If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted. (Q&A)
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- čas přidán 19. 04. 2022
- Morality is dangerous. Here is why.
#Morality #slavojzizek #samharris
Why Sam Harris is Wrong - A Critique of Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape" (in 2020):
• Why Sam Harris is Wron...
(Article by Slavjo Zizek) If there is a God, then anything is permitted:
www.abc.net.au/religion/if-th...
Daoist Philosophy | Zhuangzi: The Dao of Gangstas:
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Dr Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau. He wrote the book: "The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality", which focuses on morality and amorality.
www.amazon.com/Moral-Fool-Cas...
When you mentioned a comment by "John Martin", my heart began to race and I thought "Oh God, what did I say?" But turns out it was a different John Martin! There are thousands of us. Thousands!
You should do a zany "are you Dave Gorman" style odyssey of John Martins. Juan Martinez notwithstanding
Love Solid Air man, fair play
I think perhaps something that blocks people from approaching this new perspective of amorality is that the concept of amorality is strongly rooted in moral terms, i.e Amoral = bad/evil. At least that's how the word is popularly used. We see it associated with villains/psychopaths etc.
Amorality is understood less as rejecting the system of morality, and more as a rejection of the moral stipulations within the system.
Maybe a new word like postmoral might work better, as it doesn't have all that baggage, and implies moving past the morality framework, rather than just rejecting the moral stipulations
This comment deserves more attention
You have a whole branch of meta-ethicists who call themselves non-cognitivists who basically try to do this. Look it up if you are interested I would say, A.J. Ayer is a classical figure to start at
Damn, you could write a book about this and call it "Beyond good and evil" or something...
@@mouwersor don't be rude, the man's just discovering philosophy on his own
What blocks people is their guts, because normal people can't reject morality, it is biologically ingrained in the homo sapiens.
What is strange to me is how some people talk of amorality as if it was one more option because it can be socially constructed. People who embrace amorality that way don't have the slightest intelectual depth.
Innate grammar was explored by Chomsky and Pinker (among others), the same as innate knowledge of physical properties, and of course morality, from Piaget to Haidt.
Of course amorality is associated with psychopaths, because the response in the neocortex in some areas has a causal relationship with amoral framing of reality, that has been proven.
We have performative aspects of morality, and heavily biological ones that are rooted in biology.
What is strange is that before thinking amorality is an option, that those people didn't even reflect in how morality emerged with a core through all humans groups,
and that not only history but science shows that are performative aspects that are optional and others that are universal and are subjected to the context of those biological creatures.
Amorality is a profound intelectual mediocrity with disregard for human wellbeing with the mere purpose of appearing interesting. Because not having even the discipline to explore the subject when all what has been said about it from so many disciplines?. A weird type of laziness.
Even psychopaths modulate their behavior using as proxy the neocortex of others, and most evolutionary biology models show that although a number of psychopaths exist,
the model of human cooperation in which we have several degrees of moral responses around an defined average is the most successful for survival, and therefore inevitable and not susceptible to be altered
Learning to step away from a moral framework helped us a lot in leaving the abusive relationship with our parents and our boyfriend. When we were still thinking in terms of good/bad/who is guilty, it was a mess to navigate. Because we don't see either of them as "bad" people...and it's also hard to place guilt, when you see all of their struggles and suffering as well.
But once we asked the questions about what would be more healthy for everyone involved it was clear to see that none of these relationships increased anyone's wellbeing. Not having to place guilt made it so much easier to leave
I wonder if you have read _We Do This 'Til We Free Us_ by Mariame Kaba. It was the last book I received from the excellent Appalachian Prison Book Project. It is about what she calls transformative justice. I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea it could be practicable; I doubt there is much that damages trust and equanimity more than being wrongfully imprisoned and then finding out nobody cares at all. But I like her ideas, and anybody who knows how to spell "'til" correctly is A-OK in my book. She also displays a degree of integrity in relation to principle over expedience I find admirable.
@@deadman746 I've heard about transformative justice and it sounds like something that might be promising, if it can be implemented. It's definitely something that I wish to work someday. But I haven't read the book you mentioned, I'll have a look on it 😊
@@incanthatus8182 Thanks for replying. I seldom get replies, and when I do, they are generally along the lines of "your lying."
I liked it so much I hand-carried it out of political prison. I might have to give it up soon, for reasons I've given in my videos. But I have it right here now.
I was going to write about it, but I'll just quote a few paragraphs from "Justice: A Short Story." If they don't hook you, nothing will. I myself am tearing up a bit as I type it.
The ocean is a special kind of blue-green, and I'm standing on the shore watching a woman drown. My friends and family members are watching the same scene, or maybe it looks different to their eyes. They are grieving; I am not. I turn to my mother (who is a man) and whisper in his ear: "Vengeance is not justice." And again, "Vengeance is not justice." I let the wind carry my words because human beings (even highly evolved ones) can't hear spirits.
I was sixteen when I died.
Darn, I did it again. I rushed to the end of the story before telling the beginning. I am one of those girls. You know who I mean; the kind of girl who eats dessert for dinner and reads the end of the book first. Everyone calls me impatient. Impatient should be my first name.
"Learning to step away from a moral framework helped us a lot in leaving the abusive relationship with our parents and our boyfriend."
Isn't this just stepping away from someone else's moral framework? And sticking closer to our own? I certainly agree with stepping away from abusive partners, parents, toxic people etc. but it seems to me this is rejecting an older (and someone else's) moral code: to be loyal to your family, partner, spouse no matter what etc.
I'm still unconvinced that anyone has rejected (and has no) morality. At best this all seems to me like a failure to agree on definitions. As well as a sign of how we all live in an unnatural environment where we're starting to doubt our own morality, or that morality itself exists.
@@the81kid we definitely have a moral framework, but at that time we absolutely did not value ourselves enough to consider harm against us immoral.
Now we would consider the actions immoral, but still not see our parents and our ex as "bad people" overall.
That's a very good point. Saying something is immoral often stops a discussion. There's one person in my life I had to think of immediately, who can get very upset if other people don't act according to his moral code. Usually the reasoning goes that he finds that people simply SHOULDN'T act this way, and the discussion ends there, because "if that's what you think, there's no arguing with that". But perhaps I *could* argue with that, namely that his morals are no reason to treat people that way.
I was so confused in my philosophy classes about ethics! I’m very proud of my statement: _”Morality is just bicycle paths”_ (They are safer, better for the environment, there is no discussion about “But why should you have the RIGHT for a path?” or something. It feels technical, like all “morality” should.) But, because of you, i finally get my own issue with the ethics class: most people just think morally-even in philosophy. I didn’t really get what morality meant, I thought everybody would just mean: “the most well-being” with moral good. But they don’t.
I still feel like I’m autistic or something, like, I really didn’t get what it’s all about. But now I have a more clear understanding: I’m not wrong or misaligned; I just don’t think morality exists. Although I still don’t really get what they think it is. Is the whole concept inconsistent and non-existent after all? 🤔
Dumb comment
@@seandevine5836 Explain! I love this subject
I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I however struggle with the gap between 'we can maximize wellbeing' and it actually being a worthwhile task. To me it seems that it requires empathy, but to justify it, I am inclined to label it as good. How is this gap closed within amoral thought?
This kind of case for amorality is just utilitarianism without moral talk (the feets)
@Twenty faces Well, Bentham does a similar argument to this one
@Twenty faces Utilitarianism says that because everyone strives for well-being (pleasure), it’s what we _should_ strive for (as a moral standard). At least that’s the argument Mill makes, and that’s exactly the feet they were talking about I think. We don’t need to define well being as a moral standard, we can just use the observation that almost everyone strives for it and move on from there.
@@fredhasopinions Well, that is just the "feet". Literally Mill makes that observation and moves on from there. He just says "should"
@@etincardiaego yeah that's what I'm saying, I was just replying to the other guy (gal? folk?)
@@fredhasopinions Ah yes, sry. Didn't notice haha
“Wellbeing” appears to me as a massively ideologically loaded concept cleverly smuggled inside a seemingly benign word
If you think "well being" as a concept could ever be fully amoral or value-free, then you are basically just letting those in power decides whatever "well being" will mean
I full heartedly love this. It only follows to see what sort of impact this thinking may produce in a general sense. Thanks, this brings me a lot hope!
Eh… well-being has a problem of being susceptible to infinite regress. I mean a person can just assert “why should I care about the well being of [insert target(s)]?”
It might be a stronger to start off by assuming that we live in a world where somethings want somethings. Desire exists.
This is phenomenologically provable for one’s self at the very least.
Once we descriptively establish that desire exists, we can talk about liabilities. Liabilities to various desires can at least be induced to exist.
This to me is a stronger defense against infinite regress. Since people share the qualia of desire I don’t need to justify its existence and the properties contingent on the existence of desire(liability) are also just as self evident.
This is argument provides protection against the “so what?” counter point that all proscriptions seem vulnerable to.
I like this a lot. It reaches for the same goals too.
That just pushes the argument down to "why should we choose to maximize access to desire?" It doesn't avoid infinite regress, it just pushes the regress down a level. Desires exist, and so do liabilities to those desires. Why does that mean we should take those desires into account when acting?
Everyone has to start with a set of moral axioms to reason for why one _should_ pursue something or not do another thing. Morality serves a regulatory function of behaviour and especially of behaviour on a societal level. This is what morality is. To attempt to derive morality from nature is a misunderstanding of morality.
And what would make us strive to increase well-being and abstain from decreasing well-being (not just our own, mind you, but also that of others) in the first place, if not the notion that we *should* do so, that doing so is good, and the reverse is bad? Which is still a moral imperative, of course. It seems to me that prof. Moeller presupposes morality even as he supposedly rejects it. Matthijsendt, on the other hand, seems to have a more truly amoral stance than prof. Moeller, because he only accepts the objective observation that people prefer to flourish, but rejects Harris's 'controversial' notion that we *should* try to help (other people than ourselves) flourish. Of course, it's obvious that such consistent amorality is, in fact, detrimental to the well-being of humanity. Finally, Zizek's version of the statement is more adequate, b/c, fortunately, most people are not just lukewarmly 'not inclined' to torture - that definitely wouldn't be enough - but 'the idea of torturing is deeply traumatic to them', partly because of morality (combined with empathy; but empathy can *far* from always be counted on as an indicator of what is conducive to well-being).
He does presuppose a moral judgment, yes. For example his notion of not "punishing" people based on their decision, in his example getting vaccinated for something, but rather "limit" their threat. The outcome is exactly the same, and it also creates the exact same "us vs them" outcome that the moral equivalent does.
It changes absolutely nothing, except the tone in which its spoken about.
Just as a man who commits a crime out of desperation, for example to feed his family. He is attempting to increase his family's wellbeing, perhaps even keep them alive. He is not acting "against" wellbeing, he simply has a different notion of which "wellbeing" he is favouring. His family's wellbeing as opposed to the wellbeing of the strangers making up the general public. And without morality, then there is no way to argue that "they" should experience X and "we" should experience Y.
It becomes a question of "why does this law exist?" and is answered by "because it serves greater wellbeing"
Which inevitably leads to "greater wellbeing for who?"
And with that question, the philosophy can only answer "the majority". Hello, tribalism.
