Quote from: SecondClass on June 12, 2016, 06:23:27 PM

Quote from: Meta Cognition on June 12, 2016, 06:20:16 PM

Except we don't have the luxury of always doing the (hypothetical) first-best option.

Exactly. And in some situations, doing the first-best option is the moral option. But the world can be shitty, and humans can be shitty, so the moral option isn't always the one that makes the most pragmatic sense.

All this is is a disagreement in terms.

We're thinking about the same concepts and the same ideas, but you have a more precise definition of morality. I don't think your definition is particularly useful, or enlightening, but I can see why you use it separately to 'pragmatic morality' or whatever term you want to use.

It all comes down to that, out of necessity, we sometimes have to do bad things. The fact that those bad things may be necessary or have a better outcome in utility than the alternative doesn't absolve them of being immoral. What we should do usually lines up with what's the right thing to do, but that's not always the case.