Morality?

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How do you guys go with morality?
I wondered if a lack of morality could be connected to a lack of empathy? Recently, I realized that I don't believe in a simplistic, absolute "right" or "wrong." I myself am basically amoral - all I seem to have are working ethics based on an awareness of concequences. The immediate thought that probably comes to mind in an amoralistic person is, funny enough, a moralistic judgement - that they're a "bad" person because they don't believe in right and wrong and therefore do not base their actions on an automatic motivation to do the "right" thing. A lack of morals, I find, does not necessarily lead to harmful actions. It's all a balance of probabilities.
How does everyone else understand the concept?

I don't believe there is an objective morality but I have my own values. I just don't pretend they are anything more than precepts that I enjoy living by. They enhance my self-image and by living by them I reinforce my own belief that others will do likewise. The latter may be an illusion but it's comfortable.

I have very strong morals. I have a strong sense morality. There was a time that I had no morality at all. You know the story. Having my favourite person as a role model really makes me think before I say, do or post things. Before I cleaned up my act and chose to have a proper role model who has strong morals, I used to post in every single thread that I saw and I'd speak my mind, whether I had something nice or nasty to say. I can't get away with that, anymore. Not with Mick Avory for a role model. My posting has slowed down by 50% as a result. To avoid saying things that are nasty, I refrain from posting in threads that I don't like. Why didn't I have it together 4 years ago at this time?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qTJowtn38w[/youtube]

Wow, it's not everyday you read a title to a post on WrongPlanet as "morality."

You bring up some very good points about morality. I come from a highly religious background, and I am just now beginning to see some flaws in my religion after years and years of being fully immersed in it. The question has come to mind -- how would I act differently if I were to completely leave my current religion?

The answer was pretty clear to me -- I wouldn't act any differently. My personal code of ethics has been shaped through years of teaching, first by parents, then teachers, then situations. My morality is still very much tied to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Except, now, I don't see that quite so much as a religious ethic as I do more of a community ethic -- that things run more smoothly if you look out for each other.

I don't have a rigid ethical structure, but I'm about as far from amoral as you can possibly get. So are most autistic people, by the way. They've done studies. Once we're able to understand the situation (which we may have trouble with due to our social difficulties), we care about the ethics just as much as any other person. If you're amoral, it's probably just because a certain percentage of people in general are, not because autistic people are any more likely to be.

The way I deal with ethics is... it's kind of hard to explain. It's like I have certain core values. Not rigid moralistic rules, but basic values about what is important in how to treat people. Then, how I apply those values depends entirely on what situation I'm in.

This mirrors how I understand the world in general, outside of ethical situations. I don't believe in creating complex structures in my brain to represent the world around me. (Most people do seem to do the "build a complex structure in their head" thing, including many autistic people. But I don't.) Rather than have complex structures in my brain to explain the world around me, I allow the world to hold all the complexity and I observe whatever part of the world I'm in, and that's enough for me rather than having a structure in my head telling me what's in front of me. One reason I do this is because the world is so complex on its own that even if I could build the most complex thought-structure in my head possible, it wouldn't even come close to representing the world. So why not just let the world represent itself. The other reason I do this, is because I'm not capable of holding idea-based thought-structures, even fairly simple ones, in my head for very long at all (if at all). So the only alternative is to rely on observation.

Similarly, a lot of people's approach to ethics is to build a complex structure of ethical ideas. It can be a rigid one or a flexible one but it's still basically like a huge structure of Tinker Toys inside their head (whether the rods are flexible or rigid determines flexibility). This tells them what to do in an ethical situation. Sometimes their structure allows for a lot of variation by culture and whatnot, but it's still a structure of ideas. So instead, I take a few basic values (I could not tell you for the life of me what they are, I just know from how I respond to the world that they must be there), and respond to real-world situations rather than to ideas.

