from the I'm-morally-opposed-to-statements-about-morality dept.
Simply telling people that their opinions are based on morality will make them stronger and more resistant to counterarguments, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that people were more likely to act on an opinion - what psychologists call an attitude - if it was labeled as moral and were more resistant to attempts to change their mind on that subject.
The results show why appeals to morality by politicians and advocacy groups can be so effective, said Andrew Luttrell, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at The Ohio State University.
"The perception that an attitude we hold is based on morality is enough to strengthen it," Luttrell said.
"For many people, morality implies a universality, an ultimate truth. It is a conviction that is not easily changed."
The key finding was how easy it was to strengthen people's beliefs by using the 'moral' label, said Richard Petty, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at Ohio State.
"Morality can act as a trigger - you can attach the label to nearly any belief and instantly make that belief stronger," Petty said.
Always preface your comments with, "The Lord sayeth..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @10:41AM
So if everyone starts using it as an excuse for their opinion (even immoral things), will it become powerless? Can it be used as a tool for people to accept immoral things?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @10:50AM
Well you know what they say, as long as you appeal to authority, any authority, you can pretty much make people believe anything you say.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @10:55AM
How Daesh came to be where it is today, and how America, Japan, Britain, China, Russia, Germany and many other places made their 'civilized massacres' possible. By appealing to their citizens morals and stating their 'enemy', be it within or outside was contrary to their morals and much be abolished through any means necessary.
And yet we watch the same things being done today, only with just different of a target for few people to notice it is the same horrid crimes, expansionism and narrowing of their minds that has happened innumerable times in the past.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:45PM
"Can it be used as a tool for people to accept immoral things?"
Of course not, because you just redefined it to be moral.
Now, go forth on your moral quest to club to death your neighbor kid's cute kitten.
See? Absolutely moral.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by davester666 on Friday June 03 2016, @08:48AM
Yes, for example see the Catholic Church. It was 'moral' to have the inquisition, just keep moving pedophile priests moving around instead of being put in prison, hiding church assets to not compensate victims, buying indulgences. Stuff like that.
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 02 2016, @10:50AM
Normally I'd be inclined to dismiss a psychological study like this on the grounds that most psychological studies nowadays are crap but being as it was done by one of the nascar greats, I'll at least consider it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:04PM
I would say you are morally obligated to give this study your due consideration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:04PM
Amen.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @10:52AM
"The Lord sayeth I must put meh whenier in yer tiny little bunghole... it's teh moral thing teh do."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dunbal on Thursday June 02 2016, @11:57AM
Hey it works surprisingly well. Just ask any priest or pastor or even politician.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Gaaark on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:08PM
Yea, tho i lay thee down in the valley of my bed, thy shall speak no evil, see no evil and hear no evil as i put mine wiener where i wants to: i will leave the lights on, because Lennon/McCartney said to let it be... let. it. be. let. it. be. yeah. let. it. be.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @06:15AM
"God said to me that I should have many wives!" - Joseph Smith, founder of the cult of mormonism
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @11:44AM
"The world is already overpopulated, and we shouldn't risk making it even worse, so it is a moral imperative that you take it up the pooper tonight."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quintessence on Thursday June 02 2016, @11:13AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExdM0IMDQQw [youtube.com]
The vast majority of moral propositions really don't stand up to scrutiny, and anymore I'm highly suspicious of moral claims.
The study only confirms that the heart of most morality is illogical, unreasonable, and unwavering in the face of evidence. And this is to be the basis of ethical considerations?
And especially as most morality is imbued from without instead on within, it reduces people to automatons as it removes the most basic aspect of morality- choice. If people are not free to choose, there can be no implicit morality anymore than a falling rock is moral.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 02 2016, @03:42PM
Morality and ethics cannot be separated. Without morality, ethics are entirely arbitrary and without meaning.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quintessence on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:10PM
Completely disagree. Ethics can give you a framework of different concepts to take into consideration without getting into the moral ought. I can make an argument for harm reduction, expediency, what is viable, etc. without making a claim for good vs. bad. In fact, I'd argue ethics functions better in this auxiliary role as it avoids the pomposity of claiming absolute knowledge of a near divine good, and instead puts moral reasoning as it actually practiced: fuzzy, full of contradictions, and frequently operating with incomplete information.
