Even if all morality is subjective or inter-subjective I have some very strong opinions about tabs vs spaces
People who use tabs are monsters
Tabs are the one true way! All those who blaspheme against the might tab will be regex’d into compliance.
<overly dramatic threat of violence here>
Vertical or horizontal tabs? And I don’t mean browser tabs.
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. If you’re willing to condemn the world to your shitty code just because the tab key is quicker, you’re a selfish monster who deserves hyponichial splinters. See also: double spaces after a period.
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.
Nah, the probibitions against mixed fabrics, and who can be considered holy, and how to pray and to whom, all of those are edicts designed to exert control. It has nothing to do with morality.
Who did that? Jewish people who wore mixed fabrics were unclean and had to cleanse themselves. Who murdered people for that?
Oh no, my half remembered example of overly violent reactions to breaking moral traditions might not be literally accurate!
Did religions include extremely harsh punishments for breaking moral codes? Yes. That is the point even if the details aren’t exactly right.
You can hold to an ethical code while breaking your moral code. This seems to be an example of that, and my frustration with ethics codes of many professional societies/organizations. You can be entirely ethical yet still spend your life crating efficient life ending tools.
This is gonna get out of hand.
ANNNND
Fuck you, nuh uh
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
So, empathy like I said.
Why do you value the technological advancement of the human race? How do you determine what is advancement, and what is regression?
Why place emphasis on satisfaction and aversion to harm? How do you determine the relative levels of satisfaction and harm except through empathy?
I apologize for breaking your comment down into quotes.
So, empathy like I said.
Incorrect, it can be entirely selfish and rational, because helping others also helps you.
Why do you value the technological advancement of the human race? How do you determine what is advancement, and what is regression?
I thought I explained that pretty well. Life has the meaning we choose, technology gives more choices.
Why place emphasis on satisfaction and aversion to harm? How do you determine the relative levels of satisfaction and harm except through empathy?
I also explained that. It’s the most efficient method. It is the time-proven way to accomplish the goal of furtherment of technology, and satisfaction is also our primary motive as animals. All methods which fail this simple test, whether or not they avert harm for others, inevitably fail on a societal level. How we measure it, satisfaction and harm, is by actually measuring it via communication. Humanity has developed means of quantifying happiness and wellbeing, of assessing the wants and needs of individuals and society as a whole.
I feel like I’m just repeating myself.
As I have learned today: “tabstospaces”: true
My heart goes out to those who suffer with poor editors where this is a problem. I do empathize with them. It’s important to love others and help. That’s the code for my life: love others. Except vim users. Straight to jail.
Tabs. F alignment for aesthetic purposes
I see no paradox here. Yes, the rubrics change over time, making morality relative, but the motivation (empathy) remains constant, meaning you can evaluate morality in absolute terms.
A simple analog can be found in chess, an old game that’s fairly well-defined and well-understood compared to ethics. Beginners in chess are sometimes confused when they hear masters evaluate moves using absolute terms — e.g. “this move is more accurate than that move.
Doesn’t that suggest a known optimum — i.e., the most accurate move? Of course it does, but we can’t actually know for sure what move is best until the game is near its end, because finding it is hard. Otherwise the “most accurate” move is never anything more than an educated guess made by the winningest minds/software of the day.
As a result, modern analysis is especially good at picking apart historic games, because it’s only after seeing the better move that we can understand the weaknesses of the one we once thought was best.
Ethical absolutism is similarly retrospective. Every paradigm ever proposed has flaws, but we absolutely can evaluate all of them comparatively by how well their outcomes express empathy. Let the kids cook.
To add to this, morality can be entirely subjective, but yeah, of course if I see someone kicking puppies in the street I’ll think: “That’s intrinsically morally wrong.” Before I try to play in the space of “there’s no true morality and their perspective is as valid as mine.”
If my subjective morality says that slavery is wrong, I don’t care what yours says. If you try to keep slaves in the society I live in as well I want you kicked out and ostracized.
In moral philosophy cultural relativism isn’t merely an empirical observation about how morality develops, though. It’s a value judgment about moral soundness that posits that all forms of morality are sound in context.
(When he says “entirely relative” that signals cultural relativism).
