/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12762302]

I don’t think morality is real. Where do I even find moral axioms?

[Anonymous No.12762310]

>>12762302
It isn't real but it feels real.
Honestly if you're a functional person who has felt pain you should understand that it's wrong to inflict it on others, everything else is extrapolated out from that.

[Anonymous No.12762318]

>>12762310
What if I was a freak person who enjoyed pain? Wouldn’t my intuition in that case be to inflict pain on others?

[Anonymous No.12762320]

Is there even an axiom that can not be deconstructed?

[Anonymous No.12762371]

>>12762310
Low iq post
I am compassionate person, but I hate all this lazy moralfaggotry.. “just be a good person, like, um, come on..” cringe.

[Anonymous No.12762377]

>>12762310
I don't think thats true. What if the pain was to instruct me? Like the pain of touching a hit stove, after some reflection i think most people would want that pain for other people.

[Anonymous No.12762406]

>>12762377
I never had to personally burn myself just to learn that fire's bad. Somebody just told me
That said, maybe there's a baseline amount of pain a person should experience for instructional purposes, but its not that high. Pain stops being productive really quickly as an instructional tool in my experience.

[Anonymous No.12762410]

why is this on the literature board?

[Anonymous No.12762415]

reason
read Kant you jabroni

[Anonymous No.12762423]

>>12762302
very edgy thread. infant studies have shown themselves to have the same moral perceptions as adults do, i'm really not sure what you even mean by it being "not real". maybe you're just generally selfish, and less compassionate, and therefore assume that all of morality is born from the same selfishness within yourself. if that's the case, it's your duty to cultivate a loving nature towards others, and you should look into various spiritual traditions to help you climb that mountain. in my opinion, anyone can improve in their moral nature. i'm still reading into unique cases like sadists and psychopaths though, who might be the exception.

[Anonymous No.12762437]

>>12762410
It’s philosophy

>>12762415
I don’t understand on what basis Kant made his categorical imperatives. On a more reductionist level, why does the suffering of people matter?

>>12762423
Appeals to nature are a very weak basis for your moral framework because if someone has a different nature it doesn’t apply to them

>if that's the case, it's your duty to cultivate a loving nature towards others
Why? Where does that duty come from?

[Anonymous No.12762439]

>>12762406
Well that's just physical pain what about the pain of a heart break, or the pain of doing bad on your exam? Even if you've felt these pains before in your life, it's not like feeling them once will immediately teach you all the things that you did wrong or that caused them.

I feel momentary, reasonable yet regular amounts of pain keep people not complacent. I'd totally want people to feel these things so they could grow as individuals.

[Anonymous No.12762454]

>>12762437
>why does the suffering of people matter
it literally doesn't, read Kant you jabroni

[Anonymous No.12762455]

>>12762439
Those don't necessarily lead to morality either though. I could get my heart broken and "learn" that women are scum and I should always be cruel to them, or I could learn that I'm scum and should never pursue love. Both are pretty similar to what you learn from touching a hot stove. What you learn from pain is entirely about how you interpret the pain.

[Anonymous No.12762463]

>>12762455
Right, sure but to give people the chance to interpret surely that is moral? Or is it more moral to sedate people and keep them away from their free will (if you even believe in such a thing)

[Anonymous No.12762466]

>>12762454
How did Kant decide what was good and bad?

[Anonymous No.12762482]

>>12762466
Literally its all in my brain bro

[Anonymous No.12762489]

>>12762463
I don't know what I believe personally about this. Good questions though. Christians do kind of a combination: there is definitely a right and wrong thing to do, but its not moral unless you choose the right thing of your own will.

I'm personally, not a total deontologist though. I don't think there are objectively right and wrong acts, it depends on situational context. I think morality is complex enough that we have to interpret it anyway, and I don't like overly prescriptive moral systems.

[Anonymous No.12762510]

>>12762302
It's the biggest meme ever. There is no divine law that dictates what is right or wrong. Morals are just a subset of values. You can have whatever morals you want really. You've just been raised with Christian morals but you can unlearn them and make your own, better ones.

