[quetzalcoatl]

How do you assess the morality of an action?

Is it causing pain to another human being? A doctor causes pain in removing a ruptured appendix; is that immoral? You could answer that the doctor is performing a higher good in saving a life, but it would only highlight the fact that the "no pain" standard is contingent rather than universal.

My approach to morality is based on a respect for the autonomy of other persons. Depriving another person of his life or earnings, physically injuring them, or restricting his freedom of movement I would consider immoral. But again, this standard is contingent. We have prisons, we have armies and police, and we have taxes; most of us would consider some or all of these to be justified.

Then there is the question of how inclusive to make the idea of person. Fetus, cow? Is sentience the standard, and if so is there some reasonable way of determining sentience? Are we talking about actual sentience, or its potential? Is a sleeping person sentient? An anencephalic is probably not sentient, but we define it as a person because it is a member of the human species. Any way you look at it, there is no way to avoid social context and personal judgement in these questions.

[Eran]

All actual wars in human history have done so.

If you include both sides - sure. If you only look at the defensive side - not as much.

Let us hope that you are not in charge of your nation's armed forces if and when it is ever invaded, because it would be a very short and very unsuccessful war for your nation.

Let us hope. I would argue, though, that if my country adopted my ideology more comprehensively, the likelyhood of a foreign invasion would be low indeed.

[R_G]

Morality is a social construct - in fact, it's what makes human society itself possible - and as such it tends to change as society itself changes.

Winner. Seriously, I know in debate forums there are often several answers, but this is the correct one.


You just can't argue it. It's based upon context which is why there is no natural ethics.


In terms of Muhammad's child bride, to be fair, there have been 9 and 10 year old mothers....so maybe at the time they mistook a thin injury for her period?

[Someneck]

When I was kiddy, I joined the Police Force for a while and homosexuality in England was a crime.

Seek em out, arrest em, jail em

Now half the British government is 'gay' and most of CNN. I spent last weekend in New York and under the old rules, that place would be uninhabited !

Everybody is told to adjust their morality 'as received' formerly from their betters

Much morality is received rather than innate or instinctive

When I was 17 I would drink 5 pints of beer and drive around town with my buddies. No big deal if I was stopped.

Now, I would be a total pariah

Yes morality (as taught) is changing all the time

I agree that there is a small core of morality which doesn't change much, but the crimes of burning witches and child brides and capturing slaves in Ireland and lots of other things are mere functions of 'the times'

[Wellsy]

I haven't dwelled on it long enough but my impression is that it might be possible to make moral condemnations that aren't the the sort of condescension one gets with the middle/upper classes over the working class. But to do so requires some sense of what is in order to then situate the a realistic ought as opposed to the empty abstract and impotent type common to much deontology (See 2.4.1 Marx on Kantian Morality p. 93.

And I hear that following Hegel, Marx adopted a morality which is about fulfilling a prosperous human nature in which he speaks of realizing a rich individuality and pushing back the limits on our necessities. That by examining real existing conditions, what one's understanding of is will influence what one believes ought to occur. Because one's conception of reality very clearly informs what one thinks the conditions of possibility are which I suspect is an important part of morality regardless, that one needs to be able to fulfill things to be morally compelled.

Spoiler: show

http://isj.org.uk/marxism-and-ethics/

One attempt to escape this predicament involves a return to classical (Greek) virtue ethics.37 Instead of focusing on the intentions of actors or the consequences of actions, virtue ethicists insist that the key ethical question should be, “What kind of person ought I be?” Unfortunately, while these writers hark back to classical discussions of ethics, Aristotle’s model of human nature is not only inadequate once we accept Darwin’s proof that humans are a product of natural evolution, but it is also at odds with liberal conceptions of our natural state as one of conflict. Developing a virtue ethics that goes beyond the limits of liberalism by drawing together individual and social conceptions of the good requires that we indicate some social and historically specific practices through which non-egoistic forms of human relations might emerge. It was Hegel who first pointed towards a solution to this dilemma by suggesting a historical model of human nature.

Both modern and classical conceptions of ethics share one common theme. They tend to treat the very different social contexts in which they were formulated as unchanging features of nature.38 Hegel’s great contribution to moral theory started from a historical comparison of these two contexts: asking how and why we (or more precisely Germans at the turn of the 19th century) are different from ancient Greeks. By doing this he began a process, later completed by Marx, of synthesising and overcoming the limitations of both Kantian morality and Aristotelian ethics.

