You are confusing the hard wired emotions that we feel with morality itself. The first is fixed. Everyone feels them, always have and presumably always will. The second isnât. What triggers the emotions is the cause of moral thinking, but just because you feel embarrassed or proud about something doesnât mean that others will as well. As I have said before and as you have kindly pointed out above, morality isnât fixed and can be said to be constantly developing. To use a trite example, it wasnât that long ago that a person may have felt shame if someone knew that they were gay. Or someone might have been embarrassed to discover a friend was gay. Now we know better. Now those feelings have mostly disappeared and our sense of morality as far a gay friends are concerned have changed.
Now it is quite possible that a person will hide his homophobia (used in the strict sense of the word) because they donât want to be rejected by the majority of society.
I hope that the above clears that misunderstanding.
To be honest it doesnât clear up any misunderstanding because there was no misunderstanding.
You canât say, âNow we know better,â or âMorality is improving,â without a clear view of what morality is and the ends towards which moral principles exist in the first place. You have no grounds for claiming things are getting better or now we know better unless you can precisely detail what âbetterâ actually involves. And if you can detail that today, why couldnât it have been detailed 100 years ago or 2000 years ago. In fact, I much prefer Aristotleâs clearly detailed ethical system and Jesusâ clear view of the ends involved than most of the contrived or ad hoc ethical âsuggestionsâ that pass for morality today.
You provide no grounds - except appeals to politically correct social approval or to a very small segment of the population âfeelingâ more comfortable - as the basis for your claim that âNow we know better.â We âknowâ better because some subset or a subset (gays) are made to âfeelâ better? How is that a rational argument?
You may as well argue that the most fundamental grounds for morality are achieved by determining whether or to what extent a few or a lot of people â who happen to be oblivious to consequences and âfeelâ âgoodâ precisely because they are oblivious to those consequences â report having more âpositiveâ or comfortable feelings. Good luck persuading any serious moral thinkers of that. Why donât we just drug everyone with happy pills to the point of oblivion and, voila, thereâs your Utopia: everyone âfeelingâ better.
Unless you can trace a direct line from âfeelingâ better to actually being better-off given specific teleological ends, you havenât made the case. AND, by the way, you canât argue that gays are better off merely because they âfeelâ better off. That would be circular reasoning.
No, a far more compelling argument would be that moral systems necessarily aim towards objective and definable ends in terms of actual well-being and such an argument positively requires a depiction of what that âgoodâ or âwell-offâ state looks like given the nature of what it means to be a human being - not merely that some sector or other of humanity, or even the bulk of humanity âfeelâ more comfortable or more secure. That state of emotionally induced obliviousness or contentedness could, like the proverbial calm before the storm, merely portend some cataclysmic existential or moral disaster and may, in fact, have nothing to do with the actual state of humanity with regard to moral agency.
Sorry, Brad, but any claim that human beings ARE better off merely because they FEEL better off, is not one worth entertaining - not for more than a few seconds.
Iâve been told that if I donât obey Godâs rules, then God is the one who will throw me in the fiery depths of hell. If however, Iâm responsible for my own punishment, then I will simply choose not to punish myself with hell.