"Coercion is the state of two or more personality strands being expressed in different options of a single choice so that one cannot see a way to choose without forsaking some part of his personality."
Coercion --> Immorality
personality strands --> intentions
personality --> set of intentions
"Immorality is the state of two or more intentions being expressed in different options of a single choice so that one cannot see a way to choose without forsaking some part of his set of intentions."
Discuss.
Messages (12)
Wouldn't that just be getting confused by options?
So you've got a choice, and two different ideas about what outcome you want (intentions). If you act according to one idea, you're sacrificing the other.
This doesn't seem like immorality, but something like "irrational decision-making": you have two intentions that contradict, and instead of resolving them you just pick one and forsake the other.
Whether the decision you chose is moral or not is semi-independent of how you came to make that decision. You can do the moral thing while in an irrational conflicted mindset.
I guess the truth in this is: here's how you can get better morality, be rational about moral choices. If you have two intentions that contradict, at least one of them is wrong. You need to resolve that conflict to have a hope that you'll do the right thing. Otherwise you'll be acting on an idea you have criticisms of.
> Whether the decision you chose is moral or not is semi-independent of how you came to make that decision. You can do the moral thing while in an irrational conflicted mindset.
part of morality has to do with what you do in your mind. it's not just how you act wrt to the physical world. if you are irrationally conflicted, that's an issue to do with morality.
> Whether the decision you chose is moral or not is semi-independent of how you came to make that decision. You can do the moral thing while in an irrational conflicted mindset.
Why did you call it semi-independent? Because you can, accidentally, do the moral thing, but that won't happen very often?
If you have no knowledge that you did the moral thing, how is it the moral thing? Someone else judged it to be moral? It's objectively moral according the laws of physics?
If you don't know, you took no responsibility for how you acted, wasn't that immoral?
If the person is irrationally conflicted, unhappy, isn't that immoral?
> Why did you call it semi-independent?
semi means partially. it's saying: partly, how you make the decisions affects its morality. partly the decision itself (independent of how you decided it) affects the morality of it.
why only partly?
you can look at an action and go "ah, he shot that harmless dude in cold blood. immoral!" without knowing all about why he did it, how he decided to do it. you can have some partial knowledge of the action's immorality without knowing his thought process.
and thought processes are relevant. you can do the same action for different reasons and it has a different moral status. one time you push someone to attack them. another time you push them to save them from an oncoming car.
one guy thinks carefully and rationally and comes up with plan X. moral. another guy says "thinking is hard" and does something really carelessly, which just happens to be plan X. immoral. another guy says "thinking is hard" and passively does whatever his buddy wants, which happens to be plan X. immoral.
but what you describe means that how you make a decision affects its morality completely, not partly.
in what way it would the decision making not affect morality for you to say "partly"?
> you can look at an action and go "ah, he shot that harmless dude in cold blood. immoral!" without knowing all about why he did it, how he decided to do it. you can have some partial knowledge of the action's immorality without knowing his thought process.
that has not to do with the decision making process being partly relevant or not, but what the observer judged from the limited information he had.
i still don't know what was meant by semi-independent.
when is it dependent?
when is it independent?
if you can (even partly) judge X without any knowledge of Y, then Y cannot be the complete issue, only part of the issue.
i still don't get it
from what you said here:
> one guy thinks carefully and rationally and comes up with plan X. moral. another guy says "thinking is hard" and does something really carelessly, which just happens to be plan X. immoral. another guy says "thinking is hard" and passively does whatever his buddy wants, which happens to be plan X. immoral.
it seems decision making is fully what makes x moral. not partly.
or are you saying that what makes THE PERSON moral is:
- part 1: how the the decision, plan x is made.
- part 2: plan x itself.
> you can look at an action and go "ah, he shot that harmless dude in cold blood. immoral!" without knowing all about why he did it, how he decided to do it. you can have some partial knowledge of the action's immorality without knowing his thought process.
this illustrates how other stuff besides the thought process is relevant to immorality. you aren't refuting it.
> if you can (even partly) judge X without any knowledge of Y, then Y cannot be the complete issue, only part of the issue.
this makes a logical point. and you have not tried to reply to this, at all.