nv - 19 December 2011 08:24 PM
[
I wasn’t disagreeing with you as much as I was attempting to direct you to a different angle I feel is worth considering in your formulations.
So what exactly am I trying to get at? Just that answers to morality-style situational questions are typically formed well before any such actual situation presents itself. To examine a culture’s moral habits, we must look at its various histories and mythologies—its favored narratives—as well as its education systems, governments and its level of prosperity, or success in coping with what nature hands out. To examine the individual’s moral habits, we need to look at their upbringing, education level, job training/prosperity, and their personality types and quirks. People don’t make moral judgements on the fly. Rather, individuals arrive to a given morality-decision circumstance via emotional connection and resulting response—shortcut methodology, as with a macro key in a word processing program. We rely heavily on such emotional responses because we can’t possibly analyze ethics with anything approaching thoroughness on the fly.
I agree, our moral intuitions make most, and for some people, virtually all moral choices. The rational part of our brains then typically just make up justification stories (as an unconscious, ad hoc process as shown by experiment) for why we did whatever we did when we acted according to our moral intuitions.
nv - 19 December 2011 08:24 PM
[We need to have already done the analytical and educational work. In a very real sense, a person is a controlled agent at the moment of most any given decision-making rather than a moral agent.
So when does one think and act fully as a legitimate moral agent? It’s a process that takes place gradually over broad spans of time as we grow up and learn lessons. In fact, it doesn’t end till we die. Some of us end up quite analytical as we ponder the nature of our social environments, as we read literature, take in and contribute (if we’re able) to arts, perform various life roles such as parent, spouse, friend, neighbor, worker, etc. Others pay less attention, relying instead on lessons directly taught to us, without much questioning. Where we end up on this spectrum of sorts is a result of personality, upbringing, and levels of prosperity (success in dealing with nature).
At least that’s how it seems to me. I’m not arguing against the sort of analysis you’re engaging in because it attempts to follow paths of philosophical history. Someone needs to do it, and it won’t be me. I do hope, however, that my take on this helps your analysis in some way, Mark.
nv, I also find little to disagree with here.
I’ve been thinking about how the moral principle “Altruistic acts that increase the benefits of cooperation in groups are moral” might be applied if two cultures concluded it actually was a useful moral principle. I expect both cultures would say something like: “Well at last, science recognizes our moral culture which, of all the moralities in the world, is the best at ‘increasing the benefits of cooperation in groups’ and therefore is the morality all cultures should adopt”.
I don’t expect multiple cultures adopting the proposed moral principle to instantly resolve their differences about what is moral. At best, I expect they will be able to focus that conversation on what acts are “altruistic that increase the benefits of cooperation in groups”. But even that is, I think, a potentially large improvement.
