Morality and toleration
Toleration is about allowing things we disapprove of. But why do we disapprove of some things and not others? An overview of the articles on morality and toleration.
Important for toleration is the question of how we relate to others. Toleration is about consciously allowing things that we have a negative opinion about. Things that we actually disapprove of. Let's take a very fundamental approach: why do we disapprove of some things and not others? As far as behavior is concerned, we then enter the field of ethics. Ethics is about right and wrong: how do you determine what is right or wrong?
We can approach this question in a number of different ways. Ethics is a philosophical discipline, so a philosophical approach is obvious. But sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists and psychologists also offer interesting perspectives. An important difference is that philosophers tend to treat the question normatively more often than the other disciplines. The latter approach the question rather descriptively: they mainly describe why people regard some things as good and others as bad.
Before we get to the normative questions about good and bad, it is good to consider why we think some things are good and others bad. We have a rudimentary morality that seems partly genetically ingrained and partly the result of a cultural revolution that humanity has collectively experienced over the past tens of thousands of years. Then we come to the three most influential philosophical approaches to good and bad: virtue ethics, Kantian deontology and utilitarianism.
The episodes in this series are:
The morality that everybody was born with
Finally, we come to describe genetic morality. In the series on human rights, I announced this article several times. This is a very important subject, with major consequences. Oddly enough, the interest among ethicists in this subject is still substandard, while they have been speculating about the
Playing games with morality
Let us assume for a moment that we already have a picture of our genetically determined morality. In this series about morality and toleration, the previous episode was about that. But what about the rest of our morality? It is a big step from family first
The morality of our inner hunter-gatherer, farmer and citizen
In this series we study human morality to understand our moral judgments: how do we distinguish right from wrong in human behaviour. Toleration is about allowing things we disapprove of. Only when we understand why we find some things wrong can we understand why we can sometimes allow them.
Annoying questions about good and bad
Are we actually capable of taking irrefutable ethical positions? Is moral knowledge possible? Such questions are the subject of metaethics. Did you use to do that with your parents in the past? You were a child, and you kept following up their answers with one word: why? My mum and dad enjoyed explaining things, but after four or five whys, there was onl…
Good people are happier. But how to become a good and happy person?
We must treat each other humanely, you will agree that with me. But what is humane, and how do we become that? Even before philosophers started to consider what we owe to our fellow human beings, people were already thinking about how to ensure that coexistence runs as smoothly as possible. Already before our era, the idea of ​​virtue ethics emerged bot…
Tolerant according to Immanuel Kant
We move on to the next main moral movement, particularly the version developed by Immanuel Kant. Deontology, simply put, formulates our moral duties on the basis of rules. Those rules should apply to everyone. What you should do flows from those rules. Don't lie, don't steal, etc.
Everybody happier: we all want that, but at what cost?
In addition to virtue ethics and deontology of the previous episodes, utilitarianism is the third classical ethical theory. Utilitarianism is an ethical movement that measures the moral value of an action by the contribution that action makes to the well-being and happiness of all people.