Intrinsic morality

[Elfa]

I think that the capacity for acting based on morality is natural for humans. But the moral rules vary from culture to culture. There is empathy, and some would say that even other animals may be empathetic, but I don't know if I would call it morality... I've seen a video of a cat trying to save another from a bath; a dog dragging a dead dog from a road full of cars passing by; and I read a researcher saw a monkey throwing a hurt bird, maybe to make it fly... It seems more like empathy to me...

 

[Ginkgo]

I heard that morality is of a religious nature while ethics is secular. Oh yeah that was Peguy.

 

[Munchies]

Instrinsic? What is that? i can understand that killing someone for no reason is "wrong" due to my personal morals. but on a universal level, to say instrinsic implies a god which made laws. Lets not get into subjective objectivity

 

[UniqueMixture]

I mean intrinsic in the sense of being "controlled" by physical factors outside of the individual's control. So for example this is not saying you should/should not be sociable but rather that inclination towards sociability can increase with certain physical properties and that one needs not look only at the physicality of the thing in itself but also the networks of relationships it is tied to. So for example attractive people tend to develop better social skills because others seek out interaction with them more. They have to learn how to navigate other people's reactions to them better as a survival mechanism. This is why women tend to have better social skills than men however that one quality is not solely determinant of social development

 

[Elfboy]

Just to a small extent. I believe it's mostly social construction. 500 years ago most of you would be raised to believe slavery is a good thing - and would end up believing in it. Today, if I was born as an aborigine, I probably wouldn't feel very guilty about letting a defective baby die - first because it's what everybody does; second because he's supposed to be the incarnation of evil.

no, just Fe users. the Fi users would still have known it was wrong

 

[skylights]

I think there is instinctive empathy and an instinctive sense of fairness, which combine to result in an instinctive facet to personal sense of morality.

I tend to think of morality as operating in "spheres" though. In other words, in most situations, it is very context-bound. (Yes, including for Fi users! Fi is a process, not its contents!)

For example - in terms of saving an old man or baby, my relationship with the two beings would impact who I chose to save, as would how much I knew about their relationships with other people. Were the child an orphan and the old man a lively, healthy grandfather of a large family, I would choose to save the old man, because of the extent of the impact on the people around him. My personal belief is that the importance of their lives is equal... so it is really a net zero in terms of losses and gains for saving one versus the other in terms of static morality. Thus I can move to the sphere of context - beyond the fairly black-and-white "all lives are equal" personal belief - to make an ethical decision.

 

[A window to the soul]

I think there is instinctive empathy and an instinctive sense of fairness, which combine to result in an instinctive facet to personal sense of morality.

I tend to think of morality as operating in "spheres" though. In other words, it is very context-bound. (Yes, including for Fi users! Fi is a process, not its contents!) In the example of saving an old man or baby, my relationship with the two beings would impact who I chose to save, as would how much I knew about their relationships with other people. Were the child an orphan and the old man a lively, healthy grandfather of a large family, I would choose to save the old man, because of the extent of the impact on the people around him. I feel like their lives are otherwise equal... so it is really a net zero in terms of losses and gains for saving one versus the other in terms of static morality.

Interesting. I would do the opposite. I would save the orphaned baby because it's helpless, and its life has just begun. My relationship wouldn't impact my decision.

 

[Cellmold]

Interesting topic. Ill admit my own view is somewhere between understanding the necessity for our own morals and laws and at the same time knowing that they only work because we want them to.

I dont know if creatures besides humans, (and maybe intelligent ones like dolphins), can really have an idea about morality. For most animals life and death are just things that happen, I dont believe they attach anything to them and the same goes for theirs and other creatures actions.

Then of course as others have said; natural disasters, regardless of scale, do not care who they hurt or what happens to others, since there is likely no consciousness to guide it.

However in the context of humanity, I believe the very makeup of our minds lends us towards the formation of moral values. Always being the social, group, creatures that we are means that it is part of our survival. It might be seen as not intrinsic since it is often a case of social osmosis that teaches us such values growing up, but to me I see the cultivating of moral values within human groupings as something inevitable, of course the interesting part is whether or not those morals are good or bad depending upon who is viewing them at the time and how their own moral opinions have been formed.

Of course this could also be interesting from the side of objective vs subjective. Objectively it seems better to protect the group as a whole, sometimes this might lead into ostracisation or even killing of those who were previously part of the group so as to benefit the rest. Subjectively it is better to protect individuals and then lead that into a view of the whole using the subtleties of a situation. For a subjective viewpoint, cutting someone off or down would not always be neccessary for the benefit of the group and may over time, hurt it.

In any case, as I said before, interesting topic.

