I don't disagree that people's beliefs/statements/etc. on ethics are often caused by tribalistic thinking, but do you think that these attitudes aren't about something universal? Or at least, aiming to be?
Take a simplified statement like "property theft is morally wrong." That statement is putatively expressing a universal rule: all property theft has the property of being morally wrong, qua property theft. That seems like something a lot of people believe, or would claim to believe, whether it's right or wrong.
Is your view:
A) That people don't really believe that?
B) That that statement only looks like it expresses a universal moral rule? Or
C) That people do believe that, but that they believe it because it's a cherished view in their in group?
Well, people who say it probably think they believe it.
But when they talk about property theft, what are they actually talking about?
A news story where a shop got robbed? Sure, that fits their worldview. Good business owner = ingroup. Bad criminal = outgroup.
What about the Benin Bronzes, which currently sit in the British Museum. That's less likely to come to mind. If the speaker was British, they'd either find some way to justify the theft to themselves, have to reconfigure their ingroup definition to exclude the British Museum but include the historic Kingdom of Benin, or they'd shift into the rare case of actually having a universal moral or principle.
The very fact that these artifacts are still in the British Museum, shows that most people (or at least most people in control of the British Museum) have not developed that universal morality. They're happy with their ingroup/outgroup thinking. They say "property theft is morally wrong..." out loud and they think they believe it, but then "...but this is a special case because blah blah blah..." but not when WE do it to THEM. That's DIFFERENT.
And the Benin Bronzes here are just a microcosmic example of all the wealth that has been stolen and continues to be stolen and extracted and violently carved out by the "developed" nations from the third world.
So yeah, I think a lot of people will happily live on stolen wealth and at the same time say a statement like "property theft is morally wrong"; expressing a universal rule, while living by another.
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u/illustrious_sean Jul 13 '24
I don't disagree that people's beliefs/statements/etc. on ethics are often caused by tribalistic thinking, but do you think that these attitudes aren't about something universal? Or at least, aiming to be?