Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Moral Gray Areas
The following is a slightly modified definition of morality: "Honoring the equal rights of all sentient adults to life, liberty, property and self-defense, to be free from violation through force or fraud". And as has already been said here, all else is subjective and can be labeled as virtue--which is fair game for social pressure, but morality is the ONLY thing that should be legislated. This in no way changes the fact that subjective morality for adults does not exist.
However, there are a gray transition areas which, while limited, can be shown to need carefully considered legislation as well, all having to do with when rights are acquired. Specifically, I'm referring to cases such as the differing degrees of humane treatment given to animals, when does an embryo acquire the right to life, and when do children/adolescents or the mentally handicapped come to possess their rights to liberty, property and self defense. All of these gray areas deal with the degree of consciousness, intelligence, self-awareness or potential sentience possessed by a given subject; and they're gray because there is rarely a specific time, or stage of evolution between point A when they don't have a particular right, to point B when they do. For example, children acquire the right to liberty gradually, yet we use a specific age when they're suddenly no longer considered a minor and have full legal rights as adults. The point is to recognize that picking a specific, arbitrary point for legal purposes can obviously have negative consequences. How can we allow for extenuating circumstances yet maintain equal protection under the law? Should, say, an arbitrary first trimester limit on abortion be lengthened if, for instance, the fetus has developmental problems? When does the right to life of a fetus override the right to liberty of the mother? For animals, is humane treatment for a dog the sames as for a chicken, or a lizard or cockroach? It isn't immoral to put (lock up) a child in playpen, restrict an adolescent from selling his TV, drinking alcohol, or making them do chores, and you don't give a child a gun to handle bullies, etc., but when do they acquire those liberties?
When we look at the extremes, 1 day old vs. 9 mo. old fetus, dog vs. cockroach, we have little trouble making judgements. This isn't an argument against arbitrary limits, but the transition can be very problematic for deciding what's moral, and how we should deal with these issues legally. Sometimes we just don't have the information we need to make an informed judgement, and the first step is to recognize that. Some fundamentalists believe that the right to life begins at conception, but that's strictly a matter of arbitrary faith. Should a 13 year-old girl who is one day pregnant as the result of being raped by her father be forced to carry the baby to term? Others believe we can abort a healthy baby even when it's in the process of being born, but that's just as much a matter of blind faith, and that example should actually be considered murder.
These gray areas are gray because we don't have definitive answers for them, and the point is we need to recognize them for what they are and deal with them calmly as much as we can in our laws. All we know for sure is if a crime can have no victims, it isn't a crime. All certain immorality stems from an adult sentient establishing a moral double standard for himself or his family, group, race, religion or country.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Religion vs. Philosophy
Why is religion, and philosophy for that matter, important?
Originally, somewhere back in civilization’s deep, dark past, religion was the equivalent of science. Grog, in his cave, tried to make sense of the natural world around him; a nature that appeared to be a benefactor and source of fear at the same time. Truth and knowledge were sought. But it wasn’t long before some were able to use that fear and confusion as a source of control if it was manipulated properly.
Later still, someone developed the carrot and stick idea and added rewards from the gods in this life as well as the next, for proper behavior. The original morality consisted of a simple form of the Golden Rule, but it was necessary to include honoring and providing for the gods as part of that favored behavior; and as time passed many more extraneous rules were added to the code of behavior, which eventually ascended to greater importance than proper behavior towards each other. Then finally someone consolidated all the rules from all those gods into rules from just One God, and that mixture of mono/polytheism is where we stood at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment and the ascendancy of science and the scientific method.
While science has been very successful at acquiring knowledge, the issues of morality (a code of conduct for how we treat each other), virtue (a code for our personal behavior), and of fulfillment and purpose in this life (and perhaps the next), appeared to be beyond the reach of the scientific method. So religion, with all its baggage, maintained its position of spiritual authority—albeit a reduced one.
Enter philosophy, the attempt to use reason to combine knowledge and the metaphysical. But the latter wasn’t subject to reason since there was no knowledge available (other than pure hearsay) with which we could deal. Thus two usually unstated assumptions were made: Human life is of ultimate value, and a laissez faire divine being created the universe. If neither of those was the case there was no possibility for good order or hope for an ultimate purpose.
Today, we stand on the verge of the realization that morality is the only thing that should be the subject of civilization’s legal code—we should never legislation personal virtue. Organized religion continues to fight this principle as if its life depends on it, which it does. It won’t submit to the ascendancy of philosophy for the same reason that governments resist submission to political and economic reason…..the ability to use power to favor an individual or an elite class structure.