In a hypothetical world where you could drug people to feel a shared amount of empathy on every action, then a pursuit of a general wellbeing would be possible. But even then, it would impossible to argue in favour of, because by imposing your definition of wellbeing on those who don't share it, you are acting against their own, removing the "general" wellbeing and replacing it with your own "for the greater good", which is literally a moral judgment. And I would say its much worse than even the strictest religion, because instead of simply demanding that people agree with you, then quietly hoping they listen, you are physically forcing them to fit your vision of a person who serves ...... wellbeing. And at that point, "wellbeing" has become synonymous with "moral framework".
"if not the notion that we should do so, that doing so is good, and the reverse is bad? Which is still a moral imperative, of course."
if we think of increasing "well-being" as ensuring better maintenance or survival of human race, then it can be seen as amoral.
for example, we preserve lots of endangered species, because their survival is vital to us. Not out of a moral imperative.
Because our survival is amoral. We merely want to survive.
Trying to prioritize human's survival compare to other species is an amoral act. Neither good or bad, merely species favor-ism or biased.
@@williampan29 "wellbeing" is not as simple as "surviving longer durrrr".
There are many things which shorten lifespans but most of us would consider an increase in wellbeing. Smokers, Dr. Pepper-downers, people who just absolutely love alcohol for some reason, and a million more.
And frankly, anybody who defines "quality of life" by only survivability and time is practically just deadwood already.
Also we don't keep endangered species alive for our own survivability, its pure sentimentality. The very reason they've become endangered is precisely because we don't need or use them for anything, compared to say...chickens. I don't even know why you thought that.
There is a well-known phenomenon in economics, that if you want to reduce a behavior that is considered morally bad (for example being late to pick up your kids at the daycare), by imposing monetary punishment the bad behavior actually increases.
I do agree that moral judgments are often unfair but they are also extremally powerful in promoting societal well-being.
Only if you apply bad incentives. For example, a 25$ fee for being late to daycare. Now, anyone who is late can pick their kid up 15 min or 3 hrs late. Doesn’t matter. And since they’re fined they feel less guilty. If you Change the fine to a rolling basis (increases as the parent is more late) and put in social punishments then the behavior decreases
But what you're describing is a legal framework, not a moral one. It does more good than harm precisely because it's just a cold ticket, not a walk of shame.
Of course there are situations where truly moral communication is more helpful than harmful but imo that is mostly constrained to private matters. Anything "political" i.e. pertaining entire demographics is better handled amorally because morality is so double-edged. You can mobilize people to do "good" things, but you're potentially setting them up for someone else to mobilize them to do "bad" things.
Without violence and conflict life ceases to exist.
Interesting video, but I still don't get how morality is not the quality of an action. How can we decide which laws we want to implemt, if we don't have morality?
Look up legal positivism. One of the dominant schools of legal philosophy specifically dedicated to establishing how a legal system is not a moral system (as opposed to “natural law” tradition which may say things like “an unjust law is no law at all”)
because it's motivation.
I think Slavjo is still under the naive impression that reason automatically arises out of good faith and pro social motivation by default. This assumption is false, because reason alone doesn't account for initial intention. It's reasonable for a politician to lie, it's reasonable for an international company to have unpaid workers with no health benefits, it's reasonable for a drug addict to stab someone in the streets for their next fix, and it's reasonable to push narratives that promote your will to power at the expense of even recognizing objective reality. My point is that reason alone isn't enough to motivate people into pro social behavior, that's why we evolved to value a moral system(from where Slavjo wants to arbitrary separate that from his vague term of wellbeing)
The uncomfortable truth is that humans will always have a religious instinct, and rather than force it out of ourselves, it's better to understand why they evolved that way in the first place
You want certain things to happen, I want certain things to happen. We then find that which is intersubjective about our desirabilities (and what's necessary about them), combine it with a well-predicting model of the world and voila: laws.
Legal positivism is not aboit "how we decide what law should be made" but about "is this text a law". It doesn't say how law SHOULD BE.
This makes so much sense to me. Thank you very much for posting
Really good stuff. I think of morality as a rhetorical device that tries to capture certain intuitions about kindness, reciprocity, etc. but it does so badly, distorting and biasing our thinking in ways that are not helpful. Look forward to reading your book,
You just made three moral claims.
@@FightFilms Which claims are those? I don't see a single moral claim in the OP.
I'm confused if this "wellbeing" doesn't collapse onto what is its somewhat self-referential nature but also formal emptiness. I fail to grasp the specificity of this "wellbeing", and almost see it like a medieval transcendental (the Good, the One, the True). That it somehow escapes moral discurse because of conceptual self-sufficiency.
I appreciate the critique of morality as founding a discourse that places most actions within it, and therefore within the realm of discursive justification, opening up a zone where producing such arguments "makes sense" and is in fact immediatly expected of us in certain situations, already producing a "moral way to look at things" that covers it up and impedes other analysis (one of your examples for this sort of intuitive moral response was torture, and I agree that it becomes hard to not have an account of torture that is not tied to moral sentiment).
But the problem with the efficacy of such moral discourse, is that even the attempt to flee it is nontheless made in relation to it. The discourse on wellbeing is placed within moral discourse, its language is mined to the point of exhaustion. It seems like "wellbeing" tries to rely on the psychological confort of a notion that doesn't have to exist in moral discourse. This why it reminded me of medieval transcendentals, in the way that it pretends it doesn't have to contend with history. In a similar way, and in regards to other discussions, I view the pretention of escaping ideology as the most ideological move of all. Also in a similar way, and more to the point of your video, health. Today the moralizing health discourse is stronger than ever, with entire industries of wellbeing shaping all conversations about health procedures. The example of health as finding ways to promote wellbeing "amorally" doesn't work I think.
The first moral problem is "why should I BEGIN to CARE (for others)?" We know that descriptions like yours end up being merely procedural, a pure calculation (literally) of pleasure and pain, just like in Utilitarianism, through which the mere idea of "CARE (for others)", or regard, if you wish, is not necessarily present. In other words: The Welfare State, currently implanted in all of Western Europe, where suicide is usually more common than in poor states.
Indeed, we do not judge poor people morally bad for being poor: we judge them certainly GOOD SIMPLY FOR BEING PEOPLE: that's why we can judge that perhaps they DESERVE, regardless of calculations, a better situation (so that a system can be "unfair", not just "malfunctional").
There's no merely neutral position that may convince me of the necessity of watching out (directing my attention and my efforts to) others. Ask tyrants. Their calculations of well-being work just fine for them.
I loved reading book of the professor:” Moral Fool and highly recommend it for interesting deep arguments
I'm reading it at the moment.
When you employ categories like 'better people', it follows there also exist 'worse people', and therefore there is an implicit value judgement on what is 'better' and what is 'worse'. How exactly is this different from morality? Just because it's different from various religious moral frameworks, doesn't seem to me like it's not a moral framework at all. I'd say the only difference is that instead of some divine goodness, the moral judgement is against purportedly rational (but basically axiomatic) social or personal goodness. Such pseudo-amoral framework is in no way naturally prevents people from arbitrarily assigning the label of 'worse' to behaviours and acts, and even exercising violence to eliminate them over an 'amoral outrage', so to ensure that 'better' behaviours and acts become more prominent and result in 'better people' somewhere down the line.
So you get rid of morality by defining it out of existence through semantic gymnastics?
The analogy with "A good game of chess, or a good meal" is fallacious, because these two things are descriptive no prescriptive judgements. A good meal , doesn't mean that you SHOULD make or eat a good meal, its just a subjective observation. Morality is also implicitly universal and there's no way out of this. To enter into debate with someone over anything, is to immediately and performatively assume the normativity of truth.
nope
I feel like you might be right, but what the professor said in the video does resonate with me, and I'm trying to square that circle. I think what the professor calls "morality" is really what most people would call "black-and-white thinking". To me "morality" is just a particular type of value judgement. And I guess the question is can you have the value judgement without the black-and-white thinking.
@@APaleDot I don't think this was about black and white thinking, this was about morality. This is a philosophy prof we're talking about here, so accuracy and rigor is their bread and butter. If he wanted to talk about black and white thinking, he'd said as much.
I agree with you that morality is a kind of value judgement, but its a very specific kind, its a kind that deals with what one ought to do, and its one you can't get out of. You try to change anyone's mind about anything, and you're immediately assuming that truth is something someone ought to seek and believe.
In defense of the prof, this is a fallacy where a lot of very smart ppl fall into, and I think the reasons for that are psychological rather than logical. Morality has always been associated with religion, dogma, tradition, intolerance and as you said, black and white thinking...etc, its also associated with alot of other good things, but many academics feel a need to distance themselves from religion by trapping themselves into relativism or moral non-cognitivism ..etc
By the way, objective morality doesn't necessarily mean that there is only one way of doing things for all times and all ppl and all places, but rather that for each given unique situation there is an objectively best way of doing things, and for that situation the person/s ought to follow it insofar as they can. As Kant said, an ought implies a can.
@hansfrankfurter2903 "for each given unique situation there is an objectively best thing to do"
nope. Take eating for instance, a predator wants to eat, a pray doesn't. If a predator traps a pray, there is no objectively best way to get out of it, beacause it is merely the functioning of a cycle of nature.
"Best" implies there exist a standard of an ideal world. But if there is never a such thing and cannot be defined, then there is no best way.
As someone who works in the field of mental health, a prissy euphemism for mental illness, which threatens to become an accidental contranym, the last part of this talk was particularly enlightening. It is the paranoid schizophrenic's notion of evil, of the immoral, that leads them to commit violence.
Pretty sure it's their mental health issues that causes them to commit violence. They'll just rationalise their value in a particular way
actually it is the absolutum, reaching one goal once and for all.
@Bob Squirrel your statement is valued with your own perspective what is morally acceptable
fascists thought of themselves to be a higher level of morality. Actually when you want to have a passion to read about power and mighty you should read Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra.
@Bob Squirrel The word "conspiracy" doesn't imply fiction.
@@iBloodxHunter It does in a colloquial sense
Professor, since you've done a video on some of the more "negative" aspects of Kant, could you do the same to Nietzsche? He's someone who comes up often in your or videos and in philosophy in general, yet noone ever seems to adress his passion for aristocracy, cruelty, suffering, his utter disdain for the common man, his advocation of "slavery", and other such things.
Isn't this really just semantics - rejecting the term 'morality' while still making moral statements? Would you accept the word 'ethics' instead of 'morality'? It seems to me your moral framework is one of increasing well-being and reducing that which harms well-being - i.e. that wellbeing is an intrinsic good. But how did you decide that well-being was a good thing to aim for, or that harm to well-being should be avoided? Is it the idea of an absolute ahistorical moral truth you object to? When deciding how to live your life you may say whether X is good or bad is contingent or whether Y is good or bad is contingent. But if you dig down, there has to be an intrinsic good to decide on whether the outcomes of whatever other contingent events are 'good' or 'bad'. Is not saying "health is an intrinsic good" a moral statement? I don't think we can avoid morality when deciding how to act - even if we give it another name. I agree with you that it's better to avoid judging people as 'good' or 'bad' but actions and outcomes need to have some judgement applied to them if we are to make any informed choices about our behaviour.
