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Essay / The meaning of morality
The Concise Oxford Dictionary (p925) describes morality as follows: “1) Principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or right and wrong behavior; a system of values and moral principles. 2) The extent to which an action is good or bad. What is morally right relative to one moral framework may be morally wrong relative to another, and unfortunately no moral framework is the final word on true morality. We all live our lives according to moral rules, the statement in the essay question states the relativist thesis about the justification of our moral principles. This essay will examine the different approaches to morality. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Relativism and absolutism are theories concerned with morality and the justification of our moral judgments. Relativists believe that all moralities are equally valid, that there is no one true morality, and that there are many different moral frameworks, none of which is more correct than the others. Relativism has been highly criticized because it implies the very validity of the view that relativism is false, and because of these views they undermine the act of trying to improve our way of thinking. Moral rules, values and beliefs vary from society to society and relativists argue that even if our society considers the values of other societies to be "bad", it is just as correct as our own values, they argue that even if something is wrong, like as long as we thought it was right at the time, it was. Few philosophers describe themselves as relativists, but some include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Emile Durkheim. There are many types of relativism. Two of them are individual relativism (subjectivism) and social relativism. Individual relativism asserts that humans are responsible for their morality, while social relativism asserts that society decides what is right or wrong, that is, we inherit our moral principles from our society. Both of these theories have their problems. With individual relativism, moral debate becomes impossible, because if you accept that the individual can be wrong, you cannot agree with individual relativism because according to this theory, the individual cannot be wrong, and nor could individuals improve or reform themselves if they changed their minds. Bertrand Russell (1935), in his chapter on "Science and Ethics", in his book "Religion and Science", essentially states that if two men disagree about their values, then they do not really have a disagreement but simply a difference of point of view. taste, he goes on to say that this is so because it would be impossible to prove that this or that has any inherent value, essentially because there is no way to decide who is right in a difference of values , it must be a difference of tastes. , not an objective truth. With social relativism, the problem is that there is no unanimity in society, how do we determine what society approves of? You can't do it one hundred percent, and if you had to get a majority vote, would the majority be right? Anyone who disagrees must be wrong by definition, this is extremely oppressive to minorities and makes debate between societies impossible. The essay question is not specific enough to decide which of the two relativisms it is talking about. The idea of relativism is summarized by Durkheim (1905), he suggests that "the content of morality changes over time:each society has its own particular system which is never the same as that of another society. It is also not possible to prove which morality is superior, as each seems to work well for the particular society in which it finds itself. (Durkheim: Essays on Morality and Education, p116). The alternative to relativism is absolutism. Absolutists believe that there is a common moral standard for all of us. They believe that certain moral principles and values are right whether we accept them or not, in other words, we have no choice, they are simply, for example that the square root of nine is three, we don't question that because we know that's just the case. They believe that the principles are universal. They also believe that if an act is morally wrong, then any similar act must also be wrong. It seems that few philosophers agree with the theory of absolutism, but fundamental moral diversity is not a contradiction of moral absolutism. Where there are differences in the cultures of societies, there are usually differences in circumstances, and differences in culture are differences in circumstances that can and do affect moral right and wrong without involving moral relativism. Even when the circumstances are fundamentally the same, mere differences do not refute absolutism. Each of us lives our lives according to a certain set of moral principles, we must be able to justify our moral principles. Justification involves determining the right action and appropriate beliefs. We cannot have knowledge of a belief without justification, but at the same time we can be justified in believing something that is false, for example if someone was sitting in a windowless room and heard a weather report saying that it was raining in their area, one could say that this belief was justified. Suppose then that this person then heard what appeared to be rain outside, it may not actually be raining, the sound could simply be that of a neighbor watering their garden, but this person has a justified belief . Justification generally consists simply of being able to give adequate reasons for a particular belief. One problem with justification is being able to determine what counts as adequate reasons for providing justification. We also like to make exceptions to our moral rules, for example lying, if a friend asked us if he seemed nice, but he wasn't, we might say that he did and we would be able to justify this lie by stating the obvious fact that we didn't want to hurt our friends. Another problem with justification is that one cannot justify a moral conclusion from a set of facts, for example David Hume (1711-76) states "no duty comes from a being" (A Treatise of Human Nature, BkIII, Pt 1, p469). ).The process of reasoning for the purpose of justification can be considered argumentation in four forms: inductive, deductive, conclusive and prima facie. Inductive and deductive justification require evidence and logical evaluation. For conclusive justification, reasons are analyzed by asking whether another rational human being would have the same belief if given the same reasons. At first glance, it involves giving several different reasons for believing something and then deducing which one is most important. In conclusion, moral right and wrong is just a matter of opinion. First, relativism, it just doesn't make sense to believe that all moralities are equally valid, e.g. that we should be nice to people and that..