Just as Aristotle sought to base his ethics on a model of human essence, Hegel insisted that ethics must start from a model of “what human beings are”. It is only when they are so grounded that it is possible to say “that some modes of life are suited to our nature, whereas others are not”.39 He followed Aristotle in assuming that the goal of life is self-realisation, but he broke with him by arguing that it is only by way of freedom that this is possible. Whereas Aristotle insisted that happiness is the end of life, Hegel believed with Kant that the end of life was freedom.40 But unlike Kant, who counterposed freedom to necessity, he insisted that to act freely was to act in accordance with necessity.41 He thus criticised “Kant for seeing dichotomies in the self between freedom and nature…where he ought to have seen freedom as actualising nature”.42 Moreover, he believed that moral laws, far from being universal in some transhistoric sense, are in fact only intelligible “in the context of a particular community”, and can be universalised only to the extent that “communities grow and consolidate into an international community”.43

Hegel thus provided a social content to the concept of freedom by relating it to the movement of “a living social whole”.44 In so doing, he simultaneously worked a dramatic change on Aristotle’s concept of happiness. For if human nature evolves with the cultural evolution of communities then so too does the meaning of self-realisation. His ethics is therefore best understood as a form of “dialectical or historicised naturalism”.45 It was this historical understanding of human nature that provided Marx with the basis from which he went beyond existing materialist (Hobbesian) and idealist (Kantian) models of agency.

http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
p. 14

What it means to say that morality is determined by human nature.
Whenever Marx evaluates the moral status of an economic formation, a political system, the role of a group or collective, or the specific actions of one individual person, he does so within the context of this more abstract and universal conception of human social existence (which is in turn based on the concrete totality of human social being)20. Throughout this dissertation, I emphasize the fact that in determining what is morally required in a specific historical situation, Marx asks whether or not the action, principle, political movement, etc. in question is such as to promote or to inhibit the expansion of human powers and the satisfaction of human needs. Put differently, in order to know the moral status of a thing, one must know whether or not it is such as to help human beings to realize their nature as natural and social beings who satisfy their needs and transform their existence consciously through the labor process. However, this is no mean feat. I do not intend to make it sound obvious or apparent, simply from a knowledge of this abstraction of human essence, which human actions will fit the bill.

I believe it is a virtue of Marx's theory that his conception of human nature is quite thin. He does not think that human beings are essentially selfish, essentially altruistic, essentially competitive, fallen, vicious, or any other of a whole host of characterizations that other theories have attributed to essential human nature. But then it is fair to ask, Now that one has ascended “from earth to heaven,” as Marx puts it in The German Ideology, and abstracted a human essence out of a concrete totality of determinate appearances, how do we get back down again?

The move downward is mediated by different levels of abstraction between essential human nature that is universal to all human beings and a particular, concrete historical situation and the agents who are in it21. We approach historical questions proceeding from the fact that human beings are always at least indirectly producing their own conditions of existence when they produce in order to satisfy their needs22. However, that is quite general. This human production can take on a variety of forms, and so in evaluating a concrete historical situation it is not enough to know merely that human beings produce their existence through the labor process. Although of course no human being acts in conditions of absolute knowledge, in seeking to determine what is morally right or wrong in a given situation, we must gather as much information as possible regarding moments of the concrete totality of social existence in which one acts. In short, a scientific materialist knowledge of human social existence is a prerequisite for accurate normative judgements. Here is a non-exhaustive description of some of the most important aspects of reality which we must investigate in order to determine what is morally required at a particular historical moment.

In addition to knowing that human beings produce their existence, we must also determine how that production is carried out. We must know what the mode of production of a given society is, whether there is a division of labor and if so, how labor is divided, and furthermore, at what stage of development a society is within that mode of production. This is an empirical question about the economic organization of a society. To answer it, we have to investigate such matters as who is taking part in production, and whether society is still at the stage of consuming what is found ready in nature, as in a hunter-gatherer society, or human beings are actively intervening into nature to direct its processes, as in an agricultural society, or whether production has become rationalized and socialized, and its efficiency increased, to the massive extent that it has in industrial production. We need to examine how goods are distributed once they are produced, and whether a surplus is created and if so, how large a surplus and who controls it.

We also need to know what material resources society has at its disposal, and whether these are such as to allow a transition to a higher stage of society—that is, one that is more amenable to the realization of human nature. It is Utopian, Marx argues, to advocate a new type of society without properly identifying exactly which forces within the old society make such a transition and development possible, and how those forces can be directed at such a transition. A social transformation can only be genuinely moral at a point at which it is historically possible to realize.

