What is a moral absolute?
In order to understand what it is, it is maybe easier to say what it is not.
it is not “Fairness” life isn’t fair, get over it. it isn’t “Mercy”, that is the domain of the merciful who often don’t exist, and it damned sure isn’t “Justice” because justice is a moving target.
One thing moral absolutes are not, and have nothing to do with, are Crime, and Punishment.
Lots of things are crimes, and they are not remotely immoral. Speeding on a long stretch of highway in the desert? Crime. Not immoral. Speaking your mind in Chicom country? Crime. not immoral. In fact a great deal of crime, and the laws that are aimed at controlling behavior, are not about immoral behavior at all, and as often as not the very law itself is immoral, because it is a theft; it’s a crime to carry a loaded firearm in Illinois except under the most stringent of circumstances, and that in and of itself is immoral, because it robs the individual of his or her right to defend his or her person.
No, to discuss justice or mercy or crime or punishment or fairness in the same breath as moral absolutes is to grossly misunderstand the meaning of moral absolute, and we can always return to the basic moral absolute of theft, because a lot of other moral absolutes are based on it. Kill someone? you are stealing their right to live. Rape someone? Stealing from them their ability to determine what happens to their own body.
A moral absolute is something that is wrong no matter who does it nor who it is done to. Stealing a loaf of bread is stealing a loaf of bread. Doesn’t matter if yopu steal it from a pauper or a millionaire, doesn’t matter if you are in need or just like stealing, the only consideration is the theft itself and that theft is always wrong. There is no circumstance under which it is not. nobody deserves to take someone else’s property without consideration, period. And from this moral absolute springs all others.
16 comments Og | Uncategorized
Well, there goes ‘situational ethics’ right out the window.
Hence the argument that it’s OK to tax (i.e. steal from) “The Rich” because they can afford it is immoral.
I think where we get wrapped around the axle is where we have a choice of two moral absolutes. It’s wrong to steal, it’s also wrong to allow your child to starve to death. (You may very well choose to allow yourself to starve to death rather than steal, since you have ownership of yourself, but I’d submit to allow a child for whom you are responsible to starve is wrong.) So once all moral avenues to preventing said child from starving are exhausted (like begging) one must choose the lesser of two evils.
Note that I did say all other avenues must be exhausted. You don’t get to steal because you’re too proud to beg or too lazy to work. I’d suggest that someone actually coming to that point may have happened a few dozen times in all recorded history. Most people would choose to steal because it’s easier, and justify it that “they can afford it”.
The thing is, this is all, missing the point. Theft is wrong. It is always wrong. You can have a discussion about if someone’s culpability is greater or lesser, but the theft itself is still wrong. You can say that it’s “Ok” to do one wrong to mitigate another, but the wrong remains wrong. In the case youi posit; it’s wrong to let your children starve; why aren’t you working? If someone prevents you from working then the culpability is theirs, but it doesn’t make any of thew wrongs less wrong. It’s still wrong to let your kid starve,(Stealingb his life from him) it’s still wrong to steal, it’s still wrong to prevent another from making an honest living so they are forced to steal to feed their kid. The wrong remains wrong regardless of the reasons for it, and everyone seems to overlook this and look to motive. You cannot. The moral absolute is the moral absolute; you can’t make something less wrong by having a good reason. This is not grade school, you cannot get a note from someone saying “It’s OK that Bobby stole food, he was really hungry” it doesn’t work like that. Wrong is wrong is wrong.
I understand what you’re saying. If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the guilt of the wrong act may be mitigated by your circumstances and by other wrongs done by others, but the fact of the wrong exists regardless.
To use a different example: killing is wrong. If you force me into a situation where I have to kill you (self defense for instance) the culpability lands on YOU, but the fact that a killing happened is morally wrong. It was wrong to attack me, and further wrong to put me into a situation where my only recourse was to use deadly force against you.
As I understand the concept, a moral absolute is an immutable factor – that is, a concept which can be neither altered nor obviated. What you leave unsaid, Og, is that it is also an immaterial concept – that it resides outside the physical reality of human experience.
The same can be said for mathematics.
