Originally posted by moonbusBut why would you? Your neighbor may be acting morally correctly. You claim that you do not know whether his actions are morally correct and that you refuse to pass judgement on his actions. Or are you, as I said earlier, totally lacking in morals and do not act for moral reasons anyway?
If my neighbor threatens me, in the country where I live that is a crime and there are legal mechanisms for dealing with it (police, courts, fines or injunctions, etc.). I would certainly avail myself of those mechanisms.
Originally posted by twhiteheadSplendid. A direct answer to a direct question. Thank you. We proceed:
Immoral, no. Silly, yes (this doesn't mean I would say so to their faces).
Q2. Would you criticize (as immoral) or demean (as silly) Jewish customs regarding marriage (at what age one becomes marriagable, under what conditions, etc.)?
Same re Islamic marriage customs.
Originally posted by twhiteheadPart of what it means to be neighbors is to share a community. This does not mean that we must have or do in fact have completely congruent interests; it does mean that we submit to the same legal system which guarantees to all a basic level of security and freedom from threats and injuries. I do not claim that I do not know when someone is in breach of the moral values of the community we share. If my neighbor violates the basic level of security and freedom from threats and injuries, then he is in breach of the moral values of the community we share.
But why would you? Your neighbor may be acting morally correctly. You claim that you do not know whether his actions are morally correct and that you refuse to pass judgement on his actions. Or are you, as I said earlier, totally lacking in morals and do not act for moral reasons anyway?
We don't run loose in the streets here with machetes chopping people up at random, you know. Sheesh.
Originally posted by moonbusI would criticize as immoral those customs I believe are immoral. I would demean as silly, those customs I believe are silly. Again, I may not necessarily do so to their faces unless I thought I was in a position of power to stop the immorality - and depending on how serious I thought the immorality was.
Splendid. A direct answer to a direct question. Thank you. We proceed:
Q2. Would you criticize (as immoral) or demean (as silly) Jewish customs regarding marriage (at what age one becomes marriagable, under what conditions, etc.)?
Same re Islamic marriage customs.
Originally posted by moonbusSo basically you act according to a legal system. Is it your claim that a legal system is equivalent to morality?
Part of what it means to be neighbors is to share a community. This does not mean that we must have or do in fact have completely congruent interests; it does mean that we submit to the same legal system which guarantees to all a basic level of security and freedom from threats and injuries. I do not claim that I do not know when someone is in breach of the ...[text shortened]... m from threats and injuries, then he is in breach of the moral values of the community we share.
Also, I think what you have just said directly contradicts your earlier statement:
Myself not being in possession of Absolute Truth, yet susceptible to doubt, see no compelling reason to give more credence to your verdict as to what the moral implications of this putative Absolute Truth are than to someone else’s verdict. Comprende?
We don't run loose in the streets here with machetes chopping people up at random, you know. Sheesh.
And you are yet to adequately explain why not. In fact, you claim that you wouldn't really have a problem with it if it was legal.
""It's also pretty basic stuff that there isn't only one morality in the world..."
I'm not even sure what you mean by this claim... "
There is a great deal to respond to in your post and I cannot possibly do so in a single reply. DeepThought's mention of "meta-ethics" puts me onto an idea, why you and tw on one side and I on the other seem to be talking at cross-purposes here. There really and truly are at least two fundamentally different conceptions of morality and ways of talking about moral issues.
Philosophers define rule-ethics and role-ethics (also sometimes called virtue-ethics).
Rule-ethics concerns itself with right actions; right actions are those which conform to certain criteria, usually formulated as rules or laws, often but not necessarily held to be derived from Divine Commandments. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is an example of this sort of moral system. Kant represents the secular version of it: obedience to rules but without God as enforcer.
Role-ethics concerns itself with right actions only derivatively as indicators of states of character; states of character are what matter primarily. To give a rough example: role-ethics concerns itself with honesty, rule-ethics concerns itself with telling truths. The one does not exclude the other, but it would be a mistake to assume that they are simply equivalent formulations of the same underlying universal principle. Other examples could be given which illustrate this fundamental difference: there are states of character in the virtue-ethical model which are not instantiated by any specific actions (as truth-telling instantiates honesty). Temperance or continence, for example, are states of character considered praiseworthy in some virtue-ethical systems, but no single class of actions instantiates them. For a man of wild and impetuous instincts, the achievement of temperance and continence will look quite different and require quite different actions and sacrifices than for a man of naturally subdued instincts.
