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Are we cut out for universal morality?

nautil.us

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Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#91

Post by PeterisP »

stablenode wrote: post #64
PeterisP wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that there's substantial disagreement for and against these principles is an argument that whatever morality Ayn Rand is arguing for, that morality isn't universal, it would not be universally accepted.

That's a novel argument. I believe what Rand was ultimately concerned with was a morality that is rational and objective; the idea being that one only needs to rely on one's own reason in order to judge what is moral and what is not. As to universality of moral doctrines, if I was feeling malicious, I'd say that the Catholic church was there first (that's what 'Catholic' means, after all). Some rather remarkable mora…

"the idea being that one only needs to rely on one's own reason in order to judge what is moral and what is not" - I would argue that this is fundamentally impossible. A commonly used (and IMHO generally accepted) counterargument to that is "Hume's guillotine" or is–ought dichotomy; you can't derive "ought" statements (i.e. morality) solely from logic reasoning and factual "is" statements.

Of course, you definitely can derive a full system of morality logically if you start from a few "ought" axioms - many proposed systems of morality are done this way, and likely Ayn Rand's proposal as well. But in such cases these axioms are the subjective and potentially questionable part, and we don't have an universal agreement on them. If your system has 99% of logical reasoning based on 1% intuitively assumed axioms, that 1% carries pretty much all the weight.

We know where many particular "moral axioms" lead, but that only leads to disagreement about them when seemingly reasonable moral axioms logically lead to various outcomes that intuitively seem unacceptable, so we don't have anything approaching consensus; for every proposal there is enough substantial critique that it doesn't seem suitable to be the One True Perfect morality - perhaps we should keep looking, but perhaps it's futile, there's no strong arguments yet to say that an universal morality must be possible in the first place.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#92

Post by mantas »

fighterpilot wrote: post #85
mantas wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best example is West-based colonies in the new world. Why did Canada or Australia went their own way? Why is USA seemingly splitting apart? UK? If someone would manage to establish single world order, it's only a matter of time when it would fracture into pieces.

The trend is steadily towards a more inclusive global tribe over all of human history. There aren't many objective signs that this trend is reversing in any nontrivial way. It wasn't long ago that Europe was constantly engaged in warfare within itself. Compare today with 50 years ago or 150 years ago. We've arguably backslid in some places over a 20 year lookback but those backslides are fairly minor in historical co…

Not so long ago vast majority of Europe was controlled by a single extended family. Now it's gone.

Roman empire collapsed. HRE collapsed. Austro-Hungary collapsed. Tsarist Russia + Soviet union collapsed. Ottoman empire collapsed. UK is still slowly collapsing. Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth went separate ways. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia split. Roman catholic church was pretty close to superstate at it's height.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#93

Post by achenatx »

There is no universal morality. Morals are likely partial genetic and partially cultural. Natural selection selects for cultural values ("morals") that allow a culture to survive to destroy other cultures.

Random morals are constantly being created - mutations. They sometimes are negative for cultural survival, sometimes neutral, and sometimes positive.

Based on a changing environment morals needed for a culture to survive will also change.

Over a long enough time, some moralistic behavior has become embedded in our DNA. (e.g. protecting children). Moralistic behavior that is embedded in DNA is probably the closest thing we have to "universal morality".

Controversial examples might be procreating at 13. When people died at a much younger age, it was not immoral to procreate as soon as we were able. Now it is morally abhorrent. Some cultures still allow it. It is absolutely not universally immoral.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#94

Post by slver »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #26
Enginerrrd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need to stick with tribalism, but make everyone part of the same tribe. That sounds completely psychotic to me.

Absolutely. IMHO, the best outcomes come from moral, economic, political systems competing with each other. Show me an instance of purity and a lack of competition of ideas that ever turned out well. It always turns out tyrannical, hypocritical, and oppressive. Always. Diversity of thought, as taboo as it might be to say today, is more important than what people tend to think of when thinking of diversity. But it can…

What you're witnessing in the US is not systems competing on their merit, but rather competing by throwing money at various social manipulation techniques, misinformation campaigns and so on.

That's not diversity of thought. That's lack of thought, with a few different colors of paint on each side.

Tribalism isn't merely "competing ideas". It's literally the tribal members suppressing their own thought process in order to align WITH their tribe and AGAINST the other tribe. This alignment makes otherwise intelligent individuals collectively quite stupid and easy to mislead and manipulate.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#95

Post by DangitBobby »

bumby wrote: post #78
DangitBobby wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or any other entity capable of "experiencing" some reality I pre-answered your question about the animal kingdom. When I say "must include" I imply only that it's necessary, not sufficient. My premise is simply that I have identified a necessary condition which will never be met.

