Is there a Rational Ground for Morality?

[coberst]

Is there a Rational Ground for Morality?

 

There can be no morality without law but there can be law without morality.

 

Law can create particular obligations but law cannot create a law that dictates an obligation to obey law. Law can punish but cannot create the general obligation to obey law. Such an obligation comes via moral character. “Morality must be distinguished from self-interest, although the two can often coincide…What is the rational ground for morality and its obligation?”

 

The rational ground for morality rests upon the need for mutual cooperation within a community. With mutual cooperation comes mutual dependence. Mutual cooperation demands trust, which relies upon honesty. Honesty implies obligation. Violence destroys cooperation.

 

Cooperation is essential for social life; only if we wish to withdraw into isolation can we afford to ignore cooperation. Empirically we can find cooperation within every community. Morality is about human relationships thus empirically we can find both the need and presence of morality in all communities.

 

Morality exists in all communities but it has many variables and much diversity. Three factors are important here: differences in religion, differences in politics, and differences in production and economic relations.

 

“Certain moral commitments with their attendant obligation are necessary for any kind of human co-operation whatever. These must first be acknowledged before there can be other values which vary. This is an a priori not an empirical thesis.” By definition, a group of individuals without human co-operation is no community at all.

 

A diversity of moral codes within a community can be accepted but primary loyalty to all within the community must be to the community and not to particular groups or classes within the community. Those values that unite must be more important than those that divide.

 

A community is a group committed to the rule of law, which entails three specific principles of law: the law is supreme with equality and freedom under the law. Legal rules are supreme and all members are subjected to and protected by those rules.

 

Public interest, when properly understood, forms the “rational basis of both government and politics”.

 

Quotes from The Morality of Politics edited by Bhikhu Parekh & R. N. Berki

[Kriminal99]

IMO:

 

People start out selfish. They are punished (like for stealing a crayon at age 2) for it. They realize that trying to benefit themselves at the expense of a group is going to be fruitless in general because the group will stop them. So they decide not to be selfish as a rule.

 

People accept rules when they believe a rule to be the "norm". This can be described as a statistical norm, in the sense that the rule would reappear independently across many unrelated communities. The thing that makes it the norm (and gives people the ability to recognize it as so) is that the rule actually makes sense which usually means it can be traced back to preventing selfishness (the root rule of morality).

 

If there is a rule that deviates from people's understanding of this model, no one respects it. But, people's understanding of this model deviates from the true model greatly - and regimes often try and alter people's perception of this model to get them to accept a rule.

[pamela]

posted by Krim

People start out selfish. They are punished (like for stealing a crayon at age 2) for it. They realize that trying to benefit themselves at the expense of a group is going to be fruitless in general because the group will stop them. So they decide not to be selfish as a rule.

hmmn...interesting Krim

from dictionary.com

devoted to or caring only for oneself; concerned primarily with one's own interests, benefits, welfare, etc., regardless of others.

2. characterized by or manifesting concern or care only for oneself: selfish motives.

 

Do you really suppose it is the punishment for stealing that changes the child's behaviour? Or could it be, the look of displeasure on the parent's face, that motivates the child to follow the rules so as to please them? Take that same child, who then gives back the crayon( even though they want it) derives pleasure from sharing and is rewarded with praise from the parents for thier good deed.

Both acts are in essence, selfish, to gain for the self.

Punishment , while somewhat effective in changing behaviours, lacks in comparison to love being a motivator. I remember being a teen and breaking a few rules. Being grounded just made me angry and i continued to break the rules. However when faced with" wait till your dad gets home", played out quite differently. His saddened look of disapproval and no words spoken, would crush me. That look, along with my desire to please him with my actions, was enough, to put a halt to my behaviour. Love was the impetus to change.

As an adult this manifests itself in kindness to humanity. While shopping yesterday, i hand picked a beautiful mandevilla. I have been wanting one for a year now.It was perfect. The was a lady who was debating whether or not to purchase one. She was questioning me on how to care for one, was it a perennial or annual, etc, when they sold out.Now she had her eye on mine.She asked me for it, much to my horror. Yeah, i gave it to her.....I took home the feeling of making someone else happy, remembering the look on her face, for this act of selfishness.

The thing that makes it the norm (and gives people the ability to recognize it as so) is that the rule actually makes sense which usually means it can be traced back to preventing selfishness (the root rule of morality).

If i had prevented this selfishness, would i be immoral?:QuestionM

[Kriminal99]

hmmn...interesting Krim

 

 

Do you really suppose it is the punishment for stealing that changes the child's behaviour? Or could it be, the look of displeasure on the parent's face, that motivates the child to follow the rules so as to please them? Take that same child, who then gives back the crayon( even though they want it) derives pleasure from sharing and is rewarded with praise from the parents for thier good deed.

Both acts are in essence, selfish, to gain for the self.

Punishment , while somewhat effective in changing behaviours, lacks in comparison to love being a motivator. I remember being a teen and breaking a few rules. Being grounded just made me angry and i continued to break the rules. However when faced with" wait till your dad gets home", played out quite differently. His saddened look of disapproval and no words spoken, would crush me. That look, along with my desire to please him with my actions, was enough, to put a halt to my behaviour. Love was the impetus to change.

