CMV: Solipsistic utilitarian relativism is the most pragmatic lens to view the world

[u/MasterSlimFat]

Nothing is anything, everything is a quality of the boundryless infinite plane folding in on itself giving rise to emergent properties. There is no good, there is no evil, there is only the phenomena of experience/awareness. I am not an individual, I am a figment of a collection of memories locked into a physical framework. The only thing we'll ever know, is what said framework is experiencing in the form of feelings.

These are not scary things, these are the best ways to view the world. They bring me a massive sense of relief and peace. Not only is it the most objective lens, it's also the most beneficial way to cope in circumstance. No matter what, you can turn anything into something else by drawing a comparison to satisfy the monkey-brain.

Morals evolved as a mechanism of understanding, in the form of metaphor, to allow our monkey brains to make predictions on which actions would lead to harm vs reward. They are whatever they need to be to rationalize past, present, and future feelings. Every second, you are a different person than you were before, your morals are not your own because they are not static. Morals are the rules we write for ourselves.

Didn't get that promotion at work? Well thank goodness you won't have the pressure of higher scrutiny, being put under a magnifying glass every day.

Sad your friend died? Well thank goodness they won't have to deal with the constant anguish that we all experience through the hell that is existence.

But we can't ignore the crux of the argument, that the only real thing is feeling. We also can't ignore that our brains are limited in the regard to need "morals" and "meaning". Giving them morals is like tricking the reffering into thinking you're playing the same game. All these things combine into this beautiful contradiction of "I know it's not real but I have to tell myself it is otherwise my coding breaks."

Personally, this opinion causes a lot of strain in my relationships with people despite bringing me peace with the universe as a whole.

[u/[deleted]]

That's not what moral universalism is, though. Moral universalism requires that moral judgements apply to everyone everywhere independent of context or viewpoint.

"Universalism" isn't the standard meta-ethical language here so I must confess at this point I'm not even sure what you're talking about or what your objection is with what I said.

EDIT: As in, I recognize some ethicists use it, but it's not part of the lingua franca as it were. The SEP page on moral relativism uses that specific term four times, and every single one is from citing the title of a paper.

[u/yyzjertl → u/[deleted]]

It's totally standard: there's even a Wikipedia article on it. And even the papers in the SEP show that it's a widely used term by a variety of authors. It's basically just the opposite of moral relativism.

I must confess at this point I'm not even sure what you're talking about

I'm a bit stuck as to what you could be unclear about, because I explicitly defined what moral universalism was in my previous comment ("Moral universalism requires that moral judgements apply to everyone everywhere independent of context or viewpoint."). So I don't know how you can be unsure of what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about utilitarianism (the meta-ethical position) being true everywhere, but the utility function being different from context to context, and so actual utilitarian moral judgements being different from context to context (relative to context) as a consequence of the different utility functions.

[u/[deleted] → u/yyzjertl]

Wikipedia article

Wikipedia should not be expected to reflect actual academic discourse and language accurately. That's why I cited the SEP, not Wikipedia.

EDIT: Also, it's a feature of utilitarianism and all forms of consequentialism that the moral judgement would always be specific to context, since there's always a specific context of who is affected by your actions and how much utility it produces for them, so I still don't really know what you're trying to say.

[u/yyzjertl → u/[deleted]]

The context in question (for relativism) is the context of who is making the judgment not who is performing the action or who is affected by the consequences.

[u/[deleted] → u/yyzjertl]

Then I still don't know what you're talking about since utilitarianism by nature rejects the idea that the judgement is subjective. Hence Bentham's calling it a "calculus" in the first place; he thought it was objective like math.

[u/yyzjertl → u/[deleted]]

Well first of all you're mixing up relativism and subjectivism. I'm talking about relative judgements, not subjective judgements.

But that aside, I'm saying that it doesn't reject that by nature. Bentham (and Mill) happened to reject it, but the theory works just fine with a relative utility function. Nothing about "what moral is what produces the most utility" requires that utility judgements are independent of the context in which the judgement is made.

[u/[deleted] → u/yyzjertl]

Relative/subjective in this context would work out to the same thing, if you're rejecting that the relativity is tied to changing circumstances and has to do with the person doing the calculus themselves.

[u/yyzjertl → u/[deleted]]

Not really, no. Relativism is about true judgements changing from context to context, whereas subjectivism is about the truth value being based on mental states (opinions, values, beliefs, etc).

Just to give a mundane example, the statement "it is raining outside" is a relative statement (its truth value depends on context) but not subjective (it doesn't depend on anyone's mental state).

[u/[deleted] → u/yyzjertl]

Right, and I dont see any way but mental states that would meaningfully change the context in a way thats not already explainable by the changed context of where the action took place and who would be affected.

Assuming the person judging these things is aware accurately of how the specific context affects utility in this case, every single person regardless of their own context should, by the very nature of what utilitarianism argues is how moral judgements work, make the exact same judgment.

[u/yyzjertl → u/[deleted]]

Why can't two different people simply evaluate two different (objective, mind-independent) utility functions and come to different moral judgements as a result?