Everybodyknows
The good guys lost
I'm approaching it historically, in that I'm talking about the origins/foundations of human morality. I suppose 'maximising social benefit' is a rather cold way of putting it. I'm thinking way back to hunter gatherer society where the simple act of cooperation is sufficient to explain the foundation of morality in terms of benefit/harm without invoking some higher prefect good beyond ourselves.Maximizing social benefit is a problematic way to measure things. To take a page out of The Brothers Karamazov, if paradise is built upon the suffering of a single child, is the price worth it? Do we really want to base concepts of good and evil on a capitalist model: maximizing profits and minimizing costs?
With time these basic moral values became instilled in us and we no longer do them simply for the benefit (even though they are still beneficial) but rather because they have become ideals and feel right. Morality has become an abstraction, a complex collection of ideas and ideals, far less simple than the view I've been presenting. I'm merely going back in time to illustrate morality in it's simplest form.
What is you view of virtues? Are virtues objectively defined or are they measured by beneficial results? In saying that "what is psychologically and socially healthier for the individual" you still seem to be approaching morality in terms of well-being or benefit.I'm all about virtue ethics--that morality is something to be lived and that a moral life is determined by what is psychologically and socially healthier for the individual, most strongly tied into the concept of living authentically rather than simply being carried along in a cloud of excuses. That's much easier said than done, of course, which would be my answer to the thread.
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