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I won’t, thanks
Hell yeah!
Steven Crowder is a piece of shit.
“If morality is objective …”
Well, there’s the debating point.
In my eyes there’s nothing to even debate about. I’m a simple man so I apply simple logic. The trolley problem is a thought experiment about morality. Objectivity does not allow multiple answers to the same question. Thus if morality was objective there would be an objectively correct answer to the trolley problem. The fact that there isn’t a definitively correct answer to the question means morality can’t be objective.
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God could also exist, we just don’t know how to prove it.
Belief is free and you’re free to believe what you want, but based on what we know right now morality isn’t objective.
Surprisingly it has been proven that there exist true theories that cannot be proven. There could still be an objectively correct answer and we could still be unable to prove it.
There’s no such thing as objective morality. That’s a tired and long-discarded enlightenment idea. Morality was invented entirely by people and is entirely concerned with things people think matter.
We are factory-farming, oil-guzzling monsters that will be judged just as harshly as our forbears for our own barbarities as you judge southerners for theirs. The only reason you don’t consider this is a one to one deal is because you were raised in an environment that normalizes and excuses what we do to our planet. The same way enslavers and their communities normalized and excused their behavior.
Your second paragraph seems to contradict your first paragraph? In my view, morality always comes back to what makes us humans (from an evolutionary viewpoint); and enslaving or killing people is, for the archetypical human, not acceptable. We continue to do this though, and that’s why discussions about morals keep on haunting us.
“for the archetypical human”
So moralist IS just popular opinion then?
Deciding that the world should be some specific way, and that it remains true regardless of human thought, is kind of silly. The universe doesn’t give a shit about morality or justice or any of it. It’s all subject from a human perspective. Morality is always subjective.
Some people have morals very different from yours but you would not call them bad. Others are very similar to you, but are undeniably evil.
I see this from the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist. Our egoism and altruism are coded in our DNA and in constant conflict. Moral rules are created to try to resolve this. So you’re right, on a universal level there is no right or wrong; but for primates there obviously is: right makes us feel good, wrong makes us feel bad.
So is it morally right for a murderer to do what he does because it makes him feel good?
Obviously not. The murderer may get a kick out of killing people ( although many murderers will deep down inside NOT feel good about it, they live in conflict with themselves). The societies witnessing the murder will be shocked (and this applies to any society, at any time, from the early hominids to nazi Germany) because deep down inside our “altruistic genetic make up” tells us murder is despicable. (Society will punish the murderer; either with a prison sentence or a death sentence. A death sentence is however also murder, and then a moral discourse starts: society will struggle to find the balance between our (genetically programmed) levels of altruism/ egoism).
Yeah so that’s the thing, you assumed the morality I was referring to is objective. It’s ALL subjective. There’s no objective base outside of human desires and considerations to refer to, and climate disaster being comparable to slavery is a called shot on my part. Today’s normal is tomorrow’s evil and yesterday’s mundane is today’s exceptional because morality changes over time. Humans made it and they made it to concern the things they care about. That doesn’t make them bad, but it makes them purely subjective.
For that matter, “archetypical” anything as a concept outside of clinical psychology that hasn’t seen the light of day since Plato’s world of forms. Archetypes are invented by our brains. They have no sway or influence on reality past their social impacts, and what makes a thing archetypical is ALSO purely subjective.
Objectively, Crowder is a piece of shit.
Chowder, on the other hand, is delicious.
The thing with the slave debate is that for as long as there was slavery, there were people against it, while a minority it shows that seeing slavery as the evil that it is, is not a modern innovation
The fact that Aristotle wrote a defense of slavery is evidence that there was an antislavery movement in ancient Greece. We can judge them based on modern values because the antislavery movement likely had the same political currents as modernity
Morality, like history, is but a fable agreed upon.
And rarely agreed upon.
That being said, people who clamor about not judging the past also need to take into account that, if we are regarding their acts to be ‘fair’ by the standards of their day, we must also account applying our own standards in judgement to be equally fair.
I tend to take a middle ground (yeah, I know, wimp’s way out) that while the actions of individuals remain just or unjust according to my moral standards, that historical individuals themselves should be judged by how close relative to the rest of their society they meet my standard. Especially since we, as human beings, largely form our morality according to our environment, as innumerable (and sometimes bizarre) popularly accepted cultural standards for moral behavior show.
is to concede that morality is just popular opinion
I believe the standard response here is: “so?”
Then you have to accept that you are an immoral actor in the present, facing the inevitable judgment of some future which condemns your choices.
And what if some further future decides on a different view? Do you become moral again?
Then you have to accept that you are an immoral actor in the present, facing the inevitable judgment of some future which condemns your choices.
I mean, yah, obviously.
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“Does morality exist if we have no free will” just entered the chat.
Through all of time, there were always people who thought slavery was wrong. It has to with our genetics as primates; as an example, even in chimpanzee groups murder (infanticide) happens occasionally, leading to great stress and panic in the group, indicating that on a basic level the primates (as social animals) know it is simply wrong (it is encoded in our genetics). Discussions about morality appear at that exact moment where the hard-coded gets into conflict with the harsh reality of suppression, egoism and social action. Thus, throughout time, when humans acted against our basic altruistic instincts, there were always people who raised their voice against violence, claiming that these actions were “immoral”. Alas, humans have a great capacity to gloss over wrongdoing, as we are also strongly egotistic, and we can actively suppress our altruistic characteristics.