@Tracchofyre But why is being healthy or increasing wellbeing "good"? How did we decide that? On what foundation is the decision made? If that is not a moral foundation, what kind of foundation are we using? Science can help us reach our goal more efficiently. It can show us cause and effect. If we do X then Y will probably happen, which will either bring us closer to our goal or not. But it cannot tell us what basic intrinsic values underpin our goals. If they are intrinsic (ie good in themselves, for there own sake) then are hey not outside of cause and effect? If not then it seems we have to accept that wellbelling isn't always "good" and whether it is "good" or "bad" is contingent on other factors and their cause or effect. But then, we come back to asking - on what basis are we deciding? It seems circular to me. Contingent all the way down. We have to land on a foundation eventually to make a decision (Which, I suppose, might mean making one up). I don't know the answer, I find it confusing.
Morality is like an object, an external feature. It can be embodied, but it‘s primarily mediated by communication media. Externalization is by the way the central human property. Morality today is surrounded by the terms of „helping“, „saving“ and managing, which seems to signal, that the externalization process is a still ongoing one.
Additionaly: moral outrage is one of the most egocentric feelings one might have. It's all about deceiving oneself that "I am morally superior to these villains" and setting oneself in a position to lecture others and tell them how to live.
sums up most twitter feeds quite neatly
The moral law is not to murder.
You can choose whether to follow this moral law or not, and your choice determines which future universe you will exist in, as murderer or not.
"We no longer see the people who are sick as punished by God, or morally responsible for sickness" - uhhhhhh, think again. If the pandemic has shown anything, it's how quickly people will "moralize" the covid 19 public health. Some subset of the people turned zero covid as a sacred cow, and not following all of their pointless guidelines (and even getting covid 19) as some sort of moral failure.
Which actually goes back to your point, about how morality can itself be pretty dangerous. Great video!
It's moral to needle r@pe, enslave and impoverish people because you believe a pathogenic virus exists?
@Tracchofyre Yes, ignorance among those who oppose covid 19 public health policies - specifically those who have an almost a blanket opposition - is a problem. But I also see failings on the parts of those so-called "public health experts." Many have misled, if not flat out lied to us and pushed a certain narrative while diminishing or even dismissing the valid concerns. It doesn't help that we have a uniformly biased media (except for Fox news, which has its own set of biases) and a justified distrust of the said media to begin with.
And in the midst of all the division, we find ourselves with the same moralization problems that Dr. Georg Moeller has been talking about. The public health experts and the media, instead of treating the pandemic as specific set of problems to be solved, applied blanket fear mongering and advocated for blanket restrictions. All because these measures are "morally good."
So no, viewing it simply as a failure of education is not quite enough. Failure of education simply deepens the already high distrust of the authorities we have. The undercurrent already existed for a long time - the covid 19 pandemic surfaced it.
@Tracchofyre Probably the same percentage that were for the public health measures were scientifically illiterate as well and viewed their advocacy as a righteous crusade against Trump and the ones with the MAGA hats.
Two words: adaptive and maladaptive. In most cases, violence is maladaptive. Cooperation is adaptive. Morality isn't required with these...for personal use - as I assess my own behaviour, including thought-behaviour. Morality can get in the way of honest self-reflection (if, for example, I want to avoid guilt).
It would seem that everyone has the same claim on welbeing. If we both need help, how do we decide who gets it first? In USA, it usually boils down to who has the most money. That seems unjust. Although, a cynical argument could be made that the rich deserve to be saved first.
Wow, the warnings are helping, seeing this QA a year later from the video, made think if it was done only to encourage people to watch that old video, which in my case it did! Because the conversation about Russia has been a conversation about morality, I've been wanting to hear more, which is why I immediately clicked on this video, which is harder to enjoy if I haven't watch the old video on Sam Harris. Now I wonder other QAs I've seen, are they just hooks to make us watch other, referenced, videos? Anyhow, if so, the hook worked, great job!
I'm currently knee-deep in Machiavelli literature. I chuckled a couple of times during this video - I think the way many people (mis-)understood your last video is very similar to the way Machiavelli's views on morality and statehood have been (mis-)interpreted the past 500 years (and as I am currently rummaging through still more Machiavelli literature I can say with some confidence that people continue and will continue to present him as basically a PR guy for being a sociopath).
I know this is an older video so you might not check the comments or want to reply but I'm curious if you've read any of the research by Dr. Randall Collins (author of the Sociology of Philosophies) looking at cross cultural hesitations towards interpersonal violence.
I have a question not so much related to this particular video but in regards to the East Asian philosophy such as Taoism etc.
Anyone who has some good recommendations for where to begin reading about these philosophies?
Thank you very much for this Q&A. I really appreciate all your videos!
I think your observation of Harris is on point. However, isn't Harris basically a utilitarian because he wants to maximize the well-being (whatever that exactly is) of everyone. And isn't that an individual value judgment which we just relabel from 'moral judgment' to 'value judgment'? Someone might think the human race would be better off if there is pain and suffering. I agree that stepping away from morality is helpful to be more doubtful and thus less radical but ethical or political judgments will remain subjective, right?
Even if he is a very religious thinker, I like Kierkegaard's notion of subjective and objective truth. He thought that objective truth, e.g., 2+2=4 are the boring ones and our subjective truths make us who we are. The danger for him was to confuse those two. I find Harris and other Atheists, especially if they talk about Theists, fundamentally religious because they confuse their subjective truth as being objective. We might be better off without religion but we need doubt about our reality, otherwise, we lean into jet another total system.
It might be dangerous to argue that morality does not exist because there is no science of it, i.e., we can not quantify it. For the same reason, many things that make us human do not exist (love, art, passions, the ability to tell a good story, ...).
It seems to me that the professor here wants morality just as much as anyone else, that it's only the traditional means and presentation of morality he'd like to eliminate. ie he wants his moral values to be drawn from empirical data rather than intuition or spirituality, and he wants to present it without moralistic language and get rid of words like "good" and "evil".
But put those differences aside and I'm struggling to see how the final product you generate with that process is any different from "Morality" in any practical way.
I think you misunderstand him. The advice that a physician will give you will be objectively good for your bodily functions. That doesn't make it moral. You might be under a moral framework that demands your death ASAP, which would obviously contradict the advice given to you. Most people just assume the advice itself to be moral, not realising that it's their own frameworks that moralise the advice. His intention is to get you to notice the distinction.
As Crispman says: you're mistaking prescriptivity itself for morality. That is not the case. Just as making a prescriptive claim about the world is not inherently religious, it is not inherently moralistic.
By your logic, you could also spin his argument into advocating for religion just not in a traditional way, because hey, if you have any opinion about what the world should be like, it must be out of religious conviction, right? If God does not exist, then everything is allowed, amirite? Ergo, anyone who makes claims about what should and shouldn't be allowed must believe in God.
@@TheJayman213 Please correct me if you spot errors in my reasoning, but I feel like your extension to religion doesn't work. Prescriptivism necessarily entails having a vision for how the world should be and working to implement that. Isn't that what morality is? Opinions on what the world should be like don't have to be made out of religious conviction, but they do need to originate from *some* conviction (otherwise the opinions wouldn't exist). This conviction is what morality is, isn't it?
For example, take his example of harm reduction (specifically, informing a patient that smoking could cause them to suffer from diseases). The literal advice itself may be amoral, but it exists in the context of a doctor's ethical duty to promote the welfare of their patient (which is a moral framework). The advice would never be given if it weren't for morality because there would be no reason to prioritize general welfare. In general, if you decide to follow a course of harm reduction, that is necessarily a moral decision (because it is driven by a conviction that a certain principle should be upheld, namely, the principle of avoiding harm).
With excessively moralistic behavior, people begin to hold too many moral axioms (which may even contradict each other), and they begin to feel that their moral framework is objectively right. I do think it makes sense to reject excessively moralistic reasoning, but ditching the concept of morality entirely seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater (so to speak). In fact, just taking a stance against the intolerance of moralistic behavior is a moral stance.
I think that you can definitely cut down the number of moral axioms you rely on, but you can't eliminate morality itself entirely, simply because the process of making judgments about the world necessitates having some moral stance. Even the choice to focus on one thing over another ends up being a moral judgment (because you have to decide what matters, and such a decision literally has no resolution outside of a self-constructed moral framework).
@@sparshjohri1109 I would argue that the majority of decisions you make all the time are not the result of moral deliberation. Deciding on how to interact with the world doesn't require specifically moral judgement, it can be the result of any judgement.
This kind of definition of morality seems pretty useless to me. Where do you draw the line between moral and amoral decisions? "I'm gonna browse CZcams" vs. "I'm gonna give this homeless person my spare change". You could expand the definition to simply mean whatever underlies literally any decision but that seems absurd to me.
The definition of morality, discussed in the video is the difference between a doctor who thinks of the addict's history and potential continued actions as a moral failing, and one who doesn't; i.e. whether you are morally judging people when telling them to act differently. A deeply religious person can struggle imagining having a basis for telling people how to act, besides Religion.
@@TheJayman213 My point was that you can get away with reducing moral prescriptivism, but you can't get away from morality altogether. The decision to value human life (and therefore tell people if they are endangering themselves) is moral, even if the advice is given in a non-judgmental way. Obviously, morality doesn't need to come into the picture for every decision (I was definitely oversimplifying there so thanks for pointing that out), but it does come into play in so many person-to-person interactions. For example, if you come to any position about murder, that is a moral position. Aversion to killing is a moral stance because it's rooted in the ideal that life should be held in high regard (or that the well-being of other people is important). Some degree of moral prescriptivism is necessary (e.g. consideration for the well-being of others is important, which means deeming murder to be illegal), but the difference is the degree to which moralists push the specifics of their own brand of morality.
My image of morality is that people make efforts to live up to the ideals that they adopt. The kind of moralism that the video is discussing is a particular type of morality in which people feel compelled to push their own ideals onto other people.
Edit: While writing this comment, I thought about why murder could be held to be bad without involving morality. I came up with a Kantian line of reasoning where "if everyone were to do it, that would be a bad thing." But then, I thought, "If one person were to go around murdering people, would we condone that? Since not everyone is doing it? That still feels like it should be condemnable behavior." Then I realized that, in fact, society does permit an entity to commit murder: the state. So in that respect, there actual is amoral reasoning going on as opposed to moral reasoning.
I realize this weakens my position, so I acknowledge that I have more thinking to do. I personally am opposed to the death penalty and would like to see it gone because it violates my personal principle that sentience should be inviolable unless a person wishes to die, but then this makes me among those moralists who wish to push their ideals onto the world (and that contradicts my belief that people shouldn't push their morality onto other people). So there is a contradiction there in my beliefs that I do have to iron out.
Shoutout to Tsutomu Nihei's Blame! manga in the background!!
Excellent video professor, I have a few questions relating to metaethics on this.
Without morality is the quest for wellbeing grounded in personal preference; this preference being an extension of natural human drives?
Would you say your view is incompatible with expressivist theories? I understand your idea that morality isn't a natural feature of humanity but if it isn't natural why do we do it and where does it come from if not an expression of something else?
I have seen a couple of other people in the comments make similar questions so it may be helpful to boil them down to:
Why do you believe in the quest for wellbeing?
If moralising isn't natural then where does it come from?
This is essentially my question as well.
maybe I can help you. Morality as a specific code is not a natural thing, being morally towards others (who don't have to see that as a form of morality) is natural.
edit: a house built by humans is not natural, but building a place where humans can feel safe is natural.