Even a brief overview of moral philosophers makes clear NO ONE has a clear grasp of what defines morality, and yet I'm expected to accept a claim for something that can't even be agreed upon?
Nope, we'd do better to try and remove morality from the public discourse as much as possible and leave it as a private affair where your are free to abuse your mind as you see fit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:51PM
You're entitled to your opinion, but it's wrong. Without morality to tell you why you should do something, there is no "why". Logic in ethics can be fascinating and lead you to extremely well thought out conclusions but without a kernel of morality there is no way to evaluate the value of outcome A over outcome B. Unless you have a desired outcome, which can only come from morality, all the logic in the world means nothing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @06:12PM
Common fallacy.
You can justify a "why" based on stated preferences. You don't have to include any notion of Good or Evil.
This is how you get the Insidious and Wicked scourges of moral nihilism, and amoral utilitarianism polluting your vital fluids and ... giving people reasons to do things that are not based in Good and Evil.
Now, you can avoid this by trying to redefine a preference for avoiding pain as a moral position, or something like that, but only contorting a notion of morality far beyond any definition that people generally recognise, since even base invertebrates avoid pain, but they don't generally represent what we would understand as moral agents.
A large part of the problem is there is no objective morality, since people's perceptions of what constitutes morality depends on the moral code they accept, and that's a matter of taste and opinion. You can find people barking bumper sticker level slogans at each other, frothing with rage in their conviction that they're all right and the other person is all wrong on every conceivable level, and you can't convince either party of anything since they accept their own moral position as axiomatic. Ergo, a proper response to "That's immoral!" is always "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 02 2016, @07:07PM
Morality is not good and evil. Those are higher constructs tacked on later to justify yourself for doing what you feel like doing and merely confuse the issue. Morality is simply the emotional "why" that you eventually come back to if you keep asking "why <anything>". Ethics are logic applied to extend that "why". Simple, yeah?
The only purely logical thing you can do is kill yourself, as soon as is convenient, because the eventual death of the universe makes all actions irrelevant and thus wasted effort. Everything else is based on emotion if you look closely enough.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Thursday June 02 2016, @07:27PM
And again, complete disagree.
I'll use the example of Kierkegaard's treatment of Issac: your feelings may be not to kill your child, but submitting to god's will makes it moral. In fact, morality is often going against what you feel like doing to serve some higher purpose or whatnot. Otherwise it's just rationalizations after the fact.
Appeals to emotion based morality is setting a pretty low bar and invalidates ethical reasoning. You can't have it both ways.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 03 2016, @02:35AM
Of course it's rationalization after the fact. Organized creeds of morality are nothing more than you subscribing to someone else's rationalizations. Personal morality has no need of good and evil as concepts. There was morality long before those concepts were created. There is what brings you happiness or staves off unhappiness (short term and long often conflict here) and there is what causes unhappiness. We're not talking strictly id reasoning here, nearly every moral concept believed by anyone on Earth falls into one of those two categories. The rest you believe because someone taught you to because it fell into one of those categories for them or someone further back in the creed's history.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @08:17PM
Morality is precisely about the definition of good and evil. What should you do - the imposition of a demand based upon a mandate (or you can be all Kantian and talk about the categorical imperative) based on the idea that some course of action is right and another is wrong.
This was also precisely why Nietzsche (before he went insane) wrote so much about moral philosophy, and the limits of morality and its applications.
Your version that you're proposing, based on the emotional element, fails as a useful level of analysis because it frames the question of why the chicken crossed the road as a moral one, when chickens do not have moral agency. Do they have emotions? Yes. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it felt like it - but when you describe that urge as a moral driver, then it crossed the road as a moral act - by which time you have reduced the meaning of the concept to morality to a degenerate form of the idea. You would then need a new word to describe what we actually talk about when we address ideas of moral philosophy; goodness? evility? conscience theory? Whatever.
