Calling all philosophers - a question about normative values/morality.

[Rantmum]

I am very clearly not a philosopher, but I have been trying to sort out a vaguely philosophical question in my head and need some direction!

I believe quite strongly in what I think are fairly fundamental values, human rights and that there must be some universal truths about what is right and wrong - these things inform our judicial system etc, so many of them are ingrained in our culture. For me, these beliefs do not stem from any religious convictions, although I suppose most morality across cultures is found in religious texts. However, this is where my question emerges; if you divorce morality from religion does it exist at all? Are the things that I believe in really stemming from universal truths or is a common human morality a fiction.

If it is a fiction, if we all get to decide for ourselves, then should I just abandon my set of beliefs and with what should I replace them? And if we all did this, would we not just have anarchy?

Sorry I am having a minor existential crises and the fact that I am have never really studied philosophy does not help.

stuffitall I changed my name for halloween and never changed back, I rather liked it but I guess it is a bit gruesome, but I like it more as an expression and it fit with how I've been feeling about various issues in my life at the mo

What do you recommend if not hobbes then?

Acinonyx when you say 'There are people who see wester sexual morality and behaviour, the apparent disintegration of the family, and lack of care for children and the elderly as violating their innate sense of goodness', do you htink they wound have these views if it weren't for their religious beliefs? Or do you think these views pre-dated the religion and so where encorporated into their religious beliefs?

You sound very knowledgable and sorted,I've always had an interest in evolutionary anthropology, but the more I read the more jumbled everything becomes, I feel like I'm getting deeper and deaper into a tangled web

Since these kinds of views were very common historically it is likely that they predate religious views. In fact, at the time, Islam, for example, was revolutionary in that it actually spelt out the rights of women, albeit, not as equals - but an improvement on the acute opression that came before.

Religion, IMO, does not spring fully formed from a vacuum. It is created by people and imbued with the values they hold at that time in that place.

A little Hobbes is probably required really I suppose - but just enough to get the flavour i.e. that man's natural life is 'nasty, brutish and short'. Fair enough really. I would say that covers it.

These days, I'm more interested in evolutionary psychology and behavioural ecology as a means of understandng issues around ethics, free will and responsibility etc. I really recommend the books I mentioned - they are very accessible and written for the general reader. Honest.

As for sorted - well I am quite old and there are many issues in this area that I am unsure about and probably always will be - such as free will and responsiblity for example. That is my personal tangled web.

Must get back to sorting toys - don't want dh to come back from shopping with dd only to find I have snuck off to mn AGAIN......

Thanks Acinonyx!

I love how your posts end with some family task that needs doing It adds to the aura! POndering on the complexities of ethics and then sorting toys, or reading a story, or making pancakes

Hi Acinonyx

I'm not suggesting we go anywhere and change anything by force, I'm not suggesting that our view of female circumcision should affect what we do about it. That's a separate moral question altogether.

I'm also not suggesting that you would approve of female circumcision in its home culture. I'm sure you deplore it as much as I do, which you would see as a result of our cultural and functional upbringing.

What I'm suggesting is, that as a relativist, on a purely intellectual front, you must accept that female circumcision in its home culture is not wrong.

Whether or not we choose to do anything about it is completely independent of that. I'm saying it's wrong, full stop.

And all this talk of human rights is missing the point. The point is:

Is there such a thing as an absolute good?

When you start talking about human rights, you are implying that human rights are "good", therefore you accept the concept of an absolute and independent good.

I don't accept that human rights are necessarily good as I don't think they are a universal standard - they are culturally based as I believe all ethics are in the details. Many people in the find our obsession with the rights of the indiviual distastful and I think they probably have a point.

As for whether FC is wrong in another country - the point is not that I personally must think that it is right anywhere - but that I must accept that others believe that it is. My point about the use of force is that if you believe something is wrong in an absolute fashion that can have no dispute or negotiation - that is generally taken as a justification to intervene by force - and you facilitate that when you describe it as objectively wrong even if that is not your intention.

FC is wrong primarily because it is involuntarily performed on children. Throughout history parents have had absolute dominion over their children and the notion of children's rights as being seperate from that is pretty modern. It is also always limited - even in our culture.