Though we have made great strides in science and technology, it appears that we are no closer to conquering evil with good because we still depend far too much on emotion to make our decisions. Progress will not be made until we learn to employ our emotions as the engine to pursue our goals, with reason at the wheel.
Originally, somewhere back in civilization’s deep, dark past, religion was the equivalent of science. Grog, in his cave, tried to make sense of the natural world around him; a nature that appeared to be a benefactor and source of fear at the same time. Truth and knowledge were sought. But it wasn’t long before some were able to use that fear and confusion as a source of control if it was manipulated properly.
Later still, someone developed the carrot and stick idea and added rewards from the gods in this life as well as the next, for proper behavior. The original morality consisted of a simple form of the Golden Rule, but it was necessary to include honoring and providing for the gods as part of that favored behavior; and as time passed many more extraneous rules were added to the code of behavior, which eventually ascended to greater importance than proper behavior towards each other. Then finally someone consolidated all the rules from all those gods into rules from just One God, and that mixture of mono/polytheism is where we stood at the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment and the ascendancy of science and the scientific method.
While science has been very successful at acquiring knowledge, the issues of morality (a code of conduct for how we treat each other), virtue (a code for our personal behavior), and of fulfillment and purpose in this life (and perhaps the next), appeared to be beyond the reach of the scientific method. So religion, with all its baggage, maintained its position of spiritual authority—albeit a reduced one.
Enter philosophy, the attempt to use reason to combine knowledge and the metaphysical. But the latter wasn’t subject to reason since there was no knowledge available (other than pure hearsay) with which we could deal. Thus two usually unstated assumptions were made: Human life is of ultimate value, and a laissez faire divine being created the universe. If neither of those was the case there was no possibility for good order or hope for an ultimate purpose.
Today, we stand on the verge of the realization that morality is the only thing that should be the subject of civilization’s legal code—we should never legislation personal virtue. Organized religion continues to fight this principle as if its life depends on it, which it does. It won’t submit to the ascendancy of philosophy for the same reason that governments resist submission to political and economic reason…..the ability to use power to favor an individual or an elite class structure.
Though we have made great strides in science and technology, it appears that we are no closer to conquering evil with good because we still depend far too much on emotion to make our decisions. Progress will not be made until we learn to employ our emotions as the engine to pursue our goals, with reason at the wheel.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Enlightened Self-Interest
A common quesiton asked when considering a laissez-faire, non-interactive God is, how do we then know right from wrong? Mustn't that come from God?
If we have inalienable, even inherent, rights, wouldn't the violation of those rights also be necessarily inherent? The biblical analogy of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is an excellent example, and in the process shows that the Bible does contain deep wisdom. When they ate of its fruit, Adam and Eve became self aware, which meant they understood the impact their actions had on others. We could then put ourselves in the shoes of others and understand how our own actions could cause pain, or pleasure in others. It also made us aware of our nakedness because the deep intimacy of sexual bonding cannot be physically endured indefinitely--making our clothes part of the mate selection ritual, a barrier the removal of which indicates acceptance.
So then, is sex a subject for morality? Yes and no. First we need to determine what our inherent rights are to begin with, and thus how they are violated--and to do that, we need to come up with what the objective of morality is. Assuming we're on our own and morality is not coming down to us from God, that's very simple, Good Order. 99% of us (there's always that 1% who want to use anarchy and chaos to their advantage even though it usually puts them at greater risk) want and desire good order so that we can make the most of our lives in peace. And the need of good order naturally leads us to the behavior we must observe amongst ourselves to achieve it. So what rule(s) should be followed to achieve this good order? It's incredibly simple, the Golden Rule is here stated as:
Morality is honoring the equal rights of all to their life, liberty and property, to be free from violation through force or fraud.
That's it, that's all there is to it. It covers all interactions between human (or sentients if we're ever faced with them from other worlds or from within our artificial intelligence). And here the other shoe is dropped--morality does not and should not deal with individual codes of behavior. For that we should apply the word "virtue" and use it strictly in that sense instead of melding them together, resulting in the "moral" confusion we've been experiencing since....the dawn of time.
Virtue is an individual code of behavior that is up to the individual to determine and follow, but is still subject to religious and other social pressures for non-mandatory conformity. Immorality, on the other hand, is the only behavior that should be legislated and governed against.
Morality is so simple that it has only one cause, ego; and only one label under which ALL immorality (evil) can be placed, and that label is a legal/moral double standard. When, we murder, rape, enslave or steal from others, we emote that our egos justify putting our rights above those of our victims. Again, morality is the equal rights of all. We are not all created equal, but we all have equal rights, otherwise good order is impossible.