To use your chess example a cultural relativist would hold buckle and thong to the argument that if most people in your chess club habitually play scholars mate and bongcloud then those are the soundest openings, full stop, and that you are objectively right to think that.
Of course chess is a problematic analogy because there are proven known optimums, so tha analogy is biased on the side of objective morality.
Sorry for my delay. I’m with you, and it’s possible these undergrads could be considered cultural relativists.
I suspect all they’re equipped to express is something like the prime directive from Star Trek due, potentially, to their knowledge of the troubled history of deploying foreign (e.g. colonial) mores in non-native contexts. If pressed, I wouldn’t expect any of them to truly support every moral schema without reservation.
Of course chess is a problematic analogy because there are proven known optimums, so the analogy is biased on the side of objective morality.
This confusion was my point, actually. The only proven optimums in chess relate to end game positions, as I mentioned above, due to computational complexity. For moves elsewhere in the game, such as openers, we have convincing anecdotal evidence of optimality, but we definitely cannot prove them without onerous assumptions about the opponent’s behavior.
As a moral relativist myself, I’m obligated to point out that this prompts the question of what constitutes the end game in the moral context. That is, in what situation are the extended effects of any morally relevant action known to a given moral agent? If we can find an example, only then can we begin defining a truly objective moral construct.
Until then, however, “convincing anecdotal evidence of optimality” must suffice, to the chagrin of moral absolutists everywhere.
Edit: swype errors
This is basically how teaching secular ethics always is, though. Doesn’t seem special about 2025. People will always be overconfident in their beliefs, but it’s not necessarily a coincidence or even hypocrisy that they can hold both views at the same time.
You can believe that morality is a social construct while simultaneously advocating for society to construct better morals. Morality can be relative and opposing views on morality can still be perceived as monstrous relative to the audience’s morality.
But “constructing better morals” is by itself a non-relativist statement. How can you say there are “better morals” when you follow moral relativism, which states that there is no universal set of moral principles? In other words, that morals are not comparable with each-other?
It’s not the same thing as accepting that different cultures have different set of morals, but whether some things are simply more moral than others, or not. For example, saying that slavery is always bad, and should never be allowed, is an absolutist moral statement.
I think they worded this poorly. I believe their argument was more that someone can believe that morals are constructs, and relative, but you can also believe that you should try and move people to construct morals based on your own.
I’ve had people, presumably young, argue with me on here about politics and morals. For example, I say the right to abortion is a political issue. Been screamed out that it’s not a political issue because a woman’s right to an abortion is a moral issue. Yeah, I agree, but the argument is still political. Some believe abortion is murder and that they’re right. That’s politics.
It’s like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics. “I’m on the right side of this thing so it’s not politics!” As if I’m somehow lowering the debate to mere… something?
That was one of the first things I got confused by on lemmy. Am I making sense? Just crawled in from work and I’m wasted tired.
The point they were trying to make (I believe, and this specific argument) is that the entire basis of the opposing argument is entirely based on religion and pretty much by definition specious. There is no sky daddy looking over your shoulder, and this any morality you base on its existence is inheritetly flawed at best.
What there is are women who need timely access to medical care or their lives are at risk. This is a tangible and real threat.
So treating the issue as “Politics” only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
So treating the issue as “Politics” only serves to dignify the flawed morality of one side while letting women die.
Your earlier paragraphs don’t provide any evidence for this point.
But they are moral arguments, unless politics is added into the discussion. Let me give you a different example. If I believe people are entitled to the fruits of their labor then that’s a moral point. If I believe the government should enforce everyone getting their fruits, that’s political.
If I were to believe abortion is wrong then that can be a moral point. However if I think the government should take a stand on the matter, that’s political.
It’s like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics.
I think they point they are trying to make is that once you are very very wrong about something (in their mind), it’s no longer a political position, it’s just an immoral position. And if that’s what they’re saying, I disagree with it.
I’m not saying that there are no immoral positions, I’m saying that a position can be completely immoral and still be political. I hate when people use the phrase “it’s just politics” as a shield, as though everyone else has to be OK with some incredibly shitty attitude they have, just because they have managed to also make it a political attitude.
And that’s such a terrible superpower to give to politics, too: the ability to instantly legitimize a position simply because it falls under the domain of politics.
