RE: Is Moral Nihilism a Morality?
May 22, 2019 at 9:47 am
(This post was last modified: May 22, 2019 at 10:10 am by The Grand Nudger.)
-more afterthoughts and addendums, lol. Perhaps the unification of virtue ethics and consequentialist ethics lies in the final moral evaluation. Is there some specific problem that can't be resolved at that level of consideration, do you think?
Where we take the example of a mustache twirling villain tying some maiden to the tracks, the train stopping to avoid running her over moments before the engine would have exploded. We see his act, and we see the consequence. The act is un-objectionably evil while the consequence was a net good. Is this a problem, or simply the acknowledgement that bad people can accidentally stumble into doing good things? From the other end, we can see the virtue in a faithful commitment to radical forgiveness - but simultaneously we see the consequence of that playing out when some pastor convinces his flock to apprehend ongoing genocide in this way. Here again, problem for virtue ethics, or just the acknowledgement that a good person can do a bad thing for all of the right reasons?
We (generally) unify these things when we describe desert, what categorization (and consequence) a person deserves on account of he above. We don;t imagine that the mustache twirler deserves praise or reward, least of which to be called a good person, though we hold out the possibility of moral redemption through unintentionally good acts or consequences. Similarly, we don't hold the pastor fully accountable for the outcome he facilitated. He doesn't deserve to be thought of as evil, he was just stunningly and disastrously naive.
The problems, so much as they exist and are problems, aren't properly issues of the moral schema, but in what we might consider half baked declarations of desert. The virtuous nazis don't deserve to be called good (even if they are). So, if they are then this presents itself as a disparity between what they deserved and what they got. Kagans two peaks. It;s presents itself as injustice, unfairness, which seems out of place in a moral system.....but who ever said that goodness was fair...? Perhaps goodness-itself really is stacked against some people and really does favor others. Your poor nazis never could be good, eh, and a useful idiot is almost categorically incapable of being bad.
Moral knowledge is a curse, something something something about a magical fruit in a garden. It may be that none of this wisdom actually helps us to escape our moral circumstances, only informs us of how hard we fail by the standard of the ideal, thus increasing misery rather than reducing it ,lol.
Where we take the example of a mustache twirling villain tying some maiden to the tracks, the train stopping to avoid running her over moments before the engine would have exploded. We see his act, and we see the consequence. The act is un-objectionably evil while the consequence was a net good. Is this a problem, or simply the acknowledgement that bad people can accidentally stumble into doing good things? From the other end, we can see the virtue in a faithful commitment to radical forgiveness - but simultaneously we see the consequence of that playing out when some pastor convinces his flock to apprehend ongoing genocide in this way. Here again, problem for virtue ethics, or just the acknowledgement that a good person can do a bad thing for all of the right reasons?
We (generally) unify these things when we describe desert, what categorization (and consequence) a person deserves on account of he above. We don;t imagine that the mustache twirler deserves praise or reward, least of which to be called a good person, though we hold out the possibility of moral redemption through unintentionally good acts or consequences. Similarly, we don't hold the pastor fully accountable for the outcome he facilitated. He doesn't deserve to be thought of as evil, he was just stunningly and disastrously naive.
The problems, so much as they exist and are problems, aren't properly issues of the moral schema, but in what we might consider half baked declarations of desert. The virtuous nazis don't deserve to be called good (even if they are). So, if they are then this presents itself as a disparity between what they deserved and what they got. Kagans two peaks. It;s presents itself as injustice, unfairness, which seems out of place in a moral system.....but who ever said that goodness was fair...? Perhaps goodness-itself really is stacked against some people and really does favor others. Your poor nazis never could be good, eh, and a useful idiot is almost categorically incapable of being bad.
Moral knowledge is a curse, something something something about a magical fruit in a garden. It may be that none of this wisdom actually helps us to escape our moral circumstances, only informs us of how hard we fail by the standard of the ideal, thus increasing misery rather than reducing it ,lol.
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