I remember I was almost punched in the face for attempting to meditate on a similar question. Now I hear Mark Passio's voice emotionally criticizing relativistic morality in the background.
#philosophy #morality
View quoted note →
@ABH3PO you're kinda simplifying life for me by creating these polls, thanks; I was planning to record a video that touches something like this, but tbh I'm not into recording that much, and at the same time I don't feel like I'm capable enough to express certain ideas in the least distorted ways when I'm limited only to text posts.
TLDR: Those who are capable of understanding the immorality of their actions, wherever they are in the social hierarchies, are probably acting the most immoral ways. Others are, poetically speaking, hypnotized, manipulated NPCes/children/slaves; actual complex enough morality is kind of inapplicable to them, irrelevant. Projecting the capability to understand morality on them may even make things worse.
Longer version: I still think that context matters a lot here; if you mean US-like locations as the context (where you still can relatively openly communicate and collaborate, openly discuss and decide why something is reasonably immoral), the answer is basically that relativistic morality indeed became damaging to Western society; so the immoral order executor is in a morally worse position.
But if you mean some of the most corrupt countries today—the situation is more confusing: those who are already trapped themselves in the premature choice to serve a corrupt government long before they could have a chance to make any independent conscious choices will endanger their family if they choose to suddenly revolt individually towards them. Collectively they technically still can revolt against immoral orders but not individually; I think that would be both ineffective and less moral because the dramatic outcomes might even make government propaganda stronger in this case.
Another way to look at it: we have autonomous vehicles that "decide" whom to kill in case if they can't stop; they do their best to "decide" according the way they were programmed. But the ultimate decision is on those who programmed them; so if they make an immoral "choice", whom to blame? An engineer, a company, a machine itself? Do these machines somehow remind, poetically speaking, the hypnotized NPC guys trapped in their premature police/military career choices in their corrupt governments? Kinda, except these are machines with no real subjectivity, and they don't have families as well. The scary thing is the machines could be modified to be used as aggressive military machines, so those who originally designed them wouldn't have any idea they would be used that way.
I'd be glad to hear anything that can change my mind.
