Friedrich Hayek's Ghost
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
I think it's a lack of a concrete internal morality. I've known believers and atheists who were all good, upstanding people, because they had an internal sense of right and wrong. To be charitable, Dev and his ilk lack that internal moral compass. To be uncharitable, they have it, but deliberately ignore it. Most religions and a fair few philosophical systems have admonitions against this. Christians would say they're ignoring the pull of the Holy Spirit, Stoics would say they're letting their desires override their cognition, and so living out of accordance with nature. Whether it's deliberate or not, they don't have a fixed sense of what constitutes evil, just a vague sense of what does and doesn't feel good. Rape is bad, because being raped wouldn't feel good, but designating it evil requires an objective moral sin. Sin as a concept is anathema to them, because it implies that some things are wrong regardless of context. They're ostensibly moral utilitarians, but utilitarianism falls apart completely when forced to be a standalone moral guideline. It's actually quite useful as a sort of moral "tiebreaker", when someone's put into a moral zugzwang. When there's no good moral solution, and the least bad must be chosen, utilitarianism shines. Dev is a hedonist, which forces him to either find a moral framework that allows his hedonism or to acknowledge that he knows better than what he's doing. Unfortunately, he's also a contrarian who can't admit fault. This leaves as his only option creating an ad hoc, constantly shifting, moral framework that allows whatever gratifies him at that moment, while disallowing whatever doesn't. He doesn't have a concept of evil, either because he rejects it intentionally or because he's simply never formed one, but he knows that the word can be persuasive, so he uses it as a pejorative for whatever he doesn't like. The things you listed all have in common a sense of duty, which precludes his hedonism, therefore, his moral framework must disallow them, lest his gratification stop being his highest priority.
Moral relativism, its misinterpretations, and the consequences thereof have been a disaster for midwits.
