Going about Morality (And why Authoritarians Suck!! ;))

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by Strafio, Jan 28, 2008.

  1. Strafio

    Strafio Trying again...

    There's a popular view that morality cramps down on freedom, that these rules are societies way of controlling you to their benefit. Then people on the other side are quick to point out that if we didn't keep to the moral code of not murdering and stealing then the environment we lived in would be terrible for all of us. In that sense you could say that a moral structure is freedom from a nihilistic environment.
    Are the instructions on boiling an egg a encroachment on 'free cooking' or is it freedom from having to eat badly cooked eggs?

    In any case, it doesn't seem to moral rules themselves that's the problem. I think that the problem is the attitude that people can take to these rules. There's a playful approach that sees them as guidelines that will generally lead to a better life and a strict authoritarian approach that sees them as unbreakable absolutes. You can probably see where I am going with this.

    Perhaps we could make an analogy with another activity.
    Imagine that James and Bob are both learning to hammer nails into wood.
    James has a natural curiosity, tries things out, makes a few mistakes but gradually gets a knack for hammering nails into the wood in an extremely efficient way.
    Bob, on the other hand, has a set of detailed instructions on how to hammer the nail in the ideal way, detailing every minute movement in the human body. He has a strong incentive to get it perfect, perhaps a threat of punishment if he fails or perhaps a large reward for perfections that will otherwise be lost. Either way the pressure is to get it right.
    The idea is that they are both learning the same thing, hammering nails into wood, but through different approaches.

    James has a playful approach to hammering nails while Bob has an authoritarian approach. James tries things out and devellops a natural competence at the task while Bob works on develloping a habit of following the rules correctly. What follows from here is how I state the obvious in pointing out how the playful approach is so much better than the authoritarian approach in almost every way!!


    The problem with trying to have too much 'control' over your actions.
    So given that we need moral rules to live our lives, the question is how to have them followed the most efficiently. The authoritarian approach looks at how we apply rules as laws, i.e. reward and punishment.
    We reward people who obey the rules well and punish those who don't.
    They also encourage people to reward and punish themselves with guilt and pride.
    They seem to assume by default that this is the most effective way.
    The thing is, this emphasis on following rules has a several downfalls:

    1) It's not the most efficient way to learn something.
    Studies have been done that compared two sets of people learning to play golf. The first set were just told the rules of the game, given a couple of hints and then left to explore in their own time. The second set were given a specific technique, fully detailed with explicit rules.
    The difference showed when they were put under pressure - a substantial reward was offered for good performance.

    Once the reward was on the table, the practitioners had the incentive to 'get it right'. The first set had no choice but to play as they had before, rely on their intuitive learning through playing about with it. The second set were more likely to try and concentrate on the rules they had been taught. However, this concentration on the rules led to a bad performance.
    The point being, the most efficient mindset to playing golf involved not thinking too much about it. This makes sense because when your brain is thinking about the rules too much, it is taking away processing power from a more direct concentration on the task at hand.

    (I know I should give reference to these studies but I can't find it for the moment - it's somewhere in this book but I can't remember which page!! I'll get back on this one!)

    2) Law is based on rewarding good and punishing bad.
    The rewards and punishments will be determined by a system.
    This leads to a second problem with authoritarian morality - it encourages people to be legalistic - i.e. play the system that dishes out the rewards and punishments, loop holes and all. Such an approach to morality depends on the perfection of the system and because morality is too complex for any system to be absolutely perfect, and even if there was an absolutely perfect system then it would surely be more than a human mind could grasp.

    3) Talking of the complexity of morality, it means that the perfect rule set would need to go into a ridiculous amount of detail into the situations where particular rules were and weren't applicable. Give any simple moral rule and there will be a counter example where it doesn't apply. This isn't a problem where the rule is a rule of thumb and people are free to play/experiment and work out a soluction, but if someone believes that the moral rules need to be applied rigidly without question then they will be at best confused and at worst resort to applying the rules inappropiately and in doing so committing terrible action.

    The best moral rules are rules of thumb. They give a general rules that is right for most situations (e.g. do not lie or steal) and do enough to give the learner the general idea behind the rule, and with experience they'll become better at judging where this rule does or doesn't apply.
    If I'd been hiding a Jew in Nazi Germany it would have been right for me to lie to the gestapo about it and if I had a hungry family and my only choice was to steal food or let them starve then stealing would be the right thing to do. These are extreme situations, but I just wanted some obvious examples.
    There will clearly be countless more realistics and more subtle examples.

