Poll: Logic or morality?

[Hound174]

Logic, but it didn't work for robots because they don't need to worry about appealing to people, and making them happy. Logically speaking, Living a happier life is a better life, but to a robot a logical life is Surviveing, living. It see's no purpose in emotion, or happyness.

 

[lettucethesallad]

Logic. Morals can always be changed, while objective facts are what they are.

 

[Shadowfacet]

We live in a world without logic (I'm strongly atheist)

On a certain level this may be the case but I personally (Also an atheist) consider my self a logician.

judging by your religious views, I would say you are a logician

I think part of the definition of religion implies belief and faith in something superhuman, There is nothing superhuman about a logical system.

 

[Maphysto]

You act as if the two are mutually exclusive. Good morals are based on logic.

 

[rutger5000]

Logic definitely, I would join the robots.
That is not to say I have no faith in morality, just that humanity needs a extremly powerful purely logical dictator. I do think many morals are absolute and unchanging.

 

[sora91111]

when we lose morality we lose what makes us human, because logic can lead to some messed up conclusions.

Example: Dog craps on carpet, you don't want it to so how to rectify this. You try to train it but to no avail. What would logic dictate you do, possibly get rid of the dog possibly leadind to its death. You know this so the morals you have tell you to keep the dog. Why? Because you have feelings and emotions.

 

[TiefBlau]

It's a stupid question. It's like asking someone, "Car or building?" Makes no fucking sense.

So no, you don't get an answer for such a stupid question. At most I can provide some speculation surrounding it.

Your emotions, and by extension morality, govern and give purpose to your life. Without emotions, you have no will to live. Morality creates your goals and intentions.

Logic provides the means by which you accomplish these goals and intentions. Without any form of logic, you are completely incapable. Of anything.

Lacking either logic OR morality means you're not really human. And besides, how can you have morality without logic?

 

[thahat]

snip!

personally it think both absolutes are always wrong. best situation would be a clever benevolent dictator that does the logical thing untill its turns out TOO dehumanised, then the moral thing should aply

 

[Trolldor]

So I was watching Irobot cause I didn't have much else to do and I was thinking how Vicky was a machine designed for absolute cold hard logic and it was based around the three laws. The doctor who built sunny designed him for Superior morality what is viewed right and wrong. Sunny did what he thought was right and what he was taught what was right. Vicky did what would be the logically answer. So escapist what would you rather have a world of morality where we do what we think is right or a world where we go by whats more safe and efficient?

Like always people make the idiotic assumption that the two are seperate.

Oh, and absolute morality is one of the most damaging, dangerous and reprehensible ideas to have ever been introduced.

 

[TheXRatedDodo]

Logic, to me, is fundamentally a fallacy due to the subjective nature of the human experience. Despite what people say, there is no such thing as true objectivity or true reality. To me, this means there can be no real "logic" or "illogic."
And pretty much the same goes for morality but I feel there is some sort of "higher" overarching good and evil, despite that being total "illogical," but hey \o/.

Fundamentally, I don't give a damn for logic, reason or rationality, but only for what I have experienced, and I have experienced many things that have shaken the foundations of my beliefs, which once used to be super rational and atheistic. Now, all I really follow is khaos (chaos, to me, being perceived as a more destructive force, khaos as one of creation) while not really engaging in morality very much. I try and treat people with as much love and care as I can simply because what goes around comes around. As long as I am not harming anyone else, I feel my conscience is clean.

 

[Da_Vane]

Logic is supposedly objective, where as morality is objective. However, there is the issue that most people confuse reason and logic with rationalization of their own subjective morals.

Take the issue of Atheism. Hard atheists in particular assert that there is no God because the is no empirical proof that God exists. Yet, this is not reason. This is rationalization of their own subjective judgement that God does not exist - the reasonable conclusion from a lack of proof about the existence of God is that there is a lack of proof about the existence of God. Nothing else follows on from this, particularly when, given the nature of God, there are so many questions about exactly what would count as proof and what exactly is being looked for. None of this is logical. It's not reason, it is rationalization.

This is the big danger when you start anything along the lines of "why I am right." Have you, even for a moment, stopped to consider that you might be wrong? That there is the possibility of an alternative? If you haven't - it is not reason - it is not logic. It is rationalization. It makes it subjective, because you are justifying what you already believe, from your own viewpoint.

