NY Times Op-Ed on Moral Relativism

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I don't think the issue is having an expanded moral filter, or being able to think in a nuanced manner about moral issues, or having shades of grey. The issue -- in the initial article posted, anyway -- is that there is an increasing lack of moral filter, period...an inability to frame issues within a moral context. The ramifications for a host of issues that have fundamental judgments at their core -- from human trafficking to civil liberties -- are or should be obvious.


are we seeing evidence that young people are indifferent, or supportive, of human sex trafficking or civil liberties violations, racism, homophobia, sexism, or murder?

simply because young people might not think about the moral -- painted here as "right vs. wrong" -- implications does not mean that they are not making ethical decisions.
 
With the death of Judeo-Christian God-based standards, people have simply substituted feelings for those standards.Millions of American young people have been raised by parents and schools with “How do you feel about it?” as the only guide to what they ought to do. The heart has replaced God and the Bible as a moral guide.


The way I see it, the heart is where God speaks to people. So, if there's a gnawing feeling or a calm feeling about a moral issue, then God is giving His input.

And even if you don't believe God does that, aren't we all aware to follow our heart and intuition/gut when it comes to making a decision?

I just wanted to give my 2 cents because I felt the article INDY500 posted was too upset over the state of moralism in this country.
 
are we seeing evidence that young people are indifferent, or supportive, of human sex trafficking or civil liberties violations, racism, homophobia, sexism, or murder?

simply because young people might not think about the moral -- painted here as "right vs. wrong" -- implications does not mean that they are not making ethical decisions.

The article makes that point. However, it seems that we may experiencing a cultural shift from ethicism (behavior rooted in a consistent, reasoned set of worldviews and judgments) to pragmatism (whatever is most effective in achieving a certain desired result), and while ethicism and pragmatism can sometimes go hand-in-hand, they do not always do so.

In political terms, if anything, I would see this as a bigger problem for the Right than the Left, given the Right's tendency for focusing on efficacy, particularly when it comes to economical and social issues. Conservatives need to be reminded of the values they espouse, since it seems to be the only way to hold them accountable.

All hearts, as it were, are not created equally ethical, or there would be no sex trafficking, civil liberties violations, racism, homophobia, sexism or murder. These are, tragically, still with us, and I suspect that the proponents thereof sleep just as soundly as the rest of us do.
 
The article makes that point. However, it seems that we may experiencing a cultural shift from ethicism (behavior rooted in a consistent, reasoned set of worldviews and judgments) to pragmatism (whatever is most effective in achieving a certain desired result), and while ethicism and pragmatism can sometimes go hand-in-hand, they do not always do so.
I don't see this at all. I think it's naive to think there's been some overall shift. No one has shown me any evidence to the contrary, but if someone were willing to give me actual examples of what they were talking about I'd be glad to discuss them.

In political terms, if anything, I would see this as a bigger problem for the Right than the Left, given the Right's tendency for focusing on efficacy, particularly when it comes to economical and social issues. Conservatives need to be reminded of the values they espouse, since it seems to be the only way to hold them accountable.
I'm curious what you by the right's tendency for focusing on efficacy with social issues? Care to explain?



All hearts, as it were, are not created equally ethical, or there would be no sex trafficking, civil liberties violations, racism, homophobia, sexism or murder. These are, tragically, still with us, and I suspect that the proponents thereof sleep just as soundly as the rest of us do.

As a believer do you really believe all hearts are not CREATED equally?
 
I'm curious what you by the right's tendency for focusing on efficacy with social issues? Care to explain?

I was thinking about the push for privatization of social issues, particularly when it comes to health care, as Nixon did in the 70s (helpfully documented by Michael Moore's "Sicko"). There's something strange about incentivizing sickness that I find morally problematic, even though supply-side economics argues the opposite. I was at an event where Stephen Moore, an editor for the Wall Street Journal spoke a few years ago, and he argued that the US should get out of the international aid business altogether. He believed that the private sector would step in. I had to walk out.

As a believer do you really believe all hearts are not CREATED equally?

You mean, "...equally ethical"? No, I don't.
 
does it though? i think it's making a series of bad assumptions.

Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.