We need to know what if any classes exist in the society and what the balance of forces are among them. The notion of economic class is itself an abstraction out of a totality of individual human actors within an economic system. In the case of capitalism, we often see this economic system depicted as one in which autonomous individuals interact with one another as equals, bringing different wares to market—sometimes corn, sometimes their own labor-power. However, when we evaluate the dynamics of this system we see that in fact, these individuals relate to the market in different ways, so that these “free” and “equal” individuals tend to belong, by virtue of their relation to the capitalist market, in one of two broad categories: those who buy labor-power, and those who sell it. And whether you are the capitalist who buys labor-power in order to produce commodities which she can then sell to increase her profit, or the worker who has nothing to sell but his labor-power in order to satisfy his private needs, your actions are not so “free,” but rather determined in significant ways by the economic laws which govern the movement of commodities in such a society. And these actors are not so “equal,” because those who live by buying labor-power and amassing profit tend to have the upper hand over those who live by selling their labor-power daily, thereby contributing to the store of dead labor in the hands of the capitalist.

So in determining what an actor ought morally to do within a given historical situation, we must determine the class membership of the particular historical actor in question, how and whether her actions promote the interests of her class, and furthermore how those class interests stand in relation to the interests of society or of humanity taken as a whole. We need to know the level of organization of that class, whether it has become conscious of its interests and whether it has developed a political leadership capable of advancing those interests.

We need to know the nature and breadth of the individual person's scope for action, and therefore it is important to understand the historical factors which have led up to the moment in which she acts, as well as knowing the individual's own personal qualities and capacities.

The investigation into each of these questions, according to Marx, will proceed from an understanding that each of these aspects of social being have arisen out of a long process of human beings producing their own existence through their active adaptation to the world in which they live. However, in order to derive specific, concrete moral claims out of this abstract and general principle, we must understand the particular manner in which this essence is realized, and also the manner in which it is distorted, frustrated, or limited, in the various historical formations that have arisen during this process. It may sound as though it is an awfully tall order, to need to know so much about the historical context in which an agent acts. But the point is that in order to say with a high degree of accuracy what is morally required in a given historical situation, we need to know as much of this context as possible and we need to understand it in a manner informed by categories such as class and mode of production, so that we can understand how all the parts of this totality interact with one another and form a developing whole into which human beings can consciously and rationally intervene. With regard to morality, what it means to say, as Marx does, that “When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence” (The German Ideology, MECW 5:37), is to say that we cannot make accurate moral claims without investigating the concrete historical situation as thoroughly and systematically as possible. Philosophy continues to exist as part of our knowledge, but there is no longer a hard and fast border between philosophical knowledge and the scientific knowledge of society and nature23. The question, What is to be done? is answered by determining what, in a particular situation, is most likely to promote the realization of human nature, and this is something that can be determined empirically via the method I have sketched here.

p. 181

Marx always understands that it is human beings who make history, but they do so within constraints from objective limits in the world and in the society around them. As a thinker deeply concerned with the realization and expansion of human freedom, Marx asks how those objective limits—when taken together, he often refers to these as a “boundary” of “natural necessity”—can be "pushed back” so that human beings may exercise more conscious, rational control in more areas of their existence, and realize human flourishing.

I think in emphasizing that which is good is that which accords to human nature is possibly something amicable to daoist notions, as my brief impression of it is about working with the nature of things (not passive resignation). By understanding how things are, you can best fulfill things in accordance with reality rather than unnecessary frustrate or even damage yourself in acting against the nature of things. Which I assert explicitly isn't a passive philosophy but one wise enough to not be inconsiderate to reality, that one works best when one best evaluates it to work in accordance with it.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/27/Death_in_Classical_Daoist_Thought

One of its central ideas is that of wu-wei, (‘doing nothing’), a kind of behaviour which involves the acceptance of what is inevitable or unavoidable in our experience; thereby reducing the friction and drag caused by obstinate commitment to a single preferred course of action or outcome. Some of the best examples of wu-wei are to be found in the know-how of craftsmen.

The Daode-jing suggests that within Nature all opposites are inseparable, complementary, and mutually supplant each other, including life and death; therefore, one can only understand something (e.g. beauty) by grasping its opposite. The result is that De (Te), meaning potency or virtue, which cannot be sought directly, emerges naturally.

In this way, the most efficient and effective way of overcoming problems or adversity is by noncontention or yielding, which is not the same as submission or capitulation, but involves exercising control through using the power of one’s opponent to overbalance him, exemplified in some Chinese martial arts.