 

[teebeeohh]

logic
logic is rather absolute where as morality is a very shifty thing. Nobody ever commit horrible crimes thinking they were wrong, most monsters thought their actions to be morally justified.

 

[ZeLunarian]

Pokémon Black & White talk about this very extensively.
... And I tend to agree with the message they get across, as silly as that may seem.

There are no absolutes. Logic cannot factor in every possible factor as much as morality cannot be completely universal.

So I will vote neither on this poll (as much as I'm curious) for two reasons:
1) I cannot morally vote for one without condemning the other.
2) It is illogical to back one whilst holding both to similar values.

 

[MazdaXR]

Its impossible to live with just one surely, if there were no morals everything would be possible in terms of logic. for example, it is not illogical to kill someone just because they get in your way, what makes it illogical in our world is the morals and ethics we have in place and that we put on human life.
Without logic Morals would be easily corrupted if not non-existent.

 

[Rannonzero]

snip

That's not cranking it up. Lever Story

snip

This is a good question, it often arises when people speak of the ethics of being a doctor or in a warzone or something similar in which people literally have to make decisions like this daily. I honestly would have absolutely no problem comitting one person to their death in order to save five others. It would be the same if I were a doctor or in a war, I would always do whatever I can to ensure the least amount of people lose their lives. However for me the one thing that would change it all is if the one person was someone I knew well, in which case I don't believe my logic or morals would stop me from saving them. Unfortunately this would probably send me into a spiral of depression but nonetheless I think its the action I would take.

Well, numbers mean very little to me. If it is 5 random people, who is to say that the one person I kill isn't the next Jesus or Gandhi or Buddha, and the 5 I saved are all infant-eating sociopathic monsters? Furthermore, who is to say that when I have thrown that switch and ended that one person's life, the mad philosopher won't simply kill the other 5 right then and there anyway?

In the end, I know what I would do. I wouldn't throw any switch. I would do my best to get out and end that philosopher's killing spree, ending his life if necessary. While I would feel bad about the loss of life, I wouldn't feel guilty about the deaths. I did not do it in my eyes. A madman did. Now, if it was TRUE inaction (As in, I am not tied up, I can get to this philosopher and stop him after the first death(S)), THEN I will feel guilty. But not because of the deaths, but rather because of negligence. People die all the time, and though I feel genuinely bad about it, I do not feel guilty for any of them. My regret is that I will not see them again, not that it was my fault that they died. I will still blame the one who set up the scenario in the first place, the madman. Indeed, in this situation, I would likely save the most number of people not out of a sense of morality, but more out of a sense of communal duty and a fear of consequence. Unless I knew that the single person held more worth somehow than the other 5 people, I would sacrifice the individual in order to save the many simply because it would look better. Imagine how horrified that single person would be if he/she knew I had helped kill 5 people for him or her? If this single person I saved didn't think like me morally, which is likely, then it is likely I will face dire consequences just for saving his or her life. Which would make it very hard for me to stop the madman who set up the little game in first place, which I would be compelled to do.

Now, I know the objection to this way of thinking. Replace "madman" with "god" and now what? Am I going to go after god and kill him because he keeps killing people and taking them out of my life(hypothetically)?

The answer is no. There are two reasons for this.

First, a madman is NOT god. A madman is an aberration (in this case at least) and is something to be stamped out and stopped. His actions are those of the extremely obsessed. One who's circular way of thinking has left his moral framework in such a ragged state that it (and he) are left with no recourse but to develop some drastic and elaborate death-scheme rather than break down and lose his mind entirely. Fear or malice drives this man's thoughts, not any true logic. After all, what possible reason would a man have to do this? Would a logical man tie up 5 people and threaten them with death when ANY OTHER COURSE OF ACTION were available to him? It stands to reason then that this madman is illogical and irrational, and that supporting his game would be detrimental in the extreme. So this man becomes my enemy quite readily, and by that justification, I am sorely tempted to let people die through inaction just to snub the sonova*****.

Second, god, if you believe in one, is a being that represents the laws and patterns of our very reality. If I went after god and succeeded in killing him/threatening him into stopping his "mad scheme," and all the people in the world stopped dying, what then? Why stop with an end to mortality? Why not an end to two sexes, or an end to children being born? I could tear down the family unit (every variation thereof), and remove the force of gravity which ties us to the Earth as well. I could give people wings, and then make them out of lead, and make the very mountains sail through the air. Until some other upstart with a grudge against what I have been doing comes along and ends my eclectic career as the new god.