You will bleed copiously if you are struck in the head hard enough by a 2 x 4 x 50 inch rectangle (a rectangle consisting of 400 cubic inches occupied by a dried resinous mass of fibrous hardwood), whatever your stance on the existence of Absolute Concepts like the rectangle might be. And therein lies the material necessity inherent to the nature of immaterial absolute constants.
Absolute concepts are the anchor point about which all material applications of their innate principal are expressed in human physical existence. Without the immutable Truth which comprises any absolute constant, there can be no reference point from which to derive Justice by which humans measure the degree of adherence any action (or inaction) taken may be judged against. It is also a given that no action can ever attain the ultimate measure of any absolute constant.
Much as the mathematical constant of rectangle in the case of the accelerating length of construction lumber mentioned above, an absolute constant like “theft is wrong”, while being immutably true, is useless as a standard of human activity outside its provision of a constant point of reference. For a moral (or any other) constant to be a metric by which human activity (like programming an AI) can be considered, it has to be acknowledged that the 2 x 4 is a club only in relation to it’s orientation to your head, just as theft is wrong only in relation to the circumstances in which the questionable procurement transpired, on a human material scale.
There is no direct comparison possible between an immaterial constant and a material environment, except to provide an immutable – not to say hypothetical – point of reference for material judgments and other measures of standards of behavior to be referenced from. Without the addition of some material component, a moral constant doesn’t (I’m tempted to argue “cannot”, but lack the skills to do so at all adequately) have innate physical expression, for all of its provable existence. It’s very real, but not a thing of itself (in much the same way a line exists within every point).
Let me come and take some of your shit and tell me if it’s real or not.
Really. Tell me when a theft occurs to you how it’s not real. I am dying to hear that.
If I take something that is real, from you, and deprive you of it, that is wrong, and that wrong is a moral absolute. Everything else you are saying is gibberish. You demonstrate your lack of understanding by repetitively bringing up “Justice”Justice and moral absolutes relate to one another in exactly the way window glass relates to buffalo shit, which is to say, not at all.
Mark D: You are precisely correct.
Which is precisely my point, Og; the moral absolute of “theft is wrong” is immaterial (without physical substance) without your – hypothetical – inclusion of some act of physicality, almost certainly not restricted to abscontion with my shit and window glass. And, no, my response would not be confined to buffalo shit either.
A moral absolute is entirely “real” , it’s just not physical in-and-of itself – that takes a human (or non- ) contribution to the concept. There can be, and I am arguing that there MUST BE, degrees of “wrong” without diluting the reality of the fundamental concept of wrong. Surely we can agree that there are some actions that are inherently more wrong to do than are other actions? That “less wrong” does not equal “not wrong”.
Nope. Absolutely incorrect. The pythagorean theorem is a mathematical concept. It applies ot the real world. Tell me of the circumstance where the pythagorean theorem changes in application because of the real world. You cannot, because it does not. Theft is wrong. it is immutably wrong like the pythagorean theorem is accurate. The moral absolute like the mathematical theorem stand alone, and need nothing to support them, period. When you apply them in the real world, theft is always still wrong, just as a^2+b^2=c^2. Alwasy, permanently, never changing. There are not “Degrees” of wrong, it is inerrantly binary. It canot be argued that there are ‘Degrees” of wrong without bringing completely unrelated issues into the equation. When you steal do you do right, or wrong? You do wrong. Do you ahve reasons? Are they good reasons? Do those reasons make it right? No. Wrong is binary, that’s why we use the terms right and wrong, there are only those, ever.
And no, we cannot agree on a demonstrably erroneous thing. Facts are facts.
I can think of ten moral absolutes.
I think you’re thinking of “Law”, ed, but that’s a whole other disucssion.
You cannot equate the absolute of mathematics with the vagaries of the human condition. Are you to suggest that the fellow employee that corrals you at break time and bores you to tears with tales of his breakup/ grandkid/vacation/etc. is criminal in having stolen time from your life?
Numbers have truth, everything else is subject to perception.
You have no idea what you are talking about at all. Go away adults are trying to have a conversation