So I haven't the cops to summarize but I think it points in the right direction, which I think is kind of what historians attempt to do when they situate morality within it's historical context. Because many may pine for a world without certain problems but they are unable to bring their highest aspired oughts into the realm of what is and thus confine themselves to an impotent good will that is not concerned with radically changing the conditions to improve upon the human condition.
To often there has been a tension between scientific fact and the moral ought, but there must be some sort of relation between them that is accentuated which would appear radical in content in that it loses the passivity of many of us and demands action to actualize the substantive conditions to realize it.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/humanism-science.htm

In order to resolve the problem of uniting high moral standards with a maximum of the scientific spirit, the problem must first of all be viewed in all of the acuity and dialectical complexity which it has acquired in the difficult and tumultuous time we live in. A simple algebraic solution will not do. The problem of the relationship between morality and the scientific spirit has been resolved only in the most general fashion by Marxist philosophy. In concrete situations, on the other hand, it will occur again and again in the foreseeable future; each time it will have a new and unexpected twist. Therefore there can be no simple or ready-made solution for each individual occurrence of the conflict between the “mind” and the “conscience.”

There can be no simple prescription or mathematical formula capable of meeting every occasion. If you run into a conflict of this nature, do not assume that in each instance “science” is correct and “conscience” rubbish, or at best a fairy tale for children. The opposite is no closer to the truth, namely that “moral sentiment” is always correct, that science, if it runs into conflict with the former is the heartless and brutal “devil” of Ivan Karamazov, engendering types like Smerdyakov. Only through a concrete examination of the causes of the conflict itself may we find a dialectical resolution, that is to say, the wisest and the most humane solution. Only thus may we find, to phrase it in current jargon, the “optimal variant” of correspondence between the demands of the intellect and of the conscience.

To be sure finding a concrete, dialectical unity between the principles of mind and conscience in each instance is not an easy matter. Unfortunately there is no magic wand, there is no simple algorithm, either of a “scientific” or a “moral” nature.

Quite often, philosophers dealing with ethics make up unrealistic thought experiments that bracket out a lot of details that are relevant to the actual lives of real existing people.
And quite often the moral condemnation of things from many ignores that which propels the supposedly immoral. Basically those wowsers who like to moralize only to restrict people in their condition and blame them for their lot rather than actually solve it, to deny themselves rather than assert it. To speak empty words whilst the world tears them apart.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf p. 92

The social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed, and need no further development by Prussian Consistorial Counsellors. The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorifies the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces69. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable. The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor's compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth. The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed. The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, selfcontempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its selfconfidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread. The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary. So much for the social principles of Christianity. (The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, MECW 6:231)

[QatzelOk]

What a dishonest meme the "can't judge the past by today's standards" is. It's like saying: "the dust we swept under the carpet is completely different than the dust that's currently on top of it (which we will sweep under it in the future)."

First of all, the atrocities of civilization and technology has never changed. The rich business community used to get their poor underfed classes to kill First Nations, and now they get their poor underfed classes to kill Libyans and Iraqis. For supply lines. To buy more empty status symbols that have no real useful function except as symbols.

The only thing to change are the information supply systems and the weapons used. Morally, the West hasn't changed much since Machiavelli wrote its Bible and Torah.

[MB.]

What I find amazing is the schizophrenia between relativism and moral absolutism.

So we cannot judge all cultures with moral absolutism (since morality is relative between cultures with a few minor exceptions) but we can judge historical events with absolutism, apparently.

I want to stress that historical moralism is basically whig history

The implication is that modern morality is the ultimate terminus point for human morality and therefore all past morality is inferior in comparison to enlightened protestant liberal morality.

Frankly I find this notion appalling.

[One Degree]

[quote="MB."]What I find amazing is the schizophrenia between relativism and moral absolutism.

So we cannot judge all cultures with moral absolutism (since morality is relative between cultures with a few minor exceptions) but we can judge historical events with absolutism, apparently.

I want to stress that historical moralism is basically whig history

The implication is that modern morality is the ultimate terminus point for human morality and therefore all past morality is inferior in comparison to enlightened protestant liberal morality.

Frankly I find this notion appalling.[/quote]


The scary part is when a society believes this, you can be sure they will create more mayhem than those they condemned.

[MB.]

Here is long-standing arch-neoconservative Victor Hanson on the subject:

http://victorhanson.com/wordpress/the-d ... -the-dead/

The Double Standard in the Progressive War against the Dead
August 24, 2017 1:44 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review



Will Progressives erase the history of their racist heroes, or only their racist enemies?



Much of the country has demanded the elimination of references to, and images of, people of the past — from Christopher Columbus to Robert E. Lee — who do not meet our evolving standards of probity.



In some cases, such damnation may be understandable if done calmly and peacefully — and democratically, by a majority vote of elected representatives.



Few probably wish to see a statue in a public park honoring Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, or Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the racist Dred Scott decision that set the stage for the Civil War four years later.