@@SchmulKrieger So the pursuit of subjective well-being is natural but not moral? If so doesn’t that pull the rug out from under it to some extent?
@@milesmungo Why would it? Nature is not morality and vice versa. Nature simply exists, it's amoral. Rape is natural, plenty of animals have been found to do it recreationally but I don't think that makes it a good thing.
I think that once you really bore down to the roots, all morality ultimately stems from primal instincts. Safety and power/freedom (cooperation vs resource gathering). I think that's why there's room for argument within morality. Dave values the personal power of independent agency but Susan values the safety of communal cooperation. I think that every moral system falls within this tension, the more nuanced moral frameworks understanding that balancing the two leads to the optimal results, assuming you're not suicidal.
I think the answer to your first question is yes. The quest for wellbeing, to those that follow it, is the most likely way to increase their own wellbeing in the long term. "Happy people make me happier, therefore I should make more people happy". If you're a sadistic psychopath though this obviously won't be true, but most people aren't. Again we're back to the tension described before.
very clear and concise! I greatly enjoyed listening to this, keep up the excellent work!
"Well-being" is just a word swap for "good". If you are valuing "well-being" over any other state of being, you are making a value judgment which is indistinguishable from a moral claim. You can shift words around all day but you're still doing morality.
Professor, could you tell the difference between ethics and moral? Also, how Natural Law fits in your point of view? Thanks!
Ethics is rule based, and morals are based on principles.
Will we ever get an audiobook/audible version of The Moral Fool?
If I may further express my considerations, I found the narrator of
You and Your Profile to be less than ideal in appropriately expressing intention from tone of the reading making it a more difficult read in having to seperate what the text intended and what the narrator's inflexions inferred. If it were read by the author it'd be cool.
But I know nothing of the bureaucracy and expenses of such things, just tipping my hand.
I'm getting the idea that it's also a game of definitions. If you call "morally good" that which increases well-being, and you call "morally bad" that which decreases well-being, then every statement about well-being becomes a moral statement as well. Sometimes the same thing can be said, but it sounds completely different because of a change in definitions.
What is your opinion of consequentialist moralities like Utilitarianism or Mohism that sometimes define morality as improving well-being? Your critiques seem very well suited against deontologists, but I think a critique of a consequentialist philosophy from an amoral perspective would help explain what you mean.
Anyone can claim, and most would likely agree, that actions A and B lead to improved well being and actions C and D lead to decreased well being. However, what is the connection between such cause and effect statements and morality?
Here's where it is important to delve into the definition of moral terminology and determine what definitions most closely describe what human societies mean when they make moral statements like 'Hitler is evil' or 'Rape and murder are immoral'. In this two statements, for example, virtually no one is merely making a cause and effect statement, the same way one may say 'Increased lion numbers harms zebras.'
Adopting a consequentialist position on morality like utilitarianism does not avoid this question, as the way almost everyone uses moral terminology is much closer to a metaphysical sort of statement/claim than anything else. Sure, an academic can use a different definition, but the relevance of what they are discussing to what an ordinary person is discussing is virtually zero.
This sounds like the a argument that Ivan Karamazov makes when visiting the the monastery with his family.
Another thing I really don't understand is at 20:03, when you say: "I think treating actions that for one reason or another we consider 'bad' in a legal framework is more efficient than treating them in a moral framework." What do you mean by this? Do you mean that we should no longer call bad actions 'bad' but instead just let lawyers and judges decide what should be done with the person who committed the bad action? What do we then do with bad actions that aren't punishable by law (eg. being rude, cheating on someone, expressing racist, sexist, homophobic opinions?) - do we just stop condemning these and yet punish those who do such actions with laws and regulations? Also, I can imagine if you are against vaccines and you are denied certain things just because you chose not to get vaccinated, that it is really hard not to feel like the government considers you a bad, irresponsible citizen (or at the very least a potentially dangerous one). Can laws even be amoral?
just found this channel and i already know im about to binge watch a lot of ur content. i love how you deliver ur thoughts, its so clear it makes it easy to follow each point from A to B. as an illiterate internet philosobaby i rlly appreciate that
I fail to see why statements about what increases or decreases well-being are somehow not moral. If you didn't believe that it's good to increase well-being and bad to decrease it, then why would you even bother making these statements about well-being? I'm honestly kind of struggling to understand the point this video essay is trying to make
I never got around watching the Harris video, but you present some really interesting thoughts in support of "amorality". Come to think of it, I don't think I never really thought about things in "moral" language before studying philosophy. But I still cared about my well-being, and that of others, etc. So, you may be onto something.. I have to think about it.
Why do you care about the well-being of others?
@@FightFilms Well, the ultimate answer would seem to be because that is the kind of creature I have shaped to be in this universe (as dictated by biology and environment).
But another answer could be because I view the distinction between "me" and "others" as superficial, and hence if I care about one, I should care about the other.
Another answer yet could be that because our well-being is mutually related. My well-being is, to some degree, contingent on the well-being of others. And there are also people whose well-being is, to some degree, contingent on that of mine.
Why do you ask?
@@incollectio Because you don't seem to know why, and your answer proved this. You seem to reject that morality simply exists, despite the fact that we all seem to agree that it does by moralizing everything, yet have no real explanation for why you actualy care, as your attempts to explain do not seem to cohere and don't actually explain anything.
@@FightFilms I'm not sure what "explanation" you'd want? How would you answer your own question: Why do you care (or do not care?) about the well-being of others?
In any case, I am a skeptic, sure. I may not know much anything, and I'm fine with it. Appearances and probabilities are what ultimately guide me.
But, and partly as a consequence of my skepticism, I did not claim morality does not exists. Just that it seems like a possibility worth considering.
@@incollectio An explanation that makes sense.
I never said I cared about other people's well-being. You did. Except you don't know why. I would say it's probably because you rejected God on some egoistic principle, whatever that is/however one defines that(God). So you use these unfounded pseudoscientific explanations like evolution and posit other possibilities that have no merit, or at least you cannot justify.
But, morality does seem to exist because we all agree it does, since we also moralize everything. So, assuming they do exist, where did the laws of logic, truth, morality come from? What's the more likely explanation? That they came into existence out of nowhere and developed randomly? Order out of chaos? Or, are they a higher power that has always existed or are themselves guaranteed/created by this higher power?
Moeller is a sociologically focused philosopher. Why do I bring this up? Because I think it explains where he's coming from and how he's arrived at his current position on ethics.
For me, if someone said, "If we get rid of morality we will stop seeing bad students as bad people," I'd be like, pointing to bad morality does not invalidate the reality of good morality. I would not point to homeopathy, and say, "see, medicine is all quackery." However, for Moeller, he correctly points out that seeing bad students as bad people is a systemic problem, getting rid of the problem would improve society, and moralising frameworks cause this error. These are all large, present, and obvious things for someone who focuses on sociology.
Mathematics feels unreal to many people. After all, you cannot pick up and tangibly hold a number. Moeller opines that there is no science of morality because no moral principles exist in fact. But Moeller does not study mathematics, and is unaware of the strong similarities between mathematical principles and several of the moral principles we have discovered, such as the epistemic criteria for moral responsibility.
Only immoral people see bad students as bad people. Obviously, he is projecting.
@@FightFilms Both of those statements are sus. You should try to learn your opponent's position before criticising them.
Not sure how you'd feel about it, but it just popped into my head that you may be interested in looking at the content of Mr. Girl as someone who talks alot about non-morality and makes distinctions between things like sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity. A lot of hid content is based around trying to be brutally honest while at the same time a lot of it is performative as well. I would be interested to see how you would analyze how he portrays himself using your understanding of identity.
Trying to figure out exactly what is and what isn't meant here by "morality" is maddening, and certainly the contradiction has not been removed (or even addressed) in my mind. This video is clearly moral discourse, as it discusses what actions are preferable and why.
What's more, it seems that professor is de-legitimizing some actions and legitimizing others, so, even by his own admission, he's engaging in moralizing. But apparently he's not, he's amoral. One thing is for sure: the way professor understands the word "morality" is different than how the rest of the world understands it.
Best I can figure out it "morality" is supposed to be something like "an unreflective way of justifying actions that enables one to act in a way that's ironically harmful according to our natural sensibilities". It really seems like the exact opposite of what the term means. I don't even disagree with the general conclusions here, but I take issue with the way they are conceptualized. This could be presented in a way that's clearer and less pretentious.
I see topics like being anti-abortion and veganism as an attempt at making the judgment of "right vs wrong", completely disregarding the stakes they have on humans' well-being. This is where I can see the line most clearly. I think to legitimize and de-legitimize is exactly what he is against and instead he advocates for pure judgment and reasoning and the elimination of the "appeal to authority" nature of morality. It is not "wrong" to murder but it does a lot of harm to people's well being so it must be stopped. It does not de-legitimizes murder but judges it in a way that explains why a lot of people de-legitimize it in the first place. I see those two judgments as vastly different. Following that murder is wrong, some people will and have concluded that killing animals is wrong. Now it might be "wrong" to murder animals but it doesn't have a negative effect on humans so we don't stop it. Bottom line, I think morality is a very simplified and categorical way of thinking born out of our reasoning, beliefs, emotions, etc. instead of the other way around or coming simultaneously. Completely ignoring it would allow us to see things clearer and eliminate unnecessary steps that might obscure our judgment.
My personal opinion is that the main root of veganism is simply empathy. I think it is a very self-pleasing judgment that does not take into account or at least understates all the killings we do that cannot appeal to our empathy. It is in a way a judgment for our mental well-being with an added system of morality that suggests the concreteness of right vs wrong as to say that murder IS wrong periodt. Because behind the curtains of morality, veganism stands to please our own empathy, nothing more nothing less.
I dont think morality is defined as "discussing what actions are preferable and why". You could say the same thing about philosophy as a whole.
@@canti7951 Try "ethics as a whole" and you'll have my agreement. What I don't understand is the insistence on framing this outlook as a "morality-free ethics", so to speak.
Here are two questions I would love to have answered. What is this "morality" supposed to be, exactly, and why is the professor not motivated by it?
@@luszczi I really have nothing more to say about it lol. I believe I have already shared my opinion on it in the first reply.
Yeah, I find it strange that professor quotes Zizek while, at the same time, develops the opposite conclusions from his statements.
Many times Zizek emphazised how the postmodern dictum “there is no metalanguage” is not accepted by postmodernists themselves: more often than not they put this exact statement at the place of metalanguage, thus creating a system of morality that “condemns everything that condemns”.
The concept of the “prohibition of prohibition” is central to Zizek’s critique of ideology and in Lacan’s juissance: this prohibition of prohibition inherently creates a morality with the imperative of “Enjoy!” and the Super-Ego, rather than being the force that represses pleasure, becomes that which orders and command us to enjoy.
Enjoyment becomes a moral standard.
The fact that there is no metalanguage is a call for actually taking responsibility for ones ideas, living in the paradox of how the impossibility of ethics and its existence can and do coexist.
Something that has always fascinated me is how a person can hold blatantly racist views, openly state racist comments and ideals. All the while insisting, they are not racist. A person can be called racist 100s of times, actively pursuing this label by publicly expressing their views. Knock boots with other racists and even mobilise with group ideology, only to vigorously deny the label.
