Quote Originally Posted by gwahir View Post
if you said that as your own opinion, like, that's just the way you conceptualise it, that'd be one thing. but the fact that you said "ultimately" before it makes it a vastly short-sighted statement. and you undercut it in the next sentence, which is confusing.

i'm just not sure what you're saying. it's abiding by your own moral guidelines, even though there are certain moral absolutes?




well, i defined morality earlier. it's not hard to DEFINE. it's hard to SPECIFY. it's hard to discriminate between moral and immoral.

the closest thing we have to a coherent moral theory, i think, is utilitarianism. it concerns itself directly with the wellbeing (or at least utility, which is either happiness or preference satisfaction depending on your school of thought) of all people and an action is considered good if it leads to higher utility. utilitarianism has its flaws, but i think it's consistent and coherent.

you have a problem when you get into the nitty gritty of moral and immoral actions: first we can't all agree what wellbeing means, and then we have tremendous trouble knowing whether the consequences of certain actions will be more or less wellbeing. it's hard. and often you need to make a best guess. but in many cases, even if one can't be sure what course of action will lead to the best outcome, it's easy to discriminate between an action that will cause MORE wellbeing (e.g. helping your recently raped daughter with medical care, counselling and unconditional love) and an action that will cause LESS wellbeing (e.g. honour-killing her).

the examples are there mostly to tie this back into a conversation about religion.
I don't agree that utlitarianism is a moral theory. Morality has to be about bringing in a transcendental operator to arbitrate between competing desires; utilitarianism is a theory giving a means of arbitration WITHOUT any transcendental operators. For example, if there is a woman in a cave on a hill who has a child, and nobody knows of her existence, and an infertile couple desperate for a child come along and decide to steal the baby from her, there's no clear reason why that would be objectionable to utilitarianism - you'd have to show that somehow the one woman's suffering was greater than the couples' -and their families'- joy. I don't think this can be done without question begging, and yet I find the scenario abhorrent. Utilitarianism is mostly a heuristic that describes what we view as ideal in non-moral situations - i.e. if a pregnant lady and I stumble across a chocolate bar in the desert after days of starvation I don't believe it is morally imperative for me to do more than share the bar with her - but I like to think I would, because it benefits her and the child more than it would me. But in a moral situation - i.e. My pregnant wife and I discover that our desert companion has a chocolate bar saved in his backpack and so we steal it so that she can eat it- a distinction creeps in for me precisely because I think that the situation cannot be reduced to maximising benefits for participants considered collectively.
If it can, that's not morality - that's the ideal way to act in its absence.