Not to long ago, the question of “should white children and black children be allowed to go to school together” was a political issue in the U.S. And I’d say that’s still a political issue. It didn’t magically become some other type of issue just because a few decades passed and we now agree that one side was completely wrong. The fact that it isn’t actively being discussed anymore doesn’t change the fact that it falls under the umbrella of political issues. It means that someone can have a political opinion and they have to be a real piece of shit to hold that opinion.
The owning class wants to be the only class doing politics. So they brainwash the proles into thinking politics is bad.
And making people believe preserving the status quo is not political but changing it is
not just bad, but extremely venal, petty, and a thing that happens in marble rooms you aren’t allowed to go in.
It’s also a health issue. It involves choices about life, not unlike someone in a coma or another situation where they are unable to make a conscious choice about whether to continue or deny treatment.
One argument in favor of abortion I recall reading was comparing it to donating an organ while you’re still alive. You are under no obligation of donating anything, of risking your life to save another, even if you are literally the only person on Earth that can save the other. If medical professionals have to respect those choices, they should also respect the choice of mothers who decide to end an undesired pregnancy
It’s even worse than that. You can’t even be forced to donate organs or blood after you’re dead. Most places are opt-in for organ donation. A few jurisdiction are opt-out. Nowhere has mandatory posthumous organ donation. Some despotic countries have apparently used force organ harvesting on political dissidents, but no country has ever established some broad rule, based on patriotism or some such, that everyone has to donate organs after death.
In red states, pregnant women literally have less bodily autonomy than corpses.
I’ve been a College and University prof for the past 6 years. I’m in my young 40s, and I just don’t understand most of the people in their 20s. I get that we grew up in really different times, but I wouldn’t have thought there would be such a big clash between them and me. I teach about sound and music, and I simply cannot catch the interest of most of them, no matter what I try. To the point were I’m no sure I want to keep doing this. Maybe I’m already too old school for them but I wonder who will want to teach anymore…
That is the same sentiment my music teacher had 15 years ago and the same sentiment his music teacher did before that. I don’t think it’s illustrating the times as much as just that teaching is a tough and thankless job and most people aren’t interested in learning
Yeah, I’m not sure I agree with this. I’ve always said to myself that I didn’t want to fall into this old-versus-young rhetoric, but I think the situation is different. The world and technologies are changing faster than our ability to integrate them. The world in which my father lived wasn’t that different from his father’s, and neither was mine. But young people, born into the digital age, have been the guinea pigs of social media and the gafam ecosystem, which seems to have radically altered their ability to concentrate (even watching a short film is a challenge), as well as their interest in learning. They see school, even higher education, as a constraint rather than an opportunity. I have the impression that they don’t see the point of learning when a Google search or ai answers everything, and that retaining things is useless. That’s my 2 cents…
I’ll chime in and say that math teachers have said similar things about calculators/graphing calculators for 25+ years. This is most definitely you getting “old”. It’s okay—it happens to all of us.
As far as attention span, that has been an equally common refrain—going back to people complaining that radio has reduced kids attention spans.
Interesting points. I don’t think calculators are equivalent to having the sum of humanity’s knowledge, AI, and infinite content in you pocket tho. There’s a limit to how much fun you can have with a calculator… The same goes for attention in class. Not so long ago, if the class bored you, you had to wait while scribbling in a notepad. Now you can doom scroll anywhere anytime. These kids have been test subjects for ipad, youtube content and smartphone,I don’t blame them, I blame capitalism who made them addicted to social media and their parents who didn’t protect them.
I also want to add that I have some great students, invested in their studies and super bright. It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
It’s just that a majority of them now seems to be incapable of focusing on anything for more than a few minutes.
I teach chemistry at a college and I don’t think it’s any different than the past; it’s just more obvious. When I was in middle school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I brought shitty fantasy novels to read under the desk. In high-school, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I would just leave or draw band logos. In undergrad, I would tune out all the time, but I didn’t have a smartphone, so I doodled or wrote song lyrics in the margins of my notebook. Even in grad school, i would frequently just straight disassociate my way through lectures when I ran out of attention span (so every 5 minutes or so).
