Where do you derive your morality/ethics from ?

[leonus]

lol not at all bored ... i am a doctor actually ... however, axiology and epistemology interests me a lot .... i find these questions of value to be the most important thing in our lives ...

Yours,

[leonus]

Tarni, in any philosophical argument one must base all assumptions (as well as beliefs) on the grounds of an axiom, or logic ... for example, you refuse accepting to inflict pain upon others and deem it as the (right) thing ... But why should it be so ?

thanks for indulging with me

[leonus]

tarni ... your questions of why a tree is a tree and is the earth round and do we have souls, belongs to different categories .... the real skeptic tells you that no, you dont know if the tree is a tree, and if all the people around you all people or figments of your imagination, or even evil demons have built them as robots to pretend they are people ... however, ethical truths are different from that, they dont belong to this category, since it is the epistemology rather than the ideaology we are seeking ...

in other words : How do we know what we know


yours,
Leonus

[robbrown]

There are no such things as good or evil actions, only how those actions are perceived by others; one person may perceive an action as evil whilst another may see no harm in it at all.

Some of the worst atrocities ever have been carried out by people who see little harm in what they have done because they can (at least to themselves) justify them as being right for one reason or another. Are they bad or are they barmy? You choose!

I personally live by what I perceive as right or wrong, not by what others tell me; my belief of what's right and wrong (my morals) form the basis of my own religion if you like. However, my morals aren't written in scripture and my God doesn't demand I go to a place of worship every week and live my life the way He has set out. My God is more forgiving, He's not a dictator but an understander. He understands that I can never be somebody I'm not; He understands that I am who I am and asks that I live my life by what I think is right and wrong.

As far as my God is concerned as long as I always try to do what I believe to be right then I'm not a bad person. He views others the same way too irrespective of whether or not they have signed up to a God of their own. He certainly wouldn't send their soul to eternal damnation if they didn't live their life the way He demands. However, my God would judge someone as evil or bad if they undertook actions that they themselves view as being wrong; to my God a bad or evil person is the one that goes against his own morals!

Rob

[klasik]

1. I would agree with Tarni that our beliefs about right and wrong are discovered empirically.

2. Societies do not disagree on morality as much as you might think. Let's take the extreme example of human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that gods could not create their own blood, so they needed to take blood from sacrifices. No sacrifices would mean no blood for the gods, which would mean the gods would die, which would make everyone die. To be sure, these are some crazy beliefs. But taken in this context, their morality doesn't seem as crazy. You can hardly blame someone for trying to save the whole world.

Another example: When Muhammad authorized polygamy, many of the men in his tribe had been killed in war. Unless some of the women started doubling up, there wouldn't have been enough men to go around. The Mormons were in a similar situation when Joseph Smith said polygamy was okay. Notice that both these societies have abandoned polygamy now that the dire circumstances have ended.

3. We can imagine far-fetched scenarios in which our intuitions are mistaken, which would prove that we cannot be 100% certain that some object T is a tree. But that's not the same as saying we have no knowledge of whether T is a tree. When we have competing explanation for the same data, we can evaluate them according to our standards for explanation (simplicity, conservativeness, falsifiability, depth, ect)

4. Not everything needs to be defended by logic. Our beliefs come in to our minds through osmosis, and there is nothing we can do to stop that. The best we can do is think critically about our beliefs in the hopes that the faulty ones will crumble away. If we have done this and our beliefs still persist, we can consider them justified, even if the justification is not logical.

A lot of these questions bug me too. I'm a philosophy addict.

[robbrown]

Wow, this is getting heavy!

If this is modern-day small talk then I'm getting old

[leonus]

Well, even though most replies here wear passionately honest and coming from strong emotions, they do not provide us however with (logical) answers to our question ... If anyone have read about the Navajo, the Ik, or the hopi, they would realize that we are facing a big and solid and coherent problem when it comes to ethical considerations ... for example, the Ik people think that (goodness) is (food), and a (good man) in their system, is not he who helps others, or who is altruistic, or who renders great aid to his society, rather, a good man is a man who (has a full stomach) and that a literal translation for the word (good man) ...

Life is full of mysteries, some we know about, some we can never imagine ... this post was just to remind ourselves how diverse and rich our cosmos is ....

Yours,

Leonus

[marsha]

Originally Posted by leonus

can not put it in any simpler way ... What is the source of your moral guidelines that you follow in your life (if you are not an anarchist that is) ...

Waiting to hear from you friends ...

The anarchists I've known have the strongest moral guidelines of people I know!