“Should” has obvious non-moral uses: you should open the door before attempting to walk through it. “Right” and “better” too: you need the right screwdriver; it’s better to use a torque driver. We can use these words in non-problematic physical situations. I think this makes it obvious that morality is in most cases just a supernatural way of talking about consequences. “You shouldn’t murder your rival” implies that there will be negative consequences to murdering your rival. If you ask the average person they’ll even say, explicitly, that there will be some sort of karmic retribution for murdering your rival; bad things will happen in return. It’s superstition and it’s no more difficult to reject than religious claims. Don’t be fooled by the sophisticated secularization performed by philosophers; for most people morality is magical thinking.
So, yes, I know something about morality; I know that it looks almost exactly like superstition exploiting terminology that has obvious real world uses. I also know that many such superstitions exist in the world and that there’s rarely any harm in rejecting them. I know that we’re a species that can entertain ideas of angry mountains and retributive weather, so it hardly surprises me that we can dream up entities like Fate and Justice and endow them with properties they cannot possibly have. We can find better ways for talking about, for example, the revulsion we feel at the thought of somebody murdering a rival or the sense of social duty we feel when asked to give up our seat to a pregnant woman. We don’t have to accept our first attempt at understanding these things and we don’t have to make subsequent theories to conform to it either.
Yes! Thank you, Poke. I’ve been thinking something vaguely like the above while reading through many, many posts and replies and arguments about morality, but I didn’t know how to express it. I’ve copied this post into a quotes file.
“Should” has obvious non-moral uses: you should open the door before attempting to walk through it. “Right” and “better” too: you need the right screwdriver; it’s better to use a torque driver. We can use these words in non-problematic physical situations. I think this makes it obvious that morality is in most cases just a supernatural way of talking about consequences. “You shouldn’t murder your rival” implies that there will be negative consequences to murdering your rival. If you ask the average person they’ll even say, explicitly, that there will be some sort of karmic retribution for murdering your rival; bad things will happen in return. It’s superstition and it’s no more difficult to reject than religious claims. Don’t be fooled by the sophisticated secularization performed by philosophers; for most people morality is magical thinking.
So, yes, I know something about morality; I know that it looks almost exactly like superstition exploiting terminology that has obvious real world uses. I also know that many such superstitions exist in the world and that there’s rarely any harm in rejecting them. I know that we’re a species that can entertain ideas of angry mountains and retributive weather, so it hardly surprises me that we can dream up entities like Fate and Justice and endow them with properties they cannot possibly have. We can find better ways for talking about, for example, the revulsion we feel at the thought of somebody murdering a rival or the sense of social duty we feel when asked to give up our seat to a pregnant woman. We don’t have to accept our first attempt at understanding these things and we don’t have to make subsequent theories to conform to it either.
Yes! Thank you, Poke. I’ve been thinking something vaguely like the above while reading through many, many posts and replies and arguments about morality, but I didn’t know how to express it. I’ve copied this post into a quotes file.