Courage is another example of a state of character regarded as virtuous but not instantiated by any single class of actions: there is civil courage and battlefield courage, among others; there is courage when everyone recognizes it and when no one does (or only very much later). The very same action (jumping into a river to save a drowning man) might be courageous for one man--but for another man simply foolhardy (for example, if he has no reasonable chance of success and ends up drowning himself)--and for some third man, just his job (if he's a lifeguard), no moral praise is deserved if he does it but he deserves blame if he does not.
Asian ethical systems (especially Buddhism) and Greek ethical systems (see for example Aristotle) abound in examples of this second type of morality.
Europeans are the heirs of both systems--rule- and role-ethics--, and, through colonization, most of No. and So. America and Australia were 'inoculated' with the this dual system. Only Asia preserved an ethical tradition fairly independent of this dual Judeo-Christian and Greek influence. In Asia, you will find yet another layer of moral diversity: e.g., honor/shame-cultures as distinguished from guilt-cultures.
While I am temperamentally drawn to virtue-ethical systems more than to rule-ethical systems, I understand them both. And it is at this level that I do not propose to make moral judgments, that one or the other system is morally superior to the other. To do so would be comparable to making a mathematical statement that Euclidean geometry is superior to non-Euclidean geometry, or that rational numbers are superior to irrational numbers. It's a howler.
This does not mean, as tw seems to suppose, that I am incapable of making any moral judgments at all or that I have no reason to complain if my neighbor threatens me. Of course I can apply moral judgments within my own culture, applied to myself and the neighbors with whom I share a community. Any community must assure a basic level of security and freedom from threats and injury--this is not a moral issue, it is a pre-condition for a community (as opposed to a pack of dogs) to exist at all. First existence, then morality.
The thread as I see it is this: I make moral judgments based on slightly different premises than yours and his; I am assuming that your and his premises are more heavily weighted towards rule-based ethics (that is, the Judeo-Christian strand), whereas mine tend to be more heavily the (Aristotelean) virtue-based strand. You might say that I'm broadcasting on the FM band, whereas you and tw are on the AM band, so the messages tend to pass like ships in the night.
Well, that is rather a prolix answer to only your first statement there. I shall try to respond directly to some of your other points in a subsequent post, especially regarding female circumcision (in No. Africa). Very apt example. More to follow...
Originally posted by moonbusI disagree. Many societies do not provide any such freedoms from threats and injury - or at least not to all its members.
Any community must assure a basic level of security and freedom from threats and injury--this is not a moral issue, it is a pre-condition for a community (as opposed to a pack of dogs) to exist at all. First existence, then morality.
So let me ask you this: if you were a slave, living in a slave owning society, would you submit to being a slave and say that it is 'not a moral issue'?
Originally posted by moonbusI mentioned meta-morality not meta-ethics. Meta-ethics tends to mean philosophy of ethics, I wanted a term for the underlying basis of morals which "philosophy of ethics" does not really fit.
""It's also pretty basic stuff that there isn't only one morality in the world..."
I'm not even sure what you mean by this claim... "
There is a great deal to respond to in your post and I cannot possibly do so in a single reply. DeepThought's mention of "meta-ethics" puts me onto an idea, why you and tw on one side and I on the other seem to be talkin ...[text shortened]... t, especially regarding female circumcision (in No. Africa). Very apt example. More to follow...
Originally posted by DeepThoughtWell, I want to be careful to distinguish my views from Joshua's. He's engaged in experimental philosophy and much of his work involves teasing out the content of our moral intuitions regarding things like trolley problems. Much of it is, to that extent, a descriptive exercise in psychology. When he gets to advocating for Utilitarianism as a so-called 'metamorality' that can help us adjudicate the disputes that arise between our tribal moralities, things come off the rails. We can talk more about why, if you're interested.