 

[Rasofy]

no, just Fe users. the Fi users would still have known it was wrong

There's no right or wrong, it's a matter of convenience.

 

[skylights]

Interesting. I would do the opposite. I would save the orphaned baby because it's helpless, and its life has just begun. My relationship wouldn't impact my decision.

I've been in an ethics class that had this discussion and we were actually divided about half and half. The ones who said the old man say because he has so many connections to life, while the baby is somewhat of a free floater; the ones who said the baby mainly said the baby hasn't gotten the chance to live or exert its free will yet, whereas the old man has, so the old man has "had his turn" while the baby still "deserves" one. I feel like either way it sucks. I don't really see either choice being more morally correct than the other... just different.

 

[Ginkgo]

Every conscious human being acts upon "oughts" and "ought nots". It doesn't matter if you want to consider it a matter of basic inclination rather than ethics, the same fundamental aspect applies.

 

[A window to the soul]

I've been in an ethics class that had this discussion and we were actually divided about half and half. The ones who said the old man say because he has so many connections to life, while the baby is somewhat of a free floater; the ones who said the baby mainly said the baby hasn't gotten the chance to live or exert its free will yet, whereas the old man has, so the old man has "had his turn" while the baby still "deserves" one. I feel like either way it sucks.

Too bad we can't save both.

I don't really see either choice being more morally correct than the other... just different.

Yeah.

 

[A window to the soul]

Do you believe there is such a thing as intrinsic morality? Why or why not?

Intrinsic, no. Discretion is morally correct [learned behavior (i.e., try, fail, and try again)].

 

[redacted]

No... you're misunderstanding what I am saying. Mapping them wouldn't be for the purpose of seeing which ones are correct or incorrect, but for seeing what the relationships -are-. My very question is what if ethics are "deterministic" because agency of variation (aka choice) exists at multiple levels including non-biological agency.

So in other words, let's use a classical example of ethics. There is a burning building with an old man and a baby in it which one do you save?

To me, it is not about choosing one option as correct or finding a third way it is about the subjective emotional experience of the relationships created through your actions. If you save the baby for example then though the family of the old man may feel "you made the right choice" they probably wouldn't want to interact with you anymore. What if the old man and the baby were from the same family? The emotions created would be so overwhelming it'd probably also create a lack of relationship unless the stress was sufficient to create neurological links that created a whole new holistic experience of the person saving and relating to the descision they had to make emotionally in that moment. What if that family was yours? The old man your father, the baby your child.

So let's say we neurologically map the brain. What if we could take a person bound by personal tragedy compare them to others who had been through similar experience particularly trauma and teach the others who lacked resilience to remap their networks by taking different actions, daying different things, etc. In fact we do this already it's called cignitive behavioral theory, emotion, etc.

To me the absolute morality comes frome several recognitions. Science is true and works and leaves lots of wiggle room for what shapes the universe may take. However reductionism is not true or rather it is true in conjunction with emergent holistic processes. Love to me is the feeling of everything you experience working together as one toward a specific goal and realizing that goal is but a small part of a larger process that refeeds into the holistic whole. The realization that this is simultaneously an inanimate process and something which mirrors in many respects the qualities of beings. The focusing down of that love to the person in front of you appreciating them entirely because of their flaws and then relating to them through touch, smell, shared experience... sorry I could go on forever because to me this is more of an active experience that I am describing than an intellectual excercise.

I'm not sure if I follow what you're saying, but in terms of ethics being deterministic, I would say from a certain perspective, yes, they are. We label things "right" and "wrong" because of our neurological states, which are purely physical and predicated on past physical things. So we could call morality intrinsic if we're just saying the labels good and bad are entirely functions of deterministic phenomena.

That seems to miss a little bit about what people mean when they talk about intrinsic morality, though. My idea is that those people are referring to morality existing as some external and stable thing that humans discover. Using the humans themselves as the source of the "objective" data (like with brainscans) is completely self-referential and doesn't really inform anyone about how they should think through moral decisions.

 

[UniqueMixture]

I think it does in a sense. It can be tied to impact on relationships for example. So we can see what kind of behaviors lead most to the kind of outcomes an individual desires. I dunno.

 

[redacted]

I think it does in a sense. It can be tied to impact on relationships for example. So we can see what kind of behaviors lead most to the kind of outcomes an individual desires. I dunno.

It could help us figure out what most people would do in a specific situation, or even the difference between what they think someone should do and what they would actually do. That's good information to have from a social psychology standpoint, for sure. The problem is that most people aren't satisfied with the average human response to a situation. They want to find an ideal and strive for it. The average human does not act in an ideal way whatsoever. Take diffusion of responsibility as an example, the Kitty Genovese murder is a situation in which a narrative of deterministic morals wouldn't help anyone grow as a moral being.