I’m not trying to refute your position, just trying to clarify what it’s based upon. Why is the distinction drawn with experience? E.g., if the ultimate goal is to reduce suffering then it makes sense that experience is what matters

Yes, I think it's fair to say that the ultimate goal of my personal moral framework is to reduce suffering.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#96

Post by danShumway »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #53
logicchop wrote: post #30

"If objective ethical values exist, we'll have to give up tribalism to realize them." I didn't see a definition of "tribalism" in the article. I see references to the "January insurrection" and vague references to other "far-right" things. If you go back to Plato's Euthyphro, you see the character Euthyphro on his way to testify against his own father for mistreating a criminal. This is a very early "moral" moment in…

> If you look at the laws of practically every developed country, there is no "tribalism." The laws may not be tribalistic, but their enforcement certainly is. Take, for example, drugs. This report from the U.S. Department of Justice[1] indicates that arrests for the selling of drugs disproportionately targets black people by 33%, and arrests for possession of drugs disproportionately targets black people by 26%. The…

> The laws may not be tribalistic

I get what you're saying overall, and I agree with most of it, but you're giving too much credit with this statement. Some laws are tribalistic in America. It's not just that drug laws disproportionately target Black Americans in their enforcement, they were in their original forms designed to do so. The whole history of segregation and voter suppression is laws that were designed to hurt others, largely in the pursuit of tribal power. Voting suppression is inherently tribal, the whole point of voter suppression is to limit the voting power of other demographics or tribes.

The current push for anti-trans legislation in multiple states is also being driven by tribalism. Keeping trans people out of bathrooms and sports didn't suddenly become an emergency to anyone because of any brand new risk or development or scientific discovery. There's no reason why this would be more pressing to Republicans now than it would have been 4 years ago.

The major increase in legislation now is because it's a culture war, because it makes Democrats mad, because it's a backlash to the progress trans communities have made in securing rights, because it hurts people who are different who are symbolic in people's minds of power shifts and changing demographics.

On an individual level, things get more complicated. You can't use tribalism to explain everything. But on a broad, society-wide level, it just seems absurd to me to say that tribalism has no impact at all on American laws. I mean, heck, forget about America: if people don't think that classism, party-loyalty, all of these tribal instincts affected how Britain has approached Brexit and what debates people had about Brexit, then they really aren't paying much attention to how laws get made and policies determined.

Culture, in-groups, and out-groups all influence law.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#97

Post by nanagojo »

mantas wrote: post #74
logicchop wrote: post #30

"If objective ethical values exist, we'll have to give up tribalism to realize them." I didn't see a definition of "tribalism" in the article. I see references to the "January insurrection" and vague references to other "far-right" things. If you go back to Plato's Euthyphro, you see the character Euthyphro on his way to testify against his own father for mistreating a criminal. This is a very early "moral" moment in…

> If you look at the laws of practically every developed country, there is no "tribalism." There may be no tribalism inside of developed countries. But there's lots of tribalism between groups of developed countries and the rest of the world. Forcing all sorts of laws and customs on what they see as lesser countries. Sort of colonialism 2.0.

There is actually tribalism in the form of economic equality. Rich people only hang out with rich people. Poor only with the poor, etc.

What does a rich person need to do to be segregated from society? Simply go to a expensive restaurant or country club.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#98

Post by nanagojo »

slver wrote: post #4

The premise is quite weird, because we're not "cut out". We've evolved, and still evolving. The best thing evolution did to us is to make a lot of our behaviors learned. So how we perceive morality is something we can learn, and we can pass onto generations, basically recreating the concept of evolution through culture, at a much faster pace. The article claims we need to give up tribalism to get there. I disagree. T…

> So how we perceive morality is something we can learn, and we can pass onto generations, basically recreating the concept of evolution through culture, at a much faster pace.

That does not really work since nothing would stop people from changing their minds years later, especially when it feeds into the human instinct of tribalism. See WW1, WW2, how the nazi party rose, etc.

> We've evolved, and still evolving.

Only if those with non-tribalistic tendencies outbreed the rest of the population.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#99

Post by nanagojo »

PeterisP wrote: post #50
Enginerrrd wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need to stick with tribalism, but make everyone part of the same tribe. That sounds completely psychotic to me.

Arguably, that is what we've seen happening throughout history - keeping the conceptual intuitive tribalism but significantly extending what the "tribe" means. The basics of tribalism comes either from isolated tribes (generally under Dunbar's number) for hunter-gatherers or, later with agriculture, extended family units/clans - where you have both close blood relations and know each other. Then we see city-states an…

> In that regard, humanism is essentially nothing else than treating all humans as a single tribe, and it is an extension of the same trend and practice; we know that dissolving the smaller tribes in order the larger tribe stronger works and is possible as we have done that before; though, often the unification was facilitated and driven by external threats.

Sure, but it always comes at the expense of "smaller" tribes. Either in the form of losing their language and culture, or their economic independence. Even within countries you get tribalism in many forms, whether it be accents/dialects or their morality that varies state to state. So making people to conform to a single ideology [in public] only works with tyranny. Of course secretly they resent it.

Re: Are we cut out for universal morality?

#100

Post by Jorengarenar »

mantas wrote: post #92
fighterpilot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend is steadily towards a more inclusive global tribe over all of human history. There aren't many objective signs that this trend is reversing in any nontrivial way. It wasn't long ago that Europe was constantly engaged in warfare within itself. Compare today with 50 years ago or 150 years ago. We've arguably backslid in some places over a 20 year lookback but those backslides are fairly minor in historical co…

Not so long ago vast majority of Europe was controlled by a single extended family. Now it's gone. Roman empire collapsed. HRE collapsed. Austro-Hungary collapsed. Tsarist Russia + Soviet union collapsed. Ottoman empire collapsed. UK is still slowly collapsing. Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth went separate ways. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia split. Roman catholic church was pretty close to superstate at it's height.

>Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth went separate ways

* Was partitioned by external forces and eradicated from existence for decades.

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