Moral upbringing.

[BurnedOut]

(Copying from an instantly deleted reddit post on r/unpopularopinion. If someone tells what is so incriminating in this article to trip the automod, please tell me)

Somehow the concept of morals of have been quite distorted in the iGen. There is not person, of my own age, I have met since childhood until now that takes any kind of moral literature or diktats (pejoratively speaking) seriously enough to understand that these are not rules imposed by people who belong to the previous generations.

I had a unique upbringing of sorts since my father taught me a lot of morals and ethics and stuff like that. My mother is a religious woman and so she regularly gave me lectures regarding the humankind and how it is my duty to contribute to the society who bears me. Needless to say, I grasped all this in my own botched but romanticized manner at a young age and it is not bad.

Actually, that became one of the reasons of the tumult that was caused inside of me due to so much contradiction to these values on a regular basis. That ruined my social experience in a lot of cases. My parents realized that they should have, according to them, taught me to do realpolitik than use my ideals. Then that devolved into the label 'perfectionist'.

I look back and look at myself now and I feel that my parents did nothing wrong. I found out later that in their times (60-70s) and the eras before that, having some kind of strong conviction about morals was not unusual. And if you keep going back in time, my assertion only strengthens.

After some interactions and observations, I observed that my mental inclinations are quite outdated and not contemporary. Since I was consciously given moral education, it suddenly makes me 'grumpy old man', 'overthinker' (the most common slur I receive), 'too intense' and other words that connote, 'You are outdated and naive.'

Why is moral education ignored by parents and teachers of this generation ? Why do you think just because the child's parents and members are religious, that would make that child morally considerate when he/she is going to spend a majority of children who are not going to be considerate of such ? Why do parents/ teachers of this era display some wilful ignorance to make the child 'street smart', 'strong' when the two words simply mean 'It is a dog eats dog world. The more the child is exposed to realpolitik, the better equipped he will be to deal with life.' Well, that is a more self-fulfilling phenomenon than a preemptive measure taken ?

Really ? Are we turning back into degenerates who are reducing the concept of morals to a history lesson for the sake of survival or whatever 'survival' is made out to be which is less humane and more primal ?

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/professor-martha-nussbaum-saving-liberal-arts

 

[Animekitty]

I think it has to do with your personal equilibrium. Deep down you either have a conscious or you don't. Not that you don't but that you don't use it. I mean that some care and some don't. If you are only looking out for you you have not attachment to other's wellbeing and that equilibrium is unmoved. You need to be compelled from the inside for you to do anything moral.

 

[Cognisant]

There are no universal moral values.
Reality is uncompromisingly fair.

Utilitarianism has a very agreeable premise, do the most good for the most people, surely if everybody abided by this premise the world would be a better place right? Well what if you're a doctor and you have a patient who was in a car accident, they're not dead but they're badly wounded and as you're undressing them for surgery you find their wallet and after indulging a fleeting curiosity (looking for their driver's license because you want to know their name) you see they have an organ donor's card.

You could save this patient or you could kill them and save half a dozen other patients who are waiting on life saving organ transplants, sure that's a bit unfair on your current patient but it's still the most good for the most people. Your patient doesn't deserve to die but it can't be argued that his life is worth more than the lives of six other people, it's just simple math 6>1 and technically you wouldn't be ending his life, just shortening it, I mean everybody dies eventually right?

Of course I'm using this example because I know you'll find it absolutely abhorrent, we people of the West put great value on individual liberty, so much so that if forced to choose between killing one person to save six we would rather let the six die than sully our hands by depriving someone of their most essential liberty, their right to live.

Of course were we survivors of a plane crash slowly starving to death on a mountain in the Andes then things might be different, if everyone starves then nobody lives so what does it matter if one dies for the good of the many? This is of course abhorrent to us however were we to return to civilization, a few smaller in number, no one could blame us for doing what we had to do hence why there is a legal precedent for "extenuating circumstances". If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to let them into a bank vault the bank can't sue you nor will the police charge you for aiding a criminal because you can't be expected to have not done so.

So to reiterate "there are no universal moral values" there cannot be universal values because there will always edge cases, reality is too complicated to abide by any one universal set of rules, or rather to truly express the entirety of reality's moral nuances would be nothing less than an expression of reality itself.

