[Qingu]

Originally Posted by tlj009

They had more people, industry, resources, etc. They weren't necessarily out-competed. They dealt in different products. I don't believe that the North could have competed agriculturally any more than the South could have competed in production of machines or guns.

Their advantages you listed are the results of their superior socio-economic system. The North didn't start out with more people or better industries.

And eventually technology that was more agricultural based would have replaced slaves for the most part. But it doesn't necessarily follow that ownership of slaves would become morally bad but instead outdated.

But this is precisely how moral changes occur. Look at the women's rights movement. When did this movement start taking place? When women became capable of self-sufficiency, by entering the workforce.

How were women able to enter the workforce? Because of technology developments.

As for the rest of your post, I think that there is a major difference in how we view morals. You view morals in that anything that you can justify is good and anything that you can't justify is bad. So you can take torture and declare it good if it will save 1,000,000 lives. You use all your senses and make a decision as to what is good or bad. Your whole consciousness decides your morals.

I don't look at things that way. I look at something as either good or bad (my morals). If something is bad then it needs justification from my other senses, memory, etc. in order to decide if it is necessary. Helping an old lady fix a tire doesn't need justification because it is good. I just do it. Torture is bad. Therefore, it needs some kind of justifcation, like saving 1,000,000 lives, in order to make it necessary. For that matter, not helping the old lady fix a tire needs justification since it is passing up a chance to do good.

Wha...?

I wouldn't call killing/torturing one person to save a million "good." I'd probably call it the same exact thing you'd call it—the lesser of two evils.

But whatever we call our moral actions is less important than the type of moral actions we would make, based on our moral philosophies. I'm not seeing much difference. We both need to justify anti-social (aka "bad") behavior and both apparently do it in the same, utilitarian fashion, or we don't do it at all.

Now whether something is good or bad, I say is decided by my spirit. Sort of the same way I look at something and decide it to be beautiful or ugly.

Again, what does "spirit" mean?

And how would this work if you are trying to justify killing one to save a million? I'm not seeing the analogy to aesthetics here. In fact, I think you'd struggle with this decision in the exact same way that I would, both rationally and emotionally.

[tlj009]

Wha...?

I wouldn't call killing/torturing one person to save a million "good." I'd probably call it the same exact thing you'd call it—the lesser of two evils.

But whatever we call our moral actions is less important than the type of moral actions we would make, based on our moral philosophies. I'm not seeing much difference. We both need to justify anti-social (aka "bad") behavior and both apparently do it in the same, utilitarian fashion, or we don't do it at all.

The problem here is that in my view, my morals are separate from my actions. Take a hitchhiker. My morality says to stop and pick him up. My actions, after looking at appearances and considering the safety of my family in the vehicle with me, says to pass that person by. I wouldn't classify passing the person by as a moral action, especially since my morals are opposed to that action. You appear to see things differently. Your view would seem to say that the action or maybe the decision to do a particular action is your morals. Which are developed by your conscious and deliberate consideration of the situation.

Anyway, out of what seems like 10 pages of discussion on this, that is the closest I have come to understanding your view that consciousness is the basis for your morals.

Again, what does "spirit" mean?

And how would this work if you are trying to justify killing one to save a million? I'm not seeing the analogy to aesthetics here. In fact, I think you'd struggle with this decision in the exact same way that I would, both rationally and emotionally.

No doubt. But the decision that I reach would be separate from my morals, emotions, past experience, etc. It would instead be after I weigh all the information from all of those areas. Which to me means that my consciousness is the source of my decisions but is not the source of my morals.

[Qingu]

Originally Posted by tlj009

The problem here is that in my view, my morals are separate from my actions. Take a hitchhiker. My morality says to stop and pick him up. My actions, after looking at appearances and considering the safety of my family in the vehicle with me, says to pass that person by. I wouldn't classify passing the person by as a moral action, especially since my morals are opposed to that action. You appear to see things differently. Your view would seem to say that the action or maybe the decision to do a particular action is your morals. Which are developed by your conscious and deliberate consideration of the situation.

I think we are operating under different definition of morals, then. I view morals broadly, as general codes of human behavior. I don't really differentiate between moral actions (i.e. stopping to pick up a hitchhiker) and rational actions (i.e. deciding he looks sketchy and driving on) because, of course, morals can be rational, and often are.

To put it another way, I think you could look at morals as computer programs. You would classify your moral as:

• If hitchhiker, stop car and let in.

But I would classify your moral as a more complex behavioral code:

• If hitchhiker, stop car and let in, unless
—carrying an axe
—covered in blood
—visibly unhinged

All morals have rational exemptions. We would agree that it's "moral" to jump into the ocean to save our girlfriend. But this moral is controlled by rational exemptions—UNLESS there are sharks, UNLESS we don't know how to swim, UNLESS risking our life to do so would present greater danger to the rest of the ship, etc. These aren't separate from the moral, they're part of the moral code.

Earlier I had defined laws as simply morals that are enforced by society. And look at how complex laws are—look at all the exemptions and specific situational conditions in any modern law system. They're still part of the "law."

Anyway, out of what seems like 10 pages of discussion on this, that is the closest I have come to understanding your view that consciousness is the basis for your morals.

I wonder if the root of our disagreement lies in our differing thoughts on how, or whether, morals can be influenced by rational thought.

And I'd still like to hear a definition of "spirit."

[tlj009]

I wonder if the root of our disagreement lies in our differing thoughts on how, or whether, morals can be influenced by rational thought.

Our disagreement here is almost surely based on that. And it isn't that I don't believe rational thought can affect our actions, which you would label as our morals, but that our morals and rational thought are just two things in many that do affect our actions.

And I'd still like to hear a definition of "spirit."

"Spirit" is a little hard to define. I am mainly using it as the nature of a person. When you watch kids, you can distinguish different natures within them early on. I am yet to see that nature change throughout a person's life. Now due to certain experiences, a person may ignore their nature and therefore adjust their actions but the nature is still present. A person can be kind or mean by nature and have an experience that causes them to suppress those urges. But it is still in that persons nature. And before you compare it to emotions, anger is an emotion, mean is a characteristic.

You can come up with all kinds of reasons for a person's actions. Just as you did with "women and children first in a sinking boat" and you may be right in your answers. Genetic conditioning may play a large part in it. But people don't sit down and say, "hey due to years of evolution, I think that I will let women and children go first when a boat sinks." Instead the thought is simply that letting women and children go first (and drowning yourself) is better than saving yourself and letting them drown. The moral decisions are made because something within people separate from their rational mind makes the decision.