Hello. So last week I went to a school reunion for the 20th anniversary of my hometown school. I’m not the kind of person who enjoy this kind of social events, but for this time I made an exception. My old friend from that time asked me to go and I thought I would be funny (spoiler alert: it wasn’t funny). After the event and speeches, all my classmates and I went to a restaurant. I sat in front of a girl that I had a bit of a crush on when I was a kid. During the dinner I was mostly in silence, they were talking about gossips, old memories, relationships, comparisons… At some point she talked about a boyfriend she had. She said that she cheated on him like 10 or 20 times, she didn’t know the exact number. The thing is… She was laughing about it, and so the others. “I told him I cheated on him, I don’t know how many times…” She said, like nothing happened. My ex girlfriend told me that she also cheated on his fiancée some time before the wedding. She always said that infidelities are always there, like it is normal… But is it? I’ve been thinking about it for some time now, because I know some other cases. But I don’t understand… There is no sense of morality ot loyalty or empathy?
I mean, there’s all kinds of ethical philosophy out there. I don’t really deviate too far from it.
In practice, there’s a lot that most people can agree on without too much thought, too. For example, the classical case study for how being agreeable can work against doing the right thing is how ordinary and nice a lot of Nazis were, when not being ordered into atrocities.
First off, thanks for answering. I’m a bit obsessed with this kinda stuff.
So vaguely western ethics? I mean some ethics frameworks are quite incompatible.
This is a theme I see. It’s fair to not think through it, especially when it feels obvious.
This is consistent with the above statements. I sorta agree, but obviously I have a different worldview.
So my best guess given all that is that doing a bad thing from your perspective is: Doing something you consciously know will bring harm to others.
Which I think requires:
Does that sound right?
Yes, I just meant I don’t have much to add that hasn’t been said already. I lean pretty consequentialist, if that’s relevant.
I guess I should say I don’t really believe in judging people either, per se. OP said the world is 1/3 assholes, which implies 2/3 are off the hook. 2/3 are not off the hook, pretty much everyone is part of one problem or another, and should do better (but won’t).
Drop “consciously know”. People who can rationalise things really well are common, and I wouldn’t distinguish in any sense between a bad pair of shoes and a bad person. Both are obstacles to the world being how I (and most people) think the world should be.
I guess I will include local causality, as a sort of distinction between internal and external. A human being as a subsystem can’t respond to information it doesn’t have as input. That goes for a computer or ordinary rock too.
(I get this has gone on a while, of ya wanna stop just tell me. That way I’m not waiting on your reply.)
Yeah that’s pretty helpful. It’s nice to be able to look into that without taking up too much of your time.
Noted! This lines up with your last paragraph on not being able to use info you don’t have. That sort of reasoning drives a lot of my non-judgement as well.
This sort of dryness speaks to me. I disagree, but I like the energy it’s putting out there. I don’t put extra moral weight into humans. I’m no human exceptionalist.
So this all leads me to two questions that have a lot to do with practical application:
Does this imply that human consensus drives the goodness / badness of an action and therefore the goodness / badness of the actor that brought about that action?
If so, what happens when there isn’t consensus? Sometimes a non-consesus still has intense emotions behind it (abortion for example). Also does that mean minority opinions are morally less good?
If not, what defines an action’s good/badness?
Off what hook? What would being on the hook be for someone?
I would toss bad shoes. But also I know shoes don’t think about being tossed. I guess I could extend an earlier thought and say we do whatever the consensus is to that actor. That way we maximize goodness. Though I think leaving it at that would allow us to justify some radical things.
That’s kind of an interesting question. I think in this specific context, there’s just a social consensus that you don’t want to be bad, and the conversation was about why some people are anyway. On Lemmy, there’s not much we can do beyond discuss, and I’m putting this first because it’s important to remember that.
You don’t necessarily have to decide a person is bad, to decide an act is.
In real life, you have legal systems which try to achieve moral goals through rules and force. In that context, it becomes a matter of incentivising and supporting good behavior (respectively called deterrence and rehabilitation in penology), and of incapacitating people who are unavoidably bad and dangerous. Retribution for it’s own sake is also often cited, although that one is it’s own philosophical sticky wicket.
(As an aside, it’s worth noting that ideologically driven governments are a fairly recent development. There were pre-modern historical rulers that toyed with it a bit, going all the way back to Hammurabi, but largely states were brutal, blindly self-perpetuating structures. They were seen by their subjects as inevitable or divinely mandated more than as a social good)
So, there’s the “is-ought” question that comes up here. There’s a strong argument that morality is relative, and only exists in the eye of the beholder.
Because Lemmy is for discussion, I default to the consensus. If there were non-humans capable of contributing to the discussion, I couldn’t necessarily rely on that. Ditto for the many contested edge cases that are out there. You can still talk about logical self-consistency without getting on anyone’s bandwagon, though.
Off the hook of having to worry about if you’re a good person on the right side of things (by whatever standard). When people dualistically sort the world into good and bad people like that, an excuse to do whatever they want is always the goal. So, I felt the need to challenge it.
Radical things aren’t necessarily bad. A lot of what we like about present society was once very radical.
That being said, some kind of massive violent purge isn’t a new idea, and there’s a lot of ways it’s been shown to immediately backfire. If you just mean capital punishment for some small set of egregious deviants, that’s law in quite a few places already.