What is it about that label they are so afraid of? They already unapologetically hold the ideology. Why not just as openly take the title?
It is because society accepts to be racist is to be immoral, and therefore objectively wrong. Hence to say they are racist; they must admit their views are wrong too, and the title of racist offers no redemption. Once one is branded racist, it is an objective truth and immutable.
Hence instead of self-reflection on weather their views make sense, or are harmful - they need only focus on defending they are not a racist. 'I hate racists', 'I have friends that are black'.
In turn this then only fortifies the racist in their racism, as they must hold absolute conviction. If they are wrong, they are not only miss informed - but immoral too.
Because of the moral element to being labeled racist, the racist cannot accept they are what they are, but rather sees themselves as a miss understood victim.
it's the same as any bubble built out of morality. and calling it thus you can recognise you have to watch as a foreigner or outstanding person that at all. within the racist bubble what ever the racist code is there their racism isn't considered as racism. you can even see that perspective when you read about the statements or the statements themselves made by BLM or other anti racist organisations that use a ”race theory“.
Dude that is interesting. Is it's applicable only in racism, or in different form of hatred as well?
But things get complicated when, as we speak of racism. If someone go to another society with different set of moral (it's a live subject in those times) wich mindset this person will have?
Nailed it.
do you understand how CRT is racist? Defenders of CRt are sometimes overtly racist and sometimes they are well meaning people that think people that reject CRT are racist. Your definition of what is racist might be different from someone else's definition . Is it racist for someone like Ben Shapiro to state facts that destroy the narrative of white privilege? Unless we accept the term white privilege we are a racist? CRT is a racist way of attacking racism. By their own terms they fight racism with more racism. If that is pointed out accusations of racism fly. Could it be that you are one of the well meaning people that support CRT? Or are you one of the people that recognize how CRT is segregationist and pushing policies that promote racism and hurt black communities?
The author of White Fragility claims every white person is racist and if they don't admit it they are even more racist because they don't accept their subconscious racism.
TEH right wing person is opposed to segregation and embraces Martin Luther King jr's ideas of race. the left wing embraces Malcolm X's segregationist ideas. Each side thinks the other side is racist.
HEre's an interesting video I heard today talking about how the lowered expectations the left has on black people is racist. czcams.com/video/wdVfAlRimgI/video.html The left has a supremacist attitude and believes black people are inferior. This is how the right see the left but the left will say theu=y don't see the black person as inferior but the-at being drunk and fighting with cops is "being black." Imagine how the left routinely states that and somehow that's not recognized as racism.
Do you just objectively see people that see race relations differently than Malcolm x to be racist? If I say I don't have a subconscious bias or have white privelege, am I a racist to you? Do you see how that's an illogical measure of racism? TEher is nobody in the whole world that can call themselves 'not racist' according to White Fragility.
The fear of social ostracisation in a nutshell.
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted" - Ezio Auditore DeFirenze
Hi Professor,
Not sure you'll see this comment, but (if you are intending to do another Q&A vid) I would love to hear your thoughts on Hermann Hesse's novels (Steppenwolf, in particular)? I've been getting into Hesse and would love to hear your thoughts on his exploration of authenticity, identity, and purpose.
Additionally, Hesse's blending of Western and Eastern philosophy seems right up your alley!
There is no society, there simply is no such thing.
I would absolutely love if a conversation between you and harris happened.
I'd aim for a real philosopher, not Harris. I don't know of anyone who is actually a philosopher who thinks highly of Harris' work.
I didn't know Roach Dogg Jr. was into philosophy. So cool!!
Is choosing to value well-being not still a normative/moral choice? Once we have chosen to value well-being we can be objective or amoral about it, but that starting step of choosing well-being as something worth improving is still rooted in morality no?
Human Flourishing is such an interesting choice of words. According to Foucault's last lectures, the physiocrats of pre-revolutionary France considered the function of government to increase the 'splendor' of of a population. There was no innately moral aspect to it, but instead it was simply seen as the most advantageous goal of the ruler of a territory to maximize the splendor of its people because it gave that ruler more 'forces' to deploy.
I think using an amoral framework to things like violence and viewing it through a lens of whether it increases wellbeing or not, is very dangerous. 1. some kinds of violence do increase wellbeing for some individuals while obviously decreasing it for others. If we applied a utilitarian principle of summing the relative wellbeing of all involved, we could easily justify violence against minorities. 2. and more importantly, the outcomes of an action are often times very hard to predict, therefore looking at an action from the POV of its consequences can be very misleading.
But honestly, I feel that the problem isnt morality, but an overemphasis on a black&white morality together with a notion of redemption/absolution and damnation. If we simply took morality as a set of rules of what you should and shouldnt do to live a better life, then it isn't so much different from medical prescriptions, is it?
as for pedophiles: Why should this be classified as a disorder, though? Or rather: Who is to say what sexual preference should be a disorder and what shouldnt? Should homosexuality be considered a disorder? Bisexuality? Should certain fetishes be considered a disorder?
But should I care about the other's wellbeing? That is the essential question. You can get a long way without morality as long as you only presuppose my own wellbeing, but what about those instances where I am required to give up my own wellbeing for the wellbeing of someone else? In terms of climate change, for example, the future wellbeing of people I've never met depends possibly on me decreasing my wellbeing in the here-and-now. If 'wellbeing' is my only standard, how can it make sense for me to sacrifice my own wellbeing for that of others?
In general, what we call 'moral choices' are those choices where _my_ wellbeing is in conflict with the wellbeing of the other. Everyone shows sympathy when it feels good, when it feeds their own wellbeing, but what about those instances where I feel my responsibilities as bothersome? When I would like to just ignore the other and continue my happy, complacent existence - but where nevertheless it seems that I _should_ let my complacency be interrupted? You cannot give a satisfying answer to those questions from the standard of wellbeing alone - you need morality.
I see Slavoj Žižek, i click
Can you do a video on the continental and analytic division in philosophy?
Thank you for another thought-provoking video, Georg. I do think there are some issues that in my estimation are left unresolved, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts
1. 23:54 You give an update of Slavoj Žižeks indictment of how religion corrupts moral individuals, whereas you state that "moral discourse can transform amoral people into people that may or may not act violently." This is somewhat unsatisfying as it tacitly implies that violence follows a moralisation of society, whereas it's clear that violence certainly precedes such moralisation. This is why - despite several other errors - Peterson was arguing so effectively against Harris that it isn't clear that religion (or in your book, morality) causes tribal conflict unless you simultaneously hold that chimpanzees are religious (since they also engage in tribal warfare). This suggests that our "morality" goes deeper than a mere cultural layer, as it is arguably built into us. You can choose to frame this differently, but it doesn't change the reality of that unfortunate fact.
2. 19:30 You give an example of how amoralising issues such as vaccination creates less social division. I take issue with this for two reasons. First, in that case there can be no single doubt about the fact that the benefits of vaccination outway the risks for each individual that would then be excluded (young&healthy, as well as old&vulnerable), and some of these matters can be so complicated that we might only be able to make firm conclusions about it in hindsight, so an amoral utilitarian societal excluding approach might seem correct initially and might appear to be wrong in hindsight. In this sense, the Kantians/Christian morality provides a clear benefit; as to treat each individual as an end and not as a means. Second, while us armchair philosophers might be able to easily distinguish between social utility and moralism, this is not the case for the average citizen. Consider, for instance the notion of calling someone selfish. This is arguably true when it comes to vaccination, even if you are considering it amorally; someone is simply being selfish if they make the choice not to get vaccinated because they prioritise (what they perceive to be) their own best interest over a societal interest. In that sense, calling someone selfish isn't necessarily "moral." Nevertheless, the average citizen will certainly interpret such words morally (i.e. selfishness is bad in an absolute sense). In that case we might have changed the frame, but not the function.
3. In the past few centuries we've witnessed the increasing "mechanisation" of the human being. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist outlines this well in his The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, explaining how the increasing reliance and functioning of the left-hemispheric mode of engagement with the world has caused all sorts of psychological and societal malaises. Your amoral utilitarianism (while grounded in daoist thought) would potentially push us further in that direction: "The left hemisphere is competitive, and its concern, its prime motivation, is power. If the working relationship were to become disturbed, so that the left hemisphere appeared to have primacy or became the end point or final staging post on the ‘processing’ of experience, the world would change into something quite different. And we can say fairly clearly what that would be like: it would be relatively mechanical, an assemblage of more or less disconnected ‘parts’; it would be relatively abstract and disembodied; relatively distanced from fellow-feeling; given to explicitness; utilitarian in ethic; over-confident of its own take on reality, and lacking insight into its problems - the neuropsychological evidence is that these are all aspects of the left hemisphere world as compared with the right." (p. 209). See also; "Because the mechanical would be the model by which everything, including ourselves and the natural world, would be understood, people in such a society would find it hard to understand the higher values in Scheler’s hierarchy except in terms of ultimate utility, and there would be a derogation of such higher values, and a cynicism about their status. Morality would come to be judged at best on the basis of utilitarian calculation, at worst on the basis of enlightened self-interest." (p. 431). It is for this reason that McGilchrist argues that "It is mutuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation, which is both the motive and the reward for successful co-operation. And the outcome, in utilitarian terms, is not the important point: it is the process, the relationship, that matters." (p. 147). I'm concerned that precisely the examples you gave would lead us further astray from focusing on the relationship, because morality takes place in the process and in the relationship (because we want to be "good" to our neighbours without focusing on the outcome). Focusing on the outcome will only contribute to Heideggerian Seinsvergessenheit (I'm aware that my criticism is somewhat paradoxical here by focusing on the outcome of focusing on the outcome).
4. It occurred to me that you might be engaging in a Nietzschean project; "Isn't it time to say of morality what Master Eckhart said: 'I ask God to rid me of God!'" (Gay Science, §292). In my view, this shows that Nietzsche is not vouching for a-morality just like Eckhart wasn't vouching for a-theism. Nietzsche by suggesting that there are no morals, precisely wished to reform our morality, just like Eckhart wished to reform our belief in God. Are you onto something similar? ;)
Thanks for all the great ideas, and I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Good things to do are the ones that are best for completing your goal. You can choose your goals and wants (to some extent), and you do that based on some principles. You can change your principles as well. I think that you can judge morality based on these principles.
The doctor telling you not to smoke is presuming your want of health and not being dead. If you don't have those you're considered mentally ill as far as medical profession is concerned. That pathology is considered bad and morality can be seen.
I think that most of the bad effects of morality are a result of applying moral properties to people instead of states of affairs. If you throw away morality, you throw away ideas of justice too, and thus there is no basis at all for preferring a state of affairs where people are just thrown into jail arbitrarily versus one where the law is applied evenly and fairly. Or rather, you could prefer the latter in the same sense that you prefer a flavor of ice cream. So in other words there is basically no force behind any argument that the world should be a more just and fair place. Those in power can just say "well life isn't fair, deal with it." Why should your ice-cream preference for a more just world override their ice-cream preference for a less just world (favoring themselves)? It won't, because they have the power and you don't. Morality is an essential *myth* - a story about how the poor and downtrodden can assert an ideal of justice against the rich and powerful. Without it, the implication is that we should just permanently accept any state of affairs. You may prefer something different, but oh well. Instead of discarding morality, I think we should do an immanent critique of the internal logic of the myth, and restructure it to be less potentially abused.
