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Here is a thought experiment for all those who claim that morality is subjective:
Imagine a world where the Nazis have won World War II and where they "succeeded"
(a.) to kill all Jews, and
(b.) to brainwash all surviving people so that every living person believes that Jews were a dangerous vermin and that the Holocaust was the morally right thing to do.

So we are left with a 100 per cent Nazi world with Nazi values shared by everyone.
Can you imagine this world?
Now here's the Question : Was the Holocaust morally right?
If you are tempted to answer "Even if everybody else is convinced that the Holocaust was right, I know that it is wrong" - what is your conviction based on?
A personal and subjective preference?

Matias 8 Aug 15
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11 comments

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2

Matias, I think there is a moral code that transcends conscious thought. The moral code is tied to evolutionary principle. Any population necessarily pursues a course that assures the health and well-being of the species ad infinitum. Otherwise it goes ectinct.

Humans are an animal species. We evolved dependent upon a cohesive society. The society provided protection from predators, cooperation for subsistance, and a check and balance for any behavior that threatened the health and ultimate well-being of the species. Therefore, the health and well-being of the society (reason Libertarianism doesn't work).

This evolutionary imperative serves as a check and balance against aberrant behavior that diminishes the societal structure (aka. morals). Therefore, Nazism, regardless of the conscious rationalization is in itself an aberrant behavior that endangers the cohesion and well-being of the society. Thus endangering the evolutionary health of the species. It is a form of parasitical deterioration from the inside. A necrotizing behavior that condemn the species to potential extinction. Rot from the inside out.

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Social mores and values change with time and circumstance.
50 years ago everyone smoked cigarettes, all the time, everywhere ... scientific and social pressure led to a change in the law and now few people smoke and those who do are made to stand outside, whatever the weather.
Anyone who thinks they would find the above scenario 'wrong' is dreaming .. the vast majority of people go along with the vast majority of people ... sheep may safely graze
But over time that society would change, as all societies change ... small evolutionary steps, some for good some for bad.... or revolutionary shock changes, that becomes the new normality, till it too changes by evolution.
plus ca change

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Gee, I can’t answer “objectively,” as I live in the US, a country fairly successful in it’s own genocidal activities. Despite this, there are some things about the culture and people that I am rather fond of.

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Oh you with your thought experiments! I want to not think...I am on leave from thinking. I am going to sit in a room and watch normal people's TV and resist...resist I say . I am not reading or replying....oh too late

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The subjective/objective polarity may not be the best or at least not the only metric by which to analyze the issue. I don’t think there is a ghostly body of moral truth floating “out there” somewhere as an “object,” independent of humans or other animal life.

And I do think that we become aware of moral urgings through our subjective feelings, so it is understandable that some people may think that morality has no basis other than what a given individual happens to become convinced of.

But a better metric may be the biological/cultural polarity, or nature/nurture. Science tells us that biology gives humans and some other species varying levels of altruistic behaviors. That phenomenon is well understood evolutionarily. So even though the impulse to altruistic behavior is delivered through subjective systems, it is objectively encoded into our DNA species-wide, so as individuals, we are not entirely free from hearing its call, even though we have the power to ignore that call in certain circumstances.

Then, beyond that, there is the matter of nature/nurture. Biological altruism, though still with us, was designed for existence in our ancestral environment, not for cooperative life in large cities, and indeed, states. For that feat we modified ourselves through culture. Where animal altruism leaves off, culture picks up.

So is morality subjective or objective, nature or nurture?

Yes. Yes it is. All of the above.

skado Level 9 Aug 15, 2019
1

By 1900, it was discovered that you could brainwash consumers into buying a product through an intensive advertising campaign. Promoters of totalitarian ideologies quickly discovered the same thing. They called it "propaganda". Nowadays, it's more commonly known as Psychological Warfare. It was never the goal of the Hitler Regime to "conquer the World". But even if they had, their propaganda would only have been effective until the contradictions of the "product" began to make themselves apparent. Then, the over-extended "Reich" would have toppled like a house of cards, as all empires eventually do.

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You're taking way too much for granted. You're assuming only the Jews will be against this. You're assuming that brainwashing will always work with everyone. You're assuming there isn't enough resistance to this type of behavior and this type of thinking. And most of all, you're assuming that we're still living in a 1940 Nazi mindset that was only shared by a small majority of the people.

