higher moral ground?

[belverron]

I thought I'd leave you an escape route.

Practical and moral are completely incomparable terms, if you ask me. They just answer different questions. The word moral answers the question, "What's the right way to do it?" while the word practical answers the question, "What's the easiest (most efficient) way to do it?"

So saying that the most practical way is also the most moral is like saying that if you do what's easiest, you're a moral person. I don't think anyone would agree with that statement.

[donkrabbit]

Quote by: belverron Practical and moral are completely incomparable terms, if you ask me. They just answer different questions. The word moral answers the question, "What's the right way to do it?" while the word practical answers the question, "What's the easiest (most efficient) way to do it?"

The "right" way to do it is the way that best achieves man's rational values. I don't equate the words "easy" and "efficient".

Quote by: belverron So saying that the most practical way is also the most moral is like saying that if you do what's easiest, you're a moral person. I don't think anyone would agree with that statement.

No- "most practical" and "easiest" are not the same thing. I never said that people should do whatever is easiest. I said that they should act in accordance with their rationally-selected values.

[belverron]

The definition of "easy" I was using is the second with Meriam-Webster gives, which is "requiring or indicating little effort." Now, efficiency is being " productive without waste." Now, the less effort you put in for the result, the less wasteful you are, right? So the two terms are closely linked.

I still think that linking practicality and morality is a stretch. Another way of looking at it is that practicality has more to do with the end, while morality has more to do with the means.

*edit* I do admit that the definition of "practical" is broader than I had realized. Please explain to me your understanding of the word.

[donkrabbit]

You used "easiest" to describe the standard by which to guide our actions under what you thought my position was. I explained that rational values are the standard- not that which is "requiring or indicating little effort."

I don't understand your distinciton between ends and means. Why do humans act if not to achieve goals? If they do- then why can't morality be the guide of the goals we choose to pursue?

[belverron]

You speak of "rationally-selected values." Simply because they are "rationally-selected," and I could argue that, doesn't mean that they always lead to a practical solution. I don't think you really meant "practical" when you first said it.

[donkrabbit]

I think that when it comes to this issue, as with so many others, few can say it better than John Galt;

Quote by: John Galt, "This is John Galt Speaking," Atlas Shrugged Your impracticable creed...[inculcates a] lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites. Since childhood, you have been running from the terror of a choice you have never dared fully to identify: If the practical, whatever you must practice to exist, whatever works, succeeds, achieves your purpose, whatever brings you food and joy, whatever profits you, is evil- and if the good, the moral, is the impractical, whatever fails, destroys, frustrates, whatever injures you and brings you loss or pain-then your choice is to be moral or to live. The sole result of that murderous doctrine was to remove morality from life. You grew up to believe that moral laws bear no relation to the job of living, except as an impediment and threat, that man's existence is an amoral jungle where anything goes and anything works. And in that fog of switching definitions which descends upon a frozen mind, you have forgotten that the evils damned by your creed were the virtues required for living, and you have come to believe that actual evils are the practical means of existence. Forgetting that the impractical 'good' was self-sacrifice, you believe that self-esteem is impractical; forgetting that the practical 'evil' was production, you believe that robbery is practical. Swinging like a helpless branch in the wind of an uncharted moral wilderness, you dare not fully to be evil or fully to live. When you are honest, you feel the resentment of a sucker; when you cheat, you feel terror and shame, your pain is augmented by the feeling that pain is your natural state. You pity the men you admire, you believe they are doomed to fail; you envy the men you hate, you believe they are the masters of existence. You feel disarmed when you come up against a scoundrel: you believe that evil is bound to win, since the moral is the impotent, the impractical. Morality, to you, is a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain, a cross-breed between the first schoolteacher of your past and the tax collector of your present, a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away your pleasures- and pleasure, to you, is a liquor-soggy brain, a mindless slut, the stupor of a moron who stakes his cash on some animal's race, since pleasure cannot be moral. If you identify your actual belief, you will find a triple damnation- of yourself, of life, of virtue- in the grotesque conclusion you have reached: you believe that morality is a necessary evil.

[donkrabbit]

Quote by: belverron You speak of "rationally-selected values." Simply because they are "rationally-selected," and I could argue that, doesn't mean that they always lead to a practical solution. I don't think you really meant "practical" when you first said it.

I meant what I said. It's an inherently correct statement since practicality of action is, in its very identity, the achievement of those rationally-selected values.

I really don't understand what your position is here.

[Gorgo]

Quote by: donkrabbit Do you disagree that you must make decisions in order to live?

I didn't say that morality is wrong or that there is no morality, I just said it's a word I don't use because it's often associated with certain ideas that I don't necessarily agree with.

[Gorgo]

Quote by: donkrabbit I certainly think I am morally superior to a drug addict.

Sorry. I'm just uneducated and don't have any idea what that means or how it would ever be relevant. You're not saying that one is healthier by not abusing drugs, it seems that you're saying you yourself are superior in some way to a drug addict. Maybe my perception of what you're saying is wrong.

[Capitalist Pig]

Quote by: Gorgo You're not saying that one is healthier by not abusing drugs, it seems that you're saying you yourself are superior in some way to a drug addict. Maybe my perception of what you're saying is wrong.