There’s tons of pedagogy and andragogy research that shows that humans in general only focus for 10-15 minutes at a time (and it’s even shorter for teens and males in their early 20’s), and that’s remarkably consistent across generations. I don’t think people actually have shorter attention spans; they just have an easy way to mindlessly fill that void that is harder to come back from without an interruption. Frankly, my students from Gen X all the way to Gen Alpha students do pretty good at paying attention, but even my best students still zone out every few minutes, and that’s fine. It’s just human nature and the limitations of the way our brains are structured.
Pretty much. I think a lot of the anger over phones is that it makes it real obvious when someone doesn’t care what you’re saying. You’re right that you used to look out into the classroom and couldn’t really tell who was focusing or zoned out
As someone who is young but old enough to remember when boredom was a thing let me tell you boredom sucked. There wasn’t really anything to it worth keeping. Yeah sometimes I go for a walk and have a think but that’s intentional. Being bored when you’re stuck in line or something is just painful and has no redeeming qualities
100%. The only redeeming quality of boredom is that it encourages you to go out and gain other interests and skills in the absence of other entertainment, but that’s more in the “I’m done with my homework and have nothing to do for the next 2 hours until dinner” sense. And even before smartphones, TV, booze, and weed easily filled that niche if you weren’t careful.
I’m pretty sure it’s always been the case that most students didn’t care, because they’re forced to be there. I don’t even remember being awake for the majority of precalc because first period is just too early in the day.
Maybe. But when you go study sound tech at college, I would have believe you would be interested to hear about sound stuff… Especially since the application process is pretty heavy and only half of the applicants get in.
Calculators, computers, either way the kids going to finish looking at BOOBS.
We all do.
I’m not sure that tech is really changing all that fast. In the 1990s a good desktop computer had 40 MB of HDD space and 2 MB of RAM. In the 2000s the hard drives were already 1000x as big, and people had hundreds of MB of RAM. That’s a massive amount of change in just a decade. In the early 1990s nobody had heard of the Internet. By the 2000s it was everywhere.
Sure, these days a low-end phone has much higher specs than that. But, has the phone-using experience really changed much in the last decade? Even the last 2? Specs have gotten better, but it hasn’t really opened up new ways of using the device. Yes, in some ways things are still moving quickly, but it’s always been like that. Some things change rapidly, other things slow down.
I agree that people’s ability to concentrate has been affected. The fact that “attention” has been turned into a kind of currency means that people seem to have lost the ability to focus on one thing for an extended period. That’s something that’s unique to the last 1-2 decades. But, I don’t think people’s interest in learning has changed. It’s just that the traditional way of learning in a classroom is much harder if your attention span is shot. It was never easy, most classes were always boring, but people could get through it because they were still able to focus for extended periods.
School was also always a constraint for most people. People who could go to school for the love of learning rather than as a means to an end were always a lucky minority. If you were really lucky you got a teacher / prof / teaching assistant who could make things interesting. But, in most cases they droned through the required material and you tried to absorb it.
I agree that now that searching the Internet is easier, certain methods of learning / teaching are outdated and haven’t been adapted yet. Memorizing facts was always stupid, but at least when it took a while to look it up in a paper encyclopedia you could just vaguely see the value. But, these days it’s so obviously absurd – yet that’s still what a lot of teachers focus on. It’s not to blame the teachers though. They often don’t have the freedom to change the way they teach, especially today now that there are so many standardized tests. But, memorizing facts about history, for example, is just ridiculous in a world where looking up those facts even with a vague search like “french guy who tried to attack moscow” will take you right to Napoleon.
Some of the most useful classes I ever had were the ones that taught me to analyze and understand information. For example, a philosophy class on analyzing arguments and identifying logical fallacies has been incredibly useful, and only more useful in an age of misinformation and disinformation. Then there were engineering courses that taught how to estimate. Science courses that taught significant figures and error analysis is extremely important when you have calculators / programs that can spit out an answer to dozens of decimal places when the values you supply are approximate. These sorts of things are incredibly useful in a world where a magic machine can spit out an answer and you need to think about whether that answer is reasonable or not.
Looking at music, there’s so much that I’ve learned outside of school that I never learned in school. I stopped taking music classes at the end of high school, and wasn’t all that interested in music for a while. But, since then I’ve become more interested. And, there’s so much that’s not easy to learn just using the Internet. Like, trying to understand the circle of fifths, or the various musical modes, or how to spot certain pop/rock songs as using various 8 or 12 bar blues patterns. I’m lucky because I have a friend who has a PhD in musicology who is willing to chat with me about things I find interesting and want to know more about.