I think Marxism is a pretty successful attempt at that, although we should be quick to distinguish Marxism from the civic religion of Stalinism, to borrow this channel's signature concept. It deftly posits a historicized account of how moral ideas emerge so that its prescriptions about overcoming capitalism are about systemic critique, not individual moralizing.
@@janosmarothy5409 I think Marxism is definitely a civil religion, in the guise of an anti-religion. It's theory of history amounts to an eschatology and messianic prophecy, and despite the "scientific" language, posits a world divided into Good proletariat versus Evil bourgeois. It is Christian morality distilled and transformed for plausible deniability. Stalinism is just an especially virulent strain of the civil religion, analagous to Wahhabist Islam perhaps. At the same time, I think civil religion and associated mythology is necessary. We just need one appropriate to the present time. Marxism despite it's best efforts is not going to fill that gap, because capitalism has so fundamentally transformed us that positing a world without commodities is just absurd utopian speculation with no relevance to actual working people.
@@mhugman99 Right off the bat, the "proletarian = good, bourgeois = bad" is a huge misunderstanding of what Marxists claim that is immediately refuted within the first sentences of the Communist Manifesto. Ditto with the usual commonplace misconceptions and mischaracterizations about its theory of history as merely a secularized Christian eschatology. It's an accusation that just doesn't match up with what Marx, Engels or later generations of thinkers and political figures actually had to say about class society and social revolution. Always be suspicious about common sense narratives about ideological others, as these stories are intimately bound up with the sort of unhelpful moralizing that you are very rightly apprehensive about.
The last point is interesting -- although I disagree very strongly with the conclusion -- because here there is a more substantive line of critique. Is it the case that a decommodified world is so out of the realm of human possibility, and are the theoretical and political implications of Marxist political economy of no interest to myself as a wage worker?
Let's just look at the very medium you and I are communicating: its origins are in taxpayer-funded research, outside the circuits of market exchange and the commodity-form. I'm not of the "government doing stuff = socialism" mindset, but the point is even within capitalism the system's reproduction is vitally reliant on inputs unmediated by market mechanisms and commodity exchange. So this holds true for capitalist society, and it is _truer still_ for the vast majority of sedentary human civilization. It rests on a base of subsistence agriculture, with commodity production and exchange concentrated in urbanized settlements that accounted for about 10% of a given society's population, and this really only shifts over the past few centuries.
Does any of this have any relevance to regular working people? I mean, short answer is yes. There are key insights about class formation, automation, geography, geopolitics, ecology and other fields that have practical day-to-day relevance to people's lives. And going back to the original topic, its account of ideology is _very_ interested with the sort of immanent critique of morality initially discussed.
@@janosmarothy5409 I think that as a critique of bourgeois ideology, Marxism is serviceable if only in the sense that it provides an alternative ideology/perspective from which the former appears in sharper relief. Just the very existence of class antagonism and theorizing about it is a critique of ideology, and the ways in which morality is generated as a superstructure to justify the economic base is something you have to engage with even if you are in favor of a moral point of view.
However, none of that implies that we are under any obligation to take orthodox Marxist ideology seriously as an actual description of how capitalism and society operates. Setting up a binary where you have Marxism versus capitalist ideology, and the more false the latter the more true the former, is a framing that only makes sense if you are already deeply emotionally invested in the mythology and narrative of Marxism. Not from an objective sociological point of view.
Marxism itself refuses to accept bourgeois ideology's account of itself, exposing the underlying material reality generating it. Is it so far fetched that the words of Marx himself cannot be trusted to reveal the actual material reality underpinning what Marxism is?
I think that an objective analysis would conclude that there are multiple complex systems (state, market, media...) like the systems approach the professor has discussed on this channel. These systems should be studied to reveal their properties and interactions without assuming an a priori frame which attempts to shoehorn them into an existing narrative.
Marx took the most advanced philosophical framework (Hegel) and combined it with the most advanced understanding of the time (classical economics) to create what we know of as Marxism. It was an immanent critique of those systems of thought which produced a new one. Why, if we are to be dialectical materialists, should we accept a body of thought as a timeless analysis when it was produced by particular historical circumstances? Taking Marxism seriously as a method strongly implies rejecting the body of thought which was built upon an outdated framework when cannot possibly capture all of the dynamic interlocking systems of 21st century society, particularly since it insists on a reduction to just one of those systems (the economy). Critique of commodification is essential, but it can be done more effectively without positing a utopian world completely free of it. The idea that in order to critique something you must thoroughly reject and oppose it is one of those orthodoxies we have to leave behind. Being stuck in that mode is not doing modern workers any good. Who want to be paid more so we can buy more commodities! Well we want more leisure time also, and freedom for authentic creation. But this does not have to be either/or.
@@mhugman99 There’s a lot of sweeping claims about what Marx supposedly had nothing to say about, but this all rests on false premises. For instance, one of your points was vaguely worded but it was either that Marxism has no account of its own historical origins, or that it has no account of the origins of bourgeois ideology… sorry, excuse me? I had to a double take when I read that. Whichever it was, there is no defensible version of either of those claims. Marxism has produced a copious amount of literature on these genealogical questions, and if you need a reading list, I’ll happily oblige.
We should also be clear about this: modes of production are very resilient and flexible things, they admit many configurations and political superstructures, with social formations often rearticulating multiple modes of production within them. Obviously capitalism in 2022 isn’t quite like 1848, but it also bears a number of key continuities. If anything, many of Marx’s insights are truer and more germane in a world that is much more integrated, industrialized and proletarianized than it was in his own lifetime. So when Marxists are talking about capitalism, it's a much more supple conception than its critics are giving it credit for,
And one of those continuities between then and now is that _the service sector was a thing then too_ and Marx took that into consideration. So let’s please get out of our head the double notion that (1) Marx supposedly only had factory workers, miners and such in mind when he talked about the proletariat and (2) Marx supposedly only had commodities as the objectified labor of the proletariat in mind. I can’t emphasize how much there is _zero_ textual basis for these stereotypes. In the man’s own words:
“If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value.”
There you have Marx in the 19th century telling us in this passage and in others that commodities aren’t just physical objects and that teachers are in fact part of the working class. Other usual objections: what about television? what about audio recordings? what about software? what about the internet? what about gig workers? what about cryptocurrency? Again, Marxists have kept up with these and other developments in society and technology as they arose and written extensively on them. For instance, if you’re curious to hear what people influenced by Marxism have to say about the tech sector and digital labor, look into Dwayne Monroe or Nick Srnicek, to pick just two of many names.
The reason Marxism still matters is not out of some revolutionary article of faith, it is because it makes verifiable empirical claims about society and as it turns out, those claims rest on a method that has shown itself to have a lot of predictive power over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, which tells us maybe we should listen to what this broad tradition has to say about the world we live in.
One benefit of speaking religiously and moralistically is because it allows one to be "good" or better than others. It also allows one to speak of some as evil and worthy of punishment and even death.
Only through morality and religion can we feel good about war.
How does one maintain a correspondence with the principles of physics but not any principle(s) of morality?
Yikes. What if living in an ethnostate enhances my well-being (or at least, i think it does, and i convince a bunch of people of this dubious fact) am i then justified to commit an ethnic cleansing because it enhances my group's well-being? That can't be right...
Is it just me or is this video kind of defending a very vulgar version of utilitarianism, but instead of utilitarianism he calls it amorality?
@@maximvandaele4825 Thats how I understood it too... Should be obviously off to anybody who's done even just an intro to philosophy course
@@FirsToStrike I've found prof. Moeller's content very interesting and inspiring in the past, this video is honestly a bit of a letdown
I like your critique of Harris' approach to ethics. Yet, I felt there's some room for more clarity about what you mean by morality. I remember from the last video that you base your takes on Niklas Luhmann's understanding of morality: Morality is a form of communication which questions the value of a person as a whole.
Moral communication (and thinking) is a form of attack (and self-attack). It weaponizes one of the biggest threats to a social primate's survival: being excluded from the group, severing the connection we need. Moralizing within societies is a form of power, creating the threat of exclusion, and is internalized and internally enacted through the pain of shame.
Again: When defined clearly like this, it should be quite obvious that moral communication is at best a paradoxical and tragic way to try and achieve something good. What it actually always does is to perpetuate suffering.
To me, when expressed clearly like that, it follows that wanting things to be better is something quite different from moral communication, which means ethics can be more easily disentangled from moral communication: I don't need to judge anyone according to the ethical framework I adopt. I can simply act towards a better world. And, if I agree that moralizing is a counterproductive behavior, my ethical framework should emphasize human connection rather than moral judgement. (No judgement if yours doesn't ;)
I feel like, even if I criticize morality, which I've done for many years, I still desire to make my life "better," and the world "better." I guess that just means happiness, to me. Even without technical morality, desire remains - even desire for a better world.
I guess the tricky thing is that I want to impose behaviors on others in some way to make this possible, which is to say, establish "mores." And then, the question becomes, is this merely the same as creating a morality?
Your happiness taken out of the context of morality OBVIOUSLY has nothing to do with morality. "Better" or "good" doesn't mean "moral" in all contexts.
as soon as you impose on others you are in danger of being evil Evil is usually associated with control.
Using logic, and example.
@@MicahMicahel Well, 'evil' would not exist under this paradigm. Except in some sort of very distant sense, so far from the original meaning that one would wonder why the term 'evil' was being used to describe it at all.
@@yahyamohammed637 Under what paradigm? I might have lost track of what is being debated here. The commenter says they want to impose behaviours in other people. If you impose behaviours in other people you have to destroy their beliefs. I notice your name. are you a Muslim? Our government is trying to impose gay ideology and conditioning to the children. You walk into hospitals and see gay pride signs and flags everywhere. Do you see this imposition upon you to change your religious beliefs evil?
Your religion states homosexuality is evil and yet it's being imposed upon us as an ideology. The liberal way is to not impose but to allow people to be free to believe what they want. This means liberals are anti liberal now. Liberals are anti free speech and pro mandating experimental medicine. They are liberal anymore... because they are imposing their beliefs on everyone. They are evil in their own paradigm because they are anti liberal.
They would be evil in your paradigm because they want you to disavow Islam and Judaeo-CHristian morals.
Hi Professor, I think you contradicted yourself in this video when you said that adults who are sexually attracted to children can be treated for a psychological disorder, rather than condemned for being immoral.
You apparently made a moral judgement that their behaviour is the result of a disorder and is harmful, a belief that they might not share. This is the danger in amorality; it is far too subjective to prevent harm to human well-being, particularly as abusive behaviours are passed down the generations.
It is the reason why our prisons contain many abusers who are highly resistant to psychological treatment, because in their amorality they believe they have done nothing wrong.
Amorality doesn't mean 'the opposite of morality', the problem with 'morality' is that it's a fixed system. People should 'know' what morality is intrinsically. If they do not, they are 'broken' and need to be 'fixed', and that can be as biological as mechanical. Some people are broken for life and that should be the marker for judgement, this judgement based on an authority's claim. I don't know if the 'professor' here is protecting pedophiles though, I wouldn't be surprised and I tend to agree that pedophiles who have real and outward sexual feelings for children should be condemned pretty immediately. Let's remember that almost everyone who has a doctorate and teaches in schools and hangs out with anyone who has basically more than 5 million dollars is going to 'know' about the children and teens that are passed around under everyone's noses in society, so most of them find ways 'aka rationalize' a way to make it normal. I for one don't 'believe' in psychology, I think the whole thing is just a fake game written by evil monstrous 'humans' I barely see as actual living beings, more like animated fetid corpses that deserve life as much as a fly does.
