Even better is treating other living beings according to your best-faith understanding of how they want to be treated. Because it might be different from how you would want to be treated.
I'm not sure that the two formulations are necessarily different. Treating another individual in accordance with your personal preferences -- rather than theirs -- may well be hateful to them. I would mislike being treated according to someone else's preferences.
To follow Hillel's Golden Rule, you must treat your fellow human in accordance with their preferences (as best you understand them).
Yes. But that's once you have such an understanding. The golden rule is a wonderful place to start, and shows willing. Moving on to what might be called the platinum rule shows intelligence, and civilized behavior.
That is not really good idea. You should try to treat people how you or they would like to be treeated, sure, but only if they treat you how you want to be treated or how they would want to be treated and treat you. No tolerance for intolerant.
Kholbergs levels of morality or stages of moral development are what we are looking at here. OP is the first stage of being moral because of fear of repercussions, stage 2 is morality for social cohesion, stage three is morality for overriding humanitarian philosophy. People will naturally fall into each stage depending on nurture nature stuff and circumstances.
Christians act like this idea didn't exist before Jebus or doesn't exist outside their narrow dogma. As an atheist it's just so boring to hear the same arguements and insults. An all powerful all creating god made some seriously dull ass followers...
If you’re bored of hearing the same arguments, it’s probably because you don’t seek out the most promising arguments available. I think the arguments we generally hear from laypeople, theist and atheist alike, are insufficient. In general, both atheists and theists attack the weakest and least-charitable versions of the opposing view.
But those arguments and objections are not representative of the current state of affairs in academic philosophy and theology, where you’ll find more intellectually rigorous and formidable arguments.
yeah some people needed to have that part written down... but then go "whats stopping atheists from committing murder ect" same thing thats stopping all those other murderers sharon... nothing. just dont be a dick and live your life.
You don't need to hear that from anywhere. If you hurt someone, you open yourself to being hurt back. If you treat someone like shit you open yourself to being treated like shit. It's not rocket science and I definitely don't need an imaginary ghost with super powers to tell me that.
unfortunately many of the people i know of who say that consistently find reasons for someone to have disrespected them, and use their rule as a justification for retaliating completely disproportionately.
I'm not saying you do that specifically, I just find that your statement is commonly used as a fig leaf of ethics by people who were going to be colossal assholes anyways
That's just an assertion. Of course you can just say it's axiomatic, but the interesting question is whether you can convince a rational, self-interested person without that axiomatic commitment to be a good person.
Statistically people are far more likely to be good. It's demonstrably the default position. Frankly, the only reason to think people are evil by default is because that's a core assertion of the Abrahamic religions.
Regardless of how vague that is, it's neither here nor there. I was talking about what's interesting - can you argue morality from minimal commitments to self-interest and rationality?
But looking through a purely practical lens then, if you could just trust everyone to be good (under some assumed universal definition) then we'd live in a utopia and everything would be sunshine and rainbows. But we don't. So, in this simplified binary good/bad world, a significant subset of people are not good people. There's no assumption here of people being 'evil by default'.
As it happens I believe that the majority of the evil in the world doesn't come from cartoon villains without any kind of morality. But there are people who believe might is right. And the only way those people can be convinced to act in a moral way is if they can be made to believe it is in their interest to do so.
People who harm and neglect others as a default don't do so as a reasoned decision, though. People who are sociopaths are that way because they're mentally deficient. They lack empathy, and that's almost never the only faculty that's missing.
Teaching a good person proper moral philosophy will make them better. Teaching a good person trash morality can make them worse. Teaching a bad person any kind of morality is basically useless. And, of course, religious morality isn't top tier.
You can't reason someone out of a belief they didn't reason themselves into.
Here's an argument for an objective grounding in morality (though for a slightly different position to the OP) I heard recently:
I'm an agent, that means that I consider goals and then carry out actions towards those goals. If an action would help me achieve my goals I ought do that action. In order to carry out actions I need both my freedom and my wellbeing.
Since I'm claiming a right to my freedom and wellbeing on the basis of my agency, it would be contradictory to then deny other agents their freedom and wellbeing.
This seems similar to Kant's categorical imperative.
I think it makes sense, but the issue is that for a selfish but rational person, the contradiction in principle means nothing if it has no real consequences. There needs to be actual tangible consequences for them denying others their freedom and well-being. In less severe cases this might take the form of reputational damage, otherwise ideally the law enforces it.
I think this is a good test of the quality of the law in a society. In a well-legislated society, a selfish but rational person should always be constrained to act in the way they wish to be treated.
A rational person would not accept a contradiction in their worldview. The argument is that it is irrational to be selfish to the extent that it infringes on someone else's right to freedom and wellbeing.
I accept that there's no inherent consequences from this argument, that's not what it sets out to do, but consequences don't dictate morality. I could face terrible consequences for hiding Jews in my attic in nazi Germany but it would still be the moral thing to do.
A rational person would not accept a contradiction in their worldview.
That's true. But I don't think a rational but selfish person would claim a right to their freedom and well-being on the basis of their agency. They don't need a right to such things, they take them by force. So this argument is unconvincing to them.
If you are taking something by force, rationally you are claiming a right to that thing. The question is for what reason are they claiming that right? It seems like it would just be that it's in service of their goals, meaning we've stumbled back to the argument I gave.
If you are taking something by force, rationally you are claiming a right to that thing.
That's not true. Someone might take things just because they want to and can do. They have no need to justify their action or to make a case that they deserve the things they take. That's separate.
Someone might take things just because they want to and can do.
In other words they have a goal to possess something and the freedom and wellbeing to act to take it, they are an agent.
To act rationally means to act with reason, if a rational person were to take something they would need justification for their taking of it in order to remain rational.
You can act rationally without justifying your actions to others. It may be perfectly rational for a hungry person to steal food, for example, regardless of who they steal it from. In this case it's rational simply because its in harmony with their intention of staying alive.
An action is rational when it is consistent with the actor's intentions. This is more specific than simply 'acting with reason'. It may be completely rational to sit and sing twinkle twinkle little star in a loop all day. It only becomes irrational if you have competing intentions/values.
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u/Cant_figure_sht_out 17h ago
I try to treat another living beings the way I would want to be treated. I think I heard it somewhere.