In a very small nutshell, the eighth paradox in Saul Smilanksy’s book 10 Moral Paradoxes is that “morality is an ‘enemy’ of moral worth.” When morality prevails, there is less injustice and less suffering, but also less occasion for people to do things that have moral worth. More morality, oddly enough, means less morality.
This chapter has an interesting section called “the reality of the issue” in which Saul argues that in the modern world morality really is being put out of business (not his words). In advanced societies, there is more democracy, more affluence, less war, less violence, more justice. In the most advanced societies (he cites New Zealand and Denmark), “one can get by without an undue burden of morality.” Nobody has to exert themselves too much to be as good as circumstances require.
The scarcity of demanding moral situations has occurred to me often. I do think there are all sorts of interesting ethical problems that arise in everyday life, but they aren’t usually dramatic. In an advanced society, most of us don’t have to wonder how to share our last loaf of bread (should children get less because of their size, or more for some other reason?). We don’t have to decide whether to submit to torture, or relate the whereabouts of another member of the resistance. Morality has a more modest role in our lives, the more that we live in peace and prosperity.
Now, I think you could jump all over this. You could talk about problems in reproductive ethics you might confront in your childbearing years, thorny problems you might confront at the end of life. There are novel problems about dealing with terrorists as combatants and as prisoners. There are questions about plastic surgery and internet ethics and global warming. There are problems every time you go to the store and have to decide whether to pay extra for organic, or local, or humane-certified food. So much for the notion that we have fewer occasions to be good.
And yet…you’re not going to be a hero for buying organic. The especially difficult and dramatic issues mostly just give most of us something interesting to think about in our comfortable armchairs. We don’t often personally confront high-stakes moral problems in our daily lives. Hence, the paradox: we are lucky, and yet unlucky. We have it really good, but find few chances to be good.
Should we deliberately let a certain amount of misery and injustice persist, so more people have more of a chance to be morally good? “Great and perhaps unique value emerges from true moral behavior, but the need for morality should be limited as much as possible,” Saul writes. We can’t engineer situations that foster moral worth even if it’s a shame that moral worth is on the decline.
Here’s a mundane illustration that seems to support Saul’s point. Let’s say I go to a park with my two 11-year-olds. I see a lost, crying child. I can help quickly. But I can also pretend I didn’t see the child, and wait and see what my 11-year-olds will do about it. They’ll probably help (and I’ll be available as a safety net and to assist), which means double the moral worth will be generated, at a fairly low cost: just a few extra minutes of the child’s misery. Considering that moral worth is so special, it seems I ought to choose the course that produces more of it. But morality says No. I have to quickly help the child, allowing the moral worth generated to be half what it could have been.
Some philosophers have been so impressed with morality they’ve assigned it “infinite worth.” Surely that’s hyperbole, but if being good even just has great worth, as the world gets better a certain sort of value is inevitably also going to be lost. It’s paradoxical that morality prevents us from doing anything about it.
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Previous posts on 10 Moral Paradoxes: Paradox 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. (I skipped 7).
Who’s looking for “chances to be good”? I’d rather have less “moral worth” and a life without problems.
Sometimes, I have to respond to moral demands (or obligations, as if you wish), but I’d hardly say that I cruise through life looking for opportunities not to betray anyone under torture or to share my last slice of bread. The idea that one looks for chances to be good or tries to accumulate moral worth is based on a Christian notion that having accumulated moral points, one will get into heaven. I am not a Christian.
Indeed, who does look for chances to be good? Nobody does, nobody should. But if in fact morality is “losing business,” there must be something unfortunate about that, if moral is so fine a thing. The odd thing is that there’s nothing anybody can do about it.
Yes, many somebodies look for chances to be good. But yes, as Amos points out, the motives are often Christian. My Baptist friend organizes the Salvation Army Santa Claus carts, my Mennonite friend is one of the Santa Clauses, my Mormon friend went to Louisiana to help with the Katrina leftovers. None of them, however, was looking for passes to hand to St. Peter. They are truly good and giving people, hard as that may be (for me) to understand.
Believe it or not, I can be a giving person myself, but I’m often not at all sure that it is better to give than to receive. Maybe, Jean, morality is not a fine thing, but generally, sacrifices we make for a variety of reasons, caring about others, our conscience ((I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t help that child, even if it involves ruining my best pair of shoes), our self-image (I want others to see me as a good person), etc. Still, I would rather still have my best pair of shoes and not have had to help that child. I would prefer to live in New Zealand, where there are few opportunities to sacrifice myself than in the Congo, where the opportunities for sacrifice are legion. I praying for the day when all humanity lives in New Zealand.