Is your position that there is an underlying and universal metamorality which is expressed as a culturally specific morality? I did a quick check on the word metamorality on Wikipedia and I mean it in the same sense as Joshua Greene [1]. I was going to disagree with you and say that my justification for interfering in the affairs of other cultur ...[text shortened]... rk out what to say in the OP...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Greene_(psychologist)
But, yeah, I am a moral realist. I believe there are facts about what sort of person we should aspire to be, what sort of lives we should seek to live and about what we should or shouldn't do in the circumstances within which we find ourselves. I believe these facts provide us with practical reasons.
I don't believe, though, that these facts completely determine or specify how a person must be, how a life must be lived, how we must act, etc. They certainly don't determine how, precisely, cultural institutions must be set up or how a society must get on. So there's middle ground here between moral absolutism and moral relativism. We can adopt a realism that allows for cultural variation (must as it could allow for personal ethical styles) but that has enough content to rule-out egregious forms of wrong-doing of the sort I mention above.
Note that I've described this all in a theory-neutral way. Whether one is attracted to consequentialism, deontology, virtue-ethics, contractarianism, contractualism, natural law, etc. doesn't really matter. These species of moral theory can all accommodate cross-cultural toleration and respect (though it's actually the toughest with Utilitarianism, since it's committed by definition to a maximizing rather than satisficing condition on moral rightness).
Originally posted by bbarrI read the Wikipedia page on the trolley problems as it's linked to from Greene's, it's quite interesting, but I felt the obvious course was to pull the lever half-way in the hope of derailing the truck thereby saving everyone. The reason I mentioned him was to make clear what I meant by meta-morality, I'd never heard of him before I just searched for meta-morality and wanted to check that any standard meaning it had was not totally at odds with the concept I wanted to convey.
Well, I want to be careful to distinguish my views from Joshua's. He's engaged in experimental philosophy and much of his work involves teasing out the content of our moral intuitions regarding things like trolley problems. Much of it is, to that extent, a descriptive exercise in psychology. When he gets to advocating for Utilitarianism as a so-called 'meta ...[text shortened]... s committed by definition to a maximizing rather than satisficing condition on moral rightness).
I am quite interested in the reason that you think utilitarianism is problematic as a theory of metamorality. What I got from Greene's Wiki page is that he has it working at a sort of evolutionary level. I admit I'm extrapolating rather a lot from what's in the Wikipedia article, but I felt the implication was that it's not a conscious thing but rather the social structures our paleolithic ancestors adopted had immediate survival consequences for them and so we evolved preferences for particular social behaviours.
“I believe there are facts about what sort of person we should aspire to be, what sort of lives we should seek to live and about what we should or shouldn't do in the circumstances within which we find ourselves. I believe these facts provide us with practical reasons.
I don't believe, though, that these facts completely determine or specify how a person must be, how a life must be lived, how we must act, etc. They certainly don't determine how, precisely, cultural institutions must be set up or how a society must get on. So there's middle ground here between moral absolutism and moral relativism. We can adopt a realism that allows for cultural variation ... but that has enough content to rule-out egregious forms of wrong-doing of the sort I mention above.”
I can agree with an awful lot of that. But now you owe us a definition of “egregious” which is cross-culturally acceptable. EDIT: I would accept "inclusion criteria" for your list of examples--but I don't see how you'll do it independent of specific cultural norms.
I have read a fair amount of sacred literature, including the Bible, Koran, Bagavad Gita, Upanishads, tons of Buddhist writings both ancient and modern, and, oh yes, The Book of Mormon. In all, one of the most moving and telling passages, for me, occurs in the Koran. God says to Mohammed: “To every people a Messenger is sent. It is not needful for you to know who the other Messengers were (or by implication what those messages were). Your job is to pass this message to your people” (meaning the Arabs). That is a most elegant statement of what I have been trying to say all along here, that it is not ours to pass judgment on others.
When I first heard about female circumcision in No. Africa, I was horrified. But I took the trouble to find out something about it, not just about the procedure itself, but about the counties where it is practised. It is not, as some might assume, simply a cruel torture inflicted upon women by men. Perhaps surprisingly, the procedure is performed by women, mostly by midwives. Perhaps surprisingly, mothers request the procedure to be performed on their own daughters. Perhaps surprisingly, women who have just given birth request to be sewn up again immediately afterwards; this is part of the service expected of midwives. And I thought to myself, ‘Hey, these women want this, and they do it to each other and their daughters. Whoa! What’s going on there?’
