answers about morality?

[SomeRandom]

If they don't believe a divine and supernatural deity, they are not theist.

Well they do, they worship many Gods, they just reject the notion of a creator deity. As is my understanding. Far be it for me to speak on their behalf

 

[LukeS]

What about: for any morally relevant situation, additional information may lead to a change of opinion, therefore there is never sufficient information for a perfect opinion, as there may always be more information forthcoming.

Daleks replace Jesus in paintings and Cornwall goes crazy

 

[ThePainefulTruth]

That is not true.
Most wars are not due to moral reasons. they are for pride, greed and stupidity.
Can you give me an example of a war that was made on moral basis?

In some wars, both sides are wrong (e.g. the Civil War, WWI). But often one side is only defending itself, prime example WWII.

I think we can all agree that we still have a very long way as a society until we will successfully manage crime rates.
Only today we start to understand that force and intimidation don't really solve anything.

So the answer is pacifism and the "can't we all just sit down and reason together" approach? Would you mind volunteering over in Syria to reason with ISIS, or drug running street gangs in any number of US cities? Even the most tyrannical governments have criminals to go along with the lack of freedom.

??

A person becomes a person when he acquires full self-awareness. Just sayin'. Both sides of the abortion issue are locked and loaded for irrational results.

 

[Segev Moran]

That's my point morals are set by emotional states of society at whole not by logic. His claim is that he can logically solve any moral dilemma.

Assuming supernatural is true is not logic

 

[Segev Moran]

Objective morals are things like passive happiness, or godly perfection. They can be true before we are even aware.

What is a passive happiness?

 

[Segev Moran]

You haven't logically defended anything. Your beliefs do not make something logical. You need to present facts if you make the claim that all morals can be solved logically. I don't see it you haven't used logic at all yet.
Your comments
Pride, Greed these are moral values
I do believe some criminals (not logic)
I think we all can agree (not logic)
Is it immoral to kill yourself (question)
If abortion was considered immoral, we wouldn't allow it. (not accurate many places around the world do not allow it, those that do allow abortion have limitations)
??To determine logically if Abortion is moral or not you would need to logically define a person.

You keep dodging where is your logic?

Ok. I'll try and give you the logic (my) behind each statement:

Pride and greed are not moral values. they are human values.
Moral, in my pov, is the accepted behaviors of a society to best of its knowledge.
This of course, doesn't mean that if a society accepts rape as something valid, it will be moral in my pov. I was raised differently.
Morals are based on the current knowledge you have regarding humanity and the universe.

So morals, are the definition of what we believe is most beneficial to humans.
these are the "global morals".
beyond that, you have a subjective regional moral.
Each society has it own morals, that are many times in contradiction to the global morals (like pedophilia for example)

usually, societies that contradict the global morals, are doing so due to false logic and many times low education and understanding of reality.

so when i say logic, i mean logic in the sense that an event is beneficial to the humans as a global specie.

Starting for this assumption, we can break each statement to its logical outcomes:

War: is it logical to go to war?

the outcome of a war cannot be beneficial to humans.
although it might be blinded with greed for example, and the outcome of a war can be beneficial to specific country (a war can provide a country a great financial advantage).
but now comes the logic:

Is war beneficial to humanity?
As was will always outcome with a body count. this cannot be beneficial to humans as a global, and not beneficial to any country that suffers with the losses.

So now comes into question, what was the war about? if it was a survival war, a war that without it the country fighting will be eliminated or lose it right to exist, it cannot be considered immoral.

if the war is over land, again, i cant see a logical reason to claim land by force.
due to such idiotic thinking, we today have countries that are packed with hundreds of people for each square mile, and countries that are packed with singles per square mile.

if the war was in order to bring a more balanced demographics, i could say that there is a logic behind that war. unfortunately, i haven't come across any war that the agenda was to make the lives of humans better.

So to understand the logic, you need to weigh your value of things.

I have yet to come across anything that is more important that human life.
unfortunately, many still argue otherwise.

As for criminals:

It will be logic to execute a criminal that by doing so, a greater damage could happen.