Well, OK, people do volunteer, so I exaggerated when I said nobody looks for chances to be good. Still, there’s been a drop off in “GMW”–gross moral worth– in advanced societies. That’s Saul’s claim, and the paradox is that morality prevents us from doing anything about it.
Maybe there’s a little paradox for some in being a giving person. I am considered by some to be such a one (in a small way), but in fact nothing I give leaves me with less. I give what I don’t sense as giving at all. It’s only received that way. No way would I subtract anything from myself. Goodness doesn’t do anything for me, but I’m very easy about spreading the wealth as Obama was so condemned for saying. I have enough time to give some up when asked. Is there no paradox hiding in there? An essentially ungood person gives easily.
Isn’t it possible that this indicates a problem with our approach to morality? Specifically, I find it suspicious to talk about a “golden age” when everyone had a chance to be a hero. Was it ever the case that people commonly had chances to be extraordinarily moral? Wouldn’t that make the moral acts thereby committed ordinary rather than extraordinary, and thus not so brimming in moral worth?
I remember discussing this paradox with some people when I first heard about the book. This strikes me as a plainly simplistic view of morality.
We can be moral heroes even when few evils are around, since we always have a chance to fulfill supererogatory duties. So its strikingly easier for us to be minimally decent samaritans (to borrow from Judith Jarvis Thompson) in our society. But that doesn’t make being a good samaritan any easier.
What makes fulfilling supererogatory difficult in a sense is that there is no pressing moral obligation for us to fulfill them, unlike life and death moral dilemmas and such.
Lets say we live in a utopian society, where everyone is a minimally decent samaritan (they don’t cheat steal lie murder etc.) and lets raise the stakes a bit, and say that everyone even fulfills some of their supererogatory duties (say giving to the poor or being polite and kind to strangers). Then there’s me. It strikes me that I could be a minimally decent samaritan, and I wouldn’t be a bad person… but I could still be a better person like everyone else is. Saul seems to be saying, in this world, I wouldn’t even have the opportunity to fulfill my supererogatory duties…. but I could ALWAYS bake a pie for a neighbor and give it to them for no reason, or help someone with their groceries and such.
Now the retort is, sure helping people with their groceries is nice, but its not going to elevate me to Mother Teresa status. For a Mother Teresa to exist, there has to be great evil to be overcome.
But I think this assumes a kind of ontological status of good and evil that just doesn’t exist. That for every good action, there must be a equivalent moral evil to exist. This is just mistaken. Good and evil aren’t like left and right, you can’t have one without the other, but more like black and white, where one can exist, and the other one never existing. Development of our characters and such can still exist, we could be ordinary heroes of sort like Forrest Gump. And there is nothing less noble in that, no?
Exactly what evil did Mother Theresa overcome? She’s not what I would consider a good or moral person.
Fine, replace Mother Theresa with Martin Luther king. Or anyone else that you care to that you would consider a moral exemplar/hero/good samaritan. Its rather impertinent to the point I’m making.
Wayne, It seems as if there are fewer occasions for doing what we must AND fewer occasions for supererogatory behavior as modern societies make moral and other kinds of progress. If there were no disease, there’d be nobody to visit in the hospital. If nobody was being victimized, you wouldn’t have to write letters to the president to protest. I don’t think you have to imbibe some weird metaphysics of good and evil to find this plausible.
Hmm–baking a pie for a neighbor and giving it to them for no reason. Can this possibly generate the sort of stellar moral worth we associate with sharing your last loaf of bread, or keeping a comrade’s secret in the face of torture? It just seems like common sense that the answer is No.
“The idea that one looks for chances to be good or tries to accumulate moral worth is based on a Christian notion that having accumulated moral points, one will get into heaven. I am not a Christian.”
-amos
That’s actually not an accurate description of Christian teaching. Put simply, in Christianity there is “reward” for doing morally good acts, but heaven is not it. It’s really quite a bit more complicated than that, but that’s not the focus of the discussion.
As for the paradox, I’d like to point out that, even though great acts of moral courage (such as risking our life to save someone) it takes great amounts of moral discipline to rise above the mediocrity that is so easy to fall into (I think this was part of Wayne’s point). The impact of our moral decisions is a lot harder to notice when it is a bunch of small choices compared to a singular large choices. However, the OP did point out that there is a matter of luck involved. Moral luck is a tricky thing, and I don’t know how much I am willing to the the “Gross Moral Good” be dependent on luck.