    4) The mindset for authoritarian rule following is suppressive and stressful.
    It's something that we can handle for some of the more important rules in particular situations, but if we start trying to stretch it to all areas of morality...
    Karen Hornby had a theory called the Tyranny of the 'Shoulds' where we suppress ourselves by maing idealistic demands of ourselves and feel stressed/guilty/depressed when we don't live up to them.

    This effect dulls our personality too. Because we are so obsessed with not breaking rules we tend to want to stick to situations where the rules are easily applicable and the unknown becomes something to be feared. It discourages exploration and creativity. This would be a bad thing even if the particular moral system the person was following was perfect and that they had a perfect grasp of it. Authoritarian approaches to morality would even be bad for perfect systems, let alone the imperfect ones that we get in real life!


    These flaws clearly show that the authoritarian mindset isn't a good one for morality. The jump from treating morality like 'law' is sometimes appropiate to always appropiate is clearly unjustifiable.


    So why have laws and moral imperatives at all?
    Unfortunately, in the real world things aren't this simple.
    A person who has a natural interest in a task will likely become quite competent, but we don't always have this 'natural interest' and it cannot be forced. The fact is that while it is ideal to devellop morality in a playful way, we cannot rely purely on it. The playful way relies on sometimes learning the hard way and we don't want a person to kill someone before they realise that it was the wrong thing to do. There are some immoral actions that are too severe to be left to the person to learn in their own time.

    As as result, we have social mechanisms in place to keep people in line.
    These mechanisms are in place to force a minimal moral compliance in order for society run smoothly. A society that must run smoothly no matter whether it's individuals have mastered morality on their own terms yet.
    Obviously our methods of coercion will depend on the severity and effect of the action. The most serious offences are protected against by laws, less serious ones discouraged by social disapproval, etc.

    So social institutions like laws, social disapproval, personal vigilantism, etc, they all have their place, but as practical defenses against actions that can disrupt our society. Personal devellopment should always be preferred and interference and coercion has the burden of proof if it is to be justified.
    Methods of more severity should be treated as 'last resort' methods when less invasive attempts fail.

    What I'm trying to say is...
    Like all my ideas this is all work in progress, so my presentation of wording of what I'm saying probably needs a lot of work. Nonetheless, here I go and try and explain the main points I want to get across:

    1) Absolute Morality misses the point
    Absolute morality tries to treat morality as a whole as laws that everyone should just categorically follow. Just obey.
    This misses the point in morality, misses the point in law, and more or less everything else too. They've recognised that some order is needed (the reason why we have some law) and then over the top to try and devellop/impose some absolute law for everything.
    What it boils down is a complete lack of faith in human nature, thinking that we need strict laws to control our every action rather than just let go and let our natural personalities shine.

    2) The argument between liberals and authoritarians isn't over moral rules
    Both tend to agree what the moral rules are to a degree.
    The difference is their way of applying the moral rules.
    The authoritarians believe in the absolute morality, have no faith in letting people think for themselves and demand obedience on certain issues. The liberals have a better understanding of what morality and laws is, when and why it should be obeyed, and consequently recognise the flaws in the over-simplication of anarchism.
    The authoritarians will accuse the liberals of 'picking and choosing', but what they're really doing is recognising that morality is too complex to fit into the over-simplistic rules the authoritarians want.

    3) Both have the same theoretical attitude to freethinking
    That is, they both recognise that freethinking is morally encouragable.
    The authoritarian will believe that freethinking is technically a good thing and will stress the point that they are not against it. The thing is, the nature of freethinking will mean that despite the authoritarian's theoretical approval of it, it contradicts the authoritarian's approach to morality so they will usually end up opposing it in practice. They are most likely to accept it in practice when you point out that their own authoritarian rules demand that they do, and even then it will be accepted grudgingly, and they will likely try and find loop-holes so they can find a 'legal' way to get around their own moral principles!!!

