are there anythings that are 'just wrong'???

[miss djax]

so the bestiality thread has me thinking about things i think are just wrong, and what they might be..

so for starters, i think things that don't confer consent, done to/against/for sentient beings is essentially wrong. some i guess you could argue have a survival piece, like eating meat as opposed to just having cows around to watch contribute to the greenhouse effect.

and if its some how 'internally inconsistent' or 'not grounded' is that a big deal? whats so wrong with just thinking that somethings are just wrong? not just icky, but wrong?

like white shoes after labor day or throwing cigarettes out of open car windows?

[Gooch's Dad]

In a discussion on a local message board (and when it was discussed on IIDB) going barefoot in public seemed to a great many people to be "just wrong".

[dancer_rnb]

In a discussion on a local message board (and when it was discussed on IIDB) going barefoot in public seemed to a great many people to be "just wrong".

hookworm?

[Gooch's Dad]

Hookworm is pretty rare in the U.S., so I don't see how it would make sense to say that it is "just wrong" to go barefoot.

[willynilly]

Based on some posts here I would say being overweight and wearing heals are big no-no's.

[miss djax]

i think harming anyone because you can is wrong, whether its a pet cat or a kid on your block or someone at work.

[Jobar]

Kant's central ethical precept was that you should always treat other people as ends only, and never as just means to an end.

It doesn't solve problems of survival arithmetic (is it right to take n lives, if by doing so you can save n+1 or more lives?), but for most everyday purposes, I think the treating of a person as only an involuntary means to some end of which they don't approve, comes as close as possible to a truly evil thing.

I'm convinced that there are no absolute evils, or goods. Given a sufficiently extraordinary set of conditions, any postulated absolute moral statement will fail.

[His Noodly Appendage]

I'm a metaethical subjectivist.

I consider ethical pronouncements to live in the realm of opinions, not facts - you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. As such, evil is in the eye of the beholder.

As for my personal standards - which I believe are in fact close to the closest-to-equilibrium compromise between most people's principles and intuition - I mostly subscribe to desire utilitarianism.

In DU, wrong is defined as not-the-least-worst, bad is defined as harmful, and harm is defined as violating the wishes (either explicit or implicit) of another.

So in answer to your question, no - on two levels at once.

Because ethics are subjective, an act can't be inherently wrong, any more than a place can be inherently far - the measurement means nothing without a reference point.

And as a utilitarian, only harmful things can be wrong, by definition. Asking me whether there are any non-harmful things that are nonetheless wrong is like asking me whether there are any four-sided shapes that are nonetheless triangular.

[His Noodly Appendage]

Based on some posts here I would say being overweight and wearing heals are big no-no's.

Bullshit.

Where has anyone called them immoral?

[willynilly]

so the bestiality thread has me thinking about things i think are just wrong, and what they might be..

so for starters, i think things that don't confer consent, done to/against/for sentient beings is essentially wrong. some i guess you could argue have a survival piece, like eating meat as opposed to just having cows around to watch contribute to the greenhouse effect.

and if its some how 'internally inconsistent' or 'not grounded' is that a big deal? whats so wrong with just thinking that somethings are just wrong? not just icky, but wrong?

like white shoes after labor day or throwing cigarettes out of open car windows?

I don't see immoral in here anywhere. White shoes after labor day and cigs out car windows don't fall under immoral either.

Based on some posts here I would say being overweight and wearing heals are big no-no's.

Bullshit.

Where has anyone called them immoral?

Since you targeted this post and not the one about being barefoot it's obviously personal.

[His Noodly Appendage]

Um, what fallacy is that, again?

[His Noodly Appendage]

and if its some how 'internally inconsistent' or 'not grounded' is that a big deal? whats so wrong with just thinking that somethings are just wrong? not just icky, but wrong?

Technically, nothing. You could, if you wanted, base your morality off a Giant List Of Stuff That Is Wrong For No Particular Reason. And apart from the Euthyphro problem, you'll find yourself running up against brick walls with no basis for an opinion of novel situations - and people will point and laugh at you, Nelson Muntz style.

So if you have any sense - and don't wish to carry an encyclopaedic list around with you at all times to look up the morality of a given action - you'll adopt moral principles, a set of heuristics for determining the moral value of an action, instead.