?
 
nathan1977 said:
I was thinking about the push for privatization of social issues, particularly when it comes to health care, as Nixon did in the 70s (helpfully documented by Michael Moore's "Sicko"). There's something strange about incentivizing sickness that I find morally problematic, even though supply-side economics argues the opposite. I was at an event where Stephen Moore, an editor for the Wall Street Journal spoke a few years ago, and he argued that the US should get out of the international aid business altogether. He believed that the private sector would step in. I had to walk out.

You mean, "...equally ethical"? No, I don't.

Well I'm not sure your example holds up, specifically because I haven't seen many conservatives even argue healthcare as a social or moral issue. Which as I see it, is part of the problem with that debate. When I think of conservatives and social issues efficacy is probably the last thing that comes to mind.

I'm still not following how a Christian doesn't believe hearts aren't created equally. I think it's probably your use of the word "created" that's throwing me off.
 
Well I'm not sure your example holds up, specifically because I haven't seen many conservatives even argue healthcare as a social or moral issue. Which as I see it, is part of the problem with that debate. When I think of conservatives and social issues efficacy is probably the last thing that comes to mind.

This is where you and I part ways. I do think conservatives see healthcare as a social or moral issue, just not as one that the government should focus on. I think efficacy is constantly an issue for conservatives, but the primary focus is financial/economic, and the problem with this approach to healthcare is that the value of treating patients should not be measured in dollars and cents.

I'm still not following how a Christian doesn't believe hearts aren't created equally. I think it's probably your use of the word "created" that's throwing me off.

The discussion of the problem of evil is a discussion for another thread. Suffice it to say that if I believe we are created equally, it's in our proclivity for darkness rather than light. "There is no one righteous, not even one," "all have sinned," and all of that.
 
nathan1977 said:
This is where you and I part ways. I do think conservatives see healthcare as a social or moral issue, just not as one that the government should focus on. I think efficacy is constantly an issue for conservatives, but the primary focus is financial/economic, and the problem with this approach to healthcare is that the value of treating patients should not be measured in dollars and cents.

.
I wish this were true, it would have changed the debate drastically. But I haven't seen one conservative in Washington or in here that has discussed healthcare from a moral or social issue, and I think you would be hard pressed to show otherwise. It's interesting to me that churches will get involved in social debates but wouldn't touch that one with a ten foot pole. Very telling.

How does efficacy play a part in the gay marriage debate? They don't want government in healthcare but they do want it in marriage?
 


where are the statistics about actual evidence of moral behaviors on the decline?

if we even take crime, it's been dropping precipitously for the past 15 years or so.

same thing with other so-called "moral" issues -- divorce rates are lower, teen pregnancy lower, even age of first sexual intercourse is later now than it was in the 1980s.

Brooks writes:

It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.

seems like their thinking is actually pretty spot-on? they're quite a bit more "moral" than their boomer parents?
 
where are the statistics about actual evidence of moral behaviors on the decline?

Again, the article's not talking about behaviorism, but rather about contextualization -- the ability to think critically from an integrated worldview. As an old proverb puts it, "a way seems right to a man, until another man rises to challenge him." The ability to engage moral issues from an informed perspective, as opposed to a strictly instinctual one, would seem to be one of the hallmarks of an enlightened society.
 
I wish this were true, it would have changed the debate drastically.

You and me both.

But I haven't seen one conservative in Washington or in here that has discussed healthcare from a moral or social issue, and I think you would be hard pressed to show otherwise.

I don't disagree with you. Politicians are, however, frequently a poor barometer of what's actually happening on the street. Maybe the people I hang out with are more centrist, but I do have conservative friends who do believe it's a social/moral issue, they just don't like the idea of the government getting involved. And then there are the assholes who think that, if the uninsured don't have insurance, they should be left to die. I don't have a lot of time for assholes.

It's interesting to me that churches will get involved in social debates but wouldn't touch that one with a ten foot pole. Very telling.

Perhaps because many churches, by and large, have taken it upon themselves to solve the issue, by forming volunteer health care facilities. One of my friends, a doctor, started a walk-in women's health clinic, specifically to meet the issue of poor women without healthcare. There are a lot of faith-based health-care co-ops that have formed over the last 20-30 years, who work outside of the established health insurance framework. It's not a perfect solution, but given the morass of inefficiency that constitues the US government, it may be among the better ones out there.

How does efficacy play a part in the gay marriage debate? They don't want government in healthcare but they do want it in marriage?

