Are most decisions moral decisions?

[coberst]

Are most decisions moral decisions?

 

In an attempt to comprehend the nature of ethics/morality one will find a forest of writings but essentially each person must build his or her own model of what ethics/morality means. Somewhere along the way toward becoming an enlightened person regarding this matter we all must settle on that which makes sense for us. That does not mean that we remain static about the matter but it means that we settle on some model that is our personal guide until we decide to change it.

 

I cannot remember where I read it but is resonates for me; ‘all decisions, wherein there is a choice, are moral decisions’. One may find quibbles to get around this message but the essence of the matter is that for a person seeking to be moral, all judgments from which decisions are derived warrant careful consideration.

 

Our community and our family mold our moral sense as we grow up. But at some point we must remold that model to fit our adult self. I am an American and my sense of ethics/morality was codified by the Declaration and the Constitution as I grew up and it is what determines, to a large extent, my adult sense in this matter.

 

The Declaration declares ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights’. The Constitution sets forth a listing of the rights of all citizens that are to be protected by law. These declarations are part of my heritage and are what I accept as the foundation of my sense of morality.

 

It appears that the two concepts ‘right’ and ‘good’ form the foundation of any moral system. The ‘good’ is ‘rational desire’ and the ‘right’ has varying meanings. The status of the right seems to be the important variable that determines what one’s ethical/moral model becomes.

 

I call my model of morality as being a closed system as opposed to an open system. I call my system a closed system because ‘right’ is clearly defined in the Declaration and the Constitution as being prior to the good. That which is right has a fence around it with a big “No Trespassing” sign and is closed to usurpation by the good. A different system could be called an open system when there is no closed area representing rights but that the right is considered as being that which maximizes the good.

 

I suspect that often we do not have the knowledge and understanding to determine at the time we make our decisions which matters might be immoral, or amoral, as opposed to moral. I think that a moral person needs to have that consideration constantly in mind and thus to form habits that help to keep us on track even though we often act unconsciously. It is all a part of developing character I guess.

 

This is not to say that we must become fanatical about it. Is flossing a moral act? If I floss or do not floss, does it, in some minute way, affect others? I think so. Is watering my lawn a matter for moral consideration? It might be.

 

Questions for discussion

 

Would you say that an act can be a moral or immoral without our being conscious of the matter? Can a sociopath perform an immoral act?

 

Where do these two concepts, right and good, fit into your model of morality and or ethics? I use the term ethics/morality to mean that the two terms are the same for me.

 

Assume that some young person reads my OP and is inspired by it to study what morality is all about. Then that person goes on to read a response and s/he sees that the responder ridiculed the OP. This then deflates the idea to study morality. Can the ridicule be considered to have been an amoral act?

[lemit]

Are most decisions moral decisions?

 

In an attempt to comprehend the nature of ethics/morality one will find a forest of writings but essentially each person must build his or her own model of what ethics/morality means. Somewhere along the way toward becoming an enlightened person regarding this matter we all must settle on that which makes sense for us. That does not mean that we remain static about the matter but it means that we settle on some model that is our personal guide until we decide to change it.

 

I cannot remember where I read it but is resonates for me; ‘all decisions, wherein there is a choice, are moral decisions’. One may find quibbles to get around this message but the essence of the matter is that for a person seeking to be moral, all judgments from which decisions are derived warrant careful consideration.

 

It was Socrates who said that an informed person is incapable of wrongdoing. That is, if you know and understand the consequences, you will choose another course of action. Or, as Hemingway put it in Death in the Afternoon: "[W]hat is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."

 

Our community and our family mold our moral sense as we grow up. But at some point we must remold that model to fit our adult self. I am an American and my sense of ethics/morality was codified by the Declaration and the Constitution as I grew up and it is what determines, to a large extent, my adult sense in this matter.

 

The Declaration declares ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights’. The Constitution sets forth a listing of the rights of all citizens that are to be protected by law. These declarations are part of my heritage and are what I accept as the foundation of my sense of morality.

 

It appears that the two concepts ‘right’ and ‘good’ form the foundation of any moral system. The ‘good’ is ‘rational desire’ and the ‘right’ has varying meanings. The status of the right seems to be the important variable that determines what one’s ethical/moral model becomes.

 

I call my model of morality as being a closed system as opposed to an open system. I call my system a closed system because ‘right’ is clearly defined in the Declaration and the Constitution as being prior to the good. That which is right has a fence around it with a big “No Trespassing” sign and is closed to usurpation by the good. A different system could be called an open system when there is no closed area representing rights but that the right is considered as being that which maximizes the good.

 

I suspect that often we do not have the knowledge and understanding to determine at the time we make our decisions which matters might be immoral, or amoral, as opposed to moral. I think that a moral person needs to have that consideration constantly in mind and thus to form habits that help to keep us on track even though we often act unconsciously. It is all a part of developing character I guess.

 

This is not to say that we must become fanatical about it. Is flossing a moral act? If I floss or do not floss, does it, in some minute way, affect others? I think so. Is watering my lawn a matter for moral consideration? It might be.

 

Questions for discussion

 

Would you say that an act can be a moral or immoral without our being conscious of the matter? Can a sociopath perform an immoral act?

 

Where do these two concepts, right and good, fit into your model of morality and or ethics? I use the term ethics/morality to mean that the two terms are the same for me.

 

Assume that some young person reads my OP and is inspired by it to study what morality is all about. Then that person goes on to read a response and s/he sees that the responder ridiculed the OP. This then deflates the idea to study morality. Can the ridicule be considered to have been an amoral act?

