RE: Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds
May 7, 2021 at 5:57 pm
(This post was last modified: May 7, 2021 at 6:23 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
LOL, bit of a misconception, harm isn't my jam either - I'm just the token realist arguing for bog standard realist propositions to help other people understand in those moments where their objections fail to land, -that- their objections fail to land. I've got alot of ticks of communication - so I'm sure that the kerfuffle is all on me.
Harm, to put it plainly, is just one of the first things to look for. A thing, of many things, with moral import. Pleasure is there too. Don't harm, do help. There are more (or more instructive) instances in which pleasure is present and good is absent than instances in which bad is present and harm is absent, imo. That's the utility for me. More and easier grist for the mill.
I think that it's bad to harm people today for some future good. Abortion, environmental justice or action, same same. At the level of moral facts of a matter, doing a bad thing for a good reason is and always will still be doing a bad thing. I think that a person who does that bad thing for that good reason, eyes wide open, has a clearer view of any moral field which we might call objective. It will be much easier for them to understand the notion of moral objectivity than it will be for any person who believes that the final assessment of composite situation whcih may have exclusively suboptimal outcomes is, by force, equivalent to moral assessment of an act in isolation and relies n just a single proposition which, showing any exception, renders the whole moot.
As you and I have discussed before - I'm a moral realist, sure, but also a moral pluralist. Moral pluralism leads to situations where a bad thing can have a good outcome (consistent with what we see in mere reality). Moral pluralism allows me to be personally against abortion in any case - but deeply pro-choice. Plural realism affords me the specificity and rationality of any other assertion to truth in a world of many relevant variables and cirumstances.
A great example of how this plays out, playing on an earlier question...is that I think it's bad to stick kids with needles. If we could vaccinate kids without sticking them with needles - then we should do that. You'd have to be a lollipop swiping monster to argue this point with me or with a child, lol. We can't - so that's what we're going to do, we're just picking the least shitty thing in our list of available moral responses to a situation of moral import. We could keep kids from getting polio by hitting them over the heads with bricks, too, but I think that theres a reason that we don;t do that. When we talk about morality as laymen we parcel the world up into into obviously™ goods and bads for effect..but..I can't remember who said it...something along the lines of how the world does not come to us or to me, in pieces, discrete - but all at once and as one one thing. The moral decisions we make every day are more like that than our demonstrative examples of moral principle.
A person, in that light, could see and agree with every moral postulate of their opposition, disagree with just one amoral proposition - and come to entirely disparate conclusions about the whole thing. Rationally.
*(also, I want to point out that I have these conversations with four children on the regular - pretty much no one else - I assume that I fall into those same patterns when I talk about it on the boards, which would cause any self respecting adult to rage)
Harm, to put it plainly, is just one of the first things to look for. A thing, of many things, with moral import. Pleasure is there too. Don't harm, do help. There are more (or more instructive) instances in which pleasure is present and good is absent than instances in which bad is present and harm is absent, imo. That's the utility for me. More and easier grist for the mill.
I think that it's bad to harm people today for some future good. Abortion, environmental justice or action, same same. At the level of moral facts of a matter, doing a bad thing for a good reason is and always will still be doing a bad thing. I think that a person who does that bad thing for that good reason, eyes wide open, has a clearer view of any moral field which we might call objective. It will be much easier for them to understand the notion of moral objectivity than it will be for any person who believes that the final assessment of composite situation whcih may have exclusively suboptimal outcomes is, by force, equivalent to moral assessment of an act in isolation and relies n just a single proposition which, showing any exception, renders the whole moot.
As you and I have discussed before - I'm a moral realist, sure, but also a moral pluralist. Moral pluralism leads to situations where a bad thing can have a good outcome (consistent with what we see in mere reality). Moral pluralism allows me to be personally against abortion in any case - but deeply pro-choice. Plural realism affords me the specificity and rationality of any other assertion to truth in a world of many relevant variables and cirumstances.
A great example of how this plays out, playing on an earlier question...is that I think it's bad to stick kids with needles. If we could vaccinate kids without sticking them with needles - then we should do that. You'd have to be a lollipop swiping monster to argue this point with me or with a child, lol. We can't - so that's what we're going to do, we're just picking the least shitty thing in our list of available moral responses to a situation of moral import. We could keep kids from getting polio by hitting them over the heads with bricks, too, but I think that theres a reason that we don;t do that. When we talk about morality as laymen we parcel the world up into into obviously™ goods and bads for effect..but..I can't remember who said it...something along the lines of how the world does not come to us or to me, in pieces, discrete - but all at once and as one one thing. The moral decisions we make every day are more like that than our demonstrative examples of moral principle.
A person, in that light, could see and agree with every moral postulate of their opposition, disagree with just one amoral proposition - and come to entirely disparate conclusions about the whole thing. Rationally.
*(also, I want to point out that I have these conversations with four children on the regular - pretty much no one else - I assume that I fall into those same patterns when I talk about it on the boards, which would cause any self respecting adult to rage)
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