Yesterday I made hummus because I had a jar of tahini that needed to be used up. I made too much; I could never finish it and it would spoil, maybe make me sick, certainly be tossed out. So I very kindly, magnanimously really, took some of the excess over to my neighbor and was thanked profusely. Do I give myself some credit for my generosity?
JK- I don’t think we have fewer opportunities… I think we have about the same when it comes to many of our moral obligations. I’m constantly fulfilling my obligation not to murder and rape and torture, etc. Thats what makes me a minimally decent person, and in Saul’s utopia, the generation of the paradox.
Can we generate the stellar moral worth? No. But is it a requirement for us to be Good Samaritans? By definition its a supererogatory duty, so it can’t be. Is it a good thing, sure. But if it can’t be attained, and its not morally incumbent on us to attain it, then whats the problem? And still, I can fulfill some supererogatory duties to stand out from the crowd.
William- I’m not sure if I actually wrote anything about the difficulty of overcoming mediocrity, or the difficulty of being a minimally decent person, but thats sort of what I’m saying here now. Heh, but I’m always willing to accept credit when its given to me, even when undeserved. I guess I fail at being a minimally decent person. ;)
Wayne, You ask “what’s the problem”? Well, in a way, none. It’s “just” a paradox. While it seems bad that there’s less “stellar moral worth” in an advanced society, morality stops us from doing anything about it. This is odd. Most of the time, bad things are preventable, at least in principle.
rtk–if I were working in the moral accounting office of the Obama administration, and I really had to keep “moral worth” statistics, I’d give the hummus sharing a few points. You could have thrown it out, but you preferred to share. Very nice. Of course, not as nice as offering your neighbor your kidney.
Jean, surely “More morality, oddly enough, means less morality” appears odd only if we ignore the fact that the same word is being used in two different senses? What’s unexpected about the mere fact that the more a society is operating along whatever lines we deem “moral”, the less we need to act against something seen as somehow not being “moral”?
Much of the debate re ethical problems revolves around our unwillingness to analyse the bases of our personal moral prejudices carefully. Why has the concept of morality always been so amorphous, varying widely from one society and/or one era and/or religious doctrine to another? I’d suggest an appropriate starting point is trying to explain why the feeling that there must be an objective morality out there somewhere (if only we could pin it down) seems almost universal, but when we attempt to ascertain what this means to those laying down the “moral laws”, we find virtually anything goes.
Morality really does needs\ to explain why one code, for example, can glorify a killing which causes adherents of another code to throw up their arms in collective horror. Philosophers, despite centuries of hard work, have had little success finding the Holy Grail they “knew” must (c.f. Fox Mulder’s Aliens?) be out there somewhere; and it wouldn’t hurt to ask ourselves could there be a better approach to finding an explanation which fits the known factual record of how morality has been seen.
There is good reason to accept that with many species (human and non-human alike) there was an evolutionary advantage in behaving positively towards members of your “in-group”, but wiping out members of the species “outer-groups” was also useful. I accept this isn’t a “nice” attitude, but evolution wasn’t a charity bazaar, was it. The only problem for philosophers is that while interpretations of moral concepts based on fields such as psychology/biology/evolution may offer a more consistent explanation for the markedly different forms morality has adopted over the centuries, it is a threat to Philosophers’ already dwindling Academic Empires.
The evolutionary approach explains you feeling there’s a “scarcity of demanding moral situations”. We did evolve, some much more strongly than others, a need to do “good” things to others. What initially had a significant survival value when our inner group was under attack is still there in the modern insulated (Western) world, and looks for an outlet. Help is on hand. It becomes part of the Land Rights for Disabled Gay Whales Syndrome, and those of us who no longer have to man the metaphorical barricades against any significant personal threat find “noble” new causes in fighting the good fight for the threatened Patagonian Petunia — or even more worthy causes. It not only involves little real effort and even less danger, but it also enables us to become part of a new and noble Band of Brothers — or perhaps that should be Siblings?
As Chairman Mao might say, “Let a Thousand Ethical Dilemmas Bloom!”
This can include all the new ‘moral problems’ listed in your article. Play the game according to the non-rules, and one might even become famous with a movie called, “An Extremely Convenient Half Truth”. This would be expected to sell much better than, say, a movie about, “An Extremely Painful Full Truth”.