No clue on that one.
 
Again, the article's not talking about behaviorism, but rather about contextualization -- the ability to think critically from an integrated worldview. As an old proverb puts it, "a way seems right to a man, until another man rises to challenge him." The ability to engage moral issues from an informed perspective, as opposed to a strictly instinctual one, is one of the hallmarks of an enlightened society, is it not?


i think the ability to understand the subjectivity of morality, and moving away from morality as a matter of doctrine, is more the hallmark of an enlightened society.

what i find i disagree with is the notion that we all are "fallen," somehow. that there's one way to be, and that we all fall from that, and need to be steadied and righted and put back on course, whether by our own will or through the help of others. that there is one objective standard out there, and it's our job to try to live up to that.

i don't share that worldview. and that's why i find Brooks' entire article totally besides the point. i'm really not concerned why someone chooses not to drive drunk. whether it's because, "it's not moral for me to drive drunk" or it's because, "i won't drive drunk because my reaction skills are impaired thus upping the likelihood of my harming myself or, worse, someone else, in an accident," why does it matter? in fact, i kind of like that rational, subjective, what-do-i-feel often puts us in the same place as whatever someone else might seek to be moral.

however, it's the awareness that doctrine is not in and of itself a justification for anything that's lead us to a more accepting, inclusive world.
 
But what evidence do they have that it's true?

From the article:

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
 
But read the next couple of paragraphs. The fact that people are non-committal is considered a knock against them. Is that what they're defining as "not answering the question?" That's what I'm saying.
 
i think the ability to understand the subjectivity of morality, and moving away from morality as a matter of doctrine, is more the hallmark of an enlightened society.

I'm fascinated by the fact that laws across various cultures and people groups, no matter how diverse, have often adhered to a few common points -- do not murder, do not steal, do not lie. This seems to belie that morality is entirely subjective. While morality may be interpreted differently according to different cultural contexts, the underlying principles have remarkable consistency.

You and I are going to disagree about the notion of whether or not we are broken, but I guess I look at the presence of laws, moral codes, rules and regulations as a sign that human behavior requires direction, since there is a constant tension between our higher and lower angels.
 
But read the next couple of paragraphs. The fact that people are non-committal is considered a knock against them.

The article actually knocks a lack of moral direction from a previous generation -- it's less a criticism of the "kids" than it is of their parents.

Is that what they're defining as "not answering the question?" That's what I'm saying.

The authors seem to think that not having a clue about how to answer the question is the real problem.
 
But they're the ones defining "how one should answer the question." How should you answer the question? I have no idea what these researchers would define as a proper answer.
 
But they're the ones defining "how one should answer the question." How should you answer the question? I have no idea what these researchers would define as a proper answer.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The rejection of a moral framework is part of the issue here. Reminds me of the old phrase, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Moral confusion doesn't ever happen in a vacuum, but has real ramifications for the world in which we live.
 
I tend to think that "thou shalt not murder" is both a boundary and a direction.

But is this one even black and white?

Some translations say 'kill' some say 'murder'.

Seems like even some of the most obvious ones have had gray areas since the dawn of time.

Does war, execution, self defense ever fall into this category?
 
I'm fascinated by the fact that laws across various cultures and people groups, no matter how diverse, have often adhered to a few common points -- do not murder, do not steal, do not lie. This seems to belie that morality is entirely subjective. While morality may be interpreted differently according to different cultural contexts, the underlying principles have remarkable consistency.


oh, i agree. i just don't need an invisible sky friend to tell me these things. because people with no invisible sky friend or many invisible sky friends or are indifferent to the existence of said invisible sky friend also have pretty much the same conclusions. so it's less that morality is objective, and not so much that it's entirely subjective where black can be white and up is sometime down, but that it is defined and shaped by cultural context, and constantly evolving and always complex.

for whatever reason, i am reminded of the 2 months i spend loafing around Scotland about 8 years ago. i remember reading and hearing stories about how, say, thousands of people with the Plague were walled into the city alive and left to die. i remember taking a ghost tour and hearing stories of public torture. i remember hearing about the finer points of highland warfare and how some weapons were designed to aim up and under the kilt so they could catch a man in his abdomen and better disembowel him. i remember the story of the "real" William Wallace who captured the man who killed his first wife, tied him to a chair for a week, and slowly stripped off his scalp so he could rub a lye mixture into the raw, bleeding flesh.