[Anonymous No.12762511]

>>12762489
Fair enough, I feel like this was going to be the point where our discussion departed from the ethical into the metaphysical anyway. Thanks for our small discussion.

[Anonymous No.12762515]

>>12762302
Empathy

[Anonymous No.12762517]

>>12762454
Where does Kant implicitly or explicitly say this?

[Anonymous No.12762518]

>>12762466
for something to be moral it must be
1) universalizable
2) not treating ends (humans) as means
also a good will is the only purely good thing, which means duty is always more moral than free choice (if you really don't want to do something but you still do it out of a sense of duty)
read Kant you jabroni

[Anonymous No.12762520]

>>12762511
No problem, glad we could have this chat

[Anonymous No.12762522]

>>12762310
Not so clear. We may be functional sociopaths. Just give us the damn moral axioms.

[Anonymous No.12762523]

>>12762437
if you're questioning the nature of axioms itself, you could do so for literally any area you please, and destroy every known realm of human activity that exists. mathematics, logic, language, design, art, and all the rest. you seem to think that an individual's "nature" somehow allows them to bypass a universal and objective grading for their actions, as if a person declaring a basic arithmetic truth of 5+5=10 is a similarly arbitrary decision made by me which corresponds to no objective truth beyond the statement. if you declare morality to be "subjective" simply because it's performed by individual agents, you're making an objective claim with a subjective position, and it collapses by this contradiction. again, literally every human area is without objective standard by that measure, and you have no way to even say this without contradicting yourself by uttering an objective/universal claim for a subjective/individual position. i'm not saying it's perfect and that i know what objective morality looks like, but i'd be quite baffled if you attempted to throw out the entire edifice like you seem to be doing.

where did the concept of duty even come to us from? do lower animals have it? where is the duty to abide by axioms, to follow any logic at all in anything we do?

these are not new positions you're taking here, if you haven't read into philosophies of ethics then you should probably do so.

ask yourself why morality is empirically observed in the first place, and then attempt to assign a source/cause for it existing. an investigator seeks to understand the nature of what is in front of them, not simply take their own stance on it and arbitrarily deem that "true", as if that explains the nature of it. what is empathy, why is it there in the first place? why is compassion a thing? where does conscience come from? what is the significance of it? what is altruism observed? etc. this is how a proper investigator proceeds

[Anonymous No.12762533]

>>12762518
>for something to be moral it must be
why
>also a good will is the only purely good thing
why

[Anonymous No.12762535]

>>12762302
Maybe pain gives us our precepts of morality. Everyone knows what pain is.

[Anonymous No.12762536]

>>12762515
What do you think of this? https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/
I mean it's pretty long so I dont expect a lot of people on this board to engage with it.

Plus it's written by a black sjw type so again that reduces numbers drastically. I just sort of hope any "empathy" fags like myself could tell me what they feel. Especially about brecht.

[Anonymous No.12762540]

>>12762533
reason, it is the only thing which governs the universal moral law
read Kant you jabroni

[Anonymous No.12762542]

>>12762536
Feel about the article that is. Its kind of a long shot

[Anonymous No.12762544]

>>12762540
What is the universal moral law and how did we find it?

[Anonymous No.12762550]

>>12762518
Duty is an interesting way to put it.
Kant thought that if you did the right thing, but you didn't do it out of service to those universalizable rules, then your actions can't be called moral.
Kant acknowledges that people can do the right thing for the wrong reason, and also specifies that its about where you choose to orient your actions, and what kinds of motives you have.
>>12762517
Kant is often classified as a deontologist, which means his ethical system isn't based on outcome. Actions are good or bad in and of themselves, not because they help or hurt people.

