From Philosophical Research
Main entry
- Ethics is almost impossible / Morality is almost impossible / Vegeta effect prevents naïve diffusion of morality / Individuals can never be forced to accept morality or ethics -> bound to be one of the most controversial ones, but the point of it is to test it and see if there is any way it can be clearly untrue
Mechanisms of morality
- People accept ethical standards when they wish to maintain relationships / Subjects accept moral standards when they want to maintain relationships; Subjects might reject moral standards when they do not want to maintain relationships
- Morality is a form of culture and identity / Morality is carried on Social-Philosophical Systems / Morality is carried in the bonds of social graphs / Morality is an internal characteristic of free-floating groups rather than individuals
- Moral oughts are indistinguishable from material imperatives -> the hypothesis that "Trotsky must fit himself into Stalin's Marxism to build the Soviet Union" (a material imperative, to keep the Soviet population from disintegrating and going to other continents) is an equivalent kind of statement to moral imperatives like "Progressives must vote for the Democratic party" or "Floridians must learn a correct history of racism" — they are claimed to be the same here because in each case, there are situations where somebody is handed an imperative but in practice that person is horribly suited to materially follow that imperative, and then becomes branded as a terrible person. if this hypothesis is true, then it means some moral imperatives are morally dubious under a more objective, worldwide, and consequences-based formulation of ethics; if the enforcement of morality leads to what logically should be immoral outcomes, the system of morality contains incorrect moral assumptions. to be fair, simply knowing that some moral or material imperatives are incorrect does not tell us what the correct ones are, for instance what one is supposed to do with Trotsky or exactly what should replace Democratic Party campaigning to successfully unify people.
- Every moral statement is a scientific prediction / Every moral statement is a determinist hypothesis -> for instance, if we say "all Floridians should learn about the history of racism and stop being racist", that is a prediction that there is a deterministic process of every single Floridian going through education and then doing a particular more-or-less identifiable pattern of behavior to not be racist. if it is not possible to list out a repeatable procedure that can and will be followed by absolutely everyone, however general the outline, "should" becomes meaningless and the moral statement is unenforceable.
Ideology codes
- MX / existential materialism ; MX/exmat
