I got to thinking about how a Utilitarian might term or define what people call 'morals'.
It is something that a person sets as a boundary point in there actions as a guiding rule of how they do not act in response to stimuli from their environment. So if your in the mafia it is not moral to respond peacefully if your friend gets killed. If you are a Christian you follow the morals dictated in the Bible as how to not respond to those who would wrong you and how to not cause harm to others.
Essentially morals seem to be a group of self-set rules, unique to each individual, that dictate certain limits in how you respond to events in the world around you.
Thoughts?
I would say there is an essential difference between what you are describing and the moral theories that we have been discussing (including utilitarianism). You seem to be referring to the idea of moral relativism, which is to say that morality is entirely relative and each individual or culture can prescribe its own unique code of conduct. In contrast to this, the theories we discuss are all fundamentally based on the idea that morality is objective. They may disagree, but they all assert that, given a certain situation, there is in fact a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do.
ReplyDeleteI think that most Utilitarians, even though hoping for an overall moral good of the people, would prefer for human beings to have less individual and personal morals. If they have strong personal beliefs, then that will not always result in what is best for society as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sean and Sebastian. Nothing about utilitarian theory suggests relativity, cultural or personal. Of the three approaches to morality that we have discussed, the one that comes closest to relativism is Aristotle (though I think to call him a relativist would be misleading). Some virtue ethics theories do flirt with cultural relativism, however.
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