Now indeed, you can hard-code ad-hoc exceptions into this if you want. However, inconsistency can always be lead to absurdity. If you insist on maintaining special cases, it's fairly trivial to follow your reasoning around either side of the discontinuity, and come up with directly contradictory judgements of the very same action. And again, well...

http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t25/sx200mod/medium_simpsons_nelson_haha2.jpg

I actually ran up against this with my wife, before she deconverted. She was shocked and horrified at the Amina Lawal case, however on discussing it with a friend, I pointed out that it was actually completely consistent with Islamic law, and that Islamic law was therefore despicable. By the end of the evening, she was arguing that it was the right decision - and I got doghoused for about a week for 'making her defend it'.

Being inconsistent about things generally makes a person look and feel a fool. If only for the sake of people who have to live with you, I recommend against it.

[Yahzi]

so for starters, i think things that don't confer consent
Close, but it's even simpler than that.

The only thing that is wrong is being unfair. And being unfair is the only way to do something wrong.

Every single ethical or moral dillema you can think of is solved exactly the same way: by asking what you want the person to do if the situation was reversed? If you were in their shoes, or vice versa.

This is because morality is an evolved strategy for dealing with social living. It is also because tit-for-tat is the best solution for the Prisoner's Dilemma. Both biology and mathematics prime us to understand that being fair is the definition of being moral.

[Anne]

so the bestiality thread has me thinking about things i think are just wrong, and what they might be..

so for starters, i think things that don't confer consent, done to/against/for sentient beings is essentially wrong. some i guess you could argue have a survival piece, like eating meat as opposed to just having cows around to watch contribute to the greenhouse effect.

and if its some how 'internally inconsistent' or 'not grounded' is that a big deal? whats so wrong with just thinking that somethings are just wrong? not just icky, but wrong?

like white shoes after labor day or throwing cigarettes out of open car windows?

I think most of us got out of mainstream religion for exactly that reason.

If we were content with not analyzing, we wouldn't be here.

And really? Cigs out a window? No reason that's wrong? That's how the woods around my parent's cabin burned up.

[dancer_rnb]

Hookworm is pretty rare in the U.S., so I don't see how it would make sense to say that it is "just wrong" to go barefoot.

Maybe because people can afford to wear shoes most of the time.

Didn't hookworm used to be more common?

[Bane]

Abuse of children and the handicapped is something I consider to be completely and utterly wrong--but that is because they are defenceless people....and I'm not being inconsistent, animals are taken out of this equation as they are a matter unto themselves.

[Preno]

I'm convinced that there are no absolute evils, or goods. Given a sufficiently extraordinary set of conditions, any postulated absolute moral statement will fail.Well, yeah, but that's a perfectly ordinary feature of the vast majority of both our everyday claims and the claims of science, so I don't understand why people "pick on" morality for this. Most of our reasoning outside mathematics is non-monotonic, so this observation is hardly of any great importance to the philosophy of morality specifically (as opposed to the philosophy of language in general).
In DU, wrong is defined as not-the-least-worst, bad is defined as harmful, and harm is defined as violating the wishes (either explicit or implicit) of another.That's blatantly not what "harmful" means, unless by "implicit" wishes you mean what an ideally rational personal would wish under ideal conditions, which would just be a circular definition, anyway.

[Jobar]

No argument from me, Preno. However, I not infrequently run into people who seem to think that there *are* some sort of absolute moral precepts. And not all of those people are believers following Divine Command theory, either.

[Gooch's Dad]

Hookworm is pretty rare in the U.S., so I don't see how it would make sense to say that it is "just wrong" to go barefoot.

Maybe because people can afford to wear shoes most of the time.

Didn't hookworm used to be more common?

No, it is due to improved sanitation--there aren't any open privies anywhere near where I live, or pretty much anywhere in the U.S. People regularly go barefoot in public in Australia and NZ, and they don't get hookworm there because of good sanitation.

I'd be absolutely crazy to go barefoot in a third world country. This is why it is a good example of something that isn't "always wrong", but is considered "always wrong" by so many people.

[Free in Freeport]

I'm not going to get into all the philosophy and semantics.

There are plenty of things I consider wrong, which, if I try to pick apart the "why", tend to fall apart. I'm left with "it seems wrong" or "doesn't feel right", which is a lot fuzzier.

[Goodchild]

Wearing socks with sandals.

People that do that are just plain going to hell, and deserve it.

[David B]

Wearing socks with sandals.

People that do that are just plain going to hell, and deserve it.

I'm not going to stop wearing socks with sandals when it's cold.

But back at the OP, to say things are 'just wrong' seems to me to imply some sort of Platonic view of morality. Or perhaps some theistic view of morality.

