Being vs. Believing

[Angrboda]

I will stress, again, that many of our conflicts seem to arise precisely because we do -not- seem to have this ability...but if we did........then I wouldn't immediately default to a uniformly negative summary.  

Why wouldn't you come to a negative conclusion about the attainability of virtue in practice if all those conditions were met. (Not trying to put words in your mouth, but this is how I understand your "negative summary" to be.)

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That is the hypothetical. a) Being moral involves believing that we are good rather than being good; b) our standard for when we believe we are being good is internal; c) that standard is loose enough that we can in practice adjust the standard rather than adjusting our behavior.  If that all is true, is that not a problem for practical morality?

[The Grand Nudger]

Adjusting the standard could be a useful and diplomatic arrangement between two individuals or groups which had any need or desire to coexist.  If we could go along to get along - in such a dramatic way....what would be impractical about that?  What problem is that supposed to bring that does not already exist, and for which that very attribute, that talent, would be a solution in the first place?  

What would be impractical about adjusting the standards higher and higher as we achieved?  What would be impractical about adjusting the standards lower and lower to temper expectation with experience?  At what point is virtue unattainable?  Wouldn't virtue...if all of those conditions were true...be just about the easiest thing to attain in the whole wide world (and hey, I could be wrong, maybe some of us would set em high and some would set em low and it would all be a wash,. with precisely as many virtuous people and un-virtuous people regardless)?  Couldn't it just as easily be unattainable, as we set the standard ever higher? I'm really not following, we have entirely left the real world...we are deep into hypotheticals, I'm granting you every ridiculous condition
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.....and I'm still not seeing the problem........now that, is what I'd call a problem.

(I think you have some undeclared assumptions about what people would -do- with this ability, if we had it...and that's causing the disconnect between us...my two cents)

[henryp]

Jumping back in, to be clear, I didn't intend to define morality as believing you are good.

To reword the original post, it could be Humans wish to believe they are moral rather than be moral.

The problem, of course, is 'what is moral!?'

A workaround that would allow the discussion of my point without getting bogged down trying to define morality, is to look at this question from the perspective of say a Catholic. For a catholic, their morality is pretty clearly defined. Yet we see the mental gymnastics they will use to live a life contrary to the well-defined morality, and still believe they are a good catholic.

For the rest of us, the details of morality are a little fuzzier. But I think the same principle holds.