So if a criminal grabs my bag and run, it will not be immoral to kill him. obviously, the damage if he wan't killed is much lesser than the life of that criminal.
but what if this criminal runs towards children with a knife? trying to kill them?

Is the life of children more important than a killer criminal? the answer will most likely be yes.

so based on the criminal record, the moral issue is solved.

Here are some hard cold facts that you can work on:

most people value the life of their children more than any other life.
most people rather live in harmony and piece with other humans.
most people rather not die.
most people want to be treated at least as good as any other.
most people don't want to be in misery.
most people don't enjoy pain.
most people don't enjoy being raped. (although i think i can even say all)
most people don't enjoy being tortured.
most people would like to be treated at least as equal to any other

the list is longer, but i think you get the main point of this logic.
these are facts that have been examined over and over again. the results are always the same, most people want to live in a peaceful, comfortable environment for them and their family.

now every moral question, will eventually relate to this conclusion. does this act provide a better solution to humans?

so why is rape wrong? why is it immoral to rape?

lets put it into our logic facts:

most people don't want to be raped.
rape causes harm to the person being raped, it provides harm to the people related to the victim, it provides misery and psychological damage to almost everyone that relates to the victim.

The gain from rape, is the satisfaction of a the raper to fulfill he's needs without concerning the consequences.

when you weigh the gain and loss made by rape, it is clearly logical to assume that rape is not a good act to adopt in a society.

What about violence?

lets test a case of violence of cops towards citizens?

the gain is scare tactics. citizens fear cops due their authority power.
they know that hitting a cop can result in being dead.
they know that not cooperating with a cop might cause bad outcomes to them.

in the other side, cops know they have this power, and many times will abuse it with the false logic that people should fear them because it is the only way to gain control over a society.

so now we need to check the logic behind violence as an enforcement.

the more we learn about our society, we understand that wrong distribution of resources and power, causes violence.
the solution of violence against violence, is not beneficial to either side of parties.

countries spend billions on law enforcement rather then trying to fix the cause for the high crime rates.

now please, give me a genuine moral question (and not a hypothetical one) and i will break it down to logical facts.

Lets take an example of abortion:

is it moral or not?
we don't really have an answer yet, but we do have answer to some of the cases:

logic basis:

fact: human life is important to humans.
fact: a living human is more important than a dead one.
fact: pregnancy is a right and should be treated as one.
fact: not all woman wants children.
fact: not all woman who wants children wants them exactly when they have them.
fact: not all woman are pregnant by choice.
fact: not all woman are fit to carry a child (medically or psychologically)

and some debatable facts that are the reason we still don't have definitive answer:

in its first few days, a fetus is nothing more than a collection of replicating cells.
in the following weeks, a fetus is slowly developing its vital organs.
it is only around the 3rd week of pregnancy that the fetus starts developing a nerves system.

fact: we today know how to abort without

and so on.. you can read the full stages of pregnancy here:
Stages Of Pregnancy & Fetal Development | Cleveland Clinic

based on these assumptions and fact, we can now address the question of morality when it comes to abortion:

A girl is pregnant and wants to miscarry.
We need the information of the situation to decide if it is moral or not.

how old is the girl? what is the impact of the pregnancy on her (physical and psychological)
how did she get pregnant?
how far the pregnancy is?

and many more question. once they are solved, it is a very simple answer if its moral or not to terminate the pregnancy.

 

[Segev Moran]

I haven't a clue. You haven't given enough facts to make that a question that conscience can judge.

Exactly.

No, don't fight this. I'm going to prove you wrong. Assume any set of facts that clearly support a murder.

I'll state a few, yet they are not the complete list:

the person is positioned in a place that cannot be possible unless brought there by someone else.
the person is harmed in a way it cannot inflict it by natural ways or to itself.
the person didn't ever present anything that might suggest he wanted to end his life.
the person was in a location that is not characterizing the person.
there is a suspect that might have a cause to murder the person.

I'll bet you can't name one that isn't. Now, to be clear, were talking about laws that are supposed to guide judgment on a specific moral case.

