Does Anyone Else Find Moralizing Obnoxious?

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I can not stand moralizing. The base idea of any kind of imperative outside of specifically delianated goals in a certain context of resources is NONSENSE. It is literal nonsense, and I can only imagine social signaling and other meme-factories can be strong enough to prevent any thinking person from seeing it is obvious nonsense.

Whenever I bring this up I always hear stupid responses like,
"Lulz, then rape is okay?"
Obviously missing the point, since nothing is 'okay' or 'not okay'. Rape is illegal because people want it to be illegal, why would this change if people didn't pretend to believe in some squared circle?

"Evolution provided us with morality so we can survive..."
Evolution led selection pressures so that people would tend to respond to social triggers and have certain regard for others. That is not morality. It's just a historical fact about why people have certain emotional responses and preferences in social norms. It in no way says you 'ought' to be 'moral', it just says that people generally like things to go a certain way.

"If we don't believe in morality the world will explode!"
A rehash from the theistic worldview, imagining that (somehow) if we abandon an imaginary thing that no one can believe in anyway, but only say they believe in, would cause the world to come crashing down. As if civilization was built on such flimsy foundations. Look, civil order exists because cooperation produces benefits most people prefer to fighting. If this weren't TRUE NO CIVILIZATION WOULD EXIST. Because anyone stupid enough to be cooperative would be swarmed and become food. So, it is obviously in most people's self interest to exist in a positive-sum social scenario; and this would be true whether or not people believed in ghosts like morality (or god).

However, even if it were true it would in no way change the fact that morality is still nonsense. Arguing to the consequences is a logical fallacy, which for some reason monkeys have a hard time grasping. Saying 'if morality doesn't exist then people would go crazy, ergo morality is wrong' is like saying, 'if Randy Savage got in a fatal car accident then Randy Savage would be dead, since I don't like that Randy Savage must not have gotten in a fatal car accident.'

It annoys me because it's so omnipresent in 'NT' conversations, especially on anything to do with philosophy. And all of their 'arguments' against it are so idiotic and non sequitur. Many people will have such ridiculously strong moral opinions and be entirely ignorant of the vast literature dealing with the indefensibility of moral claims (Sinnott-Armstrong, Stirner, Ray Brassier, to just name a few). I consider the whole industry of 'ethics' to be nothing more than wankery.

It wouldn't be a problem for me if people would just talk about it as general norms and consequences from a utilitarian or analytic perspective. But they always want to pretend there is a magical imperative that applies to people.

I think it is very natural to have opposing feelings to moralizing. However if people used their head more in understanding reasons that lie underneath instead of occupying themselves with producing the right amoung of punishing aggression the world would be a better place.

Rape is NOT ok.

I just asked this question ha ha. I'm glad I read this and found someone that agrees with me. Maybe I should just copy and paste my question here instead...

Ahh. The popular modern view that morality is an oppressive thing. The modern person is never comfortable with the idea something has the power to tell them what they ought to do. Each person who puts this view forward is just like Nietzsche waiting to see their own version of the flogged horse. An act that forces them to accept that some things really are right and some things are wrong.

OK, but have you considered how problematic a worldview is that denies morality? It's not nonsense, for one. Terms that describe how people almost universally respond, if unconsciously, to a moral sense exist and certainly people who admit to having a moral sense understand it. Think about what you're saying. If you assert that it's nonsense, then you're either asserting something that is objectively true or merely your subjective opinion. Well, people can be observed to possess a moral sense, so it cannot be objectively true. Which means that your feelings on this are merely your subjective opinion and nothing more. So as long as it isn't nonsense to at least one person, then you don't really have much of an argument to make here. And there exists a large quantity of people on this planet who understand some concept of morality. They may not agree on the details, but they do agree that rights and wrongs at least exist.

