Like the topic of free will, debates and threads on morality are handicapped by people starting from assumptions and then propagating misunderstandings. I intend to clarify this by approaching the subject the same way that worked with the topic of free will. A single question may eliminate any possibility of future misunderstanding. My question, then, is obvious:
What is meant when someone says, “It is immoral to X”?
That it is preferable not to do x than do x.
I would think immorality has to do with the violation of some fundamental standard for appropriate conduct.
Collapsing morality into preferences seems to be a pretty serious conflation.
What is a fundamental standard but a statement that one should refrain from doing x?
This fundamental standard is followed by those who prefer they and others follow it, no?
Yeah, but your preferences don’t necessarily have to align with the standard. It could be preferable for someone to be immoral.
Sure, but those same people’s preferences might go against a standard they believe in. So preferences and morality can align, but I don’t think you can say they are the same thing.
Then it could be moral to do evil, or immoral to avoid doing evil. Fine. Are you saying universality is not a necessary characteristic for determining whether an action is amoral, moral, or immoral?
A tautology, so by definition yes. The problem is that homo sapiens is open to staggering degrees of psychological exploitation, and intelligent evil people can easily manipulate others in order both gain, and limit competition for, power by propagating inconsistent and yet psychologically powerful ideas about morality. Indeed, this seems to be the main function of what most people recognize as “morality” in the world today. Hence this thread, to clear it up.
I would tend to agree. Some immediate questions, then, are:
— What evidence is there that your idea is valid/correct/superior to other ideas about morality?
— What is the standard?
— Who is to decide what is appropriate?
My thoughts on moral language. You need to specify the connotation by which you mean “It is immoral to X”. Then I can tell you what it means.
Clayton -
I’m in agreement with Clayton. On a side note, although morality can be used as a tool of manipulation, morality by itself isn’t simply psychological manipulations, psychologically healthy people naturally find it immoral to murder someone. People’s moral intuitions aren’t suited well to complex moral concepts (What is to the mind seen as complex moral concepts), such as taxation, because the violence isn’t as painfully obvious as seeing someone get shot, in this way people’s moral intuitions aren’t adequate. Just because they aren’t adequate, doesn’t change the fact that people naturally, without any psychological manipulation, form moral opinions.
Your misunderstanding (I’m not claiming to know what is meant by morality, quite the opposite) proves my point perfectly. A person claiming to talk about “morality” must specify what they are actually talking about, lest the responses be based on each responder’s projections of his own (mis)understanding of “morality”. Morality, like free will, is one of the concepts that may as well be called the spaghetti monster every time an OP invokes it without defining it. Hence this topic: I’m asking people to define what is meant when someone says, “It is immoral to X”.
This seems like a quite unsophistocated and untenable view. The brain is by necessity subject to psychological manipulation, even in a Crusoe model. But people don’t naturally form moral opinions. A person locked in a cave for 25 years will have no concept of morals. And so we come to another aspect of morality: it means nothing except in social situations.
@hashem: As usual, I have little to no idea what you’re talking about. I have offered four connotations to moral language. Perhaps there are more. But there are at least these four. When someone (not you) says “it is immoral to X”, I believe they mean it in one of these four connotations, or perhaps some others I’ve overlooked.
What does the word “set” mean? Well, depending on the context, there are at least a dozen different connotations. That’s why dictionaries have multiple definitions for a single word. “Immoral” is not only a multiply-defined word, its definitions are commonly confused and these confusions form the basis of many unnecessary moral dilemmas.
Clayton -
Well, we’re getting closer.
So it’s apparent that my initial belief is vindicated: P doesn’t actually know for sure if he is thinking about what anyone else is thinking about when discussing morality. At best, as you explained, people project their own feelings about what they believe someone might mean. A table comes in all different shapes and forms, but it can always fall under the category of table. A speaker, a phone, a bowl, and so forth. The same isn’t true for concepts, which only exist in minds. Concepts like free will, or in this case morality. Which means a thread like this has value. We can gather together people who value the topic of morality and work toward an answer.
You mentioned dictionaries. Well that seems like a fairly good starting point. If we take dictionary.com to start us off, it’s clear “immoral” behavior is that which violates social norms. I don’t think that’s a consistent definition, or even accurate, because many of the most hardline social norms are pure evil (statism, or slavery, but I repeat myself), and certainly a characteristic of morality is that it deals with what is evil versus what isn’t, or what is righteous or isn’t. But it alludes to an important characteristic of morality that National Acrobat brought up: there is some kind of standard, or standards. So immoral behavior would, as a starting point, be behavior that transgressed standards. But it also seems to have a negative connotation. Immoral behavior may be behavior, in violation of a standard, which has a negative result.