Oh. okay. that is a different story. yet there are wonderful laws that are truly moral.
so i stand behind my first response they are not all useless.

example would be "shant shmita". which is a great moral law that unfortunately cannot be applied in today's economy but it would be a great law to practice today.

another one is the law of alimony. it is a moral law.
we do however need to adjust it to fit our times, but the law itself is very useful

In the USA, our laws on murder have a history dating back a thousand years. They have been edited countless times. And yet, the same killing can be justifiable self-defense in many of the 50 states but not in others.

So the law of self-defense is useless?

When those laws agree with the judgment of the conscience of an unbiased jury, they are coincidentally right. When they conflict, they are potential biases capable of throwing justice off course. Useless.

That doesn't mean the law is useless. it means we can't enforce it correctly.

 

[Segev Moran]

Laws are the product of the reasoning faculty of our brains, so there are no laws that are not based on knowledge and logic.

Agreed.

However, moral judgments are immediate, intuitive judgments of conscience that derive from the subconscious. Aquinas was wrong. They are not judgments of reason. And conscience doesn't need to be "informed" by the Catholic Church or anyone else.

Can you give an example please of such judgement?

 

[Segev Moran]

You haven't logically defended anything. Your beliefs do not make something logical. You need to present facts if you make the claim that all morals can be solved logically. I don't see it you haven't used logic at all yet.
Your comments
Pride, Greed these are moral values
I do believe some criminals (not logic)
I think we all can agree (not logic)
Is it immoral to kill yourself (question)
If abortion was considered immoral, we wouldn't allow it. (not accurate many places around the world do not allow it, those that do allow abortion have limitations)
??To determine logically if Abortion is moral or not you would need to logically define a person.

You keep dodging where is your logic?

I am convinced i already answered this

 

[Segev Moran]

sorry I could not understand the question "Can you provide me with one moral question that cannot be solved without knowledge?". are you asking a moral question which can be solved with knowledge ( as you said "which can not be solved without knowledge").

Lol... sorry.. that came out a bit confusing.
no. I claim that every moral decision can be solved with enough knowledge.
I was asking for an example of the contrary as many people disagreed with this claim.
So i am trying to find a moral question that cannot be solved even if you have all the information about it.

I just wish to share that i feel that morality is knowledge.

Agree.

goodness is knowledge

Agree.

and goodness is god or god is goodness itself.

Not here though
I can't really understand what "goodness itself" means.

 

[Segev Moran]

Things to consider
Evolution of morality Evolution of morality - Wikipedia
Morality without religion Moral behavior in animals

Moral behaviors in animals, is not moral without religion.
The two have nothing to do with one an other.

 

[Segev Moran]

Bible says on the judgement day everything will be "laid bare" everybody will know everything in order to judge correctly. It won't happen in this lifetime, and it's nothing that mankind can achieve, it's simply that one day God will make everything known to us.

I actually think that one day humans will make everything known to humans, or we extinct... one of both

 

[joe1776]

That doesn't mean the law is useless. it means we can't enforce it correctly.

Self-defense laws are useless because, at times, they create injustices when they are allowed to trump the judgments of conscience of an unbiased jury. When they agree with the conscience of the jury, no harm is done, but we could do just as well without them. So, in what way are they useful?

 

[Segev Moran]

It's simpler than that. When someone says that "Abortion is murder!" -- they've made up their own moral rule. If they were right, then they should also feel an urge to punish the killer. But, while they are willing to punish "co-conspirators, they are not inclined to punish the woman who terminates her pregnancy. In other words, they fail to verify their rule.

Unfortunately, some actually do persecute woman who had abortion. how sad!

We are born with the inclination to punish wrongdoers.

We are born with the need to keep our society functioning. it is logical to try and eliminate (not execute!) such entities.

According to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, humans are born with a hard-wired morality. A deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. His research shows that babies and toddlers can judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; they want to reward the good and punish the bad; they act to help those in distress; they feel guilt, shame, pride, and righteous anger.