But this is reality, and in it, I believe that humans have a path to walk, and it is not one of omni-cognizance. We are not meant to know everything, we are meant to discover, to learn. This is not a credo passed on to us from a talking man in the clouds, but by our own very lives as individuals, and by our history as myriad countries and peoples throughout our time in existence as a species. None of us live forever, and even if one or two of us did, none of us remembers everything exactly correctly forever AND lives forever. And even if there were one or two who lived forever and remembered everything correctly forever and knew everything that needed to be known, even that alone wouldn't necessarily mean they could change the fundamental rules of the reality we live in. Since we can't set up an experiment to test this, we have to take it as a matter of opinion and faith.

To sum up, a madman is not a god. This should be self evident. If god were conducting this experiment, I would ask him why he or she was being so cruel to the victims, and then ask why he/she thought I knew better than him/her who should live or die. I would take the responsibility very seriously, and hope that I was given some sort of evidence, a sign if you will, as to what group of people deserved death over another, and pull the lever or not depending on the evidence.

However, it is not god, but a madman. The problem with the hypothetical situation here is that we are to give over our power to another human being and then blame ourselves for not being more powerful than they are at a given time. And then we are to feel bad about that for one reason or another I am sure, because THEY chose to use that power in a malicious and maniacal fashion. Or we are supposed to feel bad because we would not, or because we value one group of people arbitrarily above another for whatever reason.

I know, this has all been a lot of typing, but I can actually sum up the whole thing by saying only humans could think of such a convoluted scenario in order to explain our relationship with existence itself. What SHOULD I be thinking? What SHOULD I be feeling? What SHOULD I be doing? Untold millions of people tied to train tracks have been sacrificed to "should." In my mind, the only thing that matter is "will" not "should." Humans can't be God in any viable sense. We can only roleplay.

Morals are just the social fashion of the day. Logic and reason are what the universe actually runs on. It just doesn't conform well to a human language. We have to bend OUR perception around IT to even get a transient grasp on it.

Regardless of the reason, people are going to die. If knowing and believing in the reasons one group dies over another helps you sleep at night, fantastic. But knowing the reasons one way or another isn't going stop the train. If we DO replace "madman" with "God" in this situation, then really it's like God asking a mortal "why don't you just undo the fabric of reality like I can and save everyone? Nyah nyah nyah!" and then having said deity stick out his/her tongue and snub his/her nose at the poor sod who has to pull an otherwise innocuous lever between two sets of train tracks... really that person pulling the lever is going to go with what makes him or her feel better. If making God angry is what will do it, that's what the person making the choice will do.

If I had to make a choice on a poll, I'd say both, because a balance of both is needed to be human. You won't be logical if logic makes you feel like ass, and you won't be moral if feeling good about your actions is always illogical(and therefor detrimental). Morals are just a fancy way of saying "I want to feel good about my own logic."

Wow I took a long time to get to that last sentence...

 

[rabidmidget]

Morality and logic aren't conflicting.

Morality is simply a system of values on which ethical decisions are made, and these values are generally based on logic.

I think emotion would better suit the term you're looking for.

 

[The Unworthy Gentleman]

Pure logic: no. Applied logic: yes.

With pure logic and a look at everything and what would be the best solution then you could easily arrive at the conclusion that the human race needs to be either wiped from existence or have all buildings and factories destroyed as a means of saving a slowly dying planet. However, if you apply your logic to certain scenarios and combine it with morals then you will arrive at solutions like lowering house emissions, rather than to commit genocide. To have logic and thought processes without morals would be devastating.

I'm not sure if applied logic would be the right term, but I like it.

How the fuck am I meant to have pi and whatever Greek letter that last one is.

 

[TheEndlessSleep]

I say do what you think is right, but then also consider whether that is the logical option before you actually do it.

 

[Trolldor]

Big thread of philosophical wank.

Firstly, robots are only capable of what we allow them to be.
Secondly, no human will ever be objective.
Thirdly, reason and logic are the corner stones of a healthy decision making process.

 

[NoNameMcgee]

All my morals are based on logic. so... both?\

Morals based on anything other than logic are irrelevant.

all of them?

Yep...

Care to question one? (serious question)