1

There would never be such a possibility, even had this scenario prevailed and the Nazis had wiped out all Jews. It would never be possIble to brainwash every remaining survivor. Even when they were in power from the mid 1930s until 1945..not everyone in Germany was immoral and was a Nazi. I will concede that the majority went along with their doctrine, but enough didn’t to form resistance, there were those with strong moral cores who only paid lip service to the regime as a matter of necessity to survive and quite a few risked their own lives to shelter and help both Jews and allied airmen to escape. We know that quite a number of German officers (and presumably rank and file too) were never true believers in Nazi philosophy. As long as there is a nucleus of morally principled people left there will always be a seedbed of dissent and uprising,...so no it was never morally right and 100% would never think so.

1

I would guess that the world you suggest would be impossible. It would be something like what we see today in Saudi Arabia but it is neigh on impossible to brainwash everybody. Unless it was something like "Brave New World" where everybody is drugged all the time people will rebel and see the light so to speak. Saudi just outlawed atheists because of independent thought. It's part of the human condition. Empathy which is a prime condition of morality is in our genes and would have to be bred out of us not brainwashed out of us. At that point we would be nothing more than automations, unable to have morals.

gearl Level 8 Aug 15, 2019
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It would be morally right for those who think it was morally right. For those who think it evil it would be evil—it’s purely subjective. In other words, IMO the concept of morality has no meaning except as a personal judgment.

Hitler was thwarted in his goal, not because his goal was immoral but because he was mistaken in his thinking. His goal was illogical, impractical and undesirable for society.

@Bobby9 Yes, from their perspective they would be doing the correct thing. Humans do have a concept of judgment but their judgments don’t alway agree. And besides it is a mistake in logic to judge others to be evil. We are all the same IMO.

Of course if someone tried to rape and murder me I’d try to defend myself. We’d have a difference in opinion and a problem of conflicting desires.

@Bobby9 I suppose morality could somehow be defined from a universal perspective but I’m not understanding how it got that way or how it is implemented. Maybe we do have some common values that are embedded somehow.

It’s easier and simpler to understand morality as a set of bodily emotions peculiar to individuals. You could be right though.

@Bobby9 “I defy you or anyone to tell me how a rape and subseqent murder can be anythig except immoral.”

If you want to define immorality as that which is unacceptable to society then of course for that society certain acts are immoral. But different societies have different attitudes toward various behaviors. I doubt if any societies today condone murder, but that is just one example and says nothing about morality in general.

If you want to argue for absolute morality I think you’d have to accept some sort of higher power that controls and judges human events. I’m not saying there’s no such power, however it seems likely to me that nature is neither good nor bad and that whatever happens in the world of organisms happens for reasons and it has to happen.

If you think of the procession of life as a continuum—a single entity, the life or death of a single organism is of little significance. Walk in the woods and you’ll see death and destruction everywhere, but the forest as a unitary whole is healthy and beautiful.

Despite all my philosophical babbling, we do live in a society, and it is important to honor society’s values. Rapists and murderers have to be caught and held accountable after all.

1

Can I imagine that? Well, yes actually on account of we killed all the other species of hominids that evolved before us, along with countless other animals, no one seems to have a problem with that.

The second question show break down between the real world example and the hypothetical begging all sorts of irrelevant questions about this scenario. In the real example someone might argue that they did what they had to do in order to survive and if they didn't we might not have been around today. A similar scenario might take place in the hypothetical, where propaganda creators and teachers don't treat it as morally right but rather as necessary for the foundation of their nazi ideals, thus avoiding the problem.

All of this is unfair because it avoids the question you are trying to ask, but at the same time it shows how fluid morality can be. Maybe a better example would be the way we treat sick or dying animals, since euthanizing them is considered humane. Doing this to an old or brain dead human is considered wrong, even if there is no chance of recovery and the person is in a lot of pain. Some people say this should be morally acceptable, others say animals should get the same treatment as humans. There is disagreement between people, therefore morality is subjective, therefore if 100% of the human poulation including myself was a nazi, the holocaust would be moral.

Where’s all the finger-pointing when it comes to the burning alive of over a hundred thousand innocent civilians in the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Dresden, etc.? The average person has never even heard of the fire-bombing of Tokyo. Not that there SHOULD be finger-pointing—awareness though.

@WilliamFleming If we tried to make a list of all the atrocities committed by man in just this century we could talk for hours before finally being forced to decide that there can be no standard for what is and isn't moral by pure abstraction of the concepts. There are actual genocides actually happening right now, but we would rather argue about things that are rather petty by comparison.

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