In the societies where female circumcision is practised, an uncircumcised woman is unmarriageable. An unmarried woman is in danger, quite literally, of starving to death in those societies, as she will have no support and will not be able to support herself. The practice is ancient, much older than Islam; it is part of the history of the region, as old as the hills, and it is deeply embedded in the economic structures, marriage customs, and mores of the society. It is not like an egg in a carton which could be removed without jostling any of the other eggs.
And now, someone asks me whether I find this practice immoral. I do not see how I could condemn just this one aspect of a culture without also condemning its history, its economy, its marriage customs and the rest of its mores, too. Add to this the fact that women there want this and they do it to themselves. OK, maybe if women were better educated they would no longer want this. But I still find it hard to condemn a whole culture because of a single practice which I find repugnant.
We must guard against making moral judgments based on feelings of repugnance.
Once in a generation, if we are lucky, a great man (or woman)--a Messenger, if you will--arises who pricks the conscience of a nation and calls it to rise above itself: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela. Do I laud these people? Yes! Would I support their causes? Yes! Why? Because each one was in a unique position to re-arrange the eggs within the carton. Perhaps, someday, some woman of No. African origin will rise and lead her people to re-arrange their eggs. Someday, maybe, they will be ready to receive a Messenger. Would I support her? Yes. But it is not for me to criticize them now if they see no need for such a one.
Griping about it from abroad is about as ineffectual a moral stance as donating ten cents to ‘Save the Children Fund’; if it really bothered someone, he’d go there and bloody well do something about it.
Originally posted by moonbusWell then, if you had any moral backbone, you would do that.
And now, someone asks me whether I find this practice immoral. I do not see how I could condemn just this one aspect of a culture without also condemning its history, its economy, its marriage customs and the rest of its mores, too.
Add to this the fact that women there want this and they do it to themselves.
First you tell us how complex it is, then you try and simplify it with this statement. It is not actually that simple.
We must guard against making moral judgments based on feelings of repugnance.
I agree with you on that. But that does not mean we cannot make moral judgments based on more solid grounds.
Perhaps, someday, some woman of No. African origin will rise and lead her people to re-arrange their eggs. Someday, maybe, they will be ready to receive a Messenger. Would I support her? Yes. But it is not for me to criticize them now if they see no need for such a one.
What if they already see the need for such a one, but people like you are refusing to help?
Griping about it from abroad is about as ineffectual a moral stance as donating ten cents to ‘Save the Children Fund’; if it really bothered someone, he’d go there and bloody well do something about it.
So you refuse to speak out because you think doing so would be ineffective? That is quite a different argument than your earlier argument.
I think the biggest problem you have in this thread is that you are highly inconsistent and keep giving wildly different explanations/arguments for your stand.
You also appear, from your questions, to have totally misunderstood my stand.
So let me try and summarize my stand:
1. I believe there are moral absolutes, ie some things are morally wrong for all people at all times.
2. I believe I know some of these moral absolutes. ie I am in possession of the truth about some of them, and anyone who disagrees with me on them is wrong.
3. I believe there is a certain amount of gray areas when actually interpreting morals and implementing legal systems that enforce morals.
4. I may not speak out about some immoral behavior (for a variety of reasons).
5. I believe that stoning a woman for adultery is immoral behavior in all societies at all times.
Originally posted by moonbusOK, so a bit of background: My Ph.D. is in philosophy. My areas of specialization are meta-ethics, normative ethics and moral psychology. My areas of concentration are epistemology, philosophy of mind and formal logic. My dissertation, The Targets of Virtue: A Pluralistic Account of Moral Motivation, is, at its heart, a sustained critique modern moral philosophy from a virtue-ethical framework. I taught moral philosophy to undergrads for over a decade. Which is just to say that I know my response below will sound pedantic...
""It's also pretty basic stuff that there isn't only one morality in the world..."
I'm not even sure what you mean by this claim... "
There is a great deal to respond to in your post and I cannot possibly do so in a single reply. DeepThought's mention of "meta-ethics" puts me onto an idea, why you and tw on one side and I on the other seem to be talkin ...[text shortened]... t, especially regarding female circumcision (in No. Africa). Very apt example. More to follow...
