Is it possible to be morally wrong even if one is convinced to do the right thing?
Is it possible to be morally wrong even if one is convinced to do the right thing?
Another related question could be: is it possible to be morally wrong retroactively?
All decent people today (at least in so-called Western countries) agree that slavery is morally wrong, and that this is not just an opinion, but a moral fact. Most would even argue that slavery has always been wrong, be it 200, 400 or 2000 years ago.
Lets do a little thought experiment: Imagine that in the year 2100 all decent people are vegetarians and they are convinced that eating animals is as wrong as owning slaves or torturing suspects, and that meat-eating has always been wrong (after all there are a lot of people today who would say so, although I am not among them; but in the year 2100 this has become the general consensus).
Would that mean that those people like me, who are still eating meat from animals that were raised and then killed for that purpose are in the same moral position as slave-owners in the year 1700 CE or 100 BCE: we are doing something that we think is normal and morally acceptable, but without knowing or suspecting that it is (objectively!) morally wrong and we are in fact morally depraved beings?
Another related question could be: is it possible to be morally wrong retroactively?
All decent people today (at least in so-called Western countries) agree that slavery is morally wrong, and that this is not just an opinion, but a moral fact. Most would even argue that slavery has always been wrong, be it 200, 400 or 2000 years ago.
Lets do a little thought experiment: Imagine that in the year 2100 all decent people are vegetarians and they are convinced that eating animals is as wrong as owning slaves or torturing suspects, and that meat-eating has always been wrong (after all there are a lot of people today who would say so, although I am not among them; but in the year 2100 this has become the general consensus).
Would that mean that those people like me, who are still eating meat from animals that were raised and then killed for that purpose are in the same moral position as slave-owners in the year 1700 CE or 100 BCE: we are doing something that we think is normal and morally acceptable, but without knowing or suspecting that it is (objectively!) morally wrong and we are in fact morally depraved beings?
Comments (52)
I don't personally subscribe to any of the traditional systems of superstitious belief, and I follow Bertrand Russell: the good life is the life enlightened by knowledge, and guided by love.
My own view is that morality is a kind of shared (or imposed) 'agreement' about how a community or a society manages cooperation and order (and it is extremely unlikely that all citizens agree on every point). Moral values shift and change over time. Are we making progress? Are we less barbaric now than we were in 2000 BCE?
Probably. But all such judgments are dependent on perspectives and on shared values. From my perspective slavery was never right. If one holds values based on human flourishing of all people equally, then slavery can't be right subject to those values. I have no doubt that I partake in beliefs and practices that in the future will be considered abhorrent subject to different values. And it wouldn't be hard to find people now who think anyone with a petrol-driven car is a kind of miscreant.
Suffering.
Quoting Matias
Yes. One can be mistaken.
Yes. There's no such thing as moral statute of limitation.
I think it only means that we are morally fallible.
I think many people knew even 200, 400, and 2,000 years ago that slavery was wrong. America's founders - Jefferson, Washington, Monroe, Madison - knew it was wrong or at least had serious doubts even though they owned slaves themselves. They knew their practice put the lie to their rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence. That doesn't answer your question, but I think it shines some light on it.
By the way: when the authors of the Declaration of Independance wrote that "all men are created equal" they were talking about white men, not women nor black people (many even thought that the latter were not fully human...)
Yes, Yep, and Aye!
We're criminals, all of us, at least to the extent we kill & eat for fun/pleasure (meat is tasty, oui?).
However, predators hunt out of necessity and if meat is essential for health, that does absolve us to some extent.
Where our descendants, if they survive global warming, can point a finger at us is for not trying hard enough to develop meat substitutes.
I am vegan for more than 12 years but I can not agree with the label "criminal" on meat eating. "Criminal" is a legal term while a moral evaluation of an act is not.
Sure our current dietary practices will have an negative impact on future generations but this can only be evaluated by ethics not by our judiciary system. The issue with such wide spread unethical behavior is that our Economical Systems depend on them hence they are promoted as "acceptable".
But I will totally agree with all your "yeps and Ayes"!!! Moral evaluations are difficult BECAUSE the degree of expansion and application of more rules"rules" depend on how good we are in including groups of different individuals through time. Its impossible to evaluate an act as moral/immoral without projecting its implications in a larger temporal scope and how it affects different agents in the world.
Would you agree with me more if I replaced crime with immoral?
Personally, I would like to be vegan, but lack the will power to be one. Perhaps people like me - want to but haven't yet adopted veganism - are carriers of a proto-morality gene which will be expressed fully in a few generations down the line; some like you, a vegan, are ahead of the pack.
The short answer is universalism is an invention of monotheistic religions.
Quoting Matias
Yes you can be wrong by the standards of contemporary moral understanding.
Quoting Matias
No, as morality is determined by socio-historical context, this doesn't even make sense.
Note that morality is relative to a certain socio-historical context, not relative 'within' a certain context, which is what people generally seem to be confusing.
This is a good question. How would you convince lions, sharks and necrotizing fasciitis bacteria that what they do is morally wrong?
Yes I would. An immoral act doesn't have legal implications (at least not most of the time).
