Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1603449" data-attributes="member: 3146">I've found that "moral" and "ethical" are often used interchangably in philosophy and I wasn't intentionally distinguishing between them--such distinctions I often make it harder rather than easier to understand philosophical writing since they aren't consistently distinguished. In fact, the book I'm reading at the moment appears to distinguish between ethics and morality in exactly the opposite of the way that you do. (I suppose I did use that trendy word "mores" to describe the current beliefs of a society about what is praiseworthy and blameworthy).So, my point was that many apparent differences in moral/ethical belief really boil down to differences in non-ethical belief. To use your example of child molestation, the question of how old one must be to be of marriageable age (which I suppose should be distinguished from screwable age because in our infinite wisdom, a lot of moderns are campaigning to lower the age of consent to 12 or 13 but I've heard nothing of lowering the age of marriage) is morally/ethically significant but not, in itself moral/ethical. The example of the Icelandic blood-feud vs the modern conception of murder does as far as I can tell deal with some moral/ethical issues--the concept of collective guilt for instance--but also includes other non-moral/ethical issues such as the role of government vs. the role of family. (To the Icelander, the family had the duty to avenge a murder; to modern Americans, that is the role of the state).As for the question of how someone who believes in good and evil would interpret the case of the pacific islanders stoning their parents to guarantee them a place in the hereafter, I think it's quite possible to believe that the practice of stoning parents is wrong and that it is evil without believing that it represents a fundamental difference between my concept of evil and theirs. My interpretation is that said islanders were led into doing evil, not because they had a faulty concept of good and evil but rather because they had false metaphysical beliefs that led them to misinterpret their murder as not-murder. If they came to recognize the error of their metaphysical beliefs, it would be clear to them that their practice was a practice of murder just as I would cease to believe that it was murder if, through some strange process, I came to share their metaphysical beliefs.In this case, I'm pretty sure we have the same concept of murder as evil--we just have a different view of the non-moral aspects of that practice.Now, I'm not certain that all apparent differences in moral/ethical belief can be boiled down to differences in non-ethical belief affecting how moral/ethical principles are applied to different social practices and situations. I think there may be some genuine differences in moral/ethical beliefs (but that doesn't lead me to adopt a universal error theory like it does Mackie).My point, however, was that all of the differences between approved social practices are best explained by substantive differences in moral belief. Many of them are the result of differences in non-moral belief.That argument relies upon a differentiation between the basic beliefs and principles about good and evil that underly a society's list of approved and disapproved activities and that list of approved and disapproved activities. If you wish to call that the difference between ethics and morality, that's a fair description but I would prefer to describe it as the difference between socially accepted practice and ethics/morality. Not as neat or tidy perhaps, but it doesn't make the comprehensibility of the argument rely upon giving two commony interchangable (or just commonly interchanged) words distinct meanings.</blockquote>

Verification