This piece is Part 1 of 2. Later today, for Thorough Thursday, we'll dive deeper into a question raised in the backdrop of a philosophy essay from 1972, Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality".

It's not that the paper's core argument isn't compelling; it's that Singer's challenge to individual morality raises a bigger question about the very nature of morality - and our world's ability to achieve it.

#Philosophy #Humanism #GlobalHumanism
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/is-it-possible-to-be-good-in-our

@MLClark I've always seen others' morality as being defined by the society in which they live.

The Aztecs saw human sacrifice as not just moral, but righteous.

Many in bygone days saw speaking against the lord/king of their land as immoral.

Many Romans saw war & conquest in the name of Empire as righteous.

Of course, if your moral system is based on civilization-scale outcomes (that's me!), a lot of that subjectivity disappears... but everyone else's moral system starts to look nonsensical.

@IrelandTorin

Yep, that's the gist of it.

Except that I disagree that you're as "objective" as you think you are.

Your notions of civilization-scale outcomes are still informed by your subject-position and its exposure sets.

It's very common for people to think that they're accessing a higher-level "objectivity" by talking in abstract or at scale, though.

(Amusingly, it's especially common within a certain thread of so-called "rationalist" discourse very much tethered to our culture too.)

@MLClark I never claim to be perfectly objective - only more so than most, which admittedly is a very low bar.

The key difference is that I can, and often do, wrap my head around all the competing perspectives on an issue at once, as well as set aside emotion and think about an issue more (although far from perfectly!) rationally.

And I tend to think in terms of that which can be empirically measured.

So if subjectivity <-> objectivity is a continuum, I'm further from the former than most.

@IrelandTorin

That's the mistake in your argumentation, though - you keep using the word "rationally" as if there's such a thing as mental processing removed from the material condition of the mind, when we know full well that thinking is always informed by emotion.

I say this as a strongly empirical humanist, and one who routinely touts the importance of holding ideas in tension: one is at greatest risk of "irrational" thinking when they act like there's a binary between reason and emotion.

@MLClark It's not a mistake.

It's possible to utilize active compensation techniques, self-blinding (through the use of opaque intermediate abstractions, among other things), and manipulation of one's own internal state (eg: empathy suppression, dissociation) to reduce the impact of emotion on one's thought processes - not eliminate it entirely, unfortunately, but it can massively diminish it.

I often use many such methods in concert when a decision is of sufficient import.