I agree that morality and consensus are in principle not the same—Nazis or any evil society is an easy counterexample. (One could argue Nazis did not have the consensus of the entire world, but you can then just imagine a fully evil population.)
But for one, simply rejecting civilization and consensus based on “you have no rigorous definition of them and also look at Genghis Khan/Nazis this proves that governments are evil” is like, basically, putting the burden of proof on the side that is arguing for civilization and common sense morality, which is suspicious.
I’m open to alternatives, but just saying “governments can be evil therefor I reject it, full stop” is not that helpful for discourse. Like what do you wanna do, just abolish civilization?
So consider a handwavy view of morality and of what a “good civilization” looks like. Let’s assume common sense morality is correct, and that mostly everyone understands what this means: “don’t steal, don’t hurt people, leave people alone unless they’re doing bad things, don’t be a sex pervert, etc.”. And assume most people agree with this and want to live by this. Then when you have consensus, meaningmost people are observing and agreeing that civilization (or practically speaking, the area or community over which they have a decent amount of influence), is abiding by “common sense morality”, then everything is basically moral and fine.
(I also want to point out that caring too much on pinpointing what morality means exactly and how to put it into words, distracts from solving practical problems where it’s extremely obvious what is morally going wrong, but where you have to sort out the “implementation details”.)
I agree that morality and consensus are in principle not the same—Nazis or any evil society is an easy counterexample.
(One could argue Nazis did not have the consensus of the entire world, but you can then just imagine a fully evil population.)
But for one, simply rejecting civilization and consensus based on “you have no rigorous definition of them and also look at Genghis Khan/Nazis this proves that governments are evil” is like, basically, putting the burden of proof on the side that is arguing for civilization and common sense morality, which is suspicious.
I’m open to alternatives, but just saying “governments can be evil therefor I reject it, full stop” is not that helpful for discourse. Like what do you wanna do, just abolish civilization?
So consider a handwavy view of morality and of what a “good civilization” looks like. Let’s assume common sense morality is correct, and that mostly everyone understands what this means: “don’t steal, don’t hurt people, leave people alone unless they’re doing bad things, don’t be a sex pervert, etc.”. And assume most people agree with this and want to live by this. Then when you have consensus, meaning most people are observing and agreeing that civilization (or practically speaking, the area or community over which they have a decent amount of influence), is abiding by “common sense morality”, then everything is basically moral and fine.
(I also want to point out that caring too much on pinpointing what morality means exactly and how to put it into words, distracts from solving practical problems where it’s extremely obvious what is morally going wrong, but where you have to sort out the “implementation details”.)