What does morality mean to you?

[paulpablo]

I'd say the morality of can action can be justifiably judged on both intentions and outcomes. But I also think morality can be judged on neither outcomes or intentions.

Examples of judging morality based on outcomes rather than by intentions are situations like if someone is drunk while driving, or speeding. 

 It's very rare for a drunk driver to have the intention of causing an accident or killing someone but I would say drinking a lot of alcohol before driving, no matter what the intention is or what the outcome happens to be, is immoral.

If the driver intends to get home safe and not kill anyone and he does get home safe and not kill anyone I still think it's immoral to drink and drive and take that risk.

There are obviously cases where it doesn't make sense to judge the morality of an action based on consequences, in the case of genuine accidents, technical faults.

And obviously an action wouldn't be judged to be good morally just based on an intention either, you wouldn't say the man who intended to clean the streets by killing prostitutes had the wrong idea but the actions were morally good because the intention was good.

[MTL]

The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics. The general form of the problem is this: There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: (1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. (2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the correct choice?

Rob, in the classic example above, where do you sit? How would you label the person who does nothing vs pull the lever?
Morality can be a tricky bastard!

eg: would you do nothing and keep a clear conscious (not labelling yourself a murderer, not your problem) or become a murderer with a positive net sum result for life?
What would the repercussions of intentionally killing someone (irrespective of the reasons) be on your mental health?

I personally cannot ever see myself ending a perfectly innocent person's life for any reason! Shoot me instead, I don't care!

What if the 5 people were all people in their 60s,

...and the 1 person on the side track was a toddler?


Or,

what if the 5 people were a bunch of 20-something drunk fratboys,

and the 1 person was Stephen Hawking?


Or,

What if the 5 people were Stephen Hawking, Salman Rushdie, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Malala Yousafzai,
(assuming all these people were still alive, of course)

and the one person was a toddler?

[MTL]

I entirely agree it is subjective and relative.

My idea of morality is you judge a certain person by their own standards, and their own beliefs. So if someone is doing the best they can with what they know and are capable of, then they are being moral, even if the result is bad. If I did the same action as them, with far greater knowledge and skills, knowing what would happen (something bad), then I'd be immoral.

But to say "That would be immoral if I did it, so it's immoral for you to do it" seems pointless to me. The action is going to appear to different people all sorts of degrees of moral. But morality is meant to be a measure of how much a person is trying to do good, not how well they succeed by other people's standards. For one thing, this "standard" it's being held to is going to be the arbitrary one that happens to be held by whoever is making the judgement.

A super powered alien could turn up and declare the whole of humanity to be immoral because all our methods seem primitive to them and have caused unnecessary damage. Is that a fair assessment? I'd say no. We did the best with what we knew.

This is my take anyway To define morality any other way seems to defeat the whole point of it. We have plenty of other ways of measuring objective success.

So, was Hitler moral?  Because he was doing what he thought needed to be done.

[Kingpin]

I entirely agree it is subjective and relative.

My idea of morality is you judge a certain person by their own standards, and their own beliefs. So if someone is doing the best they can with what they know and are capable of, then they are being moral, even if the result is bad. If I did the same action as them, with far greater knowledge and skills, knowing what would happen (something bad), then I'd be immoral.

But to say "That would be immoral if I did it, so it's immoral for you to do it" seems pointless to me. The action is going to appear to different people all sorts of degrees of moral. But morality is meant to be a measure of how much a person is trying to do good, not how well they succeed by other people's standards. For one thing, this "standard" it's being held to is going to be the arbitrary one that happens to be held by whoever is making the judgement.

A super powered alien could turn up and declare the whole of humanity to be immoral because all our methods seem primitive to them and have caused unnecessary damage. Is that a fair assessment? I'd say no. We did the best with what we knew.

This is my take anyway To define morality any other way seems to defeat the whole point of it. We have plenty of other ways of measuring objective success.

So, was Hitler moral?  Because he was doing what he thought needed to be done.

In Rob's view, Rob would call Hitler immoral from Rob's perspective, but moral from Hitler's perspective.  This is the real problem with moral relativism is we lose all basis on which to condemn ANYTHING.  If morality is subjective and relative you are really then just discussing a matter of personal preference and not morality.

[Catholic_Lady]

Rob, in the classic example above, where do you sit? How would you label the person who does nothing vs pull the lever?
Morality can be a tricky bastard!

eg: would you do nothing and keep a clear conscious (not labelling yourself a murderer, not your problem) or become a murderer with a positive net sum result for life?
What would the repercussions of intentionally killing someone (irrespective of the reasons) be on your mental health?

I personally cannot ever see myself ending a perfectly innocent person's life for any reason! Shoot me instead, I don't care!

What if the 5 people were all people in their 60s,

...and the 1 person on the side track was a toddler?


Or,

what if the 5 people were a bunch of 20-something drunk fratboys,

and the 1 person was Stephen Hawking?


