I think we have instinctive feelings, but they're definitely emotional reactions to stimuli.
BUt I think intuition is a bit different as its tied to something other than a pure subjective reaction. Theres some qualification about it, a judgement implying one action is good and another bad and not just because we like it for personal reasons. Its pretty consistent and spontaneous.
Lynch mobs engage in justice as they see it. I doubt you'd agree though. Justice as an abstraction can be a righteous act to one person and an atrocity to another.
But a lynch mob is more about the punishment rather than justice itself. They all may agree that justice needs to be served but disagree on the penalty.
To say that both people work towards an abstract concept of justice is fine....but they are not applying the same principles of justice if they hold any at all.
Not applying the same principle of justice or applying personal feelings according to how it effects them personally. Like some say "don't let your anger blind you from whats the right thing to do".
Well from their perspective, your sense of justice is warped. Who is correct?
I don't think morals work in isolation from each other and justifying justice through say personal revenge or might makes right can be unjustied if its contravening other moral principles. We are also rational beings who can work this out. But if we are blinded by emotions or some ideology that denies justice then its not justified. Like taking the law into your own hands.
How do we know they are wrong and you aren't?
I was talking about how they know about justice in the first place rather than if they are right or wrong about its application. If they did not know about justice then their behaviour would just be all instinct like a predator seeking to guard their territory or something like that.
Most of us don't engage in morality that way. In fact, I would imagine almost none do.
I think you misunderstand what I mean. I am not talking about the reasoning that comes later or what behaviour. But the sense we have about the situation to begin with. When you see someone steal or persons bag you don't stop and think I need to reason this out first to see if its wrong. We usually react/respond immediately and some will actually chase the robber.
They may catch the robber and find they were taking back their bag that was stolen. So the rationalisation is that they were not really stealing but getting their rightful possession back. But it was the sense that it was wrong in the first place that hasn't been rationalised and that is what I think is in us that makes us sensitive to moral situations regardless of rationality.
The intuition or its rationalization?
Yes find its wrong later through reasoning.
Wrong in what sense? Factually or morally?
Well thats the thing we are trying to determine I think. Why does a infant react like its wrong, want to stop the injustice and even punish the bad guy. At this stage theres no rational yet their behaviour seems about what we adults call moral right and wrong.
Are our moral norms abitrarily made up according to subjective feelings or preferences or do they have some deeper basis. Ultimately we cannot know this for sure but our experience seems to point to it being more than feelings and that we are getting at something objective. But not in the physical sense. So its sort of moral and factual in that sense. Or at least qualified by something other than feelings.
I would strongly disagree.
Put it this way the majority of philosophers support moral realism and think that intution qualifies a proposition. If there were two propsoitions they choose the one that best fits our intution as being the right one.
I would say it depends on how the are arguing. Are they sitting over dinner disagreeing in a normal conversational tone....or are they on the street screaming at one another?
Well obviously whether at home or on the streets if its arguing with some emotion then this is what pricks our ears morally. Its like a sign that something could go wrong even though that in itself is not necessarily immoral. Or maybe you could say its sort of immoral in that your being abusive but thats not always the case.
The author also has no rational way to read the minds of babies.
No they can only go on behavioural findings. But they also know the cognition ability of babies through the same study methods which has been around for a long time. But it could be that infants have more cognitive ability to reason than we think. It seems like infants are reasoning out justice and fairness ect as they are pretty strong in their feelings about x being bad and y being good. If it was just feelings we would expect more variation.
Unlikely as in they are cognitively empty on morals or their strong sense and judgements. When I say cognitively empty I don't mean nothing but the ability to rationalise these moral situations. Theres really not much reasoning going on. More like intuition I think. Baies may see something they expect and are not interested but suddenly fixate on a counter-intuitive event. Maybe they are reasoning at some level but their initial reaction is pretty instant.
Are you conflating justice and fairness?
No because they are different. The tests sudied fairness as in everyone got a fair share of the treats. But they also found that infants were happy when the bad guy was punished for denying the treats fairly. That was the interesting part which for me sort of qualified it as not just being arbitratily determined.
I would agree that we don't go around with a list of moral laws or principles in our heads. We have emotional reactions and intuitions for certain....but they are emotional and reactionary to stimuli.
Thats the question are they just unqualified arbitrary emotional reactions. They seem qualified and even when we over react we say thats wrong. Thats seems to be some objective basis. Maybe our emotions are instinctual but we also have this instinctual sense that qualifies them. They go hand in hand and one without the other becomes unqualified.