Anyhow, my main points is that I don’t think that kids today are really any different from any other kids throughout history with two main exceptions: their attention span and the immediacy of information on the Internet. Concentrating in school has always been extremely hard, but at least when I was young I hadn’t been trained from age 3 to doom scroll. That means that staying focused through a 1 hour class, which was a chore for me, is a near impossibility for a kid weaned on a smartphone or tablet. As for memorizing, even when I was young, memorizing facts seemed like a waste of time. But, these days it’s clearly ridiculous, but the approach to education hasn’t fully adapted yet. Really, kids in elementary school should be learning how to fact check, how to cross-verify, how to identify misinformation, etc. But, even if teachers know that, they’re boxed in.
Best of luck to you though, it’s good that at least you want to jam information into some brains.
For me personally, life stress and exhaustion are bigger focus inhibitors. I agree that school is largely obsolete and I don’t really blame kids for checking out
I could get that at the grade school level, but at the university/college level those students are choosing the music classes. To be that disengaged for a course you picked is a bit different than a student who is forced to take a course.
That being said, if the course is a requirement that does change things a bit.
Nah, I’m early 30s, but grew up around 20th century media, competitive parents when it came to game shows, and a weird expectation to just know pub trivia.
Took me a while to realise I’m the outlier and still am. Just the other day I was talking to some old colleagues and had to spend energy convincing them that the things they were talking about in the Simpsons are mostly movie or TV references and even then mostly just Kubrick, Hitchcock and a considerable amount of Steven King. They just have no idea how unoriginal most modern/contemporary media is. Not even in a bad way, just in an homage/artist replicatong the old masters etc.
But it’s really strange for a generation with the biggest access and connection to human culture is somehow just as bubbles/silod as ever.
Algorithms, mate. Algorithms…
I think this is less time-specific, and more just people not being terribly interested in learning.
For example, a professor who specialized in virology was explaining everything about how pathogens spillover between species, using a 2010s ebola outbreak as an example. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time because it was as fascinating as a true horror movie, and yet other students were totally zoned out on Facebook a few rows ahead of me. While the professor was talking about organs dissolving due to the disease and the fecal-oral (and other liquids) route of ebola, which wasn’t exactly a dry subject, lol.
Rinse and repeat for courses on macro/micro economics, mirror neurons, psychology classes on kink, even coding classes.
Either I’m fascinated by stuff most people find boring, or a lot of people just hate learning. I’m thinking it’s the latter, since this stuff encompassed a wide range of really interesting subjects from profs who were really excited about what they taught.
I miss them a lot, I used to corner various profs and TAs and ask them questions about time fluctuations around black holes, rare succulent growing tips in the plant growth center, and biotechnology. It was fun having access to such vibrant people :)
Do a class about sounds of tiktok reels that will be a hit.
I actually do sometimes incorporates memes and stuff from tiktok and other social media in my classes.
I wonder how much of that is a change in who is going to college and why, and what the requirements are. More people are being funneled into colleges that previously would have gone directly into the workforce or into an apprenticeship. Is your class a gen ed? Gen Ed’s have really expanded and if you listen to bleeding hearts like me it’s a good thing because it exposes people to new things, but I think it’s actually so poorly managed that people end up taking the classes they think will be the least rigorous regardless of their actual interest just to get them over with.
The misunderstanding I see here is in the definition of “subjective”.
Subjective is often used interchangeably with opinion. And people can certainly have different opinions.
But the subjective that is meant is that morals don’t exist without a subject, aka a mind to comprehend them.
A rock exists whether or not a mind perceives the rock. The rock is objective. It is a physical object.
The idea that it is wrong to harm someone for being different is subjective. It is an idea. A thought. The thought does not exist without a mind.
So yes. Morals are all subjective. Morals do not exist in the physical world. Morals are not objects, they do not objectively exist. They exist within a subject. Morals subjectively exist.
That does not mean that any set of morals is okay because it’s just an opinion, bro. Because it’s not just an opinion. Those subjective values effect objective reality.