Although we can distinguish between rule-based and role-based ethics, such a distinction is neither exhaustive (you’re forgetting goal-based ethics) nor particularly helpful. First, those terms don’t track the way distinctions between moral theory types are commonly drawn. Second, there are a bunch of fundamentally different ways to carve up moral theory.
If you’re interested in how moral theories typically go about answering first-order questions about the moral status of actions, it’s appropriate to distinguish between act-centered, rule-centered or agent-centered theories. If you’re interested in how moral theories ultimately ground or explain their positions on first-order questions, it’s appropriate to distinguish between consequentialist, deontological, virtue-theoretic, teleological, contractarian/contractualist, and other theory-types. If you’re interested in what moral theories say about value, it’s appropriate to distinguish between eudaemonism, perfectionism, hedonism, objective-list accounts, etc. If you’re interested in what moral theories say about the justificatory structure of moral inferences, it’s appropriate to distinguish between foundationalist, coherentist, and intuitionistic accounts. And these ways of carving things up cut across each other.
Here are some more detailed comments on your claims above:
Rule-ethics concerns itself with right actions; right actions are those which conform to certain criteria, usually formulated as rules or laws, often but not necessarily held to be derived from Divine Commandments. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition is an example of this sort of moral system. Kant represents the secular version of it: obedience to rules but without God as enforcer.
Every moral theory, including the variety of virtue-ethical accounts on offer, has something to say about the moral status of actions. That’s why, when you read the virtue-ethics literature (see, e.g. Hursthouse, Slote, Swanton) you find accounts of right action like ‘An action A is morally right iff a virtuous agent would perform A under the circumstances’. Act-Utilitarianism, one of the most well-known moral theories, claims ‘An action A is morally right iff A maximizes utility’. Act-Utilitarianism is explicitly concerned with right action, yet the account it gives of moral rightness has nothing to do with rules. Acts are assessed on a case by case basis, and it is their contribution to utility, not their conforming to a rule, that determines their moral status.
Further, I’m not sure it’s fair to characterize the ethics of the Abrahamic religions as rule-centered. Yes, there are commandments that govern conduct, but they also enjoin us to cultivate certain states of character (e.g. generosity, humility, faithfulness, compassion… ). Much of the moral theory behind Aquinas’ Natural Law is taken directly from Aristotle.
Finally, this is a significant mischaracterization of Kant. For Kant, the moral status of actions is not determined by concordance with a rule, but by whether the maxims behind the actions can be rationally and consistently willed by an agent.
…there are states of character in the virtue-ethical model which are not instantiated by any specific actions (as truth-telling instantiates honesty). Temperance or continence, for example, are states of character considered praiseworthy in some virtue-ethical systems, but no single class of actions instantiates them.
Character traits are instantiated in people, not in actions. To think otherwise is to make a category mistake. Actions can, at best, evidence character traits because character traits cause or inform actions. Character traits are complex sets of dispositions with cognitive, doxastic, affective and motivational components. To be compassionate, for instance, is to be disposed to notice suffering, to believe it’s bad, to be distressed by it, to be impelled to mitigate it by virtue of its badness, and so on. When any of this dispositional complex is missing, you don’t have the virtue. Simply acting to mitigate suffering doesn’t constitute compassion any more than simply telling the truth constitutes honesty. If I mitigate suffering to win a bet I am not acting compassionately. If I tell the truth to humiliate somebody, I’m not acting honestly.
…I do not propose to make moral judgments that one or the other system is morally superior to the other. To do so would be comparable to making a mathematical statement that Euclidean geometry is superior to non-Euclidean geometry, or that rational numbers are superior to irrational numbers. It's a howler.
Well, that depends. I think virtue-ethics is, by and large, superior to other types of moral theories. The devil is in the details, though. Rules are important in moral education, but they should aim at the inculcation of virtuous character traits. To have the virtues is to have a type of practical skill; it is to have a form of moral expertise. The Aristotelian phronimos doesn’t need rules. I believe that rule-based ethical systems are kind of childish. We want people to be compassionate, for instance. This means, in part, being directly motivated to help by the fact that another is suffering. It is not to apply a rule such as ‘act so as to mitigate unnecessary suffering’, and it is certainly not to be motivated by such a rule. This is one of Michael Stocker’s points in his really fantastic essay ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’. It’s also the thought behind Bernard Williams’ famous “one thought too many” argument.