I can, by the way, understand why, “Some philosophers have been so impressed with morality they’ve assigned it ‘infinite worth’.” That keeps it in their Bailiwick, at the same time placing it beyond any expectation they might need to make any real progress explaining the concept — what a brilliant post-modern strategy!
Jean- But thats just it… there is no bad thing here… just simply a lack of good…. by the scenario’s construction, there is precisely no bad. There’s no bad to prevent. Its kinda like looking around, seeing that there is no poverty, and saying “Drats!”
The problem only arises if we conceive morality as that weird ontologically linked stuff I talked about in my first post. We can’t be good, because there is no bad.
If it isn’t ontologically linked, then we can continue to accumulate good character traits and/or engage in good acts and/or fulfill our moral obligations, to become even better people.
The concept of supererogation needs to be stress tested. There’s an element of paltering timidity about it. (paradox alert)
“Tell me why, tell me why
Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself,
When your old enough to repay but young enough to sell?(Neil Young/Tell me why(After the Goldrush)
(why do we know what this means though we might all disagree on what exactly)
(yes: paradox alert)
“On 16 March, Oates, whose condition was aggravated by an old war-wound to the extent that he was barely able to travel,[76] voluntarily left the tent and walked to his death, in the faint hope that this sacrifice would save the others.[77] Scott wrote that Oates’ last words were, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”"
Capt. Oates’ whole life was a training for this act and there was no leap to beyond duty. As he saw it there is no beyond duty. (paradox alert). Duty is an elastic frontier. (paradox alert) Read Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampadi’ (play up, play up and play the game) to get the feeling of this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Newbolt
We are enjoined to love our neighbours:
Q: “Who is my neighbour?
A: My neighbour is all mankind, event those who persecute and calumniate us.”(penny catechism)
In this scenario rtk’s neighbour sues him for attempted poisoning and goober pea malfeasance. Rtk sends him a note saying ‘I still have a Labrador puppy for you, the one that you liked’.
Wayne, Saul has a nice example involving artificial meat. What if current research succeeds, and there’s cheap lab-grown meat available? Nobody kills animals for food anymore. Then the sort of moral worth involved in being a vegetarian (surely there’s some) will have been phased out. If you attach great value to moral worth, then there must be something regrettable about that. Yet, there’s no “fix” for it. Obviously, you can’t keep killing animals just to preserve the moral worth of abstinence. That’s the puzzle–that with moral progress there’s also a sort of inevitable loss.
Your view, I take it, is that in a fake-meat world the fake-meat-eaters are just as good as actual vegetarians. But is that plausible?
Norman, You’re right that I’ve played up the air of paradox by using the word “morality” twice, but in two senses. I think the oddness here can be appreciated without that little verbal trick…which was just for fun.
All this stuff about moral worth sounds so self-righteous or sanctimonious, right out of the Scarlet Letter or Ibsen, the kind of discourse which leads sensitive adolescents to memorize Zarathustra.
Jean, did you stop eating meat in order to be morally worthy or because you were concerned about the suffering of animals? I always wear Levis blue jeans. Let’s say that I hear that Levis are made in sweat-shops (it would not surprise me) and that there is a boycott to pressure Levis to pay decent wages. I would participate in that boycott because of my concern about sweat-shop workers, not because I want to be morally worthy. Now, maybe Obama decides to save General Motors and the auto-workers, converting them to making Levis, with decent wages and labor conditions. Fantastic. I can go back to buying Levis again. The last thing that I want is to accumulate moral worth points. Calvin is not my role model, I can assure you.
quote m.r. “In this scenario rtk’s neighbour sues him for attempted poisoning and goober pea malfeasance. Rtk sends him a note saying ‘I still have a Labrador puppy for you, the one that you liked’.”
As a native Chicagoan, from the proud state of Illinois, represented by the governor of recent TP fame, I know better than to offer even my favorite breed, the chocolate lab. Pay to Play in this neck of the woods is high stakes.
and plus also: goober = chick? as in check out that goober!
Jean- In a world of fake meat, I’d be a faux-carnivore. I’m not sure if that would make me any less morally better or worse than a vegetarian, but we are equal standing above the carnivores, arn’t we? This implies that there is something morally superior to not indulging in our desires. I’m not sure I would think that a person who didn’t watch TV was morally superior to someone who did.
Amos, No, I didn’t stop eating meat for the sake of the moral worth, but the paradox doesn’t concern how people are motivated. The idea is simply that certain choices and actions have moral worth and that moral worth is an especially valuable thing. So if it disappears, as societies advance, that will be bad….but also good, since what occasions morality is often suffering or injustice.
