who said right and wrong?

Lets say you robbed someone and you were told robbing was wrong. who said it was wrong, surely right and wrong is just an illusion created by man itself.

Please post your thoughts

Louis O'Sullivan

(I didnt actually rob someone )

 

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"Lets say you robbed someone and you were told robbing was wrong. who said it was wrong, surely right and wrong is just an illusion created by man itself."

In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche uses a parable to talk about morality: "Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn't reached its goal."

We must decide somehow whether or not we are decieved by morality. Your question seems to be along the lines of: "Well, isn't morality just opinion?" The idea behind this is usually that, since some people believe that certain actions are moral and other people believe that certain actions are immoral, and the truth must be singular or it can't be truth, then either one or both of the beliefs must be wrong. This conclusion is faulty for two reasons: first off, beliefs can only be true or false if they are directly linked to reality. In order to detect a liar, we compare a man's words to the actual reality--if they are in accord, the man is telling the truth; if they diverge, then he is a liar. This is sincerity.
Yet with morals we are dealing with a decidedly different, yet parallel situation. With morality, we care less about whether ones beliefs reflect the actual world of our senses (which, to some degree anywhere, can be measured in an intuitive or emprical way) but rather with the realm of social interaction. Do a man's words measure up to his *deeds*? is the crucial question here. If they do not, then he is a hypocrite and acting in bad faith; if they do, then we have authenticity.
'Good' and 'evil' (or 'bad') are essentially social: socially enacted, constructed, maintained. They represent a dialectical movement from the emprical realm of what is? to the rather more subjective, contemplative realm of what should be? There is a divorce between these two realms which science is not equipped to bridge. We cannot move purely logically from a description of how the world is to what the world should be. History intervenes: we realize our heads are already full of beliefs about how the world should be; which are our *own* opinions, which have we acquired (via social osmosis) from the dominant trends in society, which are priveleged enough to count as legitimate moral truths? The test, once again, is not theory but praxis: are we authentically being ourselves, whatever we believe that to be? Well, how can we not be ourselves--indeed, what kind of creature is man that he can not be himself?

 

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But to answer the original question, I believe that morality cannot be made scientific but must be intuitive as it is essentially contextual. We must trust our instincts to the degree that we cannot predict the full extent of the domino effect of each of our actions. Stealing to eat, for example, is different than stealing for fun or for profit. What if, hypothetically, a life was saved by an act of stealing? The real question here is whether there can be simple, absolute moral laws and the short and sweet answer is 'No.' We can say safely, however, that of course stealing is in general wrong, though circumstances may make this untrue. We must learn to think of morals as rules of thumb and not as absolute truth.

 

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Louis (might I address you as such?):

Welcome to SciForums, by the way. However, I do believe you also posted this on the EThics forum. Please don't double post. It is better suited for there, anyway.

 

Morals are, and have always been, social rules by which men live together. If, in a group of humans, each were to have his own set of rules/morals, then the likelihood of being a stable society is virtually non-existent. Even hunters had to have a set of rules/morals in order to hunt together effectively.

How long do you think a society of humans would last if some believed that it was "okay" to kill another of the group and steal his "woman"? ...or steal all of his food? ...or beat the shit outta' the weaker members? ...or rape all of the women in the group?

The members of society form those rules ....and those rules came to be called "morals". It ain't nothing more to it.

Baron Max

 

"If, in a group of humans, each were to have his own set of rules/morals, then the likelihood of being a stable society is virtually non-existent."

Very true, Baron Max. What you're talking about is anarchy, which is not just a lack of morals, but a lack of rules entirely. But if there is such an enormous survival/production/reproductive advantage in cooperation over competition--why are we captialist? Why are our dominant ideologies so overwhelmingly individualistic? If we were just a collective, each person would derive their moral obligations and duty from the group.
But it's a little more subtle and chaotic than that. We get our morals from our parents, from TV, from the government, from church, from our friends, etc. Different rules for different situations, different words to describe different things, different roles for different times--all these tied together in a bundle, whose untying the philosopher has taken as his job. The question of morality I see essentially as an epistemological question: which of our moral beliefs are grounded factually? The problem here is one I mentioned earlier: that our beliefs about proper action and rules are founded not on the world around us but on an idea of how the world should be. I should've mention that these two 'worlds' are profoundly connected; most people are concrete enough to see the 'world-as-it-should-be' as a projection or extension of the 'world-as-it-is.'
We must distinguish here between ideology and morality. Ideology is firmly rooted in the here-and-now. Morality is more contemplative, yet rooted in action. It *is* more complicated than just making rules and enforcing them, because of the internal psychological and external social ramifications. We cannot always see the end results of our actions, so in a way, we are striving for the good without ever really knowing what it is, whether it works, or whether we're doing it right. We have to go with what we know, which isn't very much, or with what we believe, which *is* quite a lot. So we ultimately tend to go with what we believe to be right, which relates to society but is essentially an individual *choice.*

 

Joe, you've esssentially said what I said. But you've couched yours in psycho-babble, lots of adjective phrases and complexity so as to make it more difficult to understand, so that people can argue about it all 'til the cows come home.

