Sometimes, I wish there was objective good and evil. And that I had a sense to recognize it.
Instead, I'm limited to thinking about things and asking others their perspective. So I'm wrong basically all the time, and so are you.
I wish morality was like a video game, with a karma score visible to others. Positive and negative scores assigned for each action.
Or, a deontologically true system where certain actions count as infinitely bad. Murder, lying, that sort of thing.
Maybe even a virtue system, accurately predicting if you will act like a shitheel or a good person when faced with difficulty.
I wish for something like this most of the time. But, Socrates taught me a long time ago that'd be pointless -- that we have to create our own morality or else it is meaningless. It'd also be a terribly efficient police state.
But hey, nothing wrong with wishing.
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And sometimes I think there is and that I do, but that I have the ability to not listen to it. And that, like all my senses, it is somewhat limited.
ReplyDeleteAny simple system is gameble. In a world with objective good and evil, you get terrible people that read as "good".
ReplyDeleteI feel like that wouldn't solve the biggest problem with morality and ethics: appropriate actions in the aftermath of immoral or unethical acts.
ReplyDeleteIsn't the first step in taking appropriate actions in the aftermath recognizing that you committed an immoral or unethical act?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I feel like the conversation on what an appropriate response is often gets hung up on who's the real victim. Objective truth solves that nicely, and even lets you know //how// immoral it was. When you know that Bob just dropped -4 alignment, it's much easier to decide what to do about it.
I don't agree.
ReplyDeleteExample: We already know serial killers have acted immorally and unethically.
So, death penalty: yes or no? If no, then what?
These are already things we struggle with. If what you're getting at is that an objective system would tell you how to act because by definition there are moral actions in response to immoral acts, then choosing not to take the moral choice in response to an immoral act begets another moral choice and it's turtles all the way down. If actions in response to immoral choices aren't moral or immoral, then an objective system doesn't help at all because then how do you choose?
The primary argument against the death penalty is that the police, the prosecutors, and the courts are all human and thus fallible. Many people on death row have been retroactively found innocent. In a system of objective evil, all those issues go away. Now, I'm sure there would still be arguments over wherever the new equilibrium fell.
ReplyDeleteAll I'm trying to say is that the near-elimination of uncertainty in the suspect's guilt would nicely streamline the process.
My read of this scenario is that you'd:
ReplyDelete1. Know objectively if an act was moral or immoral.
2. Have a publicly available score card of your morality score.
So, unless there was a publicly available list of how you got your score, then you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a lifelong petty thief and liar vs a murderer. So all the same objections to whether the suspect is innocent of the crime in question still stands.
My interpretation of the original scenario is that when you see an act being done, you'd know if it was moral or immoral. You'd also know if the person you're looking at had done more immoral things than good things. It still doesn't really help you determine what to do next, because in this scenario, immoral acts are still possible, so you could still choose to do them. So how do you choose?
Oh! Though, yeah, it would totally eliminate the personal rationalization that something you're doing is moral when it isn't. You'd know.
ReplyDeleteI kind of find it comforting that I'm wrong all the time and so are you. Is that weird?
ReplyDeleteMo Jave I don't think so.
ReplyDeleteMy read of the scenario also includes a note like:
ReplyDelete3. The more extreme your score becomes, the more extreme acts it takes to shift it further. So a thousand lies do not add up to a murder.
Given that, from the point of view of the justice system, I think it would be credible to punish based on current score. They may not know everything you did to get it, but they know you did, and how evil you are.
Also provides some really nice guidelines for early release and parole.
As for the individual trying to figure out how to response to an act done in their presence, well, they have to decide what sort of person they want to be...
This exploded in the best way possible while I wasn't looking; with polite disagreement from smart people!
ReplyDeleteI figure there's at least two different ways this could go, and I kinda hinted at them in the original post:
-- perfect past calculus
-- perfect future prediction
Both could assign various weights to different crimes. For example, in either murder could be negative infinity, or merely 10 thefts. I don't know what a moral point is, and it is compromising to think about it that way anyway. The infinite weight to a person lets me get away from that, but I don't know if it is a thing I believe in. I just don't know.
With the perfect past calculus, we only know your current score. Kimberley Lam (probably) gains some points every day for checking in on her friends, while I (probably) lose some on mero for unknowingly being a shitheel.
With the perfect future prediction, though, we'd know if someone is going to be terrible in the future. Mo Jave (probably) has a positive score because she's gonna publish more warbirds; I'd (probably) have a negative ones because I'm going to be an unthinking shitheel on metro.
Which is scarier? The public past perfect knowledge of someone's crimes, or the perfect future prediction?
Scarier: perfect past calculus. We already know what that looks like: profiling. A score without context or rate of change is meaningless except as a vehicle for an agenda.
ReplyDeletePerfect future prediction doesn't scare me because I already know I'm going to be terrible, and that there are scenarios where I would willingly choose a horribly immoral path. I made my peace with that a long time ago.
People hurt other people. My interest has always been in who I would be in the aftermath of that.
I've got a feels the perfect future would also look like profiling, and we'd put all the people who're going to do terrible things together in one place. Or, maybe worse, we don't.
ReplyDeleteI don't know which of those scares me more.
I guess it would depend on how much detail we got in the perfect future prediction and whether the prophecies are changeable or self-fulfilling.
ReplyDelete(And that question got tackled in the latest Marvel Civil War II storyline. There's your trivia for the night!)
And now my brain insists larp.
ReplyDeleteThanks guys. :P
Mo Jave Dreamation 2018?
ReplyDeleteLOL! No! Too many projects!
ReplyDelete