This neatly segues into my second point, that reality itself is utterly uncompromisingly fair, it is a true meritocracy where merit isn't some metric that we devised to befit our contrived ideals but rather merit for merit's sake. Consider someone who was born disfigured, through no fault of their own they will have great difficulty finding a partner, through no fault of their own they will either have to out-compete their peers in some other way or settle for less than they "deserve". Well reality doesn't give a flying fuck what you think you deserve because reality just is, the reality is everyone's out there doing the best they know how and you can bitch and lament and rationalize and you might even be right. But nobody cares, there's no sympathy for the disadvantaged and no respite for the weak, save the few safety nets society's rulers provide for their own selfish reasons.

Now go on tell me how everything would be better if we all believed in your ideals.
You might even be right, but you'll be a fool if you think it matters.

 

[Animekitty]

A value is something of worth. In ethics, we weigh the good and the bad for all parties. But if the individual is considered the only arbitrator it has to be that they have a system of values shifting unequally weighted. Some things can be given up for other things and some cannot be let go easily. Valuing others and valuing ourselves keeps us alive. That is why it is not completely a total battle of wills. We cooperate with others otherwise civilization would not have arisen. We think that everyone should play fair. Some don't so we have morality as to what others deserve and what we deserve.

Ultimately we want what is good for us and our circle of empathy. But with our sense of fairness, we can do wrong things to people and not care that it has harmed them because we do not extend that fairness to them (the circle of empathy). We harm others just because we can and this is wrong imo. Human beings have dignity and should be valued more than that. Drowning puppies for fun is wrong to imo. Harming others is not always fair so it is wrong. Harm is bad.

Harm and fairness are to universal moral "virtues". Values is a side issue of there expression. We know what harm and fairness are with fine granularity. The problem with values is that you can have the right or wrong values because morality does not depend on your or my opinion but on what is right and wrong as universal principles, on what is moral. Values don't dictate right and wrong. Now you can say right and wrong do not exist because right and wrong are not inforced by God lets say, so all actions are meaningless due to wrong things even existing. But that does not negate the fact that values do not dictate right and wrong, they supplement them.

 

[BurnedOut]

So to reiterate "there are no universal moral values" there cannot be universal values because there will always edge cases, reality is too complicated to abide by any one universal set of rules, or rather to truly express the entirety of reality's moral nuances would be nothing less than an expression of reality itself.

This neatly segues into my second point, that reality itself is utterly uncompromisingly fair, it is a true meritocracy where merit isn't some metric that we devised to befit our contrived ideals but rather merit for merit's sake. Consider someone who was born disfigured, through no fault of their own they will have great difficulty finding a partner, through no fault of their own they will either have to out-compete their peers in some other way or settle for less than they "deserve". Well reality doesn't give a flying fuck what you think you deserve because reality just is, the reality is everyone's out there doing the best they know how and you can bitch and lament and rationalize and you might even be right. But nobody cares, there's no sympathy for the disadvantaged and no respite for the weak, save the few safety nets society's rulers provide for their own selfish reasons.

Now go on tell me how everything would be better if we all believed in your ideals.
You might even be right, but you'll be a fool if you think it matters.

Ah. Touche Cognisant.

I see that the argumentation you have supplied here are these (From the perspective of only one person. Atomistic):
1. Reality determines.
2. Reality is malleable but so complex that it's state change is impossible to perceive or if possible, its current state denies its modification by a single person.
3. 2. but with another consideration that its modification can be caused by events of massive magnitude. But imagining the eruption of a massive magnitude is hard to imagine and impossible to process.

(Layperson of a certain class as determined by morality (let us assume that this is the classification for distinction as this is a debate based on morals))

Classes can initiate change for themselves or cause a spillover effect onto other classes. For that to happen, morals (here, the last time I am going to mention 'here') should have a source that is bigger than all the classes. (For better understanding, imagine what the constitution is to the country). The source is universal in nature. If the superset of morality is a universal set for that subtree of classes, morals are transcendent and different versions of it are mere distortions of its original form.

Let us now consider Cognisant's perspective about Reality being uncompromisingly fair. I am unsure about what he means by fair in this context because it is a value judgement. Perhaps, Cognisant, you mean that reality is an unbiased consequence of all the consequences. However, if you tout that, you, in a way, end up saying that the ultimate means of means is a constant. If it is a constant, the ethical and moral convictions do not make any kind of difference at the end. Here, you commit another logical fallacy of establishing a macro-perspective of the highest order. If you are an economics student, you will know there it is an accepted notion that the short-term changes are to be analyzed more than the long term because on an average, the profits and losses cancel each other out. However, it does not simply claim that this is a universal case however much it is portrayed as so when an analysis is performed. During the performance of this analysis, it is heavily dependent on the short-term performance and since the short-term performance instance matters so much, it becomes logical to first look at the micro-level at each hierarchy, in this case, of humans.

