Dan M wrote: > > No, actually, I believe that there exists truth apart from us.
Which, with the absence of any evidence, is akin to magic, but you missed my point entirely. > That we have > partial understanding of that truth. That the Critique of Pure Reason did > a > good job defining and a fairly decent job addressing the truth. > > There have been many social constructs in history. If one defines morality > in terms of social constructs, and they contradict one another, which one > is > right? Is it the one that won? There is no constant, absolute right or wrong. Its the one that works best in the given situation with the caveat that in five years or five months or even five minutes the circumstances that made it work well might change. How quickly and completely did American attitudes and indeed, their ethics change on Dec. 7, 1941 or on 911? > > If that is the case, we only have to look at who won the three great wars > of > the 20th century: WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. Take the US out of the > picture, and there are only two real important players in WWII: the USSR > and > Germany. Take the US out of the picture, and Europe would have no power to > resist the USSR. (Granted the UK may have survived for a while on Hitler's > fear of water). > > If either Germany or the USSR won, they would have the dominant social > construct. If in one hand and... But if either of them had won, how long do you think that they could have kept their conquests under their thumb? Do you think that their social constructs would have been successful? Would they have stood the test of time? I have serious doubts that they would have, but if they did, if their constructs _worked_ you'd have to say that their ethics were superior. I've been been reading a book about the rules of baseball* and one of the rules they discuss is the distance between the bases. When the rule were first codified the distance was within 15" of the distance used today, 160 some odd years later. The distance is effective because it challenges both the hitter and the fielder; its fair and competitive. But what if something changed? For argument's sake, what if fielders were no longer able to throw as hard as they do now? A routine ground ball would be a hit almost every time. The rules would have to change to maintain the balance between offense and defense. Less than a hundred years ago women couldn't vote in this country, and we elected a couple of presidents that were demonstrably racist; at least one was a member of the KKK. In November the ticket of one party will include a woman and the other an African American. As we change, so do our ethics. Doug *my apologies to our international members for the baseball analogy and the inches. 8^) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