Quoting Agent Smith
- ? get your poetic reference to genes but in real life there are no genes in control of our ethics.There are genes (i.e. of the warrior or hunter) that affect our behavior but they are not stronger from the environmental influences around us. What I want to say is that most people well in the middle of a "Bell curve" of our human biochemical diversity, are not to be blamed for their lack of "will power" (even if christianity disagrees lol).
Sure there are some biochemical setups that do not leave room for the host to change many things but in most cases its the environment and how we are programmed by it that governs our behavior. In those cases we need to change the Situation (like we do during diets).
We are empirical animals and we are good in making judgments based on how well and direct a cause is linked to an effect. In the case of meat eating most of us are isolated from the pain caused or the negative implications of the industry on the planet or future generations so we don't really have empirical facts in our reach to inform our actions.
Think of small kids who are directed not to touch the hot stove but they do it anyway.
If I push a button that says, "Push button to save an innocent life" and I push it, and it turns out that pushing the button actually kills an innocent life. How could it be argued that I behaved immorally?
Sometimes unintentional harm is due in part to negligence of using one's critical thinking or not paying attention to one's conscience.
Did slave owners honestly believe using slaves was not bad, or were they just rationalizing out of convenience?
I think it's also a matter of scale.
Doing wrong based on being too lazy to determine it's wrong might not be as immoral as doing wrong with full conviction that it is wrong.
One other thought. Wise vs foolish seems easier to determine or more objective than morality. Can right and wrong be replaced with wise and foolish?
Ethics seems biochemically mediated for your average Joe and Jane - an illegal subroutine of sorts, oui mon ami?
What you've written makes sense. I do think many of our country's founders were aware of the ambiguity and hypocrisy.
Quoting T Clark
Interesting :up: :sparkle:
A decent argument for vegetarianism which I am inclined to agree with however as a steakloving carnivore my choice of diet does not presuppose that the calf, sheep or lamb is less endowed in its capacity of emotion and or of pain.
If the animal is put down humanely then by its inability for it to question its existence or purpose does not alliviate guilt on my part then I should be greatful for the food put on my table.
[quote=Cambridge Dictionary]humane (= showing kindness, care, and sympathy) [/quote]
Understandable. But the example you provided is based on pure mechanism of humans survival. The consume of meat is not meaningless. We literally need it because it has proteins and other compositions which help us to keep a healthy lifestyle.
Empathy is very complex to put in action. I dont even have in mind any possible example. It is difficult because it is impossible to put us in somebody else's place.
That is still up for debate however many a studies so far seem to indicate otherwise.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46590-1
Quoting javi2541997
There isnt anything difficult about it, it is actually quite simple, either it is there or it is not.
Our task could be understanding but not empathy. I dont see it as simplistic. One of the main complex issues in the relations between people is the fact that we dont understand us pretty well.
Understanding suffering yet inflicting discomfort and suffering still for whatever reason towards our comfort zone. To understand it on an emotional level is something very different.
For sociopaths, no doubt.
I find empathy easier than understanding. :wink:
Who said otherwise? :cool:
Quoting Tom Storm
Interesting! But how can we do it? I promise I am not kidding. I dont see being empathetic as a fruitful or possible scenario. I only try to understand how the people act in society. For example: a drug addict. I could understand him/her of what is the cause for shooting heroin. But I wouldnt be able to have empathy because I never experienced the fact of taking drugs.
My problem was a misunderstanding. I thought that you cannot have empathy with people if you understand them previously. But thats a fallacy
Indeed, like a stone in a river.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Morality is a man-made concept to describe a mechanism that forces man and some warm-blooded creatures to feel bad or good when they act according to or against a set of expected behaviour.
Try to explain that to political leaders, FaceBook moralists or to vegans and permutational nomenclaturalists.
That said, I do believe that humans do need and get benefit as a species from their ability to enjoy morality. I agree with Introbert that human morality does not exist outside of humanity. Trying to apply human morality to nature is unnatural.
:roll: Genetic fallacy. Also, human nature is separate from "nature"?
In the common informal English, it is. Man-made structures are not considered natural structures, unless they are freely found in nature, too.
How would you write "not found freely in nature"? If man-made objects are part of nature, then their occurrences are also objects found freely in nature. So then "not found freely in nature" are only things that don't exist.
I appreciate that man is part of nature, and man's creations are part of nature by extension. But the language does make a distinction between man-made and non-man-made, by calling things natural and man-made.
Also, this raises the problem of how to consider man, as a thing in the universe. Man is man-made, (man meaning humans, not just male humans), yet it is also a naturally occurring thing.
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If you think you can freely insult my intelligence, then don't be surprised if I insult yours.
Yes they do in fact: Over time they erode the quality-of-life of those who would not do such acts -- or would slip, doing such only occasionally and temporarily. (The latter are folks of good character who, being fallible, sometimes goof up, make stupid mistakes ...and thus become bad characters for the moment.)
BTW, I like your metaphor: how a bad burn often serves to teach some a lesson; only, though, if they are willing and able to learn. I would like to quote you [in a serious academic paper] but do not know your real name, just your nickname here. Phone me, and we will discuss this further. I live in Skokie. Okay?