What we’re really trying to do is determine what is or isn’t objectively immoral. We’ve uncovered some good guideposts so far in this thread:
— objective, not dependent on various opinions
— universality
— standards
— negativeness, is the behavior evil
@ Hashem
Growing up in a cave with no other humans isn’t natural. For something to be considered naturally occurring, it must occur under natural conditions, not unnatural conditions. We’re using psychological manipulation in different senses as well, you’re using it in a very weak sense, while I’m using it in a strong sense.
From what I can gather from this thread you think morality is just a product of manipulation by evil people, who want to bend everyone to their will, and that you believe morality wouldn’t be around without those evil people manipulating people. The manipulation you’re talking about is powerful, completely changing a person, which is the sense that I was using the word manipulation, then you responded to my post by using the word manipulation in a incredibly weak sense, manipulation which is so subtle that you can barely tell a difference. So I’ll re-phrase, morality is natural, not requiring any manipulation in the strong sense of the word.
I’ll write a longer post later, I have plenty to say on the topic, after all the reading I’ve done on the subject.
Not to nitpick, and Hashem will certainly be able to confirm or deny my suspicions, but I think you might be misunderstanding him (not that I agree with Hashem on morality). Growing up in a cave is natural, but it’s not normal. Obviously, one can use the words natural and normal as synonyms, but I think in this particular case Hashem is not. I completely disagree with him that morals are not natural to humans, but I think he is saying something different than what you are reading.
You’re right I’m using natural to mean normal. Natural just seems like the right word. When we think of humans we don’t think of them as growing up away from all contact with their fellow humans. Studies have shown that a lack of connection with any other human can cause some serious psychological problems. From that I conclude that humans are naturally social, that it is natural for them to connect with other humans, not just live in a cave.
I was going off of what you said. From my perspective, you were positing the caveman, though in retrospect I suppose you didn’t mean to. See below…
Your hypothetical person in a natural environment, absent any psychological manipulation, is a solitary caveman. I disagree that he would form moral opinions, because it’s clear morals arise in social settings, which by definition involve psychological manipulation. When a psyche interacts with another psyche, they influence each other. What’s interesting is that a definitive characteristic of homo sapiens is his tendency to form dominant hierarchies, so a natural-based moral would be non-universal, categorizing domination by alphas as righteous.
That is precisely the sort of morals history has naturally tended to give us, which is in line with my theory. Morals have developed as a means to control the weak minded, and serve the functions of limiting competition for power and providing ex post facto rationalizations for immature people who need myths to cope with reality.
Humans are social animals. Putting a human in a non-social atmosphere and observing the lack of moral development is like putting him in shackles and observing that he doesnt learn to walk very well.
I suppose you could imagine taking a mature, civilized person and placing him in a Crusoe scenario. The point isn’t that it wouldn’t happen, remember, the purpose of the Crusoe scenario is to make obvious what is missing, and so to realize what the missing pieces conrtibute.
We aren’t even here yet, because we haven’t established what morality is in such a way that we can know for sure what is or isn’t immoral.
Sadly, we’re not. This is the usual run-around.
Yes, same as P doesn’t know for sure if he is thinking about what anyone else is thinking about when discussing tables. After all, there is the kitchen table, a table saw, tabling a matter, a look-up table, water table (no, it’s not a table made of water!), and so on. Are you an ESL individual? You do realize that many words in English are overloaded and, thus, ambiguous sans context?
*shrug - The democratic approach to meaning isn’t my forte. Most people have no idea what they’re talking about on most subjects and this subject (morality) seems to be particularly muddled due to the “special pleading of selfish interests” to borrow Hazlitt’s phrase.
You seem to think that nouns that refer to physically instantiated items - such as a table or chair - are fundamentally different from other kinds of words that refer to conceptual entities, such as numbers or freedom. But this is a mistake. All words are conceptual, that is, they refer to human conceptual categories. Those conceptual categories may or may not be nouns and refer to physically instantiated items - such as chairs and tables - but the word only ever refers to a conceptual category nonetheless.
Please watch this excellent lecture where Pinker discusses the “intuitive theory of physics” embedded in language. When you refer to a table, the meaning may seem “obvious” or “objective” but it is really is not. Under the surface, the mental machinery involved is fantastically complex and is performing a great deal of abstraction, that is, applying concepts to parceling the physical world.
I don’t know why you insist on obfuscating this topic. It’s not nearly as confusing as you would like to make it.
Clayton -