And by the way, your recommendation of suicide doesn't apply even in a moral nihilism framework, because even if you reach for utilitarianism you can apply utility (however minor or fleeting) to what you do in the interim. The epicureans chased that rabbit pretty much to ground.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 03 2016, @02:37AM
Morality existed before the concepts of good and evil did. Hell, it existed before Homo Sapiens did. You can see that much in the great apes of today. Come up with another argument.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 03 2016, @12:39AM
Without morality, ethics are entirely arbitrary and without meaning.
No. Morality is very arbitrary. We have demonstrations of that every day. Ethics can provide consistency (such as rules being consistently and fairly applied to a situation) and independence of viewpoint (such as if the parties in an interaction were swapped, the rules wouldn't change), which are non-arbitrary features.
My view is that morality provides a meaning (a different morality, of which there would be many, would provide different meaning) to rules while ethics provides non-arbitrariness to those rules.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 03 2016, @02:54AM
Nah, ethics and morality exist even where there are no rules. Apes have ethics and morality without a rule in sight.
As for ethics being fair? Not remotely. Even attempting fairness is a novel concept to humans and only practiced in a handful of nations around the world. Less than two hundred years ago it was ethical to buy and sell other human beings, for example.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 03 2016, @04:29AM
Nah, ethics and morality exist even where there are no rules. Apes have ethics and morality without a rule in sight.
In sight for you. OTOH, I see a number of rules such as deference to strength, take care of young, and it's wrong to receive a cucumber while your neighbor is rewarded with grapes.
Also, there are two definitions of ethics. One is morality that governs an individual or group's behavior. The second is the branch of knowledge that studies moral principles. Apes have morality, but they don't have the knowledge of moral principles.
As for ethics being fair? Not remotely. Even attempting fairness is a novel concept to humans and only practiced in a handful of nations around the world. Less than two hundred years ago it was ethical to buy and sell other human beings, for example.
If humans never engaged in unfair activities that harm innocents, then most of the need for morality or ethics wouldn't exist. Fairness is an ever-present problem of morality (invariably, unexamined moral behavior gets this wrong) and thus, a common target of ethics. Further, there are an infinite variety of moralities. Ethics, the study of moral principles, is one of the key tools for crafting a morality that is better.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday June 03 2016, @10:20AM
Not any more a rule to them than it is to us. Just a Good Idea.
Ethic. Reason based on morality.
More. Strictly an emotional response.
Oh, they do. They're just unable to spell them out as well as we are. Pick anything that shows "good of the group" over "good of the individual" and you've got ethics; a thought out position based on a moral stance. In lower species this isn't necessarily anything but instinct but in animals capable of even limited abstract thought it always is.
There we agree. Except on what better is. That is entirely subjective.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday June 02 2016, @07:04PM
It's unfortunate, but morality MUST be on the basis of axioms, just like geometry. Innate morality is just one sector of built-in motivations, and there is no logical reason even for living,
What this study is claiming is that the section of motivations that is labelled by the term "morality" is subject to ready manipulation by the social environment so that one doesn't recognize the innate motivations that should be behind it. My guess is that this is probably related to how we evolved to live in large social groups with local customs. Common ways of saying the same thing include "To get along, go along.". And one of the problems with our innate morality is that it's composed of multiple conflicting drives. Morality is the socailly approved way of resolveing the conflict. And to recognize social approval we depend on signals from our social community, i.e., other people.
All that said, it seems wise to me to recognize reduce the moral axioms that it's necessary to accept to near a minimum. Probably not an absolute minimum, as that's likely to be something that is socially destructive even if beneficial to oneself (e.g., "The weak are only there to be eaten.").
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @10:35AM
After reading the Koran neither do I.
Claiming morality while living according to the words of murderer/ thief/pedophile/slaver ..