I like your videos about morality the best.
Not sure it is ignorance or deliberate obfuscation.
Morality is the sense of right and wrong as in what one ought to and ought not to do.
Those who try to codify morality as simple rules from which conduct in all situations can be judged end up defeating the purpose. But that doesn't mean morality doesn't exist. It also doesn't mean it is objective.
Moral sense exists to varying degrees in different people and none in some cases.
Two points: I’m hazy on the distinction between morality and wellbeing. It sounds like they could be used interchangeably. Morality could be a product of evolutionary processes designed to maximize, or balance different domains of wellbeing: individual and social.
Second, I’m interested to know what you think of Jonathan Haidt’s the moral mind, and how his research indicates that morality is comprised of five innate intuitions that guide the development of many culture-specific virtues. These give rise to tribal customs, moral codes and so forth. If this is true, can we get past these intuitions if they are pre-experience?
Morality tends to come from wellbeing, assuming you're not suicidal. All morality ultimately stems from primal instincts, safety and power/freedom (cooperation vs resource gathering). Every moral system falls within this tension, the more nuanced moral frameworks understanding that balancing the two leads to the optimal results
The quest for wellbeing, to those that follow it, is the most likely way to increase their own wellbeing in the long term. "Happy people make me happier, therefore I should make more people happy". If you're a sadistic psychopath though this obviously won't be true, but most people aren't. Again we're back to the tension described before.
"’I'm hazy on the distinction between morality and wellbeing. It sounds like they could be used interchangeably."
Wrong. Would you or almost anyone you know make the statement 'The lion that killed the baby did something immoral'? If not, why not? The lion certainly decreased the well being of the baby. Moral terms like 'moral' or 'immoral' are not merely synonyms for 'improved well being' or 'decreased well being.'
You could claim that improved well being is an EXAMPLE of what is moral, sure.
@@Crispman_777 "Morality tends to come from wellbeing, assuming you're not suicidal."
Eh, a gross oversimplification, and often times not even close. You left out some moral principles from your list, such as sanctity, which if I remember, Haidt mentions in his book. A religious person, for example, or almost any kind of 'traditional' person does not merely adopt this 'safety' and 'power/freedom' sort of thing. What you are describing applies more so to secular people, e.g. Democrats.
@@yahyamohammed637 Well I am secular/atheist so I don't think that category is distinct from the other categories of need I listed. I view all religions as social and communication tools that attempt to assist in achieving the pursuit of wellbeing. Again, the disagreements only stem from what you define as "good".
I understand the attraction of "amorality" or a shift away from moralistic terms in medicine and politics. However, you cannot escape the fact that both of these fields are founded on profoundly moral presuppositions. Politics is fundamentally a discourse about how to bring about a "better" society. However hard you try and cannot strip it of its moral implication or the implications of morality for politics.
As long as a collection of habits deemed good (or whatever variants of this judgment, like adequate, convenient, etc.), morality seems inevitable. It seems evident that the tendency to automate the behavior according to its overall utility and social acceptance, in its turn, is an expedient to which one resorts in order to save much of the time to be spent on weighing every act performed either individually or collectively.
So, moral itself cannot be a problem in social intercourse, unlike, perhaps, the inability to acknowledge when a given habit becomes useless or, worse, harmful. This may mean that we can save not as much as we expect from the time to be spent on thinking on the habits to change, but it is probable that enough of it can be saved if we manage to agree on which are the principles ruling the formation of habits and, possibly, their being kept beyond the expiration date.
In sum, using the Aristotelian terminology, we tend to do not so well the interaction of the intellectual and moral excellence or, to be more precise, we tend to spend less energy than needed with using the intellect more thoroughly, usually taking a few steps toward doing so before being distracted by the compulsion to dream, that is, falling prey to the imagination. The senseless belief in a pseudo-notion like that of 'free will' is an example of this, in particular when it comes to its compatibility with causation, due to the possibility of choosing, or of 'having done otherwise', a true collective delusion that is harmful enough to, on the one hand, allow to condemn and punish misbehavior, and to, on the other hand, to encourage and justify it.
I fully agree, but I am unsure one thing: Why pick well-being/health as the deciding factor of our behavior? It seems to be a good choice, but then again, this is a judgement being made in a moral framework. So have we real left moral behind, if well-being is most important, or is this still subconsciously moral?
Good point. He's still smuggling in morality. That's literally the problem with all moral skeptics, error theorists etc... It's seems impossible to actually live like morality doesn't exist
Morality tends to come from wellbeing, assuming you're not suicidal. All morality ultimately stems from primal instincts, safety and power/freedom (cooperation vs resource gathering). Every moral system falls within this tension, the more nuanced moral frameworks understanding that balancing the two leads to the optimal results.
The quest for wellbeing, to those that follow it, is the most likely way to increase their own wellbeing in the long term. "Happy people make me happier, therefore I should make more people happy". If you're a sadistic psychopath though this obviously won't be true, but most people aren't. Again we're back to the tension described before.
@@Crispman_777 This is all true, but i tried to acknowledge it before, by saying that wellbeing is a good choice as a guideline to our actions. My point is just that prioritising wellbeing is still grounded in morality and the Professor wasn't talking about balancing morality, but abandoning it. Which seems rather impossible.
@@braindrain8055 I think it helps coming from his earlier videos. His view of morality as a communication tool that is bolted on to what we individually already want.
@@Crispman_777 alright, i will have a look, thanks
Professor would you view morality as just another language game then? How would you differentiate your views from utilitarianism's pleasure principle? I often think of derrida's choice to destabilize and decenter ourselves from certain ideas and it seems like you have done the same here with moral language. At some point tolerating infinite paralogy assuming that everyone wants well-being may lead to the intolerance of your view of well being (ie. tolerance paradox marcuse). Because my well being may come at the cost of yours.
He is the one playing the language game, pretending like inanimate objects' good functionality is the same as human moral goodness.
@@FightFilms I don't think he is saying they are the same. I think he is saying morality is phenomenological in nature. That cultures around the world construct their own sense of moral truths so it isn't a science in the same way religion isn't a natural science. I believe he is also right that if we look at human cognition moral behaviors are quite subconscious processes. We don't need to employ the categorical imperative to do good in the world and most of us don't have to suspend judgement like philosophers do to make a moral or amoral decision. If anything I think his "description" of human morality is more apt. Plus he isn't saying the history of morality, psychology of morality, or sociology of morality have nothing to teach us. He is simply saying that these are human centered constructions that are not atomic substrate level theories so it is best to not be dogmatic about them. Look at public health for instance that assumes that environments lead to suspension of moral decision making (ie. if your parents smoke you are at a higher risk for smoking). We could moralize the other and say why are you so terrible for choosing to smoke or we could ask what is the behavioral psychology behind some counterveiling mechanisms. The later seems to be more useful for society.
I will be waiting your toughts regarding Adam Smiths moral sentiments. Cheers.
Maximum suffering is not a way to create essentialist argument, it is pragmatic. If there is such a thing as bad then maximum suffering is that. It makes the usage of words like good and bad, valid.
Hi professor,
I think I can appreciate your distinction between moral ways and amoral ways of looking at the same quest here - namely, wellbeing.
But I am (and possibly many others here are) curious if the selection of well-being as the quest in itself is a moral judgement.
And this is not a bad-faith argument, atleast for me. I genuinely think (atleast to some degree) that maybe well-being is the wrong quest.
If humans achieved well-being, would there be progress? Isn't our drive to create contingent on there being a certain irritation or anxiety within our being and the world?
This comes back to what I think what most of the original criticism was kind of stemming from. Post the death of God, humans are left to themselves, (and the structures/systems they have build). But there is no consensus on the question of "Why are we here?" "What is the great human project". And how do we settle this amoraly, in and post a post-modern era?
I don't think that "well-being" means "being happy all the time".
I was also having serious doubts about the well-being principle.
"But there is no consensus on the question of "Why are we here?" "What is the great human project"" - the vast majority of people get through life without answering those questions, or even devoting a large chunk of their time alive to even attempting to do so. They just live life. And that works out just fine. As Wittgenstein pointed out - just cos you can formulate a question doesn't make it real.
More importantly, I do not see any essential difference between accepting or rejecting existence of absolute moral and accepting or rejecting existence of absolute wellbeing. If one places either one or the other in the realm of subjective notions, then clashes between subjects of these notions become inevitable. While if one places them in the objective realm, then morality and wellbeing become synonymous for all practical purposes. So what is then the point in shifting accents from morality to wellbeing?
Could these normative amoral claims be akin to the hypothetical imperative in Kant's philosophy?
At 23:08, you said "most people are spontaneously amoral." Although our instinctive reactions are, as you say, amoral, they have a cohesive explanation to them. Here is a quote from a recent paper on the subject:
"Contemporary hypotheses on the phylogenesis of morality and guilt allows us to say that human beings exhibit skills, emotions, and motivations that allow them to make morally relevant choices and actions at a very early age. The early emergence of these emotions and skills paves the way for the hypothesis that morality is, at least partially, innate, the result of group selection process. This first innate "moral draft" is then shaped by the complex interrelation of temperamental and environmental factors, first of all, the relational experiences within a specific family and a certain culture, which determine the multiple trajectories, both adaptive and maladaptive, of moral development and guilt, and the moral concerns relevant for each specific individual."
Source: Gazzillo, Francesco, et al. "New developments in understanding morality: Between evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, and control-mastery theory." Psychoanalytic Psychology 37.1 (2020): 37.
I've always believed that morality is intimately connected to our actions and contingent on a social context.
If you're using law as a tool to enforce behaviours and obedience how does it differ from morality? Is it really a matter of efficiency? What is 'efficient'? Is it the speed at which it happens? Because court cases take way longer than a lynch mob. A lynch mob would also be infinitely cheaper than a legal system. I fail to see how it becomes more efficient.
ehh, not really about “efficiency” but consistency is one thing you’ll get from law that you probably won’t get from lynch mobs. also can you really call them efficient if they tend to produce a lot of errors?
@@kintsugikame That depends on what you consider an error.
@@A0Refrigerator either punishing someone who actually didn’t deserve it or letting someone go who actually does deserve it. lynch mobs aren’t really known for their prudence lol
@@kintsugikame Isn't that an issue of accuracy not efficiency?
@@A0Refrigerator you are correct! from wikipedia:
Efficiency is the (often measurable) ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in doing something or in producing a desired result. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste…Efficiency is very often confused with effectiveness. In general, efficiency is a measurable concept, quantitatively determined by the ratio of useful output to total useful input. Effectiveness is the simpler concept of being able to achieve a desired result…
"Morality is a way of communicating, used for legitimizing certain actions."
We have gone a long way from the ancient Greece philosophers.
So now, a concept as pregnant as morality is just another way of communicating.
If in the ancient times it was known that morality is the art of living well by adhering to the virtues that make one prosper, today the likes of professor are disseminating vague broken definitions with no actual ties to the original concept.
