August 10th
On chapter one of James Rachels’ book “Elements of Moral Philosophy” the reader is introduced to the problems of pin-pointing a concrete definition of morality. Addressing what mortality is actually like raises some very interesting and often counter-intuitive implications about how we tell desirable outcomes from unwanted ones.
The arbitrary nature of morality is addressed too on the chapter. This is done by quickly stating that almost all opposing -so called moral systems tend to disagree on specific cases and under certain criteria. To properly deal with morality as a whole the author coined the term “minimum conception of morality” meaning the basics from which all moral systems are based, three different cases are analyzed to arrive at said moral basis and, the arguments for and against every one of the cases sheds a light on our final answer.
Great detail is present on each of the three examples but the overall conclusion is as follows: The most fundamental characteristic of morality is one’s attempt to guide your actions according to sound reasoning, this reasoning behind morality must be impartial and necessarily so because reason is a matter of logic and getting rid of impartiality automatically introduces arbitrary elements and internal inconsistencies on your logic.
When reason and logic are introduced in morality some people might internally flinch because in one’s mind morality appears to be a derivative from gut feelings, in other words: People think their preexisting information is correct or better described as I-am-always-right-syndrome. This is why your average Joe always has an opinion on any given topic and why some people don’t seem to think things through when making their opinions be heard, because counter intuitively your opinions, presuppositions and mortality itself are all based on reason and logic.
Just acknowledging the presence of reason isn’t enough to steer away from fallacy cliff. It’s all about making the right choices for the right reason, this is true by all means on edge cases where moral dilemmas roam free, when confronted by a difficult question you must ask yourself not what is the right reason but if there is any good reason to follow through. This is exemplified on this short example from the book, the claim is “Tom Cruse is being discriminated against because of not being casted as the leading role of a movie about Martin Luther king Jr.” The argument against discrimination sounds compelling at first but when we get the full story we quickly figure out that there is no good reason why he would be casted, therefore we can rule out this claim as a bad one.
The chapter concludes with this notion, that morality is founded on top of reason and evaluating carefully both sides of an argument will help you filter out the bad apples, guiding you a bit closer to the most moral and therefore desirable outcome.
August 24th
I think nature is amoral, the sense of right, wrong, good or evil is exclusive for entities able to build civilizations, not because humans are special, we’re not, but because for morality to exist there has to be a sense of society. I consider animals to better resemble gatherings rather than societies so I come to the conclusion that only humans are capable of moral reasoning at the time. To say that something is good or bad by nature fails to remember that moral values like good and evil only exist to the eyes of humans, my generalization is that nothing by nature is moral, because “nature” in the common sense of the word refers to a set of process or tendencies that occur without intervention, and because processes are not conscious or able to grasp the idea of society I therefore conclude that man’s nature is amoral too. A single person is capable of moral reason because he has a sophisticated brain, the predispositions of an entire species are not conscious or able to be moral, saying that humanity is good or evil is as meaningless as saying that gardens are irresponsible in my view.
The question: do you think current humanity’s moral compass is aligned with good or evil? is an equally interesting question, in my opinion the current systems that determine if one is successful in life indeed push people in favor of taking advantage of other humans/animals/natural resources, words like capitalism come to mind for some strange reason. Although the everyman is rewarded to prefer morally unsound decisions I’m not willing to go any further and say that our moral compass is aligned with evil , that position is too extreme even for me, I don’t have the knowledge or expertise to form a definitive opinion so I’ll just say that in my opinion humanity is neutral, but current systems and trends push individuals (not humanity) to the undesirable zone.
Because my opinion on most things is that “X” just exists as it is and that does not imply anything else about “X”, I mostly brush way these type of questions, but in the spirit of the question I’ll say that cultural events is the main reason behind most moral decisions or standards. Most people intuitively believe that morality is objective, solid and never changing, but this idea is not born out reason, this idea is common because people think they’re always right and if I always have the best opinions, morality is as unbreakable as my ideas. A more true to history hypothesis about morality is that morality is not objective, it’s fluid: It changes every turn of the decade, Christians/True Americans/The Bourgeoisie are mad because X is now allowed has happed since the beginning of recorded history and this just shows how morality changes thought times. Our opinions on slavery, homosexuality, child workers, respect for animals have hanged only because of the push of the few.
The so called battle for hearts and minds is a difficult one, lots of push-back is needed to overthrow bad ideas. Real and honest conversation, first hand experience and ridicule are the main tools to downplay ideas, but the biggest factor is the unfortunate death of a past generation: Debate leads us to a more reasonably sound path, seeing the abuse face to face targets a bad idea hidden at plain sight, making fun of baseless ideas points to how absurd they really are and the death of a generation leaves a new one to reflect on the mistakes of the past.
Human nature is the natural tendencies of any given person, the programing of the mind, while human condition refers to the actual decisions taken by humankind against or following their predispositions. In other words: human nature refers to how we are all born and human condition refers to what we do with our lives as a society.
If human condition is a description of what we actually do, human dignity is all the values we wish to become, we think that child abuse is wrong because we “ought” not to behave that way, not because we are born with this ideals, we develop them and strive for them, this is our sense of dignity.
The Wikipedia article for dignity has the following section about kant’s views
A philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment (18th century), Immanuel Kant held that there were things that should not be discussed in terms of value, and that these things could be said to have dignity. ‘Value’ is necessarily relative, because the value of something depends on a particular observer’s judgment of that thing. Things that are not relative – that are “ends in themselves”, in Kant’s terminology – are by extension beyond all value, and a thing is an end in itself only if it has a moral dimension; if it represents a choice between right and wrong. In Kant’s words: “Morality, and humanity as capable of it, is that which alone has dignity.” Specifically with respect to human dignity, which his writings brought from relative obscurity in Western philosophy into a focal point for philosophers, Kant held that “free will” is essential; human dignity is related to human agency, the ability of humans to choose their own actions.
If we define human as decedent of any Homo Sapiens or their future ramifications we must guarantee their ability to maintain a good life according to society, we must also acknowledge their life as valuable: This is human rights, the basic rights a person gets for being part of our species, civil rights is the government’s attempt to closely arrive at said values and rights. Human rights are related to human dignity because its the values and ideals we ought to become.