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Just out of curiosity, lower standards typically come with lower respect for autonomy. I don't mean this in an insulting way, but in the way we treat children. I don't really complain if a toddler pulls and breaks something, but likewise, I do not afford that toddler the right to make decisions for itself. Do you think someone with that kind of propensity should be socially given less leeway to make their own decisions when it comes to that vice?
Sure. Let's suppose that we're talking about a decade. How much should we expect a person's morality to be "improved" in that time period, assuming the arguments are made in the first year?
The autonomy I personally believe in, and which is probably unpopular, is an autonomy that is the result of efficient morality. A person who is free from addictions, vices, consumerism, and general poor habits has a substantive autonomy that allows him to pursue whatever great heights of life he wills to pursue. To get there, we should eliminate the evils of human life that take advantage of primitive animal instinct. (As such, gambling should be banned.) Now to answer your question specifically, yes in theory. We should reduce the autonomy of unwise and immoral people for their own good. The question of whether you can practically do this without risks is a separate question. I would point out that in the formative years of teens we eradicate autonomy, forcing them into a very specific weekday routine with courses they usually can’t pick. Then if they go to college they also lack autonomy. Then if they go to work, they lack autonomy. Civilized life is about lacking autonomy, or, another way of putting it, externalizing cognitive labor.
I don’t know if it’s a matter of expecting. If you know someone with anger issues who is actually consuming information and practicing whatever helps his issues, intuitively we know to give this person praise and not blame. If you take another person and they are laughing off the suggestion of helping their anger issues because they say it doesn’t matter, intuitively we know that this person deserves blame. Now applying this to historical figures, did the founding fathers laugh off the idea of black people being equal in the face of insurmountable evidence? Well, no. Such evidence wasn’t widespread or unanimous. But obviously in 1970, the evidence would be, and so blame is due. [ignore HBD for the sake of my example]
Is there any analogy, in your view, between moral ideas and scientific ones? Let's suppose a new paradigm, a better one, is created to address gravity or some other scientific topic. Are scientists obligated to pursue its truth value even if they might be early adopters?
If yes, then I would ask you whether people have a similar obligation to morality. Especially, say, those who have the time or means to pursue a moral question to a rigorous end.
To a degree the paradigms are similar, sure. Did you have an example in mind? If we’re talking about the morality of slavery, that’s kind of what happened — moral development determined it was immoral. But if we’re talking about, let’s say, the bombing of Hiroshima, the moral paradigm is informed by “what would the Japanese do to us?” and “what are the costs of invasion”. Then, if we’re talking about individual morality in everyday life, norms have to be considered because moral actions are usually costly… I would allege that at a certain threshold of students cheating in a university course (51%?), it becomes morally permissible to cheat because that has become a new norm.
I'm not entirely certain that it does. Why would Japanese barbarity change pre-war moral paradigms about how to treat noncombatants and captured/surrendered soldiers? I have no desire to go to an eye-for-an-eye morality. I would not want the Japanese subjected to the atom bomb simply because they killed many more in their occupied territories.
But I'm not interested in moral questions of the past as I am the present. The clear example is LGBT rights in the last decade or two, which is a sign of moral progress (for the most part) in my eyes. Now, there are widespread and very clear arguments in favor of the variety of LGBT rights (marriage, the right to physically transition, etc.). However, there are also places where one would known of these ideas, but never encounter the arguments sans someone's anti-LGBT rhetoric or commentary over them.
Let us suppose there exists a person in a community which is largely anti-LGBT. This person is reasonably well-off, but would still stand to lose some social status if they disagreed with the majority. They know of the issue, but have not previously pursued the moral questions with any rigor. Let us also suppose that this person would, if they heard them, be convinced by pro-LGBT arguments.
Does this person have a moral obligation to dive into the question and change their stance by being an early adopter?
If LGBT stuff were objectively a moral obligation, then yes. It would still depend on “conditions” though, right? Namely that someone from a very traditional social background is going to naturally be more stubborn to change than someone raised by a gay couple in NYC.
However I don’t think today’s LGBT issues are an example of something objectively moral. There are some interesting moral questions that are often ignored like —
Does extolling gay union reduce the social significance of heterosexual union? If so, then there are negative consequences, because a society needs to extol heterosexual marriage to operate peacefully and orderly, for the greater of the society
Is homosexuality “naturally” disgusting to heterosexuals? If so, you have to balance the desires of gays with the disgust of straights, because disgust is an inherently bad feeling.
How important is being sexually active to a gay person?
Out of curiosity, I tried to find out whether celibate gays were as happy as sexually active gays, and I couldn’t find any compelling research, but I did find this:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/soin.12154
Also this
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10943-021-01289-4
Also this:
https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/ilmed36§ion=7
I don't see why a person is only obligated to consider that which is morally good. This kind of thing is always in contention, and we can never be entirely certain going into a brand new topic of where we will end up after rigorous consideration.
I'll rephrase the hypothetical and make it abstract as well. Suppose there exists moral question X, for which there are two sides. In 2023, it is generally easy for someone who was raised in a sheltered community to get access to unedited arguments in favor of the side they are not on for this issue. Is a person morally obligated to pursue these questions, even if there would be a cost personally should they be convinced of the opposing side's correctness?
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