First....doesn't matter who said it.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 3:22 pm Kant didn't think so. He thought it was about the process of making the decision. Aristotle didn't think so: he thought it was about the habitual character of the actor. And that's the two major opponents of what you're seeming to plug for, which is utilitarianism of some kind.
All judgments are evaluated relative to a standard....in my case it is experienced existence.
Second....all is process. Moral is a value-judgement. Thee is no universal morality....there is only a value-judgement relative to an objective, the quality of which is determined by natural order.
My actions relative to my objectives, within a world which determines their effect through the consequences they produce.
Love is a word referring to actions....or in most cases to definitions in books."Behaviour" is the act. But "loving" is an emotion or a motivation. "Compassion" is a feeling, but not an intellectual one. And "tolerance" is not a universal good: one can be guilty of "tolerating" evil. So again, this seems far from clear sailing as a case.
There is no 'evil'.
Good/Evil are relative to an ideal, an objective, and by the consequences.
Ideals may be unattainable and entirely ideological.
Like the Abrahamic one-god.
Again...ALL value-judgements, including moral/immoral, good/evil, are triangulations:
Subject---Objective---Effort/Distance between the two.
If the objective is projected "outside space/time, it is unattainable, and used to control those who adopt it.
We can define concepts "out of exitance"...in other words supernaturally, or surreally, or nonsensically.
Love, for example can be defined in ways that explains why it is so necessary for a social species, as ourselves, or it can be defined in nonsensical ways, justified using obscurantism and mysticism, in order to exploit and manipulate.
Love is action....not a word referring to nothing or to something outside existence.
Same for morality.
Even god is pragmatic.[/quote] How could that be so?[/quote]Yuo are infected...you require mysticism to cope.Then they aren't moral at all...merely pragmatic. And since they "evolve," why couldn't a moral imperative against abortion, or for war, or making prostitution and slavery "moral," also "evolve" out of them in the future? How do we know where this haphazard process of "moral evolution" is leading us, before we get there?
Acts are moral if they abide by collective norms, promoting collective interests, and fitness.
Some have been so ingrained into us, most of us, that we feel compelled to act in accordance with these rules.
He feel distress or discomfort if we think of acting contrary to these ingrained behavioural norms.
God is a human invention representing everything humans find incomprehensible, but also representing a collective - humanity itself.
The Jews, for example, worship a god which is a representative of their collective. the narrative of them being "chosen" when all other tribes had rejected god, is an allegory of their multiple expulsions.
God of Abraham is man's ideal man.
An ideal he can never attain, relegating him to a perpetual state of shame/guilt - sinfulness. A method of mass mind control.
This si not how the Greeks, or pagans defined the term 'god. for them god represented the incomprehensible forces of nature.
They exp[rienced god daily.
Nobody calls earthquakes immoral, either.Then it isn't "moral." It's only a "natural process." Nobody calls earthquakes, floods and fires "moral." Likewise, "evolution" is supposed to be just a natural process...and you can be quite sure it has no opinions at all about how morality should go.
morality has to do with living organisms of a particular species.
Morality is how natural selection restricted individual options so as to make cooperative survival and reproductive strategies possible.
No...animals have no words......they do act morally.They're not moral. If they were, they'd have a moral code of some kind. They don't. All they have is instinct. We may foolishly project our own feelings onto them sometimes, but when a lion kills a gazelle, it's not because lions are immoral. It's just what lions do, and what they have to do.
have you seen dogs saving other dogs?
Have you seen the love they display?
This is moral behaviour, or behaviour we humans have named moral: altruistic, compassion, lover, tolerance.
Morality is our name for all the behaviours we desire and consider necessary for our well-being, as social species with a specific survival and reproductive strategy.
Nothing moral or immoral about anything.Well, then, does nothing make war immoral? If "nature" or "natural processes," as you said before, lead us to make war, then how can there be anything wrong with war at all -- whether on the international scale or within small groups?
Again.....we name 'moral' those behaviours which are essential for our codependent strategies.
Killing isn't moral nor immoral....
All value judgements are relative to an objective.
Primordial sin is based on the fact that all life must kill to survive.
This goes back to the pagans who honoured their slain enemies and the animals they hunted.
Abrahamism used it to weaponize shame and guilt.
All actions are either effective or ineffective, relative to an objective.You're speaking like a Social Darwinist, now: applying survival-of-the-fittest to human beings. There's nothing moral about that, obviously, either way.
If the objective is life, then all actions are either advantageous or disadvantageous to the perpetuation of life.
But we can....if you understand what Flux implies.We have no moral duty to perpetuation "the flux of existence," and "objective reality" is quite able to take care of itself. So we can't derive any moral duty from either.
We are in a perpetual war against increasing chaos - experienced as linear time.
we struggle to maintain our own order, first...our organization - we are organisms.
In truth conservatives are the true rebels for they resist change.
Suredering to what occurs naturally is not rebellion....the left is confused.
What they really believe is that change leads to a "better world", one that benefits them.
The "direction you speak of is manmade. We call it our objectives., and our ideals.But it can't provide any justification for morality. Even if we take it for a fact that human cognition is "evolving" in some particular direction, we have no way of judging whether that direction is "moral" or not. It might be merely pragmatic. It might lead us to do something evil that was still "useful" to us in some way. It might actually be leading us to extinction, too. We'd never know where it was leading us. To know that, we'd need a meta-moral system, something above the particular "morality" we happened to be believing in, something objective that would enable us to assess whether our "moral" beliefs were genuinely moral at all, or amoral, or immoral, or even morally suicidal. And what would that meta-moral basis for that judgment be?
Existence has no objectives and no ends.
It is a process of cycles - a movement from near-absolute order (big bang) towards near-absolute chaos - linear time.
We living organism prefer order, obviously, soi we idealize it.....we sanctify it. We even imagine it to be absolute.
But it isn't nor can it ever be so...for this would be an end of existence.
But we are entering metaphysics...and you have problems with simpler concepts like 'love' and 'morality'.