5 ms·

No, simply that if you approach ethics from the standpoint of trying to find the "ultimate truth," you are doing it wrong. If you approach it from the view tha

by hvs 17y ago

No, simply that if you approach ethics from the standpoint of trying to find the "ultimate truth," you are doing it wrong. If you approach it from the view that ethical dilemmas don't have one right answer and that human society is inherently "fuzzy," real progress can be made.

astine 17y ago
If you are trying to find 'ultimate truth' in ethics you misunderstand the field. (You might like teleology.) My point isn't to say that there is no right answer but that if you can never get to the point where you can definitively say that this one is right, or at least more right than the alternative, then you are wasting your time. I have no patience for moral relativists that dabble in ethics. If you approach the problem from the standpoint that there is no right and wrong answer, then there is no progress to be made. Ethics is a difficult subject as it deals with the entire scope of human action. It ranges from emotional and intellual states, to changing subjective circumstances, to general (dare I say "universal") principles. Wether I should kill one man to save many depends on more than wieght of the collective needs of individuals. Do I have the right to kill even for a good cause? Does it matter if the man to be killed is at fault for the predicament of the many? Is allowing someone to die morally equivallent to actively killing them? These are hard questions, and and I can't answer all of them, but they do have answers. Moral questions aren't 'fuzzy,' they're subtle, and their applications are even subtler. This means that we have to work hard for answers, and sometimes we may have to settle with that we don't always know. But when people take the genuine difficulty of finding good answers as evidence that there are no answers, and present this as wisdom they are wasting everyone's time. I am not sayting that anyone here is guilty of this; I am just expressing a pet pieve of mine. edit: spelling & grammer
- hvs 17y ago
  "More right than the alternative" is much different than "this is the right answer." It gets to the crux of "ultimate truth." I am not a moral relativist by any stretch of the imagination, but even working within a moral and ethical framework, very few -- if any -- problems have a right answer. The reason we are even still discussing these issues thousands of years after they were first raised, is because there is no right answer. Only better answers than others.
  - astine 17y ago
    The reason we are even still discussing these issues thousands of years after they were first raised, is because there is no right answer. No, It's closer to the reason people are still debating evolution. Every first year philosophy student tries to reconstruct ethics (and philosophy in general) from scratch rather than reading those who came before. Every major philosophy since Descartes does the same. The real problem with any kind of philosophy is first principles. To go anywhere you have to accept some, and people keep picking their own. Stick with some long enough, and you'll get somewhere. You answers will be contingent, but definite.
- Tichy 17y ago
  To be honest I think I don't understand how ethics work, at all. What else can there be than the "law of the stronger"? If somebody points a gun at you and wants to steal your car, is there any hope of convincing him through some universal ethical argument that he shouldn't do it? What I can understand is societies creating rules for living together. But all these rules have targets that the individuals decided on beforehand. I don't think anything universal enters it. The best hope for arriving at acceptable ethics is to try to understand the consequences of their application, so that individuals can decide if they like the consequences or not. The only way to compute something comparable to universal ethics then would be evolution in the form of competition among societies and their rules. I understand that one set of ethics might make the society employing it more successful than another one. Even that does not allow for the creation of universal rules, though: the individuals would still have to agree that survival of a particular society is desirable.
  - astine 17y ago
    You're assuming that ethics is the search for universal moral principles. That's not ethics, it's moral philosophy. Ethics is the search for 'right human action'. That is, the search for principles on how to live. You're right that for moral principles to be meaningful they require some kind of universal law-giver (nature is one kind of law-giver, but not one we would expect.) If you assume a physicalist universe the best you can hope for in moral philosophy is a law of the stronger, or a more egalitarian notion that what is good for my neighbor is ultimately good for me (something that Plato believed for example,) but this has nothing to with the validity of ethics. If you read Aristotle's ethics, you'll find that he doesn't assume a universal moral code in the same way as our post-Christian culture is inclined.

by hvs 17y ago

astine 17y ago

If you are trying to find 'ultimate truth' in ethics you misunderstand the field. (You might like teleology.) My point isn't to say that there is no right answer but that if you can never get to the point where you can definitively say that this one is right, or at least more right than the alternative, then you are wasting your time. I have no patience for moral relativists that dabble in ethics. If you approach the problem from the standpoint that there is no right and wrong answer, then there is no progress to be made. Ethics is a difficult subject as it deals with the entire scope of human action. It ranges from emotional and intellual states, to changing subjective circumstances, to general (dare I say "universal") principles. Wether I should kill one man to save many depends on more than wieght of the collective needs of individuals. Do I have the right to kill even for a good cause? Does it matter if the man to be killed is at fault for the predicament of the many? Is allowing someone to die morally equivallent to actively killing them? These are hard questions, and and I can't answer all of them, but they do have answers. Moral questions aren't 'fuzzy,' they're subtle, and their applications are even subtler. This means that we have to work hard for answers, and sometimes we may have to settle with that we don't always know. But when people take the genuine difficulty of finding good answers as evidence that there are no answers, and present this as wisdom they are wasting everyone's time. I am not sayting that anyone here is guilty of this; I am just expressing a pet pieve of mine. edit: spelling & grammer

hvs 17y ago
"More right than the alternative" is much different than "this is the right answer." It gets to the crux of "ultimate truth." I am not a moral relativist by any stretch of the imagination, but even working within a moral and ethical framework, very few -- if any -- problems have a right answer. The reason we are even still discussing these issues thousands of years after they were first raised, is because there is no right answer. Only better answers than others.
- astine 17y ago
  The reason we are even still discussing these issues thousands of years after they were first raised, is because there is no right answer. No, It's closer to the reason people are still debating evolution. Every first year philosophy student tries to reconstruct ethics (and philosophy in general) from scratch rather than reading those who came before. Every major philosophy since Descartes does the same. The real problem with any kind of philosophy is first principles. To go anywhere you have to accept some, and people keep picking their own. Stick with some long enough, and you'll get somewhere. You answers will be contingent, but definite.
Tichy 17y ago
To be honest I think I don't understand how ethics work, at all. What else can there be than the "law of the stronger"? If somebody points a gun at you and wants to steal your car, is there any hope of convincing him through some universal ethical argument that he shouldn't do it? What I can understand is societies creating rules for living together. But all these rules have targets that the individuals decided on beforehand. I don't think anything universal enters it. The best hope for arriving at acceptable ethics is to try to understand the consequences of their application, so that individuals can decide if they like the consequences or not. The only way to compute something comparable to universal ethics then would be evolution in the form of competition among societies and their rules. I understand that one set of ethics might make the society employing it more successful than another one. Even that does not allow for the creation of universal rules, though: the individuals would still have to agree that survival of a particular society is desirable.
- astine 17y ago
  You're assuming that ethics is the search for universal moral principles. That's not ethics, it's moral philosophy. Ethics is the search for 'right human action'. That is, the search for principles on how to live. You're right that for moral principles to be meaningful they require some kind of universal law-giver (nature is one kind of law-giver, but not one we would expect.) If you assume a physicalist universe the best you can hope for in moral philosophy is a law of the stronger, or a more egalitarian notion that what is good for my neighbor is ultimately good for me (something that Plato believed for example,) but this has nothing to with the validity of ethics. If you read Aristotle's ethics, you'll find that he doesn't assume a universal moral code in the same way as our post-Christian culture is inclined.