[Anonymous No.12762554]

>>12762318
>Freak person who enjoyed pain
There's not that many of these people. Most of them enjoy only certain types of pain in certain contexts.
albert fish is probably one of the most prolific amoral masochist types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Fish
All the pain he inflicted on himself was sexual in nature. He wouldn't respond the same way a traumatic arm break.
>>12762371
In your post I see a lot of sperging out but I don't see an argument.
>>12762377
You'd know what would happen if you pushed them into a hot stove, and you would probably not do that.
Interestingly, some kids mess around with amorality sometimes. I've heard stories of kids capturing bugs and pulling the legs off, shooting birds with slingshots, etc, and most of the time the teller relates a strong feeling of regret after the action. I think it's a part of growing up healthy, nobody should feel guilty about that stuff, but you'd be an idiot to say that a normal functioning human doesn't have a sense of built-in empathy. Where that empathy comes from I kind of hesitate to say but I'm inclined to believe it comes from painful experiences. I think this because I've noticed privileged, coddled, or soft people tend to be the most sadistic, socially or physically. Tie in some shit about the cycle of abuse and learning really fucked up lessons about power dynamics and physical coertion from parents I would say you have the beginnings of a psychosocial theory of morality.
it should probably be crafted from bottom-up experiential examples (like all good heuristics) before we start applying epistemic methods of analysis like those provided by Kant for comparison and critique.

[Anonymous No.12762561]

>>12762544
r e a s o n
rkyj

[Anonymous No.12762570]

>>12762554
anyway check out the x-ray from the Fish wikipedia page.
He stuck something like 30 needles into his dick, perineum, and anus, and was known for lighting his anus on fire. He also spanked himself with a nailed paddle and was thought to have the sweet-spot IQ that made him just barely functional but otherwise technically retarded.
A lot of the serial killers and sadists/random act of violence/serial rapists are found to be incredibly stupid.

[Anonymous No.12762573]

>I don't think
Yeah, we can tell

[Anonymous No.12762578]

>>12762573
Where do you get your moral framework from?

[Anonymous No.12762579]

>>12762533
alright, if you guys are going to presume there's no objective, innate knowledge to which our reasoning flows from and aims to approximate, however small or large this knowledge extends to, there's really no discussion to be had. we may as well pursue the postmodernist shtick of asking that every word used be given a definition, such that no discussion can initiate in the first place, with "define X" being the only statement repeated after each response given to it. do you really think that hurting another person is as arbitrary as helping them, and that "we" entirely define these terms of "hurting" and "helping"? if i slap you across your face, is that equally as good as shaking your hand or patting your back? what if i torture and kill you, just like that? is it all the same? does anything have any meaning, in your world? or it merely a soup of total arbitrarity?

even animals follow moral codes, and yet here you are a human, trying to deny the existence of such. despite clearly observing them in front of you, and having the ability to even conceive of "morality" in the first place. how could you even recognize/comprehend such a reality at all, if it did not have a referent to itself?

[Anonymous No.12762581]

>>12762573
im almost certain that the venn diagram between people who read bap and people who read Fisher are two unconnected circles

[Anonymous No.12762605]

>>12762578
I don't think there are moral axioms in the sense that OP is asking about them, but the OP is clearly composed by someone who thinks in memes/clichés

[Anonymous No.12762610]

>>12762579
This is quite woke.

[Anonymous No.12762613]

>>12762579
>if i slap you across your face, is that equally as good as shaking your hand or patting your back? what if i torture and kill you, just like that? is it all the same? does anything have any meaning, in your world? or it merely a soup of total arbitrarity?
I wouldn’t like getting slapped or killed, but just because I wouldn’t like it doesn’t make it morally wrong necessarily. I wouldn’t like to see someone pick their nose in front of me either but I doubt you’d argue that’s morally wrong. What’s the difference? A scale of significance? Violating bodily autonomy? You have to take a stand somewhere beyond just intuition.