But suffering objectively exists. I know this. I experience this. It is an objectively immoral experience that exists in this reality that I am calling ‘suffering’.
That pretty much enough for moral objectivism for me on some level.
Do no harm, do only good. In that order.
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.
To you I am subjective. But from where I am sitting it isn’t.
You have a physical presence in space. That’s objective. Emphasis on object. Something being objective doesn’t mean “this is a fact”, it means it has physical form.
The pain you feel is not an object. It’s an experience. Again, that does not translate to “that’s your opinion”. It is real, it simply is not a physical object.
Objective and Subjective are both real. They’re mind and matter, not opinions and facts.
Woah there buddy, I said suffering. Not Pain. Distinct difference that nullifies your point as it’s completely irrelevant, talking about something else sorry.
Alright. Is suffering an object?
Yes
I think this is a bit too simple. Suppose I say that moral badness, the property, is any action that causes people pain, in the same way the property of redness is the quality of surfaces that makes people experience the sensation of redness. If this were the case, morality (or at least moral badness) would absolutely not be a subjective property.
Whether morality is objective or subjective depends on what you think morality is about. If it’s about things that would exist even if we didn’t judge them to be the way they are, it’s objective. If it’s about things that wouldn’t exist unless we judge them to be the way they are, it’s subjective.
Nobody used the word subjective. What are you on about?
Probably in relation to the use of ‘relative’, I guess a synonym for subjective?
(Edit) I thought is was an interesting comment btw
Yeah, I guess. Maybe they misread the OP. I agree that it was interesting, though completely irrelevant to the statement in the OP.
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?
I think you should read more carefully in the future, but this time I’ll explain it to you: The OP used the word relative. The reply went into a discussion about how the word subjective has a narrow meaning in philosophy that isn’t the same as the common usage. The OP was not discussing subjectivity in the sense of the reply, nor did it use the word subjective.
Good! In a culture that worships cops and “thought leaders”, this is two steps up from meekly accepting whatever powerful people say.
Now it’s time for:
(3) Acting on your ethical convictions towards specific goals, and learning to work with people who share them, even when their motivations or values are different.P.S. As others here have stated, (1) and (2) are not contradictory. If morality is constructed, then we all construct our own. Unless you actually WANT to be an amoral bastard.
This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.
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Honestly, those two points don’t seem incompatible to me. For example:
Teaching the history of fashion to undergrads in 1985 is bizarre because:
- They insist that standards of dress are entirely relative. Being dressed decently is a cultural construct; some cultures wear hardly any clothing whatsoever and being nude is a completely normal, default way of presenting yourself.
- And yet when I walk into class with my dick and balls hanging out, they all get extremely offended and the coeds threaten to call the police.
(And yes I changed the year because I’m sick of so many of these issues being brought up as though “the kids these days” are the problem, when so often these are issues that have been around LITERALLY FOREVER.)
I’m not trying to dunk on this Henry Shelvin guy – I’m certain that he knows a lot more about philosophy than me, and has more interesting thoughts about morals than I do. And I’m also not going to judge someone based on a tweet…aside from the obvious judgement that they are using Twitter, lol. But as far as takes go, this one kinda sucks.
*edit: I’ll add that I hope this professor is taking this opportunity to explain what the difference is between morals being relative vs being subjective, which is an issue that has come up in this very thread. Especially since I bet a lot of his students have only heard the term “moral relativism” being used by religious conservatives who accuse you of being a moral relativist because you don’t live by the Bible. I know that was definitely the case for me.
And yet when I walk into class with my dick and balls hanging out, they all get extremely offended and the coeds threaten to call the police.
Cancel culture today is out of control.
Well because we have indecent exposure laws. Hanging your dick and balls out in public is not relevant to cancel culture or fashion.
plenty of people violate laws without comment or condemnation all the time. nobody makes a fuss about someone going 5 mph over the speed limit, or doing a fuck-ton of sexual assault, and it’s really hard to get anyone to care. you’re an asshole if you make a big deal about someone doing some drugs.
laws and morality don’t really correlate.
you’re an asshole if you make a big deal about someone doing some drugs.