This means, by the way, that even when I say something in my other posts here about how I think about something ethically in general... that's just a way of translating something into words that doesn't translate into words well. It's quite possible that, despite my stated position, in a real-life scenario involving that situation, I might respond differently than what I wrote here. It's not because I have no ethics, it's because the situation determines my response and I am not able to truly know what that response is until I'm in that situation. That's one reason I often feel uncomfortable when I have to write what I think about something, because for me ethics isn't about thoughts at all. And even when I have a very strong opinion about something, it doesn't mean that there's no situation in the world that could cause me to go the other way.

A lot of this is because I don't operate in the world using conceptual thoughts, practically at all. I have to use such thoughts (or something close) when I communicate on a message board. This really bothers me. It's highly uncomfortable to use such a foreign method of thinking to communicate with people, because unless they're highly skilled at a certain kind of sensing, they are unlikely to come to know me well as a person through my writing. That's one reason I paint, it gives a much closer approximation of how I perceive the world, and how I feel, and who I am, than writing does. Writing about ethics is as fraught with problems as writing about any other subject for me, because writing simply cannot adequately represent how I really go through life. At all. And when I do try to write about how I really think, all I can really say is "Well it's not words, it's not concepts, etc." but it's much harder to say what it is, because what it is is like, the complete opposite of words/ideas/etc. so you can't put it into words/ideas/etc. That's why some people on here have no way at all of understanding what I mean when I talk about things being "beneath words" -- they simply have zero experience of it and can't imagine it.

I wonder if moral code is the only method for us to understand how to interact. I seem unable to establish what the codes of conduct are for sub groups (like at work, or with family) but I am very clear on our universal moral code (whatever they happen to be from one time to another).

Too strong. It caused me a problem EXACTLY a year ago today.

It's likely impossible to completely prevent all suffering, but I think that minimizing the overall amount of suffering is the most ethical goal. That's what I try to do.

I don't believe ethics are objective.
That's far from being amoral.

Even sociopaths, lacking hardly any empathy, have morals-
they're just very different morals from the norm.

I'm told I'm a moral person.

Are morals really programmed into other people?

The only thing that is always BAD or WRONG to me is lying and deceit.

Anything else I must examine and try to understand. I confuse negative feelings sometimes with somebody doing wrong. But intentions are important.

I have very lenient morals. My moral code is similar in comparison to that of Wicca. Basically, I believe I should be able to do whatever I want as long as I'm not hurting anybody. Sometimes I'll extend that standard to include not hurting myself.

Morality is just a very difficult concept for me to understand, so I assume I don't have any because nothing springs to mind as "bad" or "good." Like, I couldn't give an example of such, because I don't really understand the idea.
That being said, I may be functioning via ethics without even knowing it. One moral that was mentioned as "bad" was lying and deceit. But in one way, doesn't everybody do that every day if you want to be pedantic about it? Isn't simply smiling when you feel sh***y to make everyone think you're okay a form of deceit? I don't lie because I see no point, not because I think it's a "bad" thing to do.
It interests me that studies show autistic people to be highly moralistic. Why is that, do you think? What fosters morality or ethical behaviour in people, autistics or not? What is morality???
I'm known for being friendly. But not because I necessarily think being friendly is "good" morally or ethically, but it generally makes things go smoother and easier. Less fuss, and less emotions involved.
A moral standing is different to just a strong like or dislike, yes? For example, I dislike animal cruelty and environmental degredation. There was a story a while back in my local area of two young men who repeatedly ran over a young kitten with their bicycles on a train station. For no reason. By the end of their torture, the kitten had several broken bones and internal bleeding, and crept off onto the tracks. Thankfully, someone saw them, took the kitten to a vet and directed police to the CCTV. Those young men now have aggravated assault charges on their permenent records, which will prevent them working a variety of jobs. I thought about this - I didn't like the actions of the men because they caused harm to the kitten, who had done nothing. It was a small, weak animal. Their actions made no sense to me - why torture a kitten? Is disliking this kind of behaviour an example of a moral? Seriously I'm not being flippant, I honestly don't know what the definition of this concept is.