Although i am not much familiar with this study, from what i have learned in the few minutes i red about it, it is a very interesting question.
Yet i am missing a lot of information to have a genuine opinion of it.
There are some of the things i can think of from the top of my head:

Are the children of specific status or are they from all.
are the children tested in an environment where adults cannot have any chance of affecting the outcome (for example, in this short video,

, it is clear that in the first trial, the child was motivated to choose the triangle.)
children can sense tension by their parents and other being next to them.
are the children of the same age range?
what about smaller children aged 3 month for example?
are the children affected by other things like the shape and colors of the selected puppet ?

regardless of this, btw, if this experiment can prove anything, is that religion has got nothing to do with good and bad or morals

I do, btw, believe that we have a "wired" understanding of good and bad the same as animals do.
as in all other social beings, we are wired to be attracted to other beings that are helpful to us.

with humans, though, we usually ruin these natural attractions with stupidity and wrong education.

 

[Segev Moran]

Having read through the comments the thing I find hard to understand is how so many posters seem to think that morals come from within the individual. Morals are societal rules imposed upon the individual. The rules that someone uses to govern themselves would be ethics. To my mind there is no basis for an "objective" morality and the mistake some theists make when stating that without one everyone is thrown back upon their own decisions is that they fail to realise that no matter where a moral code sits on their good to bad scale it is a construct of the society that the individual has to survive within.

I Agree.
That is exactly what i am trying to find out. if some claim there is an objective morality, this means there must be a moral question that cannot be solved even if we have all the needed knowledge.

 

[Segev Moran]

Actually.. Daleks are a race genetically engineered without pity, compassion, or remorse to "hate" non-Daleks.
The Daleks live inside of machines, giving the impression that they are robots. These machines serve the purposes of protecting their precious Dalek purity from the contaminations of the universe and providing them with powerful weaponry to exterminate everyone else with.

I think there was a concept similiar to that in the show "stargate"

 

[Segev Moran]

Self-defense laws are useless because, at times, they create injustices when they are allowed to trump the judgments of conscience of an unbiased jury. When they agree with the conscience of the jury, no harm is done, but we could do just as well without them. So, in what way are they useful?

So it is better if someone tries to kill you, and you kill him as a defense, to accuse you of murder?

 

[joe1776]

Can you give an example please of such judgement?

You receive the news that your neighbor's home was invaded and she was brutally murdered. You immediately feel moral outrage. That, followed by a desire to see the killers punished. That's an intuitive judgment of conscience that the act was morally wrong.

According to Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, humans are born with a hard-wired morality. A deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. His research shows that babies and toddlers can judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; they want to reward the good and punish the bad; they act to help those in distress; they feel guilt, shame, pride, and righteous anger.

 

[joe1776]

So it is better if someone tries to kill you, and you kill him as a defense, to accuse you of murder?

No. I'm not sure why you think that question makes sense. There's a misunderstanding.

 

[Ponder This]

It seems clear to me that the children are given information and then asked to make a decision. What do you think the result would be if instead of showing the children the puppet shows, they simple presented the puppets and asked the children to choose? Would the children psychically intuit the moral nature of the puppets in the absence of information?

The question isn't whether or not information is required to make moral decisions. You can't have a moral dilemma without providing at least some information.

Let's say for example, that we have another puppet show that the children never see that explains all of the supposedly immoral actions of the villains and shows that the supposed good guys are actually up to no good. Since the babies never see these other puppet shows, they actually aren't making informed decisions. If they had, then they would've made different decisions.

I think this is the ultimate moral dilemma: how do you know that you know?

But like babies, we are free to make decisions based on appearances only, because it "feels right".
Consider the admissibility of Computer-Generated Animations In a Court of Law - Elmo projectors throwing images of crime scenes as imagined by one witness or another. It is known that demonstrations like this have a powerful influence.

So in the end, it's all about the story you choose to believe.
"You take the blue pill; the story ends; you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill; you stay in wonderland; and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." - Morpheus

Is the yellow triangle a good guy and the blue square a bad guy? Or are they just puppets in an act?
"It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." - Morpheus
"What truth?" - Neo
"You were born... into a prison... for your mind." - Morpheus