The question of morality I see essentially as an epistemological question:...

Yeah, all those pissy-o-logical questions are just for passing psycho-babble back n' forth over cold beer, fine wine and good cigars. It does nothing but give those few people soomething to flap their gums about ........and come to no conclusions about anything. Yeah, that's pissy-o-logical, alright!

But now try to say it in less than fifty words!

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Baron Max

 

JoeTheMan:

Whilst sometimes attacked as a rationalist misconception of history, I do affirm that the Social Contract thinkers of the proto-Enlightenment and Enlightenment basically understood how society functions the best. These thinkers, in essence, pointed to the fact that society furthers our goals and that is why it was adopted. If society was not beneficial to the -self- it would not exist, as there is no one who can derive benefit -but- the self. Collective responsibilities stem only from our responsibility to protect our own self-interest, which in most cases, is in fact furthered by helping others, to a certain extent, in our greater society. For instance: It is necessary for us to be protected by a legal system, hence at times we ought to go and serve on a jury, for without juries we could not function.

 

Baron Max,
"Possessing opinions is like possessing fish, assuming one has a fish pond. One has to go fishing and needs some luck--then one has one's own fish, one's own opinions. I am speaking of live opinions, of live fish. Others are satisfied if they own a cabinet of fossils--and in their heads, convictions." -Nietzsche

I'm talking philosophy and I could care less that you're not interested. Don't get offended because someone has taken the time to agree with you

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Life's too short for squabbling, sir------

 

I was not offended at all, Joe, I just wonder why people can't say something without using so many, many words ...and worse, making those sentences so complex. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

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Most of Enstein's entire life's work came down to E=mc2 ....hard to beat simplification, ain't it?

Baron Max

 

OK, Simplicity is a virtue. Students of philosophy have an awful hard time learning this lesson, and I'm sure I'm no exception...

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Let's get back to the main point, here, though:
So is morality just opinion?

PrinceJames: If society was not beneficial to the -self- it would not exist, as there is no one who can derive benefit -but- the self.

Society furthers our individual goals by furthering its own goals only if 'society's goals' represent a summary of our personal goals. My problem with this is the way modern capitalism works:
Money (or power, effort, work) is directed, under a capitalist economy, towards places where it is predicted it will generate the most profit-- *not* to places where it will lead to the most socially desirable outcomes. The most common example is outsourcing: citizens jobs are exported at reduced wages to those in other countries; money which could be invested into the economy at a lower level (the native worker here loses the wages he would have earned) is instead transferred to the owner of the factory (the native factory owner still makes a profit.) Yet, captialism is founded on the idea of individualism, that each individual seeking to maximize his own gain will result in a society maximizing its own gain. I'm just saying it doesn't *actually* seem to work this way.

 

JoeTheMan:

Your example of outsourcing is off due to the fact that through outsourcing, companies are capable of producing things cheaper, which means they can keep prices low, and thus we benefit from cheap goods which would otherwise cost us more. This is offset, of course, by losing some jobs at home, but it is likely that due to saving more money at the store we are are saving an equal amount of money as those who would be paid here, give or take some room for company profit. Moreover, since Capitalism has been the driving impetus for the huge increase in quality of life in the last 200 years, it would seem that Capitalism itself is a system to adopt.

 

Not created, humans generally know right from wrong, and animals also obey certain laws. What is right and wrong depends place and time. There are no good or evil powers, only powers which are used in a the right or wrong way. It all depends on the mind.

 

sorry

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There is no such thing as right and wrong, only popular opinion.

 

So you say. Actually, it's the basic principle of civilization.

 

Yes, if it wasn't for this, we would still be living in caves. A civilisation wouldn't function if it was still the 'every man for himself' thing.

 

Let's say most of what people say is misinformed.

 

Oh, really? What you have just said indicates that the majority is always wrong. Do you really believe that or are you just making noise?

 

I'd say robbing becomes wrong when someone robs me or those close to me. If it happens to anyone else, fuck 'em. Thier problem. They're the ones who got themselves robbed.
Right and wrong are just words. What matters is your personal opinion, and you tolerance of other's opinion.