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Witnessing people you believe to be moral now supporting genocide will create strange inconsistencies like that.

Good! In a culture that worships cops and "thought leaders", this is two steps up from meekly accepting whatever powerful people say.

Now it's time for:
(3) Acting on your ethical convictions towards specific goals, and learning to work with people who share them, even when their motivations or values are different.

P.S. As others here have stated, (1) and (2) are not contradictory. If morality is constructed, then we all construct our own. Unless you actually WANT to be an amoral bastard.

For the people not getting it:

1. They treat morals as opinions.

2. They also treat their personal opinions like they're the absolute best opinion.

Another way:

They think everyone likes different ice cream flavors and that's fine. They like Rocky Road flavor. They also think anyone who doesn't is a monster.

Convictions are one thing. But they need to be logically consistent. Saying morality is subjective but you're evil if you don't subscribe to my personal version is illogical.

Now that is funny. Its funny because its true.

Subjective morality is self evidently true, but that gives us no information about how to live our lives, so we must live as if absolute morality is true.

We only have our own perspective. Someone else's subjective morality is meaningless to us, we aren't them.

What’s even funnier- is the amount of people in the comments here that perfectly illustrate the humor in the post without even understanding why.

Even if all morality is subjective or inter-subjective I have some very strong opinions about tabs vs spaces

I'm not quite following. From my recollection meta ethics deal with the origins of morality, with absolutism being that morality is as inherent to nature as, say, gravity is, and relativism that morality is a social construct we have made up.

Is it hypocrisy to acknowledge something is a social construct while also strongly believing in it?

If I grew up in the 1400s I'd probably hold beliefs more aligned with the values of the time. I prefer modern values because I grew up in modern society. I find these values superior but also acknowledge my reason for finding them superior ultimately boils down to the sheer random chance of when and where I was born.

I don't see the problem. One can have unshakeable moral values they believe everyone should have while acknowledging those values may be a product of their upbringing and others' lack of them the same.

I see no paradox here. Yes, the rubrics change over time, making morality relative, but the motivation (empathy) remains constant, meaning you can evaluate morality in absolute terms.

A simple analog can be found in chess, an old game that’s fairly well-defined and well-understood compared to ethics. Beginners in chess are sometimes confused when they hear masters evaluate moves using absolute terms — e.g. “this move is more accurate than that move.

Doesn’t that suggest a known optimum — i.e., the most accurate move? Of course it does, but we can’t actually know for sure what move is best until the game is near its end, because finding it is hard. Otherwise the “most accurate” move is never anything more than an educated guess made by the winningest minds/software of the day.

As a result, modern analysis is especially good at picking apart historic games, because it’s only after seeing the better move that we can understand the weaknesses of the one we once thought was best.

Ethical absolutism is similarly retrospective. Every paradigm ever proposed has flaws, but we absolutely can evaluate all of them comparatively by how well their outcomes express empathy. Let the kids cook.

Yeah, that's because moral relativism is cool when you live in a free and decent society.

The irony is that you can afford to debate morality when society is moral and you're not facing an onslaught of inhumanity in the form of fascism and unchecked greed that's threatening any hope for a future.

But when shit hits the fan, morality becomes pretty fucking clear. And that's what's happening right now. Philosophical debates about morality are out the window when you're facing an existential threat.

Everything in moderating or something. I'm not an ear doctor

Hah! Cool to see Henry pop up on my feed. I knew this guy back when he was a grad student. And as somebody that also teaches ethics, he is dead on. Undergrads are not only believe all morality is relative and that this is necessary for tolerance and pluralism (it's not), but are also insanely judgmental if something contradicts their basic sense of morality.

Turns out, ordinary people's metaethics are highly irrational.

Absolute truth must exist, because if it doesn't, "there is no absolute truth" is absolutely true, which is a contradiction.

I've had people, presumably young, argue with me on here about politics and morals. For example, I say the right to abortion is a political issue. Been screamed out that it's not a political issue because a woman's right to an abortion is a moral issue. Yeah, I agree, but the argument is still political. Some believe abortion is murder and that they're right. That's politics.

It's like they have no sense that other views exist, and opposing views do not constitute politics. "I'm on the right side of this thing so it's not politics!" As if I'm somehow lowering the debate to mere... something?

That was one of the first things I got confused by on lemmy. Am I making sense? Just crawled in from work and I'm wasted tired.

Kids thinking anything goes while also being incredibly close-minded is not new.