Dream ethics

Now although this may also belong on the “beyond dreaming” thread I though that since ethics belongs on this forum as its a school of philosophy I would post my question here. In a dream is there any ethical judgment? and if yes or no, why and what does that relate to? Does this ethical judgment change in a LD?

Some examples of dream ethics questions:
Say you dreamed you murdered someone, it didn’t happen in real life so is there any ethical dilemma?

You eat meat in a dream but your a vegetarian, have you broken your vow?

Someone uses “Dream-walking” to harass someone, is this ethically wrong, how can it be stopped?

In my dreams I find it ethically wrong to have sex with any DC who does not look or act like my fiancé. I also try not to commit DC murder. I don’t think casting spells in my dreams is wrong. I also don’t think using any of my dream powers in a dream is wrong either.

Did you find a ethical dilemma when you had a certain dream, or associated with a certain dream power you acquired and why?

this is extreamly interesting, if you think into it. I am a vegetarian and would have no problem eating meat in a dream yet would never get close to meat in real life. why? depending on my feelings in the dream. If my surroundings tell me im living as a cave man than i might need meat. also if the meat was healthier and the animal wasn’t tourchered in the dream than i might eat them. This also is assuming my persanality is the same in my dream. all in all though it comes down to the truth that it is a dream. so it is created by myself and eating meat effects my real body/health in no way. knowing this i’d say i have no ethics in a dream. i would kill in a dream because i know i’m not acctually hurting anyone. Yet in real life what is it that becomes hurt. buddhist say this life is too a dream. awake from it. my ethics in life are to create no harm. if i could create harm in a dream i might not.

Meat is not unhealthy as long as you dont overdo it. The trick is to have some variation in your food way. Humans are actually born as meat eaters, so why would it be wrong other than the ethical issues with slaugthering?

The trick is moderation when it comes to health… Even wine, beer and so on is said to be healthy in moderation, even though the main ingredient is basically a poison.

I think it is harmful to intentionally do negative actions wether in a lucid dream or awake. As long as the intention is there it is harmful. Negative actions come from neagtive feelings and thoughts. If someone intentionaly kills someone in a dream he/she may not actually be killing a living being, but he/she will be harming his/her own mentality by thinking and acting out negativity.
Perceptions create feelings, feelings create actions.
The nature of perception in a moment determines the nature of feeling and feeling determines the nature of action.
If the nature of an action is nagative then the perception and feeling that produced that action must also be of a nagitive nature. Negative perception, feelings and actions are of a painful nature. Negativity produces negativity. Negative actions only produce negative results.

Personally, I avoid murdering my dream characters. Ever since one lucid dream, where a gang was attacking my school, and I shotgunned them all to death, I figured that I should probably not do that, and focus on more positive things. Anything is possible in dreams, and we may as well focus on something good and positive. I think that while mass killings and sex are fun…sex… :razz: …more is to be gotten from lucid dreamings if we focus on the colours of dreams, and flying and such. These things are much more spiritual and cool, in my opinion.

:smile:

I think as far as right and wrong go, it’s important to remember that they are just subjective interpretations. What I mean is, what I find wrong will probably be different from what the next guy thinks is wrong, and whether it actually is right or wrong in the grand scheme of things is another entirely different issue. I believe that this applies in real life and in lucid dreams.
For example, if I killed someone in a dream, I wouldn’t actually be hurting anyone, and it technically isn’t wrong I suppose, but it would make me feel bad since it’s something I consider personally to be wrong. That negative emotional response would have an overall negative effect on me, so I’d be manifesting the ‘wrongness’ of my own action - it’s all subjective :smile:

I’d like to point out that when Ethics become subjective, there’s no Ethics to begin with. How come? Well, if it is up to each person to decide what’s right and what’s wrong about a situation, we call that “opinion.” When there’s a clear line that we have all agreed about splitting what’s right from what’s wrong, that’s Ethics. Ethics is always collective.

So when we try to tell right from wrong in dreams, what it comes down to is finding a different solution. Logics, perhaps? Spirituality? Just observe waking life ethics in dreams, if you will? The point is, dreams are subjective, there’s no way to enforce Ethics into them. So they’re pretty much an Anarchy: act as you like, and if you prefer to act Ethically, that’s great! But you can pretty much decide on what’s right and what’s wrong inside your dreams.

Make your choice, and if you want a wise opinion from someone just as ignorant as you as to what is right and what is wrong in the oneiric world: don’t overdo it.

ok Bruno … going by your guideline…

dream ethics is do anything you feel happy and ok about. If it makes you feel uneasy then stop doing it. If it affects your WL outlook on life in a negative way then you should reflain from doing it too.

I had my longest Ld today Yay!!
Well i was going around when i started bothering people and pushing them around Thats when My SG and talk about dream ethcis :tongue:

I disagree with this, there is subjective ethics, in fact you so much as said there is! If its up to each person to decide then that is a form of ethics! its not No Ethics at all. Although yes you can “Act as you like” in a dream if you have some sort of decision to act that way then you have in fact made a ethical decision weather you like it or not!

Ethics is also not collective, it seems that way. A decision is always made by a person, not buy the people, and he or she is the one who listens to their own ethical code as to what to do. This is the very basis of ethics. If you make decisions based on societies ethical judgment then obviously that has to be your decision, no one else’s, society cannot control that decision if it could there would be no murder, rape, theft etc.