Yeah, it all sounds kind of sanctimonious, but I don’t think it really is. Saul’s observing something paradoxical…or at the very least odd, ironic, strange, peculiar. Personally, I am a fan of the peculiar. I like to see ways in which the world is more bizarre than I thought.
Wayne, Sounds to me like you’re biting a bullet. Doesn’t it seem odd to see people as equally good whether they are choosing not to harm animals or they are just, by default, not harming animals?
But, Jean, what you call “moral worth” is only valuable if the circumstances call for it. If there is no need for it, if we all live in an idealized version of New Zealand, heroic morality has no value at all. The fact that one is prepared to die to preserve the liberty of one’s country may have been a heroic virtue in the days of the French resistance, but it’s just hot air if one lives in a world without Hitlers and without imperialism.
This relates to a distinction Saul makes between laudatory and deprecatory views of moral worth. Some people think moral actions and choices are intrinsically good, and especially good. Others think morality is curative, sort of like aspirin for headaches. If you don’t need it, that’s great! To recognize this paradox, I think you have to have the laudatory view of moral worth, which I do. If some day nobody every does anything with moral worth, because the world is so free of problems, it does seem to me that that will be both good and bad.
Doesn’t the laudatory view of moral worth presuppose that there is someone to laud you? That is, God.
Jean, IF the use of “morality” in different senses isn’t important, what is, because the different meanings given to words in this discussion played a significant role in creating the “paradox”.
Either way, I sometimes wonder why so little attention is paid to the problem in ethics that “morality” has been and continues to be seen in so many incompatibly different guises, but we shy away from explaining WHY one shouldn’t take into account the possible significant relevance of our species’ often conflicting innate propensities. Propensities which do make sense, in evolutionary terms, for our ’successful’ exploitation of the planet.
I’m not familiar, by the way Michael, with references to Oates’ lifetime preparation for self sacrifice; but even as a youngster, and long before reading “Fire on the Snow”,, saw it in less heroic terms than you do. Oates knew he was doomed to a slow painful and unavoidable death, and decided to walk outside. A praiseworthy gesture, and extremely useful in wartime Australia to make us all feel proud about those who sacrificed their lives for us. We needed symbols then to maintain the home front, but in reality, far more heroic were the young men volunteering for the jungles of the South Pacific, even after tales of the horrors awaiting them there were getting back to us.
I’d suggest, Jean, that even if (for whatever reason) you don’t care to apply Occam’s Razor and consider a possible evolutionary role in creating our sense of morality, if we’re to give more significance to the concept of morality, discussion of faux trivial ‘conflicts’ might not help further our understanding.
One interesting thing about the paradox of Morality and Moral Worth is that it is a clear example of what I call an “Existential Paradox”, namely, a paradox that is actual (inhers in morality and reality), rather than being merely a mistake that we need to figure out somehow, and make it disappear. Here (it seems to me) we are not waiting for some further fact or thought that will solve things, as in some other paradoxes, for we do have things figured out - and see that they are absurd. So the absurdity is not an indication that we have made a mistake, but rather that we have understood something: It is absurd but true, that morality leads to the elimination of the conditions for the heights of moral worth (and arguably of human value). But still we cannot eliminate the absurdity and remain moral: we cannot go on spreading contagious diseases so that doctors can become impressive (whether in a superogatory or duty-bound way) by continuing to treat their patients. Similarly, we cannot elect a dictator once in a while so that people could then gain in stature by struggling against him. Or keep killing animals for food (once the technology making that unnecessary becomes available), just in order to maintain vegetarian virtue. The good and the absurd go here hand in hand: as things become morally better, the conditions enabling the heights of moral worth disappear. The good is absurd and the absurd good.
Jean- I don’t think I’m biting the bullet… I think the wrongness of the being a carnivore or an omnivore lies in the pain and suffering inflicted on the animal. If I could have humanely raised and humanely slaughtered animals, then I think I would be okay in eating it. Faux meat would give me that opportunity. So I don’t see a big difference between a vegetarian eating fake chicken nuggets, and a faux meat eater eating meat made in a petri dish. Heck, even PETA backs me up on this one, not that I’m always looking for their approval.
If there are any other distinction between the vegetarian and the faux meat eater, I’m not sure they would be morally relevant.
