I know I talk a lot about morality around here, not that it seems to matter, because there are a lot of people out there, both from the religious and political sides, who really want morality to be something that it’s not.

I just saw a Dan McClellan video which I think illustrates this and he even addresses it to some degree. I’m going to somewhat disagree though. The video and the discussion are below the fold.

First, the video. Watch or not, I’m not your papa.

I’m not mad at Dan, he’s right in a lot of what he says, but where he goes wrong is where a lot of people go wrong. He assumes that our modern moral views are automatically right because that’s what he’s got going through his head.

That is not the case.

Moral views are entirely subjective. The people who lived at the time of the Old Testament, which is mostly what he talks about in the video, they thought their moral views were perfect and just. Every  generation thinks that. Every generation is eventually proven wrong because moral views change as time goes on. Today, we think slavery is evil. In another 50 or 100 years, that might not be the case. We are just doing what we are doing in the moment because it “feels right” to the majority of people. Feelings change. People need to learn to deal with it. If, tomorrow, someone came up with actual artificial intelligence, not the programming that we have today, and we kept those real AIs as workhorses for humans, that would be slavery. If we could justify it to ourselves, slavery, of a sort, would return. Words are what we choose to define them as.

I’ve seen people make the case that keeping animals to do work for humans is a form of slavery. Most people would disagree because they think it’s too useful to give up. Therefore, slavery only counts if it’s done to humans, not to any other creature. The whole thing is ultimately just word games and humans are very good at word games. We will justify whatever benefits us, however we can and it’s always been that way and always will be.

Unfortunately, most people refuse to recognize what is actually going on. There is nothing that is “inherently moral”, only things that we, in the moment, think collectively are. That may not apply tomorrow, but people can’t look back at history and recognize that we are not at the end point of the world. There is a future for our species that will not include what we think today. We need to stop pretending that just because we think so today, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be true forever.

Sadly, most people can’t even entertain that thought. That’s why discussions on morality tend to go sideways, because people can’t imagine ever being morally “wrong”. “It’s what I believe now so it’s going to be true forever!” Sorry, that’s not how this works. The people in the Old Testament thought the same thing and they were wrong. We are no different. There is no end-point to morality because morality is just opinion. People cling to it  because they’ve been indoctrinated with it, just like the religious have. That doesn’t make any of it true. It just makes it a convenient point for modern people to feel superior about themselves.

That means absolutely nothing. The whole discussion is inherently irrelevant and people can’t get that through their heads.

Kind of sad, isn’t it?