RE: morality is subjective and people don't have free will
May 15, 2017 at 5:13 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2017 at 5:24 pm by Aroura.)
(May 15, 2017 at 5:03 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote:So it moved more into a grey area, though.(May 15, 2017 at 4:40 pm)Aroura Wrote: Here is the problem, you and I and 99% of people might agree right now, today, that it is wrong to yell at a random person because you are having a bad day (again, my sincerest apologies about that), but that does not make it objectively wrong.
Under some circumstance, at some point in history, I'm sure that most people would have agreed it was acceptable.
For instance, what if the person yelling at you has autism? Like severe autism, but they are still an adult.
Would you still call it objectively wrong for them to yell at a stranger because they are upset? Or is it suddenly more understandable, and therefore more acceptable, with that one little change?
If the person yelling at an innocent bystander has some kind of mental illness, I would say the act of yelling is still objectively wrong, but the yeller's culpability is lessened (if not entirely gone) due to his mental illness.
Point is, there is also some "what if" out there we haven't thought of. There is nothing that every society through all of human history would 100% agree is objectively right or wrong. Even things we would call murder. In the middle ages in some places, it was perfectly acceptable in Christian Society to kill a political rival or someone who had wronged you in revenge, unless they were sheltering in your home, then it was suddenly a big moral no-no.
(May 15, 2017 at 5:12 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: When treatment is ineffective, unachievable and unrealistic and the person is dangerous then the right thing to do is detain them.... but treat them as justly as possible while they're being detained.
That is a very succinct way of putting it. Agreed!
(May 15, 2017 at 5:06 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote:(May 15, 2017 at 5:01 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: Hehe...CL: does that mean that if you stopped believing in free will then you'd start believing that all criminals were insane because they had no control over their crimes?
Yeah, probably. I don't see how someone can rape and murder a child, for example, and not have chosen to do so unless the person was seriously insane. Unless someone was holding a gun up to his head and making him do it or something.
Exactly.

All criminal behavior, as Ham and I see it, is a result of mental illness. Not choice.
My mom came up against this conundrum once, I recall, when I was in my early teens, and it really upset her. We watched a show about a guy who had brain damage and became an utter monster. When he was treated, he was able to recover somewhat.
This led her down the path of realizing that, perhaps, it is this way for everyone. The drug addict is depressed, or was abused. The rapist was born with brain damage, lacking empathy. They don't chose to have empathy or not, that part of their brain is broken. Just like an autistic person has trouble communicating, sociopaths have trouble understanding and empathizing with people. The autistic person yells and cries. The sociopath coldly steals all of your money, or kills. It isn't choice, it is an unavoidable consequence of their nature.
It really fried her brain, and I know she still struggles to reconcile the part of her that wishes to believe in free-will, and the part that recognizes we are all victims of consequence.
(May 15, 2017 at 5:04 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote:(May 15, 2017 at 5:02 pm)Aroura Wrote: Only if the society in which it takes place agrees that it is.
So if Hitler won WW2 and Nazism took over the world... if there were a couple of Jews left hiding somewhere.... it would be wrong for them to exist?
Sadly, yes (subjectively, of course). Society tells us what our morals are, and sometimes it can have some pretty fucked up morals, in our current opinion!
“Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead