RE: General question about the possibility of objective moral truth
September 12, 2015 at 10:07 pm
(This post was last modified: September 12, 2015 at 10:08 pm by Faith No More.)
Welcome to the forum.
Social convention. I'm reading "Touching a Nerve" by Patricia Churchland right now, and she talks a lot about how humans are blank slates when it comes to morality. We pick up what is right and wrong from social cues and our parents. Churchland often cites(she's actually citing another author) the Inuit people, which have drastly different morals in certain areas. In that culture, if you eat the flesh of another human being, even if you did to keep from starving, you are to be killed. There was a case mentioned in the book where a woman ate her husband that had died and fed some to her child, and an elder from the tribe strangled them both. What he did was considered a moral action to their people.
If you grew up in a society where killing people was acceptable, you would also most likely believe that killing people was acceptable. I think, however, the reason we like to think of not killing someone as objective is due to many people's strong belief in inalienable rights, and taking a life is an extreme violation of those rights. We can see, though, from studying isolated cultures that morals vary greatly.
Social convention. I'm reading "Touching a Nerve" by Patricia Churchland right now, and she talks a lot about how humans are blank slates when it comes to morality. We pick up what is right and wrong from social cues and our parents. Churchland often cites(she's actually citing another author) the Inuit people, which have drastly different morals in certain areas. In that culture, if you eat the flesh of another human being, even if you did to keep from starving, you are to be killed. There was a case mentioned in the book where a woman ate her husband that had died and fed some to her child, and an elder from the tribe strangled them both. What he did was considered a moral action to their people.
If you grew up in a society where killing people was acceptable, you would also most likely believe that killing people was acceptable. I think, however, the reason we like to think of not killing someone as objective is due to many people's strong belief in inalienable rights, and taking a life is an extreme violation of those rights. We can see, though, from studying isolated cultures that morals vary greatly.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
