Are you feeling left out?

I have an interesting philisophical question...

Do immoral people have more fun?

I believe they do.

 

Immoral maybe. Amoral no.

 

Yer splittin' hairs buddy.

Immoral=amoral=immoral.

 

everyone has different things that they consider fun.

this is entirely too subjective.

 

I didn't think I was and they're really really not the same thing.

Immoral = against morals.
Amoral = having no morals.

 

The question is do they have more fun, not different fun.

 

it's still subjective.

I dont think there is some objective scale to measure the level of fun an individual is having.

 

Your not very good at this philosophy thing are you?

 

Um... yes, actually, I'm pretty good at this philosophy thing. I promise you that "immoral" and "amoral" are different things. I kinda wish I hadn't bothered to mention it now.

But yeah, I think there's a lot more fun to be found in breaking rules than in having no rules. Might be one of those "there are two types of people" things, a defining characteristic for those who divvy up the world into one group or another. Certainly I prefer playing with boundaries to having none.

 

O.K now we're getting somewhere.......
"Breaking the rules...."

Who makes the rules and what gives them the right?

 

Well, depends. An person can exist within a "moral" society. So they can be breaking the rules of that society. They will seem immoral to others within that society. However, they can be amoral - simply not acknowledging those rules and do whatever they would if they did not exist - or immoral - deliberately setting out to break those rules.

So as to who makes "the rules", they are imposed on us by groups of people with whom we interact. How they come about in the first place is less obvious but as I understand it, mutual consensus becomes written/unwritten law over time. "What gives them the right" is that they represent, or seem to represent, a group of people at a given time. Not that there aren't flaws in this - I wouldn't argue that - but it seems unlikely to me that there is much that is unjust about societal morality. The majority of laws/rules/codes of etiquette are pretty similar across societies.

 

So do you contend that the immoral person derives more enjoyment from his/her acts from knowing what rules they are breaking?
The amoral person gets the shaft??

 

I'm saying that someone can gain pleasure from the immorality or transgressive nature of an act which is not pleasurable out of context. Vandalism is probably the best example I can think of, although that might just be because I don't get the appeal. Vandals very rarely smash up their own stuff, because the appeal of vandalism is in doing something bad. It's the same way that drinking alcohol/doing drugs becomes less fun (to some, anyway) the more acceptable it becomes.

 

We spend our whole lives being told what we can't do(rules).
From birth we try to find the boundaries of the "cosmic egg".....and make a scratch!
And when we do, we smile.
Because we further define our selfs.
And THATS FUN!

 

Thanks SelfControl,

Have a good day! I'm going to bed.

 

I guess we kinda agree then. It's often more fun to do something that breaks rules than it is to just do it. I find this a lot in music, people who are aware of "the rules" have a lot more fun breaking them. Whereas those who decide that there aren't any rules - the "music comes from inside you" types, etc. - generally don't do anything half as interesting, complex or adventurous as they would if they'd ever been told one of their ideas sucked.

 

Depends on what you mean. I see a lot of talk here about "breaking the rules" but it's neither always immoral or fun to break the rules. When it comes to music, you can't "break the rules" because there are no rules; it's not immoral to make good, interesting music. On the contrary, it's more rebellious to ignore the rules altogether.

So no, I don't think immoral people have more fun. They lose too much in the process and spend most of their time paying the consequences of immorality. Immoral people can't be trusted, so their freedoms are restricted. They're free to break a window; they're not free to feel safe walking down the street at night.

 

It would have been cool if Bach had said this to the church.
Naa, they would have burned him.

 

Zombie just likes to hear himself talk I see.

I agree with you Selfcontrol, there's a huge difference between Amoral and Immoral.
I do not believe however that either of the two have more fun. They do more fun things, but in the end, the people with morals are the ones I think would have the consistent fun, if they can accept it as such, but it really depends on those people actually understanding what they are always experiencing as fun.

 

People have always moralised about music, but it wasn't quite my point. "Morality", or "the rules" simply refers to the conventions of [x group]. There are, for example, things we consider acceptable in one situation but totally unacceptable in the other. Being drunk at a party is acceptable. Being drunk at a baptism... less so.

In the case of music, music has its own morality, or certainly has had. It's not so long that modernist music was referred to as "the sum of all heresies". A lot of people see those willing to break one set of "rules", however insignificant, as a threat to all and any other "rules". Quite often they're right.

But about musicians "ignoring the rules altogether"... I mean, don't get me wrong, you shouldn't have to know the rules to break/ignore them. But it's been my experience that you've got more chance of doing something interesting if you know what's been done, and of those who "ignore the rules", most will end up following them anyway and not even realise it. There's only a few who will, entirely by accident, produce something that is distinguishable from a piece of theory-generated pop.