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday June 02 2016, @11:52AM
Seriously, I find this article morally reprehensible Soylent. You should be ashamed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jdavidb on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:10PM
Always preface your comments with, "The Lord sayeth..."
Morality doesn't have to come from religion. Most people agree on certain basic moral principles: not killing people would be an example. Most atheists have a code of morality and are frequently very moral people by standards most people agree to.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:20PM
Yes, a moral system is a set of rules defining what YOU consider good or evil. Good atheists build their moral system, bad atheists follow the herd. Bad believers follow the herd, good believers question every moral precept coming from their religious leaders to see if it is actually consistent with the religious message. (or at least these are my moral rules to determine good/bad un/believers).
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:40PM
Of course, in some religions those you classify as "good believers" end up getting killed for it.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @02:47PM
Yeah but one of those says that all earthly domains are Satans' (Mt. 4:8) so it's not much surprising.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday June 02 2016, @04:52PM
which is kind of funny; since god is on record for doing far more damage to the world and to humanity than 'satan' ever did.
god is angry, untrustworthy and does not seem to really care about us (by all indications of the xtian bible). satan, otoh, has never tried to destroy the world, sent floods, turned people into salt towers, etc.
but of course, neither is real. both are childhood fear-factors to get you to do what some authority thinks you should do.
we don't believe in roman/greek gods anymore. we don't believe in egyptian gods anymore. it boggles my mind that people can be so selective and say 'well, those WERE fake; ours is real' and not even be aware that across the globe, someone equally valid is saying the same thing about YOU and YOUR chosen set of gods and saints.
its a mystery to me that people who are so sure of their own religion are not able to put themselves in someone else's shoes, look at things from their POV and realize that its ALL arbitrary. your ideas are no better than theirs. they were told by their people that they are right; same as you and your people. why, then, can you be SO SURE that yours is the right one?
water freezes at the same temperature everywhere. its a constant and no sane person argues this. you don't 'believe' that water freezes at 0, it DOES freeze at zero (C). but we give up on this idea of universal truth when it comes to magic sky wizards. for those, we don't require any rational thought or logic. and the reason is (as I said in my previous post) its because they get you when you are young and fill your head with crap that is embedded so deeply and intertwined with 'happy warm emotions' that its nearly impossible to detangle and separate later.
we never program kids to think that 'our' freezing point is not the same as 'theirs'. but we surely do when it comes to religion.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:05PM
You can lambaste me all you like but I will still choose to believe that "love your neighbour as yourself" is far better than anything Daesh has to offer the world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:49PM
far better than anything Daesh has to offer the world
I think I know who you are, AC.... There's only one moron who religiously tries to get people to use that term.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @11:04PM
While I take exception to your calling me a moron, I want to point out that there legions of us who refer to them as Daesh. In fact, quite a few are Arab Muslims, who refuse to bless the group with any hint of legitimacy by implying that they are a legitimate Islamic State. Me? I just like calling them Daesh because they are threatening to cut out the tongue of anyone they catch doing it. If it pisses them off that much then I know I'm getting inside their head and rattling them.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 02 2016, @07:55PM
Oh come off it, even Islam says "he is not a believer who wants not for his neighbor what he wants for himself."
ALL religions figure out the Golden Rule at some point. It's a logical local maximum, even if it's not the absolute maximum, for human behavior. And before you say "But Jesus said the POSITIVE Golden Rule first," no, he didn't; Confucius beat him to it almost by 500 years, using characters which more or less sum up to "as [one's own] heart."
The problem, of course, is in defining who is one's neighbor. And any feeb who says "everyone" in one breath and "but people who don't believe like me get thrown into eternal torture" in the next doesn't know what words mean.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @10:53PM
And you might want to read your Bible a bit more carefully. Moses said it around a thousand years before Confucius. Indeed, if you read the Gospels carefully you will note that Moses is being referenced explicitly (Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34). Another recounting of the story has the Greatest Commandments being recited by "an expert in the Law" when Jesus turns the question back around on him ("How do you read it?") (Luke 10:25-28). Before you deign to educate "feebs" it would be good for you to get an adequate grasp of the material yourself.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 03 2016, @12:35AM
Moses said it around a thousand years before Confucius.