Did you respond to the wrong person? I was talking about displaying your cock and balls in public being illegal. Where did this come from?
laws and morality don’t really correlate.
ok. yes thats right. what are you talking about though? when did we start talking about morality?
morality
sorry used to talking to americans. they respond better to that word and can’t tell the difference. but yes. ethics.
did you respond to the wrong person
no. im pointing out that laws are about boots on necks, they have nothing to do with anything else.
Who is we? I have immunity
The woke mind virus strikes again.
We used to have academic freedom. Now we just have sensitivity trainings and PANTS. SHACKLES OF THE MIND, I TELL YOU!
no, but the shackles of the mind also cover your genitals, at least in part.
No, that is not the direct equivalence. The direct equivalence for 2. Would be something like
“But then they insist that being naked is never acceptable and is grotesque, and anyone that disagrees is a gross pervert”
That’s where the inconsistency comes from
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.
Subjective morality is self evidently true, but that gives us no information about how to live our lives, so we must live as if absolute morality is true.
We only have our own perspective. Someone else’s subjective morality is meaningless to us, we aren’t them.
Yeah, that’s because moral relativism is cool when you live in a free and decent society.
The irony is that you can afford to debate morality when society is moral and you’re not facing an onslaught of inhumanity in the form of fascism and unchecked greed that’s threatening any hope for a future.
But when shit hits the fan, morality becomes pretty fucking clear. And that’s what’s happening right now. Philosophical debates about morality are out the window when you’re facing an existential threat.
They used to be the case that just calling your political opponents evil was oversimplifying. But these days? They literally are just evil in the most cruel ways imaginable to the point where there’s nothing to debate, and people who do so are doing so in bad faith most of the time. I think that’s another dimension of the situation, a poorly moderate websites like Twitter make it so that people are constantly in a hostile environment where good faith cannot be assumed so you have to learn to operate in that kind of environment
I mean yeah, the democrats are violent, authoritarian, and and generally awful.
True. Just ask someone from Gaza
Yeah, things have hugely improved in Gaza since one of the most powerful countries in the world got rid of their “democrats” in government.
Ohnowaititstheopposite.
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.
When the other side is doing stuff like Mass deportation ASMR videos you’re past the point where it’s a reasonable debate about the exact level of income tax or whatever. Actual cartoon villains wouldn’t dare behave this badly
I don’t know, I might intellectually understand that morals are relative to a culture and that even our concept of universal human rights is an heritage of our colonial past and, on some level, trying to push our own values as the only morality that can exist. On a gut level though, I am entirely unable to consider that LGBT rights, gender equality or non-discrimination aren’t inherently moral.
I don’t think holding these two beliefs is weird, it’s a natural contradiction worth debating and that’s what I would expect from an ethics teacher
That’s because there are 2 general schools of thought in ethics - relativism and absolutism. Relativism (the idea that morality is intrinsic to the person’s experience and understanding) is the one that seems to be the most talked about in general society. I believe in absolutism, the idea that there is a set of guidelines for moral behavior regardless of your experiences or past.
Your example (more formally known as the paradox of tolerance) is what convinces me that absolutism is the better school of thought
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.
an heritage
Who pronounces it as 'eritage
I’m gonna guess French people
Touché
That’s so objectively morally reprehensible
Being Fr*nch is a choice. It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Oui-ve
Hah! Cool to see Henry pop up on my feed. I knew this guy back when he was a grad student. And as somebody that also teaches ethics, he is dead on. Undergrads are not only believe all morality is relative and that this is necessary for tolerance and pluralism (it’s not), but are also insanely judgmental if something contradicts their basic sense of morality.
Turns out, ordinary people’s metaethics are highly irrational.
Sounds like “all moral philosophies are equal, but some are more equal than others”
Love your username.
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 just commented elsewhere in this thread, but isn’t moral realism a thing for this exact situation? Is his post not a self report on his inability to identify a moral framework that fits his students worldview, or at least to explain the harm that arises if one has a self contradictory worldview and help them realize that and potentially arrive at a more consistent view? Seems like this comment section is filled with a lot of people that understand their moral framework more than this professor, but obviously are not in the field. Can you please elaborate on the issues here? Like I think abortions are fine, but I understand that others think it’s murder. I don’t think they’re bad people for that, but I understand if they think I’m a bad person for my views. How we deal with it on a societal level is obviously even more complicated. I don’t see how there’s a problem there.
