C1. Not all discourse that relates to the question of what we ought to do is moral discourse. There is also discourse about the more casual sorts of ought claims that fall under the category of what is commonly called “self-help” philosophy. This might relate to questions regarding what kinds of relationships you should form in your life or what kind of diet you should have or how should you manage your finances. — TheHedoMinimalist
C2. The existence of moral duties implies the existence of a “special” sort of reason that overrides self-help type of considerations. — TheHedoMinimalist
C3. The existence of “special” moral reasons implies the superiority of moral philosophy over self-help philosophy. This superiority makes the notion of a decision failing to be bound by duty for being too demanding on your personal life seem implausible and repugnant. — TheHedoMinimalist
The most popular response to Singer’s argument seems to be to claim that his moral duty claims are too demanding. — TheHedoMinimalist
And were you to prove no moral duties exist, do you think for a moment you would be free of them? Moral duties and the questions surrounding them seem intrinsic. That is, not a question of if they are, but rather what they are and what kinds of things are they.I have an argument against the existence of moral duties. — TheHedoMinimalist
And were you to prove no moral duties exist, do you think for a moment you would be free of them? — tim wood
Moral duties and the questions surrounding them seem intrinsic. That is, not a question of if they are, but rather what they are and what kinds of things are they. — tim wood
However, a child drowning in a pond is an immediate problem that only those nearby can resolve. The responsibility to assess whether to do so falls to a few people out of everyone on the planet. If the only way to save the child was to dial the same telephone number that the rest of the world was somehow simultaneously privy to, that personal responsibility would not be present, even though first-hand sight of the problem still would be. — Kenosha Kid
The bystander effect is like a bug in our moral reasoning. It allows 100 people to watch a child drown and do nothing, when any one of them alone would have saved the child. (The 21st century equivalent is you'd get 100 videos of a child drowning uploaded to the internet.) — Kenosha Kid
I mentioned in the OP about how a privileged person could choose to live in a place where he is extremely unlikely to encounter drowning children and thus he could avoid having to make personal sacrifices while it seems that others would arbitrarily have to make those sacrifices to avoid violating duties. — TheHedoMinimalist
I’m confused. If you say that the bystander effect is a bug then I presume that you think it is bad. Yet, earlier in the post you seem to imply that the presence of bystanders eliminates your moral responsibility. — TheHedoMinimalist
Morality is practical. Practically, the decision is never going to be whether to live in an area with drowning children or not. People do isolate themselves, have done for centuries, in stately homes, secure mansions, penthouse suites, or as hermits. This is really the only way to avoid living in the world, and living in the world involves opportunities for selfishness and callousness that are also opportunities for kindness. — Kenosha Kid
I take it that what you say here simply expresses what I have said above, namely that moral normative reasons trump other kinds of normative reason. It is more important - that is, we have more reason - to do the right thing, than anything else.
So far that sounds correct. It seems like a conceptual truth that whatever it is morally right to do in a situation is that which we have most reason to do. ("I can see that Xing in these circumstances is what it is morally right to do; but what do I have most reason to do?" sounds confused). — Bartricks
But you're making the much stronger claim that this entails that morality will be too demanding. I don't see how that follows. For instance, that instrumental reasons and moral reasons are not the same does not prevent instrumental reasons affecting what we have moral reason to do. If Xing would not frustrate too many of my ends, then I may have an obligation to do X. But if Xing would frustrate many of my ends, then it may be that I do not have an obligation to do X. For instance, it seems to me that I am entitled to do pretty much anything if my life is at stake and I am not responsible for it being so. If an innocent person is about to explode and kill me and the only way I can prevent them from exploding is to shoot them dead, then I am entitled to do so. And if there are ten such people I am entitled to shoot the lot of them. Normally, of course, one is not entitled to shoot innocent people for the sake of one's own interests. But under these circumstances one is. So these sorts of cases are ones in which instrumental reasons are radically affecting what one is morally entitled to do. — Bartricks
This means that he cannot rely on the bystander effect as he would literally be the only doctor that could have helped the dying children with the rare condition. — TheHedoMinimalist
...technically any kind of decision that you make could be moralized and be framed as being “other regarding”. For example, a man could believe that he has a duty towards his wife and kids to learn to manage his finances better because they are financially dependent on him. Normally, managing your finances is seen as a self-help concern. Nonetheless, I think one can usually insert a moral agenda into any sort of life decision that one makes. — TheHedoMinimalist
However it's worth noting that the difference between them is not that one person is saving children and the other standing by, but rather that one person made the decision to get on a plane to Africa to help hypothetical persons and the other did not (i.e. we can't infer that the doctor in NY wouldn't help a child in need). — Kenosha Kid
I am not sure I see a problem. There are normative reasons - moral and instrumental being the kind we are concerned with here - and there's what we have overall reason to do (which will be a function of the force the different reasons present have).
