Did you hear? A is sleeping with her boss; B is going to be crushed!
We discussed in class how options seem to take away objective morality due to the fact that they let you put yourself first for the most part. I find the idea of options to be an intriguing one, but (I think Zac said it) when the idea of options and objective morality not really syncing up came into play I realized I could not really go with options.
Putting oneself first is something we are often told to do, we are told to make sure we take care of ourselves, or at least, we are told to make sure we do not forget about ourselves, and that there are times where we must put ourselves first. But, morality does not really hold to this. There are cases, like cases where your life is on the line, where we are told by morality to take care of ourselves first and foremost. But, there are also times where, at least certain, theories would have our lives be sacrificed for others. Options seem to always let us out of this predicament. We would never have to greatly put ourselves out in order to be morally good.
This may not seem like such a bad thing, but I think that objective morality is the only way morality would really work out. It does not make sense to have a subjective morality. It would change from agent to agent, there would be no set basis of goodness and badness. There would only be goodness for one and goodness for another, and they may conflict to the point where one agent is harmed. Subjective morality cannot seemingly protect people from harm. Morality should be able to protect people’s rights and lives, to at least a certain extent. But an objective morality does not seem capable of this.
Say two people are married. Agent A and agent B. A is trying to get a raise at work. This would improve A’s well-being. A’s boss says that if A sleeps with him that A will get the raise. A’s doing this would greatly harm B’s well-being. If morality was objective, it seems as though it would protect B’s well-being. But if it were subjective then it would seem to allow A to follow through with this affair for her own gain.
posted by Jen Ming at
11:07 PM
1 Comments:
I did not believe in constraints, so I do not think it is prudent for me to go after options either. However, I think I have an alternative theory that is not really options per se but at a certain ability to give the right answers that options want to give in a lot of situations, without the problem of selfishness. For instance, in the case of the chemist faced with bad health and a starving family and his only job offer is for a chemical warfare plant which is a line of work against his moral principles. (Yet he will be maximizing the good by taking this job, because he can slow the progress, whereas someone else more zealous about the project might get the job and really cause some harm.)
The option theorist wants to say that this chemist has the moral option to get out of this maximizing of the good for the sake of his own personal projects. This is a very subjective type of morality as Jen said...and it appears very selfish. But the Socratic theorist has a completely different way at arriving at the answer that the chemist should not take the job: to do so would be to do the only thing that is truly morally offensive, he would harm his character. To dirty his hands, is really the worst crime he can commit. If he lead a good life, and held to his moral principles despite all the suffering, he would be doing what morality is asking him to do.
This view I want to push is a tad agent-centered and kind of a hybrid of Aristotle and Socrates, but I think it gets the job done. It maintains objectivity, in that it doesn’t appeal to self or special personal moral status, but to morality on a whole and an idea of what the good is in itself. To take the job is to get dirty hands, and dirty hands are the one condemnable thing in a man's life on the Socratic view. So, there isn’t really an option...the answer is flat out: you shouldn’t take the chemical job. Which is really what the option theorist wants to say, and I think the explanation for why they want to say it will inevitably secretly want to be exactly what I have just put forward.
(I hope that made sense, I kind of came at it backwards. It is the same argument I had against constraints: options are not really what is driving one's moral intuitions.)
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Tommy G!, at 11:51 PM
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