People twist their factual views to fit their moral views, not vice versa.
Morality
Some people don't value anything. (This is often associated with the left wing. Offense intended, but not to any particular person.)
These people often adopt pseudo-values to hide this, from themselves and others. Pseudo-values have an appearance of being values, but are not. One way to spot pseudo-values is they can be applied without thinking. An example is pacifism, which states that all violence is wrong, period.
Pacifists, of course, oppose a war on Iraq. In Iraq, every day, people are tortured, which pacifists must consider to be wrong. Yet they refuse to do anything about it. The problem is, if they did not turn a blind eye to such suffering, their "values" would fall apart. They would have to support a war, and could no longer be pacifists. But they also cannot be good people, who support freedom and liberty and such, because they do not value those things, or anything else, and do not understand how any else can either. And so they cling to their pseudo-values.
Here are some other "values" that are often (not always) shams:
- Save the environment
- Feed the hungry
- Equality for all
- Loving one's family (Notice how mechanical it is. Simply determine if someone is family to decide if there is love.)
- Collateral damage is always wrong, because it hurts people (A pacifism variant. Easy to apply mechanical, just determine if anyone will be hurt as a result of action X, then oppose X.)
- Guns kill people
- Raise school standards
- Won't someone please think of the children!?
- Save the sea snails from extinction!
- All actions have to be UN approved.
- Curse words are bad.
- TVs ruin our minds
Messages (5)
> People twist their factual views to fit their moral views, not vice versa.
i think i get what you mean.
but what's an example?
say somebody is a pacifist. what sort of factual view will he have because he has the pacifist moral view?
Israel is an example. People "believe" falsehoods, like that Jewish settlers steal land from Palestinians, because of their *moral* views. **first** they are anti-semitic, have some kinda moral objection to Jews, think Jews are morally bad, etc, **then** then make up factually false excuses like about stealing land. they aren't innocently mistaken about the facts about Israel, they twisted up their factual views in service to the moral conclusions they wanted to reach.
hmm. so is the correct way to create moral views from factual views?
also, for the people who create their factual views from their moral ones, why do they do it? seems like somebody who doesn't care about contradictions between his views.
The correct way to arrive at moral views is to hold every idea open to criticism and to look for flaws in all your ideas. Sometimes this will mean correcting your moral views in the light of some fact, and sometimes you will consider a factual idea morally suspect.
*guess* both moral and factual ideas, and mutually use them to criticize each other.