I think it is implied that he believes he is healthier than a drug addict for not being a drug addict himself. He is also at a reduced risk of being put into jail for comitting a crime, even if the health risks of whatever illegal substance a person may hypothetically abuse are negligible. I wouldn't say this is an uncommon or inaccurate sentiment, I think it the logic here is self-evident.

[Capitalist Pig]

Quote by: Gorgo I didn't say that morality is wrong or that there is no morality, I just said it's a word I don't use because it's often associated with certain ideas that I don't necessarily agree with.

But that's the problem, isn't it? A lack of any moral code of your own, the exact conditions which John Galt has apparently laid out for us in donkrabbit's quote -- whether you perform any of the acts described or not. You choose whichever values seem to have the most benefit for you, and you should be able to judge on your own which values these are.

[Gorgo]

Quote by: Capitalist Pig whether you perform any of the acts described or not. You choose whichever values seem to have the most benefit for you, and you should be able to judge on your own which values these are.

Either you value life or you don't. If you value life, you decide what are the things that promote life and healthy enjoyment of that life. If you fear life, then you tend to find things that hide you from life and destroy life. Sometimes we choose a mixture of both, and rarely is anything totally clear or totally easy. Creating a list of rights and wrongs can be helpful, but cannot be followed blindly.

I've read Ayn Rand, and thought a lot of that when I was much younger, but don't think much of it now, and for the life of me right now I can't make much sense out of John Galt's speech at all.

[Gorgo]

Quote by: Capitalist Pig he is healthier than a drug addict

I don't know that this is true, certainly some drug "addicts" are more likely to commit (non-drug) crimes than others, but certainly not all.

So, are North Koreans more likely to attack other countries illegally than the United States? Never seen them do that.

[donkrabbit]

Quote by: Capitalist Pig I wouldn't say this is an uncommon or inaccurate sentiment, I think it the logic here is self-evident.

Yeah- which is why I used that example. I trying to show that there is nothing wrong with making moral judgements.

Gorgo, my selected values are more in-line with my identity as a man qua man than the drug addict. I am better at acting to achieve these values. I am more productive towards preserving and enhancing my life- which is the very purpose of holding rational morals.

[donkrabbit]

Quote by: Gorgo Either you value life or you don't. If you value life, you decide what are the things that promote life and healthy enjoyment of that life. If you fear life, then you tend to find things that hide you from life and destroy life. Sometimes we choose a mixture of both, and rarely is anything totally clear or totally easy. Creating a list of rights and wrongs can be helpful, but cannot be followed blindly.

Why do you use the word "blind" to describe the process? It involves looking at reality and deciding, based on the facts of reality, how to best act.

If you're familar with the Humeian "is-ought problem," then it might make my position more clear to you if you consider that mine is the opposite of Hume's. The is no dichotomy between what is and what ought to be. Rather, from what is (the metaphysical facts of reality, including the identity of man), we can derive how we ought to act (man, being a living creature who must make choices and use his faculty of reason to survive, should hold his life as his ultimate value and act accordingly). It's not a process that is followed "blindly". It's the opposite.

[Gorgo]

Quote by: donkrabbit am more productive towards preserving and enhancing my life

I have no evidence of such a thing. Such things are relative anyway. If his greatest value is the enjoyment of drugs, then there is no Greater Judge to tell me that one person is superior to the other. You might be religious, or suffer from some other impediment to discerning reality. I have no way of knowing, and am not sure why it is relevant to anything to use "morally superior" as any kind of guide, even if it is possible to measure. If that works for you, go to it.

[Gorgo]

Quote by: donkrabbit It's the opposite.

There are people who follow a set of "morals" (which aren't moral at all) blindly. I don't think you're arguing against that.

[belverron]

Quote by: donkrabbit I meant what I said. It's an inherently correct statement since practicality of action is, in its very identity, the achievement of those rationally-selected values. I really don't understand what your position is here.

Practicality is not the "achievement of values" of any kind.

According to Dictionary.com, practical is "Of, relating to, governed by, or acquired through practice or action, rather than theory, speculation, or ideals" (emphasis added).

As for John Galt's statements, he is not saying to equate morality and practicality; he merely states that they are not incompatible. It was never my case that that are incompatible: I described them as incomparable.

[donkrabbit]

Quote by: Gorgo I have no evidence of such a thing.

Because he's a hypothetical example. The only attribute given is that he is addicted to drugs.

Quote by: Gorgo Such things are relative anyway. If his greatest value is the enjoyment of drugs, then there is no Greater Judge to tell me that one person is superior to the other. You might be religious, or suffer from some other impediment to discerning reality. I have no way of knowing, and am not sure why it is relevant to anything to use "morally superior" as any kind of guide, even if it is possible to measure. If that works for you, go to it.

Relative to what? What changes the fact that man must act a certain way in order to survive?

I didn't advocate hedonism or irrational, spur-of-the-moment pleasure. How does his addiction to drugs act to preserve and enhance his life?

[donkrabbit]

Quote by: Gorgo There are people who follow a set of "morals" (which aren't moral at all) blindly. I don't think you're arguing against that.

You seem to be using that as an argument against morality altogether.