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ysabetwordsmithHere's an article about morality that pits relativism against absolutism, and largely ignores practicality.
My thoughts in general:
* Each culture has a right to arrange itself as it pleases. This is essential, because what's considered moral or immoral varies drastically from one time and place to another. Your culture is not special just because you happen to be standing in it. Probably it does some things that others consider or will consider to be terrible.
* Insofar as anthropologists have discovered, there is one universal human rule: sexual activity shall not be unregulated. Every culture studied has had some sort of rules about sex, but none of those subrules are universal. So that is as much as everyone agrees on. Below that, there's just a bunch of stuff that is more or less popular.
* Regardless of whether something is considered moral or immoral, it has practical effects. These effects lead to the aforementioned popularity of some rules over others.
-- While practiced by some cultures, incest is widely discouraged because it predictably leads to reproductive mishaps. It is among the most consistently self-defeating of activities.
-- Theft is generally discouraged because, on the whole, people like to own things and will fight if someone tries to take their stuff. Most cultures maintain a sense of personal property which is to be respected.
-- Lying is consistently frowned upon, even though most people do it a lot, because it screws up communication for everyone. To succeed, cultures have to find a way to keep a lid on it, while not holding people to unattainable standards.
Enough moral relativism: some cultures are worse than others
Now try to get people to agree on which ones are better or worse. That'll be fun. Almost everyone will claim their culture is better, or best, no matter how much of a shithole it is.
The only places you're likely to get somewhat of agreement on are:
1) Plenty of people will agree that societies which are totally falling apart, like Somalia, are worse than those which are coherent, like Canada.
2) They also tend to feel that societies which score high on many desirable traits, like happiness and standard of living, are toward the better end of the spectrum. Bhutan and Norway are good examples.
People are still very prone to rank their own society high or highest, regardless of its actual performance. This is a problem because it undermines the ability to identify and solve problems. It also impairs people's ability to work fluently with those from other cultures.
However, the more different cultures someone has passed through, lived in, or studied the less blinker-sighted they tend to be. It's harder to think of your own society as brilliant when it's doing stupid things you have seen others handle better. And all societies have a different set of strengths and weaknesses.
But if we accept this reasoning, we are forced to conclude that any manner of atrocities — from ritual child sacrifice to female genital mutilation — are permissible.
Funny how America keeps harping on female genital mutilation as bad while male genital mutilation is considered not only good but nearly mandatory. The leading reasons -- hygiene, religion, and culture -- are the same for both. It's all bullshit. Cutting up someone else's body without their consent is not okay for any reason other than extremely urgent medical necessity (e.g. intersex babies lacking a urethra). No wonder the Africans don't want to listen to the hypocrisy.
Without a universal standard of morality, it is difficult to claim that some behaviors are always wrong.
No it isn't. See above re: practicality. An action which consistently causes problems is wrong. Without any appeal to morality, the practice of incest is extremely self-defeating.
Morality, like etiquette, is supposed to be a set of guidelines that help people find a functional lifestyle instead of cocking up society to the point it fails to work.
On August 17, 2021, the Taliban, fresh from their takeover of Afghanistan, released a statement that they would protect the existing rights of Afghan women "within the framework of Islam." There was no mention of "human rights" or the Western idea of equality. Instead, the Taliban were appealing to a 2500-year-old tradition — the idea of cultural relativity.
And they are likely to find that those ideas are no longer as practicable as they used to be, which is going to result in a lot of friction. They might have power, but they do not have much in the way of functionality. Also their behavior extensively violates many principles of Islam, so the claim is readily disproven.
They are going to get the same lesson that America just did, which is that the inescapable drawback to forcing people to do what you want instead of what they want is you must keep applying force. You cannot ever stop. The moment you let up, they will bounce back to doing what they want instead of what you want, and possibly also attack you. History is an extremely patient teacher and will repeat this lesson as often as necessary. But it's a lot cheaper to learn it from books than by hauling your ass across a desert to hit people who annoy you.
