On Apr 20, 2005, at 3:59 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
From: "Warren Ockrassa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From my point of view today, and I suspect from yours and most others',
those actions are all reprehensible. But to no small degree I suspect
that's because we're living in a world and a time that affords us the
luxury of extending the epithet "human" to *all* people, even those we
oppose or who oppose us.
It is indeed far easier to do that when one isn't risking one's childrens'
lives in doing so....which makes That is a valid point. I would point
out that the arguement had been made thousands of years ago....it's just
that even people who state that's their source of ethics find ways to
weasel around it. The way I like to look at the Old Testiment is as a
journey of a people from a polytheistic religion where every tribe had
their totom god and Yahwah was just the god of their tribe to where Yahwah
was the God of all, and Israel had a special responsibility.
There's a jump in this graf that seems to reflect a complete change of subject; did something get elided?
The issue I have with the word "moral" is that it suggests, to me, an absolute, a code of conduct implicitly derived from a superhuman source.
I think that, at a minimum, morality requires the existance of Truths that
exist apart from humans...but that we can come to understand. We agree
that one cannot emperically derive morality.
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree on the source of morality, which is of course why I don't accept that something like morality -- as I think it's commonly supposed to be -- exists. ;)
But if I can't accept the presence of that source, I'm not personally comfortable with the word, and I get, along with that, the sense that what we call "moral" is really nothing other than ethics dressed up to look like divine edict -- when in fact "morality" is every bit as plastic and fluid as ethics, and for exactly the same reasons, because to me they both spring from the same source: Social consensus.
OK, let me ask you a hard question. I bet if I did a poll of the world,
most people would say that homosexuality is wrong. Does that make it
unethical to be gay? Aren't gay people wrong _by definition_?
Heh, now you're getting into the idea that majority rules. But there are a couple "escape hatches" to what I'm suggesting, one dealing with this specific question (but applicable to at least some others); the other more broadly available.
(I'll leave aside the fact that a *global* poll really doesn't reflect much, since we are not a world governed by one single social construct; rather, there are dozens of national governments alone, and there are some nations that explicitly or implicitly have declared homosexual behavior to be fully acceptable. The question's, I think, nullified in effect by our lack of One World Government, but it's still an interesting point.)
The specific response is, simply, discussion. A poll that reflects an opinion doesn't leave any room for dialogue, no opportunity from which to determine how the opinion/s are derived or how they might be changed by simple constructive dialogue.
There are myriad reasons why any one individual might believe homosexual behavior to be "wrong", so the simple response ("Yes, it's 'wrong'") is not an effective metric. It doesn't address issues like religious concerns ("...because God hates fags"), fears ("...because gay men all want to stick it up my rear"), superstitions ("...because gays are the reason [whatever] is wrong in our world today") or simple in-group inculcations ("...because my parents thought it was 'wrong' so I do too").
That's one reason, as I see it, that such a global poll would not a priori define homosexual behavior as "wrong".
The more general response is that socially-derived ethics provide *context* for individual actions and judgments thereof, but (to my mind) shouldn't be taken as absolutes -- as they are not -- and should not be taken as dictates that are meant to immutably control behavior in individuals *within* a given population.
An analogy might be how a master artist could behave -- he knows the "rules" for working in his medium, but maybe in his works he *breaks* those rules, and in so doing creates something that is not only of profound immediate impact (unfortunately often rejected by contemporaries) but of lasting effect, not the least because it can actually change the way art in his medium is assessed. In effect by breaking the known constraints he can actually change the entire landscape of his craft.
There's also the question of relevance. What's good for the goose is not necessarily so for the gander, and likely less so for the horse. What's sensible from one person's perspective is not necessarily acceptable or even *recognizable as rational* from another's.
Put yet another way, one million coyotes *can* be wrong after all; or at least, their apparent gustatory opinions don't mean that I'm somehow obligated to join them in dining on jackrabbit.
Social ethics, I think, provide the background, the context, the framework for individuals to begin from, but I don't think it's necessarily appropriate to derive majority rules from them and attempt to apply them on a universal individual level.
From the perspective of a person raised in a society that values individual freedoms very highly (such as the US is purported to be most of the time), the very question itself -- whether it's appropriate to use a massive and vague social metric to attempt to dictate terms of individual, more-or-less private behavior -- is possibly teetering on the edge of unethical. ;)
That said, in a forum devoid of contrary argument, whatever ethics exists is the ethics that will be used. Hence my earlier conclusion that, had the Nazis won WWII, there wouldn't probably be any substantial debate on the disposition of the Jews as an ethnic group, because the vastly prevailing opinion would probably be that it was a justified action.
Of course there *might* be a backward look after a while, but only when time had provided a buffer between the actions of the Final Solution and those contemplating the results. Just as today most Americans, even when they're made aware of it, don't seem to feel particularly guilty about the way that the aborigines on this continent were treated by early colonists and, later, settlers and, later still, the US government itself. (To a great extent, I don't think modern Americans *should* feel guilty about the actions perpetrated by others 100 and more years ago, but that's another discussion.)
I don't believe this because I consider it inconsistent with my
morality....which is based on my belief in the worth and value of every
human being. If you include the power to persuade, doesn't your statement
imply that might makes right? But, I agree you have to have faith to get
away from that. I admire your intellectual honesty in not trying to
pretend that one can experimentally obtain the Golden Rule. We differ on
the ethics of the Nazi's but I fully accept that it is a difference in my
having faith and you not, not a difference where I can prove you wrong.
Heh, we don't differ on the ethics of the Nazis. I believe what they did was atrocious. All I'm saying is that, to them, it wasn't, and had they succeeded completely, it might not be a point for discussion, much as most people today aren't outraged about the way the US Army once gave smallpox-infested blankets to American aborigines possessed of immune systems that had never seen the disease. (The results were predictable and appalling, and there's some evidence the infection was deliberately spread -- a way to solve the "Native Problem" of the 1800s.)
One *might* be able to experimentally derive *some* ethics, but I don't know that they'd be universally applicable. I mean, we can try to abide by "Thou shalt not kill" (which is the *protestant* version of that commandment), but in practice almost everyone can find a way to break that rule, and furthermore a way that is consistent with his/her personal ethical scale.
So if we can experimentally get any rules at all, my suspicion is that they would be every bit as relative as any other ethical conclusions. That is, entirely relative.
If what you mean by the above is that there simply are no absolutes on behavior that we can determine in anything like a concrete, incontrovertible way, I'd be inclined to agree -- but then, there are some pretty solid guidelines that we can probably use as starting points. Such as adopting a lifestyle that attempts to minimize the harm one does to others. However, how we define "harm" and how we balance it in our ethical systems is, as I think history (let alone present day events) tends to show us, very very plastic indeed.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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