Quoting god must be atheist
So you cannot differentiate Man from "man-made structures"? :roll:
Btw, cite a single case of a "man-made structure" that is separate from nature unconstrained by laws of nature.
:sweat:
Quoting 180 Proof
Why should I?
Instead, please find me:
- a pyramid, in the fashion of burial place of pharaohs, complete with sarcophagi and mummies and mummified remains of food items in proper containers, freely found in nature formed by other than man;
- a nuclear power station, that generates electricity, with all its intricacies in its design, freely found in nature other than created by man;
- a plastic shopping bag, with a company logo printed on its two sides, freely found in nature, that has not been a manufactured product of man.
Quoting god must be atheist
Please find me a natural object that is not throughly the product of conventional schemes of language that incorporate such cultural features as how we understand the use of our measuring devices. As our linguistic, material and technological interactive engagements with our world change, so does the meaning of the nature we observe.
I am sorry, but that's not a good answer.
Quoting Joshs
I fail to see why I should find you such a natural object. Go find it yourself. You probably put it under the tool box in the shed, like the last time you were so desperately looking for it. :-)
Please don't blame me for your not seeing the answer in what you call non-answer.
You expressed your demand of showing you separateness between natural and man-made this way:
Quoting 180 Proof
You added that these structures must be independent from natural laws; but your understanding of nature is different from my understanding of it, and you are begging me to show you what I understand as nature.
Basically how I see your claim (1) is that the set of nature fully encompasses humans and creations of humans as its proper subset. Please correct me if my view of your view is not correct.
What I am saying is that that is not true, IFF you take the common informal meaning of nature vs human-made, because there are human-made objects that are not found made by other than humans.
This is an important difference. And I supplied the parameter under which I claim that nature is separate from human-made.
If you agree with the fact that man has only made objects that are found in replicates made by non-humans, then I disagree with you. You actually did not claim that, but it follows from your claim (1), under the parameters I have specified for my claim.
Now, your wording:
Quoting 180 Proof
There is a danger of equivocation here, so I spell out the differences, in order to avoid further misunderstandings:
You gave your parameters, as "separate" must mean not following natural laws.
But my parameters not as stated, but implied implicitly that "separate" is something that is unlike. Different. Separate in appearance, structure, and component parts.
This has not been spelled out in my initial claim, but many things have not been spelled out by your initial claim, either.
However, in my question my definition, if you like, of separateness has been insinuated. Your laughing at it is meaningless and fully dismissed as anything of merit, substance or brains.
Quoting god must be atheist
Since humans are natural beings and therefore inseparable from nature, applying human morality to ourselves is indistinguishable from applying human morality to nature, and therefore not "unnatural". Maybe, in most instances, to do so is impractical, missplaced, anthropomorphizing, etc; not, however, "unnatural".
Besides, we cannot help but "apply human morality to nature" insofar as we judge our environments and ecosystems as not worthy of our moral concern, thereby denying any moral culpability for us destroying them and their natural inhabitants with our thermal & chemical pollution, overdevelopment, non-renewable resource extraction, etc.
So the question is, who is worthy of being moral agents? Is there an objective criterion? I think so, it can only be consciousness. To be a moral agent is to be conscious. Why? To be conscious is to feel, to have goals and interests, to have a sense of self, to be in the most important respect similar to all other moral agents, that is, all other conscious beings. (Consciousness is not an absolute, if a being is minimally conscious, it is minimally a moral agent.)
Therefore, to enslave people or animals is objectively immoral, as this is treating moral agents, that is , conscious beings, unjustly.
:death: :flower:
Read Laozi & Zhuangzi.
Read Epicurus-Lucretius & Seneca-Epictetus.
Read Spinoza & Nietzsche.
Read P. Foot & M. Nussbaum.
Like waves in the ocean, humans belong to nature for better and worse. Yeah, we "stand out" but not so much that we are separate from or rise above nature anymore than ocean waves are separate from or rise above the ocean.
In addition to future generations possibly viewing us as savages for eating meat, future generations could possibly view us as savages for aborting fetuses (if public opinion will eventually take a sharply anti-abortion turn) or, alternatively, for refusing to give unwilling male parents a unilateral opt-out from paying child support. Right now, the only two guaranteed choices that males have in regards to this are abstaining from penis-in-vagina sex with all fertile and potentially fertile cisgender females or literally getting surgically castrated, since even a bilateral epididymectomy combined with a radical scrotal vasectomy can theoretically fail even after three successful/negative semen analyses. Future generations could view the lack of genuine male options in regards to this as being completely barbaric! Seriously.
Something that perks my curiosity, is the possibility (or is it a certainty?) that future generations may view us as savages for something that we cannot currently comprehend as immoral in today's society.
But that is a difficult nut to crack, as how can I have any hope of comprehending something that cannot currently be comprehended given my position in time and society?
Can one reach a place in which one can think without being constrained by the zeitgeist?
And of course, polyamorous relationships could get more acceptance and recognition in the future. And maybe the public will become more tolerant of an atheist President in the future. Who knows, right?