Unless, of course, he didn't. There is a certain problem with relying on the Bible as a historical reference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @02:58AM
Question: why are you willing to accept accounts of Confucius as "historical" but not Moses? What is your basis for accepting one but not the other? I am genuinely curious!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday June 03 2016, @05:04AM
Question: why are you willing to accept accounts of Confucius as "historical" but not Moses? What is your basis for accepting one but not the other? I am genuinely curious!
Confucius was better documented and emulated by a lot more people in his time. The story of Moses has evolved over many more centuries than the tales of Confucius. I doubt it has much resemblance to the original events. For example, most of the Old Testament, including the Book of Leviticus, is heavily tainted by propaganda during the Babylon exile period (which let us note, is at or before the birth of Confucius, so the golden rule as expressed in the Bible probably would still predate Confucius) and after.
Now, maybe Moses did state the golden rule, but it's hard to square that with the stories of merciless Hebrew invaders in the decades after his death.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 03 2016, @03:18AM
Nice try, but if this is actually the case, Christians look WORSE that I portrayed them, as this is one of their usual arguments for Jesus being different from all those other religions' founders. That sound is the sound of 2.2 billion own goals at once. Nice job!
Besides which, Moses...is not the example you want to use. Nor is his demonic God, Yahweh. If YOU would read YOUR Bible a bit more, you'd notice Yahweh has much to say about not eating shellfish or mixing fabric, but has no problem with slavery. You are really, REALLY not in a position to be trying this argument.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @11:29PM
> does not seem to really care about us
getting crucified, a clever way to not really care.
The problem with modern atheists is that, even starting from the hypothesis that there is no god, your arguments are still baseless. Any idiot can disprove an incomplete version of a theorem like you attack a specially crafted "god does not care" religion, and a specially crafted reality where acts against religion have not caused many, many more deaths than the old testament God. Oh but maybe you were talking about satan the character, the one who is behind every death of any descendant of mr. Adam the First having given him the possibility of committing sin? You are a funny guy.
(As an aside, believers say, like, "knowing good and evil means being responsible, able to sin, and ultimately, able to be judged and condemned from that sin. Animals driven by instinct are not responsible. The Genesis story is symbolism about this simple fact" and all you atheists can say about it is "OH BUT THEY ONLY ATE AN APPLE HOW VENGEFUL IS THAT GOD FOR DISOBEYING A PETTY ORDER". Which is pathetic?).
As for the objection I try to infer from your post, starting from the opposite 'there is a god' POV:
1. a god can do whatever, you are not able to judge it because you do not know the ultimate effect of his actions.
Try and disprove "any interaction which we interpret as casual is directly operated by GOD ALMIGHTY with the objective of obtaining the ultimately best possible outcome for the Creation". If you can't disprove the preposterous proposition above, how can you judge any single act? But this is a logic trick, let's see the bigger picture.
2. the previous applies to satan, except that by not being a dual entity but a creature, so his authority is limited to what he can get away with, just like us. It is a fundamental distinction. God is like a programmer who writes code and executes it in his head. Your objection is like saying the programmer cannot remove a piece of code from his "act".
3. acts of men proclaiming to do god's will are obviously not justified by 1. and 2., plus, being less able to talk to God as Satan is able to, you can prove what god's will is, in fact asserting that a god *needs* man to do things should get people struck by lightning with nobody being surprised about it.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Saturday June 04 2016, @05:10AM
lol
just 'lol
you guys beieve quite silly things with zero proof.
save me the wall of text or gish gallop, m'kay?
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday June 04 2016, @10:56PM
Proof of god is the silly concept, m'lord.
Since you might be tempted of theorizing one, I suggest to start with simpler things.
For example you design an AI in a virtual world, the AI gets self aware, how do you show yourself and prove you live beyond the virtual world without AI having to BELIEVE that those pixels making up your avatar are not just part of the virtual world, a prank, or a more powerful AI?
