“This is an idea I could get behind for myself, but I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with anyone else adhering to it”

Even those who profess to only live and die by science try to develop an objective moral stance that transcends science. For instance, some of Sigmund Freud’s followers who complained that some of his theories were sexist. It’s a strange inconsistency, isn’t it? If it’s true and falsifiable, then it doesn’t matter if it’s sexist (from the perspective of the Scientist).

Not only is it strange that we have a set of morals, it’s strange that we attach value judgments to anything. Anyone who has ever said “I hate that song” knows what I’m talking about. You hate it why? Did you use the scientific method to arrive at this conclusion? Does it make you less fit to pass your genes on to your offspring? Or, even stranger, are you EXPERIENCING it differently than I am? Does it sound different to you than it does to me? Is the “qualia” different? If not, what’s the difference then?

But back to morality. There are some even stranger things about morality. Namely, why does someone do something wrong even if they feel it’s wrong? Some people break laws without any apparent gain (vandalism perhaps). When I was a teenager I liked to spray paint things. I feel bad about it now. Sort of. But anyway, I did it because I thought it was fun, even though I would have admitted it was wrong. Not only do people do things they think are wrong, morality seems to differ from one individual to another. There are pedophiles who don’t know or think there’s anything wrong with their actions. There are some pedophiles who think that their actions are consensual. Not only do cultures have different ideas of what is right and wrong, individuals seem to have different ideas as well.

But again, this is not quite as interesting to me as the idea that we assign values at all.

This is an idea I could get behind for myself, but I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with anyone else adhering to it.

The idea of propagating any ethical concept whatsoever need not have any objective component. The proposition that someone should adopt some ethical concept can also be subjective…

If moral realism is false, then we simply know what’s what: the universe doesn’t care if someone does or does not adopt any ethical concept, but we can still care due to our subjectivity. So, even if moral theories are in error, we are at this standstill of, “So what?”

The real question is “Do all moral precepts worthy of the name have a non-subjective aspect to them?” The position that answers in the affirmative goes by the name of “moral realism”, also well known by the term “natural law theories”.

And with respect to this more subtle position, we can say absolutely one thing, if moral realism is false, all normative religions and codes of ethics are too. That includes all “relative” codes as well, because the very idea of promoting or propagating any ethical concept whatsoever (including the concept that no one should follow any ethical concepts) has an objective component, namely the proposition that anyone should adopt any ethical concept. Moral relativity never goes all the way down.

Any statement about ethics betrays the position that there is something objective about ethics. The only way to avoid objective talk about ethics is never to say or think anything about them at all.

Some cultures believe that being selfish is immoral, so if everything that a person does is for the receipt of a perceived reward then everything they do is immoral.

I realize that this is a broad generalization and many have issues with the whole all human action is inherently selfish but, my experience shows that if there is not some kind of return on investment most people will quit investing.

There are two types of rhetoric used in the US to engage the people in the cause of war (I’m probably not using the correct terms, but I’ll explain what I mean in each case):
1 – protectionism. This is rhetoric like “We will be hailed as liberators,” and focuses on the injustices being perpetrated by that nation on its own people. We are protecting the citizens of a foreign nation from the mistreatment of its ruling body. This feels like a slightly more “moral” argument than the next one.
2 – interventionism. This rhetoric often appeals more to the right wing in the US. We are openly protecting our own interests from a dangerous “rogue” entity in the world stage. This is the “weapons of mass destruction” argument (and frankly, I believe that an underlying sentiment of that argument was some evangelical fear-mongering that Saddam Hussein was the Nostradamus-prophesied anti-Christ who would attack the US; not only did we have an evangelical president, but evangelicals had a lot of political power under his regime). While morality can (and doubtless often does) coincide with self-interest, once self-interest enters the picture, can our actions be clearly identified as motivated by morality?

Thomas Jefferson said that foreign policy should only ever be dictated by self-interest, not ideals. This was the argument to stay out of the French revolution, which had so much idealism in common with our own revolution (at least initially). I think it’s probably good policy. But I’m not sure it’s moral.

“so…. whats your take on the morality of U.S. involvement in Iraq Hawkgrrrl from the 50’s til now….”

Its that it has change so much over the years that I often wonder which morality argument americans will come up with.

