I wrote this last Summer as a private “blog post” just for me. I’m posting it publicly now (after mild editing) because I have some vague idea that it can be good to make things like this public. These rambling thoughts come from my very naive point of view (as it was in the Summer of 2020; not to suggest my present day point of view is much less naive). In particular if you’ve already read lots of moral philosophy you probably won’t learn anything from reading this.
The free-for-all
Generally, reading various moral philosophy writings has probably made me (even) more comfortable trusting my own intuitions / reasoning regarding what “morality” is and what the “correct moral theory” is.
I think that, when you start engaging with moral philosophy, there’s a bit of a feeling that when you’re trying to reason about things like what’s right and wrong, which moral theory is superior to the other, etc, there are some concrete rules you need to follow, and (relatedly) certain words or phrases have a solid, technical definition that everyone with sufficient knowledge knows and agrees on. The “certain words or phrases” I have in mind here are things like “morally right”, “blameworthy”, “ought”, “value”, “acted wrongly”, etc.
To me right now, the situation seems a bit more like the following: moral philosophers (including knowledgeable amateurs, etc) have in mind definitions for certain words, but these definitions may be more or less precise, might change over time, and differ from person to person. And in making a “moral philosophy” argument (say, writing down an argument for a certain moral theory), the philosopher can use flexibility of interpretation as a tool to make their argument appear more forceful than it really is. Or, the philosopher’s argument might imply that certain things are self-evidently true, and the reader might be (maybe unconsciously) fooled into thinking that this is the case, when in fact it isn’t.
It seems to me now that genuinely self-evident truths are in very short supply in moral philosophy. And, now that I think this is the case, I feel like I have much more licence to make up my own mind about things. That feels quite liberating.
But it does also feel potentially dangerous. Of course, I don’t think it’s dangerous that *I* have freedom to decide what “doing good” means to me. But I might find it dangerous that others have that freedom. People can consider committing genocide to be “doing what is right” and it would be nice to have a stronger argument against this than “this conflicts with my personal definition of what good is”. And, of course, others might well think it’s dangerous that I have the freedom to decide what doing good means.
What does morality even mean?
Now that we’re in this free-for-all, even defining morality seems problematic.
I suppose I can make some observations about myself, like
When I see injustice in the world, I feel a strong urge to do something about it
When I see others suffering, I want to relieve that suffering
I have a strong intuition that it’s conscious experience that ultimately matters—“what you don’t know can’t hurt you” is, I think, literally true
And some conscious experiences are clearly very bad (and some are clearly very good)
And so on
I guess these things are all in the region of “wanting to improve the lives of others”. This sounds a lot like wanting to do what is morally good / morally praiseworthy, and seems at least closely related to morality.
In some ways, whether I label some of my goals and beliefs as being to do with “morality” doesn’t matter—either way, it seems clear that the academic field of moral philosophy is pretty relevant. And presumably when people talk about morality outside of an academic context, they’re at least sometimes talking about roughly the thing I’m thinking of.
A moral philosophy free-for-all
I wrote this last Summer as a private “blog post” just for me. I’m posting it publicly now (after mild editing) because I have some vague idea that it can be good to make things like this public. These rambling thoughts come from my very naive point of view (as it was in the Summer of 2020; not to suggest my present day point of view is much less naive). In particular if you’ve already read lots of moral philosophy you probably won’t learn anything from reading this.
The free-for-all
Generally, reading various moral philosophy writings has probably made me (even) more comfortable trusting my own intuitions / reasoning regarding what “morality” is and what the “correct moral theory” is.
I think that, when you start engaging with moral philosophy, there’s a bit of a feeling that when you’re trying to reason about things like what’s right and wrong, which moral theory is superior to the other, etc, there are some concrete rules you need to follow, and (relatedly) certain words or phrases have a solid, technical definition that everyone with sufficient knowledge knows and agrees on. The “certain words or phrases” I have in mind here are things like “morally right”, “blameworthy”, “ought”, “value”, “acted wrongly”, etc.
To me right now, the situation seems a bit more like the following: moral philosophers (including knowledgeable amateurs, etc) have in mind definitions for certain words, but these definitions may be more or less precise, might change over time, and differ from person to person. And in making a “moral philosophy” argument (say, writing down an argument for a certain moral theory), the philosopher can use flexibility of interpretation as a tool to make their argument appear more forceful than it really is. Or, the philosopher’s argument might imply that certain things are self-evidently true, and the reader might be (maybe unconsciously) fooled into thinking that this is the case, when in fact it isn’t.
It seems to me now that genuinely self-evident truths are in very short supply in moral philosophy. And, now that I think this is the case, I feel like I have much more licence to make up my own mind about things. That feels quite liberating.
But it does also feel potentially dangerous. Of course, I don’t think it’s dangerous that *I* have freedom to decide what “doing good” means to me. But I might find it dangerous that others have that freedom. People can consider committing genocide to be “doing what is right” and it would be nice to have a stronger argument against this than “this conflicts with my personal definition of what good is”. And, of course, others might well think it’s dangerous that I have the freedom to decide what doing good means.
What does morality even mean?
Now that we’re in this free-for-all, even defining morality seems problematic.
I suppose I can make some observations about myself, like
When I see injustice in the world, I feel a strong urge to do something about it
When I see others suffering, I want to relieve that suffering
I have a strong intuition that it’s conscious experience that ultimately matters—“what you don’t know can’t hurt you” is, I think, literally true
And some conscious experiences are clearly very bad (and some are clearly very good)
And so on
I guess these things are all in the region of “wanting to improve the lives of others”. This sounds a lot like wanting to do what is morally good / morally praiseworthy, and seems at least closely related to morality.
In some ways, whether I label some of my goals and beliefs as being to do with “morality” doesn’t matter—either way, it seems clear that the academic field of moral philosophy is pretty relevant. And presumably when people talk about morality outside of an academic context, they’re at least sometimes talking about roughly the thing I’m thinking of.