But of course you would be content with a miracle, like all the others.
Miracles unfortunately cannot tell the hypothetical god from a sufficiently resourceful creature. High scientific knowledge, high tech, mind control, and so on. So, back to square one.
In fact when strange things happen to more than one person, the position of those who choose not to believe is "collective hallucination". Not very scientific, but still an equivalent position of a believer.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday June 02 2016, @07:07PM
A small quibble:
Those aren't moral rules. Those are logical rules for implementing your underlying moral system. Morality isn't a mechanism for reasoning, it's a set of principles for evaluating situations and actions.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:21PM
So always preface your comments with, "The Constitution sayeth...."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:37PM
Good thing the constitution can be amended if necessary. But really, I don't see it as unreasonable to expect that the government follow the constitution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:58PM
(1) The history of all religions is constant amending, even so called "literalists" pick and choose what parts to focus on and what contradicting parts to ignore
(2) People make all kinds of shitty arguments and use half-assed constitutional interpretations to justify them.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:36PM
Absolutely. There are in fact quite a few common moral statements that are pretty much universal in human society, and no wonder because those are useful evolutionary adaptations. Here are some of the basic rules:
- Don't kill anybody in your own society. (There's no equivalent rule for those jerks from other societies, though.)
- Take care of children, at least once you know they won't be dead within their first year of life.
- Take care of yourself if you are capable of doing so.
- Be basically honest with those in your own society. (Again, tricking those jerks from other societies may be OK.)
- Respect the elderly, even if you don't heed their advice.
- Don't bang your relatives. (Who exactly qualifies as a relative varies a bit, but immediate family is obviously out.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @03:54PM
- Don't bang your relatives.
I don't see a moral issue with incest if the relationship is consensual. Having children is not a given. Even if the couple wants to have children, the chance of genetic defects is not absolute or even that high in most cases. Even if the child would have genetic defects, they were simply born that way, and they know no other way of living. It's also not necessarily true that a resulting child will have severe enough genetic defects and taxpayers will somehow shoulder some of the burden. We don't forbid couples who would likely (even in cases where it's more likely than incest) produce children with genetic defects from breeding in other cases, yet incest is treated as an especially horrific case. It really just seems like a knee-jerk reaction to me.
This is really a case of people needing to mind their own business, even if they think it's 'icky'.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday June 02 2016, @04:44PM
These moral rules are ones that tend to be enforced by human societies, whether or not they're actually justified. And in the case of incest, that's a pretty universal no-no, with the only real exception being very specific royal bloodlines where the siblings were kept apart from each other growing up so as to not imprint "this person is a relative" on their psyche the way almost everyone does with their actual siblings (this effect is social, not genetic - step-siblings raised together experience the same kind of revulsion).
Also, parent-child and uncle/aunt-niece/nephew incest is never considered consensual because of the power the adult has over the child. Much of sibling incest isn't either, because of the great power differences between the partners. For example, a 17-year-old is in a very different place physically and mentally than a 13-year-old.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:32PM
Also, parent-child and uncle/aunt-niece/nephew incest is never considered consensual because of the power the adult has over the child. Much of sibling incest isn't either, because of the great power differences between the partners. For example, a 17-year-old is in a very different place physically and mentally than a 13-year-old.
That's fallacious reasoning. Just because the adult has power over the child doesn't mean they're actually using it. To say that it is never consensual is just an absurd legal fiction at best. Furthermore, why bring incestuous relationships that involve children into it? You're already starting from a very strange place, and the fact that it's incest is entirely incidental; the subject could be about gay relationships, heterosexual relationships, or anything really. It's possible for a 20 year old to get into an incestuous relationship with their parent; they don't need to do so when they are children. Incest is far more broad than relationships with children, so they can't be treated as the same thing. With that said, I'd be extremely hesitant to trust any social science studies, given the lack of scientific rigor in those fields and the extreme societal bias against incest.
