On Apr 19, 2005, at 6:35 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
From: "Warren Ockrassa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
On Apr 19, 2005, at 6:27 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
Why? Morality is not the product of an opinion poll. Something is either the right thing to do or it is not.
Umm, I can think of a lot of historical precedent that might indicate otherwise. Ethics (I prefer not to use "morality") is very much an artifact of culture, society, weltanschauung. To my mind ethics is all about opinion polls -- the opinion of an entire society, in some cases.
So, the Holocaust would have been ethical if Germany had won?
At least as "ethical" as the extermination of various native peoples.
It was ethical to the Nazis at the time it was taking place. Just as it was ethical for slavery to be practiced, here and elsewhere, for a long time, just as it was ethical for the original tribe of Israel to, occasionally, utterly murder rivaling peoples, even to the point that a psalm was written singing of the joys of dashing out the brains of enemies' children against stones.
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.
Agreed. Further, I think I can describe what it takes, namely an expanding economy, to keep a population in a mode where it extends "human" to all. In stone age times where there was plenty of room to expand, it was not good for your genes to go out trying to kill neighbors. Different situation when the future looks bleak and you are facing the problem of your children starving.
That is, since we're not (on the whole) caught up in an urgent need -- a constant, driving need -- to (1) fend off starvation and (2) guard against enemies literally at the door at all hours of the day and night, we're able to be considerably more magnanimous to others than our forebears were. We're not in "survival mode" -- and I think that the only way for broad-based inclusive idealism to flourish is in an environment that is reasonably stable, secure and affluent.
That's a digression; what I'm suggesting is that ethics is contextual. People individually -- I think anyway -- don't set out to deliberately do bad things, at least most people most of the time. There are exceptions of course, but I think that for the most part most of what any person does makes sense to him or her *within the context of his/her ethical landscape*. Others might not see a given action in the same light, of course, but to the individual I think actions and decisions spring from a place that is not intentionally bad, though at least some behaviors might be rationalized, occasionally tortuously.
I'm inclined to think that societies *usually* behave in the same way -- a culture or nation does not set out to do terrible things; the things it does are, to that culture or nation, ethically sound actions. Whether it's burning witches, performing human sacrifice or attempting genocide, those behaviors make sense to -- they fit into the ethics of -- those who perpetrate them.
And ethics in this case goes back (no surprise) to what is good for your gene's inclusive fitness.
Thus, had WWII been won by Hitler's minions, yes, there would be strong argument (rationalization, I might call it) that the extermination of the Jews as an ethnic class was fully justified, and it would be *extremely difficult* if not impossible for someone raised in that worldview to think otherwise. That doesn't mean I think it would be a good thing, and it doesn't mean I think it would be ethical, but then, I'm applying my society's ethics to the situation, not working within the ethics of the hypothetical Third Reich of 1000 years.
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.
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.
And social consensus springs from a tribe of related people doing what was best to get their genes into the next generation.
Depressing.
Keith Henson
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