/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12463054]

Should we do what is moral, or what is practical?

[Anonymous No.12463060]

We should do what gets us what we want most effectively.

[Anonymous No.12463064]

>>12463060
What about morals?

[Anonymous No.12463068]

>>12463054
Just do what feels right for you

[Anonymous No.12463088]

>>12463054
There is nothing more practical than what is moral. If something is immoral, how can it be desirable? If it is not desirable, how can it be practical? To say that there is a morality is to say that there is an ultimate good. If such a good exists, there can be no profit in transgression. Immorality is self-harm, and is therefore the antithesis of practicality.

[Anonymous No.12463090]

>>12463064
Feel free to give yourself a handicap if you want, I won't complain about competition removing itself.

[Anonymous No.12463097]

>>12463060
>>12463090
See >>12463088
Nothing is more desirable than the Good. Therefore, nothing is less practical than immorality.

[Anonymous No.12463115]

>>12463088
>If something is immoral, how can it be desirable?
I really hate my neighbor and want to kill him. Most people would call murder immoral though. Unless you define morality as whatever feels good to you, this doesn't work. And if you do that, what's the point of having morality if it just bends to whatever is desirable to you subjectively?

[Anonymous No.12463173]

As if you could separate the two

[Anonymous No.12463193]

>>12463173
Care to expand?

[Anonymous No.12463196]

>>12463054
Both. This is a false dilemma.

[Anonymous No.12463209]

>>12463193
it's no coincidence that the cultures who are most concerned with morality outcompete cultures that don't care about it. ie mormons vs inner city blacks

[Anonymous No.12463212]

>>12463115
Haha, wtf fag. You're trying to defend your moral relativism by saying my argument is relativistic? Read again. If it is not Good, it is not good for you. You think you want to kill your neighbor, and you think this will be good for you, but you are wrong. The practical solution is to find the moral solution. Any other solution will only lead you away from the Good. Any other solution can only harm you. Any other solution is inherently undesirable.

If you don't want a relativistic worldview, you need to have a solid anchor. Practicality above morality is not solid. How can you have any consistency? You must define practicality in terms of ultimate desire, which is best defined in terms of morality and the ultimate Good.

[Anonymous No.12463218]

>>12463193
already did so here:>>12463088

[Anonymous No.12463293]

>>12463212
>If it is not Good, it is not good for you.
I need some help understanding your view on this. How can it be that killing my neighbor is necessarily bad for me? What if we were in the stone age, and killing him would get me his land, and all his resources? Is it that in this scenario, killing is not immoral, which allows it to be good for me?
What is the Good?

[Anonymous No.12463315]

>>12463054
>what is moral, or what is practical?
What is moral and what is practical are exactly the same thing

[Anonymous No.12463321]

>>12463293
You are saying that whatever is convenient is good. But how then will you define what is convenient? Convenient to what end? You are being purposefully obtuse. There is more to killing him than simply getting his land. How can you be so idiotic about this? First you define what is good. Then you live according to what brings you closest to what is good. And what is good cannot simply be seen as good right now, or good in a certain context, but transcendentally good, good in a universal sense.

[Anonymous No.12463325]

>>12463209
At a societal level I can see why morality would be beneficial, but at an individual level? It's not like society would immediately crumble if you took advantage of everyone whenever you could, and the benefits from doing so would likely outweigh any demerits, assuming you did so carefully i.e. being prudent, always acting to your advantage even if most people would consider it immoral.

[Anonymous No.12463336]

>>12463209
>mormons care about morals
Enough internet for you today christfag.

[Anonymous No.12463379]

>>12463321
>How then will you define what is convenient?
Convenient to what I believe will benefit me the most. It's necessarily only a guess, but then I'd also have to guess what I think would bring me closest to the Good if that's how I wanted to conduct myself.
>there is more to killing him than simply getting his land?
What is that?
Your definition of the Good seems to be what's best for society, but that brings me back to the original question. why should I do what is 'good in a universal sense' when I can't see how it directly benefits me? And no saying that it will benefit me inherently because it's Good, you won't convince anyone with that, and it's inanely circular.

[Anonymous No.12463406]

>>12463054
Define “morality”

[Anonymous No.12463427]

>>12463054
We should each do our devotional service.

[Anonymous No.12463429]

>>12463406
Just off the top of my head, I'd say morality is considering not only what is good for yourself, but for others, and acting in accordance with this thinking. It's basically a guess as to how your actions would impact others, and trying to minimize any negative impact on them (any sentient being)

[Anonymous No.12463434]

>>12463379
Circular would be saying what is good is what is most convenient for arriving at the most beneficial outcome for myself. My argument is not circular. It's axiomatic. It's axiomatic because these concepts are abstract and irreducible. The mere existence of the notion of good demonstrates that there is some ultimate Good, whether or not it can ever be accessible to Man, let alone a man. But if no axiom is chose, like you are trying to do, then you fall into a pit of relativism that devours meaning itself. You've already admitted that your perception of what benefits you is flawed and limited. Therefore it cannot be used as any reliable metric. However, if you shape your sense of what benefits you to the notion of ultimate Good, what is convenient and what is moral will become identical, and satisfaction will be guaranteed. You want to say this is circular, but it is not. You just don't like to hear it, because you perceive that it hurts you. But you will spend more time and energy trying to demonstrate the goodness of your convenience than you would in changing your perception of what is convenient.