>even animals follow moral codes, and yet here you are a human, trying to deny the existence of such.
I’m not dying animals follow “moral” codes, or at least instincts that embed moral frameworks. What I’m saying is that any morality that is only granted by intuition is almost worthless, because some people intuitively desire to kill people, and don’t intuitively fee anything wrong with that. An argument for morality from intuition is an argument for relative morality.

[Anonymous No.12762625]

Is it moral to kill a killer?

[Anonymous No.12762628]

>>12762613
>What’s the difference?
universalizability and treating humans as ends in themselves
intuitionism != deontology
read Kant you jabroni

[Anonymous No.12762631]

>>12762613
>Some people intuitively desire to kill people
This "intuition" reflects an awareness of morality.

[Anonymous No.12762639]

>>12762628
I understand deontology is different than intuition, that’s why I wasn’t making the intuitiona argument against you, Kant-anon.

>>12762631
Sorry I don’t really understand what you mean by this.

[Anonymous No.12762646]

>>12762522
1. Love others.
2. Recognize your fundamental equality to them, and do not do to them what you wouldn't like done to yourself.
3. Harm none, in words or actions. Cause them no pain, be it physical or emotional or mental or otherwise.

it's pointless to give you guys any though, because you think that pointing out a very very small pocket of the population with different neurological wiring means that "morality doesn't exist, bro", it's all in your head. sure, and so are the meaning of those words since there are people out there who can't grasp language and would consider it gibberish, which means you haven't communicated anything with these words either. if you truly believe in this, why aren't you embodying any of it in your own life? if pain is just as good as pleasure, why haven't you inflicted some on anyone today? go slap your mother in her face when you see her next, go spit on your father next time he's near you. go choke a stranger on the street, go kick an infant and set a school on fire, if these are not "objectively" bad actions. absolute edgelords, i swear

[Anonymous No.12762667]

>>12762646
You really don’t see anything wrong with an argument for morality from common sense? Because that’s essentially what you’re saying.

[Anonymous No.12762678]

>>12762578
Society

[Anonymous No.12762687]

>>12762646
>if pain is just as good as pleasure
Complete straw man. I’m not saying people can’t have preferences for what they find good or bad, I’m asking whether an objective measure for what is good and bad exists, and if it does, where it comes from? If 99.9999% of the population finds the same things to be good and bad, that still doesn’t make it objective. It’s just subjective on a grand scale. If I say “it’s not wrong to kill people” your current reasoning wouldn’t be able to make any argument against me other than “it’s wrong because I feel it’s wrong.”

[Anonymous No.12762695]

>>12762302
Go act them out in the world and witness the real consequences. Results will vary depending on your location.


>>12762320
Cogito ergo sum

[Anonymous No.12762703]

>>12762695
Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it’s morally wrong, and vice versa.

[Anonymous No.12762712]

>>12762302
What do you like? What do you want for others?

[Anonymous No.12762716]

>>12762703
If you're pragmatic then it technically does since you're getting yourself in trouble for no reason.

[Anonymous No.12762721]

>>12762646
Wow it's almost like saying "everything is abritrary" and "context can influence the meaning if an action" are too different things.

Ofcourse this is useless to point out to your type of overly romantic phil undergrad tier thinkers. Everything for them is black and white, right and wrong, everything must be simple because if it wasnt how could I ever understand it or master it?

[Anonymous No.12762722]

>>12762613
as I explained >>12762523 here, taking this position regarding the complete arbitrarity of intuition can then extend to literally every human realm known of, in which case we're left with absolutely nothing at all. even these words you speak from are defined by individuals, and can't have any real meaning to them if the individual is not capable of creating any sort of universal and objective (within the system) web of meaning by which to both grasp words in themselves and similarly communicate to other parties with. why is verbal gibberish or written scribbles less-meaningful communication than well-defined speech and clear writing? who decides this? you? but an infant would beg to differ. it would voice its disagreement with you, in its own language of gibberish. again, i could extend this line of reasoning onto anything. i've already explained above that you should be asking yourself WHY people aren't hurting eachother in the first place, why conscience is universally observed, why empathy exists, why many feel a duty to be moral at all, etc. ask WHY, and then answer it. don't think you've done anything by simply and incoherently relativizing reality into nihilism and then addressed the above questions. even if you want to be a complete subjectivist, you cannot do so, since that would require objectivity of position. at best, you can be a moral agnostic, having no position of any kind on the area.

