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Never going to get tired of self-identified libertarians making statements about moral obligations.
by saraid216 13y ago
Never going to get tired of self-identified libertarians making statements about moral obligations.
- baddox 13y agoI would probably self-identify as a libertarian (although I would be eager to qualify that), and I am very tired of statements about moral obligations.
- dfc 13y agoEmpty and unjustified statements about moral obligations.
- baddox 13y agoThe thing about moral obligations is you can't really "justify" them to someone who doesn't share your fundamental beliefs about morality itself.
- dfc 13y agoI could have been clearer with what I meant by justification. By justify I meant demonstrate/explain, e.g. * What are the moral values/principles that create the obligation? * How does the use of crypto foster these principles?
- maxerickson 13y agoDo you think most people are constructing their morality on top of some fundamental beliefs? (I tend to think we work backwards trying to come up with compact descriptions of what we are comfortable with...)
- baddox 13y ago> Do you think most people are constructing their morality on top of some fundamental beliefs? Yes, but not necessarily consciously, and certainly not necessarily consistently.
- dfc 13y agoYes. I can not imagine any other conception of moral obligation. How would you come up with an obligation to do X or not do Y without an underlying belief structure?
- maxerickson 13y agoI was asking about the second half of the sentence. (But to answer your question in terms of what I am getting at, you would work backwards from what you were comfortable with and then tell yourself that it was your underlying belief structure, whether that were meaningfully true or not)
- dfc 13y agoI see. I guess I took it for granted that everyone understood moral obligation to mean a commandment to act a certain way due to moral principles. Depending on how you define "comfortable with" we might be using different language to talk about the same thing. I am uncomfortable with immoral behavior? I do not think you are advancing moral relativism/nihilism? I do not think most people use moral reasoning to guide (even semi-consitently) their actions. However I assumed that anyone who says "You have a moral obligation to do X" was speaking in a philosophical context and not using it as a euphemism or "Crypto is /<oo1."
- maxerickson 13y agoWell, someone could be discussing in good faith, articulate a principle that they believe represents their morality, reason out a consequence of that principle and then observably act in a contradictory manner. (now that I have written that, I guess part of what I am getting at is that the more often that actually happens, the more you have to discount the articulation of moral principles rather than discounting the people or the good faith. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic about people and pretty cynical about the things they say...)
- malka 13y ago>libertarian >obligation meh.