(Apr 28, 2015 07:50 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Is a person "good" when they are not doing anything good? Is a person "evil" when they are not doing anything evil? If moral properties exist objectively and independently of our own minds, how do we perceive them? Do we have some extra faculty or sense by which to perceive the goodness or badness of an action or person?
Perhaps more along the line of evaluating what system (if any) is regulating them, and also how well that governance is succeeding. But extreme adherence to a universal duty, which would ignore all contingent circumstances, will produce at least some negative results along way (deemed such from the perspective of their victims and sympathetic onlookers). In a sense, the capacity to deviate or not from a global principle is the difference between practical human behavior and formal / robotic human behavior. Or the difference between Man (the mutable beast) and Nature (the law-enforcing, indifferent machine-god).
Both morality and human/animal rights resting upon duty should be seen as an idealized coastline for indicating when one is about to stray disastrously into deep waters, rather than a system one must strictly obey without justifiable exceptions (though the latter may indeed often rest in emotional feelings and superstitious-like dread of trespassing on some other duty that has been personally adopted). Even practical morality wouldn't possible if there wasn't some idealized scheme it was still remaining in the corral of or not drifting too far from. To jettison a moral blueprint merely because it is not being perfectly obeyed in practice would be to actually share with a strict ethical zealot his/her misunderstanding of what the purpose of a moral blueprint is to begin with.
(Apr 28, 2015 07:50 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Do good or bad exist as objective moral properties?
Perhaps as much as any general conceptions, that we abstract from particulars, could exist physically "out there" (which is to say, not likely to be phenomenal entities found or perceived somewhere in the same manner of what they would regulate). More like intellectual necessities that are recruited when needed; or immaterial powers that instructively will this or that. If one can strip away the empirical properties of groups of differing objects (like blueberries and rocks) and have something invisible or insentient remaining that they all have in common (a quantitative characteristic represented by symbol, like "seven" being applicable to each set).... Then "evil" seems as much a functional idea or global trait that could be extracted from historic Nazis -- a synoptic essence of what Nazi goals / behavior had in common. Similarly, in generalizing all the states in the timeline of a single individual (via a conduct context), "good" might summarize / categorize many of the distinct moments of a charity worker's whole life, or be an expression of the "duty" such a person followed.
Apr 28, 2015 07:50 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 28, 2015 07:57 PM by Magical Realist.)
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