Morality

Rortykiller · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 1:28 pm Post subject:

Knight, you're a broken record once again in a debate way out of your league. i'll consider you inability to respond a signal of defeat and leave you to wallow in your stupidity. I'd recommend a dictionary and a book, though I don't know where you'll find a reading comprehension class for someone your age. I think you're just screwed off the top like bottle caps.
_________________
"rights" are the modern recontextualizing of "holy"; a romanticized state of being beyond reproach.

PJS · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 2:51 pm Post subject:

If we are being descriptive and not normative here, the social intuitionist model may add a bit to this thread. In this model, emotions and intuitions are significant players in morality. That is they factor heavily into the way people actual arrive at moral decisions. Often we portray ourselves as dispassionate moral reasoners making objective decisions only after logical analysis. But as Hume pointed out centuries ago, and much cognitive psychology supports, reasoning is often on the other end. Reason is often the consequence and not the cause of our moral judgments.

For example, when people are given scenarios that are offensive but not harmful, the actions feel wrong to many respondents but their reasons are either lacking or very weak in support of their judgment. (The psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s examples of would you eat your dead pet dog? Would you eat a chicken carcass that had been used for masturbation?) Yet subjects typically maintain the actions are wrong nonetheless. This was so even though subjects acknowledged no harm was being done.

Affective reactions are often the best predictors of judgment; estimations of harmfulness were less predictive. Other experiments also demonstrate that people often do poorly at trying to explain the causes of their judgment. When facing a situation there is a very quick, automatic, effortless, intuitive decision. Some post hoc reasoning then follows this conclusion, where we look for arguments to support our initial intuitive judgment. The mind makes a quick call and the reasoning process acts like a lawyer defending a client, the initial intuition.

This model asserts that if we want to get a more accurate description of moral decisions –how they actually work much of the time-we need to examine the quick, effortless mental operations such as intuition and perception. Experiments suggest that people generate these causal explanations for their behavior out of “a priori causal theories.” Since we do not have access to the automatic, quick, often unconscious evaluations that precede reasoning, we justify these right/wrong impressions on what we can access – a priori moral theories. These may in actuality be effects of our immediate impressions.

Moral reasoning does play other roles of course, but psychologists such as Haidt point out that once conflict has begun, such reasoning is largely ineffective between debating individuals. Neither person is persuaded after conflict emerges. However prior to conflict and when communicating with friends, allies, or neutral parties, new perspectives can be built through rational discourse. Cultural influences come into play as well.
_________________
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.
-John Dewey

Rortykiller · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 3:24 pm Post subject:

I think that raises a chicken or the egg question. I don't directly dispute what you're saying, namely that morality is not subject to reason or logic, but is instead a vague and defensive attempt to justify something without substantial reasoning. Now, is it an intrinsic quality of humans to use morality as a sort of untouchable platitude within which we should attempt to place our actions? Or instead, is it the case that the history of morality and the vocabulary that accompanies it permitting us to think and act within this paradigm? Specifically, if our language required, say, rational explanations for actions and evaluates everything in terms of rationality (Mr. Spock); would we be thinking or using terminology about morality?
Instead of trying to find out how morality works, I personally think we should try and find out how and if we work without morality.
_________________
"rights" are the modern recontextualizing of "holy"; a romanticized state of being beyond reproach.

MockingGods · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 3:57 pm Post subject:

PJS · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 4:11 pm Post subject:

Wickedtruth · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 4:18 pm Post subject:

I was going to say something about morality and common sense...then I remember this Albert Einstein quote....

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

(I'm in an Einstien mood today)

LakeGeorgeMan · Posted: Fri Aug 15, 2008 4:25 pm Post subject:

	AtheistForums.com Forum Index -> Philosophy & Rhetoric General Discussion	All times are GMT - 5 Hours Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Next
Page 4 of 5