Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: The Philosopher who wrote (5676)	2/13/2001 7:39:25 PM
From: thames_sider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

And good reply... But I think there are some moral principles that ARE absolute... I think either you have to say that morality is societally defined and therefore if the German society defined the holocaust as moral it was, or you have to say even if German society defined the holocaust as moral it wasn't. But societies do define moral, right, in their own terms - at least, in terms with which the majority accept. When the majority - or some minority, or outside body, with sufficient force - dissents, those morals change. From some age or culture I'd wager there would be at least one acceptable - 'right' - practice which would disagree with any absolute wrong you or I might name: be it infanticide, paedophilia, genocide, slavery, cannibalism, incest, live sacrifice, whatever. I believe that the Nazi genocide of Jews (and others they saw as unhuman) was unequivocally wrong, immoral, evil. They, presumably, did not. I don't and don't want to understand their mindset, but clearly an absolute wrong for me to them was not just acceptable but a positively desirable goal. In other words, my morals are not theirs. No absolutes. Different cultures have different morals, different right and wrong. And however vile we find their practices, we can only condemn by our standpoint. I do hold that we can (should!) assert by force our POV against theirs: but it does not make ours 'right' in absolute terms. And, when it comes to force, 'God is on the side of the big battalions'... the greater force with the better weapons and better leadership will win. [Outside fables and wishful thinking, anyhow]. We may believe that there should be absolute standards of right and wrong, and most probably yours woud be broadly similar to mine... sadly, the Universe has no such laws. If you disagree, I'd suggest you consult the spirit of Charles I, who believed absolutely in the Divine Right of Kings to rule absolutely. As for an individual moral sense.. bring up an individual away from society and its laws, and at best you have Huxley's 'Brave New World'. Children? Fair and reasonable? 'Lord of the Flies'. For an amusing alternative, read the philosophy in 'Starship Troopers' (seriously - it's cogent and doesn't play with semantics). A moral sense is learnt, not innate. Or ask how a doctor's ethos, training and Hippocratic Oath could result in Dr. Harold Shipman [if you haven't heard of him, check news.bbc.co.uk - he's now ranked as the world's second most prolific serial killer]. As Einstein almost said, all is relative...

To: The Philosopher who wrote (5676)	2/13/2001 8:34:49 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I think every--or every healthy--person has an instinctive understanding of what is right and wrong. A pleasing notion, but logically insupportable. If the understanding of right and wrong was inherent, people belonging to different societies would have the same understanding of what is right and what is wrong. They don't. Philosophers have spent lifetimes ferreting out what natural law is. Philosophers spend lifetimes trying to ferret out the obvious. Natural law is a simple thing. It is the law of the jungle. Eat or be eaten. Reproduce as much as you can before you die. That's the law of nature; it applies to all of nature's creatures. Like nature, it is harsh. If we want any law beyond that, we have to make it ourselves. My own belief is that all of our moral codes stem from the simple fact that we are pack animals, and that our survival as a species has always depended on maintaining cohesion and cooperation within the pack. (Note that for most of our recorded history, moral codes have applied only to people within the social group - with outsiders, all is permitted.) Our morality has always stemmed from our experience of what is expedient for the pack; all our thought and philosophy has not changed this. Our thought and philosophy have, however, provided steadily expanding definitions of what expedience is and what our pack is, to the point where we are now reckoning expedience in terms of the remote future, and some of us are beginning to think of the entire species as our pack. These, IMO, are the changes that have driven the evolution of what we call morality.