As an adult this manifests itself in kindness to humanity. While shopping yesterday, i hand picked a beautiful mandevilla. I have been wanting one for a year now.It was perfect. The was a lady who was debating whether or not to purchase one. She was questioning me on how to care for one, was it a perennial or annual, etc, when they sold out.Now she had her eye on mine.She asked me for it, much to my horror. Yeah, i gave it to her.....I took home the feeling of making someone else happy, remembering the look on her face, for this act of selfishness.

 

If i had prevented this selfishness, would i be immoral?;)

 

The look of displeasure is the punishment right? Doesn't being grounded reduce to basically the same thing? I mean you don't get to go out and get attention from your friends.

 

The idea is that your motivation can be likened to a flow of water (or electrons or whatever) tring to get from a to b, and punishment is a sudden block in the path that forces it to go around. The simplest path at first appears to be simply taking what you want from people, but then people block that path and then you take the next best path which is compassion. Here I am alluding to a more precise model that can be communicated with some formalization.

 

When people are in positions of siginfigant power to others, their compassion begins to decay and they worry less about how their actions affect others. This isn't some abstract argument that only applies to facist dictators either, it plays out every day in personal relationships. If you don't stand up for yourself in personal relationships people will behave selfishly. They don't sit there and try to figure out how their actions affect everyone else - they do what they want until someone pops up and says "Hey you can't do that and expect me to be around you".

 

You were immoral for not preventing that act of selfishness - in fact it wasn't an act of selfishness because you didn't prevent it. If you genuinely didn't care, then it would be fine, but you just revealed that you did care. You withheld information from that lady. Suppose she has a sort of statistical distribution in her mind that allows her to operate in the world. Had you told the truth, she would have had at least one trial showing that a person holding a flower probably wants it for themselves. This could probably be generalized to other situations so it may affect her behavior elsewhere.

[pamela]

The look of displeasure is the punishment right? Doesn't being grounded reduce to basically the same thing? I mean you don't get to go out and get attention from your friends.

I do not consider my father's disappointment as punishment-I was upset because my actions had caused him sadness- I only wanted to make them happy. The grounding or preventing me from doing something only served to make me more defiant against authority. It did not change the behaviour.

When people are in positions of siginfigant power to others, their compassion begins to decay and they worry less about how their actions affect others. This isn't some abstract argument that only applies to facist dictators either, it plays out every day in personal relationships. If you don't stand up for yourself in personal relationships people will behave selfishly. They don't sit there and try to figure out how their actions affect everyone else - they do what they want until someone pops up and says "Hey you can't do that and expect me to be around you".

yes some people do this, but not all. I really try to think about the consequences before i act, although the spoken ill word is harder to control.

You were immoral for not preventing that act of selfishness - in fact it wasn't an act of selfishness because you didn't prevent it. If you genuinely didn't care, then it would be fine, but you just revealed that you did care. You withheld information from that lady. Suppose she has a sort of statistical distribution in her mind that allows her to operate in the world. Had you told the truth, she would have had at least one trial showing that a person holding a flower probably wants it for themselves. This could probably be generalized to other situations so it may affect her behavior elsewhere.

not sure i am following you here... She knew it was mine and i wanted it.I even asked her twice was she sure she wanted MINE- laughingly, in disbelief. Bottom line, her happiness was more important than the plant to me. I imagine that if she was in a similar situation, she may think twice

[vanamoinen1]

Law can create particular obligations but law cannot create a law that dictates an obligation to obey law. Law can punish but cannot create the general obligation to obey law. Such an obligation comes via moral character

.

 

I have to disagree--the obligation does not arise out of moral character alone, but rather, it rides on the coercive/punitive aspect of society. Our law may have its fundament in the Constitution, but it is the policing power of the state which ensures cooperation with respect to "the general obligation to obey law." Sure, sure--most people do not run out and commit a killing NOT because they are afraid of the punishment for doing so, but out of a sense of something else--morals, I guess. But the fact remains that regardless of your motivation to commit an action or to avoid an action the state maintains a policing power to enforce its laws--AND WE ARE AWARE OF THIS. This is an extra-moral (as in beyond the structure of morality) remedy of the state. Consider: one may be in fundamental disagreement with the goals, actions, lapses etc of a government, and yet he will still pay his taxes. In other words, he will support with his own income a government which he may even find to be immoral. The choice to pay isn't a moral one; it's a choice made with the knowledge that a failure to pay those taxes will result in a fine or imprisonment--punishment avoidance really.

 

What remains to be hoped for is that the laws themselves represent a morality we as individuals are comfortable with. And until man behaves as he should (under a sense of morality) we will have law which enforces behavior the majority views as moral.

[buddhaboy]

it seems to me, that we can make up whatever morals we like... there is a good one about loving thy neighbour in christianity(your neighbour being everybody you meet) and then killing millions of them anyway!!1! we ned laws etc...but we also know what people are like... you can have the moral that stealing i bad, but if you lost your job, had children who were starving, and on deaths door, and you ha d no means of feeding them except for stealing, then it may be more immoral not to steal than it would to steal!...make whatever morals you want but knowthat someonewill break them.....