Comment by MagicMoonlight
13 hours ago
Absolute morality? That’s bold.
So what is your opinion on lying? As an absolutionist, surely it’s always wrong right? So if an axe murderer comes to the door asking for your friend… you have to let them in.
13 hours ago
Absolute morality? That’s bold.
So what is your opinion on lying? As an absolutionist, surely it’s always wrong right? So if an axe murderer comes to the door asking for your friend… you have to let them in.
I think you are interpreting “absolute” in a different way?
I’m not the top level commenter, but my claim is that there are moral facts, not that in every situation, the morally correct behavior is determined by simple rules such as “Never lie.”.
(Also, even in the case of Kant’s argument about that case, his argument isn’t that you must let him in, or even that you must tell him the truth, only that you mustn’t lie to the axe murderer. Don’t make a straw man. He does say it is permissible for you to kill the axe murderer in order to save the life of your friend. I think Kant was probably incorrect in saying that lying to the axe murderer is wrong, and in such a situation it is probably permissible to lie to the axe murderer. Unlike most forms of moral anti-realism, moral realism allows one to have uncertainty about what things are morally right. )
I would say that if a person believes that in the situation they find themselves in, that a particular act is objectively wrong for them to take, independent of whether they believe it to be, and if that action is not in fact morally obligatory or supererogatory, and the person is capable (in some sense) of not taking that action, then it is wrong for that person to take that action in that circumstance.
Lying is generally sinful. With the ax murderer, you could refuse to answer, say nothing, misdirect without falsehood or use evasion.
Absolute morality doesn't mean rigid rules without hierarchy. God's commands have weight, and protecting life often takes precedence in Scripture. So no, I wouldn't "have to let them in". I'd protect the friend, even if it meant deception in that dire moment.
It's not lying when you don't reveal all the truth.
"even if it meant deception in that dire moment".
You are saying it's ok to lie in certain situations.
Sounds like moral relativism to me.
That’s not what moral relativism is.
Utilitarianism, for example, is not (necessarily) relativistic, and would (for pretty much all utility functions that people propose) endorse lying in some situations.
Moral realism doesn’t mean that there are no general principles that are usually right about what is right and wrong but have some exceptions. It means that for at least some cases, there is a fact of the matter as to whether a given act is right or wrong.
It is entirely compatible with moral realism to say that lying is typically immoral, but that there are situations in which it may be morally obligatory.
Well, you can technically scurry around this by saying, "Okay, there are a class of situations, and we just need to figure out the cases because yes we acknowledge that morality is tricky". Of course, take this to the limit and this is starting to sound like pragmatism - what you call as "well, we're making a more and more accurate absolute model, we just need to get there" versus "revising is always okay, we just need to get to a better one" blurs together more and more.
IMO, the 20th century has proven that demarcation is very, very, very hard. You can take either interpretation - that we just need to "get to the right model at the end", or "there is no right end, all we can do is try to do 'better', whatever that means"
And to be clear, I genuinely don't know what's right. Carnap had a very intricate philosophy that sometimes seemed like a sort of relativism, but it was more of a linguistic pluralism - I think it's clear he still believed in firm demarcations, essences, and capital T Truth even if they moved over time. On the complete other side, you have someone like Feyerabend, who believed that we should be cunning and willing to adopt models if they could help us. Neither of these guys are idiots, and they're explicitly not saying the same thing (a related paper can be found here https://philarchive.org/archive/TSORTC), but honestly, they do sort of converge at a high level.
The main difference in interpretation is "we're getting to a complicated, complicated truth, but there is a capital T Truth" versus "we can clearly compare, contrast, and judge different alternatives, but to prioritize one as capital T Truth is a mistake; there isn't even a capital T Truth".
(technically they're arguing different axes, but I think 20th century philosophy of science & logical positivsm are closely related)
(disclaimer: am a layman in philosophy, so please correct me if I'm wrong)
I think it's very easy to just look at relativsm vs absolute truth and just conclude strawmen arguments about both sides.
And to be clear, it's not even like drawing more and more intricate distinctions is good, either! Sometimes the best arguments from both sides are an appeal back to "simple" arguments.
I don't know. Philosophy is really interesting. Funnily enough, I only started reading about it more because I joined a lab full of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. No one discusses "philosophy proper", as in following the historical philosophical tradition (no one has read Kant here), but a lot of the topics we talk about are very philosophy adjacent, beyond very simple arguments
No. There is a distinct difference between lying and withholding information.
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But you have absolute morality - it's just whatever The Claude answers to your question with temp=0 and you carry on.
So you lied, which means you either don't accept that lying is absolutely wrong, or you admit yourself to do wrong. Your last sentence is just a strawman that deflects the issue.
What do you do with the case where you have a choice between a train staying on track and killing one person, or going off track and killing everybody else?
Like others have said, you are oversimplifying things. It sounds like you just discovered philosophy or religion, or both.
Since you have referenced the Bible: the story of the tree of good and evil, specifically Genesis 2:17, is often interpreted to mean that man died the moment he ate from the tree and tried to pursue its own righteousness. That is, discerning good from evil is God's department, not man's. So whether there is an objective good/evil is a different question from whether that knowledge is available to the human brain. And, pulling from the many examples in philosophy, it doesn't appear to be. This is also part of the reason why people argue that a law perfectly enforced by an AI would be absolutely terrible for societies; the (human) law must inherently allow ambiguity and the grace of a judge because any attempt at an "objective" human law inevitably results in tyranny/hell.
The problem is that if moral absolution doesn’t exist then it doesn’t matter what you do in the trolly situation since it’s all relative. You may as well do what you please since it’s all a matter of opinion anyway.
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