I subscribe to neither of those, seeing, as I do, morality as an emergent and evolving, both, part of the extended human phenotype.

However, there are, as Dennett would put it, evolutionary good ideas, I think.

Some of which are good moral ideas, too.

David

[Preno]

I don't understand how using the perfectly ordinary word "just" would imply any sort of metaphysical view, much less a specific view such as Platonism. In fact, I'd say you're projecting your own metaphysics onto ordinary language now.

[David B]

I don't understand how using the perfectly ordinary word "just" would imply any sort of metaphysical view, much less a specific view such as Platonism. In fact, I'd say you're projecting your own metaphysics onto ordinary language now.

Under some definitions of the word 'just' then you would be right.

But in the context of 'just wrong' I read the 'just' as meaning 'precisely'.

Not so much my own metaphysics as my own semantics, I'd suggest.

David

[His Noodly Appendage]

I'm not going to get into all the philosophy and semantics.

There are plenty of things I consider wrong, which, if I try to pick apart the "why", tend to fall apart. I'm left with "it seems wrong" or "doesn't feel right", which is a lot fuzzier.

What you have there is principles and intuitions in conflict.

Luckily, principles and intuition inform each other if you let them. Keep picking, keep confronting, and you can find lower-conflict states. And that's usually a good thing.

[His Noodly Appendage]

In DU, wrong is defined as not-the-least-worst, bad is defined as harmful, and harm is defined as violating the wishes (either explicit or implicit) of another.That's blatantly not what "harmful" means, unless by "implicit" wishes you mean what an ideally rational personal would wish under ideal conditions, which would just be a circular definition, anyway.

It's not a standard definition for 'harmful', granted.

But then, things like euthanasia are harmful by a standard definition, tangling the living fuck out of naive utilitarian ethics.

However, by using a desire-based definition in a 'least harm' heuristic, you get a pretty fucking reasonable system.

[Mediancat]

Holocaust denial.

Evolution denial.

Rob

[Gooch's Dad]

Wearing socks with sandals.

People that do that are just plain going to hell, and deserve it.

YES!

It's amazing how many HS students wear Nike shower sandals around, with short socks. Has to be one of the worst style faux pas I've ever seen. I'm sure Dante just forgot to mention the level of hell reserved for this.

[His Noodly Appendage]

Holocaust denial.

Evolution denial.

Rob

So there's no reasons why these things are wrong? None at all?

[Mediancat]

Of course there are.

But I've reached the point where I think that there is no other side to those issues. Evolution happened; the holocaust happened. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just wrong. I don't need to refute them; they've already identified themselves as idiots at best.

Rob

[Preno]

Under some definitions of the word 'just' then you would be right.

But in the context of 'just wrong' I read the 'just' as meaning 'precisely'.

Not so much my own metaphysics as my own semantics, I'd suggest.So, um, what would it mean to say that something is "precisely wrong"? That seems like a very bizarre expression to me.
It's not a standard definition for 'harmful', granted.

But then, things like euthanasia are harmful by a standard definition, tangling the living fuck out of naive utilitarian ethics.

However, by using a desire-based definition in a 'least harm' heuristic, you get a pretty fucking reasonable system.Not really, you appear to get some sort of contractarian ethics, which is not particularly reasonable, at least not in a world populated by people who aren't ideally rational and ideally informed.

Also, the fact that you, in your opinion, get a reasonable system, doesn't justify the detour through "harm". If you want to identify "wrong" with (something like) "contrary to the wishes of another" (who?), just do it, you don't have to first identify "wrong" with "harmful" and "harmful" with "contrary to the wishes of another".

[Goodchild]

Wearing socks with sandals.

People that do that are just plain going to hell, and deserve it.

I'm not going to stop wearing socks with sandals when it's cold.

Cold weather is natures way of telling you it's time to put the sandals away and wear shoes :)

[Free in Freeport]

My short list of things that are "just wrong", because I say they are:

A woman asking her daughter-in-law if her uncircumsized adult son is keeping his glans clean.

Fried corn.

Showing your thong / tramp stamp when you work in an elementary school

Fried pork rind.

High-heeled sneakers.

Polyester slacks.

Black and Navy.

Mullets on Midgets. Or almost anyone else, for that matter.

Having sex in front of your children.

Saying 'cunt' in front of your mother.

Creamed spinach.

[Bane]

Flying Buttress, that actually makes sense to me. Those just.....freak me out! I get awkward questions quite a lot, like "Why are you still single?" :rolling: