Example: I believe that IP is a direct contradiction of nature, sacrificing the advancement of humanity and the world for selfish gain, and therefore is sinful.
Edit: pls do not downvote the comments this is a constructive discussion
Edit2: IP= intellectal property
Edit3: sort by controversal
Don’t just tease me like this, what’s the objective standard? And like I’m totally following along, but i still want to know what the disagreements are.
I just like ethics and want to hear what you think.
Personally I go for deontological ethics. Actions are right or wrong in themselves, regardless of their consequences. So if it’s immoral to lie, then it is even wrong to lie for good reasons. This contrasts with consequentialist ethics (i.e., the consequences of the action determine its moral worth) and virtue ethics (i.e., good actions are what the morally virtuous agent would do).
Kant’s deontological procedure for determining the moral worth of an action is what he calls the Categorical Imperative. The procedure can roughly be summarized as follows: ask yourself if I willed that everyone did the action I’m considering whether it would be logically consistent. To return to the previous example, if everybody lied all the time, then lies would lose their effectiveness. Hence, lying must be morally bad, because it is self-contradictory. Mutatis mutandis for murder, stealing, etc.
The classic argument against Kantian deontology is “if the nazis come searching for the jews at your house, is it still wrong to lie?”
And if we use your procedure: “if everyone always lies, then the nazis will know who is hiding jews,” the lies won’t be effective, and therefore the action is self-contradictory. Thus it is wrong to lie about harboring jews from the nazis.
But if we reword it to “if everyone always denies hiding jews, the nazis will not know who is or is not hiding jews,” thus it is not self-contradictory, therefore it isn’t wrong to lie about harboring jews.
Yes, there are problems with the categorical imperative. Another problem: what if two moral duties are in conflict? A third: can’t we phrase the same action under different descriptions in a way that yields different results?
There are objections to every moral theory because this is philosophy and we rarely reach a consensus on topics this large. These problems are indicators of epistemological grey areas. They do not, in my opinion, entail moral nihilism.