Imagine that you find yourself visiting a hypothetical culture that acknowledges two importantly distinct classes of people: masters and slaves. By cultural convention, slaves are understood to have effectively no moral weight; causing their suffering, death, injury etc. is simply a property crime, analogous to vandalism. Slaves and masters are distinguished solely by a visible hereditable trait that you don’t consider in any wayrelevant to their moral weight as people.
Shortly after your arrival, a thousand slaves are rounded up and killed. You, as a properly emotional moral thinker, presumably express your dismay at this, and the natives explain that you needn’t worry; it was just a market correction and the economics of the situation are such that the masters are better off now. You explain in turn that your dismay is not economic in nature; it’s because those slaves have moral weight.
They look at you, puzzled.
How might you go about explaining to them that they’re wrong, and slaves really do have moral weight?
Some time later, you return home, and find yourself entertaining a visitor from another realm who is horrified by the discovery that a million old automobiles have recently been destroyed. You explain that it’s OK, the materials are being recycled to make better products, and he explains in turn that his dismay is because automobiles have moral weight.
How might you go about explaining to him that he’s wrong, and cars really don’t have moral weight?
Yup. But would they argue as Jagan did that “rationality does not apply to moral arguments. Morality is an emotional response by its very nature”? I’m specifically interested in Jagan’s answers to my questions, given that assertion.
Imagine that you find yourself visiting a hypothetical culture that acknowledges two importantly distinct classes of people: masters and slaves. By cultural convention, slaves are understood to have effectively no moral weight; causing their suffering, death, injury etc. is simply a property crime, analogous to vandalism. Slaves and masters are distinguished solely by a visible hereditable trait that you don’t consider in any wayrelevant to their moral weight as people.
Shortly after your arrival, a thousand slaves are rounded up and killed. You, as a properly emotional moral thinker, presumably express your dismay at this, and the natives explain that you needn’t worry; it was just a market correction and the economics of the situation are such that the masters are better off now. You explain in turn that your dismay is not economic in nature; it’s because those slaves have moral weight.
They look at you, puzzled.
How might you go about explaining to them that they’re wrong, and slaves really do have moral weight?
Some time later, you return home, and find yourself entertaining a visitor from another realm who is horrified by the discovery that a million old automobiles have recently been destroyed. You explain that it’s OK, the materials are being recycled to make better products, and he explains in turn that his dismay is because automobiles have moral weight.
How might you go about explaining to him that he’s wrong, and cars really don’t have moral weight?
“You might have been a slave” is imaginable in a way that “you might have been an automobil” is not. See Rawls and Kant.
Yup. But would they argue as Jagan did that “rationality does not apply to moral arguments. Morality is an emotional response by its very nature”? I’m specifically interested in Jagan’s answers to my questions, given that assertion.