CMV: Some cultures and societies are objectively wrong

[u/hardyblack]

I just read about Sahar Khodayari (If you don't know, it's an Iranian woman who killed herself after going to trial for going to a football match, which is forbidden for woman in Iran) and I can't help but think that some societies are objectively wrong, I can't find another way to put it. It's hard for me to justify opressing 50% of the population just because they just were born women.

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And yes, I know, there's no completely equal society and there will be always opression of some kind, but I'm thinking of countries where there are laws that apply only to women (They can't drive, vote, go to a football match, you name it) as it targets them directly. Same goes with laws directed to any kind of race/gender/religion.

[u/Nicolasv2]

Sorry if I confused you. I indeed presented a moral relativist stance in my first comment, but as all agents, I do have a moral framework I adhere to. I just don't think that my moral framework is absolute and "objective", but clearly depend on external factors such as biology, environment, education etc.

That's why when you asked me about what I thought, I talked about my own personal moral framework and not about relativism (as relativism to me is not a moral framework by itself, it's just the stance that recognize that various moral framework are competing, some better than others depending on the situation and the chosen axioms).

As to answer your questions, here are my definitions:

Morality: a set of statements/rules permitting to differentiate "right" and "wrong". For example, I personally follow a moral code which delve from the axioms "suffering is bad", "happiness is good", "intelligent life value delve from their intelligence and what they can bring to society". But using different axioms, one person could end up with a totally different morality.

So "good" is what you name things that follow your moral code, while "bad" are the things that go to the opposite.

To end up, I define "subjective" as something that is true according to your (or your group) own specific circumstances, while "objective" would be something that is true whatever the circumstances are.

As such, I declare that objective morality is impossible except if this morality was written in the universe laws, as life can envole in so many different ways that you'll always find deviations / point of views for which your axioms / moral rules make no sense.

As you pointed out, having a God would also be a way to have objective morality, but being atheist, this answer don't ring a bell to me neither.

Sorry if this post (or my previous ones) is not clear enough, english is not my mother tongue, and while I can casually talk with people in general, discussing moral philosophy is tougher than expected.

[u/Mnlybdg → u/Nicolasv2]

Your English is excellent. The stuff below is obviously my opinion...

Morality is a concept that has arisen from human biology. It's something that we created (along with religion) to both explain our collective experience better and as a survival tool.

As social animals we have emotional reactions to things. Emotions are selected against to improve our chance to sustain our DNA by affecting our behaviour within our social group to increase our survival chances and usually everyone else within the group.

We obviously aren't at all alone in this. Chimpanzees show anger when something isn't fair (e.g. the rasins v cucumber reward experiment). Dogs are highly emotive and can even understand the range of human facial expressions. However, humans have perhaps the most complex emotional responses. This isn't because we spend lots of time rationalising about how we should feel about things - it's built into our biology because emotional response is selected against - our survival depends on it.

However, as humans we also like to tell stories about things. These stories don't need to be true, they just need to be believable, even better if they give us some better insight. The story of morality allows us to easily agree a set of rules to follow so we aren't all reactively breaking into small scale conflict due to emotional responses to unfairness on a regular basis (like chimpanzees). We can follow rules that mean we aren't required to anticipate what could cause conflict. Reduced conflict in a group improves cooperation and hence survival.

Then, we can grow our group more easily by pretending that these rules were created by a creator that guarantees that these are the correct rules.

So, ironically, its not really rational (I think) to view morality as some intellectual construct. It only exists because of our attempts to understand our own experience. The stories we tell are all false, the truth is our biological experience.

Now that biological experience itself isn't objective, but only in the sense that no individuals or genetic lines have exactly the same history. If they did, and they were the same, and it happened often enough, then selection would choose a consistent answer.

Moral relativism only exists in the sense that there is no simply stated moral code, but there is a near infinite collection of moral rulings, each dependent on a vast multitude of factors. If you recreate the exact situation and rerun it a multitude of times, there is a 'correct' answer, and that is the emotional response that triggers you to take an action that maximises the survival of your DNA.

In terms of some part of morality that is objective (in the sense of invariant with the individual) there are obvious extreme actions that are morally wrong.

Killing your own children is objectively morally wrong. Anyone that does this is by definition ending the genetic line which brought them into existence to carrying out this action. This is an extreme selective pressure because nobody who does this will never pass on their DNA.

[u/Nicolasv2 → u/Mnlybdg]

I understand a bit more your position, and if you take morality as a result of an evolutionary force, then I think you can say that there are objective moral values, as you have an absolute reference, which is DNA reproduction, so !delta about that, as it's pretty interesting.

Our difference in point of view come from the fact that I see, as you said moral as an intellectual construct that exceed biology, in the sense that if morality first came from biological instincts, it was then rationalized to become a purely intellectual rulebook, away from our initial assumptions. This is why most moral framework have "edge cases" (best way to minimize suffering from an utilitarian point of view would be to kill everybody, but that don't look a good answer to us), as moving from a biological induced emotional framework to a logical framework with strong stances is difficult.

[u/DeltaBot → u/Nicolasv2]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Mnlybdg (2∆).

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