We can call what we have overall reason to do, 'rational'. — Bartricks
When it comes to self interest, sometimes the fact that doing x would compromise your interests can operate to prevent other facts from generating moral reasons. So we do not have moral reasons being overcome by instrumental reasons, rather we have some facts preventing other facts from generating moral reasons. — Bartricks
...technically my brother had his wife’s interest in mind when he bought that piano; one could moralize his action and say so; you could call it “other regarding”, for it was technically a gift to her; we could certainly frame it that way, based on appearances (and ignoring certain other details), and I don’t doubt that he inserted this moral agenda into the decision he made. — Leghorn
this seems a rather antiquated and misogynistic scenario: doesn’t his wife work also? How does she manage her money? Do they combine their incomes, or keep their monies separate? If the former, who has the final say? — Leghorn
In this schema, it would still be morally praiseworthy to choose to move to Africa (assuming the intent is altruistic) and save some but not all children (a la the ending of Schindler's List). To not save the drowning child would be antisocial and, in a small social group, the person would not be fed, protected, or the object of altruism which, projected onto a moralistic framework, is equivalent to saying that there's a moral obligation to save the child (insofar as moral obligations are really about reciprocal altruism, and the correct response would be ostracisation). — Kenosha Kid
Even if his sole motivation was to make his sister in law happy — TheHedoMinimalist
he bought her a new electronic piano as her present that year, but within a month he had signed up for piano lessons and was playing it everyday, far more than she ever played the old one... — Leghorn
I wasn’t trying to dispute the existence of moral reasons in my OP. I was actually trying to argue against the existence of moral duties which I think is like a particular sub-category of moral reasons. — TheHedoMinimalist
The rest of what you have to say regarding the anecdote tells me you entirely missed its point. In it, I related certain particular details of what happened, but left it to the reader to draw the conclusions without explicitly stating them myself: — Leghorn
What does my brother’s behavior after Christmas suggest about his motivations for giving the gift? — Leghorn
Wouldn’t reciprocal altruism be in the realm of self-help philosophy though? After all, I could imagine a self-help philosopher telling people that you do nice things for others and not harm them because that will effect how they treat you. — TheHedoMinimalist
After all, if moral duties are nothing more than evolved mechanisms to ensure that others treat you well, then why should we assume that they have some sort of real ontological existence. — TheHedoMinimalist
I mean, if you accept that there are moral reasons, then you must accept that there is, in any situation in which moral reasons are present, what you have overall moral reason to do. What are you going to call that, if not your moral duty? — Bartricks
I'm saying you're born an altruist: it's biological, not philosophical. — Kenosha Kid
Saving the drowning child essentially becomes morally obligatory only insofar as, if you do not, you are not in the morality game at all (psychopath, sociopath, individualist, isolationist). — Kenosha Kid
That's actually an interesting variant. A man sees two children drowning in a pond. He saves one and has plenty of time to save the second. Must he? — Kenosha Kid
I'd say the opposite: if moral duties are just arbitrary things we get to decide through philosophy, then they don't have any ontic value at all. An evolved characteristic for moral behaviour is objectively real. — Kenosha Kid
If someone is born an altruist then wouldn’t being altruistic make that person feel good? If that’s so, then wouldn’t this give them a purely selfish self-help sort of reason to be altruistic? — TheHedoMinimalist
If people can rationally work out their moral philosophy for themselves then it seems that they can presumably create a moral philosophy without duties where actions can only be morally praiseworthy or morally blameworthy in a supererogatory sort of way. — TheHedoMinimalist
In addition, it seems to me that moral existentialism would suggest that anyone who claims to be part of the morality game is part of the morality game simply by virtue of asserting that they are part of the morality game. — TheHedoMinimalist
I’m not sure why anyone would think that the obligation is dependent on the number of children that need to be saved rather than the amount of effort that would be required of you. — TheHedoMinimalist
I think there’s good evidence that a belief in the supernatural was somewhat beneficial to the survival and reproduction of our ancestors. It can bring people a great deal of hope and it might ward off pessimistic life attitudes that are probably bad for survival and procreation. Nonetheless, if I made a comment that religions are just arbitrary things that we get to decide through philosophy and they don’t have any ontic value then you probably would think that this invalidates religion. It probably wouldn’t matter to you that there is an evolved characteristic for religious behavior that is objectively real. Though, maybe you do think the same way about religion as you do morality. — TheHedoMinimalist