[Anonymous No.12463482]

>>12463054
>implying

[Anonymous No.12463645]

>>12463434
>The mere existence of the notion of good demonstrates that there is some ultimate Good
Why? This is a faith based argument as far as I can tell. You're basically saying there is a God because wouldn't that be great?
Also, how do I shape my sense of what benefits me to the notion of the ultimate Good? It really just sounds like you're defining Good as what is convenient for you (or maybe society, but you've never defined your central concept for me so I can't be sure)

[Anonymous No.12463650]

We should do the only moral and practical thing and delete stupid threads from clogging up the board.

[Anonymous No.12463672]

>>12463650
Thanks for your input faggot

[Anonymous No.12463702]

>>12463645
No, it is not. You have an absolutely abysmal sense of logic and comparison. The notion of better/worse//benefit/harm//right/wrong is inherently comparative. Which raises the question--compared to what? If there is no absolute Good//Benefit//Best//Right, then there is no foundation for comparison. This would make the distinction between better/worse//benefit/harm structureless, and therefore meaningless. If this was the case, how could the ideas themselves come about? You as an individual notice these axes of action as a matter of primal, basic observation. There are some states of being you prefer to other states of being. You know and recognize this without explanation. This principle is demonstrated on every level of being. Being-in-total is not a random and undifferentiated field, but rather it has unified structure. Regardless of our ability to accurately perceive this structure, even the imagination of such a structure requires some kind of inherent structure. This demonstrates the inherent movements of all things from one position to another in a non-arbitrary manner. This is incompatible with any idea of pure relativism. So even in the most abstract and secular sense, there must be some ultimate, ideal structure in which the structure cannot be improved and cannot be threatened. The important realization is understanding that even when there is no limit, there is still a maximum.

[Anonymous No.12463739]

>>12463702
Must we throw in insults in every response man?
So I never said there was no fundamental, perhaps evolutionary basis for morality. There are clearly things which would be more beneficial to us as communal creatures, and we probably largely consider those things as moral.
My question was whether we should override this instinct when we think it would be beneficial to do so? If it is something evolutionary, surely there is nothing cosmically wrong with disregarding it.

[Anonymous No.12463847]

>>12463739
It is necessary, because it is true. Each time you have replied, you have steered the conversation away from reasonable discussion towards flippant and sophomoric outbursts of illogic. You have repeatedly misstated my argument, straw manned, and moved goalposts, all while demonstrating how accurately I've described your own position. And now you've completely misunderstood evolution, which, for how trying it is to debate like this, I have no motivation to explain to you. Evolution is not a motive, or even a mechanism. It is merely a description of change. The mechanisms are the ordinary selection of the preferred over the unpreferred by an unfathomable array of deciders, each with absurdly limited knowledge and choice, which ultimately leads to the predominance of traditional behavior punctuated by moments of rapid change, all occurring relative to the changes of all other things. Importantly, this means it is inherently correct and implicitly useless to describe any and all choices you make as evolutionary. Whatever you do is a part of evolution, and is impacted by your evolutionary inheritance. That it is instinctual has no inherent moral value. That it helped your ancestors survive a particular event does not mean it was the ideal strategy or even a moral strategy. There is no guarantee that what worked in the past will continue to work in the future. There is also nothing that implies the opposite. To say that things evolve is only to say that change is iterative on a species level, as opposed to spontaneous or fixed. In fewer words, it's irrelevant.

[Anonymous No.12463853]

>>12463427
>novalis when the levee breaks
based

[Anonymous No.12464129]

>>12463847
Go kill yourself faggot. You've continuously failed to define aspects which are fundamental to your position, which means to me you only have a surface level understanding of this shitty idea you're parroting back to me. You can't just define something as axiomatic and say therefore you don't need to explain yourself. All this pseud behavior, wrapped up in some of the most fluff filled, bullshit writing I've ever come across.

[Anonymous No.12464624]

>>12463054
always do what is practical when it is also moral, and strive to do what is moral but not practical

[Anonymous No.12464743]

>>12464129
Once again, you demonstrate what is either an unwillingness or an inability to read. I have explained myself, and I never used axiomatic as reason not to explain. That my position is axiomatic is only said to draw a contrast to your relativistic position; it is only given as a strength in that, in being axiomatic, it is consistent with itself, whereas your position is invalid. The reason I've not defined Good is that there are multiple ways to define Good, but that conversation cannot be engaged with meaningfully unless the logical structure is first accepted. You are saying that your utility is a sufficient definition of good even though utility is more ill-defined than my Good. In fact, utility cannot even be recognized without some notion of Good, which is largely what I was demonstrating in my two previous posts. All I said before, which you are shockingly unable to grasp is that value judgements, being inherently relative, need some sort of grounding element to not collapse in on themselves into meaninglessness. Im short, Goodness cannot be defined in terms of utility; utility can only be defined in terms of goodness, which can only be defined in tersm of some ultimate Good, whether or not that Good is or can be understood.