The sandpit of cat turds that is "morality-proper"
Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2020 10:55 pm
There will obviously be no end to the "morality-proper" nonsense we are going to be force fed with, so here's a generic response for all of them from now on. It happens to apply broadly to several posters who all make a similar form of mistake that can be summarised as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Consider a small child who sits in a sandpit playing with cat turds. A kindly stranger walks up and asks him what he is doing. "This is the man" says the child pointing to the smaller of the turds, "and this is his house", he says, pointing to the larger one. The turd man then enters his turd house in a manner that we shall not describe, other than the noise of it, which goes "squish". "Perhaps you should stop playing with cat shit" suggests the kindly stranger. "You fat ugly fool" responds the disgusting child "if you were inside my sandpit you would realise this is not poop, this is a man-proper entering his house-proper, you're a big stupid head who doesn't understand my sandpit of fact because you lack understanding of the sandpit-proper". After a moment's thought the kindly stranger gets the hell outta there, because that's some fucked up nonsense. We should probably demote him, he walked away from a child covered in cat poo, that's not very kindly really. But none of my stories ever really has a hero, why start now? He is handsome though, perhaps debonair, so we will let him off.
"Why the exciting parable with the meandering ending?" you may ask. "I mean it's great, but it's not illuminative, you are a notorious bastard FlopDandiePoots". Well I am glad you asked. We have an infestation of utterly inadequate eliminatory moral thoeries that purport to supply a factual basis for morality, and I am getting bored of them all. If that was what they actually did (establish moral fact), these theories would be descriptive of morality - actual morality, the component of our lives that we think about frequently and discuss every day, usually without need for specialists in fields such as anthropology, neuroscience or anything at all involving the word "quantum". There is no adult you ever meet who is not capable of discussing morality with you in some pretty significant detail, and you have never met two people who hold exactly the same moral views as each other, not once, and you never will.
To provide a descriptive account of morality as it is actually practiced and understood, we must allow for all the uses that actual people use the thing for, and all the situations in which they do actually use it. This does include considering whether it is wrong, and morally so, to do the following things...
[1]place unwanted kittens in a sack and throw that sack in the river.
[2]steal the ring from a corpse's hand at a funeral, even if nobody notices.
[3]engage in an unfair transaction (assuming it is possible for even a mutually beneficial transaction to be unfair, which is a subject of potential disagreement)
[4]abuse of power over people
[5]abuse of power over animals
[6]small lies
[7]massive lies
[8]having sex with your own dead grandma and then getting her dog to lick your genitals clean
... it at least makes sense to consider such things in a moral context and using moral vocabulary exactly as we already do. They fit easily and obviously within our normal everyday standard discussions of what it could mean for an action to be morally right or morally wrong. Especially the last one, which is so incredibly immoral that I can be judged unfavourably just for typing it!
Instead we are subjected to painfully artificial explanations that it is not immoral to do anything at all to an animal or a corpse, just some sort of madness. And why do we have to put up with this? Because somebody has some grand theory about moral fact, but sadly for them a large chunk of our actual moral vocabulary doesn't fit, so they want to eliminate it. This is not descriptive of morality, this is replacing morality with something smaller, meaner, and cheaper to produce. These are Genuine American Cheese theories: nasty, fake plasticky stuff that must have its relationship to the real thing constantly asserted for fear nobody would notice there was one otherwise.
In other words, they are prescriptive where the need is to be descriptive. They tell us what may be viewed through a moral lense, instead of asking what is actually seen. Failure is guaranteed for all such efforts, they have absurd conclusions such as that it is not immoral to drown kittens. not every one of these people is all that great with metaphor and stuff, so I may need to point out that the authors of those theories are not the kindly stranger, they are the child, sitting in their own special logical domain, insisting that their fake product is the real thing. Until they understand that you need a descriptive theory that relates in full to morality as a human practice that is actually in use rather than a fraudulent theoretical framework of unconvincing faux-knowledge that nobody can recognise, there they will sit, covering themselves in poo.
It doesn't help incidentally that their faux-knowledge always happens to tally exactly with their current moral opinions, as if an actual science just would just give your own intuitions back to you as fact. This obvious slice of fuckery also pisses me off.
Sure, we all know what it is that they are trying to do, and I'm sure we all agree it would be nice if morality and all that goes with it had simple answers that were $true, so that we could point at a truth in the matter and the person who was misbehaving could realise their error and all would be super-duper in the world... But insisting we all must replace the thing they cannot describe accurately, with the meagre alternative which they resist describing in any detail, is never going to work.