I disagree. Ever see the movie The Martian? Matt Damon gets stuck alone on Mars? Just asking for a short thought experiment.
Not sure what you mean. When I say has to tave some starting point I don't mean morals themselves but some sense that leads us to be moral and create morals. Like arobot doesn't have morals, I would say most animals don't have morals in that way. But for some reasons and not just because of higher intelligence or instinct to protect for survival we have this sense that doing certain things to others provokes us to act morally to make moral judgements.
You say "sense" but I'm still not sure what you mean.
Either do I in some ways. Its hard to explain and being that this sense lacks any rational for infants at least in a way that adults can later rationalize it seems hard to explain exactly what that is. You could call it gut feeling which also lacks a rational. Gut feeling or intuition seems to be more than just feelings.
If you're asking why we have morals at all, I'd suggest it's because we're social animals.
Yes but other creatures are social animals yet an ape will say kill a baby to get mating rights as a matter of survival and this is perfectly ok. When a lion kills someone we don't put it on trial for murder. We respect their instincts.
Assigning value is a choice. If you had a list of tasks to do....but you couldn't possibly finish them in a day....you would choose which ones to do, based on whatever you personally value.
It depends as there are all sorts of reasons where you have to weigh up the pros and cons or even moral value as some choices involve ethics and others don't. It seems when it comes to morals that value is pretty consistent and we put certain things at the top of the list universially.
But to put them at the top of the list in the first place is what I am talking about. If we never had this moral sense that makes morals matter we would treat those choices like any other choice or not even rate them as mattering to make them a priority.
Value is assigned....not sensed.
Value cannot even be assigned if we diedn't have some sense that the values matter. Its later that we bother to assign value.
Right. You haven't explained what you mean by a moral principle though. Justice can mean wildly different things to wildly different people because it's an abstraction....not a principle.
An example of a principle would be "I believe people should be free to express themselves in speech"
Now, that's not a moral principle, but it's a principle.
I think the principle stands intrinsic and all else stems from this so it could be that we are talking about secondary values that stem from that. Like innocence before guilt. Everyone has the right to a fair trial regardless of what others think or feel (going back to the lynch mob or Mafia revenge killings).
They are abstractions because they represent a wide range of possible things. Many of those things you wouldn't consider justice.
I think your talking about how justice is applied rather than its truth principle. That justice is applied differently is another issue. Even if justice is applied differently the fact that its applied at all is the point. We have this sense that people deserve justice as part of being human. We could have evolved to not be concerned about that.
If you mean to say, ideas are real, sure.
Yes something that can change reality of the world.
I don't know how you would begin to prove a "justice" as "true".
Its simple really. Through our experience of it, just like through our experience of the physical world. We testede Justice over a long time and the findings pointeed to some truth prinicples justice being one. We seen when you deny it bad stuff happens that leads to more babd stuff. But when applied for the most part it allows us to live together in relative peace and good order.
The thing is we probably knew this already but because we can also cause injustice we can deny it and it takes denying it to rediscover and reinforce it with a better understanding. The same understanding of justice we have today applied a 1,000 years ago but we just denied it for various reasons. You could say we were less conscious of it because there was sufficent reason to.
Objective reality doesn't appear to be affected something that can be destroyed.
I mean they are related and not seperate. So if we choose to breach these moral truths we also end up destroying things, the planet itself and we alter objective physical reality. Once we have pristine forest and now we have concrete jungles and now the atmosphere is changing. Like that I mean.
Plenty of societies have fallen and the earth still exists.
Yeah the earth is pretty resilent. But that doesn't mean we are slowly and by small steps destroying the planet.
That's exactly what the mafia does.
Not as babies. That marfia buy as an infant would not be calling for the good guy to be killed. Morals work within a system and not in isolation. The marfia kill the good guy and praise the bad guys because they have some warped sense of morality. They have been influenced by their greed and power as a method to achieve what everyone else achieves through adhering to moral codes as a matter of principles not subject to personal feelings or rationalisations due to personal reasons.
I don't know what you mean by this. You can't feel anyone else's feelings. You can read cues....like facial expressions...but again, you're just reacting emotionally to stimuli.
But we can put ourselves in the shoes of others and this to some extent allows us to feel what they may feel or imagine and that seems enough for us to not want bad things to happen to others. That in turn leads to moral principles like justice and kindness towards others.
I think I will leave it here as otherwise its a pretty long post.
though I had a couple of old school teachers thank God that hadn't yet been cancelled.
