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Are morally objectionable acts excusable if enough people think it's ok? (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Lolsmith
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Lolsmith
kill all boomers
interesting point
fortyfortyforty
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Start with a basic rule for judging whether acts are okay or not, like autonomy = good. To then evaluate how well an act fits the rule you then need facts which you can get with plenty of studies done over decades in a scientific way.
In the case of old Muslim men marrying 7-14 year old girls, you could probably gather some facts about how it goes against the child's independence because they're being married off by their parents and not making the decision themselves, and because people that young don't have the mental development or the life experience to evaluate decisions like that, and because in the marriage there's going to be subtle or outright coercion on behalf of the man who has the income, owns the assets and home etc.
You could go in a different direction and start with the moral rule that girls are the property of men though. Aww yeah.
In the case of old Muslim men marrying 7-14 year old girls, you could probably gather some facts about how it goes against the child's independence because they're being married off by their parents and not making the decision themselves, and because people that young don't have the mental development or the life experience to evaluate decisions like that, and because in the marriage there's going to be subtle or outright coercion on behalf of the man who has the income, owns the assets and home etc.
You could go in a different direction and start with the moral rule that girls are the property of men though. Aww yeah.
Blue Suede
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Kant's two main points are:
Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law
and
Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only
Autonomy = good only comes out of that because autonomy is something you wish would become a universal law.
Blue Suede
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You might find this useful http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ It's certainly easier than a translation of the original Kant (which you can find here http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/metaphys-of-morals.txt)
funkshen
dvds didnt exist in 1991
yeah but kant was a fucking idiot. if every man must find his own categorical imperative than the kantian house of cards will always collapse in itself. kant speaks of autonomy but teaches submission. i would hardly think he would argue that an act is morally objectionable if enough people thought it was okay, or rather approached universal validity. and what if people willed it to be so that the majority's moral judgement should become a universal law? or what if the human will is not the vehicle for moral imperatives, as kant would put it, but rather something more primordial: schoppenhauer's strive for life, or for power and ambition as nietzsche would have it. why anyone continues to hold kant as a font of moral knowledge is beyond me. his theories are swiss cheese. kant might be a convenient solution to the idlemma, but evidently there is a reason the merits of his work only linger in the realm of epistemology, and not ethics.
read karl jaspers' 'The Question of German Guilt' (1961) if you want an answer to your question lolsmut
read karl jaspers' 'The Question of German Guilt' (1961) if you want an answer to your question lolsmut
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ladiesman217_
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has anyone actually tried to pronounce 'kant' irl h3h3h3h3h3h3 those crazy germans
Lolsmith
kill all boomers
Sacredoblivion
Member
It is interesting that you bring out the idea of autonomy, since what would happen if you're autonomy was influenced by your society. If society believes that rape is okay and therefore not a breach of your bodily autonomy, it is thus not bad. We have been conditioned to believe that certain actions are right or wrong, and this conditioning has always been influenced by society, so it is only natural to say that "Rape is not consensual, so it impinges on someone's autonomy and is thereby bad and can never be good, regardless of whether it is a social norm or not". If society teaches someone that raping others and being raped is ok then it is no longer bad as society has collectively been conditioned to remove their bodily autonomy. Such a concept may appear to be strange or shocking, but it is comparable to Huxley's Brave New World (and is one of the reasons why I found the book to be shocking when I read it in year 8).
BTW i'm muslim, and I'm not finding this offensive but rather mildly amusing hehe, I love these sort of theoretical questions
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Some Vunt
Banned
BUT the very notion of rape is that it isn't consensual. So there is NO WAY you would like it (then it would just be consensual sex) so there is no way it could be correct under this system.
Some Vunt
Banned
Umm wouldn't it just make rape impossible instead of it being wrong?
Some Vunt
Banned
it would be impossible
But also would be wrong still
Because the reason it is impossible is because it is wrong in this circumstance.