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#29 “This is one reason other nations consider America too protectionist” I would say that they consider America interventionists.

Note that the Kurds had some rough times under Saddam but mostly in the ’80s when the US backed him and the Shi’ites weren’t in that much danger during 2002. But the administration at the time as well as most democrats seemed to find moral arguments to justify the invasion anyway.

They say that the first casualty of war is innocence. For me the second casualty of war is morality and it comes in a very close second.

I’m familiar with your propagandizing study (by the co-founders of “the only national physician organization in the United States dedicated exclusively to implementing a single-payer national health program,” natch) and its 44,000 number. The methodology was simple: Check the health insurance status of 9,000 people (as reported in surveys in 1988 and 1994), and then check back to see how many were dead twelve years later. The sample had a slightly elevated rate of premature death than the general population, which the authors extrapolated out into the 44,000 premature deaths per year figure.

See any problems with that methodology?

How about this: Reporting onesself uninsured in 1988 does not mean that one continues to be uninsured for the next twelve years. In fact, a significant proportion of the various numbers of uninsured Americans consists of the temporarily uninsured — people between jobs, for example (which included me — expensively — several years ago. I rather dislike insurance companies, but like Keynes, I have no confidence that politicians are substantially more moral than businessmen.) The study made no effort to confirm health insurance status during the period immediately preceding death, which would seem to be the relevant criteria.

In any event, as long as we’re bandying about studies (btw, “peer reviewed” is not a synonym for “infallible”), a study just came out that there are 10,000 unnecessary cancer deaths each year in Britain, resulting from delays in diagnosis. Britain’s population is about 60 million, versus 300 million for the U.S.; scaled up, those 10,000 dead Brits scale up to 50,000 dead Americans. So if we’re going by body count, socialized medicine (with its inevitable rationing of care) is more immoral than the greedy profit-riven American system — even if you accept the flawed Himmelstein and Woolhandler study.

Speaking of morality: One of the features of the House bill is a provision that nobody can be charged more than twice the premium of the person who pays the least. So in other words, I — a struggling thirtysomething whippersnapper who takes reasonably good care of myself — can expect to subsidize care for my fiftysomething Harley-riding, hard-drinking, chain-smoking landlord, who is a hell of a lot wealthier than I am. In what possible universe is that “moral?”

I didn’t want this to turn into a health care debate — this is about morality. Sure our government knows how to spend money and we spend it. The figures you quoted we’ve doubled or tripled to bail out financial institutions or blow things up, most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. If our morality as a society is judged by how we chose to spend our money, then not only are our systems broke, we are a very immoral, evil society.

Short side note on health care: Lots of Brits on this site, I’d love to hear if they want to swap health care plans with the Americans. And by “blow the doors off”, I mean anyone on VA and Medicare isn’t completely financially financially ruined if they become ill (and they keep their insurance).

Medicare still works because there’s not really an alternative for the elderly. However, if Medicare truly followed the cost-of-living as it is supposed to, there would be a cumulative 20+% cut this Jan. Congress continually passes a bill punting the cumulative deficit forward a year. It is a broken system that can’t even pay what it is supposed to. Many physicians have closed their practices to new Medicare practices because reimbursements are already so low. If the 20+% cuts went through, it wouldn’t matter if you had Medicare or not, no physician would be able to see you.

A concrete example: in orthopedics, most hip and knee replacements occur in the Medicare population. Doing a fellowship in joint replacement used to be extremely competitive. Over the past 10 years, reimbursement for a joint replacement has decreased 65% by Medicare. Costs of running a physician office have gone up. Because of this, over 50% of the fellowship spots available for doing total joints went unfilled last year. No one wants to specialize in doing them anymore. Now, they want to decrease Medicare reimbursement to specialists even more to help the general practitioners. And all of this is in a setting of greatly increased demand – it is predicted that because of lifestyle and obesity, the number of knee replacements alone is going to increase 750% over the next 10-15 years.

The VA. Any veteran who has other care goes outside the system. In private practice, a surgeon can do 4-5 joint replacements / day. At the VA, we were only allowed to do 2. We had a 90 minute lunch break between our 2 cases. We were done at 2:00pm. Our waiting list for joint replacements was 9-12 MONTHS long. We repeatedly asked to do more. The exact same team of attendings / residents / fellows could do 4-5 at a different hospital. We were told that they only had a certain amount of money, and if we did 4-5/day, they would be out of money by May or June and we wouldn’t do any at all for the rest of the year.