I also don't like this thinking that because someone's brain isn't fully developed, they can't comprehend the consequences of their actions. While this might be true more frequently than if they were older, that doesn't mean it's impossible for them to understand the consequences of their actions, and really, adults are hardly better at this. People drink alcohol and make decisions, make decisions when they are sleepy, make spur-of-the-moment decisions, etc. Really, people in general are bad at long-term thinking. Let people make mistakes and learn from them.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Friday June 03 2016, @03:03AM
...unless they deserve it.
...unless they are exploitable, an economic or societal drain, inconvenient, or someone else's.
...unless someone of higher status compels you to do otherwise, or unless you can compel someone of lower status to do it for you.
...unless they are of a lower status to you; or unless it is an obligation, economically or societally advantageous, convenient or undetectable.
...unless they are exploitable, an economic or societal drain, inconvenient, or someone else's.
...unless it is an obligation; economically or societally advantageous, convenient or undetectable.
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FTFUniversality--references available upon request--or, unfortunately, unnecessary with a fair knowledge of world history and society in general :(
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday June 02 2016, @04:45PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday June 05 2016, @07:08AM
Thanks for having the intellectual honesty to admit that. Of course, you still think all non-Christians are going to fry, riiiiight?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:16PM
It is your moral duty to avoid systemd wherever possible!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:01PM
Here I've been avoiding systemd by switching distros and trying BSD. Now I feel compelled to support it, in opposition to you. Damnit!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:27PM
When you are having a discussion and put X on the table it is OBVIOUS that all the other stuff becomes less prominent.
When X is morality, which is something unfalsifiable, and which the honest person has already pondered for a while, it is OBVIOUS that the positions are not going to change easily.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:35PM
I feel that repeatedly saying something is "OBVIOUS" is trying to invoke the same effect as stating something is moral.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Touché) by Bot on Thursday June 02 2016, @02:41PM
OBVIOUSLY.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday June 03 2016, @01:42AM
Obviously. [youtube.com]
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday June 02 2016, @05:42PM
That's just Common Sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @12:57PM
Oh wait--you're telling me that if someone prefaces their argument by saying it's rooted in a higher authority, we're more willing to believe it?
That's news?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority [wikipedia.org]
Now that we're all de facto atheists, we're struggling to find a place to root our morality or ethics. [1] Hard to appeal to authority when there is none. Stuff like "Hate Speech" and "Codes of Conduct" become the new Torah because we threw all that old dusty scroll junk in the incinerator.
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1. "Say what you want about national socialism--at least it's an ethos!," Soubchek, Walter, 117
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:38PM
Looks like some theist is a bit butthurt today.
Visited your priest lately?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @02:13PM
Maybe he did visit his priest earlier, and that's why he's butthurt....
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday June 03 2016, @03:20AM
I doubt it. SN doesn't let 8 year olds post here.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday June 03 2016, @10:35AM
We are not all atheists. There are for sure some followers of the Great Spaghetti Monster. But maybe when talking about moral and ethics it would be better to not mix it with religion and have a look at e.g. philosophy [wikipedia.org] instead, e.g. the categorical imperative?
Btw: camilla cream helps against the pain I heared... scnr
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:08PM
If someone tells me something is moral without providing any evidence or reasoning, I would like to think I would be less likely to believe them.
However I am aware that skepticism is not considered a virtue by most of the populace.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Thursday June 02 2016, @01:54PM
There are some people who are such good storytellers, that they can use their (very readable) stories as a canvas to paint a description of a moral story, which is too large & complicated to convey to the feeble reader's mind in any more direct way.
I'm thinking of Terry Pratchett now; he was already a very good storyteller, and then I saw shining through some of his later stories the outlines of larger morality tales. But always in a very delicate, subdued way, so if you didn't spot it, it wouldn't bother you, or distract you from the adventures of the trolls & dwarfs & cetera.
If only it wasn't so warm or if only I was smarter, I could give some examples of what I mean.. maybe the end of Hogfather; or some of the Watch stories about the difference between soldiers and police and criminals.
