Morality is fake and doesn’t exist

Morality is fake and nonexistent, but only trivially so. Think “unicorn”. if you want to think well, productively, about morality, you gotta know going in that it’s nonexistent. Moral actions exist, but only because someone labels them so. Moralities are sets of rules for conduct. Not like the rules for chess or pledging for a fraternity. Moral rules are designed for the overall security and safety of those who formulate the moral code in question - a particular moral code. When you’re using an explosive, read the instructions first, so you don’t hurt yourself. If someone else can get hurt, read your moral code. Exercise can be a benefit, but you have to do it right. When it may benefit someone else, there is a moral component.

Rules don’t literally exist. But because we have a memory, and a collective one, we (some group) can agree to some rules. Or not.

This is not difficult.

But rules do exist. Morality is only a way of behaving according to rules that otherwise wold be enforced by some dire consequence.
A rule is for example to not eat for children. It just won’t work out for you, evolutionarily speaking.

A morality can be a beautiful thing, a thing that brings about a lot of art, or it can be a prison camp, or a lobotomy. But whatever its manifestations may look like, morality is always a pre-emptive strategy in accordance with very real rules or laws, consistencies in the behaviour of the world wherever you are.

For example, a case where someone trips and falls among other people. In no circumstance would this person be elevated in rank the next moment. A blunt example of how basic morality really is, how it is more of a reflex than a consideration, and how to be free of its grasp (its valuing-you in its terms) requires a very agile and grounded mind, one the tis always a few steps ahead of the moral code, ahead of it on the same path, not in contradiction to it. That would simply be another morality.

If that is your definition that would make your thesis here a semantic tautology…
I don’t want to accuse you of sophistry, so I’ll assume the equivocation by re-definition of a common term is accidental.

The resistance you’re running into here is semantic… most people do not subscribe to your definition of morality.

Exactly, yes.

Jake - I beg to differ. Rules do not exist. But sure, moral rules stylize revenge, for instance. The more immediate problem with eating children is that they often belong to someone who values them. Morality has always been an aid to a well run economy.

Probably most people shouldn’t try to be a step ahead of the morality that their group lives with. Most people aren’t that creative. But those who are successful probably have the most fun overall.

Your last point illustrates why ignoring the extant morality is a very bad idea. Using it as a theme upon which variations may be made makes for a happier, healthier, more successful moral scofflaw.

I think it’s excessive to say that rules do not exist. Just consider what a rule is. An example would be a conditional statement such as “if you kill someone, the police will arrest you”. The statement describes what will happen if you kill someone. That’s a decription of reality. It’s a description of how things work. It’s a description of what consequences will follow if you make certain kind of choices. As such, the statement has a truth value. It is either true or false. It is either describing something that exists or it is describing something that does not exist. I think we will all agree that a rule such as “if you kill someone, the police will arrest you” exists pretty much in every country in the world whereas a rule such as “if you kill someone, the police will make you rich” has no match in reality. The first rule exists whereas the second one does not.

Now, when people say something like “morality does not exist” or “morality is fake” what they normally mean is that some specific morality they have in mind (e.g. Christian morality) is not practiced in reality – not even by those who claim to be practicing it.

Currently there are lots of research indicating in the direction, humans are born with a faculty of morality, like faculty of reason, intellect, and other mental faculties.

Magnus, you’re example is inapt. That’s more of a threat than a statement of fact. Nonetheless, rules do not exist experientially, empirically. Novels don’t exist, but my copy of Farewell to Arms does. That’s the wacky world of the nominalist.

To your last point, to expect near universal practice is no measure of the realness of a moral system. Because moral systems aren’t real to begin with… no, never mind. Someone is just bitching about someone they are morally judging. Humans keep doing that, over and over. It’s just what we do. Philosophers attempt to find some external basis for it.

That’s a description of reality which can either be true or false. Either the police will arrest you when you kill someone or it won’t.

We use symbols to describe reality. The symbols themselves aren’t reality, i.e. they are not what they are symbolizing, but they are nonetheless symbolizing something and that something either exists or it does not.