 

Socrates considered himself a gadfly. He thought that was the duty of the philosopher. After his death sentence, in the penultimate paragraph of Plato's "Apology," Socrates had a request:

 

When my sons grow up, punish them, my friends, and harass them in the same way that I have harassed you, if they seem to you to care for riches or for any other thing more than excellence; and if they think that they are something when they are really nothing, reproach them, as I have reproached you, for not caring for what they should, and for thinking that they are something when really they are nothing. And if you will do this, I myself and my sons will have received justice from you.

 

I don't know. What seems like ridicule might in reality be justice, an exercise of morality on a higher plane. That isn't an excuse. It's applying an encumbancy on satirists, similar to Kant's, that their behavior should provide at least a rough draft for future laws of nature.

 

Is that helpful?

 

--lemit

[coberst]

Where, in American culture, is the domain of knowledge that we would identify as morality studied and taught?

 

I suspect that if we do not quickly develop a science of morality that will make it possible for us to live together on this planet in a more harmonious manner our technology will help us to destroy the species and perhaps the planet soon.

 

It seems to me that we have given the subject matter of morality primarily over to religion. It also seems to me that if we ask the question ‘why do humans treat one another so terribly?’ we will find the answer in this moral aspect of human culture.

 

The ‘man of maxims’ “is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.” George Eliot The Mill on the Floss

 

I agree to the point of saying that we have moral instincts, i.e. we have moral emotions. Without these moral emotions we could not function as social creatures. These moral emotions are an act of evolution. I would ague that the instinct for grooming that we see in monkeys is one example of this moral emotion.

 

We can no longer leave this important matter in the hands of the Sunday-school. Morality must become a top priority for scientific study.

[lemit]

I'm not sure this answers your questions, but I think it addresses them:

 

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

 

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

 

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

 

--William Faulkner, "Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech" as published in

The Faulkner Reader

 

I personally think morality is chasing technology. How close it is varies, but it always seems to be behind. It is the role of those of us who see that, and there are many of us, to constantly work to close that gap. Like Faulkner, I think we can succeed. That is why I employ humor in many of my posts. I am ultimately confident and therefore ultimately happy.

 

--lemit

[Donk]

The OP deals with morality in terms of a binary yes/no. Many of life's decisions are not so clear-cut, nor is morality so absolute.

 

Suppose one of the lifeboat's occupants goes mad, leading to a danger that all will die. Is it right to throw him overboard? Is the decision influenced by the fact that there will then be more supplies for the rest?

 

Or this: you've foreseen famine times coming, and stockpiled food. Suddenly the famine is here, and is expected to last three months. You have enough food for your family for a year. Do you share the surplus with your neighbours, risking starvation if things don't get back to normal?

 

Or this: as previous, but the stockpile has been supplied by the government to feed your small town through the crisis. Because of corruption, a nearby city has no stockpiles for its citizens and a million starving (and blameless) people are heading your way. Do you give them what you have, or put up a shoot-to-kill barricade?

 

The above examples aren't exactly daily occurrences, so let's get into the real world. A while back we had to draft a report for a major client. The information came through at 4pm; it would take at least six hours and was needed by 10am next day. The report would help to ensure that the contract was renewed, and therefore help to preserve my job. The boss asked me to stay late to do it, explaining that he had important business elsewhere. I wasn't doing anything special that evening, but from past experience I knew that (1) I wouldn't get paid any extra; (2) the boss would take all the credit (and the bonus); (3) he would tell his wife that he was working through the night and then go off to his girlfriend. What's the morally-correct decision?

[lemit]

A while back we had to draft a report for a major client. The information came through at 4pm; it would take at least six hours and was needed by 10am next day. The report would help to ensure that the contract was renewed, and therefore help to preserve my job. The boss asked me to stay late to do it, explaining that he had important business elsewhere. I wasn't doing anything special that evening, but from past experience I knew that (1) I wouldn't get paid any extra; (2) the boss would take all the credit (and the bonus); (3) he would tell his wife that he was working through the night and then go off to his girlfriend. What's the morally-correct decision?

 

Look for another job?

 

--lemit

[Donk]

Medium-term, I did.

 

Short-term, I found something nastier B)

 

Long-term, I did something much, much nastier! :doh: :doh: :singer:

[lemit]

Medium-term, I did.

 

Short-term, I found something nastier :smilingsun:

 

Long-term, I did something much, much nastier! :hyper: :) :(

 

So, that explains the avatar's expression.

 

--lemit

[Kriminal99]

Assume that some young person reads my OP and is inspired by it to study what morality is all about. Then that person goes on to read a response and s/he sees that the responder ridiculed the OP. This then deflates the idea to study morality. Can the ridicule be considered to have been an amoral act?[/b]

 

But when a person does this, there is some argument behind the "ridicule". If that argument is valid, then it is just for it to sway the reader.

 

However by my reckoning it is an amoral act because instead of just saying why they disagreed they obfuscated their motivation by instead acting on what they believed. This makes it harder to raise counterpoints, giving the argument false credibility.

 

People cannot be expected to do all kinds of moral calculations on the spot. Luckily there is a universal rule of morality that can always be applied to the situation to remove the need for any such complicated calculation. Always be truthful and straightforward, and vigilant against those who aren't.

[coberst]

 

People cannot be expected to do all kinds of moral calculations on the spot. Luckily there is a universal rule of morality that can always be applied to the situation to remove the need for any such complicated calculation. Always be truthful and straightforward, and vigilant against those who aren't.

 

Good judgment is the essence of good behavior in moral matters an in all matters. Of great importance is what goes on before the decision must be made. That is why I have such low regard for our (American) educational system. Our system concentrates only on teaching us what to think and not how to think. It is like the story of giving a person a fish for lunch but if we help her to learn how to think she can go fishing and catch her own fish.