So, when you state that Medicare and the VA “blow the doors off of private insurance”, you have to define what you mean. The reason people don’t want to give them up is basically because the recipient of care is insulated from the cost of that care. The government is paying for that care, through taxes and through accounting games where they increase future debt to our children to pay for care this year. When Medicare was started in 1965, it was predicted that Part A would cost around $9 BILLION per year by 1990. In reality, it cost $66 BILLION in 1990 for Part A. They were off by over 700%. So when they start talking about a $1 TRILLION cost of this plan, and knowing that the government is generally off 500% or more (in medicine, military, NASA, etc.) it makes me terrified.

The system is obviously broken, but the proposed cure terrifies me.

Yes there is a problem with definition. The majority around the world would also classify the invasion of Iraq as an immoral act and even criminal but many in the US see that invasion as honourable, necessary and morally correct because at least Saddam is gone.

So it does depend a lot on which side of the fence you sit for this morality question.

“#3 — “You wouldn’t fight to keep health care away from sick, uninsured people in need.”

Watch me. Or, more specifically, watch me oppose a colossally unwise and unworkable scheme supported by simplistic notions like that above.

Actually it is the attitude you display that I believe number 3 was tweaking and you took the bait. If the attitude was how do we provide optimal health care for all (the most moral choice) then we could actually discuss and make progress. And before you completely bash our ability as a nation to provide health care, the United States has two of the best socialized medicine systems in the world — Medicare and the VA — both of which blow the doors off of private insurance. Don’t believe me? Ask any Medicare or VA benefit holder to give them up.

So that I’m not too off topic, this illustrates the problem with defining morality. If morality is caring for the sick and needy, a very Christian concept, then Thomas’ attitude is by definition immoral. Thomas obviously carries a resentment of government programs and that trumps his desire to vote for welfare for the poor and needy, but is that attitude immoral? Does Thomas arguing politics and JulieAnn arguing morality, simply two different arguments? If the result of Thomas’ position is, as documented (I can get you the peer review study link if you like) that 44,000 people die in the United States every year from lack of health insurance does it matter whether he thinks it is a political and not a moral issue?

We like things that blow up– Pearl Harbor — bad; 9/11 — bad; smashed cars with drunk drivers — bad. All the things that go bang are immoral. Someone dying quietly in their sleep because they contracted pneumonia and didn’t have health insurance that is just ” moral imperatives of rationality and liberty “.

Now, Thomas before you get too upset, I was using this as an illustration of how difficult the discussion on morality can be, because from what I understand of both the Senate and the house bills, they do exactly what you suggested — tax and regulate the health insurance industry (good-bye pre-existing conditions and a reduction in the ability to deny claims) and additional subsidies for the poor and chronically ill.

You are so wrong about this. It doesn’t work like that at all.

Vaipato #15,

Ouch!

I wrote that because I’ve heard it over and over again over many years from Tongan men who were being disciplined for incest. We have a large tongan community here and it was even larger in NZ, were I spent 3 years. They justified their actions with the ‘tongan culture’ thing. Because I’ve heard them, that is it isn’t gossip or hearsay, I wrote what is written above. But then again they were incestuous men so maybe that is why they claimed this. Anyway, they were excommunicated nonetheless. If you don’t do this at all, well all the better since it shouldn’t happen anywhere no matter what the culture or tradition is.

An example is their view of sexuality. Sexual misconduct is conduct that injures another person. According to this, adultery is obviously bad, as it breaks a commitment of marriage. Incest is bad. Sex between 2 loving and committed partners isn’t bad. Taking advantage of someone, either within or without marriage is bad. Homosexuality is somewhat cultural dependent, but generally is looked at in the same light as above. If it doesn’t harm anyone else, it’s ok. It is actually a very coherent and logical approach.

I would argue that all religions would be very similar if they actually stuck to the basics. The things that generally distinguish followers are “add-ons”. If we stuck to the core of Christ’s teachings, and didn’t worry about add-on’s like polygamy, earrings, varying interpretations of the Word of Wisdom, white shirts, etc., our daily actions would vary very little from Buddhists, Muslims, other Christians, etc.