Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
It's not at all clear to me that they are even commensurable. "The Government" is just other people, ultimately. Diffusion of responsibility can create the illusion that the individuals acting on the government's behalf are somehow insulated from blame for morally impermissible activities, but anyone who has seen A Few Good Men knows how thin that illusion can be.
When individuals' understanding of their rights differ, at least one of those people is probably wrong. The realpolitik (or what are sometimes called the "facts of power") are a different consideration; you are right that powerful individuals or groups will often simply impose a view, but that doesn't make it the morally correct view. And often, powerful individuals or groups will regard themselves as bound by morality in ways that are not explainable on the reductive account you've offered here. Your concern has been expressed since ancient times (e.g. Thrasymachus in Republic), and very few moral theorists find it compelling, because it does not appear to capture the way that most people experience morality.
What then does make a morally correct view? And, assuming such a circumstance can or does exist, who is to recognize it? I also don’t see why it follows that one person is likely morally wrong (in some objective or universal sense) when two disagree on their rights. It’s as likely, it seems to me, that they could both be wrong, or both be right based on incomplete information.
Sticking just to the constitution of the us (including the bill of rights), I’m not persuaded that even all signatories agreed what it meant. And that’s an arbitrary, defined set of rights and relationships. I happen to agree with a particular interpretation of much of it, partly due to conditioning and partly to sharing certain values with some of the drafters (could also be due to conditioning, tough to tell). But my interpretations differ widely from many others. Have so far been unable to persuade a sufficiently powerful group to my point of view, and so I remain coerced into abiding by understandings with which I disagree. Is this a moral outcome? How am I alone to determine that? How are you and I? How are we as a polity?
You appear to mostly be asking the basic questions of moral realism versus moral relativism. A majority of philosophers either accept or lean toward moral realism. A big reason for this, I think, is that retreating to moral relativism is like the original motte-and-bailey. It's the kind of thing people say when they feel like they are losing an argument about morality. But if someone starts torturing you, or tries to enslave you, or steals your precious belongings, or otherwise wrongs you, it would be very surprising if your reaction were simply, "eh, who even knows how to do morality, really? Maybe they're doing the right thing, by torturing me for their own amusement." In fact there is a very high chance that, if you thought it might change their activity, and maybe even if you had your doubts about that, you would try to reason with them, in part by appealing to morals. So it is no accident that, for thousands of years now, there has been very broad agreement among people thinking about these matters carefully that ethics is first and foremost grounded in human reasoning.
I'm not saying that this makes the answers easy, or that it makes the answers uncontested, and most of the time those answers are rooted quite deeply in the human condition, so it would be a mistake to assume they are definitely universal in nature, even if they are broadly applicable to humankind. But there is absolutely nothing arbitrary about this process. Powerful people do act to subvert it, but there has never in history been a shortage of criticism of people in power!
Yes, "at least one of those people is wrong" also means both could be wrong.
No, this is not how "being right" works. If you would be right if you had all the information, but you don't have all the information and you are wrong, then you are still wrong. (You might lack all the information and accidentally be right, but then you're just lucky.) This is just how truth works.
But now that you've removed the discussion from the actual issues and retreated into simple relativism, you've stopped expressing any points (and essentially claimed that there is no way for us to reason to a shared understanding) because moral relativism is in fact a thought-terminating cliche. If you really do accept it, then I have no way of persuading you, and you have no way of persuading me, so it's not clear why you're even talking to me about it. I have reason to talk to you, of course--I believe you actually don't believe what you've suggested here that you believe. But if I'm wrong (as I may well be!) and you're right, then your own judgment on the matter is irrelevant, and the only point of substance you can really contribute here is to discourage substantive conversation. I'm not interested in continuing that conversation, as it seems to me that it can only either be false, or true but both useless and boring.
This mischaracterizes my statement. I meant, right based on the available information. There is no speculative conditional embedded there. And, as a practical matter, there is always incomplete information, and always, two minds will interpret the same information differently. In the case where their capacity and approach to logic is identical and without error, they may still reach opposing conclusions. They are nevertheless both "right."
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You seem to have sidestepped my question, which was not “are morals relative,” or even, “why do you believe in moral absolutes.”
It was rather, how do individuals and groups determine morals? This is also not a question about politics, but rather procedural. I don’t think your answer would be “long tradition,” but I guess it could be. That runs counter to your confession if individual rights, however, as many groups across the world, often in the minority, have lengthy traditions different from Europe’s.
For example, certain Buddhist traditions would, in fact, hold that allowing torture of oneself is a moral imperative.
FWIW, I certainly don’t feel like I am losing a debate, or even having one. I’m simply asking clarifying questions about assertions of yours that seem presumptive. I do appreciate your engagement.
I will push back on one thing though. If the basis of your belief in “moral realism” is simply long tradition, I don’t see how thousands of years is sufficient. Humanity has been around for much longer. And I can’t think of any moral that is universal and also divorced from economics. Perhaps you can provide an example? Maybe involuntary euthanasia of old people? Not sure that goes back much before the Hebrews in the western tradition, nor has it ever been universal.
Another way to ask my question might be, what is the standard against which you measure moral truth, and where does it come from?
I answered this quite directly, actually:
I am a contractualist, so there is greater detail on what I think the process actually looks like (and some standard objections to my view) behind that link.