So Dara, if I consider it right to steal and murder and decide to steal and murder random hypothetical person number 2, where exactly is the Ethics?

Nope. Sure there are inner morals, even moral and amoral choices, it’s not like Ethics define you, you’re free. But the Ethical framework of thought is only possible when it’s absolute. Make it subjective and it won’t work.

The ethics in that situation was how thought it was ok to behave as you did, ethics being the school of thought on how one behaves. Ethics is always subjective Bruno, it can’t not be as it always on the imputes of the individual to behave in any particular way thats what ethics is. Morals are a part of how that framework is constructed. Also ethical thought does not have to be absolute and its pretty easy to come up with some situations it which its not, for example stealing, if you need to eat stealing food may be your only choice, or if you are about to be killed you may have to kill to save your life. I am sorry but I will always disagree with you on this one.

Wow both of you make really good arguments. :eek:

That’s because both of we talk about two different things and we’re both fighting for which thing should be called “Ethics.” :razz:

I, too, propose that ethics is NOT subjective. I just propose that we have not found the truth behind it, yet.

And I don’t like when people interchange ethics and morality. They’re different things. I know what they are, but don’t interchange them!! Please!!

And I hate philosophers (not you though, Bruno!! :wink:) that create massive books and large amounts of works just to say that “it’s all subjective”. Seriously, one person already told us that, the idea is with us, and it wasn’t your idea. It stops being inspiring after the first twenty thousand billion philosophers say it.

That being said, I just did a report where one section consisted of “ethics”. I remember comparing Kant and Aristotle and their two definitions of “ethics”. Kant believed in the “universal maxim” while Aristotle believed in the “golden mean”.

Kant’s universal maxim is just that - basically, he thought that if everyone could follow a set of guidelines, then if the world would still be fine, the set of guidelines must be ethical. For example, not killing would be ethical. Killing would not be.

Aristotle believed that the “golden mean” could be found to explain every ethical idea. For example, to choose what to do on the wide spectrum of possibilities where one side holds hatred and the other side holds lust, there would lie somewhere in the middle “love”.

Of course, both definitions are flawed in one way or another, but if these philosophers were trying to find some kind of truth, then perhaps there was one, and they couldn’t explain it yet.

Now, to go on with this train of thought, let us (or me, because you’re not discussing this as I type) discuss dream issues. According to Kant, anything and everything in a dream that you do must be considered ethical, because if everyone did whatnot in their dreams, the world would still be fine when they awoke. I’m not entirely sure about Aristotle’s beliefs on this matter… It’s not quite so straight-forward to me…

But I find it an interesting topic and will keep you guys posted if I think of anythign else or decide to banter. :smile:

Ooh, I remembered another philosophy train of thought - utilitarianism. The proposition is that it would be the ethical thing to do the greatest happiness for the greatest good. Hedonism is similar, except it advocates the betterness of one’s self rather than people as a whole.

Utilitarianism and hedonism would both argue that the best thing to do is to do what would make you happy, because you can’t possibly make someone else unhappy by doing whatever in your own dreams. Thus, it would be unethical to, say, murder someone if it made you feel bad, yet it would be ethical to murder someone (this is still in a dream, by the way) if it made you feel good.

My take on Aristotle’s aurea mediocritas principle applied to dreams: you have infinite negative possibilities of an infinity of possible intensities, and infinite positive things to do of an infinity of possible intensities. The Ethical thing to do when you can do everything is to look for the less impact. In games theory, that would be to play on the {0,0} option. No one wins, no one loses from your actions. So the aurea mediocritas in dreams would be not to use your powers. :grin: You naughty LDers. :wink:

Seriously, musing about ethics in dreams, what a sex–of–the–angels talk! Dreams are nonsensical, illogical realities and we’re trying to frame them on a logic perspective and make sense out of them. This won’t happen.

I know talking about dream ethics is nonsensical! I find the entire topic interesting, though. I love how dreams tend to refute… well… a lot of philosophy, now that I think of it…

Well, I still stand by what I said :tongue:

Keep in mind I’m thinking about this from an atheist’s point of view - the Universe was not created with it’s own set of rules about what’s right and wrong. I believe we were never given a set of rules to live by from God, and even if we were, God creating ethical guidelines for our way of life would still be a subjective experience from God’s point of view.
So where do ethics come from? There are no objective ethical laws in the universe, just the ethics that we humans have come up with to help insure that society functions properly and no one gets hurt, and these rules are a product of lifetimes of experience and millions of years of evolution. No one put them there at the beginning of time for us to start using 15 billion years later, they arose via subjective experience.
So, if an entire society agrees that killing is wrong, that’s okay, but it’s still subjective. If I asked everyone here why killing is wrong, the answers would probably all be along the same lines, but they’d still be different, because there is no fundamental law in the universe that makes killing unethical; it’s we humans who have created those laws.

So, that’s what I mean when I say ethics are subjective :smile:

That means Ethics aren’t absolute, which is very different. Subjective is the quality of something whose outcomes or other qualities are not inherent to itself, but rather dynamic, depending on each person’s values. If that happens to Ethics, Ethics becomes opinion. If you let a burglar decide what’s right and what’s wrong, that’s not ethics, it’s his opinion. The law is an attempt to code the basic rights and wrongs, so that we have an ethical framework which is absolute to its subjects—so even though it was made by men, it’s not (supposed to be) subjective. Am I making myself clear? I think I might be spreading more confusion rather than clarifying anything :razz: