this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is basically how teaching secular ethics always is, though. Doesn't seem special about 2025. People will always be overconfident in their beliefs, but it's not necessarily a coincidence or even hypocrisy that they can hold both views at the same time.

You can believe that morality is a social construct while simultaneously advocating for society to construct better morals. Morality can be relative and opposing views on morality can still be perceived as monstrous relative to the audience's morality.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (18 children)

Morality is subjective. Ethics are an attempt to quanitify/codify popular/common moral beliefs.

Even "murder is wrong" is not a moral absolute. I consider it highly immoral to deny murder to someone in pain begging for another person like a physician to murder them painlessly simply because of a dogmatic "murder is wrong" stance.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

"murder is wrong" is a moral absolute if you adopt the deontological viewpoint. It's not if you adopt the teleological approach. Discussing these things is literally what I learnt in the very short Ethics course I had in third year uni (while in France that sort of stuff was much much earlier during Philosophy class...)

Edit : and to be clear, I think absolute opinions are the province of the philosopher and the fanatic. Real life tends to be a bit more messy. But that's why it's important to sort of know what the options are and how difficult the choices can be (again, for real human beings who struggle with dilemmas ; fanatics tend to eachew all that and I'd say that's how you can spot them).

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago (1 children)

i consider this specific example to also be an issue of language, which is in itself a construct.

Murder as a word has meaning based in law, which is another construct.

If you were to switch out "murder" for "killing" the outcome remains the same (cessation of life by another party) but the ethical and moral connotations are different.

Some people use murder when they mean killing and vice versa which adds a layer of complexity and confusion.

Though all of that could just be me venturing into pedant country.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

It's even worse than that. It floors me that it's widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn't murder. It's murder when a contract killer murders by order and gets paid, the fact that a government is paying the contract and giving you a spiffy Lil wardrobe to do it in is a really arbitrary line. They don't even have a proper word for it, they just say "it's not murder.... IT'S WAR!" What a lazy non-argument. It doesn't count because we're doing murder Costco style, in bulk?

I mean yeah, it's people killing people that don't want to die on the behalf of people paying them to either gain something or secure what they have. It's more cut and dry than my first example, where you could argue that if the party to be murdered consents to be murdered, it no longer fits the definition.

As George Carlin said, the word is avoided to soften what needs to be done, to defang language until it is robbed of the emotional weight of what is happening. Target neutralized doesn't have the baggage of human murdered. Don't want those soldiers in the field to internalize the weight of what they're doing, or they won't comply as reliably!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

floors me that it's widely accepted that soldiers murdering soldiers in war isn't murder

Because it's not. Murder is one sided. War, you are fighting. It's not 1 sided. It's killing, and can easily and is often morally reprehensible. But that does not make it murder. Civilian deaths are still murder in a war.

It's not defanging language. Its using it as it is.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Excuse me I was told that anyone who says "people view disagreement as moral monstrosity" is actually a nazi.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Parallel: Teaching contemporary American literature to undergrads in 2019 was utterly bizarre because they hadn’t lived through 9/11. So much stuff went over their heads. There’s just a disconnect you’re always going to have because of lived experience and cultural changes. It’s your job, especially in a philosophy course, to orient them to differing schools of thought and go “oh, I didn’t think about it that way.” And correct them on Nietzsche, because they’re always fucking wrong about Nietzsche.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (6 children)

The misunderstanding I see here is in the definition of “subjective”.

Subjective is often used interchangeably with opinion. And people can certainly have different opinions.

But the subjective that is meant is that morals don’t exist without a subject, aka a mind to comprehend them.

A rock exists whether or not a mind perceives the rock. The rock is objective. It is a physical object.

The idea that it is wrong to harm someone for being different is subjective. It is an idea. A thought. The thought does not exist without a mind.

So yes. Morals are all subjective. Morals do not exist in the physical world. Morals are not objects, they do not objectively exist. They exist within a subject. Morals subjectively exist.

That does not mean that any set of morals is okay because it’s just an opinion, bro. Because it’s not just an opinion. Those subjective values effect objective reality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

Nobody used the word subjective. What are you on about?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

So you legitimately don't recognize the screenshot as being fundamentally based around the issues of subjectivity and objectivity?

I mean.. what are you on about?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Probably in relation to the use of 'relative', I guess a synonym for subjective?

(Edit) I thought is was an interesting comment btw

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Yeah, I guess. Maybe they misread the OP. I agree that it was interesting, though completely irrelevant to the statement in the OP.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I don't know, I might intellectually understand that morals are relative to a culture and that even our concept of universal human rights is an heritage of our colonial past and, on some level, trying to push our own values as the only morality that can exist. On a gut level though, I am entirely unable to consider that LGBT rights, gender equality or non-discrimination aren't inherently moral.

I don't think holding these two beliefs is weird, it's a natural contradiction worth debating and that's what I would expect from an ethics teacher

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's because there are 2 general schools of thought in ethics - relativism and absolutism. Relativism (the idea that morality is intrinsic to the person's experience and understanding) is the one that seems to be the most talked about in general society. I believe in absolutism, the idea that there is a set of guidelines for moral behavior regardless of your experiences or past.

Your example (more formally known as the paradox of tolerance) is what convinces me that absolutism is the better school of thought

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

an heritage

Who pronounces it as 'eritage

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I'm gonna guess French people

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That's so objectively morally reprehensible

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Being Fr*nch is a choice. It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Oui-ve

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