From where do you get your morals? Your sense of right and wrong? If you are an absolutist, it will presumably come from some kind of universal (possibly religious) moral order. But if you are a relativist, you likely will point to some worldly source, like society, family, or personal conscience.
Or you can look at all of those things and choose the ones you see working most effectively or doing the most good. Few people do this. There is actually a scale of moral development.
Kohlberg suggested that there may be a seventh stage—Transcendental Morality, or Morality of Cosmic Orientation—which linked religion with moral reasoning. Kohlberg's difficulties in obtaining empirical evidence for even a sixth stage, however, led him to emphasize the speculative nature of his seventh stage.
Sure, that's where you get into galactic-scale moral issues like:
-- Life is precious. It is wrong to despoil planets with a complex ecosystem.
-- Sapience is precious. It is wrong to violate a species which is or has the potential to become sapient.
And then they debate things like:
-- Is it ethical to spread the seeds of life where none are found?
-- Is it ethical to uplift less-intelligent species toward sapience?
-- Is it ethical to light a star, such that it promotes complex life on some other celestial body(s), but in so doing destroy some other body(s) possessed of simplistic life?
People who cannot even grasp "Don't saw off the branch you are standing on," as in Earth's current biocatastrophe, will not be able to process these larger issues. Moral reasoning, like anything else, requires practice.
Similarly, you can debate divine ethics. Are things moral because some deity says so, or whatever that deity does is always considered Good? Or are things moral because of their effects, such that what is wrong for mortals is also wrong for deities? Do mortals and deities have different moral capacities based on their nature and scope (a difference in kind) or similar because they are both sapients (a difference in degree)?
You don't necessarily have to start at the bottom, though. I was trying to articulate sophisticated social-religious-gender arguments as a toddler.
Can we declare that another culture is immoral?
You can declare anything. People call each other's cultures immoral all the time. What matters is whether you can back it up with facts. Are people in that culture running about doing things which will cause it to malfunction? If you look at somewhere like Afghanistan, you can observe that shooting each other, undermining education, and rampant corruption are toxic to a functional society. Similarly America is attacking body autonomy, democracy, privacy -- things which are important to its survival. Societies can be just as daft as individuals, which makes sense as they are made of individuals.
And, with our opening example, if the Taliban or Afghan Muslim tradition subjugates women and forbids free speech, what grounds do we have to rebuke them?
Well now, here we get into a higher level of social complexity.
Your personal problems remain your business to the extent that you keep them private. The moment they spill out into public space, they become other people's problems too, and those people then have a right to opinions on the matter.
The same is true in the international realm, where cultures function much like individuals on a personal scale. If you fuck up your society until it spews refugees into other people's territory, which is expensive and bothersome for them to deal with, then those other societies have a right to complain about your behavior and exhort you to quit doing things that cause your citizens to spurt out.
Unless you are a hermit with no neighbors, you have got to get along with those around you. Going against them will cause friction. This is sometimes necessary if they are doing things which are stupid or dangerous, but it is always risky and fractious.
We need a reply when someone asks, "On what grounds is your way better?" One way, of course, is religion. But if not religion, then what?
Practical performance based as solidly on facts as possible.
Which method(s) of agriculture, a practice heavily associated with cultural norms, produce enough food to feed the people while maintaining or improving the health of the land and environment? Some are MUCH better at this, and those tend to belong to cultures whose morality obliges them to care for the Earth instead of telling them it's fine to despoil it.
Which economic practices result in most or all citizens successfully meeting their survival needs, and preferably, their higher needs as well? It is fairly straightforward to measure a country's rate of homelessness, hunger, etc. and compare that to its resource base. A country with plentiful resources but lots of needless suffering is inferior even to one which has little but spreads it as fairly as possible.
Which methods of human interaction result in the highest happiness and mental health, the lowest crime and other friction? A society where people more often talk things out is more functional than one where shooting people is considered an acceptable solution to disagreements. Note that no human society is as good at this as our relatives the bonobos, who solve all their conflicts with sex.
