Firstly, you assume that by moral nihilism I mean that I do not believe morality, as a social construct, exists or is valid. That's not true at all, and I will happily stand up and help to enforce the morality of ensuring nobody does, of doing what's best for your nation, and for those in other nations to do what's best for the world. My point is exactly the same point you make in your post. Morality is arbitrary, it is defined by our feelings and attitudes about the world. Morality is also something that is larger than the individual. Yes, your example of killing is an accurate one, but that ignores that we do work as part of a larger group, and that group can set rules that allow us to kill one another, at the ignoring of our "basic" moral instinct, while still acting in a way that produces long-term benefit and success. Society allows us to obfuscate moral choices, to make choices we would call immoral, but whose benefits are well worth the costs. We put the morale of killing animals that we clearly know to suffer behind the minds and actions of a select number of butchers, who cleans and sterilize the process so much that we just buy a package from a grocery store. We put the process of enslaving, or abusing people for their ability to perform labor, and the pain caused by that behind the minds of other societies, or behind the idealization of markets. We will do our best to ignore empathy, to ignore the morality we assume is better-by-default, when it best suits us. People taught the "empathetic" view of morality from childhood look at these things are are shocked, horrified, at how "we" can cause so much destruction and abuse, but they fail to realize that's the nature of society. It's a decision making engine, from my point of view, and the decisions it makes are correct at the end of the day, although there are times it goes wildly off course, and we often think of those times when we think of "evil". My argument is that the reason we live in a society that values us so greatly, that feeds us so well, that pampers and cares for so many within it is largely thanks to the fact that doing so benefits society at the end of the day. If it didn't, if we needed to be starved, worked to death, so that society could continue, our social structures and beliefs would shift until those things became commonplace, accepted, and rationalized. It's like I said, we lived thousands of years, and practiced slavery all across the world. It doesn't end until right around the era where mechanized labor becomes popular, and where factories replaced the uneducated laborer. We didn't suddenly realize slavery is immoral, slavery became immoral, and society changed as a result. We live in an era, despite our best intentions, where forms of slavery are still moral, and will continue to be practiced, even if your kindergarten class taught you that right and wrong are determined by nothing but feelings and the golden rule. Additionally, we can discuss individual morality all we like, but individual morality is meaningless. We always make decisions we feel internally are correct, so what's the point of ever discussing what I feel is right? What I feel is right doesn't change anything, it's what I do to effect the actions of people around me, and how I pressure and how the system I live in pressures me that matters, that pressure is morality, and the actions that system attempts to create are the "moral" ones. I'll guarantee you that when we stop torturing animals it'll be thanks to an innovation in lab-grown meat, or it will be due to global warming causing our consumption of meat causing the practice to be unsustainable, not because humanity suddenly realized it was wrong. The same will occur when we stop abusing the third world for labor, It won't be thanks to a sudden moral realization, but because the world changed, and helping the third world is more important than using them for acquiring cheap plastic toys. Should we stop? I as an individual may believe that it is wrong, but at the end of the day I'm still buying a chicken sandwich and shopping at walmart. Society is bigger than us, smarter than us, and sets us up from birth to act the way we do. There is no hope, no practicality, in fighting it, unless you believe society itself has recently seen a change in the forces against it, such as fighting for abolition leading up to the civil war. If the forces that effect society aren't changing then you will be a single man against a hundred thousand, and the most you will be remembered for is, at most, being ahead of your time.
There are so many things in your comment that point to the same thing that I won't bother quoting - I'll just get to the point: You seem to have established to yourself that society is a big machine that exists somewhere out there and controls us for what it's worth, as well as that we don't get to do something about it because we're doomed to fail due to the machine's sheer size. You know what? I'm not buying that. Look at people who've shifted history into the way we have it today. Gandhi freed India - a whole damn country - from the British rule and helped establish it as a country of its own. Not singlehandedly - he had a great crowd of supporters, ordinary Mohinders - but it was his philosophy and his thinking that started the movement and made it into what it was. Could he have done it had he relied on the kind of thinking you propose? Not at all; I imagine he'd rather weep quietly in the corner, crying to heavens about the terrible state of affairs and how he's helpless because the whole world seems to be against him. Yet, he didn't; yet, India is a free country. It's true that there's effort to standardize people in bigger, more capitalist societies like Russia or the US (you wouldn't think, but in this aspect, the two countries are very similar). It's true that standard-issue people are easier to control and manipulate. But you, armed with that knowledge, failing to do something about it on personal level? That's your choice, not some sort of destiny that the society has somehow "chosen" for you. It sounds to me that it's not morality that you're concerned with. It's with what we can or can't do, and how imperfect we are as a species and as a whole human culture. Moreover, it sounds to me like you're assuming way too much about how humanity works in justifying your thoughts on the matter. Take slavery. It ended "right around the era where mechanized labor becomes popular", you say? Well, here's the list of facts to counter. Some of the good ones: As much as I may be opposed to religion, that last one is a good one. And so on. So maybe it's not the issue of humanity-wide morality - maybe it's the issue of specific cultures that allow or tolerate such inhuman behavior. Maybe it's about people being humane to each other after years of figuring it out. Culture evolves, and we aren't perfect yet - perhaps will never be - but it doesn't mean it isn't getting better. Want a good example? Compare two thousand years ago and now. Five hundred years ago and now. Hell, hundred years ago and now. Perhaps you've forgotten that you're a part of the society you so heavily condemn. Even if you consider yourself to be a cog, one refusing to rotate is enough to break the machinery. But you choose to spin. Is it hypocritical of you? I don't know. Is it immoral of you? I don't know. What I know is that there are choices and consequences, and that things improve as you work on them. I'm not going to continue this conversation because it brings me down. If you'd ever want to discuss this issue in a meaningful manner later - feel free to PM me.1117: Slavery abolished in Iceland.