[Anonymous No.12762726]

>>12762703
I think that was a response to "where can I find moral axioms." Everybody is acting based on an internalized, if not entirely conscious morality in how they treat you. If you hurt one person, and everybody stops talking to you, you've probably violated some widely held axiom.

[Anonymous No.12762727]

>>12762721
Two*

[Anonymous No.12762768]

>>12762716
Many illegal actions have pragmatic benefits so in that case if you get away with them they’re perfectly moral.

>>12762722
We have empathy and conscience because we evolved to have it. Humans are social animals and it’s beneficial to us that we all get along. That doesn’t make morality objective though, that’s just an instinct. I’ve already stated that basing your entire framework on the feeling of empathy is a bad idea. I doubt you think an argument entirely based on feelings is valid in other fields so why is it allowed here?

[Anonymous No.12762776]

So, is ethics that that without existing, has a value?

[Anonymous No.12762780]

>>12762712
I’m assuming you mean in a general sense and not goals or whatever. What I want for myself is happiness. What I want for others depends on who they are, but generally I want others to be happy as well. Though that is because others being happy makes me happy in return. It’s not based on any moral framework, unless you’re going to claim anything that makes me happy is a moral good.

[Anonymous No.12762781]

>>12762768
If empathy were a legitimate measure for morality then it would be moral to be nice to people you related to or felt sorry for, and moral to harm or ignore the suffering of people you don't.

[Anonymous No.12762787]

>>12762781
I agree.

[Anonymous No.12762790]

If morality didn't exist there'd be no meaning to life and you'd find no repercussions for anything you do or don't . You'd probably just kill yourself because nothing would matter

[Anonymous No.12762792]

>>12762667
Why are we discussing this in the first place? How do we even know there's any subject to discuss? I'm not saying I know what perfectly objective morality looks like, I'm saying anyone who throws out the entire edifice is still an intellectual teenager that can't grasp the nature of a position in the first place, and how you can't have an objective/absolute/universal position with a subjective/relative/particular claim inside it. This is not new, you guys are not breaking new ground on this front, Plato and Aristotle already addressed this when Protagoras proclaimed "man is the measure of all things".

>>12762687
Why has what is generally considered good or bad emerged as such in the first place? Were it totally arbitrary, 100% arbitrary, one would imagine no stable and universal trend should be observed. Why is this not the case then? And why has what is generally considered to be "good" and "bad" been so, for thousands of years now? When it comes to the general stuff, remember. Golden rule, etc.
A thousand years from now, will every developed society generally consider murder to be "good", and this remain so for all the years after that?

>>12762721
That's not what I'm saying. You guys are the edgelords though, who think that "a few people in society with proven neurological differences to the rest of the population" means that pain and pleasure can be qualitatively equated to eachother, and placed horizontally on an ethical hierarchy. I'm only claiming that common sense is very much a basic guideline, else throw away the term "objective" at all, since everything, being the work of an individual, can't have such a quality to itself. Your words must be as meaningful and gibberish is. You guys also never seem to actually embody these moral positions of yours in your own lives, which is strange if you claim to actually believe in them. Why don't you hurt others every day, if you truly consider it arbitrary and that others who do so are just as ethical as anyone, since "ethical" is purely defined by the individual agent?

[Anonymous No.12762794]

>>12762790
I don’t understand your argument. I can still feel pleasure even if it fundamentally has no “meaning”, so what motive is there to kill myself?

[Anonymous No.12762796]

>>12762768
That depends on your position of power obviously. The way to harness objectivity with pragmatism would be some sort of unstoppable state that couldn't be overcome or corrupted. That or the Abrahamic God.