Yeah but this doesn’t work very well for moral imperatives. It is to say, “If you sin, you will go to Hell, unless of course I am mistaken.”

Your second point is trivial. For it is a certainty that anything we symbolize either exist or it does not. The Big Question is of which is which.

If morality exists outside of human construct, then what is it? A law? Like gravity? Well gravity has immediate consequences, but immorality does not. If morality existed in the form of a “law” then immorality would not be possible.

If the light breaks the speed limit, does it get a ticket and have to appear in court? What would be the punishment? And how would punishment rectify the broken situation? Maybe instead of light learning its lesson, it would outrun the cops next time.

God cannot go back in time to reverse immorality and, if he did, it would mean immorality never happened and there is nothing to complain about. God punishing the immorality does not fix the immorality. Morality is a human construct.

For sure man.

Why is this thread called “Morality is fake and doesn’t exist” when it’s moralising about how you should moralise?

A moral imperative expresses a preference for certain kind of behavior. The preference it expresses either exists in reality or it does not.

Well, moral statements are symbols and preferences or ways of behaving are the symbolized.

Because you’re apparently a dipshit retard who makes shallow claims based on absolutely nothing.

Funny twist of words you use, I am “moralizing about how you should moralize”, when in fact that is literally the exact opposite, the exact opposite, of what I am doing with this thread.

Humans didn’t just wake up one day to find a full-blown language to use. It grew from single expressions, some not verbal. Likewise with morality. Everyone has a sense of being wronged or being helped without immediate gain going to the helper. That’s what morally is - it’s a ledger book of behavioral transactions, undertaken with a long view.

Philosophers and politicians eventually fucked this up by introducing gods or by reifying reason. Like language, morality is always evolving, an evolution that is self-limiting to an extent, but which will always be helped or hindered by someone, the way usage manuals and dictionaries, poets and scientists help or hinder language change.

Languages do not exist, but they’re not supposed to. Individuals express themselves and in a very sloppy and incomplete way, language is the codification of these expressions. Individual expressions are not dependent on language - it’s the other way 'round. Of course, you need arbiters. Human society has never been short of those.

Arbiters very much do exist.

“a ledger book of behavioral transactions, undertaken with a long view”

^ That is part of it, absolutely. But this also points to why I am saying that morality is fake, and does not exist. “Morality” is meant as a concept, as used in philosophy and in regular meaning by regular non-philosophers, to mean far more than just this. We can do the whole Nietzschean reduction thing if we want, try to isolate some basic aspects of what is called morality, but doing that is exactly why I am saying morality does not exist, because it is not treated as this sort of thing which we are treating it as here.

Once you strip away the veneer and reification and emotional reactivity and false piety and all of that shit, you get to the place where you and I are at, Faust-- just looking at what is there, objectively. What we are doing with this thing “morality” is not at all what is meant by the concept of morality. So you can call the two by the same name if you want, but either way I appreciate you coming to this thread and offering your ideas, since they are further demonstrating my point for me.

Except for when you say things like “rules do not exist” or “languages do not exist”. Stop saying stupid things like that. Obviously rules and languages exist. But I suppose you can offer your definition of what “exists” means, since you are the one claiming these things which we can understand and explain, use and define and discuss somehow do not, in fact, exist for us to do those things with them.

Sort of hard to understand, explain, define, use, and discuss something that doesn’t exist. :confused:

So go ahead and explain yourself, on this. We can then move through that sticking point and begin the more fun sort of work of the topic here.

Well, college football is made too much of by some. That’s just gong to happen among humans.

I thought I mentioned that I am a nominalist. When you begin by claiming that rules literally exist, then you have to come up with some way of destroying those that you do not like. It’s much easier to destroy that which empirically exists (we may be able to destroy the entire planet some day, after all) than to change the acceptance of some moral rules. And destroying some moral rules is far from permanent. You can melt a bad penny, though.

Philosophers have forever been concerned with making the unreal realer than the real, precisely because the unreal is much more difficult to assail.