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Admittedly, allowing same-sex couples to marry will change the social meaning of marriage (it will no longer be part of this social meaning that every marriage is the union of a man and a woman); and for marriage to bring these intangible benefits, it needs to have a relatively stable and well-understood social meaning. However, there is no evidence that the introduction of same-sex marriage will change any other elements of this social meaning. Moreover, this social meaning has already changed radically over the years.
Marriage used to be generally understood as an unequal partnership, with the wife being subordinated to her husband, whereas now — at least in law and in most of mainstream culture — marriage is viewed as a partnership of equals. In general, the social meaning of marriage must change whenever such changes are necessary to avoid injustice; so this social meaning must now be changed so that it no longer excludes the participation of same-sex couples.
There is a lesson here for moral and political philosophy. In much of political philosophy, social institutions are conceived legalistically, as rules for the distribution of tangible benefits and burdens (such as money, health care, employment opportunities, and the like). Yet social institutions also have social meanings, which enable them to create important intangible benefits as well. Such institutions matter, not just because they are a mechanism for distributing tangible benefits and burdens, but because they create opportunities for meaningful human lives within society.
Many people believe, with Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, that if ethical precepts were not grounded in God's commands, then anything would be permitted. From Plato on, however, the philosophical tradition has frequently questioned the idea of a religious foundation for ethics.
Despite this, philosophers have yearned for a different source of absolute ethical authority, substituting the dictates of reason for any divine imperative, seeking, with Kant, the "moral law within."
Without such transcendental limits - so the story goes - there is nothing ultimately to prevent us from ruthlessly exploiting our neighbours, using them as tools for profit and pleasure, or enslaving, humiliating and killing them in their millions. All that stands between us and this moral vacuum, in the absence of a transcendental limit, are those self-imposed limitations and arbitrary "pacts among wolves" made in the interest of one's survival and temporary well-being, but which can be violated at any moment.
But are things really like that?
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It is well-known that Jacques Lacan claimed that the psychoanalytic practice inverts Dostoyevsky's dictum: "If there is no God, then everything is prohibited." This reversal, of course, runs contrary to moral common sense.
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even if Lacan's inversion appears to be an empty paradox, a quick look at our moral landscape confirms that it is a much more appropriate description of the atheist liberal/hedonist behaviour: they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures, but since there is no external authority which would guarantee them personal space for this pursuit, they get entangled in a thick network of self-imposed "Politically Correct" regulations, as if they are answerable to a superego far more severe than that of the traditional morality. They thus become obsessed with the concern that, in pursuing their pleasures, they may violate the space of others, and so regulate their behaviour by adopting detailed prescriptions about how to avoid "harassing" others, along with the no less complex regime of the care-of-the-self (physical fitness, health food, spiritual relaxation, and so on).
Today, nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist.
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"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.""
The Evolutionary Challenge for moral realism is, roughly, the challenge to explain our having many true moral beliefs, given that those beliefs are the products of evolutionary forces that would be indifferent to the moral truth. This challenge is widely thought not to apply to mathematical realism. In this article, I argue that it does. Along the way, I substantially clarify the Evolutionary Challenge, discuss its relation to more familiar epistemological challenges, and broach the problem of moral disagreement. I conclude that there may be no epistemological ground on which to be a moral antirealist and a mathematical realist.
THERE ARE SOME THINGS money can’t buy—but these days, not many. Almost everything is up for sale...
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A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong. Thinking through the appropriate place of markets requires that we reason together, in public, about the right way to value the social goods we prize. It would be folly to expect that a more morally robust public discourse, even at its best, would lead to agreement on every contested question. But it would make for a healthier public life. And it would make us more aware of the price we pay for living in a society where everything is up for sale.
the debate over morality in America has less to do with moral outcomes and more to do with a vision of how society should look based on idealistic remembrances of how things were. So people like Mr Munro and the Republican candidates believe America is in a moral slump. The odd thing is, people on the left might actually agree, though for very different reasons. They are upset by the perceived greed of the 1%, and the broad acceptance of torture and war as foreign-policy tools. In the end, the debate over morality more closely resembles two distinct monologues.
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over the past several decades the crime rate has fallen dramatically, despite what you may think. The homicide rate has been cut in half since 1991; violent crime and property crime are also way down. Even those pesky kids are committing less crime. There are some caveats to these statistics, as my colleague points out, but I think we can conclude that crime is not the cause of America's moral decline.
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Abortion has returned as a hot-button issue, perhaps it is eating away at our moral fiber. Hmm, the abortion rate declined by 8% between 2000 and 2008. Increases in divorce and infidelity could be considered indicators of our moral decay. There's just one problem: according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the divorce rate is the lowest it has been since the early 1970s. This is in part due to the recession, but infidelity is down too.
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Scientists in the Netherlands hoping to create a more efficient alternative to rearing animals have grown small pieces of beef muscle in a laboratory.
These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn.
The stem cells in this particular experiment were harvested from by-products of slaughtered animals but in the future, scientists say, they could be taken from a live animal through biopsy.
One usually assumes the main motivation for vegetarianism - aside from those who practise for religious reasons - is about the welfare of animals. The typical vegetarian forswears meat because animals are killed to get it.
So if the meat does not come from dead animals would there be an ethical problem in eating it if it one day lands on supermarket shelves?
what we have today in the world of moral and ethical thought is not a dictatorship of relativism, but, from a bird’s eye view, moral ambiguity and pluralism.
