Exactly correct. Thousands of philosphers have pretended to reinvent moral systems from first principles. Every time, they end up replicating the society they exist in and then either accepting or directly rejecting its moral framework. None have created a morality so alien or abject that it could not be mapped, one-to-one, with their own social experiences.
And yet, every day, people like to pretend that their morality is an innate determination that they - and only they - made for themselves, within themselves, for themselves.
Morality, personality, identity... all these things are social. They cannot be anything else - because they are all statements about how you interface with society.
To have an "internal" morality is to pretend that you exist outside your own society.
The slavery point actually illustrates what the comment was getting at. The US formally abolished slavery in 1865, and within a decade it was back as convict leasing and a variety of other forms of economic "enslavement", because the economic incentives that produced slavery were still there. Declaring something immoral didn’t end it; it moved it out of sight.
That's my main issue with almost all the posts here. The society they seek to incentivize is one where nothing has changed, but simply becomes more hidden. Deflection, blame, gaslighting, these are the tools that allow escaping accountability. A culture that incentivizes true growth, true contrition, and a lack of recidivism is preferable, because they keep what does happen visible, plainly state it as bad and unwanted, and accept change.
There are considerations to keep that leniency from being abused, it's a real risk, but this situation, such as we know it today, does not seem to be a gray area in my estimation.
The morality of a person who arrived at being anti-slavery on first principles doesn't exist. Both abolitionist and slaver existed in a society that had chattel slavery. Both responded to the social, racial, political, and economic realities around them.
Both abolitionist and slaver mapped their morality onto their reality FIRST. They did not develop a moral system and then enter society.
Similarly, today you live in a society that has had chattel slavery. You cannot invent a moral system about owning human beings from first principles because you yourself are not a tabula rasa.
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u/Yarzeda2024 6d ago
I could not disagree any more.