Meaning of Right and Wrong... Finally Answered!

[Cerrone]

Well of course you have to want to do the right thing. All oughts are qualified by If's. If you want to get to antarctica, you ought to go south. If you want to see at night, you ought to turn on the lights. If you want to make the world a better place, you ought to be a moral person.
Without the desire to make the world better there is no reason to act morally in the first place, this is somethign that is subject in all moral systems, you always need an IF. If you wish not to have your ass fried by god for all eternity, you ought to follow the rules. etc.

But the evident question is "do people want to do the right thing?"

You're saying an ideal state of affairs is desirism which promotes stronger desires and thwarts less appealing ideas, but there are countless examples in day to day life where the right thing to do isn't the most appealing/pleasent thing to do. When faced with a choice between doing something "right" which is unpleasent and doing something which has no obvious impact on the "right thing" but is more appealing to them in fulfilling their immediate desires they're usually going to choose that over the "right thing". I'm not wrong in describing that as "being selfish".

People can only be convinced of a changing particular direction of action when it's made to clear them it will benefit them. In the short term they may not be instantly fulfilled by doing the "right thing", but it will benefit them tenfold in the long term. I suppose i'm trying to convey the merit for those who in their behaviour and thought process favor long term benefits over short term gains, if we need to define the topic somewhat.

You just seem to be lost in your own confusion, people being selfish has nothing to do with the validity of any moral theory, it's simply a fact about this world that has an impact on the wright and wrong of moral action inside the theory.

So how exactly is moral theory at all relevant when you construct it without taking into the account the actions and behaviour of people that the theory is attempting to be applied to? Makes no sense.

Can you cite my argument when stating these conclusions so i can see where you've gone wrong?

You've got it wrong here too. A better state of affairs is one in which there are more and stronger desires promoted than at the present. This is a state of affairs in which people get to do more of what they want to do whilst having less of their desires thwarted by the desires of others.

Since our desires are what drives all of our action, a better state of affairs is one where we are free to take more action towards fulfilling our desires than we are currently. Desires that lead to a better state of affairs are good desires.

You cannot use desireism to validate anythign other than the impact of desires and whether or not they lead to a state of affairs in which more and stronger desires are fulfilled than at the present moment.

No, desirim won't make anyone's choices morally good, it will provide a standard by which we can judge these actions.

lol I guess you're not used to metaphors and rhetoric.. ok well, I was saying there that you're beginning recognise desirism as a natural occurance in behaviour, that's true, but I replied that desirism (when used on its own) is utterly worthless for the primary basis of using it as a yardstick or a moral theory. If you rely on the desires of a selfish man with his own immediate needs as his focus to be the yardstick by which to judge others then you don't set any kind of watermark to better other people, because they'll just be allowed to be as selfish as that man is.

However, if you instruct people (as i said above) to focus on the long term instead of the short term, then they begin to realise that their own immediate fulfillment is selfish and destructive in the long term, and only then when the desires have been modified with perspective and virtue can desirism be put to use to benefit society. Otherwise by itself desirism is just no more of an obvious statement than watching a pigeon pick away at some crumbs and remarking on how it picks away at some crumbs as if its a miraculous event.

No i don't doubt that happens, but negating aid for them is just going to leave them even more at the mercy of certain exploitative companies (stabucks).

It's more likely that the representatives of the exploitative companies would be chased out of the country and whatever resources they left behind would be put to use by the revolutionary forces. Like ohh.. a few south american nations that immediately spring to mind.

We can use praise and condemnation on individuals long term to change their desires, we can threaten them with punishment, which means their desires will be thwarted for proloned periods of time while they are imprisoned. We can also praise and reward good desires to help people desire actions that promote other desires as well as being fulfiled themselves, lik the example of making your friends happy, it's both self fulfilling and promotive of other desires.

That doesn't really work though, prisons are our only real way of punishing, but its a counter productive solution that either destroys people or makes them 10 times worse by the time they're released... at the expense of the heavily taxed civilian. And you can apply that to any kind of punishment really, unless behavioural education is implimented then the person punished won't learn anything from the experience; it's just a short term solution to a long term problem.

The only way to prevent more complicated selfish and destructive desires is to educate people about how those kind of desires will hurt them in the long term.

If someone believes that they are doing the right thing and they actually arent all that means is they are mistaken, this again has nothing to do with determining right and wrong. Intentions play a large part, an accidental wrong is not as bad as an intentional wrong, because the desire to do wrong is stronger than a desire that unintentionally did wrong, even though they might have the same negatvie impact, so in that case the accidental thwarting of desires is less wrong because of the strenght and intention of the desire.

Accidents are forgivable, but ignorance of consequences is no excuse. Again, it comes back to education on the subject.

Short term and long term gains are no different, the impact of the desire is relevent for as long as it has impact. All desires thwarted for any length of time contribute towards how morally bad the initial desire was. If the desire in question intially promoted more desires but long term ended up thwarting more then this was a desire than thwarted mroe and stronger desires than it promoted, and thus is morally wrong.

Neutral is just that, the action has not made the state of affairs better or worse.

Short term/long term are vastly different.

Impacts of actions are felt long after the action has been forgotten, the butterfly effect for example.

And neutral isn't as simple as not taking part, you aid the progress of either course of action or not, by doing nothing simply because you've chosen to opt out leaves others with stakes in either course of action liable to suffer or gain because of your lack of involvement.