Things such as governments, economic systems, religions -- those are all just tools we use, well or poorly, in attempts to meet needs and solve conflicts. Some of them tend to work better than others.
But how well they work is partly based on what your goals are. If you wish to get rich, capitalism is a more useful tool than egalitarianism. If you wish to minimize people starving, egalitarianism is more useful. Because people often choose different values and goals, they routinely disagree over which is "better." Nevertheless, practicality will still bite you in the ass if you choose foolish goals, which is why we have climate change.
If you wish to explore these ideas, I recommend that you get a good list of moral and philosophical systems:
https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/gender/MoralTheories.html
https://opentextbc.ca/ethicsinlawenforcement/chapter/major-ethical-systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies
Pick 5-10 of these. Choose any current issue. Now go through and determine what each system would recommend in regard to that issue, with justifications from that system's major values or principles. Compare the results. How similar or diverse are the answers? Which one(s) do you consider the best advice in this case, or can you think of something better? If you repeat this exercise 10-20 times, do some systems consistently give advice that produces better outcomes than others? Are there systems that routinely oppose each other, and thus compensate for each other's weaknesses?
People often forget that there are many options; they like to pretend that you "have to" use the one you are handed by your religion, government, or other authority. You don't. They're all just tools. You can totally dump out the box and test them to see which perform better or worse in your circumstances, or the world at large. Or perhaps you'd like to set up a forge and create something new; we have this stuff because people have done that. You can read widely and analyze other people's mistakes and successes. History has a vast array of resources regarding which ideas tend to work well and which tend to blow up in your face.
WARNING: This exercise tends to make people more ethical, more thoughtful, better equipped to handle serious challenges -- and less precisely fitted to their culture no matter which one they are standing in. However good the culture, somebody is doing something better, and if you know this, it becomes harder to keep doing things the dumb way. A cosmopolitan culture will tolerate your quirks more than a narrow one, but it's always going to cause some friction. It's especially challenging if you exceed the average level of your species; see above re: galactic ethics.
My thoughts in general:
* Each culture has a right to arrange itself as it pleases. This is essential, because what's considered moral or immoral varies drastically from one time and place to another. Your culture is not special just because you happen to be standing in it. Probably it does some things that others consider or will consider to be terrible.
* Insofar as anthropologists have discovered, there is one universal human rule: sexual activity shall not be unregulated. Every culture studied has had some sort of rules about sex, but none of those subrules are universal. So that is as much as everyone agrees on. Below that, there's just a bunch of stuff that is more or less popular.
* Regardless of whether something is considered moral or immoral, it has practical effects. These effects lead to the aforementioned popularity of some rules over others.
-- While practiced by some cultures, incest is widely discouraged because it predictably leads to reproductive mishaps. It is among the most consistently self-defeating of activities.
-- Theft is generally discouraged because, on the whole, people like to own things and will fight if someone tries to take their stuff. Most cultures maintain a sense of personal property which is to be respected.
-- Lying is consistently frowned upon, even though most people do it a lot, because it screws up communication for everyone. To succeed, cultures have to find a way to keep a lid on it, while not holding people to unattainable standards.
Enough moral relativism: some cultures are worse than others
Now try to get people to agree on which ones are better or worse. That'll be fun. Almost everyone will claim their culture is better, or best, no matter how much of a shithole it is.
The only places you're likely to get somewhat of agreement on are:
1) Plenty of people will agree that societies which are totally falling apart, like Somalia, are worse than those which are coherent, like Canada.
2) They also tend to feel that societies which score high on many desirable traits, like happiness and standard of living, are toward the better end of the spectrum. Bhutan and Norway are good examples.
People are still very prone to rank their own society high or highest, regardless of its actual performance. This is a problem because it undermines the ability to identify and solve problems. It also impairs people's ability to work fluently with those from other cultures.
