Good post.
how would you define 'moral' if not as 'accepted
by society'?
This is a good question, but separate from the question of whether there are absolute standards. Two separate points. One: are certain moral principles absolute, or are the all merely based on time and place. Then, second, if you accept that certain moral principles are absolute, how do you define those? Your question goes to the second.
I'm not arguing that all moral principles are absolute--I think there may be some room for some situational ethics. But I think there are some moral principles that ARE absolute. How do we define them? It's a question that has challenged philosophers for ages.
I don't think it's a matter of societal agreement, but a matter of what's inside every person. I think every--or every healthy--person has an instinctive understanding of what is right and wrong. Children playing games know what's fair and not fair, and don't much care whether the adult world has deemed some of the things they know are unfair to be societally okay.
Philosophers have spent lifetimes ferreting out what natural law is. Locke was perhaps the best known, but far from the only one. That they never reached full agreement doesn't invalidate that they exist (that we don't know exactly what the composition of the moon is doesn't mean it doesn'thve an exact composition.)
The problem with defining morality in terms of societal values was best brought out by Reinhold Niebuhr in his superb book "Moral Man and Immoral Society." Individuals are inherently, he argues, imbued with a sense of morality. Societies aren't. If you doubt this, just look at mob behavior. Mobs as groups will do things that few if any of the individuals in the group would think were right.
So I don't think you define moral as accepted by society, because society doesn't have morals. You have to go the individual and ferret out what the individual really knows is right and wrong. It's not easy, but it's doable. I don't claim to have the full handle on what is moral and what isn't. I'm still working that out, as all of us are. What I DO claim to have a handle on is that morality is something other than what a given society at a given place defines as acceptable.
BTW, I think some customs ARE situational. Whether women get to vote or not is not, IMO, an issue of eternal morality (after all, voting itself isn't!), but others may disagree with me.
No, I don't believe the holocaust was 'moral', either [I probably have more reason than most]... but I equally don't believe
that there are fixed 'rights and wrongs'.
I don't follow your logic here. I think either you have to say that morality is societally defined and therefore if the German society defined the holocause as moral it was, or you have to say even if German society defined the holocaust as moral it wasn't. If the latter, you are imposing a set of fixed rights and wrongs which are outside of the society. I don't see how you can have it both ways. |