    4) This isn't to demonise authoritarians themselves
    I don't think that the world simply splits between authoritarians and liberals. People who are mostly liberal can be authoritarian on certain issues and people who are mostly authoritarian can be liberal on other subjects. The purpose is to discredit authoritarian thinking so when we get into an authoritarian mindset (which is perhaps more stressful for the authoritarian themself than the people around them!!) then we can remind ourself that we are getting ahead of ourselves and see if we can try and relax a bit. When battling an authoritarians it's dead easy to find yourself fighting back by develloping your own authoritarian ideals to combat theirs, becoming one yourself without even realising it. So I think it's good not to associate authoritarian with a position because it can make you less likely to recognise the real thing - i.e. when you are doing it yourself.




    This has probably been a pointless topic as it mostly states the obvious, stuff we likely recognise just by being ourselves in real life. But it's nice to be able to back it up with justification, especially as we will sometimes come up against authoritarians in debate.
    Sooooo... thoughts? :)
     
  2. Fire-quan

    Fire-quan Banned Banned

    Thanks.

    Two points I would suggest considering:

    1. How many people would break the law if the law wasn't there? I.e., obviously many people break the law already, so it doesn't deter those people. So what is it that makes the other people not break the law, and how many would, and to what degree would they, if they could?

    What makes Kenyan mobs machette one another? Is it the break down of the law? What makes those Kenyans who choose not to machette one another not machette?

    And 2. How free are we really? Sufferers of long term memory loss display massively repetitive behaviour when exposed to similar stimuli - like a question, which they will almost inevitably answer in the same way every time. Are we really free anyway? And if not, how far does social programming go to making us behave in certain ways?
     
  3. Strafio

    Strafio Trying again...

    And thanks to you too.
    Getting a read so early with a post like this is always an uplift! :)

    Although some of us are brought up/culturally trained to have a natural respect for the law, it's designed to deter and compensate against certain damaging actions. Whether someone finds this convincing depends on the person.
    Law tends to work in societies where people are comfortable with what they have and have a lot to lose by breaking the law, while broken communities are more likely to be lawless.

    Most of us have a reasonable degree of what we call 'free will'.
    That is we can think about our options and make a decision on whether to do them. Obviously our will doesn't control everything and a lot of the times when we are doing something we aren't weighing up the actions to make a 'willed' decision. I think that would be inappropiate.

    However, free will is important as it's where our rational decisions are made, and even where we don't have direct control, we usually have an indirect control.
    E.g. Bad habits mean that we can do things against our will, so we can't just 'will' not to have the habits and gain full control. But what we can will is the decision to go through certain measures/therapies that will break such habits. So even actions that aren't directly controlled by our free will e.g. prejudice, we can still take a degree of responsibility in the way that take measures towards dealing with our psychology.
     
  4. AZeitung

    AZeitung The power of Grayskull

    No real comments on the thread, but there's a lot in this post that I think is applicable to several different areas in life. Maybe I'll get a copy of that book, as well.
     
  5. Fire-quan

    Fire-quan Banned Banned


    What do you think about the idea that most humans, like most primates, will establish fairly peaceable groups naturally - i.e. that ther emight be in-built laws - or rather, inate senses of social order and community?
     
  6. Strafio

    Strafio Trying again...

    So long as you put the emphasis on can rather than will.
    Obviously our ancestors evolved the moral systems that we have today, but imagine how many primitive societies must've perished during this long period of devellopment.
    So I certainly wouldn't recommend a society building up a morality from scratch - it would undo millions of years of learning the hard way!!

    We do have innate/instinctual features that favour moral conduct but I don't think that such instincts don't constitute morality themselves. I think they merely gave the starting blocks that morality could culturally evolve out of. Just like the human body being made as it is didn't start as a martial artist but started with the necessarily foundations for martial arts to devellop over generations.

    Nobody starts from scratch though.
    We have a lot of 'instincts' softwired into us through our upbringing in society, so characteristics that are for all practical purposes innate, but wouldn't have develloped had we not grown up in a society. E.g. Mowgli from the jungle book only develloped them because he was brought up by anthropomorphic animals with human style society! ;)

    Definately.
    It's a really good book and I recommend it to anyone and everyone.
     
  7. Martial novice

    Martial novice Valued Member

    Hey Strafio,

    Interesting to see this sort of thread appear on MAP. I liked some of what you're saying, but as is the way with healthy debate, I'm going to ask about things I think are unclear, or that I might disagree with.

    First, I want to wrap my head round exactly what you mean by 'authoritarian'. Early on you say:

    Whilst I would prefer that to say anarchic rather than nihilistic (the former being free from rules, the latter deliberately destructive), I also worry that by saying 'moral structure', you imply all morals (including ones we would arrive at without laws), which would scupper the rest of your argument.

