational.
Sounds like “all moral philosophies are equal, but some are more equal than others”
Love your username.
Thanks bro, had read it in Plato but was on a real King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard kick when I signed up for Lemmy (still am).
Morality is subjective and many different systems exist.
However, mine is the best one because it leads to optimal human welfare and happiness. If you can show your system is better, I’ll happily change my mind, but until that time, if you follow a system that doesn’t lead to optimal human welfare and happiness, you are, thus, intentionall working against it, and are a thus a monster.
Not disagreeing that they’re probably just inconsistent.
Is it possible to be consistent about moral relativism & still make firm choices?
What’s it called when morality is construed as systems of arbitrarily chosen axioms & moral judgements amount to judges stating whether something agrees with a system they chose? Is it inconsistent to acknowledge that these axioms are ultimately choices, choose a system, and judge all actions eligible for moral consideration according to that chosen system?
I just commented elsewhere in this thread, but isn’t moral realism a thing for this exact situation? Is his post not a self report on his inability to identify a moral framework that fits his students worldview, or at least to explain the harm that arises if one has a self contradictory worldview and help them realize that and potentially arrive at a more consistent view? Seems like this comment section is filled with a lot of people that understand their moral framework more than this professor, but obviously are not in the field. Can you please elaborate on the issues here? Like I think abortions are fine, but I understand that others think it’s murder. I don’t think they’re bad people for that, but I understand if they think I’m a bad person for my views. How we deal with it on a societal level is obviously even more complicated. I don’t see how there’s a problem there.
It seems like ALL is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. Do they really believe ALL morality is relative and are also always insanely judgy if things contradict their beliefs?
I think the issue is that students aren’t consistent. They’ll fall back on relativism or subjectivism when they don’t really have a strong opinion, or perceive there to be a lot of controversy about the subject that they don’t want to have to argue about. But fundamentally, whether there’s an objective and universal answer to some moral question or not really doesn’t depend on whether there’s controversy about it, or whether it’s convenient or cool to argue about.
I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t. Variation in cultural norms is totally okay, as long as we don’t sacrifice the objective, universal stuff. (Like don’t harm people unnecessarily, etc.). The contours of the former and the latter are up for debate, and we shouldn’t presume that anybody knows the exact boundary.
Your beliefs seem to align with what the students are saying and generally with moral realism.
You just said “I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t.” so you can view some morality as subjective and some as necessarily universal. That is what most people default to and what you seem to saying is wrong with the students. You state they aren’t consistent, but you’re also not consistent. Sometimes subjectivity is right sometimes it’s not. I’m not seeing a distinction, so please elaborate on it if I’m missing it.
