The issue is believing that everyone has a right to their beliefs but then attacking them. It’s like in cultural anthropology: you should only judge a culture by its own internal morals and standards and not impose your outside view when studying them. Kinda like Star Trek Prime Directive.

If you TRULY believe everyone is entitled to their own morals, then you’re breaking that when you criticize someone else’s. After all, they have their own morals system and you’re perfectly fine with that. Your morals can only include your actions. If you believe that your morals are objectively the best, you’re no longer thinking the first thing anymore. It’s subjectivism vs objectivism.

There are two opinions: mine and wrong.

It seems like that tension between those things (which I’d expect are natural intuitions that many people experience) would be a foundational principle in ethics. Is it? Is that the joke?

This, we sadly have people who believe that open-mindness is a virtue, as long as you’re open-minded in the exact same way as everypony else.

Setting aside the unshakeable part, morality should be somewhat rigid. While relative, that doesn’t mean morality can or should change on a whim.

Probably in relation to the use of ‘relative’, I guess a synonym for subjective?

(Edit) I thought is was an interesting comment btw

Seems my brain autofilled the concept in, with the post image being confused why someone would consider opposing morals to their own as terrible.

“Moralality is subjective” is a common way to say “Well my morals are different than yours and that’s okay” to justify immoral behavior. With the image being confused about students acknowledging morals being culturally formed, while not entertaining debate on their own morals.

Yes, morals are a subjective thing that only exist with a mind to perceive them.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t right or wrong morals. That doesn’t mean anyone should entertain debate over the morality of whether, say for example, white supremacy is “just an opinion, bro”. There’s nothing confusing about acknowledging that it’s a mindset caused by culture, and also viewing it as a “moral monstrosity”.

… I’m also posting these ramblings half asleep.

So you legitimately don’t recognize the screenshot as being fundamentally based around the issues of subjectivity and objectivity?

I mean… what are you on about?

The keyword there is experience.

You are a subject. Suffering isn’t an object, it’s a feeling. A concept.

Subjective doesn’t mean “not real”. It’s something that needs a subject to exist. The suffering, just like morals, do exist. They are real, they can be measured, they can be discussed, they have real effects.

What makes them subjective isn’t “well that’s like, just your opinion, man”, it’s the fact that without a subject to experience them, they would cease to exist.

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Except that they probably don’t think that.

However, they might think that a professor exposing himself to his students is an abuse of power and sexual harassment, due to the local cultural consensus around what that specific action means, and the unequal relationship between teacher and student.

Well because we have indecent exposure laws. Hanging your dick and balls out in public is not relevant to cancel culture or fashion.

We used to have academic freedom. Now we just have sensitivity trainings and PANTS. SHACKLES OF THE MIND, I TELL YOU!

And the evil guys are yelling that the other side is evil, while the other side is too good to call anyone evil 😔

I think the person replying to you actually just outlined the point the post made. You can frame all of these views for both sides, and could let two people on both side argue about who is actually trying to be cruel.

As much as I’d agree so much evil shit is going in, it’s a good point about how perceptions from others don’t change our own views lately and we aren’t even interested in discussing them. I also understand your point of there being no reason to try discussing them, but that’s the view the people on the other side have had for the past 9 years now, and that’s why we’re where we are. I’m not American but I truly wonder if there’s a way that people can capitulate to each other without having to start a civil war.

I mean yeah, the democrats are violent, authoritarian, and and generally awful.

I can’t help but be struck at how cowardly ‘moral relativism’ seems. Yes, you could potentially offend or step on someone’s toes if you express moral outrage at the practice of childhood genital mutiliation, for example, but are you truly opposed if you are willing to contextualise said opposition? If you have a strong moral objection to something, then have a strong moral objection.

There are 8 billion people, and not all of them are going to or have to agree with you. There’s absolutely no need to play the chameleon to keep everyone happy.

If your moral objection to something isn’t universal, then it isn’t an objection.

I’m gonna guess French people

The correct answer is to map tab to spaces in your IDE.