Consider a small child who sits in a sandpit playing with cat turds. A kindly stranger walks up and asks him what he is doing. "This is the man" says the child pointing to the smaller of the turds, "and this is his house", he says, pointing to the larger one. The turd man then enters his turd house in a manner that we shall not describe, other than the noise of it, which goes "squish". "Perhaps you should stop playing with cat shit" suggests the kindly stranger. "You fat ugly fool" responds the disgusting child "if you were inside my sandpit you would realise this is not poop, this is a man-proper entering his house-proper, you're a big stupid head who doesn't understand my sandpit of fact because you lack understanding of the sandpit-proper". After a moment's thought the kindly stranger gets the hell outta there, because that's some fucked up nonsense. We should probably demote him, he walked away from a child covered in cat poo, that's not very kindly really. But none of my stories ever really has a hero, why start now? He is handsome though, perhaps debonair, so we will let him off.
"Why the exciting parable with the meandering ending?" you may ask. "I mean it's great, but it's not illuminative, you are a notorious bastard FlopDandiePoots". Well I am glad you asked. We have an infestation of utterly inadequate eliminatory moral thoeries that purport to supply a factual basis for morality, and I am getting bored of them all. If that was what they actually did (establish moral fact), these theories would be descriptive of morality - actual morality, the component of our lives that we think about frequently and discuss every day, usually without need for specialists in fields such as anthropology, neuroscience or anything at all involving the word "quantum". There is no adult you ever meet who is not capable of discussing morality with you in some pretty significant detail, and you have never met two people who hold exactly the same moral views as each other, not once, and you never will.
To provide a descriptive account of morality as it is actually practiced and understood, we must allow for all the uses that actual people use the thing for, and all the situations in which they do actually use it. This does include considering whether it is wrong, and morally so, to do the following things...
[1]place unwanted kittens in a sack and throw that sack in the river.
[2]steal the ring from a corpse's hand at a funeral, even if nobody notices.
[3]engage in an unfair transaction (assuming it is possible for even a mutually beneficial transaction to be unfair, which is a subject of potential disagreement)
[4]abuse of power over people
[5]abuse of power over animals
[6]small lies
[7]massive lies
[8]having sex with your own dead grandma and then getting her dog to lick your genitals clean
... it at least makes sense to consider such things in a moral context and using moral vocabulary exactly as we already do. They fit easily and obviously within our normal everyday standard discussions of what it could mean for an action to be morally right or morally wrong. Especially the last one, which is so incredibly immoral that I can be judged unfavourably just for typing it!
Instead we are subjected to painfully artificial explanations that it is not immoral to do anything at all to an animal or a corpse, just some sort of madness. And why do we have to put up with this? Because somebody has some grand theory about moral fact, but sadly for them a large chunk of our actual moral vocabulary doesn't fit, so they want to eliminate it. This is not descriptive of morality, this is replacing morality with something smaller, meaner, and cheaper to produce. These are Genuine American Cheese theories: nasty, fake plasticky stuff that must have its relationship to the real thing constantly asserted for fear nobody would notice there was one otherwise.
In other words, they are prescriptive where the need is to be descriptive. They tell us what may be viewed through a moral lense, instead of asking what is actually seen. Failure is guaranteed for all such efforts, they have absurd conclusions such as that it is not immoral to drown kittens. not every one of these people is all that great with metaphor and stuff, so I may need to point out that the authors of those theories are not the kindly stranger, they are the child, sitting in their own special logical domain, insisting that their fake product is the real thing. Until they understand that you need a descriptive theory that relates in full to morality as a human practice that is actually in use rather than a fraudulent theoretical framework of unconvincing faux-knowledge that nobody can recognise, there they will sit, covering themselves in poo.
It doesn't help incidentally that their faux-knowledge always happens to tally exactly with their current moral opinions, as if an actual science just would just give your own intuitions back to you as fact. This obvious slice of fuckery also pisses me off.
Sure, we all know what it is that they are trying to do, and I'm sure we all agree it would be nice if morality and all that goes with it had simple answers that were $true, so that we could point at a truth in the matter and the person who was misbehaving could realise their error and all would be super-duper in the world... But insisting we all must replace the thing they cannot describe accurately, with the meagre alternative which they resist describing in any detail, is never going to work.