Not A Poll: Does Motivation Affect Morality?

[robvalue]

@ Rob, yeah... But I'm wondering if my health analogy works perhaps... I do think there's far too much of the darn speciesism lark. No but seriously, yeah it's disgusting. The treatment to animals and bias against them sickens me.

But anyhoo, about the health thing. Animal health can be studied and we merely label physical and mental well being as health yeah? Why not same for morality, like, when it comes to suffering and stuff?

Yes, I agree. Animals are the new second class citizen, in countries where women no longer are. Some countries are far worse than others, but even in the ones where animals are "treated well" I see a whole lot of improvement being needed. I imagine future generations looking back with disgust, just as we do with slavery and such. My personal views on this are controversial, as you know. But I would like to believe they are forward thinking.

I've been mulling this over, and I reckon I might have a handle on why we seem to disagree on morality in general. Well, not much disagree, but come at it from different perspectives. You seem to be approaching it from the point of view of setting up a series of guidelines, as in "Doing the following things are harmful, so don't do them." And similarly, "Doing these things are helpful, so do them". There's nothing wrong with that, and I agree that each person basically comes up with their own lists like this, to manage their own behaviour. It is the basis of everyone's morality.

Examining objective harm can certainly be very beneficial for this process. Ignorance is often the cause of unecessary harm. However, I have been talking about examining a specific action a particular person has taken, and considering what judgement I would come to about how moral or immoral it was for them to act that way. This is a more difficult process, but it's new information. It is then redundant for me to just point out what I consider to be harmful. I need to get inside their brain, as much as I can. Sure, I can say that "If I did what you just did, I would consider that moral/immoral". That is a useful judgement too. But it wasn't me, it was them. And so if I'm to be able to discuss morality with them, I can't just project my own values. I need to see how they came to their decision. So I'm also thinking, "If I was this person, would I have been acting morally or immorally"? This is yet more new information, to aid discussion. And if their idea of "moral" is different to mine, why is that? Am I able to convince them that my idea is superior? Just announcing that it is doesn't achieve anything.

And it's also to do with accountability. Just because someone has "caused harm" I don't necessarily hold them accountable, or assume they acted immorally. Things are much more complex than this. Just saying "it would have been immoral to cause that harm devoid of context" is again redundant. People never accomplish exactly what they mean to for one thing, and you can't expect everyone's beliefs to be true either. It's a hugely grey area.

But my point is that just handing over a list to someone and saying, "don't do these things, they are harmful" isn't going to achieve anything if they don't care that they are harmful, or don't agree that the harm matters. So discussing the goals of morality, and the way moral decisions are made, is very important.

I have so much I could potentially say about this... that it's hard to summarise really. But as always, I'm a pragmatist at heart. If a discussion about morality isn't actually achieving anything at all, then it's worthless. So it has to be sophisticated enough to actually make a difference between people who don't agree on the fundamentals.

And among people who do agree, it has to be sophisticated enough to handle conflicts. You don't need any discussion to get most people to agree that cutting off someone's head is worse than not doing so, in most situations. But it's when there is a need for compromise, when you must choose the "lesser of two evils", that morality becomes complex. And it's where it stops being objective, in my opinion, in any useful sense.