    This then gets seperated into the 'playful' and the 'authoritarian'. Here the term seems to mean following set guidelines rather than self-discovery, although later you talk of authoritarians restricting free-thinking, much more in line with the most severe authoritarian states.

    Then we have the 'playful James' and 'authoritarian Bob' analogy. From having set out how they learn in different ways, you never return to this analogy, but do say:

    Be careful: you're posting in a philosophy forum - nothing is necessarily obvious!

    Hold on!! That's a very big assumption! Do we? Why? (I agree with it, but be careul with such a bold opening gambit!)

    If they are laws, rather than, say, government policies, what rewards are offered? freedom from punishment is neither one nor the other, and knowing the criminals are in prison is a service for which I pay taxes. I'm not saying there aren't any, I just couldn't think of any off the top of my head.

    You then proceed to the example of learning golf. I have to say I'm inteersted in the study. Unable to buy any books at the moment, but if I get the chance would like to know how many took part in the study, over how long etc. However, you should be very aware that the optimal body mechanics for a golf swing are much less disputed than moral rights and wrongs. You also say:
    Do you mean rules or techniques? If the other players did not learn the rules, then they probably were't playing by them. It seems pedantic, but you can see the point I'm making. Don't learn the rules of the game - you probably won't win the game. (Though you might invent a new one - that's how rugby was created after all! :D )

    In point 2 you say:

    This again is bold to say that obeying the law is a problem. You qualify this by explaining that people will find loopholes, but it could easily be argued that a functioning system with loopholes is better than no system at all. (Large companies in Britain pay corporate lawyers to find ways of reducing their corporation tax. Still better than no companies paying tax, if you believe in a tax/public sector system).
    Only if you will accept perfect application of the system and nothing else, which, if you're arguing in favour of trial and error methods, cannot be the case.

    Careful! You're in that dangerous territory again. If there were a law for every circumstance, nobody would recollect them all, but the principles would largely be the same - don't drink and drive [how many units? it doesn't matter, the principle is DON'T].

    So how is the rule of thumb enforced? I didn't mean to kill everyone, I was trying to find the most efficient way to hammer a nail Your Honour!
    Or do we say that murder is wrong in principle, but with caveats, because sometimes it's manslaughter, or because they made you so angry, or because it was self-defence. That's the way Common law developed in Britain. That is why citing precedent is often so important in unusual cases. There have been other methods, such as Russian villages in feudal times using Customary Law - village elders considering cases, usually based on tradition, but I wouldn't say they were more moral than our enforced laws: beating your wife because she hadn't cooked dinner is ok, but doing it because you were drunk is wrong.

    This is what you were trying to prove - try to refrain from using it in the argument.

    Be VERY wary of using a glib analogy of Nazi Germany. It may be your opinion that it would be right to lie, but this is again not necessarily obvious. There was a strong anti-semitic feeling in Germany anyway, fuelled under Hitler's regime. Many Germans were unaware of what was happening to the Jews, even though they were disappearing it was widely believed that they were being sent to work camps rather than their deaths. Being caught hiding a Jew could result in death for you and all of your family. This is what makes the few who did help so courageous. Risk the lives of your loved ones for someone who helped ruin your country? Although you said 'If I'd been hiding a Jew'. If so, then you'd already broken the law - this could then be argued two ways. Either one - you'd already endangered yourself, so best to keep quiet, or two - youd already broken the law, so you have no qualms doing it again.
    This is all just food for thought!

    Karen Horney's theory is about perception, and one could suffer equally under either the 'playful' or the 'authoritarian' system. In fact, if authoritarian means an oppressive state regime, one is less likely to suffer from Tyranny of the Shoulds, because of what is promoted by the state. (you have less freedom to go wrong!)

    Law can never be 'sometimes' appropriate. Do you mean different areas of morality should always be protected by law? I take it you don't mean bank fraud is ok at weekends! If a law is in place, it has to be 'always'.

    Social disapproval is a very dangerous tool. Is inter-racial marriage ok? It is still frowned upon in many circles. Gay marriage? I'm not expecting a dfinite answer - that one has caused controversy throughout several faiths! I have an opinion, but not an answer.

