On the question itself I’m not sure having a coherent moral system is something it is important for people to have- though I’m hesitant to make the point since I’m not confident in my ability to make the claim convincing enough to avoid the downvotes that come from saying something that sounds so dumb at first.
Morality is the product of a chaotic, random and unguided process. There is no particular reason to expect human morality to be coherent. That isn’t what evolution optimized it for. If the morality we evolved isn’t coherent (a precise definition of coherent in this context I’ll leave for later, or someone else) what should we do? A lot of people here seem to want to cull, shape or ignore our intuitions so that we act according to a coherent normative theory (preference utilitarianism for example). But to me this looks just like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. You don’t get more moral by sacrificing parochial deontological rules for abstract principles. If a hodge-podge is what we got then a hodge-podge is what we’re stuck with (until we evolve a different hodge-podge). To demand that folk morality meet the demands of logic and coherence feels like a mistake to me. It also feels anti-human.
On the question itself I’m not sure having a coherent moral system is something it is important for people to have- though I’m hesitant to make the point since I’m not confident in my ability to make the claim convincing enough to avoid the downvotes that come from saying something that sounds so dumb at first.
Morality is the product of a chaotic, random and unguided process. There is no particular reason to expect human morality to be coherent. That isn’t what evolution optimized it for. If the morality we evolved isn’t coherent (a precise definition of coherent in this context I’ll leave for later, or someone else) what should we do? A lot of people here seem to want to cull, shape or ignore our intuitions so that we act according to a coherent normative theory (preference utilitarianism for example). But to me this looks just like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. You don’t get more moral by sacrificing parochial deontological rules for abstract principles. If a hodge-podge is what we got then a hodge-podge is what we’re stuck with (until we evolve a different hodge-podge). To demand that folk morality meet the demands of logic and coherence feels like a mistake to me. It also feels anti-human.