What is Good? The Shifting Line Between Wrong & Right - Dr. Cory Clark, U. Penn.

Environmentalism, equality, gun laws, lockdowns, these are all
areas where people are interested in doing the RIGHT thing, but
end up with very different ideas of what that looks like.
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Though it might not look like it on the surface, most of the
problems in the human world today are all about how to tell the
difference between wrong and right - but most people don’t spend
a ton of time trying to figure out if their definitions of those
words make sense.


What happens is that a lot of people, when they start to think
about the difference between right and wrong, conflate legality
and morality. It’s a reasonable confusion - there have been
thousands of years of empire on Earth, all of which have asserted
that rules about good and bad behavior originate from a
supernatural authority, rather than from the individual. But in
the modern democratic age, it doesn’t make much sense to look to
laws for moral guidance when you’re the ones expected to build
the laws of the future.


In the absence of a trustworthy top-down source - whether that’s
an institution, God, or nature itself - individuals have to take
on the heavy mantle of moral reasoning for themselves. It can be
hard, in an atomized isolating world to make sense of this
responsibility. The Western world is one of the most permissive
societies in the history of your species and it might feel
impossible to establish the difference between right and wrong.


In building a moral framework, you really have to look out for
motivated reasoning, which means that if you reeeeeaaaally want
to do something, it’s going to be really easy to convince
yourself that it’s morally okay. That’s because reason is a
post-hoc justification that animals generally  give to their
actions after the fact. As David Hume, one of Kant’s
contemporaries argued, reason is slave to the passions.


Remember, the ethical and legal system in which you live right
now isn’t the best version of the world - it’s just the latest
greatest adaptation in the aftermath of the church, the rise of
reason and nation, and the emergence of the individual. What
comes next, humans?


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#Moralpsychology #Morality #ScienceofCulture


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Metaphysics, Spirituality, Science of Consciousness,