RE: what are we supposed to say again when christians ask us where we get our morality?
July 4, 2014 at 12:23 pm
(This post was last modified: July 4, 2014 at 12:30 pm by GrandizerII.)
Quote:No, murder is an unlawful killing, and I meant murder. Murder is not by definition wrong, just unlawful. But smoking weed is illegal too, doesn't mean it's wrong morally.
Ok, I am used to thinking of murder as killing that's considered unjustified, but let's go with the "legally wrong" definition.
In such a case, no, murder would not be objectively wrong in the moral sense. Plus, laws on what constitutes murder may differ with each state or nation, so even if a moral system supports the belief that murder, as defined by a certain state or nation, is immoral, it may not agree with the notion that murder, as legally defined by another state or nation, is immoral.
If the law of a nation considers abortion to be murder, but another nation does not, which definition should the moral system of concern follow? Either way, it cannot agree with both notions of murder being wrong.
Quote:I didn't say it was in wrong in all circumstances. Here, you're equivocating between "objective" and "absolute". As a consequentialist, theft is wrong on my view if it decreases well-being, which it most often does.
You are using a standard/ideal by which to measure the wrongness of stealing/theft. You are not relying on an observation of nature to determine that theft (in general) is wrong. Correct me if I'm wrong, but by what you're saying, you are basing the wrongness of theft on how you personally assess the well-being of each person involved in the theft and how you personally do the comparisons. If so, then how is this not subjective?
Quote:What? These things were the result of cultural and historical changes. And what logical system one should employ will be selected based on your own opinion about what you're applying it to. Further, moral realists could easily claim they're corrections too and not simply opinion, but I'll get to that below.
Adjustments in the fields of logic, mathematics, and science typically occur when new discoveries are made in nature (or in deduction and such).
For example, it was once believed that the earth was flat because that's what they could intuit at the time. But eventually, smart people came along, made some observations and calculations about the world they were in, and found that the earth was actually round (not flat). So a change in thinking regarding the earth's shape occurred as a result, not based on human standard, but based on what was observed in nature.
When it comes to morality, changes in thinking regarding the moral rightness of something typically occur when standards are adjusted rather not when a new discovery in nature (or a discovery of an argument based on axioms/premises established by observation of nature or any such thing) occurs.
Slavery was, generally speaking, morally acceptable back in the days because standards were different from today's standards (in most of the developed world at least). But nothing in nature screams "slavery is wrong" in the same way that nature (from what is observed) screams "2 + 2 = 4" or "squares can't also be circles".
You also mention the many branches in the fields of logic and mathematics and such, but that's still missing the point. You can't just say they're similar to many moral systems relied on just because they also have branches and different systems.