Even though this site is very much anti-Paul (some considering him to be the beast of Revelation), Truth can come from any source--babes or the devil himself. In the following instance I think he gets it right. For the biblically minded (who are certainly not dismissed out of hand, re: the Tree of Knowledge above), see Romans 2:14, "Even Gentiles, who do not have God's written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. 15 They demonstrate that God's law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right." NLT
....written in their hearts at the moment of self-awareness. Truth must be accepted wherever it is found.
Finally, one can ask, what's to motivate us to follow this Golden Rule moral code? That's where enlightened self-interest comes in, which is accepting the fact that we and our families are most important to us. that enlightened selfishness isn't bad. Such morality promotes good order inherently, but we also increase that good order by the example we set in following it. Enlightened self-interest also compels us to risk ourselves to defend our own rights by defending the rights of others. In other words we are morally obligated to help others whose rights are being violated if it is within our power--and it's almost always within our power to do something. You defend your own rights by defending the rights of others.
Coming up next: What if whatever is "outside" our natural universe is not supernatural, that is, where natural law and rationality don't exist. Rather what if there is a reality of infinite dimensions which still follows a rational, natural law. You could call it the hyper-natural, or ultra-rational or even the uber-rational, but let us dub it here as the:
If we have inalienable, even inherent, rights, wouldn't the violation of those rights also be necessarily inherent? The biblical analogy of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is an excellent example, and in the process shows that the Bible does contain deep wisdom. When they ate of its fruit, Adam and Eve became self aware, which meant they understood the impact their actions had on others. We could then put ourselves in the shoes of others and understand how our own actions could cause pain, or pleasure in others. It also made us aware of our nakedness because the deep intimacy of sexual bonding cannot be physically endured indefinitely--making our clothes part of the mate selection ritual, a barrier the removal of which indicates acceptance.
So then, is sex a subject for morality? Yes and no. First we need to determine what our inherent rights are to begin with, and thus how they are violated--and to do that, we need to come up with what the objective of morality is. Assuming we're on our own and morality is not coming down to us from God, that's very simple, Good Order. 99% of us (there's always that 1% who want to use anarchy and chaos to their advantage even though it usually puts them at greater risk) want and desire good order so that we can make the most of our lives in peace. And the need of good order naturally leads us to the behavior we must observe amongst ourselves to achieve it. So what rule(s) should be followed to achieve this good order? It's incredibly simple, the Golden Rule is here stated as:
Morality is honoring the equal rights of all to their life, liberty and property, to be free from violation through force or fraud.
That's it, that's all there is to it. It covers all interactions between human (or sentients if we're ever faced with them from other worlds or from within our artificial intelligence). And here the other shoe is dropped--morality does not and should not deal with individual codes of behavior. For that we should apply the word "virtue" and use it strictly in that sense instead of melding them together, resulting in the "moral" confusion we've been experiencing since....the dawn of time.
Virtue is an individual code of behavior that is up to the individual to determine and follow, but is still subject to religious and other social pressures for non-mandatory conformity. Immorality, on the other hand, is the only behavior that should be legislated and governed against.
Morality is so simple that it has only one cause, ego; and only one label under which ALL immorality (evil) can be placed, and that label is a legal/moral double standard. When, we murder, rape, enslave or steal from others, we emote that our egos justify putting our rights above those of our victims. Again, morality is the equal rights of all. We are not all created equal, but we all have equal rights, otherwise good order is impossible.
Even though this site is very much anti-Paul (some considering him to be the beast of Revelation), Truth can come from any source--babes or the devil himself. In the following instance I think he gets it right. For the biblically minded (who are certainly not dismissed out of hand, re: the Tree of Knowledge above), see Romans 2:14, "Even Gentiles, who do not have God's written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. 15 They demonstrate that God's law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right." NLT
....written in their hearts at the moment of self-awareness. Truth must be accepted wherever it is found.
Finally, one can ask, what's to motivate us to follow this Golden Rule moral code? That's where enlightened self-interest comes in, which is accepting the fact that we and our families are most important to us. that enlightened selfishness isn't bad. Such morality promotes good order inherently, but we also increase that good order by the example we set in following it. Enlightened self-interest also compels us to risk ourselves to defend our own rights by defending the rights of others. In other words we are morally obligated to help others whose rights are being violated if it is within our power--and it's almost always within our power to do something. You defend your own rights by defending the rights of others.
Coming up next: What if whatever is "outside" our natural universe is not supernatural, that is, where natural law and rationality don't exist. Rather what if there is a reality of infinite dimensions which still follows a rational, natural law. You could call it the hyper-natural, or ultra-rational or even the uber-rational, but let us dub it here as the:
Ethernatural
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