However, the more different cultures someone has passed through, lived in, or studied the less blinker-sighted they tend to be. It's harder to think of your own society as brilliant when it's doing stupid things you have seen others handle better. And all societies have a different set of strengths and weaknesses.
But if we accept this reasoning, we are forced to conclude that any manner of atrocities — from ritual child sacrifice to female genital mutilation — are permissible.
Funny how America keeps harping on female genital mutilation as bad while male genital mutilation is considered not only good but nearly mandatory. The leading reasons -- hygiene, religion, and culture -- are the same for both. It's all bullshit. Cutting up someone else's body without their consent is not okay for any reason other than extremely urgent medical necessity (e.g. intersex babies lacking a urethra). No wonder the Africans don't want to listen to the hypocrisy.
Without a universal standard of morality, it is difficult to claim that some behaviors are always wrong.
No it isn't. See above re: practicality. An action which consistently causes problems is wrong. Without any appeal to morality, the practice of incest is extremely self-defeating.
Morality, like etiquette, is supposed to be a set of guidelines that help people find a functional lifestyle instead of cocking up society to the point it fails to work.
On August 17, 2021, the Taliban, fresh from their takeover of Afghanistan, released a statement that they would protect the existing rights of Afghan women "within the framework of Islam." There was no mention of "human rights" or the Western idea of equality. Instead, the Taliban were appealing to a 2500-year-old tradition — the idea of cultural relativity.
And they are likely to find that those ideas are no longer as practicable as they used to be, which is going to result in a lot of friction. They might have power, but they do not have much in the way of functionality. Also their behavior extensively violates many principles of Islam, so the claim is readily disproven.
They are going to get the same lesson that America just did, which is that the inescapable drawback to forcing people to do what you want instead of what they want is you must keep applying force. You cannot ever stop. The moment you let up, they will bounce back to doing what they want instead of what you want, and possibly also attack you. History is an extremely patient teacher and will repeat this lesson as often as necessary. But it's a lot cheaper to learn it from books than by hauling your ass across a desert to hit people who annoy you.
From where do you get your morals? Your sense of right and wrong? If you are an absolutist, it will presumably come from some kind of universal (possibly religious) moral order. But if you are a relativist, you likely will point to some worldly source, like society, family, or personal conscience.
Or you can look at all of those things and choose the ones you see working most effectively or doing the most good. Few people do this. There is actually a scale of moral development.
Kohlberg suggested that there may be a seventh stage—Transcendental Morality, or Morality of Cosmic Orientation—which linked religion with moral reasoning. Kohlberg's difficulties in obtaining empirical evidence for even a sixth stage, however, led him to emphasize the speculative nature of his seventh stage.
Sure, that's where you get into galactic-scale moral issues like:
-- Life is precious. It is wrong to despoil planets with a complex ecosystem.
-- Sapience is precious. It is wrong to violate a species which is or has the potential to become sapient.
And then they debate things like:
-- Is it ethical to spread the seeds of life where none are found?
-- Is it ethical to uplift less-intelligent species toward sapience?
-- Is it ethical to light a star, such that it promotes complex life on some other celestial body(s), but in so doing destroy some other body(s) possessed of simplistic life?
People who cannot even grasp "Don't saw off the branch you are standing on," as in Earth's current biocatastrophe, will not be able to process these larger issues. Moral reasoning, like anything else, requires practice.
Similarly, you can debate divine ethics. Are things moral because some deity says so, or whatever that deity does is always considered Good? Or are things moral because of their effects, such that what is wrong for mortals is also wrong for deities? Do mortals and deities have different moral capacities based on their nature and scope (a difference in kind) or similar because they are both sapients (a difference in degree)?
You don't necessarily have to start at the bottom, though. I was trying to articulate sophisticated social-religious-gender arguments as a toddler.
Can we declare that another culture is immoral?
You can declare anything. People call each other's cultures immoral all the time. What matters is whether you can back it up with facts. Are people in that culture running about doing things which will cause it to malfunction? If you look at somewhere like Afghanistan, you can observe that shooting each other, undermining education, and rampant corruption are toxic to a functional society. Similarly America is attacking body autonomy, democracy, privacy -- things which are important to its survival. Societies can be just as daft as individuals, which makes sense as they are made of individuals.
