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.
I'm not sure what you mean by intuition then.
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.
Never been part of one so I can't say.
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".
Not applying the same principles. I have every reason to believe that whomever "does justice" sees it as justice no matter how far from justice it seems to anyone else.
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.
What if someone considers "taking the law into their own hands" justice?
This is the problem with your claim of justice as a principle. You and I would probably disagree with such a person I have no reason to believe that they don't see their idea of justice as good.
That's the problem with hiding behind vague abstractions. It doesn't change the fact that we disagree morally on what justice is and when it's good or bad.
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.
You said that someone could have a wrong or warped sense of justice. Again I'm asking you to explain how you know it's wrong. I'm not asking why you think it's wrong.
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.
Emotions.
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.
It depends on the situation.
We usually react/respond immediately and some will actually chase the robber.
If you saw someone steal a french fry off a stranger's plate....you'd chase them?
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.
I don't think we operate that way.
Yes find its wrong later through reasoning.
If your moral intuition can be wrong then how would we know this later?
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.
I think that's reading a lot into the behaviour of babies.
At this stage theres no rational yet their behaviour seems about what we adults call moral right and wrong.
I don't know a babies thoughts....so again, I think the author is just making some guesses.
Are our moral norms abitrarily made up according to subjective feelings or preferences or do they have some deeper basis.
I think we're acculturated into the moral norms of the social groups we're born into or join.
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.
I don't think it does.
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.
No idea what you mean here.
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.
Then I disagree with most philosophers.
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.
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.
I don't know that we don't have more variation. We aren't talking about a guy setting up experiments with babies where he can objectively measure their reactions to injustice. He's just observing and trying to make interpretations of behaviour.
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.
Babies have such limited abilities to physically express these intuitions that if I had the chance to ask the author anything.....I'd ask him how it is that babies act so morally but toddlers so immorally? Young children are downright cruel to each other....quite deliberately...and often take delight in it.
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.
What tests? It's a book. The link didn't provide the research. It just talks about a book.
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.
It doesn't change the underlying problem of not agreeing on what is good.
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.
It was a really simple question of whether or not you've seen a movie.
Regardless, let's imagine you're an astronaut landing on a distant planet but your spaceship breaks upon landing, you have enough food and shelter for several lifetimes, but cannot possibly repair your ship. Any hope of rescue or even communication is absent as you are simply too far or no one knows you are there. As alien life is unknown to mankind....there's no reason to think you'll encounter sentient life. Indeed, only vegetation and primate life exists here...incapable of higher thought or reasoning.
Since you have these moral intutions that give you a sense of right and wrong....go ahead and give a list of behaviors you would consider good and bad in thus situation. It doesn't have to be long. Skip suicide if the reason why you consider it wrong is God.
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.
I don't think that the author is onto anything here. Babies cry for many reasons, boredom, discomfort, surprise, etc. If you put a baby in a room with a crying baby, perhaps that baby will try to comfort the other, perhaps it starts to cry as well, or perhaps it crawls out the open door and escapes the annoying sound. If a baby leaves while another tries to comfort the crying baby....it's weird that is being judged as an immoral behavior as both seen to be attempting to deal with the stimuli of an annoying sound.
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.
We don't judge them morally.
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.
I get what you're saying....I just think you're wrong. Perhaps you can come up with a whole list of moral behaviours, good or bad, in the thought experiment above. I can't. It's not because I don't have any values. I might go exploring for example, because I value the exercise and stimuli of exploration. I can't call this morally good or bad though....those "intuitions" or "senses" or "feelings" as you describe them disappear completely in the thought experiment. It tells me that without the possibility of judgements from a social group....morals disappear.
Value cannot even be assigned if we diedn't have some sense that the values matter. Its later that we bother to assign value.
I disagree. See above.
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).
Actually all throughout history, the tendency of assuming guilt seems to have been more prevalent. Presuming innocence is a rather uncommon feature in systems of justice.
I think your talking about how justice is applied rather than its truth principle.
What's it's truth principle?
That justice is applied differently is another issue.
I think it's the only issue. If you disagree with how it is applied, you probably disagree that justice even occurred.
Even if justice is applied differently the fact that its applied at all is the point.
You described "taking justice into your own hands" as a distorted view of justice. If a man kills another man because of some transgression he believes occurred....would you agree that the man who killed the other has committed an act of justice?
Yes something that can change reality of the world.
Ok.
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.
I disagree.
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.
I disagree. I understand that you have a tendency, like everyone else, to imagine your moral norms as the correct ones....and to resolve the problem of so many others disagreeing....you imagine that somewhere deep down they knew they were wrong. I think the sheer number of social groups making that argument is enough to dismiss it.
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.
I think you and I have a different understanding of physical reality.
Once we have pristine forest and now we have concrete jungles and now the atmosphere is changing. Like that I mean.
Ok...we can build or destroy things but I don't see that as altering physical reality, but a feature of physical reality is our ability to interact with it in some limited ways.
Yeah the earth is pretty resilent. But that doesn't mean we are slowly and by small steps destroying the planet.
Oh I'm sure the Earth will continue to exist. I'm sure you understand that we could launch hundreds of nuclear weapons and throw enough smoke and dust into the sky and irradiate the planet so badly we will end all or nearly all life.
Climate change is the same idea....except we aren't destroying all life in a week....we're each doing it little by little, all 8 billion of us, and it's happening over the course of a few centuries.
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.
You disagree with their moral values....but you agree they see their acts of justice as "good"?
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.
I actually think that's where most moral reasoning and negotiations occur.