1214: The Statute of the Town of Korčula (today in Croatia) abolishes slavery.
~1220: The Sachsenspiegel, the most influential German code of law from the Middle Ages, condemns slavery as a violation of God's likeness to man.
1274: Landslov (Land's Law) in Norway mentions only former slaves, which indicates that slavery was abolished in Norway
I see society as an emergent entity, as the computer emerges from the transistor. Our decisions are not ones that are separate from the mechanics of the machine, but are a part of it, and those who make the strides in society, who push for great new things, are part of the mechanisms that allow society to adapt to new challenges, rather than people reaching out and truly creating change. The difference is subtle, but it is there. In the latter, it is driven by a drive for a true moral good, for doing what is right. In the former, it is an instance of society always picking what's best for it. Imagine society making a decision on some issue as a network of nodes, each node effecting one another's state. Each node observes it's variables and picks 1 or 0. However each node effects those around it. As variables change, the way people enforce each other to keep the same tends to resist the ability for rash or sudden action. However, as these forces cause some of the more sensitive nodes to swap sides, despite the input from their peers. Eventually, as the forces continue to increase, enough sensitive nodes change, and begin having enough force to overwhelm their peers that were enforcing the old standard, and thus the new ideal cascades through society and becomes newly enforced. It's a thinking machine distributed over continents, and each group of people holding similar opinions, who are connected to one another, and tend to change within this cascade form a "culture" such as "the west". Before technology it was a nation, and before that a tribe. That's what I refer to when you talk about the many times people have fought for change and brought it about. Yes, the change was good, and moral, but it only came about because the enviornment society was in allowed that change to become strong enough to "cascade". Without the industrial revolution changing our demand from hard labor to semi-intelligent factoryworker dealing with easily broken machines, the forces changed. When global warming starts effecting us, the forces will change. That's what I mean. My point is not at all that we cannot make change. No, it's important we have those people out there who are sensitive to things, who do shift before the group, and ignore the common ideal of morality. However, ultimately our opinions and goals are driven by our biases, and those are formed by what we see and learn are right and wrong. This means that practical/enforced morality depends more on what benefits society or what doesn't, rather than how the individuals in society feel.
I think I see where you're coming from. If something isn't really necessary for us to do anymore, it becomes a luxury and as such finding it immoral becomes much easier due to us not really suffering without it. I don't lose anything by giving up my slaves, we have machines for that. Right? In my opinion, that misses a crucial point: Where do innovations come from? What caused the industrial revolution? There's an argument to be made that greater freedoms in the UK after the abolition of the monarchy made the crucial inventions possible - and worthwhile. We can't just say that slavery went out of mode because of the industrial revolution, because that revolution was in turn powered by improvements in public life. People put their life on the line, and they improved their lives - and the lives of countless others. History doesn't bear this out. Societies where this begins to happen inevitably crumble long before this happens, or get abandoned, or changed. See the french revolution. See the potato famine in Ireland. People won't take shit lying down. Rather than society being shaped by progress, it is society that is shaping progress - we improve upon things we consider important. If animals don't have to die anymore because of lab-grown meat, that's because we wanted to invent that alternative! Because of societal pressure to stop killing animals. The same is true of all other moral changes. There's always a group that has been advocating it beforehand, and they work to convice other people that their view has merit, and eventually people come around. If it didn't, if we needed to be starved, worked to death, so that society could continue, our social structures and beliefs would shift until those things became commonplace, accepted, and rationalized.
I do not believe the UK even had a substantial slave population in the first place. Their choice to outlaw slavery was driven likely by the fact that it would continue easily in the USA, and would continue to benefit them. They were the manufactures at this point, and were sitting on large deposits of coal that allowed their industries to be free of rivers. The US, meanwhile, was in full swing in terms of relying on slaves for their labor, and banning slavery would have had a tremendous impact on the south, and did. Consider that this is an accepted reason for why the US opposed ending slavery for so long, along with that the south, whose economy depended on slaves, thought slavery moral and right, while the north, which had industrialized like the UK, did not. At the end of the day, slavery ended thanks to the fact that large areas did not need to rely on slaves anymore to get work done. If they still had to, they would not have banned it. See china, see one of thousands of impoverished nations that rely on thousands of highly oppressed and disadvantaged workers. See the serf and nobles system. The shift would be over generations, not just a lifetime, and would be something you don't notice in your day to day life. I'd say it is both/neither. Society is changing the things that effect it, and is causing itself to adapt to those changes itself. Like the body releasing a hormone, and then changing to adapt to it's presence. Oh, I agree entirely, and am a huge supporter of constant and well funded research and science to make the world a better place, but I do not see this as the equivalent to society doing what is right, only doing what is best.Where do innovations come from? What caused the industrial revolution? There's an argument to be made that greater freedoms in the UK after the abolition of the monarchy made the crucial inventions possible - and worthwhile.
Societies where this begins to happen inevitably crumble long before this happens, or get abandoned, or changed. See the french revolution. See the potato famine in Ireland. People won't take shit lying down.
Rather than society being shaped by progress, it is society that is shaping progress
If animals don't have to die anymore because of lab-grown meat, that's because we wanted to invent that alternative!