My morality is built on furtherment of mankind technologically, with weights assigned to satisfaction and an aversion to harm. Here are some examples on how to apply this logically and without any emotion, empathy included:

• It’s kind of like not really believing in human rights but supporting them anyways because the people who oppose human rights are destructive and inefficient.
• Humans are animals. We must act according to our basic wants and needs in a way that maximizes our satisfaction, or else we are acting against our own nature. However, we must do this in a way that causes no harm, or we have failed as a collective species.
• Diversity is a must because exclusivity is a system which consistently fails every time is has ever been tested.
• The death penalty is taboo not because life is sacred but because one person deciding the importance of another’s life is intellectually bankrupt and only leads to a spiral of violence.
• All life is meaningless, full stop, which gives us the right to assign whatever meaning we like, and having more technology, with equal control over it by each individual person, gives us the collective power to make more choices.

I will not be taking any questions, meatbags

This is gonna get out of hand.

Morality is, and always has been, built entirely upon empathy. Understanding how someone else feels and considering the greater implications beyond yourself is the fundamental building block to living a moral life.

Stoning people to death for mixing fabrics was based on morality too.

<overly dramatic threat of violence here>

Tabs are the one true way! All those who blaspheme against the might tab will be regex’d into compliance.

Vertical or horizontal tabs? And I don’t mean browser tabs.

The humor is based on a seeming contradiction this guy’s students exhibit.

They apparently simultaneously believe:

1. in a relativistic moral framework - that morality is a social construct (that can mean other things, too, but morality as a social construct is a very common type of relativistic moral framework)

2. that their morality is correct and get outraged at disagreements with their moral judgments.

This isn’t logically inconsistent, but it is kind of funny.

It isn’t logically inconsistent because, if you believe morality is relative and what is right/wrong for people in other societies is not necessarily right/wrong for people in your society, then assuming that the professor and his student are part of the same or similar societies, they should share the same or similar morality. People in the same society can disagree on who is a part of their society as well as what is moral. Ethics is messy. So, it is not necessarily logically inconsistent to try to hold others to your relativized moral framework - assuming you believe that it applies to them too since “relativized” doesn’t mean “completely individualized”. And, due to globalization, you might reasonably hold a pretty wide range of people to your moral views.

It is kind of funny because there is a little bit of tension between the rigidity of the ethical beliefs held and the acceptance that ethics are not universal and others may have different moral beliefs that are correct in their cultural context. Basically, to act like your morals are universally correct while believing that your morals are correct for you, but not for everyone, represents a possible contradiction and could be a bit ironic.

A good example of relativistic morality based on culture/society:

On the Mongolian steppe, it has traditionally been seen by some nomadic groups as good and proper for the old, when they can no longer care for themselves, to walk out on the steppe to be killed by the elements and be scavenged - a “sky burial”. Many in the West would find this unacceptable in their cultural context. In fact, they might say, it is wrong to expect or allow your mom to go sky bury herself in Ohio or say… Cambridge. Instead, they might think you should take her in or put her in a home.

Now, if your professor said to you “So you don’t think Mongolians expecting their mothers to die in sky burials is wrong, but you believe me expecting my mother to die in a sky burial is wrong in Cambridge? Curious. I am very intelligent.” You could probably assume they are either a Mongolian nomad or don’t understand relatvistic morality.

I think the issue is that students aren’t consistent. They’ll fall back on relativism or subjectivism when they don’t really have a strong opinion, or perceive there to be a lot of controversy about the subject that they don’t want to have to argue about. But fundamentally, whether there’s an objective and universal answer to some moral question or not really doesn’t depend on whether there’s controversy about it, or whether it’s convenient or cool to argue about.

I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t. Variation in cultural norms is totally okay, as long as we don’t sacrifice the objective, universal stuff. (Like don’t harm people unnecessarily, etc.). The contours of the former and the latter are up for debate, and we shouldn’t presume that anybody knows the exact boundary.

Thanks bro, had read it in Plato but was on a real King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard kick when I signed up for Lemmy (still am).

I guess I’m parsing the statement as “understand it as a concept” when they mean “hold that position.”

It’s the kind of thing professors say when they want to go viral on some fascist platform.

I believe abortion is moral. I believe people who disagree are morally monstrous. I can also understand that their beliefs on whether abortion is moral or not can be a product of their culture and upbringing. What am I missing? Why is this odd?