and that's just Scotland and what i can remember off the top of my head.

while we can find any number of stories today of equal brutality, but i would guess that our understanding of both the self and of the selves of others as being of equal weight of our own, has evolved over the centuries. commonplace brutality back then is, i think, greeted with much more revulsion now, and we live today (at least in the west) with a remarkable absence of violence unthinkable just a few centuries ago.

are we more moral? yes. i'd say so. i'm not terribly concerned about whatever lack of "moral language" we might have. if anything, i'm glad we're dispensing with language that divides up the world into easy categories, for it's categories that dehumanize ourselves to one another and allow us to bury people alive, torture them, or rub lye into their raw, bleeding scalp as a method of revenge.

it's this stark right vs. wrong that supports the death penalty, for bloodshed deserves more bloodshed, justice is an eye for an eye.


You and I are going to disagree about the notion of whether or not we are broken, but I guess I look at the presence of laws, moral codes, rules and regulations as a sign that human behavior requires direction, since there is a constant tension between our higher and lower angels.


i don't feel this battle between myself and my bad self. i don't think Jesus and Satan are waging a war for my soul. i think the world is messy and imperfect and defective and cruel, but i don't think that there's a perfect version of it, or of myself, out there somewhere and i have to find it.

i use my intellect and my heart to live the best life that i can. when i do something wrong, i try to understand it. when i do something right, i try to understand it.

it's a process, a dialogue, and i don't feel the need of an external force telling me that i'm good or bad, right or wrong. i did when i was 8. i'm not a child anymore.
 
I think the biggest issue the article raises isn't so much about how young people think about morality, but about how they think, period:

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The bolded lines indicate, to me at least, that a lot of young people - absolutely not all young people, just a lot - don't have the reading comprehension they should have, and they don't have the critical thinking skills - whether it's critically thinking about morality or critically thinking about history or psychology or philosophy or one's own faults or what love truly is or about anything else - that they should have. It's an indictment of how kids are educated as they grow up. They're not taught to think, they're taught to memorize, imo. Although the two subjects might not appear at first to be related, I think they're directly related.
 
this seems like apathy or fear rather than an absence of moral language.
I'd say an outright majority of liberals of 'baby boomer' age I know are quite strongly of the opinion that the generations born after theirs ('X' just as much as 'Y') are on the whole much more politically apathetic than they were and are. It would definitely take a hefty tome to lay out empirical evidence for that view (and to justify why such-and-such measure should even qualify as evidence, how the historical contexts are and aren't comparable, etc.), but that in itself doesn't convince me it's wrong. You have not had this experience?
How does efficacy play a part in the gay marriage debate? They don't want government in healthcare but they do want it in marriage?
I'm not sure efficacy in that sense is even applicable to gay marriage; no one on either side of the debate wants to abolish civil marriage altogether, do they? Which is what 'getting the government out of marriage' would actually mean. But with regard to the thread topic, I think that, for one, Catholic theologians' arguments generally provide an example of an internally coherent case against gay marriage (no divorce, no contraception, no nonmarital sex gay or straight). Most other social conservative arguments I've seen fall well short on that measure, though; like I said earlier they mostly seem to be lazy, nostalgic appeals to an aesthetic (Marriage is, like, Really Sacred and Really Important, and everyone I knew growing up had a mother and father, that's how it's always been so it must be right) with no coherent system of beliefs about marriage, families and sexuality underlying it.
In political terms, if anything, I would see this as a bigger problem for the Right than the Left, given the Right's tendency for focusing on efficacy, particularly when it comes to economical and social issues. Conservatives need to be reminded of the values they espouse, since it seems to be the only way to hold them accountable.
For Brooks at least, this could be the main issue. He frequently expresses concerns about the decline of conservative intellectualism (e.g. his 2008 characterization of Palin as "a fatal cancer on the Republican Party," the triumph of a reactionary populism that prizes eagerness to stick your finger in the opponent's eye over the ability to argue a case against him). However, it's not clear to me how much of a connection he sees between increasingly impoverished political discourse and the kind of hyperindividualism he's alleging in this particular column (which social conservatives tend to see as strictly a liberal pathology, e.g. the Prager piece upthread).
 
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