Ah, I see. So you're talking about a sadist really, one who derives enjoyment from inflicting pain on others. In this case, as in Lanthanide's example, I still think it's somewhat trivial to amend what is meant by pain. Let us consider only those pains in which some form of permanent, meaningful damage is done. A whiplash may cause real physical pain and marks, but it isn't likely to leave any permanent physical or mental damage, but chopping off someone's arm will. A sadomasochist would not want their arm chopped off, therefore they should not do it to others by the golden rule.
It needs to be both for this to work. Sadist and masochist, so sadomasochist.
Let's use a specific example,
cock and ball torture. A sadomasochist could inflict this on someone else (thereby making him a sadist), but he also enjoys CBT himself (making him a masochist). He does not violate the Golden Rule.
"Treat others as one would like others to treat oneself." This other person would not be a masochist, and would therefore not enjoy a bit of CBT, it would just be plain torture with no pleasure involved. So to one's commonsense this would come across as immoral, but yet it doesn't violate the Golden Rule.
This isn't really an 'exception'. This is just a really good example to show one of the ways in which the Golden Rule is flawed. Since morality is relativistic there will be many other examples of people being okay with something being done to them, and therefore be willing to do it to others. Even the Silver Rule does not escape this (
Don't treat others in ways you wouldn't want to be treated). The Silver Rule avoids other problems the Golden Rule has which is separate to the flaw I am detailing above.
Why is murder wrong? I'm taking a leaf out of Douglass Adams' work here, and saying we know the answer (42) but have yet to find the question. In the same way, I don't think anyone really doubts that murder is wrong, but what is the simple justification for that fact? I'm not interested in empirical arguments ('when murder rates go down, society improves') or transcendental arguments ('god said so') or existential arguments ('everythings pretty much the same unless you're dead'), or social contract arguments ('we agree as society that murder is bad'), or even 'pure' rational A->B type arguments. I just want a simple, reasonable argument whose assumptions seem sound and seems to point to the truth. I'm not interested in petty semantics, and of course you can use elements from all the argument styles I mentioned above, I really just mean that I've seen all those core arguments before and there's something missing. If all that existed in the universe was you and another person, and you had the knife, why wouldn't you kill that person? Why would that be wrong?
Okay...
This is a prima facie simple question but it's actually extremely complicated to answer. I don't get what you mean by "simple, reasonable argument whose assumptions seem sound and seems to point to the truth." Why is that mutually exclusive to all the other examples you mentioned?
I will just start with my own personal views I've come to over study of the subject:
* Morality is subjective to the individual, though there are societal moral norms that individuals share, and laws which individuals are cozened into obeying even if their personal moral views conflict with those laws.
* Morality is a human construct, that is, it doesn't exist in actuality. There is no divine being with a set of absolute moral laws that we are all trying to adhere to.
In order for morality to really work you have to make an assumption, and that assumption is basically always going to be unsupported by anything. Morality is really nonsensical at the base level, I believe. Here are the three tiers of morality that we were taught about:
Meta-EthicsThis is basically the starting point of ethics. Nowhere near as specific as 'is murder wrong'. Do moral truths actually exist? If you hold the view that moral truths don't exist you'd be called a nihilist or moral anti-realist. Some people do hold this view, but I think it's impossible to actually live your life by this view.
Normative EthicsThis is the next level below. If you accept moral truths exist, then you have to ask how to establish what they are. There are basically two main views:
(1)
Deontology - morality is about following rules. If you adhere to these rules, you're moral, if you don't, you're immoral. It's focused on the act itself "murder is wrong" rather than the consequences.
(2)
Consequentialism - as the name suggests it's about morality being the consequences of your actions. Under this view, murder is neither right nor wrong. It's only the consequences of that murder that determine whether it was right or wrong. If you murder someone, and it turns out they were just some innocent, you're in big trouble. If you murder someone and it turns out they were going to become the next Hitler - you're a paragon!
(3) There are a bunch of other random ones, like virtue ethics from Aristotle, for instance - but I never learnt much about them.
Applied EthicsFinal level. What you have here are a series of attempts by philosophers and such to create moral theorems and apply them to the real world. Some examples:
Immanuel Kant had this concept of the
Categorical Imperative. "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." Which basically means, like, analyse your actions based on what would happen if all of society did it instead of just you. So if you murdered someone because they stole your lunch what would happen to society if everyone did that.
Golden Rule - a deontological maxim we've talked about.
Utilitarianism - morality is a big numbers game where you maximise good and minimise bad (consequentialist derivative).
Numerous religions and their adherence to commandments. They come under the banner of divine command theory, which defines morality as adherence to a divine being's will.
So, yeah.... info dump. That's why I say you can't really just expect some simple answer from 'is murder wrong?'. You basically have to 'choose' your morality, the one that makes most sense to you, then try and defend it as best you can and adhere to it as best you can. And from what I can tell NO moral theory is just devoid of flaws. I thoroughly believe that it's not possible to justify any moral stance about anything, because at the end of the day its a human construct. It's like fiction. As to why I personally don't murder people, well, I don't have any desires to murder any particular person. And if I did, I'd like to think that threat of jail, social ostracisation and self-guilt would be enough to dissuade me.
I just think when you all throw around words like wrong and right, you really haven't seriously considered what those words actually
mean. It's like a child just continually asking why, why, why ad infinitum. It eventually dissolves into absurdity.
THERE, I contributed.
EDIT:
I don't think anyone really doubts that murder is wrong.
Just on this. This implies a deontological way of thinking. There are many times when murder would be RIGHT, if you ask me, as a consequentialist. Say if someone is about to kill you, and you kill them in self-defence. I believe that would be moral murder, or rightful murder. Then there are precarious slippery slope situations. Say you knew this person was going to detonate a bomb tomorrow killing X people, or w/e other immoral act. Let's say the situation was such that peacefully stopping him wasn't an option. Murdering this person then would be rightful, too, I would argue.
Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Aug 21 2015, 8:05 pm by Oh_Man.