Aaand enough of that. If he continues when he gets back from vacation, I'll send him away for longer.
Again, ignore him. Continually feeding an obvious troll is a warnable/bannable offense. I don't want to have to talk to any of you one-on-one about it, because I like all of you.
I would first draw a couple of distinctions. first, it might be illuminating to put it this way: as much as this may bias me, I refuse to live in a world where the actions of despots like hitler can't be called immoral in an objective sense. to me, moral relativism is a cop out rather than an actual position on morality. if I ask "was hitler evil", moral relativism, to me at least, answers this by saying it is not a valid question, then fails to contiune searching. in effect, moral relativity is the most absolute form of morality, it allows no other definitions.
in that vein, I would distinguish between absolute morality and an objective form of morality, the former proposing that there is one single way to understand morals, whereas the later only supposes that morality can be based upon observable reality, maybe "empirical" morality is a better term.
anyways, the big question then is " what are morals, or more
specifically, what type of behaviour are we reffering to when we talk about morals? the way I see it, morals represent a set of axioms that deal primarily with how humans interact with eachother, to a lesser extent the animal kingdom, and in some respects, the planet and enviroent itself. further, morals deal with a judgement or indictment of certain acts as positive or negative, else the term "moral" would be completely useless.
the question then becomes, can we identify behaviour that is more or less condusive to
human suffering, and the answer is of course we can. obviously there are going to be more shades of grey than absolutes, but I've found this challange illustrative before:
for moral relativism to be true, morals should truly be relative, as in, there should be valid moral arguments for everything. not appeals to pragmatics or eventual benefit, but strictly moral justification for the most heinous acts. in this respect, what is the moral justification for killing an innocent?
I can expand from this, the idea that people follow similar moral paradigms in all cultures is very persuasive to me, but in a nut shell, I think that does it.
also, sorry for the troll baiting, it has been a slow day at work
This presumes that the job of morality is to reduce human suffering or at least that reducing human suffering is a good thing. There are many philosophies that argue against that. Environmentalist groups would argue that reducing all suffering should be the goal of morality even if that increases human suffering.
"It will make me happy."
"I feel like it."
"There are no innocent people."
Not every system of morals says everyone is equal under the rules. The utilitarian simply claims that his feeling of joy at murder is greater that the victim's suffering. The anarchist claims that restricting his right to kill people is a greater evil than killing people.
Taking those philosophies to such a level is unlikely in most cases and impractical for wide scale implementation but they're just as moral as any other system.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
I was under the impression that this particular piece of information could only ever be used to show that there is a narrow range of moralities that facilitate human society. That is to say, cultures have parallel moral structures (that do, in many cases, diverge at fairly significant points; the divide between tribal (non-agricultural) peoples and civilized nation-states in their approach to the natural world is a fairly significant difference) only because those types of moral structures are the only ones that can survive for long periods of time. A morality that says that killing girl children is mandatory will quickly select itself out of existence. This so called "Moral Law" is an empirical fact best explained by evolution, not by some aspect about the universe that is only relevant to animals with some degree of metacognition. (I realize I am on dangerous ground talking to you about psychology, but I am reasonably confident that Hume's Guillotine covers this observation along with any others.
(Sorry for the wall of text, syntactical quirkiness is fun sometimes.)
I'll have to sit on in's post for a while. Given your types of morality, and how you try to justify objective morality, I can see your point. But I can't bring myself to agree with you, I'm just having a hard time explicating why.
well, yes that it presumes that morality is attached to the human condition, but that would be, I assume, at least a colloquial definition. Suffering might be a very narrow way of putting it, and like I said, few situations are black and white. The bombing of Berlin by the British during ww2, for example, could be seen as liberating or murder, and there is ample room for argument. I wouldn't try to promote an axiomatic "all suffering of humans is bad", because obviously it is possible to imagine situations where that wouldn't apply.
And I think that distinction might also answer your last point as well. While I primarily think human interpersonal relations are the central theme of morality, others might think humans relationship to the environment is more important, or any such relationship that I didn't think of. My ideas aren't that there are absolute ideas with which we can judge people's behaviours, but rather that we can objectively measure the consequences of people with relation to each other or animals or the planet, and that this measure would be the best judge of morality.
but I think this is the main issue I have with moral relativism. I don't see that as an actually valid moral argument, its a tautology. It defines the end by the motive.
It is hard to articulate in any way that isn't just "does not compute", but its like... well like, it defines morality in a way that I don't even think moral relativists would see it. Morality now becomes a matter of intention, of personal narrative. It is a soley inner issue of what you meant to do and how you justify it to yourself. It no longer has any attachment to your actual interpersonal or environmental interactions. To me that is really not what morals are, especially given what psychology tells us about how people invent the world in their minds.
this is really just the same argument as relativism, only instead of there being no morals, there are no people for whom morals apply, and it fails to actually address the challange. It simply dismisses that the situation could ever occur.
I don't think so though. I think they try to do away with morality from the question altogether
that all could be true, but there were never humans who werent in societies.
My argument isn't because there are bioilogical imparitives for certain actions they are thus, moral, but rather that evolution probably picked some natural instincts that reduce in-group inhospitability towards one another. I don't know, maybe it doesn't hold up?
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Jun 18th, 2010 08:42 PM