Being a relativist does not mean having to think all manner of things are good when some other culture proclaims that they are. That's unworkable outside of an armchair debate - or for some rather unsavoury and extreme philosphical types (IMO). We each decide what will be meaningful for us wrt to ethics and for me human rights makes sense in the world and moral context I find myself in. But I must accept that it is my feeling and take responsisbility for that and take stock of others' frames of meaning. In these instances there are always people in the home culture who question whether a given behaviour is really good - again it's part of a battle of ideas.

But our reactions to good and evil are very emotionally charged - even your chosen example shows that clearly. What western woman could bear to contemplate FC or be deeply disturbed on reading an account or seeing a documentary on the subject? But really there are many wrongs out there that people just accept dolefully or indifferently that do not have the same emotional impact yet cause the same or more suffering.

I think I am being less clear but (this is the truth!) I came upstairs to go to the loo and I am supposed to be cooking dinner.....

Acinonyx
I need to read your post carefully.

But you say: "FC is wrong"

as judged against what?

Only to myself by my own standard of choice - and to those of like minds who hold the notion of human rights as current in the west. I have a good friend whose daughters are all circumcised, arranged by his wife. It distresses me but I'm pretty sure not as much as it would distress you. (We had a brief discussion about it.) If I thought that he felt as I did we could not remain friends - but I know that he thinks this is for their own good and his wife assured him that it is. I have to accept that. I understand what your problem is here and although you may not agree with my solution I hope I can at least explain it efficiently.

I think that it is part of the human condition to establish a moral code of ethics. It is an imperative. As a pp said - by a process of logic and compassion - but I would say more by logic and emotion which may or may not involve compassion. If it does not - then what is usually termed amorality may be the conclusion. The only choice is whether to reflect and make that code your own - or take it lock stock and barrel from some other source. (But if doing the latter, many people become unstuck if it does not feel right to them personally in some ways.)

In doing this I am doing the same as an absolutist - it is only that I think about it differently. If you think you can say that something is absolutely good or bad, yet you know that many others would not agree, then how do you actually know that it is you that possesses the absolute universal standard? You have to decide that you do. The difference for someone like me, is that I know that my standards are my own, albeit inevitably biased by my culture (a rather large bias, admittedly). In most cases I would look for like minds, but perhaps there are cases where the personal notion is so strong it must persist even if everyone else disagrees. It depends on the issue.

I think, in fact, that just about everything that we attribute to reason is essesntially the result of emotional processing with posthoc ratoinal justifications after the fact. This is why my views are barely distiguishable from those of many liberal theists - we are coming from the same emotional base and that dominates out thinking.

The advantage of my position is that I am continually adapting my moral outlook to new information and experience (and living overseas has certainly changed my views on a number of things). Collectively, this process allows culture to evolve and develop (notice I do not say progress). That kind of change is abhorrent to many but if you accept that ethics is relative it is essential and inevitable.

I would say you have a muddled understanding of the purpose of this conversation. Have you ever completed a logic module? Your field of inquiry is very interesting, and I do think that sometimes all philosophers should be required to complete at least one logic module before wading into the ethical swamp! However I think that whereas we differ on the issue of an absolute morality or a functional/relative morality, we are probably on the same page as far as those empirical ethical issues are concerned. Which is not really what I thought we were trying to establish, but is reassuring anyway.

We are on the same page and I think I understand your point about logic as this is the usual circular problem with relativism. But I think my view is logically valid given my take on human nature.

I thought the intitial enquiry was to whether or not there were universal, objective standards and the OP implied an anxt about the consequences if there were not. That's what I was trying to discuss. It's not enough to discuss ethics as an abstract notion without following through on the consequences.

If your understanding of the prupose is different - please be specific.

To be honest I expected you to come back to me with this.

That you can't say "FC is wrong in all circumstances" and that it was a slip to say that, but you can say "I think FC is wrong is all circumstances" which is very acceptable within your system. That it is a product of your cultural upbringing, and that my belief that it is wrong in all circumstances because it falls against a standard of absolute goodness is simply a product of my cultural upbringing too.

Which would lead you to tell me that even my belief in an "absolute good" is a product of my cultural upbringing, and that it is impossible for me even to examine that belief because such examination would also be informed by my cultural upbringing. And that therefore it is impossible to separate the subjective from the objective, because whenever we examine ourselves there is always a separate part of ourselves doing the examining.

Which leads us to Cartesianism, and to the bones of logical argument. I would expect you to say at this point that the very fact that it is impossible to prove that there is an absolute good is proof IN ITSELF that an absolute good does not exist.

Saying that FC is wrong because it is practised against children implies that doing bad things to children falls against a standard of absolute goodness. Which implies the existence of a standard of absolute goodness.

Do you see? I only took the example of FC as it is an easy example of a cultural phenomenon which one culture finds profoundly unacceptable and another culture approves of.

I think the examination of whether or not there is an "absolute good" must take place as an abstract notion, otherwise confusion arises as above. I didn't wish to examine the rights and wrongs of female circumcision, or western values or whatever..I'm a liberal and a champion of human rights and so on. I think you moved away from rantmum's angst into this field.

I must also say that as an absolutist, I accept it is impossible to prove the existence of an absolute good. One is reduced to "tripping up" the relativists, which is a most strenuous mental exercise on both sides.

We both do this in between washing up and hoovering -- I haven't done it for a frightfully long time and it's been testing and interesting.

You'll say .. "but you did want to examine it, you brought it up"

But it was just as an example of how from a relative point of view you must accept the morality of a certain issue is profoundly fluid if you don't accept an absolute good.

Golly hope that's clear.

Thank you Acinonyx and Stuffitall, I think that you have clarified some thoughts for me to consider, and given me a starting point for further research - I have never read Hobbes, but I studied a little bit of Locke a long time ago, and I will have get the books that Acinonyx mentioned. I was still a bit confused by your post Acinonyx, where you said,

"Thus people everywhere generally agree that killing is wrong but differ in the specifics."

If people everywhere generally agree that killing is wrong, does that not imply that the belief that "killing (people, I assume) is wrong" is a universal truth EVEN if the specifics differ?

And the thing that concerns me about the idea that a relativist point of view could be accurate is that it seems to mean that under certain circumstances it would be theoretically possible to argue a moral case for human atrocities, for example, genocide becomes acceptable because within the context of a particular culture at a particular point in time a dominant cultural group feels that it is justifiable? Is this inaccurate? (Still muddled, I guess)

Stuffit - you saved me some effort I see in my response. Yes indeed that is how it would follow. But at the risk of sounding shocking, I don't think that cruelty to chidlren is an absolute universal wrong - it is part of the moral (very humanist in fact) framework that I have constructed for my sense of meaning and hold in common with a great many other people in consensus.

Rantmum - you are quite right in your worry over the possibility you mention. But IMO that is more likely to happen as a consequence of absolutist views (which is why I got onto the whole bit about consequences and use of force etc). If you can justify an atrocity by means of an absolute, non-negociable code, then the adherents of that code (eg religion but not necessarily) cannot reasonably argue against it without seeming to deny the code itself - which cannot be right if that code is based on absolute universal standards. So your fear is the same as mine - but I think relativists would be hard pushed to convince the greater mass of people that an atrocity was justified exactly because they cannot draw on absolute standards - it's always open to debate and objections are not heretical. This is my single greatest fear about religion otherwise I would not care what people believed.

Culturally, there do appear to be universal notions about e.g. murder, theft, adultery, tresspass (can't cite the studies off the top of my head but there are many). But the specifics are really VERY different - different enough IMO to be incompatible with the idea that this is evidence of objective standards that would exist without humans to think about them. They exist because we are all humans whose minds were shaped by the same evolutionary process - but only the overall software not the specifics - they are cultural.

Yes it's been fun - haven't had this debate in a long, long time. Dd is napping in an arm chair downstairs and I must get off mn and wake her up or I will never get her to bed tonight.

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Kant formulated the Categorical Imperative, which briefly means that goodness exists independently of circumstances or motives and is based on moral duties or obligations. Kantian ethics are deontological which means absolutist. He believed morality to be a priori (innate) (reason or conscience), rather than a posteriori gained through experience. He essentially argued a form of the Golden Rule 'do unto others what you would have them do unto you', but was not concerned with consequences of moral actions, but with the fact that moral actions were taken in the fist place. For Kant moral actions (a categorical imperative) has no ulterior motive , it is done for it's own sake. An example is be kind to others because you should, not because it makes them like you.

Kant did allow for the possibility of God and writes that it follows that the postulate of the possibility of the highest derived good (the best world) is likewise the postulate of the reality of a higher original good, that is to say, of the existence of God.

I prefer Kant to Bentham and Mill, as I believe that there is for most of us a bottom line below which we try not to sink morally. I think that the greatest happiness or utilitarian principle espoused by Mill is dangerous...look at the Holocaust.

However, I do acknowledge that absolute morals can also be dangerous, which is why I presume we have codified our morals and ethics into a set of laws that provide structure for our daily lives, and the regulation of our society.

What Acinonyx said.

Bloss: to the best of my knowledge there has never been a society in which beating a baby's brains out for fun would not be regarded as wrong. In general, societies disapprove of killing without 'good reason': ie depending on the societies, it has been seen as acceptable for a conqueror to kill all the members of a vanquished ruling family; acceptable to kill members of a tribe or group seen as 'other', and many people believe that state-sanctioned punitive killing is acceptable (the death penalty for some crimes). Human beings are social animals, to an extent herd animals: we do not function well alone, yet we also have a tendency to tribalism, applying different rules and standards to our own tribe (class, race, gender) than we do to those we percieve of as 'other'.

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The thing is that things which one society thinks of as emotionally abhorrent but another society finds acceptable: these things generally serve some practical purpose (I mean a percieved one if they are based on a factual inaccuracy), and are pro-evolutionary, that is, they contribute towards the survival of the tribal unit, or are seen to. Human sacrifice, for instance, seems entirely abhorrent to pretty much every developed society yet it was practiced by societies to whom the propitiation of an imaginary being was essential to the survival of the society. But encouraging people to murder babies (or anyone else) for the sheer enjoyment of it does not contribute to either a viable or a stable society, which is why no society actually basis itself on the idea that killing for fun is OK.

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I think perhaps you're not quite understanding me: I am saying that murder for fun is always going to be regarded as wrong because it is always regarded as detrimental to society: people always feel that kiling other people is wrong, especially if it happens at random and without the set of laws and rules which surround warfare, human sacrifice and state-mandated execution. However, one area in which societies have often differed is in which people are allowed the status of being 'human' and which people are regarded as not quite human, so killing them, whether for fun or because they have outlived their usefulness, becomes a private matter.

I can see that human sacrifice serves a purpose: it is, after all, still going on in a variety of different ways to this day (the tabloid houndings of certain individuals who have some artistic talent yet appear to suffer from mental illness: that ritual will not be complete until the death of the individual is followed by an equally ritualised mourning period). The purpose of this prolonged ritual may be, for some people, to propitiate imaginary beings: for others it promotes cohesion (everyone talking about it and thinking the same things) and offers a moral lesson and a method of social control - 'don't get above yourself or you will become the sacrifice'.

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Bloss: Ok I have perhaps leapt into the debate from the wrong end: I think the core universal values depend on what is or is not beneficial, ie it's a practical matter not a moral one and morals are based in practicality. (that is, I don't subscribe to the idea that there is an absolute morality decreed by the Great Flying Teapots: as Heinlein said, human beings are not capable of inventing a god superior to themselves, most gods have the manners and morals of spoiled children). Human behaviour - and I can;t really comment on non-human behaviour be it alien or animal - is a constant balancing act between our twin drives of competition and co-operation.

Have you ever read Sideshow by Sherri S Tepper? (It's perfectly reasonable to answer WHo? WTF? by the way). It's a sci-fi novel that actually sort of addresses the idea of a universal morality. It's not a great book (and parts of it are quite upsetting if you;re easily upset by fiction or v hormonal) but it deals with some interesting ideas.