definitely moral relativist, my big problem with absolutist systems is that they’re either derived from something I don’t believe in or they’re designed based on “how do I make murder against the rules” and then moving on from there
the closest thing to an actual absoloutist moral system I could believe in is this:
“An action is moral if it creates more choices for people than it takes away from others”
and even that run into some flaws in some very niche cases that often come up in moral dillemas
Yes. In a case of “lesser of two evils” the lesser evil is no longer evil because it is the only choice. there’s no fixed value of how moral or immoral an action is from my perspective and it’s only found in relation to the morality of other choices
Doesn’t that effectively lead to moral absolutism in that sense? In a binomial example, there is a choice that is absolutely better than the other?
Not neccecarily, because what is best overall can change based on situation and we almost always have imperfect information.
it’s hard to explain because coming up with a truly accurate moral dillema is not osmething you can just come up with an hour before lunch on tuesday
but i can’t say that in every situation one action is more moral than the other due to imperfect information
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So your moral relativism is something like
I am a cannibal and I see two humans
it is more moral for me to kill and eat the two humans because one will not satiate my hunger, rather than just one and the other gets off scot-free because I’m feeling nice and not wanting to satiate my hunger that much
When in fact the actual answer is that the cannibal should rethink his diet.
…No, because of the fact that morality is not from the perspective of only the individual but it’s from the perspective of the whole of society
the cannibal is still evil because they’re murdering people, moral relativism is only different from absoloutism when it comes to very niche cases
I suppose what I’m really getting at is that this kind of moral relativism is borne out of ignorance and misunderstanding rather than a changing set of morals
But i’m sorry, your argument dosen’t actually make that much sense. The most moral act in that situaton is for the cannibal to eat nobody because murder is almost always immoral
There’s actually some uncivilised places still out there on planet earth.
Am I delving into your murder thing too much and you’d like me to make a different argument?
when judging other people’s actions you judge them as if it was you making the decision, and society would judge the cannibal to be a heartless monster
you’re acting like just because I don’t think we can say something is always right or always wrong that everything is from the perspective of the individual, that’s solpsistic relativitism and it just dosen’t work
But your argument physically makes no sense
just because somoene dosen’t know something is bad dosen’t mean it isn’t bad
the whole point of moral reletavism is that actions are good or bad but we don’t have a reliable metric of telling whether they are or not 100% of the time. there are some which we can intiuitively tell but they are usually caused by mental disorders or insanity or something not even having a mind