    Don't assume that everyone shares your view of personal development. As Fire-Quan said, crime is comitted anyway. Why should I believe personal development will lead to a good moral point?

    Not sure I like this term. Absolute would suggest final or a complete system. I suggest changing it to 'enforced morality'.

    Misses the point or doesn't fit with your view of morality? If you want to dismiss something, do it in a structured way, not out of hand.
    Maybe, or it may be that it exmplifies a much higher level of faith in human potential. Why waste time on lots of trial and error - learn the basics quickly and shine more brightly.

    I strongly disagree. There are very different schools of thought on morality. A classic discussion is the state of nature. (assumes no previous contact - so no garden of eden, no evolution.) Hobbes thinks this is a state of war, Locke thinks this is a state of peace, Rousseau thinks this is bliss because it is ignorant. There are massively different views such as communism versus capitalism - which is morally better: to have the freedom to buy a house of my own, or the freedom to live in a house? both have up and down sides. Going back to the Jew you were hiding from the Gestapo, the Nazis believed Jews, Slavs, Gypsies to be racially inferior, so no moral qualms with working them to death. Infect them with disease to try and cure it, just as we do with animals in the UK. The Japanese using captured Chinese for bayonet practice because they were also believed inferior, all less than 70 years ago.

    Are these political liberals such as Locke or economic liberals such as Adam Smith? When should the laws be obeyed? What if a liberal comes up with a different answer? Why would everyone reach the same conclusion?
    In fact authoritarian states often make the simplest rule sets. The most severe authoritarian states. 1930s Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, North Korea, leave such little individual freedom that the laws are quite simple.

    Here it's very important to know exactly what you mean by authoritarian - a high tax socialist model like Sweden? A political control such as Mussolini's Italy? Totalitarian such as Pol Pot in Cambodia?

    Again we've come full circle to those definitions!
    Sorry for the rambling reply, but I got the impression you wanted a bit of analysis. Well here's some overkill! Hope it's of some use.
    If you're interested in the ideas at all I recommend Hobbes 'Leviathan', Locke 'Second Treatise on Civil Government'. These are the 2 often pitched against each other because of their views. Imagine you and Bruce Lee are in a state of nature. Locke says that you will both benefit from working together. He makes a house, you do the cooking - you both have food and shelter. Hobbes says Bruce will want to fight you. Why not? he can take what he wants. Incidentally Rousseau would say you're happy in your hut as long as you don't know that Bruce lives in a mansion.
    Another good one is Plato's 'Republic', which is a record of Socrates talking about perfect society.

    Again, sorry this is soooooooo long!!
     
  8. Strafio

    Strafio Trying again...

    Sure. Authoritarians think that morality should be treated like law.
    There's rules that you must obey and you must follow them.
    Basically, you know the kind of mindset we tend to save for when strict control is required.
    E.g. We might impose strict control on a health an safety situation.
    Authoritarians want to impose this sort of control on all morality.

    I understood anarchy to be freedom from law while nihilism to be free from any values. So an anarchist might well believe in morality but doesn't think that government/law is necessary to do this.

    I am talking about all morals.
    I'm not simply talking about authoritarianism as a political position.
    I'm talking about it as a particular approach to morality, the approach where one thinks that actions should be strictly controlled and the rules strictly obeyed.
    This is contrasted to treating moral imperatives as guidelines and rules of thumb to bear in mind or that might be helpful.

    In philosophy, nothing is necessarily anything.
    What we do, rather, is stick by what seems to be true until we have a reason to doubt it. I thought that it was obvious and nobody seems to have disagreed with me yet.

    You're right that everything is potentially questionable in philosophy, but we tend to stick to questions that matter to the topic at hand. I'm addressing a conflict between two approaches to morality, both already hold to morality so to prove morality to the sceptic would be another topic for another day.
    Given that we're addressing people who already hold to morality, "We need moral rules to run our lives" isn't something that needs to be questioned in this topic.

    You're missing the point.
    The point is, the law encourages people to obey rules they wouldn't normally, either by positive encouragement or by deterrent. This is the approach that authoritans think that must be used to morality as well.

    It was pedantic.
    It was pretty obvious by the context that I meant technique.

    I wasn't saying "the system should be perfect else we should scrap it", I was saying the system was flawed enough so that we shouldn't treat it as the be all and end all like authoritarians do. It you rely purely on the system for morality then 'legalism' is likely to occur.
    If someone recognises that there is more to morality than the system then they are more likely to do it properly and less likely to try for loopholes.

