Talk:Morality

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[edit] Commentary on Haidt

Haidt's theories about morality are all nice and sciencey, but they do not seem to be very rational. --Woozle (talk) 18:41, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Is there any controversy about this?

Why should we accept what people feel as "morality" uncritically as the real thing? Even if it did evolve morality is about what's really right and wrong and that reflects consequences in the real world. This feeling mechanism interacted with the environment of people and the media put together in Germany and the reaction lead to people having 'moralities' that justified mass murder. We shouldn't deify feelings, no matter how natural they are or that they evolved over time as being automatically an indication of what is really "right" and "wrong". Humans also naturally have an ability to think rationally in pursuit of self and group (including humanity) interest.

It is arguable that morality should be rationally based upon the results, the consequences to oneself and others and that if necessary feelings should be suppressed or ignored in order to achieve this outcome. Think about all those red staters who just let their emotions guide their thinking all the way to the voting booth and if they were to try approaching morality from a rational perspective based on objective needs for the flourishing of one's self, the groups of oneself, and of humanity.

Also the article fails to mention that the answers given in those experiments are not universal. It has surfaced in some studies I read before that rarely people will make other decisions. This isn't just studied in psychology. I was in a philosophy class and in debating utilitarianism and deontology some people took different sides over these issues, there wasn't universal agreement, and personally because I actually care about people I would in most situations shove the person, 5 people>1 person, although if it was 5 regular people and one person who might cure cancer or AIDS or save the human race I wouldn't do it. Too many articles pose with words like "people" or "we" or "you" blindly assuming that their results are the same for all rather than just fitting a statistical average or norm or even a culturally-relative average. If I had a dime for all the psychology articles where I was left scratching my head thinking "that isn't me". To truly understand the mind more cross-cultural comparisons need to be made and not just in terms of people's ethnicity or religion or geography but class, occupation, lifestyle, subcultural affiliations, and even the person's hobbies and interests, music a person listened to, consumption habits,...There's just so many factors that running a few studies and then making universalizing statements without contextually limiting it to conclusions about the environments/contexts studied makes no sense.98.209.57.51 (talk) 01:48, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

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