Why is rape illegal? For one, it is morally wrong. But like I just said, people don't always agree on what right and wrong always are. Legal code is merely the recognition of some things by a society that are either right and wrong along with procedural processes to deal with people who break the rules and to provide justice for victims of injustice. Rape and murder are two such things that are almost universally recognized as wrong. If morals do not exist, then you would be right that "nothing is 'okay' or 'not okay.'" But "nothing is okay or not okay" does not describe the world we live in. People believe that they have rights and freedoms and that they deserve to have their rights and freedoms protected either by themselves or by governmental authorities.

I'm not going to argue for/against evolution here... We will agree that "people...tend to respond to social triggers..." etc. We also agree that it's "historical fact...people have certain...responses and preferences in social norms." Evolution alone doesn't explain where this phenomena derives. I'm not going to argue any source specifically, just that purely naturalistic explanations aren't enough, i.e. it's not just a simple matter of biology. Morality acts as a behavioral guide. If you deny morality or any moral sense, then you're compelled to offer alternative explanations and theories for observed behavior. Emotions aren't enough because emotional responses to stimuli aren't uniform. You're going to find that given the behavioral evidence alternative hypotheses end up being ad hoc by comparison. Morality, on the other hand, appears to be the most parsimonious.

You said "civil order exists because cooperation produces benefits..." I agree that this is true, but that doesn't rule out morality. Under normal circumstances, people will tend to act in accordance with what they feel will benefit the most people. I don't, for example, agree with Islam or the tactics of its extremists. However, we do know that the most horrible atrocities committed by Moslems in the name of Allah were done with the personal future benefit of the terrorist (personally) in mind as well as the hope of creating a world in which Islam was the dominant religion. So even if we disagree that what they did or what others may do in the future, it remains that these people were aware of their own actions and believed what they did or what they will do was/will be the right thing to do--looking both to their own reward in the afterlife and for the good of all mankind under Islam.

And you don't necessarily have to be a theist to value the good of all humanity and celebrate human achievement.

But you do need some kind of explanation for why anyone should value anything at all. Why should I care about the hereafter? Non-theists won't care, of course, but they do still exercise a certain sense of justice and a desire for it. So why should they care about society? Why care about consequences? Why even have preferences at all? The common perception and understanding of moral sensibilities best explains why people care at all.

The problem of a utilitarian perspective is that not all aspects of reality fit so neatly within that perspective. You're trying to attack morality from objectivism, but you're exposing yourself widely to the subjectivity of pragmatism and relativism. So I fail to see how you're going to explain behavioral science without resorting to some veiled moral reference. I mean, if morality doesn't exist, then you shouldn't expect people to care about their own interests or the interests of society at large. People DO care. How do you explain that people in general tend to care about the same guiding principles and value the same things?

Finally, just think about some of the things you yourself have written here:

Morality exists within people. Everyone has a system of ethics, as demonstrated by AngelRho's analysis of the OP. The problem is, people try to force their own opinions on others and can't back it up. I don't believe in any absolute morality that must be upheld. Values change with time. As StonedMoonie seemed to say, absolute morality exists because of necessity. Humans naturally try to find the simplest way to run a functional society and those rules are deemed law. The problem comes when people try to say that these sets of laws are "right" or "wrong", because, as I previously stated, these are just opinions. And this one is mine, not a law.

You may like this book.

morality is a human construct, it will change with us.

I don't mind being moralized/sermonized to, but I hate it when it becomes repetitive (IE: telling me when I already KNOW). =/

Some old-school moral notions either originate from ignorance or are values that were once useful but don't serve a whole lot of purpose in modern society other than being annoyingly restrictive. These morals tend to vary from culture to culture and differ between religions. But then there are more general moral principles that are universal to almost all cultures.

The Nash Equilibrium is a type of universal moral attractor that can be mathematically modeled. A proper balance between individual egoism and altruism tends to produce the optimal society. Values like the golden rule and some tendency to cooperate and sacrifice for the greater good are probably genetic. What varies between cultures is the scope.