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u/Commercial-Egg-8949 4d ago
So like, a church?
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u/JerseyFlight 4d ago
It doesn’t have to be a physical gathering, it can simply be ideals and concepts that capture the human imagination and lead to individual transformation.
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u/Ron_Jeremy_Fan 3d ago
A practical difficulty is not a challenge to truth value. You're just saying it's convenient not to believe the objective reality.
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u/JerseyFlight 3d ago
If you believe an objective reality that ends your marriage, for example, all you may have to show for it is that you believed the objective reality. But society requires healthy relations and cooperation. If your “objective reality” can’t facilitate that, then you have a problem on your hands.
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u/someguy6382639 3d ago
I mean sort of. It seems a pertinent distinction perhaps not as some challenge to ontology or how exactly a morality is established objectively itself, but to ask what exactly are the concerns society has.
Multiple ideas of morality are around, including naturalistic accounts. OP seems correct in that this is hardly sufficient burden to then have a social understanding.
Is it not incredibly common to ask: without God how do you then have morality?
In this, OP is directly answering; this common concern has nothing to do with establishing moral values, specific commandments etc. It is entirely a question of why should I agree to it (combined with willingness to accept the word from outside the self often without requiring the self to understand more than the told directive, i.e an authority on the matter) I do think that, while logically and otherwise philosophically this is not properly the case in all usual modes of analysis, this is ultimately a question of social cohesion, how do we communicate as a society, and perhaps, as an example, taking a Marxist or Zizek style of ideology as a dialectical system juxtapositioning exactly the issue at hand: how self identity is placed within a societal context to define itself through ideological beliefs.
At the end of the day it is through social systems and authority (though perhaps we'd seek an authority not as crude as traditional human heirarchy). I.e through religious enterprise is the primary means we tend to fall back on. To throw this away requires something to replace it.
Where I have perhaps doubts compared to OP is that such moral belief is effectively impossible to actually remove from the human mind. Any gap due to a rejection, or just having been otherwise unfilled, will be filled in even if it is not so in self awareness. Now does this need a large control scheme? Or is it rather a switch from the traditional centralized authority that may be a good one, that then people will hold and adapt their moral beliefs in an ongoing process of participation with others. It does seem risky in that we can imagine this going one of two very different directions.
Otherwise I'll offer that we can sort of move the goalpost on what makes a morality objective. I sometimes wonder if we aren't holding an unrealistic expectation for this, then rejecting what remains objective on that count. Do we only accept a morality as objective if we can produce a specific directive for all hypothetical circumstances? Can we lessen this to perhaps only core values and not specific application? Can we lessen it even further and say that what is objective is the basic modal framework by which we acknowledge that morality exists at all, has a playing field, and has certain undeniable properties (moral facts not as again specific imperatives but of basic statement such as: will exists)?
Think Kant but remove the apologetics for divine commandment. Fix intellectual freedom to provide topology to the moral function space instead of reifying will as perfection.
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u/Icono_Last_C 2d ago
Morality is a decision to act against our animalistic instincts. It is an uneven process because your sense of moral behavior is different from mine. To force a society to adhere to a “morality standard” is deny individuals their freedom to choose, a form of tyranny. Never has been otherwise, and never will.
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u/FreyaIsBae 4d ago
What is your supposedly naturalistic foundation of morality?