Morality

I define morality as the collection of acceptable behavior, or morals, that a society largely agrees upon. A society, for this discussion, is any group of people who have to interact with each other on a regular basis.  People, in this context, consist of anyone who can intelligently voice an opinion.  A moral code, however, is an individual's set of beliefs that determines their morals.  Two people can have entirely different moral codes while having the same set morals, in the same way that two entirely different function can still produce the same output.

That raises the question: are some moral codes objectively better than others?  I find it hard to answer.  Intuitively, the response would be yes.  Morality is objective.  Some things are clearly wrong. "Murder," a friend of mine once argued, "is always morally wrong."  But murder is, by definition, the immoral (or unjust, but in this case the adjectives are synonyms) killing of another creature.  Saying "an immoral killing is immoral" is a tautology.  But killing someone can be justified. It can be considered morally correct depending upon the circumstances under which it happens and, more importantly, depending on who's judging it to be moral or immoral. Self-defense, punishment, vengeance, casualty of war, etc have all been used as justifications for why a killing may be considered to be just or moral instead of murder.

But surely some overall moral codes, the collection of morals held together by a unifying theme, can be shown to be better than others.  How would we even show this?  How can we define better?  Is it the code that results in one society having the largest possible population, or another society having the happiest population? Perhaps it's the code that allows one society's population the most "freedom," however you wish to define that word.  Regardless, for one code to be objectively better than another, it must have some empirically testable dependent variable.  As I have not been able to identify such a variable, nor have I yet seen an argument which strongly defends one that I can agree with, I tentatively conclude that no such variable exists.

The disturbing question is then raised: if all morality is equal, then how do we justify punishing those who do things we morally disagree with?  All moral codes are equal, but only the morals which are widely agreed upon are enforceable.  Therefore, even if your moral code found a killing you committed to be acceptable, if everyone else (or really, a sufficiently large number of people) found your action to be immoral, you would be considered to be a murderer, with all the weights and punishments attached.

Similarly, multiple people with very different moral codes could (and do) live harmoniously together as long as their moral codes produce similar outputs. One person's moral code could be defined as "what Jesus said in the New Testament," another could be "the ten commandments," and a third could be "do not harm another living person," and all three would probably agree on a wide variety of issues that would come up on whether or not an action that was taken was morally right or wrong.

As a final note,  I used to believe that a moral code should be logically derived from a few axioms and be as thoroughly consistent as possible.  I can think of no reason to defend that view, unless you believe hypocrisy is morally wrong (which, for the record, I do).  However, at this point, society does seem to consider hypocrisy morally wrong, so I do think that any argument that relies on morality at this point should be internally consistent.

Over time, morality will continue to evolve and change. Things that we would regard as innocuous now will one day be considered reprehensible, and vice versa.  For this reason, all laws need to be passed in such a way that they can be eventually discarded or abandoned.

The structure and style of this post's prose frustrates me.  Though thematically, the ideas here are related, I seem to be making several arguments at once, and all of them poorly. I'll edit this later.

This Blog Post about Tautology is a Tautological Blog Post

Tautology: noun the saying of the same thing twice in different words, generally considered to be a fault of style; a needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word This definition and this example are both tautologlies, they both needlessly repeat the same idea.

Tautologies amuse me.  The quirky self-reference of them almost always gives my head a quick spin. and whenever I can, I try to find them.

As part of my daily routine of not doing any work, I tend to spend a lot of time surfing the web.  Very rarely do I actually encounter something amusing or witty (and even more rarely, a good tautology that manages to note itself as one), and, more often than not, most of the things I read just annoy me (upon rereading this sentence, I realized "more often than not, most of the things..." is a tautology itself).  Most of the things that tend to annoy me are pieces that strike me as hypocritical, or hypercritical, or just overly politically correct.