    You seem to be accusing me of anarchy here.
    I made the point quite clear that sometimes the moral imperative was necessary, especially for actions with severe consequences. Not drinking and driving comes into that category. I simply made that point that authoritarians believe that all morality should be treated that way rather than just the rules where it is appropiate.

    The whole point is that it doesn't need to be enforced.
    It's something that usually works but you shouldn't be afraid to deviate if the situations appears to demand it.

    Sheesh...
    Is missing the entire point a speciality of yours or something? :eek:
    I was simply trying to give an example of 'good lying' that everyone can agree to.
    If 'police' come around to look for a 'fugitive' and you know that this fugitive will be treated unjustly.
    The only way to stop the fugitive being brutally murdered for no reason is to lie to them. It is scenario to show that lying can be the right thing to do sometimes.

    Um...
    As I understand it, Karen Horney's theory was about conscience.
    It was how even if the state gave a person freedoms, their conscience could give a tyranny in the form of 'shoulds' - moral imperatives.
    Authoritarians encourage this kind of thinking when it comes to morality.

    I mean that while I think that someone shouldn't pick their nose, I don't think it's appropiate to have a law against it.

    Yes. Social disapproval can be inappropiate too.
    It's useful for things that are quite bad, but not bad enough to be law.
    So say a friend is on drugs, you don't think that they should be arrested but you still want something to be done.
    Btw, Over-use of social disapproval is another characteristic of authoritarian thinking. As they treat their moral rules as absolutes they will use any power/control/influence they have to try and impose upon someone.

    That's probably a better word for it.

    Yes, but these aren't differences between 'liberal' and 'authoritarian' morality.
    You're talking about differences between rules.
    X thought that action Y was wrong while Z disagrees.
    The difference between 'liberal' and 'authoritarian' that this topic is about is the difference between the approach to morality. The difference between moral rules is a different topic altogether.

    Here you ago again with the pedanticism.
    Yes, the world liberal is used in a variety of ways.
    In this topic the debate is between liberal and authoritarian approaches to morality. Is it so difficult to guess what liberal must've meant in this context?

    When you hear the word "too", are they saying 'to', 'two' or 'too'?
    They all sound the same so how can we tell?
    Should we ask them to spell the word for us?
    Maybe we should ask whether it's a number?
    Or maybe it's obvious by the way they are using it and a little common sense would solve it!!

    It seriously seems like you're looking for excuses to misunderstand me for the sake of 'argument'. Nobody else in this forum have had such difficulty in using the common sense!!

    I know. The point was to argue against a 'So simple rules don't work, but they just need to devellop a more comprehensive rule set' objection.

    The same way I've been using it throughout the rest of the topic.

    Sorry if I've been a bit harsh on your analysis, but it seemed like that you failed to grasp the point it was trying to make.

    I'm moderately familiar with these.
    Once again they are all off topic.
    They are interesting pieces about morality in general but don't address the point being discussed in this topic which was:
    Given that you already have decided on your moral rules, what is the best way to go about making them work
     
  9. Martial novice

    Martial novice Valued Member

    Hey Strafio,

    Thanks for considering those points.

    Thanks as well for clearing up the terms 'authoritarian' and 'liberal' as you were using them as well. As might be evident from my focus, my background is largely in Political Theory, so many of the words you are using have another, specific meaning to me.

    Now though, I'm intrigued as to who the 'authoritarians' are, as you define them. These people who want to enforce everything that falls under the broad category of morals and morality. Your original post talked about 'when we argue with them', but I have to profess that I'm not sure I have.

    Also, you seem to contrast the authoritarians, who want to control all morality, with the liberals, who want to control some. In the end you conclude by saying most people fall somewhere between the two. I would agree with this, if you changed your definition of liberal to be those who wanted to enforce no morals, however severe the consequences of the action.

    I'll explain myself better - of your original post, I'm possibly most interested in your first paragraph, which I realise is not the subject of the rest of your post. It is the idea that morality itself encroaches on freedom. It is from this point I suggested the Hobbes/Locke comparison. The debate that surrounds their work, however, is not on moral rules, but on human behaviour. Given the same situation, (where no morals are enforced at all) they have very different beliefs in the way people will act.

