Big Think

Steven Sturdevant on September 16, 2008, 2:16 PM

I agree that arguments won’t change. They can’t change because there is no argument. There are no facts. There is only opinion. Morality arguments are arguments about nothing.

Steven Sturdevant on September 18, 2008, 10:28 PM

roaks;

“Are you saying that there has been no argument on this point?”

Depends on what you accept as an argument. Take the “argument”; “The bad luck lasts seven days when you spill the salt.” “No it doesn’t; it lasts five days.” To some, that’s an argument. To me, it is not. To me, it’s a form of articulated noise.

The word Morality can mean anything from the will or plan of god to the will or plan of evolution. To some, it means being nice. I don’t believe in a plan of god or a plan of evolution and I think “being nice” is a bit subjective. So, unless the word Morality is, first, extensively defined for use in a a specific argument, it’s not an argument. It’s articulated noise.

t

Theodore Brown on September 27, 2008, 6:35 PM

I think that at least two of the previous commentators have missed the point of Walzer’s comments. The question is whether the findings of science have in some way presented us with grounds for changing the criteria we might apply in making a judgement about a moral issue. Science certainly forces us to confront many moral issues that would not otherwise arise, but it does not in itself seem to have given us new grounds for judging whether some action or proposition is morally right. For example, is the use of in vitro
fertilization a good thing? The criteria for making a judgement in this case still rely on what harms may occur, what costs will be borne and by whom, and so on, using ethical considerations that have not really changed much over the time during which science has become a dominant force in society. We use our understanding of the science, the record of the efficacy of IVF in the past, the social costs and so on in addition to the clear benefits that accrue to couples that use it successfully, to make a moral judgement. So we need knowledge, whether you want to talk of it as “facts” or not.

Steven Sturdevant on September 27, 2008, 11:22 PM

TheoB;

You sling the words moral, morality, ethics and so forth around as if there were some overall agreement as to what these words actually mean. I’ve never, in my life, heard two individuals define them in the same way yet I consistently hear long argument over morality by individuals who have never bothered to define what they mean by the words. It’s as if people think there is a marble tablet somewhere on some mountain that lists the rules of morality and that they know what these rules are. As someone famously said; “I can’t define pornography but I know it when I see it.”, there is this constant squawking dialog with each individual completely unaware of what the other is saying. The whole of the argument can be distilled to a huge, very subjective generality.

No one has yet prefaced his statements with a clear idea of what “morality” means… to him.

My answer to Waltzer’s question is: Technological advancement changes all my concepts of everything. Every day. How could they not?

Clive Reedman on October 24, 2008, 5:42 AM

Unfortunately (in many ways) I have to answer that technological progress has changed the general understanding of ‘morality’. But the progress I cite is in media communication. Nietzsche’s ‘Herd’ is now one that is fed exclusively on moral values piped to them in an endless bit stream in high definition colour and in rapidly produced and easily digestible freebie rags. So the real answer for me is ‘yes’. I see moral ‘standards’ changing around me because of the growth of the degenerating effect of media, which now has enormous bandwidth with which to null our minds and then fill them again, ‘re-programmed’ with their morals. It is ‘immoral’ to err against the popular view, which is of course the one propagated by the media in an act of collaborative ‘population control’ with governments that rule easier if all our ‘good citizen’ moral standpoints are as well aligned as our knowledge of the soap opera’s.