*cracks philosopherly muscles*

[martasfic]

First, the big question: I'm physically well and financially secure. Very much ready for this nonsense to be over, though of course not wanting to rush it and return to the big wide world philosophically.

Also: happy Passover to those who celebrate it. It's hard with the social-distancing thing, but as someone pointed out on Tumblr, scrounging for food while you huddle indoors from a plague sweeping the land, knowing that staying inside your house is the only way to be safe, is about as Passover as it gets. But sheesh, why is this year's night unlike all previous year's nights!

 I'm also going a bit stir-crazy so to stretch the muscle between my ears I've signed up for an online "course" — really mostly a series of videos on the kind of standard questions covered in your freshman philosophy course, but it's kind of fun to revisit them. The latest question is an interesting one — is morality objective — and I do have thoughts, but when I tried to write them up they seemed really too technical for week four of the quarantine.

Thinking about it, that's ... depressingly true of my relation to the written word generally, just now. Lots to say, it just doesn't seem I have the confidence or skill to wrestle them into something fit for public consumption. So I'll just leave it at that for now.

Comments

[aearwen2.livejournal.com]

Okay - here's a response that will hopefully break through the dam on your being able to write down your thoughts:

Yes, morality is objective. Morality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Most of our strictures - be they laws, traditions, attitudes, etc - have more to do with organizing a smoothly-running society that benefits the many overtly and consistently. These strictures have changed over time; witness the evolution of most of humanity's view of slavery. It was moral, ethical, economically beneficial, and all other sorts of "good" to have slaves "back when" - but in the decades and century since the bulk of (at least) Western Civilization has determined that slavery is an abomination to be eradicated, such movement in attitudes in the individuals and the societies involved was very slow. The question of the morality of slavery modulated as much due to the attrition of those who had no problem with it as anything else. The numbers of younger folks, raised thinking slavery was wrong, eventually overwhelmed the numbers of die-hards - and it was the younger folks who took on the codified strictures and changed them. Are there still folks who profit from the trafficking of human beings? Of course - but now it is pretty much an illegal proposition. Give it another few centuries, and hopefully even that will have died away except for those who qualify as genuinely "evil".

We're still in the evolutionary phase in the question of the morality of extramarital sex - not that any codified strictures ever prevented it from happening anyway. Perhaps that particular evolution is more evidence of the movement away from conforming to religious authority than anything else? I'm not sure but that most of American society, at least, no longer turns a couple "living in sin" into social pariahs anymore - and it can be pretty surely assumed that most of such couple ARE engaging in extramarital relations of one kind or another. We no longer stigmatize children born out of wedlock as "bastards" - that particular word has come to carry a whole different kind of meaning that has nothing to do with the circumstances of birth and more to do with the personality of the individual in question.

I have to admit, I tend to consider The Golden Rule in all its iterations religious and philosophical as a guiding principle that benefits the individual first and foremost, and lubricates the gears of society as a consequence. If one treats the next person as one would prefer themselves to be treated, then most people will be behaving kindly, honestly, and mindfully. There will always be those who couldn't be arsed to think of anybody but themselves, of course; but they for the most part are aberations (sp?) - exceptions to the rule rather than the majority.

Until we come to difficult times, like we're in now. "Every Man For Himself" is the functional principle behind the panic buying of foodstuffs and toilet paper, if you think about it - and "every man for himself" very distinctly is NOT a practice conforming to The Golden Rule.

Hmmmmm... Maybe, now that I think on it, if there IS a somewhat more permanent & discernable form of morality/ethics (I won't get into which The Golden Rule is here), it might BE The Golden Rule. Then, as has been said before, "all else is commentary."

Take care of yourself, be safe, and may your Muse rise to the occasion more often.

[marta-bee.livejournal.com]

(Thank you for writing this. I do seem to be in a bit of a funk/perpetual exhaustion that's making it very difficult to sort words into order, or even having the drive to want to. So the prompting is really good!)

I do think we all need a lot of humility and mercy and, yes, even tact when it comes to preaching morals to other people. But I think we're talking about two very different questions here: are there universal moral principles that apply to everyone -vs- how do we interact with people in light of that.

Take an example. I think everyone has an obligation to help others where they can; say, if I can save a life (even of a complete stranger) by mildly inconveniencing myself. I was thinking about that in light of the coronavirus and those news stories of college students going on spring break the same weekend a lot of cities were starting to shut down. That made me really mad, actually, because it seemed such a casual disregard for the most vulnerable among us; I thought it was wrong. But at the same time, I don't know those people, I'm not really in a position to judge them. So it's not like I would get on social media and call them out, or yell at them if I came across them in person. I'm not in the kind of relationship where that's appropriate. That doesn't mean the basic principle doesn't hold; just that I have a bit of humility in how I act on it.

That said... there's a lot of different ways to put moral principles into practice. I say we should try to prevent suffering. Does that mean big governmental programs? Neighbors watching out for each other? Better economic opportunities so everyone can care for themselves? Probably a combination; and those are just the ideas that occur to me as a very Western, very white person so there are probably options I'm not even thinking about. I'm much more concerned that people are trying to help each other where they can, than that they're doing it the same way I am. (I don't actually think that would be a good idea in most cases).

Speaking for myself, and at the most basic level, I do think there are things all the best lives have in common: people being able to reach their full potential; having a community (in a form of our own choosing), freedom from material want, being shown dignity, that kind of thing. But when it comes to specifics, I think these broad goals will take different forms for different people in different contexts, and that's a good thing. I would argue that not *all* paths are trending toward the good, and we do need *some* kind of basis to sift out Nazis or their modern analogues (whatever group you think that is), not just to save other people from them but to save the people caught in those poisonous subcultures from the way it destroys them as well. Of course, the devil really is in the details with this kind of thing.

[shirebound]

scrounging for food while you huddle indoors from a plague sweeping the land, knowing that staying inside your house is the only way to be safe, is about as Passover as it gets. But sheesh, why is this year's night unlike all previous year's nights!

Oh gosh, so true!

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

Hugs.