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
Can you talk me through the experiment setup to measure or observe that morality? I’d like to confirm it.
Reposting my response from above:
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.
How does effectiveness of lying have anything to do with the morality of lying?
If I am ineffective at providing for my family (disability/sicknese/other means for which I cannot control), is that immoral?
I’m leaving some philosophical details out for the sake of space. Kant thought that the moral law is a duty that is imposed upon the self by reason. But we cannot place a duty on ourselves that is logically inconsistent. Since the moral law should be the same for everyone, if everyone doing something leads to a logical contradiction, then that must not be an action prescribable to ourselves by reason.
The notion that we (morally) ought to do something implies that we could do it; conversely, if we could not do the action, then this implies that we are not morally obligated to do it.
So how do you evidence that this value is objective?
I’m not sure I understand your question
What is the evidence that this thought is true? How do you objectively prove this?
Ah I see. In a nutshell, if morality were dictated to rational agents through an external source, we could not be sure of its objectivity (i.e., universal and necessary validity). Moreover, the notion of an external source that dictates morality conflicts with our being free moral agents. Hence we must legislate ourselves through our own faculty of reason such that the moral law holds objectively for rational agents such as us. From this the Categorical Imperative, a procedure for determining moral worth through logical consistency, is supposed to follow.
He gives different philosophical arguments for these positions in The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason. Unlike science, where we can appreciate the result without combing through the evidence, the philosophical arguments have to be understood in their entirety to see the salience of the conclusion. I’m willing to give a sense of the view (see the foregoing), but I’d rather not recapitulate the entire work. If you’re interested, I would read the following entry page on the issue. You might find Kant’s arguments convincing: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/
I agree with everything here until the “must” of the last sentence, as it seems to be based on the implication that said free agents care. There are people who do not care for their own wellbeing, or the wellbeing of others. On a subjective basis, they lack the values that objective reasoning would be built on.
To them that “must” is meaningless. Or worse, they view statements such as that as being dictated to them from an external source.
On top of that, we aren’t completely rational, or able to make completely rational conclusions at all times. We can make attempts, sure. But we have biases, we fall into fallacies without realizing, and like I said some of us just don’t care.
Morality can’t be objective if we can’t be objective.
I understand not wanting to do that, so all good.
Though. I’m more interested in a discussion than anything else.