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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (4270)	2/1/2001 1:33:58 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

In absolute terms there is, imo, nothing wrong with killing anyone or anything at any time. We live in a world built on killing. Unless we fix sunlight or inorganic compounds to live- we are all living off the death of other organisms. Death is all around. There is nothing inherently (imo) wrong with death or killing. Subjectively, of course, we don't want to die. Thus that little "intuitive" voice (self preservation, imo) tells us if we don't respect the lives of other people like us, our life may not be very safe. That same little voice is built into religions, because (imo) people make up religions- so all human fears and idiosyncrasies show up there. Subjectively, and unabsolutely, I am probably more opposed to killing than most people. I hate having to kill to live every day of my life. I try to kill only plants- but it still makes me feel part of a very soiled chain of death and destruction. I wish life were organized around other principles. Why? Because I can quite easily imagine organisms much more advanced than us, that looked at us like plants- chomp chomp. In conclusion- it is merely the basis of morality that I am talking about. No agnostic that I know would think it was "ok" to kill anyone else, and agnostics seem to be much less likely to commit crimes than other people. PErhaps because we know that right and wrong are very tenuous, that they hang upon a slim societal thread, and that every action must be though about carefully.

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (4270)	2/1/2001 1:48:41 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

from the new republic, Ladies, Truth, and Logic by Simon Blackburn: '"The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to it's factual content. Thus if I say to someone, "you acted wrongly in stealing that money," I am not saying anything more than if I had simply said, "You stole that money." In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said "you stole that money," in a peculiar tone of horror..." ...Ayer's position (the article is about a.J. Ayer) is not so very terrible: finding that ethics is a matter of which attitudes to hold does not make it either simple or unimportant. A person who still believes this about ethics can still act ethically or unethically.'

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (4270)	2/2/2001 12:00:41 AM
From: E	Respond to of 82486

Bland does not personally believe in the special sanctity of any one book of faith, but he also does not believe it is necessary to have such a book or body of opinion to fall back on to support the "intuition" that it is wrong for one individual to decide the life and death fate of another based on nothing more than personal preference...even if there were no real world consequences to suffer. E agrees with bland, believing that that very "intuition" is a sort of evolved, genetic "wisdom" about what makes human life work. Our intuition is strongest about members of our own families, getting less and less strong as the connection or identification with the "other" gets more remote. Good Christians have bought and sold human beings, and hunted aborigines for sport.... EDIT: X , i think i just said what you said in an earlier post, only I didn't say it as clearly....

To: bela_ghoulashi who wrote (4270)	2/2/2001 1:20:55 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Bland does not personally believe in the special sanctity of any one book of faith, but he also does not believe it is necessary to have such a book or body of opinion to fall back on to support the "intuition" that it is wrong for one individual to decide the life and death fate of another based on nothing more than personal preference...even if there were no real world consequences to suffer. That intuition has to come from somewhere. I see no logical reason to suspect that it comes from anywhere but accumulated human experience, just like the rest of our "moral" values. For the vast bulk of human prehistory, we depended for our survival on the cohesion of small social groups. It is not hard to see how humans figured out that activities like theft, rape, murder, etc., that threaten the cohesion and thus survival of the group, need to be discouraged to the greatest extent possible. Humans have traditionally been quite willing to accept all of these forms of behaviour when they are applied to members of other social groups; the notion that these values should be applied to all humans is a very recent one, and has yet be accepted in many groups. I see no compelling reason to suppose that any of our moral values stem from any source other than ourt collective experience of what is expedient.