Wayne, What we’re envisioning is a future in which there’s no longer any need to kill animals for meat, because there’s an abundant supply of faux meat. In this future, the whole idea of eating the flesh of formerly live animals is outlandish. People give no thought to the morality of killing animals for food…it just isn’t done.
I think there’s a big difference between a faux meat eater in this future, and someone today who chooses faux chicken nuggets over real chicken nuggets out of a concern for the suffering of chickens. The future faux meat eater is not especially laudable whereas today’s faux meater eater gets morality points, so to speak.
And yet, clearly, we ought to work toward that future in which nobody’s laudable. That’s the paradox–it’s a better world morally, and yet it lacks the heights of moral worth (as Saul puts it above).
It’s always more fun to disagree with an author–I find myself unable to disagree with anything Saul says in this chapter. Fortunately, I am slightly more at odds with him on paradox #9…on which I’m going to post soon.
Norman:
Oates’s sacrifice has been taken as a standard example of supererogation. The concept itself as due behaviour being transcended I find unsympathetic. The development of ‘moral muscle’ involves the exercise of pushing against the limits of what you can do. The ideal limit is an heroic spontaneity. There are infinite opportunities for working out even in NZ. That we are moving towards a moral NZ is not very convincing. Zero traction for this pilgrim. For that size and that price I’d want 15 not 10.
It’s interesting to hear, Saul, you feel it’s absurd, “that morality leads to the elimination of the conditions for the heights of moral worth”. I have no problem accepting it’s true that morality, if the word is taken as meaning making decisions to act in moral ways, leads to changed conditions in the future under which the need to take many moral decisions is reduced/eliminated. But there’s no paradox involved in this, merely an absurd “paradox’.
Jean, since for you, “It’s always more fun to disagree with an author”, I suggest ‘Emotion, Truth and Meaning” by Newcastle University philosopher, Colin Wilks. He uses cute seal pups in his analysis of our extensions to what we mean by ‘morality’. Wilks’ approach to morality was suggested by Ayers, and others, over four decades back; but perhaps (in part at least) because its implications threatened their demesne, it was never followed through. Wilks examines it more systematically. You’ll have no end of fun with his book — although some readers do appear to find it discomforting. Wayne, by the way, might also appreciate the interesting challenge to his views on animals to be found in the book.
I wasn’t disparaging Oates’ action, Michael; but I did see an irony in the way he was being used during the War to help develop — something, under the circumstances, I concede was very useful at the time –enthusiastic patriotic ideals. Our troops were making far more demanding sacrifices in New Guinea especially, and Oates’ going for a walk was an act I saw then, and now, as something which would be an easy one. Since slow painful death was inevitably coming soon for him anyway, dying immediately (and hopefully helping to save his mates) was not as exceptional as were the everyday actions of many brave individuals in New Guinea. They were sacrificing their lives for a cause beyond their own person. It may be difficult for some to understand fully how many people felt then; but willingness to sacrifice your life for your mates and/or country was seen simply as something Australians did. U.S Military Historian Eric Bergerud’s “Touched with Fire” (although its purpose was to cover the exploits of U.S. troops in the South Pacific) gives an understanding of just how different the diggers of the 40s were. On the other hand, in a world where “morality” has ended up absorbed with such issues as the willingness of someone to die for a turkey, the beliefs of the wartime 40s might seem a trivial irrelevance?
I’ve long been puzzled by the apparent reluctance of so many modern ‘philosophers’ to examine carefully the possibility that many of the allegedly moral disputes an inherent part of the centuries long analysis of what is/isn’t moral behaviour, are best explained in terms of our innate drives to behave in very different ways to different groups of people. It’s not a pleasant prospect, of course, but if we’re seeking to improve our understanding of the human condition, we really need, however reluctantly, to put aside our ‘wish list’ prejudices about what our species “should be”, and accept the fact that all too often we discover Dr Pangloss was over-optimistic about the world
Jean- Hmmm.. I think we’re just going around in circles with this issue. Maybe we have to approach this in a different way…. Which is a better state of affairs, a world in which nobody does bad, or a world in which bad exist, but some people struggle against it? Isn’t the first option at the very least a necessary condition for a Utopian world?
Wayne, The world with less bad seems overall better, but I don’t think that makes the paradox go away. Clearly that’s the world we have to strive for. The point is that on the day we get there, we will have a lot to celebrate, but (oddly, absurdly, paradoxically) something to mourn.
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The best thing the devil has ever done is to get us to think he is no longer around. To accept middleclass
lifestyle as an end in itself has to be 100 times worse than getting drunk in a whorehouse.