Philosophy meme

balderdash@lemmy.zip to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 296 points –

Not sure why this got removed from 196lemmy..blahaj.zone but it would be real nice if moderation on Lemmy gave you some sort of notification of what you did wrong. Like an automatic DM or something

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Ok so who's deciding which people are evil and which aren't? There are plenty of wrong things (according to me, today) that have been consensus among some for hundreds or even thousands of years. Adults marrying children. Slavery. Execution of homosexuals.

Or consider that vegan/vegetarians would say that slaughtering animals is wrong, and that they know that in the same "innate" way that you're describing... and yet the majority disagree with them. So who's right? Where can we get this objectivity? If it's just our "gut" then I'm sorry but there is not a single morality, there are 7 billion separate objective moralities.

It is wrong to slaughter animals now that we have technology that makes it unnecessary. The world could stop eating meat tomorrow if there was a virus inside meat that made people sick, so why can't we decide to do it without the virus?

If there was a virus, the world would invest billions in alternative foods. Why can't we do that now, today?

The majority disagreeing is not new. Democracy is not based on the wisest people making decisions. It's mob rule, or majority rule. Today people just watch TV to make decisions, and TV is controlled by corporations. So we don't really have the kind of democracy where people are well informed and feel like they can trust what someone in power is telling them.

I agree with all of that, but I don't see how that deals with the problem that we don't even have consensus on a morality that we are all supposed to "know" by ourselves because it is objective and somehow contained within us. Why is there such disagreement on what is moral if we should all know what's right?

It's a good question... I think social media has made it worse, because people are now convinced that they are correct within their perception bubble. This is why I hate downvotes - because it removes the chance for people to see opinions they disagree with.

It's crucial to see opinions we don't agree with, or we believe that the "others" are just stupid, since clearly everyone on our side agrees.

So, regardless of the reasons behind it, it seems clear that we don't all know what is right - or certainly we don't agree - so where exactly does an objective morality fit into the picture?