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This is moral relativism. You can't build anything on moral relativism. By that same logic, there is no moral justification to freedom of speech either. (also

This is moral relativism. You can't build anything on moral relativism. By that same logic, there is no moral justification to freedom of speech either. (also we're talking about outrage here, not about lawsuits.)

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
That totally fails to answer my question. You said being anti-LGBT is morally wrong. Here's some guy in Teheran. He's not a moral relativist. He's very much a moral absolutist, and he's dead certain that LGBT itself is what's morally wrong. Why do we believe you instead of the other guy? Why does Facebook believe you instead of the other guy? Because Facebook is in the US instead of Iran? Here's my position: I am a moral absolutist. Still, I don't want a moral absolutist deciding what Facebook thinks is appropriate content. There's too many systems of absolute morality, and too many of them differ from my own in important ways - ways that I'd like to be able to talk about.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  Wait, I didn't say that I get to legally dictate what Facebook is allowed to do. However, I get to be morally outraged at their actions whenever it pleases me, and I get to get others to be outraged too and if we're enough people we may convince them to change course. In that sense, I don't care one bit about the guy in Teheran who thinks being LGBT is wrong and I don't have to.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    OK. I pretty much agree with that. I'm still worried about the guy who does get to dictate what Facebook will carry (namely, somebody at Facebook). I don't want that person to be very morally absolutist, and I worry that they are becoming increasingly so as time goes by.
    - Tainnor 6y ago
      Well, it's not black or white. There are opinions that I don't agree with that I think are still completely legitimate and perfectly moral. There are opinions that I take serious issue with and may even find immoral but for which I'd still claim that it's worse to try to suppress them than to allow them. And then there's stuff like incitement to violence or the president of the USA spreading dangerous lies about an election ... tolerance can only go so far. Of course, it's a difficult call to make. Of course, no matter what you decide, someone is going to be angry. But you can't just not decide, you do have to take a stand and by refusing to do so, you have effectively already decided something (that's the whole point of Sartre's philosophy btw, which was inspired by WW2).
jedimind 6y ago
> This is moral relativism. You can't build anything on moral relativism. So what exactly makes your morality absolute? Can you provide any evidence for it? Most people give hand wavy answers to this question, mumbling something along lines of intuition etc, which is not evidence, but as arbitrary and relative as some random choice of initial values for some random moral framework.
- Tainnor 6y ago
  I'm not arguing for moral absolutism. Both that and moral relativism are deeply flawed. It's a fact that different people have different perceptions of morality, but that alone is not a sufficient argument to shut down any debate about ethics. It is our duty as moral individuals to fight for what we think is morally right. And sometimes we will have to compromise. But I'm tired of having to argue for why LGBT rights are important (something that I really would have hoped would be understood by now), since that is not the point. The point is that OP gave an example of a decision that "would spark an outrage" and I contended that that would be the case because it would be seen by the outraged as an immoral decision. You can't take people's rights to be morally outraged away from them. You can, at the most, try to argue with those people why the supposedly immoral thing is not actually immoral, but I haven't seen anyone here doing that: only people defending the truism that "everyone has different moral standards". Which... yeah.
  - jedimind 6y ago
    That's not even the point. You are throwing around with the word 'moral' around a lot and it seems to me that you don't even understand the basics of moral philosophy. Your usage of 'moral' seems to be merely a rhetoric device to give more weight to your opinion, but what does that even accomplish when you fail to deliver any evidence for your morality? You just make a lot of claims, but you fail to back them up, so they are and remain nothing but that, baseless claims. It's basically just your opinion, which you are trying to wrap in the garment of 'morality'. So if you are moral realist and your morality is easily discarded, why should they care? If you are a moral anti-realist and still make moral value judgments, which are also easily discarded without consequences, why should they care?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

That totally fails to answer my question. You said being anti-LGBT is morally wrong. Here's some guy in Teheran. He's not a moral relativist. He's very much a moral absolutist, and he's dead certain that LGBT itself is what's morally wrong. Why do we believe you instead of the other guy? Why does Facebook believe you instead of the other guy? Because Facebook is in the US instead of Iran? Here's my position: I am a moral absolutist. Still, I don't want a moral absolutist deciding what Facebook thinks is appropriate content. There's too many systems of absolute morality, and too many of them differ from my own in important ways - ways that I'd like to be able to talk about.

Tainnor 6y ago
Wait, I didn't say that I get to legally dictate what Facebook is allowed to do. However, I get to be morally outraged at their actions whenever it pleases me, and I get to get others to be outraged too and if we're enough people we may convince them to change course. In that sense, I don't care one bit about the guy in Teheran who thinks being LGBT is wrong and I don't have to.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  OK. I pretty much agree with that. I'm still worried about the guy who does get to dictate what Facebook will carry (namely, somebody at Facebook). I don't want that person to be very morally absolutist, and I worry that they are becoming increasingly so as time goes by.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    Well, it's not black or white. There are opinions that I don't agree with that I think are still completely legitimate and perfectly moral. There are opinions that I take serious issue with and may even find immoral but for which I'd still claim that it's worse to try to suppress them than to allow them. And then there's stuff like incitement to violence or the president of the USA spreading dangerous lies about an election ... tolerance can only go so far. Of course, it's a difficult call to make. Of course, no matter what you decide, someone is going to be angry. But you can't just not decide, you do have to take a stand and by refusing to do so, you have effectively already decided something (that's the whole point of Sartre's philosophy btw, which was inspired by WW2).

jedimind 6y ago

> This is moral relativism. You can't build anything on moral relativism. So what exactly makes your morality absolute? Can you provide any evidence for it? Most people give hand wavy answers to this question, mumbling something along lines of intuition etc, which is not evidence, but as arbitrary and relative as some random choice of initial values for some random moral framework.

Tainnor 6y ago
I'm not arguing for moral absolutism. Both that and moral relativism are deeply flawed. It's a fact that different people have different perceptions of morality, but that alone is not a sufficient argument to shut down any debate about ethics. It is our duty as moral individuals to fight for what we think is morally right. And sometimes we will have to compromise. But I'm tired of having to argue for why LGBT rights are important (something that I really would have hoped would be understood by now), since that is not the point. The point is that OP gave an example of a decision that "would spark an outrage" and I contended that that would be the case because it would be seen by the outraged as an immoral decision. You can't take people's rights to be morally outraged away from them. You can, at the most, try to argue with those people why the supposedly immoral thing is not actually immoral, but I haven't seen anyone here doing that: only people defending the truism that "everyone has different moral standards". Which... yeah.
- jedimind 6y ago
  That's not even the point. You are throwing around with the word 'moral' around a lot and it seems to me that you don't even understand the basics of moral philosophy. Your usage of 'moral' seems to be merely a rhetoric device to give more weight to your opinion, but what does that even accomplish when you fail to deliver any evidence for your morality? You just make a lot of claims, but you fail to back them up, so they are and remain nothing but that, baseless claims. It's basically just your opinion, which you are trying to wrap in the garment of 'morality'. So if you are moral realist and your morality is easily discarded, why should they care? If you are a moral anti-realist and still make moral value judgments, which are also easily discarded without consequences, why should they care?