My surmise is that morals at an interpersonal level matters. A concept of 'sway' is very much real. If the concept of sway is tangible than it is easy to understand why evolution of anything moves in a certain direction than diffuse into all. It does not matter if it is a zero-sum construct. It is and it will be. But while obtaining its zero-sum, it experienced sways in contradictory directions who cancelled each other out but the fact that it swayed in the first place portrays enough that microchanges are real and important.

Your deduction is still profound in the most astounding sense that it represents the phenomenon of Schrodinger's Cat. However, the box is canned only when there is no action and if the world is an entity that always functions, the box is always going to be opened and there will always be only one particular solution/ phenomenon existing.

From all this, I claim that morals do matter at an individual level if I consider the definition that you provided (as surmised by me) because classes (even if singular) have a unifying abstract value which will always lead to formation and destruction of distinctions. The ultimate point I make is that just like Utilitarianism aims at achieving a zero-sum in the quickest way possible, value-ethics and morals have the same goal because all the appeals to goodness of someone asks for a similar rationality required at being most the exploitative/ utilitarian. It is a matter of how you look at the world. However, if you fail to provide the rationality in the case of both, you end up performing a very blotched form of utilitarianism and deontological practices whose dissonance yields good results for one and bad for another and worse for the both at the end. This is called pragmatism in a pragmatic sense which is nothing but a deluded state that only deceives everyone to perpetuate by ritualistic behaviors. In this era, it ensures its survival by encouraging disbelief and anarchy of morals and increasing dependence on nonhuman agents for humanizing wants.

In fact, Cognizant, I have a (bullshit romanticizing) perspective on Utilitarianism. It is something I wrote after just reading up on Utilitarianism after being thoroughly impressed by its ideals.

 

[Cognisant]

Let us now consider Cognisant's perspective about Reality being uncompromisingly fair. I am unsure about what he means by fair in this context because it is a value judgement. Perhaps, Cognisant, you mean that reality is an unbiased consequence of all the consequences.

Fair in the sense that in reality unmodified by our impositions the person who wins a race is the one who runs the fastest. By contrast we have separate races for women and men and the differently-able and in that they have handicaps so that the most and least differently-able are able to compete on fair terms. Without the allowances made for them by imposing our ideals upon reality there would be no special Olympics, no separate races for men and women, no weight classes in boxing, no women's and men's tees in golf and no weighted saddlebags in horse racing.

I'm not saying the special Olympics shouldn't exist, rather merely highlighting the fact that it is an imposition upon reality, that reality simply is what it is and that is what's "fair" is irrespective of any human moral values. Furthermore nor should we value this natural state of "fairness", there is a case to be made for doing so because it is a moral outlook that is most congruent with the nature of reality but I digress.

What gives you the right to dictate your moral values to others?

Suppose I'm a Hindu and because I'm a Hindu I think it's immoral to eat cattle and I so I forbid you from eating beef cheeseburgers, of course you would retort that it's none of my goddamn business and even if there's a case to be made that eating cattle is immoral (because the consumption of cattle fuels the incredibly ecologically damaging cattle industry) the fact remains that it's your choice to make.

This I think is the crux of the issue, you say people should be moral but if you don't define that morality you're not really saying anything, it's a circular argument, the world would be a place if there were better people in it but what is "better"?

Furthermore even if you're right and propose a set of values that is somehow both less incongruent with reality and more effective at realizing our ideals in reality, the fact remains that people are not going to do what you want them to even if it is in their best interests to do so. Which I doubt (that it's in their best interest) because you seem religious and I'm EXTREMELY critical of religion, but lets burn that bridge when we get to it.

 

[Animekitty]

Utilitarianism
The greatest good for the greatest many

Seems good but what is good? Right and wrong must still be defined. And who is doing the defining? We cannot go above the individual level when it comes to personal responsibility. In morality, a choice is always being made and this is because of the intimate connection between morality and free will. There is no one without the other.

Here is a definition

right is right and wrong is wrong
A choice is made when an agent KNOWINGLY does a right or wrong actions.
This is free will: that we can choose to do right and wrong things.
Our morals are the choices we make.