Or,

What if the 5 people were Stephen Hawking, Salman Rushdie, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Malala Yousafzai,
(assuming all these people were still alive, of course)

and the one person was a toddler?

I'd say it would be ok to divert the train if it would save more lives to do so. The person in the train who would die as a result of the diversion would die as an unintended consequence/side effect of diverting a train that is about to run over people, and not as the intended end result.  

May sound petty, but when you get into grey areas and extreme circumstances like this, you have to comb through the really fine details imho.

[houseofcantor]

I consider morality to be an artifact of chemical intelligence. I'm waiting for science to catch up and verify my conjecture. I'm a lazy prophet. 

In perhaps more pertinent terms, faith is moral certainty; the only certainty one can expect in a casual, entropic universe. 

Look for a moral code from this direction, I go with the tao. Generally non-interventionist; go with the gut on a case by case basis. There is no objective morality, but perhaps some "objectively moral" paradigms shared by the greater society.

[Captain Scarlet]

Other for me.

I tend towards desirism. On the basis of which morality is the practice of:
- shaping malleable desires
- promoting desires that tend to fulfill other desires; and
- discouraging desires that tend to thwart other desires.

[robvalue]

[Multiple edits!] Thanks for the input everyone

It has become clear that what I refer to as morality is not the same as what some other refer to. That is fine. I'm not sure what I would call these alternate versions, but at least you know what I mean when I say the word morality I'm not claiming mine to be the "correct" definition; simply the one that makes most sense to me regarding the point of the terminology. If you think ISIS sit around thinking, "Haha! We're so evil. We're objectively worse than the West. We're doing exactly what we think is the wrong thing" I think you may be being naive. In fact, what seem to us like crazy societies would probably like to "objectively condemn" the way we go about things just as much as we'd like to condemn them. Who is "right"? Objectively, no one is right, in my definition of morality.

Here is my new refined definition. Thanks to your ideas, I've expanded it beyond simply "intent":

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The action of a person, to the best of their knowledge and according to their beliefs at the time the action is taken is:

A moral action: an attempt by them to do the right thing regarding other people/animals. This should include where possible careful consideration of the method used, enough reflection to recognize the need to consult others before acting and ownership of the results of the action, whether they were intended or not.

An immoral action: one which they think is wrong, and are unconcerned with the consequences for others.

A neutral action: one that is neither intended to be right nor wrong.

Calling an action moral from their perspective does not mean I think what they have done is necessarily actually in the best interest of others. It doesn't mean I think they should be allowed to do it and not be stopped or put in prison. The law and morality aren't the same thing. It simply means they honestly believed they were doing the right thing, nothing more. Also note that a greater understanding implies a greater responsibility to use that understanding in your decisions. Of course we can objectively say that someone has been harmed by an action, even if the person was intending to do the right thing. I see no need to plaster this obvious objective consequence over the top of morality as well; simply assuming everyone else understands and agrees with our own morality is pointless and godlike. To say "I wouldn't have done that" is accurate, but entirely self centred and not useful. Of course, you can explain to the person why you wouldn't have done it. That is the important part. Then maybe you can shift their morality in your direction through reason.

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I was waiting for someone to bring up Hitler

I don't know what was in the mind of Hitler. I can't know whether he truly thought he was doing a good thing or not. He was almost certainly mentally "different" from other people, so his sense of right and wrong was probably unrecognisable to us.

So maybe, yes. From his point of view, if he genuinely thought he was doing a good thing, I would consider him moral from his perspective. It's perfectly possible he was simply manipulating situations to gain power and prestige, not thinking it was of any real benefit to other people. In that case, he was being immoral by his own standards. To me, morality isn't about agreeing with or condoning actions, it's about assessing intent.

Of course, by my standards, he was immoral. If I did what he did, it would be immoral for me. I know everyone wants to be able to objectively call Hitler immoral. It's just that such a phrase doesn't mean anything.

Objectively, he killed lots of people, yes. But we can only objectively "condemn" him if we put ourselves in the position of an ultimate moral authority. We're saying we know exactly how to best measure the wellbeing of life in general. Then someone else could condemn us, using a different standard. It's all relative. Being uncomfortable with morality being relative doesn't stop it being so.

If you're simply measuring the outcome of actions regardless of intent, then I don't think this is morality. It may be that Hitler simply didn't have any morality, he was a psychopath/sociopath. So from his point of view, his actions were amoral.

We condemn Hitler as a society, what he did does not fit with our norms. In another society, it may have fitted perfectly well. I think people mistake these norms for objective morality. Clearly they are not, because they change. To claim that we're somehow at the peak of morality now and know the "best morality" is ludicrous. In the future, people will look back at some things we did with the same disgust we look back at slavery with. So where's the objectivity? I personally condemn several things society says is OK, I try and stay ahead of the norms. Am I objectively more moral than most people in society? Of course, I feel I am more moral by my standards. But other people are doing what they think is moral (or at least not immoral) by their standards. So for me to simply announce I'm morally superior is pointless and incorrect. But again, this is all according to my definition of morality. If morality means something else to you, then you won't agree with my statements. But if you use another word for what I call morality, do you agree with my reasoning?