I think that appeals to morality are easy things to communicate; but what morality you actually mean, is much harder to communicate, and only few people can do it in a way that comes across.
What was the morality of the "mullah" who presumably responded to religious scholar Farkhunda Malikzada [wikipedia.org]'s religious complaint of desecration with: "Now I shall call you someone who burned the Quran, so you will get killed instead of me!"? [WARNING: link is sickening]
Did the gullible idiots who listened to mr. Snake-oil actually think about the situation before acting? I don't think so.
As I grew up I encountered lots of priests trying their stinking best to explain the stories of Jesus to youths. This was the good kind of priests (obviously. the "appeal to authority" kind leads downhill to Gehenna). They get special training to talk to young people, but it can't be an easy job, conveying the Bible's morality tales to the next generation. When I finished school, I still had my love for stories, and I didn't have a visceral hatred for everything catholic, so I was a bit of an exception to the rule in university. Maybe the priests in my village were just better than the average, and the average was trained in the "appeal to moral authority" school.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @09:49PM
As Samuel Vimes said, "Remember, you're an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gringer on Thursday June 02 2016, @02:09PM
I've recently decided that I will try not to disallow something on purely moral grounds (particularly when talking about what my children can do). This applies to reasons like "because I said so", "because we've always done it that way", and "because it's polite".
There are frequently other reasons to disallow things, and I prefer explaining things in that way rather than falling back on what can't be argued against.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 02 2016, @02:18PM
the jews have been using the "muh holocaust" argument for what seems like forever now when questioned about their actions.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 02 2016, @02:25PM
A guy named Norman Finkelstein wrote a book called, "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History [amazon.com]," on that subject. You might find it interesting.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2016, @01:02AM
troll or not, but true.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday June 02 2016, @04:43PM
these are magic 'get out of jail' cards, of a sort.
if you are in the south, you can get away with murder, nearly, if you invoke those words. you can absolutely get away with hate and discrimination when you invoke those words, too.
the problem is respect FOR religion. that's the problem. we indoctrinate kids way too early with mind control and illogic that was done the same way for their parents and so on. when you get to kids so young, you form 'thinking bonds' that are really hard to undo. a protective shell is formed around concepts like motherhood, family and religion. the first two are useful and beneficial to society. the last clearly is not, if you've been awake at all during your lifetime.
as long as we continue this mass brainwashing (world wide, this is not about US but its yet another fact about humanity) we will have to deal with the 'god said so and I'm not about to question god!' bullshit. total cop-out. put your brain on hold, just do what you're told!
and if we could finally decouple morality from religion, we'd be able to progress and really reach our maximum potential as beings. but the same disease keeps getting passed down generation to generation, almost without exception.
as an outsider (no religion in me, none at all) I can see the absurdity of it. I was raised as most were, with the usual amount of 'god said this, we believe it, too' crap, but over time (decades) I was able to nullify that bad and useless thinking. most people are not able to overcome that cocoon that was woven and protected over their lifetimes. they even consider it something of value!
society is slowly stopping the punishment and banishment for those who reject the idea of religion and 'magic'. but its still a long road ahead before its openly acceptable (in most places in the world, the US, too!) to state that you do NOT believe in magic sky fairies. the ability to choose and not be forced - that will open more minds, over time. in the recent past, you could be run out of town or killed for saying such things. at least today, you can find places to live where you won't be outcast for not following the 'flock'. over time, if we continue, we might free ourselves of this cancer. but we're not there yet.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2, Informative) by donkeyhotay on Thursday June 02 2016, @09:07PM
Which is why people have used religion to justify wars since time immemorial. Religion gets blamed for war, but in reality conflict almost always comes about because some person or group says, "They got something I want. Imma take it." And to bolster that line of thinking, they find a way to attach it to religious beliefs. It not only works, but it works too well. Thanks, psychologists, for telling us something we already know.
Now, if they could do a study or experiment detailing how to counteract the morality effect, THAT would be something.