At the end of the day, it kinda feels like your non-ontological understanding of morality kinda already dismisses the idea of genuine moral duties(at least the kind of moral duties that I think most people care about). — TheHedoMinimalist
But self-help is not the same as hedonism. — Kenosha Kid
But then what would make it a moral philosophy? I mean, in the extreme where the philosophy is 'do nothing for anyone, accept nothing from anyone', what makes this a philosophy of morality as opposed to any other neutral politic? — Kenosha Kid
since morality concerns particular ways we interact with each other, not interacting with each other isn't categorically a moral philosophy (in much the same way zero isn't categorically a positive integer). — Kenosha Kid
I think a surer sign of objective morality is manifest in the way that, over the last few hundred years, against powerful concepts like religion, empire, colonialism, slavery, capitalism, neoliberalism, the very real, very ontic morality I speak of has gradually biased us towards something better, more human. Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, equal opportunities, LGBT rights, animal (!) rights, stewardship of the planet, equity. These have arisen against powerful vested interests simply by virtue of a global village of people having a united voice. Only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage rights, but the majority of us think it's important to fight for. Why? Because deep down, despite everything done to us, despite the great efforts to destroy every last vestige of community spirit -- the remainder of our traditional ways of living -- those drives that make us distinctly human, social, moral, reassert themselves ever more strongly. That's far more obviously objective than merely insisting that one convention is objective imo. — Kenosha Kid
I think that any form of egoistic hedonism firmly falls into the self-help category. — TheHedoMinimalist
Thus, I don’t think morality necessarily has to be about us interacting with others. — TheHedoMinimalist
I don’t think that the supposed moral progress that you speak of had been brought about by something like a global village of people having a united voice. For example, you mentioned how only a minority of people benefit from gay marriage but it should also be mentioned that it seems that almost nobody gets harmed by gay marriage either. So, I think we hardly had any incentive to be against gay marriage to begin with. — TheHedoMinimalist
I’m also confused regarding what issues like abolition, suffrage, and civil rights have to do with reciprocal altruism or morality being in our DNA. I don’t think that the Northern states that fought to abolish slavery in the past ever had the favor returned to them by the freed African slaves and the men who marched with MLK to give African Americans civil rights didn’t seem to get rewarded by African Americans in any way. — TheHedoMinimalist
If anything, it seems to me that we have biologically evolved to be very tribalistic and put our ethnicity above other ethnicities(after all, isn’t that what our pre-historic ancestors did). — TheHedoMinimalist
I disagree. I don't think you'd find a book encouraging you to eat and drink with gay abandon in any self-help section. — Kenosha Kid
Self-help is an ethic of looking after and improving oneself. — Kenosha Kid
I'm not sure this is an apt counterexample though. Presumably, being a Jainist, should they encounter someone needing help despite their aims to encounter no one at all, they would help them and, likewise, should he be found by another needing help he would accept that help. By absenting themselves from morality altogether, I had in mind more someone who simply would not help others or accept help, whether they harm animals or no. — Kenosha Kid
I think you misunderstand. You can't have a biological capacity for reciprocal altruism. Reciprocity is an outcome, not a drive. You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses. — Kenosha Kid
You do have biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism and empathy, but also for counter-empathetic responses. — Kenosha Kid
Actually, many people like myself choose to help others sometimes only because we feel that this would result in getting more people to help us in the future. Of course, we might often disguise this as genuine altruism and it’s hard to distinguish between the two a lot of times. I think we have actually evolved to be altruistic in part because we expect reciprocation. Though, I do think some people are evolved to be directly altruistic. Still, I think there are definitely cases where someone is motivated to be altruistic for selfish reasons. — TheHedoMinimalist
Egoistic hedonism is the view that one should make themselves feel as good as possible in the long run(at least if we’re talking about prudential egoistic hedonism rather than what’s known as folk hedonism which is the stereotypical form of hedonism. You can read about that distinction in philosophy encyclopedia entries on hedonism). — TheHedoMinimalist
I don’t think that having biological instincts for altruism, egalitarianism, and empathy necessarily would give you the kind of morality that requires you to rescue a child drowning in a shallow body of water. For example, I could imagine a highly pessimistic and suicidal person who has fair amount of empathy towards others choose to ignore a drowning child because he might envy the position that this child is in. — TheHedoMinimalist
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