But cleansing the past is a dangerous business. The wide liberal search for more enemies of the past may soon take progressives down hypocritical pathways they would prefer not to walk.



In the present climate of auditing the past, it is inevitable that Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood will have to be disassociated from its founder. Sanger was an unapologetic racist and eugenicist who pushed abortion to reduce the nonwhite population.



Should we ask that Ruth Bader Ginsburg resign from the Supreme Court? Even with the benefit of 21st-century moral sensitivity, Ginsburg still managed to echo Sanger in a racist reference to abortion (“growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of”).



Why did we ever mint a Susan B. Anthony dollar? The progressive suffragist once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”



Liberal icon and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren pushed for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II while he was California’s attorney general.



President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?



Wilson’s progressive racism, dressed up in pseudoscientific theories, was perhaps more pernicious than that of the old tribal racists of the South, given that it was not regionally centered and was professed to be fact-based and ecumenical, with the power of the presidency behind it.



In the current logic, Klan membership certainly should be a disqualifier of public commemoration. Why are there public buildings and roads still dedicated to the late Democratic senator Robert Byrd, former “exalted cyclops” of his local Klan affiliate, who reportedly never shook his disgusting lifelong habit of using the N-word?



Why is Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Klansman, in the 20th century, still honored as a progressive hero?



So, what are the proper rules of exemption for progressives when waging war against the dead?



Do they tally up the dead’s good and bad behaviors to see if someone makes the 51 percent “good progressive” cutoff that exempts him? Or do some reactionary sins cancel out all the progressive good — at least in the eyes of self-styled moral superiors to those hapless Neanderthals who came before us?



Are the supposedly oppressed exempt from charges of oppression?



Farm-labor icon Cesar Chavez once sent union thugs to the border to physically bar U.S. entry to undocumented Mexican immigrants, whom he derided as “wetbacks” in a fashion that would today surely earn Chavez ostracism by progressives as a xenophobe.



Kendrick Lamar, one of the favorite rappers of former president Barack Obama, had an album cover featuring a presumably dead white judge with both of his eyes X’d out, surrounded by black men celebrating on the White House lawn. Should such a divisive racialist have been honored with a White House invitation?



What is the ultimate purpose of progressives condemning the past? Does toppling the statue of a Confederate general — without a referendum or a majority vote of an elected council — improve racial relations?



Does renaming a bridge or building reduce unemployment in the inner city?



Do progressives have their own logical set of selective rules and extenuating circumstances that damn or exempt particular historical figures? If so, what are they?



Does selectively warring against the illiberal past make us feel better about doing something symbolic when we cannot do something substantive? Or is it a sign of raw power and ego when activists force authorities to cave to their threats and remove images and names in the dead of night?



Does damning the dead send a flashy signal of our superior virtue?



And will toppling statues and erasing names only cease when modern progressives are forced to blot out the memories of racist progressive heroes?

[QatzelOk]

The implication is that modern morality is the ultimate terminus point for human morality and therefore all past morality is inferior in comparison to enlightened protestant liberal morality.

Not at all.

Modern morality is really status-seeking fake morality. (This may have begun with the neolithic revolution and the first technologies)

Technology creates new moral "requirements" (which are very destructive in terms to general well-being and survival of species) so that an elite can obtain or increase-their-share-of socially-constructed status. There is no "moral progress" among the industrialized nations of the earth - only status-seeking and a mass media blanket (to wrap around our faces like Linus).

To pretend that we have reached some kind of pinnacle just as we are stealing resources from half the world's poor and defenseless, choking the planet on plastics and chemical residues, and erasing natural childhood and social life with technological products... is silly and this kind of clueless opinion is a result of modern brainwashing through modern media.

Each technology ruins us a bit more, and there has been no change in profit-seeking status-seekers since they were created by our unnatural environments and unnatural social networks. Their unnatural and psychotic behavior gets more harmful with each technological "improvement."

[Negotiator]

Uh-hu. Why dont we check these old books from ages past ? Like the bible ? For example, Jesus already pointed out that rulership in his time was mostly tyranny, and demanded correctly: those who rule shall be servant to all. Which was the principle of good leadership back then, was true even further back in the stone ages, is true today, and will be true in the future. A good ruler provides a service to his community.

So nope, people in the past havent felt much differently in respect to morality than we today. Even back then the core principles of morality - such as the golden rule, dont do to others what others shouldnt do to you - have already been well established. This is true for all areas. Tyranny of those in power was evil. Slavery was evil. Suppression of women was evil.

About slavery, there have been plenty primitive people who dont know about it. Same about suppression of women and bad/tyrannical rulers.