What Is Morality? #2

Part 2 of my Morality post:

Now that we’ve cleared the air on what morality is, and the two viewpoints on it that are prevelant in our modern day society, let’s discuss what my view on the subject is. To begin explaining my view, I want to start with the idea that while there are aspects of both schools of thought that may be correct in their own way, neither are completely correct. Let’s begin with the Friedrich Nietzsche quote from earlier: “You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, it does not exist.” While this sounds great on paper, when it’s applied it may not be so great to the Moral Relativist. Let’s take for example two people standing at a bus stop. One of their ways of doing things is just to simply push the other in front of a moving bus. This may be “correct” to him, but is it correct to the other person? Well obviously not. While the counter argument of “Well it’s correct to him and thats the core of moral relativism” could be used here, we need to look at what MOST people would consider correct. I would wager my life savings that most people do not view pushing another person in front of a bus as morally correct, meaning that the person that thinks this is ok probably has a very unnatural way of thinking. So this shows that this form of moral relativism is not correct as there needs to be a general consensus for something to be deemed correct. Back again to the quote from Kreeft: “... first of all that absolute moral law exists not to minimize, but to maximize human happiness, and therefore it is maximally loving and compassionate, like labels, or roadmaps. You're not happy if you eat poison or drive off a cliff.” His argument can be countered with the idea that while it may not be enjoyable to most people to drive off a cliff, if someone does enjoy that action, and doesn’t affect anyone else, who are we to say that they are morally lacking? So this is where we land on my view.

I think that morality is a cross between both of these thought processes but in a complicated way. When we look at morality, we need to look at it in a geographical sense, and when we do this, we can see both relative and absolute morality at work. If you look at the middle east, for example, we see a repression of women in their society. While we may view this as morally wrong in our society, they sure don’t. But when we look within the region, we see that as an absolute morality. So morality can, and should be, looked at from a geographical standpoint. Certain regions of the world have more uniform social moral standards that make that region more uniform, and thus creating absolute morality for the area, but looking from a grand scheme of things, we may see it as relative morality. So I guess I could end my post by saying that morality can be viewed as both relative and absolute, it just all depends on the eye of the onlooker.

First Post: http://athphil.blogspot.com/2016/05/what-is-morality-part-1.html