Yeah … Morality is subjective… If the majority of a given population does a thing, that thing is moral within that population.
Yeah … Morality is subjective… If the majority of a given population does a thing, that thing is moral within that population.
binux@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Ironically enough the topic of whether or not morality is ‘subjective’ is also inherently up for interpretation. There’s literally a whole philosophical field of study for this.
That being said, I’ll counter this sentiment by saying that the things we find to be ‘moral’ as a species are more often than not the things that help our species prosper (i.e. taboos for murder, theft, bullying, sexual violence, etc.). Sure, there may be a certain degree of variation within the moral frameworks of a culture, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t have that baseline of enforcing against most forms of explicit harm that can come about from members of that society. If that weren’t the case then we would have gone extinct a long time ago.
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being “moral”, it’s just trying not to die.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
But let’s apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
binux@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Confusing them? No. We simply have different standards for what qualifies as objective truth. For me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong. Simple as that. I am acutely aware that there isn’t any universal moral standard when it comes to existence at large, but for my own and humanity’s purposes, those which help us get by better than others are the “truer” ones.
As with what I just stated, it doesn’t matter whether the universe itself cares or not. The universe can frankly do whatever the hell it wants (as it certainly does); reality to me and many others is that which I can sense and experience in my lifetime, and that’s all it ever will be. For any reasonable person’s purposes, the universe’s (as a personification) stake in their lives shouldn’t hold any stake in what they do or do not do. And that especially goes for their morality. Nihilism is equivalent to just being mindless and inert matter on a biological level, and that’s honestly just sad given what humanity and its qualifiers have been able to achieve.
Wrong. As with any complex systems we’ve been able to create in our societies, this will certainly be up for debate, but you’ll have to concede that not being able to own the things you purchase (as humans have done and have been able to do for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence) sets a frankly awful precedent for what these corporations and governments will feel they are entitled to do. To pretend it has always been like this is or it’s inevitable is fatalism, which like nihilism, is sad, and frankly pathetic. I pity that mentality.
And what are these “consumer inconveniences”? Because by your logic, the universe shouldn’t care about that either, considering that it’s a human construct and therefore abstracted from the “objective features” of reality. This is the main problem with your mentality. If morality doesn’t matter, then nothing does. And if nothing matters, then this topic is redundant. It’s nothing more than a spending of entropy.
Think what you want to think, believe what you want to believe. But if you’re seriously following the route of nihilism as if it will lead to some sort of peace of mind, I’ve got some bad news for you: It’s just going to make you feel worse. And with that, I’ve got a funny, albeit facetious image relevant to this conversation that I’ve been looking for an excuse to use somewhere. So here it is. Don’t take it too seriously. (Or do, I’m not your dad.)
Image
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
You are attempting to mask a highly subjective, culturally specific worldview as an objective universal truth. Your entire argument rests on a foundation of ethnocentrism and philosophical contradictions, projecting your modern consumer habits onto the entirety of the human race.
You claim you are not confusing biological utility with objective truth, but then immediately define your standard for truth as: “for me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong.” That is not objective truth. That is utilitarian pragmatism. Gravity is an objective truth; if you jump off a cliff, it will pull you down whether it harms you or not. Reality does not bend to accommodate human comfort, preference, or survival.
By declaring that reality is only what you can “sense and experience in my lifetime,” you have completely abandoned objectivity. You are arguing for a self-serving, subjective moral framework while simultaneously trying to enforce it as a universal law for all of “humanity.”
The most glaring flaw in your argument is your claim that owning purchased things is something humans have done “for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence.” This is profoundly ethnocentric and historically illiterate.
You are taking a highly specific, modern, Western capitalist paradigm, the individual commodification and perpetual ownership of goods, and projecting it backward across all of human history and across all global cultures. For the vast majority of human existence, property was often communal, tied to land stewardship, or dictated by complex systems of patronage and social hierarchy. The idea that an individual has an inherent, natural, almost biological right to permanently own the intangible intellectual labor of another human being for a one-time transaction is a recent cultural anomaly.
When you claim that changing a software licensing model sets an “awful precedent” for humanity, you aren’t defending humanity. You are aggressively defending the modern Western consumer culture you happen to live in, mistaking your local economic norms for the laws of nature.
Finally, you are completely misusing the concept of nihilism to dismiss a legally and structurally accurate argument. Pointing out that a shift from physical to digital software distribution has zero impact on biological human survival is not “nihilism.” It is basic perspective.
Acknowledging that the universe does not care about End-User License Agreements does not mean “nothing matters.” It simply means that your inconvenience over a corporate software transition is not a cosmic moral tragedy. You can find profound meaning in human achievement, art, and philosophy without holding onto the delusion that you are morally entitled to permanently own the digital labor of a development team.
You are perfectly entitled to your subjective preference for physical media. But stop pretending your consumer inconveniences are objective moral imperatives for the human species.