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aeromill  ·  3069 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: My thoughts on the Syrian refugee crisis

    Except most people do not see morality like that, they see morality as a definite set of things that are good, things that we should discover that are in this set, and perform. They see immoral actions as things inside a different set of actions, and things we have to discover and not perform.

    "Do this because it is moral" is an argument that X falls into objective set Y, and as a result X should be done.

    I am arguing that no objective set Y exists, and as a result, that form of argument to morality, the argument for an idea of right and wrong, do not exist.

Sorry I never explicitly addressed this aspect of your argument. I wanted to focus on the overall theme but here are my thoughts:

Philosophers will rarely say that there exists a set of actions (e.g. killing, stealing, lying) which are objectively wrong morally. The way ethical philosophy is done is (to use an analogy), create a formula that, when the variables are put into it, will calculate the goodness of an action.

The way that the above is done is by defining an aim (happiness, well being, logical consistency, etc.) and then measuring actions against that aim.

My argument here is that you choose that aim to be selfish gain (you can be more specific, but you get the idea). The goodness of any actions is then measured against that, as we've already been over. That's great and all but your counter is: but that aim isn't objectively good. Here's my retort:

You subscribe to the ethical philosophy of egoism for a reason. You may say it's "just what I want to do" but it's a little deeper than that. You believe that the aim of self gain is the best aim for a reason. You therefore believe it to be the objectively correct aim by the logic that the best solution is the most correct one. So the very fact that you choose one aim over another is you implicitly saying that your aim is the best of all possible ones.

    what is the difference between a moral judgement, and any average judgement?

Nonexistant. Your original comment about the reasons why we should intervene in Syria, be it economic, political stability, etc., are in fact moral justifications for an action. By that logic you could say even breathing is a moral action, to which I would respond: yes. A miniscule, functionally irrelevant one, yes. But it does serve to further whatever my aim is (because living is required for basically any end).

    What I am trying to do with my "moral" system is to explain the way people act, the rationalization between choices. Why the worm chooses to eat dirt, why the human chooses to eat meat.

Let's play that game and take a naturalistic approach. Let's talk about "is"s and forget "oughts".

Is statements for humans:

(1) All humans have the same nature

(2) Human nature dictates that we all seek well being (call it happiness, pleasure, etc.)

(3) Nurture doesn't change that desire

(4) Actions that increase human well being are good in regards to what humans naturally desire

(5) We should do what's good as defined above

Now I can't empirically prove my first three premises but I'm sure you'll find them to be pretty reasonable. This also might not be your original idea of a moral system, but you might find it interesting as it's rooted in concrete "is" statements (as opposed to tricky "oughts").

Now naturally you will have utilitarian issues with this guideline which is why you can play around with adding a few rules as precursors like "don't violate others' liberty" to smoothen out the edges, but you get the basic idea.

I'm most curious as to your thoughts on the above 5 points, what do you think?