Take, for example, this blog post from someone at Princeton:

" Along with these paper advertisements were business card ads for a female freshman running for class president. On the right side is her name, the position she’s running for, and her slogan “Looking to have a good time freshman year?” accompanied by “Don’t be Square, Vote for [redacted]!” On the left side of the business card is a photograph of a shirtless male on top of a shirtless (but bra wearing) female. The picture seems to suggest that they are either about to engage in sex or are already engaging in sex."

"These campaign business cards portrayed sex as something that everyone’s doing, and that you should be, too. Or else you’ll be square."

The piece goes on to bemoan the over-sexualized view of college, and what a shame it is that our hookup culture has taken over so strongly, and isn't this a great example of pluralistic ignorance, where everyone assumes that everyone's hooking up when really the majority are not?

And the piece annoyed me.

It annoyed me first because I thought that was a funny and clever way of getting attention for a completely pointless election, and I rather enjoyed the ad.

It annoyed me even more because it struck me as hypercritical.  I felt the author was reading far too much into a silly little freshman election.

It annoyed me because it seemed overly politically correct.  The author didn't bother to say what she really felt, but clearly implied: that the hookup culture and college sex in general is degrading and inappropriate.  I would have more respect for the author if she had just come out and said it. I would have disagreed with her, but her bluntness would have been refreshing.  However, the last comment on the post was refreshingly scathing and witty:

"What is a “square”? Someone conventional. But on the card, sex is associated with not being a square, with not being conventional. The natural conclusion to draw is that having sex is not considered conventional.

Yet you draw the opposite conclusion, that the card implies that the conventional thing to do is to have sex. Why? Because we all know she didn’t chose the word square for the nuances of its definition, she chose it because it rhymes with her name. What she really meant was something like “loser”. In which case your analysis is less bizarre.

“Loser”, however, is an accurate description of students who fail to attract the opposite sex. Men who attempt to attract women but do not succeed are losing out to other men. They are literally losers with respect to women. Romantic success is, I’m willing to guess, very important to college students, so being a loser with respect to the opposite sex more or less amounts to being a loser, period. So, the candidate’s card is really a tautology: if you aren’t hooking up with the opposite sex, you are, in fact, a loser."

I found that rebuttal absolutely excellent for the following reasons:

1. Early on, the commenter pointed out how silly the entire article was: "Because we all know she didn’t chose the word square for the nuances of its definition, she chose it because it rhymes with her name."  It's a freshman election, no one cares about it now, or ever will again. Creating a brouhaha over it is pathetic.

2. The commenter revealed accidental hypocrisy inherent in the post. "The natural conclusion to draw is that having sex is not considered conventional.

Yet you draw the opposite conclusion"  Almost no one is intentionally hypocritical, which is what makes it so entertaining when you find out someone is a hypocrite.  Now, I'm not saying that the author hooks up and then bemoans the hook up culture on her blog.  The hypocrisy I refer is the far more annoying "matyred minority" variety, where someone is convinced that he or she is making a last righteous stand for some pet cause that the masses have long abandoned.  Here, she is convinced she is one of the few public voices trying to stop the massive onslaught of conversation about sex.  But sex is not considered conventional. Despite its prominence in our society, it still is considered scandalous and taboo. That's the only reason the ad made any waves at all. Far from being the last defendant of public morality, the author is just another random hack.  And, the commenter managed to convey most of that in the two sentences quoted above, the brevity and subtlety of it making it all the more biting.

3.  Finally, the commenter makes a tautology reference.  I love tautology, largely because I accidentally engage in it all the time.

I am a member of that Facebook group and I read XKCD. (comic from Randall Munroe's XKCD #703)

"Men who attempt to attract women but do not succeed are losing out to other men. They are literally losers with respect to women. .... So, the candidate’s card is really a tautology: if you aren’t hooking up with the opposite sex, you are, in fact, a loser."

So, with one short comment, some random troll on the internet turned some idiotic fluff piece that annoyed me immensely and gave it an amusing and distracting skewering.  I salute you, random troll.  And yes, "random troll" is a tautology.