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The day before his papacy began, Joseph Ratzinger delivered a homily in which he made the oft-quoted observation: “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.” I disagree. At least, I disagree if we’re speaking of serious contemporary moral thought. With the claim that modern mass society is marked by egoism and intemperance, I’ve no quarrel, but I’d call this moral laziness or the absence of moral consideration, not a dictatorship of relativism.
Why are some people prepared to risk their lives to help a stranger when others won’t even stop to dial an emergency number?
“What it looks like is when you see somebody actively harm another person that triggers a strong automatic response,” said Brown University psychologist Fiery Cushman. “You don’t have to think very deliberatively about it. You just perceive it as morally wrong. When a person allows harm that they could easily prevent, that actually requires more carefully controlled deliberative thinking [to view as wrong].”
many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality. A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong. After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?” And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?
What the author is attempting to pass off as an objective characteristic of the "climate debate" proves to be just standard climate denier ad hominem – greens are humorless scolds, socialist-secular anticolonialist navel-gazers, self-righteous Chicken Littles undergoing a "millennarian meltdown" in which they "have lost all sense of proportion and hope."
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Notice how easily we slip into the conventional internet libertarian's assumptions about the world. Government action has become "enormous government coercion" (is a carbon tax more coercive than a property tax or a sales tax, or does he believe all taxation and regulation to be "enormous government coercion"? He doesn't say, but one suspects.) The people or the right side of that "lopsided empirical basis" have become "climate change warriors" – because while denying climate change "is just silly" proposing that we act on what we know is the moral equivalent of making war on our fellow citizens. And then we have this gem of tortured logic: "which explains many climate change warriors' antipathy to democratic principles on this point - easier to persuade 200 governments than all those people."
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Lobbying the government to act is now undemocratic. International treaties are undemocratic, too. (We are allowed to persuade people individually, provided we don't make them feel bad by "moralising" the issue.) One wonders how democracy ever recovered from treaties that banned ozone-depleting chemicals, or the use of chemical and biological weapons, or child labor, or those that created trade agreements.
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The global climate change debate has a lopsided empirical basis - in the economy of nature but not political economy - and this has contributed to a peculiar moralising trajectory. I have three main concerns with this: i) climate change has displaced other important concerns, for example of the 1 billion people living in unacceptable poverty; ii) a fixation on global CO2 levels alone distracts from what we can practically do, and even from caring about other aspects of the environment that we want to protect; iii) the debate has induced a kind of millenarian meltdown in which otherwise sensible people have lost all sense of proportion and hope.
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The science of climate change is not my target. It is clearly a fact that the world's regional climates are changing substantially and at unprecedented speed, and this is a result of greenhouse gases produced by human activity (in particular by the industrialisation of the West). Denying the science is just silly. But 'science' does not have the legitimacy or resources to tell us what we should do about climate change. We have to work that out for ourselves.
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In trying to tackle climate change by directly dealing with the causal mechanism of CO2 levels we have framed the situation as an enormous collective action problem - how to persuade 7 billion people to adopt the new morality of carbon rationing (and prevent free-riding). Everyone who thinks this through recognises that it is impossible to realise without enormous government coercion (severe rationing along the lines of China's one-child policy). That requirement explains many climate change warriors' antipathy to democratic principles on this point - it seems easier to persuade all 200 governments to be adopt carbon authoritarianism than to persuade all those people individually (e.g. James Lovelock). However even the government coercion approach fails - see the failures of every inter-governmental treaty, from Kyoto to Copenhagen - and the reasons are obvious.
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In another test, he asked Jews and Christians to:
Imagine a son, Mr. K., who does not like his parents very much, because they have very different personalities from him. That son can either pretend to like his parents, or he can ignore and neglect them. If he doesn’t like his parents inside, does it mean anything for him to behave nicely toward them?
As the figure shows, Jews and Christians see Mr. K the same if he both inwardly dislikes his parents and also neglects them in reality (the 'Sincere condition' in the graph). But Jews, in contrast to Christians, were much more likely to think favourably of Mr K if he pretends to like his parents.
Cohen attributes these differences to differences in their respective holy books. For example, Jesus explicitly condemns thought crime ("You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."). In contrast, Cohen says,
...the Jewish attitude is that it is better to override your temptations out of obedience to God. True virtue is doing what God says even if you don't internally want to.
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All of this puts me in mind of George Orwell's novel, 1984, in which he wrote about thoughtcrime:
The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed - would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper - the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.
adolescents are slower to emerge into adulthood these days: they study for longer, they depend on their parents for longer and they marry later, if at all. The world of real work they eventually enter is not the world of stable, long-term jobs that previous generations knew. During that long transition they have unprecedented freedom—from unwanted childbearing, for example—and no particular reason to rush into commitments of any sort. Moral boundaries are less clear than they were; many young adults have been taught not just to tolerate other people’s views and behaviour but to see them all as equally valid.
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to consumerism. Shopping is personally fulfilling; buying things supports the economy (true enough); if you can afford it, you deserve it. Might it be just a tiny bit gross to own ten cars while others in your city are working double shifts to buy shoes for their children? Apparently not. The good life consists of having a decent job, a decent standard of living and a nice family, not of fighting for justice or saving whales.
Ever wondered why we get disgusted by things that taste bad and also by things that are morally outrageous? Well, it seems that they really are connected in a very deep way - moral disgust seems to have evolved as an extension of physical disgust.
And that means you can play a neat trick: you can measure moral disgust indirectly by looking to see how it affects our physical sense of disgust.
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