Morality if one wants to use it for himself like a conceptual tool that one needs to have in their intellectual arsenal, is a code of values for which one acts to gain in order to accomplish one's ultimate and perpetual goal.
So in this light if you want to use it, the question that professor, Harris and other intellectuals are not posing is: Good for whom?
Because morality is in fact your personal guide to achieve your values, your goals, your well-being. (if we believe the ancient greeks)
But it is foolish to confound form with substance, morality has different values and different goals for different people; knowing this could help all of us from making moral judgement on others by the prism of our own morality.
What does that actually means, thinking amorally?
In this light, it is impossible, you see?
If morality is a code of values to accomplish a goal, it means not to think.
Even if you do not act for yourself, to act means to judge to judge, you need to evaluate and you evaluate something by how much that action will get you closer or farther to your ultimate goal, and that evaluation results in two possible answers "good" or "bad".
If you have an other word that describes the concept of morality like I have described here please tell.
Ah, we have also the word ethics that pertains to the values and scope of the actions of an collective. So if morality is a guide for the individual that one discovers and changes over time, ethics applies to a society.
Word salad.
In the ancient times, morality refered to mores, which is Latin for customs, a set of widely accepted forms of social conduct. Being moral simply meant doing what is expected by others in certain situations. Later, the concept of morality just as ethics was elevated to refer to some abstract ideas of absolute good and evil, instead of simply good or bad manners, or social- / anti-social behaviour.
@@addammadd Thank you for your feedback.
The definition given by professor is weird/faulty, by defining morality as a way of communicating he is deflating the concept to just one aspect: its transmission.
Morality can be transmitted via religious and moral communication but to be
identified as the transmission itself is misleading.
Morality as i said is discovered, by trial and error, in our parents, our friends and the people we admire and we emulate, then if the acts we learn from them are serving our own purpose they are kept, otherwise we stop doing them.
Religious and moral communication is an attempt to induce a wanted behavior via a
secondary or novel purpose for one's life, like the grace of God or the Well-Being of society, the security of the group or country, etc., i call this the hijacking of one's moral standard, because any action you do will be measured by your new standard:
how close are you now to God or defeating poverty... etc.
In conclusion Morality is a much more rich idea, than what the professor and other intellectuals define.
Does this have more sense?
@@udarntors you have no creditable basis for any of the assertions you’re making. The professor deflates nothing besides your inflated misreading of term. You speak with conviction, but very little objective rationality.
The "increase/decrease well-being" calculation is by all possible means the classic utilitarianist moral philosophy. It is literally explained like that in school: a calculation on objective evaluation of causes and consequences under the paradigm of well-being. If the paradigm is fixed for all it's an Aristoelian-like utilitarianism; if it is based in the historical contingencies, belief-systems and agreements among the members of a community is the modern kind of utilitarianism. In general, it's a hypothetical imperative: if X, then Y, and since "Y!", then "X!". Whose lack of proper foundation was exposed by Kant in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. In general, nothing here is "amoral" or "immoral" (in the Nietzschean sense of the concept).
In general, without a moral paradigm of reference (grounding the specific discourse) the concept of violence dissolves. Whatever was to be identified through the term "violent" would, in a completely amoral paradigm of reference just "be" what it is (a motion of bodily masses in space, a vibration of air hitting your cochlea and being translated in sodium-potassium discharges along neurons, ink on paper, stones around a body, displacement of material objects, etc.) and the property of violence would stick to nothing, it would be super-imposed on the mere "being" of things. In an amoral paradigm (which is not self-contradictory in itself) rape would be a movement of masses in space, when even, a determination of certain affective states in a soul ... but without a moral paradigm whatsoever (including the clearly moral paradigm of "increasing/decreasing well-being") the term violence wouldn't make any sense (it'd be mere flatus vocis).
Even if we were to assume something like: every individual being bestowed with experience and agency of some sort has a tendency to a maximum level of functionality. We could then use a made-up concept of 'violence' as "external reduction/hindrance/deletion of this tendency to maximum functionality". This thing we call "violence" wouldn't still give us any determination pro or against (plus rape would be just as "violent" as 'not being able to become the king of the world'). As such, an amoral paradigm prevents any meaningful conception of violence as such and not just as a synonym for amoral terms like the one aforementioned. There's nothing contradictory in removing the possibility to conceive violence. It's just a very strange, limited and probably even ontologically wrong way to conceive of relity and especially the human one.
I didn’t watch the whole video yet, just want to address a confusion that occurred to me in the beginning. How can you drop morality just by phrasing well-being as an unquestioned good? Like in the example with smoking, for the judgment that smoking less would be increasing well-being to carry any incentive to action, well being must be identified as =good. Ergo a moral decision. A basic one most people would instantaneously agree to ofc. But this is the narrow sense of morality as concerning right action, usually we speak of morality in the sense of how to act rightly in relation to other people, not just in regards to what is good or bad for ourselves
In my humble opinion, the primary motivation of establishing a morality and/or a religion (which in the ancient societies were as far as I understand basically the same thing) was, within the paradigms of this video, amoral. The goal was the maximizing of well being of particular population (tribe, nation, another ancient gathering of people) and particular religion (and morality thereof) was solely a vehicle to carry the message how the early leaders believed it can be done (of course usually sub-optimal, as they lacked an experience of nowadays).
It is not a coincidence that all of the ancient/primitive societies of humans, that we know of have some sort of religious/moralistic code embedded in their culture. I do not believe that is because there were no religion-free/amoral ancient societies. I view this observation in evolutionary terms, therefore the societies with religion had some type of advantage which allowed them to ultimately win a competition between the societies (either culturally or, probably more often, by violence). This in fact, can be observed in the spread of early Christianity, which without a doubt gave Christians some sort of advantage over "pagan" religions (at least Christians were more willing to fight the evangelization fights than, let's say Thor followers). Nor it is a coincidence that the words "good" and "bad" (or "evil"; in all instances fundamentally moralistic terms) are in most of the languages the oldest known expressions and "core words" by which similarity (taxonomy) of the languages is determined.
Of course, there has always been a side effect (or better co-effect) of religions/moralities, that they can be exploited for the political/authority purposes and it can enhance building and preserving the centres of might.
In that light, I am affraid, that every attempt to try to philosophically reach an amoral definition of maximizing of well-being in society will ultimately lead to re-inventing some sort of morality.
Do you have any evidence for this? If we look at early religion, we see practices like sacrifice and what we might call warlike activities. The purpose of sacrifice of animals might have been in part to get over the "ick factor" of killing and eating animals that lived with the family group by sanctifying part of the kill as a gift to a god. Then in terms of religions sanctifying war like activities, we do not have to look very far for examples these days. I agree that in part, religion protects the wellbeing of certain populations, but that protection it is normally reserved for a priest/brahmin class.
the main source is: are you an egocentric being or a collective being. amorality is considered the behaviour that only benefits one single person/being.
@@SchmulKrieger I don't believe that individual humans can hold a universal perspective, if that is what you mean. Every attempt to "moralize" is probably a turning outwards of "egotistical" self-obsession. But you were making claims that fall more under the umbrella of anthropology than existentialism.
I dont buy the reason of "well-being" for the people in ancient civilizations for the invention of religion.
For me there are two good explanations for inventing religion:
1. The lack of knowledge about nature.
2. The necessity to find a mechanic to establish and explain POWER that automatically rises as the number of people in a civilization are rising. Over a thousand people the civilization becomes more and more anonymous. Over ten or even hundred thousand people means you have to create a lot of "functions" and hierarchies for making it to work when you dont have modern mass communication and dont have a power control system (like democracy).
The second reason for me is the more important one. Religion was just the best solution to deal with power that automatically rises with the number of people. But yes - this happened without moral. It was just demanded or otherwise the civilizations could not work.
@@BoothTheGrey religion has existed already before civilisation, so it's not the question about power.
But a very solid definition of a moral act, in the descriptive sense, is that act which increases wellbeing. And conversely an immoral act decreases wellbeing. So the same with right/ wrong and good/ evil.
The following assumes that morality is defined as a system or set of principles used to characterize actions as being good or bad.
I think the issue with morality vs amoral systems of decision making (like increasing well being) is that at its core, by choosing any metric as an indicator of what we want to maximize or minimize in the world, you are choosing that metric to be what you measure good to be. You want to increase well being, well, why? Whatever answer you come up with is a moral reason since you're making a distinction between what is and isnt worth pursuing. Sure you dont use the words good and bad or good and evil but choosing a metric is, in and of itself, a moral judgement, because you're choosing to create a principle to classify good and bad behaviour (with good being increasing well being and bad being decreasing well being)
But perhaps when you mean morality you mean moral language and not morality the way I've defined it.
Those were my thoughts as well. It feels like the system described in this video is just tip-toeing around the terms associated with morality but it cannot actually escape its logic.
I think what you are actually meaning is that the term "moral" is a social construct that is usually based on the context of who is doing the enforcing, and in many cases comes with convoluted explanations for the judgement and the enforcement of a "moral code" and that this construct is actually not useful. It exists in the same way that cave man paintings do exist, but nobody thinks that is the one and only way to do art, much less painting, not because it is good or bad, but because it is no longer useful to most of those interested in art. Morality exists in the sense that we carry instincts of fear, anger and disgust that guide us to make conceptions about the world around us, but in the sense that we need in absolute terms one single code for everyone to follow is not a useful one to us, since we now understand how disconnected from reality that mob mentality can be no matter how much rationality they profess.
Your philosophy reminds me of the ethical hedonism of Jeremy Bentham that boils everything down to a felicific calculus of pleasure and pain. Harris in particular is an overinflated guy bringing back long dead ideas that lead to more misery than they tried to stop for the most part.
“Every petal that flowers out of any human being has a material basis” a tweet from Roderick Day. Well being, being kind for homo-sapiens is critical for social production.
You need to move the conversation further. As is made clear by this video, one cannot answer whether morality exists by focusing on concrete, pragmatic concerns. You need to back up into a metaphysical discussion.
Once there, though, we can establish ethics. There is very little difference between saying something is important and saying ethics exists, as saying something is important is the first normative claim, from which we can derive other normative claims.
In this video, for example, Moeller states that the quest for wellbeing is important, but then sidesteps into a discussion of whether a doctor needs to reference morality at all in order to explain why you need to quit smoking in order to maximise your wellbeing. As the doctor is taking the objective of wellbeing for granted, that part of the discussion is cut out.
That said, Sam Harris would not be my goto for a book on morality.
One can't have an objective morality until one states the objective. If human well-being is the "objective" then you can evaluate your actions accordingly. But you first have to declare your subjective objective :)
What about personal responsibility? Is this still possible in a value free/ amoral sensibility?
In the sense that you have free will and can change your own situation, sure, it exists. But 'responsibility' also has moral connotations, atleast some definitions of the term do, and so that sort of 'moral responsibility would no longer exist.
Nietzsche would have loathed the replacement of traditional theistic moral systems with a system of mere calculation of accounts of "well-being", he did not believe pleasure and pain were good ways to measure value, but that there was something beyond and behind them: power, growth, life, drives for which people will even sacrifice their own well-being to attain... The notion that "rationality" can determine the value of all things is what has paralyzed philosophy and caused it to atrophy. The earliest forms of "good" in a society were not only amoral, they were also irrational.
Could you explain last sentence.
I wish you go back to this topic because I have a question about it!