Quote: (04-16-2016 07:42 PM)RatInTheWoods Wrote:
Imagine you walking down the street and there is a beetle on the footpath in front of you.
If you change your step to ensure you don't step on it, you are a good person.
If you change your step to ensure you step on it, you are a bad person.
If you don't change your step either way and care not if the bug is squashed, you are a neutral.
These kinds of thought experiments fail to capture the total "big picture" of a person's morality. Two reasons: it's too narrow (one might have the urge to kill insects needlessly but genuinely care about human beings), and it assumes that killing the beetle is inherently immoral.
There's a case to be made that beetles' lives aren't very important. I go out of my way to step on, say, Mexican Boll Weevils, because here they're an invasive species of beetle that is detrimental to the local ecosystem. So I'm immoral?
I think morality is about intent. That means that if a person genuinely wants to benefit human society, or what he perceives to be feeling creatures around him, without the primary motive being personal gain, that person is moral.
However, these intentions have to be put into actions that he similarly regards as moral in the sense that they are pursuant to the aims of benefiting others. To want to help others and to want to improve the overall station of everyone is one thing, but to be "moral," one must act on this desire. He must pursue morality.
There is also the issue of who "others" are. To be moral, the "others" one must try to benefit are people or feeling entities/life that that person regards as having the ability to suffer and/or be put into a place of unhappy existence. The exceptions include those who deserve punishment, such as rapists, murderers, etc.
Notice a disconnect between being moral and actions being moral. As long as a person genuinely believes that his actions are moral, he is a moral person. That does not mean that his actions have to benefit others in order to be moral—he simply has to think they do.
Morality then is subjective to the individual. That is true morality.
This is not satisfactory to society, so different cultures lay out individual mandates on right on wrong, with norms and mores dictating exactly what is and isn't moral for everyone to follow. This is not true morality. If a person follows the customs simply because they are the customs, he is not a moral person. He just believes the customs and believe that they either uphold morality or do not hinder it. If a person regards customs to be immoral and pushing immorality, then that person recognizes that harm is being done to others, which inherently goes against his goal of helping others.
Thus, if it is in the moral person's power to oppose these immoralities in a meaningful way, even for just one other person, he is obligated to do so.
The moral person, in regards to immorality, must however weigh the net damage to net gain for others. The way he must do this includes the individual cases—if one individual is being dismembered to give one million people faster Internet, that one person' last unjust suffering outweighs the net gain of convenience for others.
But if gays are inconvenienced by not being allowed to spread propaganda to children, then the moral position is to support that inconvenience.
Should moral people find themselves in an immoral society, they must actively fight against the society by introducing logical arguments for morality, civil disobedience (refusing to partake in the immorality), or removing themselves entirely from the society to oppose it from the outside (the Camus method versus the de Gaulle method in a sense).
While this has the potential for individuals to fix themselves on a million different definitions of morality, cultures are divided by different conceptions of morality, and the individuals in these cultures, coming from these cultures, should find the specifics of their societies satisfactory to their rational perceptions of morality. If they are irrational but moral, then they are inclined to oppose the society, and if they are the minority, then they are eliminated from the discourse.
If a significant, powerful minority or majority of moral people oppose the society's immorality, then the differing conceptions of morality will be weighed and replaced. If moral, rational people in the minority find themselves in a society they deem immoral, they are compelled to attempt to advocate new definitions of specific morality, and if they cannot, then they are further compelled to remove themselves to a culture which fits their morals. This way, both cultures benefit by having their moral standings strengthened.
If the target culture in question has dynamic, ever-changing morals, then one can advocate to change them from an external culture that is more steadfast in defending its mores and norms and laws.
So to OP—if you want to figure out if you are moral, look around you. Identify what you really, truly believe are creatures that can suffer. What suffering means is up to you—an unsatisfactory degree of discomfort and pain, with or without rationality or feelings to process it, depending on how you view it. Then figure out if you genuinely want to benefit these things. Then ask yourself if you actively try to. That's your answer, I think.