It's not. The basis of my belief in moral realism is reason and experience. Specifically, I find moral relativism to be self-undermining; I also don't know anyone who practices applied relativism in a persuasively principled way.
I explicitly said
so I don't understand what your question (or economics) has to do with anything.
As with every other category of truth you value, the answer to both questions is "human reason."
So I read your linked encyclopedia entries. I'm not sure the author of the moral realism entry would agree that "human reason" is equivalent to moral truth, or that it can exist in any objectively ideal form. Based on these entries alone, it would seem that relativism and realism are not directly antithetical. Rather, realism might be a subset of objectivism, the true antithesis of relativism. But I'm not into binary synthesis, so that probably doesn't matter much.
However, it seems from the articles, your agreement that no moral universal exists places you in one of the modified relativist camps. These seem to take a realist approach but only within particular contexts, such as a society; in your case, broad humankind.
I'm still unclear on two things. One question I didn't see answered in your linked entry is why anyone should care whether none of their peers could reasonably reject any particular proposition? What about Rick Sanchez? His skills are infinite, enabling him to act in any direction he wills. Every choice is executed in a perfectly well-reasoned way, what logical basis could persuade him to engage in any contract with anyone?
The question remains, too, what is the procedure by which human reason may be made manifest? What basis is there for the presumption that every human has the same concept of "reasonably?" If no such presumption is in play, how can a contract form without a common framework? As a practical matter, noone's conception will be identical, and some will vary a lot. What basis exists to coerce one to accept another's conception? Whose conception should be the one enforced?
Because we have good reason to coexist with others; it's in our interest to have friends, family, and the like. Obviously Rick Sanchez is at least superhuman (and, correspondingly, fictional). Essentially no one can live without other people, and almost no one really wants to; even those who give it a serious go can never transcend the fact that their present independence requires substantial past dependence (on caregivers as a child, on a linguistic community, on a pre-existing economy, etc.).
Actually this is substantially what drives people's interest in Rick Sanchez as a character--he does not embody independence so much as he embodies ambivalence about his independence. He doesn't strictly need other people, but indulging this fact dehumanizes him, which he's not entirely on board with. If he wasn't constantly dragging Morty around, helping his family even though he totally doesn't care about them, etc. the show would be... well, not necessarily boring, but at best kind of power pornography. Imagine a Just Rick show in which he transcended all connection to everyone--his family, alt-Ricks, gods, whatever. He never has to justify himself to anyone else, he never shares his joy or pain with anyone else, he just goes places and does things without regard for what anyone thinks (good or bad!). Without the desire to justify his actions to others, he would become totally unrelatable as a character.
Instead, we have Rock and Morty, in which Rick is relatable precisely because he cannot transcend his need to justify himself. It's not that he craves love or approval, exactly, but he embodies the tricky emotions we all have about our interpersonal relationships. The people closest to us bring us the most pain! Relationships are effort, and often thankless effort! And yet they are also the site of our most desired and celebrated victories, our greatest joys and pleasures. I think I mentioned in a comment on a different topic recently the movie A Monster Calls, which explores the same themes from a slightly different angle (spoiler: the kid is conflicted because he does love his mom, deeply, but he kind of just wants her to die already, because her protracted illness is really screwing with his emotions).
I often encounter people who respond to contractualism in approximately this way--"what if I don't feel the need to justify myself to anyone, ever?"--and while it is maybe possible in theory, in practice we would identify such a person as a true sociopath, who still needs to pretend to justify themselves in most cases, since even sociopaths do usually need some support from society to live. The vast majority of people, on reflection, find that they do feel the need to justify themselves to a spouse, parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, someone whose good opinion of them matters to their overall well-being. This is why I draw human hedges around "universal" morality; I can conceive of some alien being that is wholly self-existent and self-sufficient, while also being eminently rational, that may have a separate form of morality I would find, well, alien. But even the least-connected of humans will probably fail to rise to that level.
Thank you again for your continued indulgence.
I think we agree that Rick Sanchez is an interesting character in part because it explores the limits of self-sufficiency. I disagree he is supernatural, however, at least in-universe. I think the setup is that he is someone whose intellect is so far off the chart as to render physical constraints non-existant. I also think part of the show's message is questioning whether, why, and what morals might apply to such a person.
When I was a lad I read a short story about a character who couldn't get along in society and committed some crime. As a result he was exiled to a kind of penal territory with no rules, but also no access. He was allowed to take with him anything, and ended up taking a completely reliable RV will full armor and food and ammo and energy to last a million years. Upon exile, he was promptly relieved of it entirely through a rogue's wiles (no force needed), and thereby forced to engage with his peers in exile. Ultimately he redeems himself by snitching on his new pals to the Republic. After our conversation, I expect this author (can't remember who) was exploring the contractualist ideas.
If I understand you correctly, contractualism's final authority rests on a particularity of the human condition where individual humans must, innately, remain part of the collective?
How does contractualism resolve Coases' lake problem?
It's final authority rests on reason. But yes, in the sense that "what we owe to each other" logically depends on the existence of a "we," contractualism doesn't have anything to say about what morality might look like if there were not a "we."
You'll have to be more specific. I think you might be asking questions about externalities, but first of all contractualism is a moral theory, not an economic theory. That said, my guess is that it would resolve the problem in the same way it resolves all problems, by conducting an analysis of the weights of interests and the objections individuals can raise on their own behalf to various principles for action.
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