Examples of non-objective moral situations:

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My baby example. Is it more moral to let my baby live until 10 and die, or give it a treatment which makes it live until 20 in pain? The answer: neither are objectively more moral than the other. Anyone disagree?

I open a door and it whacks my wife in the head. Ouch! Was that action objectively immoral? I caused her unnecessary harm. I'd say the action itself has no morality. It's the intent behind it that is important.

(A) I genuinely had no idea she was there. I thought she was downstairs, she went up without me realising it. It was a pure accident, and as such it was not immoral. It wasn't moral either, simply neutral. Of course, consequences still happen and I should take responsibility.

(B) I knew she was behind the door and opened it fully aware it would hurt her. This is immoral.

It's exactly the same action both times. So unless we include intent, how can we objectively rate the action? If we exlude intent, then accidents become immoral. This commits the mistake of assuming everyone always knows what the outcome of all their actions will be at all times. This is obviously false.

And now: I firmly believe some people are demons and need killing. I genuinely think I'm helping society. I have a mental disorder which makes some people appear as demons, and anyone trying to convince me otherwise I see as a demon. I kill as many as I can. I am being moral, from my perspective. If a mentally well person performed the same actions, it would be immoral from their perspective (probably). Again, it's not about condoning actions or consequences. It's about intent. If we simply measure the consequences, we again put ourselves as the ultimate authority of what a "good and mentally well person" should do.

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[Pyrrho]

...
The action of a person, to the best of their knowledge and according to their beliefs at the time the action is taken is:

A moral action: an attempt by them to do the right thing regarding other people/animals. This should include where possible careful consideration of the method used, enough reflection to recognize the need to consult others before acting and ownership of the results of the action, whether they were intended or not.

An immoral action: one which they think is wrong, and are unconcerned with the consequences for others.

A neutral action: one that is neither intended to be right nor wrong.

Calling an action moral from their perspective does not mean I think what they have done is necessarily actually in the best interest of others. It doesn't mean I think they should be allowed to do it and not be stopped or put in prison. The law and morality aren't the same thing. It simply means they honestly believed they were doing the right thing, nothing more. Also note that a greater understanding implies a greater responsibility to use that understanding in your decisions. Of course we can objectively say that someone has been harmed by an action, even if the person was intending to do the right thing. I see no need to plaster this obvious objective consequence over the top of morality as well; simply assuming everyone else understands and agrees with our own morality is pointless and godlike. To say "I wouldn't have done that" is accurate, but entirely self centred and not useful. Of course, you can explain to the person why you wouldn't have done it. That is the important part. Then maybe you can shift their morality in your direction through reason.
...

I disagree with your criteria.  You would be telling us that most drunk drivers are being moral, because at the time the decision is made, they believe they can drive themselves home.  There is generally no evil intent.

I would say that they should have known that driving while drunk is not safe and they should not do it.  I do not care if they believe at the time of their action that they are doing nothing wrong.

Also, people are often willfully ignorant, such that they try to avoid thinking about things and learning about them, and that affects what they believe (and as a consequence, what they do).


Regarding your earlier post:

I entirely agree it is subjective and relative.

My idea of morality is you judge a certain person by their own standards, and their own beliefs. So if someone is doing the best they can with what they know and are capable of, then they are being moral, even if the result is bad. If I did the same action as them, with far greater knowledge and skills, knowing what would happen (something bad), then I'd be immoral.

But to say "That would be immoral if I did it, so it's immoral for you to do it" seems pointless to me. The action is going to appear to different people all sorts of degrees of moral. But morality is meant to be a measure of how much a person is trying to do good, not how well they succeed by other people's standards. For one thing, this "standard" it's being held to is going to be the arbitrary one that happens to be held by whoever is making the judgement.

A super powered alien could turn up and declare the whole of humanity to be immoral because all our methods seem primitive to them and have caused unnecessary damage. Is that a fair assessment? I'd say no. We did the best with what we knew.

This is my take anyway To define morality any other way seems to defeat the whole point of it. We have plenty of other ways of measuring objective success.

I don't think it is useful to try to define "morality" as "someone doing what they believe is moral."  (If you need me to use actual quotes from your post, I can do that, but it will make the point harder to follow.)  Aside from the problem of using a concept to define itself (which makes it completely useless as a definition), I don't think morality is reducible to intentions alone.

[robvalue]

I agree with your point about being drunk, and indeed willfully ignorant. If you have knowingly put yourself in a situation where you are impaired but required to make important decisions, then that adds immorality.

What else do you think is missing?

By "doing the right thing" I mean trying to maximise the wellbeing of other people/animals and reduce unnecessary harm. I should have stated that explicitly.