It seems like ALL is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. Do they really believe ALL morality is relative and are also always insanely judgy if things contradict their beliefs?
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.
Your beliefs seem to align with what the students are saying and generally with moral realism.
You just said “I think that there are parts of morality that really are culturally relative and subjective, and parts that aren’t.” so you can view some morality as subjective and some as necessarily universal. That is what most people default to and what you seem to saying is wrong with the students. You state they aren’t consistent, but you’re also not consistent. Sometimes subjectivity is right sometimes it’s not. I’m not seeing a distinction, so please elaborate on it if I’m missing it.
Not disagreeing that they’re probably just inconsistent.
Is it possible to be consistent about moral relativism & still make firm choices?
What’s it called when morality is construed as systems of arbitrarily chosen axioms & moral judgements amount to judges stating whether something agrees with a system they chose? Is it inconsistent to acknowledge that these axioms are ultimately choices, choose a system, and judge all actions eligible for moral consideration according to that chosen system?
Morality is subjective and many different systems exist.
However, mine is the best one because it leads to optimal human welfare and happiness. If you can show your system is better, I’ll happily change my mind, but until that time, if you follow a system that doesn’t lead to optimal human welfare and happiness, you are, thus, intentionall working against it, and are a thus a monster.
What’s even funnier- is the amount of people in the comments here that perfectly illustrate the humor in the post without even understanding why.
Could somebody explain it to me, please?
The humor is based on a seeming contradiction this guy’s students exhibit.
They apparently simultaneously believe:
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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)
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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.
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Jokes on you, I don’t believe in subjective morality.
I don’t see the problem. One can have unshakeable moral values they believe everyone should have while acknowledging those values may be a product of their upbringing and others’ lack of them the same.
What about the last part: “viewing disagreement as moral monstrosity?”
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?
When you say “abortion is moral,” do you mean that it is never immoral? As in, you literally can’t think of a situation where it would be wrong for a woman to get an abortion?
Not the person you responded to, but yes, that describes me.
The only situations I can imagine where abortion would be immoral are extremely contrived scenarios that don’t happen in reality.
That’s very nieve. You can believe in a woman’s absolute right to choose while also acknowledging that sometimes people do heinous things.
How is that naive and why do you believe you’re saying something different than me?
I’m someone else, but yeah, I believe the right to bodily autonomy trumps quite literally every other right.
If the world’s smartest person’s survival depended on compromising my bodily autonomy for 5 seconds, I would be in my right to let that person die. If you forced it on me, I would be in my right to kill the world’s smartest person for violating my bodily autonomy.
And not just that, but I think the vast majority of people hold this opinion, but they’re either too dumb to realize it, or commit non-stop special pleading to deny it. I think that very basically, because to think bodily autonomy is NOT the ultimate right, is to think it acceptable to farm human organs as long as it’s for a sufficiently good reason.
So mother is in the 12th hour of labor, she can just morally request an abortion? What if the baby is crowning? How about before the cord is clamped or cut? What about the day before a C-section?
The mother can, at any point in time, choose not to let someone else use her body. Doing so, practically, in all your examples would result in the birth of the child.
This isn’t some clever gotcha, the point of my argument is that the child has no right to use the mothers body to survive. If someone decides not to let someone else use their body, and that means the child dies, then so be it, because bodily autonomy supercedes life.
My argument isn’t that a mother should be able to kill a child just because she feels like it. It’s acceptable to kill someone to maintain bodily autonomy, that’s my argument.
Your “clever” examples all have options where both bodily autonomy are maintained AND life is maintained, which is a double win.
Your approach is an absolute approach. You see another culture doing something that’s monstrous and say hey that’s monstrous but I guess that’s how they were raised. In other words, your values are absolute.
It’s the kind of thing professors say when they want to go viral on some fascist platform.
I think you’re missing the significance of his phrase “entirely relative”.
In moral philosophy, cultural relativity holds that morals are not good or bad in themselves but only within their particular context. Strong moral relativists would hold the belief that it’s fine to murder children if that is a normal part of your culture.
I guess I’m parsing the statement as “understand it as a concept” when they mean “hold that position.”
Yes, I think that’s what has happened. He could have been clearer.