And, with our opening example, if the Taliban or Afghan Muslim tradition subjugates women and forbids free speech, what grounds do we have to rebuke them?
Well now, here we get into a higher level of social complexity.
Your personal problems remain your business to the extent that you keep them private. The moment they spill out into public space, they become other people's problems too, and those people then have a right to opinions on the matter.
The same is true in the international realm, where cultures function much like individuals on a personal scale. If you fuck up your society until it spews refugees into other people's territory, which is expensive and bothersome for them to deal with, then those other societies have a right to complain about your behavior and exhort you to quit doing things that cause your citizens to spurt out.
Unless you are a hermit with no neighbors, you have got to get along with those around you. Going against them will cause friction. This is sometimes necessary if they are doing things which are stupid or dangerous, but it is always risky and fractious.
We need a reply when someone asks, "On what grounds is your way better?" One way, of course, is religion. But if not religion, then what?
Practical performance based as solidly on facts as possible.
Which method(s) of agriculture, a practice heavily associated with cultural norms, produce enough food to feed the people while maintaining or improving the health of the land and environment? Some are MUCH better at this, and those tend to belong to cultures whose morality obliges them to care for the Earth instead of telling them it's fine to despoil it.
Which economic practices result in most or all citizens successfully meeting their survival needs, and preferably, their higher needs as well? It is fairly straightforward to measure a country's rate of homelessness, hunger, etc. and compare that to its resource base. A country with plentiful resources but lots of needless suffering is inferior even to one which has little but spreads it as fairly as possible.
Which methods of human interaction result in the highest happiness and mental health, the lowest crime and other friction? A society where people more often talk things out is more functional than one where shooting people is considered an acceptable solution to disagreements. Note that no human society is as good at this as our relatives the bonobos, who solve all their conflicts with sex.
Things such as governments, economic systems, religions -- those are all just tools we use, well or poorly, in attempts to meet needs and solve conflicts. Some of them tend to work better than others.
But how well they work is partly based on what your goals are. If you wish to get rich, capitalism is a more useful tool than egalitarianism. If you wish to minimize people starving, egalitarianism is more useful. Because people often choose different values and goals, they routinely disagree over which is "better." Nevertheless, practicality will still bite you in the ass if you choose foolish goals, which is why we have climate change.
If you wish to explore these ideas, I recommend that you get a good list of moral and philosophical systems:
https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/gender/MoralTheories.html
https://opentextbc.ca/ethicsinlawenforcement/chapter/major-ethical-systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies
Pick 5-10 of these. Choose any current issue. Now go through and determine what each system would recommend in regard to that issue, with justifications from that system's major values or principles. Compare the results. How similar or diverse are the answers? Which one(s) do you consider the best advice in this case, or can you think of something better? If you repeat this exercise 10-20 times, do some systems consistently give advice that produces better outcomes than others? Are there systems that routinely oppose each other, and thus compensate for each other's weaknesses?
People often forget that there are many options; they like to pretend that you "have to" use the one you are handed by your religion, government, or other authority. You don't. They're all just tools. You can totally dump out the box and test them to see which perform better or worse in your circumstances, or the world at large. Or perhaps you'd like to set up a forge and create something new; we have this stuff because people have done that. You can read widely and analyze other people's mistakes and successes. History has a vast array of resources regarding which ideas tend to work well and which tend to blow up in your face.
WARNING: This exercise tends to make people more ethical, more thoughtful, better equipped to handle serious challenges -- and less precisely fitted to their culture no matter which one they are standing in. However good the culture, somebody is doing something better, and if you know this, it becomes harder to keep doing things the dumb way. A cosmopolitan culture will tolerate your quirks more than a narrow one, but it's always going to cause some friction. It's especially challenging if you exceed the average level of your species; see above re: galactic ethics.