    That is why I questioned the assumption:

    You replied that:

    And this is really where I have a problem with your argument. It assumes that needing moral rules isn't something to be questioned. I appreciate it might not be what you wanted to argue, but I really believe it's crucial to what you're saying.

    I now better understand your view on liberal and authoritarian, but still can't see how you're seperating these actions. Essentially, what counts as severe? Again, I realise this may not be where you wanted this to go, but it seems that you are imposing values as given. Really, I'm not trying to be an **** about it, but in order to decide how extensive the control of morality is, there must first be a sense of morality. I get the impression (from using my common sense :D ) that you see drink driving as dangerous, so this moral imperative is necessary. Which means cold blooded murder would definitely be illegal and controlled by law. So, how should abortion be treated? Is it the murder of an infant, or the controlled disposal of cell tissue? Should it just be frowned upon? After how many weeks? If this is getting too specific then is there a general rule of thumb?


    I the rule of thumb doesn't need to be enforced, then what are your severe consequences? When do you not have to apply them?

    But this is your own value system. Why shouldn't it be against the law? Spitting carries a very heavy fine in Hong Kong (for example).

    Whilst I have trained for some time in missing the point, I'm more interested in the accurate use of language. I gathered the point of what you meant, but was saying it was a fairly ugly analogy to use. If I said 'it's obviously worth producing a fraudulent dossier to support a case for going to war in Iraq' you might question it as something that 'everyone can agree to'. Some people could even find it offensive.

    As I said earlier, I like the fact this post is here, and I think it's interesting. My pedantic picking was for a purpose though. It wasn't a personal attack, but was all to either clarify for my benefit, or alert you to problems for yours. My previous discussions of this nature have usually been with people hoping to produce books of their theories, where accuracy is vitally important.

    I might also have exposed gaping holes in my knowledge of philosophy!
     
  10. Strafio

    Strafio Trying again...

    Fair enough.

    Well, when debating morality with someone, they usually have assumptions or an approach to how morality should be applied. An authoritarian approach usually states a position and claims that it should be unquestionably obeyed. The liberal approach might agree that the position is preferable but that the "unquestioningly obeyed" attitude isn't the right way to go about things.
    So it's a different split compared to the traditional split between 'liberals' and 'conservatives'. Conservatives can have a liberal approach to their conservatism and liberals can often be quite authoritarian about their liberal principles. Infact there's a quite common stereotype of the liberal tries to demonise people who don't agree with them by shouting "Facist!!"

    Hmmmm...
    I think I was trying to paint the liberal as the sensible moderate.
    Perhaps you could say that the two opposite ends of the scale are the authoritarian (who is OTT controlling) and the libertarian (who is OTT passive). The liberals are inbetween who recognise where control is appropiate and where it isn't. When I was saying that we tend to be somewhere inbetween, I was kind of saying that nobody is perfect.


    I didn't say that it wasn't something to be questioned, just not here and now in this topic. The topic was directed at a dispute between people who had accepted morality, and people almost uniformly justify morality with the reason I gave above. I saw it as an assumption that both sides generally held so one that I could validly use in my argument. Ofcourse it ought to be questioned, just not in this thread as we have a different question at hand.

    Remember my premise that morality is best justified by how we need it for society? (I know that some people have different justifications but I've yet to hear one of these alternatives that are worth anything, so until then my 'assumption' is justified.)
    That premise is the only value that I am imposing here and it's one that both sides agree with.

    From there it's a matter of objective fact over 'what is good for society' or 'what is good for particular person A'. In this we tend to see health and safety as utmost of importance, which is why the strictest rules are based around them. Drink driving, murder, assault.. etc.
    Theft and lies are tended to be seen as less severe until they start impinging on people's health, i.e. the deed did significant damage to the person at hand.
    (btw, health include mental health so threats etc could be seen as damaging in this way)

    Abortion is a particularly difficult case being the greyest of grey areas.
    Nevertheless, certain rules of thumb have generally become socially adopted.
    E.g. No one (except exceptionally religious fundamentalists) has qualms when the mothers health is inquestion, and the morning after pill tend to be accepted while more develloped abortions are discourged. (Discouraged, but the girl must still have the final say)
     
  11. Strafio

    Strafio Trying again...

    Ckava? LJoll? Topher? Aikimac?
    Did you guys miss this topic or have I scared you all off?
    Either way you all suck!! :p


    (bump! ;))
     

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