Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 4:57 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 2:52 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Mar 27, 2024 11:14 am
The moral value of a decision or act comes from the intention behind it and the consequences of it,
That's not going to work. The "intention" and the actual "consequences" are notoriously sometimes different. It's like the old Kant-Mill controversy: Kant thinks motivations are everything, and Mill says only the consequences are determinative of morality, and they arrive at opposite moral judgments relative to the same actions.
It's not a question of its working.
It is, because your answer doesn't "work" as a logical statement. Consequences and intention are very different and sometimes even oppositional touchstones for working out what is moral.
If a decision is made on what are considered to be
By whom? Who establishes what "good moral grounds" are?
...those who considered it to have been made on good moral grounds would regard it as a morally good decision, even if the consequences turned out to be disastrous.
So now you're going with intentions, and rejecting consequentialism.
Harbal wrote:I don't think we are any kind of "specially exalted" creature, and I do think we are just another kind of beast. I do think human beings are a special case, but that is only because I am a member of the species. I believe our sense of morality and our capacity for caring about the welfare of one another is a product of human evolution; it enables us to much more successfully function as a social species.
Think of what an odd view that is: that a reflective creature such as we are would say to himself, "Well, what I'm going to do might damage my prospects of achievement or survival, and it probably will doom my community in some way, but I'm just fine with it because I think the species will be benefitted thereby." Does that really sound to you like the thinking anybody does? Species survival is very low on our list of motivations, and comes well down the list after the survival of our friends, our families and ourselves. That's just human nature.
But the larger point is this: what makes species surival a moral imperative? The Tasmanian tiger and the dodo bird went extinct. If we are just accidental animals, such as they were, then why should the rules be different for us?
We are motivated to obey the urging of the twinges in order to satisfy them, in much the same way as we respond to an itch by scratching it.
So now it's not a question of morality at all: it's just a question of how you itch?
But it is the fact that we have the feelings, and that they motivate us to act in a particular way, that is the point.
Sometimes we have feelings of jealousy, rage, lust and covetousness. They're highly motivational, too. But a great many of the actions they sponsor we conventionally recognize as highly immoral. So the fact that a feeling "motivates" doesn't tell us a thing about its moral status.
You might be able to reason that it would by wise to obey what you believe to be the will of God, but your sense of reason won't tell you if doing so is morally good, you would need to already have a sense of morality for that.
Well, yes it will. But in addition, we DO have a moral sense, a conscience, flawed as it sometimes is. But conscience is clearly not a perfectly reliable guide, because sometimes it fails to alert us to our moral duties when it should.
Think of conscience like the fire alarm you have in your house. Sometimes it goes off for a good reason, such as an actual fire. Sometimes it goes off when you just burnt some toast, or when the battery malfunctioned. But a smart homeowner checks anyway. Conscience is useful, but it's far from a perfect instructor as to what right and wrong are: it needs to be informed by revelation and reason, so as to detect when it is going right, and when it is going wrong.
Exactly, people see moral issues differently, and that is precisely what makes morality subjective.
No, it only makes some people wrong. What it cannot show is that contradictory choices are both moral. It cannot be both moral and immoral to murder somebody. In every case, it's either a moral death or an immoral one. And that doesn't depend on how psychotic the murder is, or how he "feels" about what he did.