Crud,
Our Culture's "personal opinion"
In some ways this is a tricky one - if we are to take an individual culture in isolation then what you are saying makes sense, but that is not what we are dealing with here.
What we have is a cultural history of morality. One would like to think, and indeed hope, that our culture actually represents the pinnacle of societal morality to date. Morality is a constantly changing thing but I like to consider it a process of evolution with each subsequent "level" being built upon the last.
This is not a smooth process by any means. The declaration of independence and bill of rights are 2 moral outlines I regard as massively ahead of their time whilst Nazi Germany was not only a throw back to the worst excesses of religious intolerance from the middle ages but overlaid entirely new issues. As I have already covered we now reject that societal morality.
It could be that it was the very repulsiveness of the Nazi morality that propelled us to where we are today - or at least accelerated our change.
If my theory of the continuing evolution of societal morality is correct then I would expect future generations to look back on us with a slight sense of shame at the way we behaved.
So we are in a situation where we still have no absolute - but we can judge right from wrong against a history of moral evolution. This is why, for example, in today's western society we know in our very souls that Sharia Law is totally unacceptable.
Our Culture's "personal opinion"
In some ways this is a tricky one - if we are to take an individual culture in isolation then what you are saying makes sense, but that is not what we are dealing with here.
What we have is a cultural history of morality. One would like to think, and indeed hope, that our culture actually represents the pinnacle of societal morality to date. Morality is a constantly changing thing but I like to consider it a process of evolution with each subsequent "level" being built upon the last.
This is not a smooth process by any means. The declaration of independence and bill of rights are 2 moral outlines I regard as massively ahead of their time whilst Nazi Germany was not only a throw back to the worst excesses of religious intolerance from the middle ages but overlaid entirely new issues. As I have already covered we now reject that societal morality.
It could be that it was the very repulsiveness of the Nazi morality that propelled us to where we are today - or at least accelerated our change.
If my theory of the continuing evolution of societal morality is correct then I would expect future generations to look back on us with a slight sense of shame at the way we behaved.
So we are in a situation where we still have no absolute - but we can judge right from wrong against a history of moral evolution. This is why, for example, in today's western society we know in our very souls that Sharia Law is totally unacceptable.
