Meaning of Right and Wrong... Finally Answered!

[Cerrone]

No response whatsoever to post 39 VOID?

I take it you agree with everything I said and have been pawned else you wouldve replied.

It's still impossible to define a universal right and wrong within ideas of morality. It's true what you're saying with "desires", but that itself isn't morally stating right or wrongs, it's using a selfish impulse with is left unchecked by other means of comparison from other people and it's running free; in the case of the desert island dude.

Not it isn't, we can establish moral standards based on the universal considerations of the desires of all agents that need to be considered.

Lets put it this way:

Desirism is:

cognitivist – ethical sentences like “murder is wrong” can be true or false; they assert a proposition.

objectivist – ethical sentences refer to facts, not opinions.

realist – some ethical sentences are true; they correspond to reality.

naturalist – moral facts reduce to non-moral facts about the world.

gnostic – many ethical sentences can be known to be true; moral knowledge is possible.

consequentialist – the goodness and badness of something (of a desire, in the case of desirism) is determined by its consequences.

Desirism is both a theory about what our moral terms mean to, such as what it means to say "rape is wrong" and about how we determine these moral propositions to be true.

But all of that replies on the assumption that you've first defined what "morality" itself is. What is your idea of a moral fact, or moral knowledge... or even true ethics? Morality and ethical standards differ from one culture and person to the next, as they're impossible to define universally- prove me wrong.

And if I understand you right, "Desirism" isn't even properly defined- of course the casual observer/student can attatch tags to what Desirism represents, but i'm struggling to find a cogent meaning for it.

Morality is a standard by which we judge actions. All morality refers to someones reasons for action, causing the death of a human changes morally by intention. It cannot be morally wrong to accidentally kill someone (given no fault to the causer) but it is morally wrong to allow a death to result of your negligence given you have responsibility in a situation, and it is morally wrong to murder someone. So reasons for action are how we determine whether or not the outcome was the result of a moral right or wrong.

So how do we tie together morality and desires? Because morality is a standard by which we judge action, and actions are only the result of desires, morality in desirism is a measured relationship between the desires of all the people involved, and the state of affairs in which more and stronger desires are promoted than are thwarted.

No no, that fails when stood next to consequentialism; when you take responsibility for uprighteous moral behaviour and all the indirect or direct negativity it causes. Easy example, murder isn't always morally wrong, if for example the person murdered was causing others to suffer then the consequence of that persons death would be a welcome relief to the people he had made suffer. However, by the standard of morals that includes "murder is always wrong", i'd ask you to consider that if the man in the example hadn't been murdered that the people he had caused to suffer would have likely to gone on suffering indefinately- and which is worse ultimately? Or another example thats probably easier for most people to relate to; people consider giving money to charities in africa to be a morally good thing, but the result of this is the exact opposite, as it increases the people in those countries need for dependency on outside sources and reduces their ambition for independence and/or social revolution to change their life for the better in the exact same way that somebody whoses lived a life on government handouts has grown accustomed to "not bothering to work" when somebody is ready to hand him money for nothing. Examine the long term consequences instead of the short term to really be able to get a clearer understanding of "consequentialism" in all its instances.

In fact, if you do go by your current society's (wherever you are) definition of morality, how do your actions differ in anyway from that of a slave christian?

I'd go as far as to say that deferring your entire behaviour to what is deemed currently to be morally correct, is taking the easy way out from making hard choices. No surprise there in this world of ours.

There are a room of 100 people, and 99 of them have the desire to rape. But all 100 of them have a desire not to be raped (because it is not possible to desire non consensual acts) therefore a desire to rape is a desire that thwarts more and stronger desires than it promotes and it is an action that a moral person will not perform.

If you desire to be moral you should act like a moral person.

In that same room, you have 99 people potentially ready to do other people harm, but only through their own cowardice they do not. If they were in a situation where they weren't likely to be harmed, but able to rape another person, they would do it. Therefore the consequence of watching them stand around uncomfortabley and then leaving the room is the consequence of letting those people to go and inflict harm onto others. Better that they should be cattle proded into raping each other than putting off the inevitable, they might just learn something from the experience.

So all desirism achieves universally then, is putting off the inevitable harder choices for short term gains (and we'll assume that inaction and remaining neutral is considered a short term gain as well) and forgetting to take account for the long term consequences of the act, which you didnt even consider then when creating the example... or willfully ignored.