Morality - beyond "good" and "bad"

A

Alagar

Registered Senior Member
Many people runs debates during everyday life about ethics without knowing what is the base for their moral beliefe, if there is one.

1. Let's assume there is a god (no relations to any religion, just a creature with all-positive qualitys, one of a kind).

2. If there is one, only it can know what's moral and what's immoral.

3. If there is a god, only it can capture its existence.

Conclusion A: we cannot establish ethics, for only god can know what are the real ones.
Conclusion B: we can't know anything about god's existence.

4. Let's assume there is no god .

Conclusion: No ethics can be established.

Quite painful to think of it - either there is no such thing as moral, or we can't know what that moral is.
people who think there is way to prove a base to form an ethics from are welcome.
 
What kind of world do you want to live in? Your actions reflect the society which would be built if you were in charge.
 
Pardon if it's an insult, I don't intend it to be - but is English not your first language?
I think you're expressing a rather common philosophical maxim, but your last lines seems to fuck things up.

Conclusion: No ethics can be established.
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No - all you've proven is that there is no objective ethics.

Quite painful to think of it - either there is no such thing as moral, or we can't know what that moral is.
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To say there is no such thing as ethics is ridiculous. The English word 'ethics' simply means A set of principles of right conduct. Almost everyone has a set of principles of right conduct. They just aren't objective.
 
There are no Common ethics. Obviously everyone out there conforms to a different moral code, even if nobody is completely sure what, if anything, is objectively right and wrong.
Still, some things are "made" moral by common practice: Example, most people believe torture is unethical/immoral, simply because most other people hold the same belief.
 
This thread reminds me of this quote:

An untroubled mind,
No longer seeking to consider
What is right and what is wrong,
A mind beyond judgments,
Watches and understands.
 
before I continue, I would like to apologise for my poor poor english. It is not my mother toungue (I hope I spelled
that word right), and I'm still havign troubles mastering it.

Tyler, I think you really hit the nail on this one. The only set of principles of right conduct that be established are subjective. Do those subjective sets have any meaning for anyone besides that fellow one? only to those that are in similar conditions . This leaves only one princples of right conduct that is objective - Everything is dependant. Well, it seems Albert Einstein was right after all :)

Meanwhile, are there any conditions that are common to all people, that can help us form a valid objective moral?
 
This is confusing two different issues. Let's say that we do not have any objective yardstick for right and wrong. Does this mean there is no objective right and wrong. Strangely no it doesn't.

If you believe that murder is wrong but then you murder someone then you have done wrong. Your belief that murder is wrong is subjective (and may even be wrong). But your wrongdoing is objective, you have behaved in way that YOU believe is wrong. That is what 'wrongdoing ' is.

After all God himself couldn't judge you as having done wrong if you couldn't have known you were doing wrong. But anybody at all (including yourself) would, on strictly logical grounds, judge you as doing wrong if you did something YOU thought was wrong.

We should not confuse not knowing whether an action is right and wrong with not knowing that right and wrong exist.
 
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