RE: What would be the harm?
November 29, 2018 at 9:14 am
(This post was last modified: November 29, 2018 at 9:34 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Same thing it would mean in a dualist or idealists world. Evolved or instinctual behaviors or biases in the periphery of moral propositions present themselves as instrumental goods. To "be good" is not the goal, the goal (and I'm calling it this for convenience sake rather than as a statement of natural teleology) is fitness. Juxtaposed against that are morals (allegedly) derived from principle. Intrinsic good. In both cases these goods purport a meaningful objectivity. The behavior or bias does produce fitness, or the behavior or bias does reflect some principled metric. Both are quantifiable, regardless of what kind of world we live in.
What jorm is circling around, is the observation that when we remove those quantifiable groundings..it's often the case that we still perceive the things to be wrong. That this remaining arbitrarity or subjectivity needs to be accounted for. I think it is, personally, and right within the issue of evolved or instinctual behaviors. We can know all sorts of things that are true and based in rational principles. We can know, for example..that spiders are not a pressing concern for human beings and that their presence actually reduces other pests that are - but it we walked into a house and found that it was full of spiders we would think that there was something off or wrong about the person living there. That person could remove our objections. We would still think that they were a weirdo who should reach for a can of poison. Our instinctual behaviors are very firmly put in place and resilient in the face of contravening facts.
One way that we leave room for human error, in moral (and other) systems, is permissiveness and resistance to desert. We say things like "under some circumstances this thing might not be bad, or might not be as bad as it usually is, or maybe I'm wrong about why it's bad..even....so I'm going to withhold my judgment of the person though I cannot conceal my distaste for the act". Institutionally/societaly we propose that a person has no duty to the good, only a duty to avoid the bad. In that way...what a person is doing may not be broadly good or specifically good..but so long as it's not actively harming anyone - it's tolerable. Essentially, the difference between duty and praise. Between focusing on what a person must not do over what a person should do - and particularly when those actions have consequences or we seek to impose consequence for the act.
In all of this, I think that the arbitrarity or subjectivity jorm is referring to is thoroughly accounted for, both in that we have some understanding of why it persists within us, and..noting that it does, a way of handling it's existence within the context of principled rather than evolved systems derived from the intrinsic rather than instrumental good.
What jorm is circling around, is the observation that when we remove those quantifiable groundings..it's often the case that we still perceive the things to be wrong. That this remaining arbitrarity or subjectivity needs to be accounted for. I think it is, personally, and right within the issue of evolved or instinctual behaviors. We can know all sorts of things that are true and based in rational principles. We can know, for example..that spiders are not a pressing concern for human beings and that their presence actually reduces other pests that are - but it we walked into a house and found that it was full of spiders we would think that there was something off or wrong about the person living there. That person could remove our objections. We would still think that they were a weirdo who should reach for a can of poison. Our instinctual behaviors are very firmly put in place and resilient in the face of contravening facts.
One way that we leave room for human error, in moral (and other) systems, is permissiveness and resistance to desert. We say things like "under some circumstances this thing might not be bad, or might not be as bad as it usually is, or maybe I'm wrong about why it's bad..even....so I'm going to withhold my judgment of the person though I cannot conceal my distaste for the act". Institutionally/societaly we propose that a person has no duty to the good, only a duty to avoid the bad. In that way...what a person is doing may not be broadly good or specifically good..but so long as it's not actively harming anyone - it's tolerable. Essentially, the difference between duty and praise. Between focusing on what a person must not do over what a person should do - and particularly when those actions have consequences or we seek to impose consequence for the act.
In all of this, I think that the arbitrarity or subjectivity jorm is referring to is thoroughly accounted for, both in that we have some understanding of why it persists within us, and..noting that it does, a way of handling it's existence within the context of principled rather than evolved systems derived from the intrinsic rather than instrumental good.
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