The Case For A Non-Absolute Morality

[Medi]

[Inspired by the 'Father Arguments' thread. Thank you, Severan]

I disagree, if only because I am bored. If what you are saying makes any sense to me, you would believe in moral relativism and judge people by their own cultural standards whilst in their culture. Which is disgusting.

If I may use your example, to stop someone from killing thousands is the goal and to kill him IS A LAST RESORT because you have failed to stop him by any other means. All you would be doing is not confounding your mistake(s), or the mistakes of others that already failed in their moral obligation to his society, of letting a person whom would kill thousands get in a position where they could and making killing him the only out.


If you were not derived of any empathy and held yourself to any sort of intellectual standards, you would see, this person is a victim whom needs treatment.

People are a product of their environment and perception there of, nature and nurture. People don't choose to be suicide bombers, or in this hypothesis, some sort of Bonde villain. And yes I believe that morality can be weighed and measured to a degree whereby all actions can be judged by the same standards irrespective of the situation. To follow the example, a society that merely kills the Bonde villain every time he is about to kill everybody is statically going to loose at some point. The punishment for not fixing the root of the problem and stopping the creation of the villain, whether it is biological or environmental, is its own destruction.

The variables are enumerable granted, but, they are not supernatural. As such a solution is possible, we owe it to all the potential Bonde villains and our society to insure everyone has an upbringing that negates the situation entirely.

Sam Harris



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Of course this requires every person being totally great at parenting or at least us having adequate fail-safes in place if some aren't, and a means for psychological analysis and identification of high-risk individuals, which currently we don't have. It is a nice thought, but it's just not achievable, not in my lifetime anyway.

Besides, killing him is the last resort, of course, and surely I empathize that people are often pidgeon-holed into positions like his in lots of ways, but we can't blame society entirely for him being in that 'last-resort' position. People grow up with great upbringings and kill, maim, torture or harm others.

If it's a choice between innocent kids, for instance, and his life, I'll take his any day of the week, if it should come to that black-and-white scenario. Since his uprbringing shouldn't destroy the lives and opportunities of those who have barely had one yet.

I do agree that there are more angles to morality and peoples' mental state than a lot of theories suggest, but then, I've not had the upbringing of a prince and I still hold myself generally accountable for my state of mind and personal choices.

Come the moment, should it come to life or death, I would consider myself to have no choice but to stop him any way that fitted the gravity of the situation. And I'd probably feel guilty for it for the rest of my life. However, a preferrable route would be treatment.

[JohnCrichton72]

Walk past a starving man, give him money. See a guy about to release nerve gas, stop him. A child being beaten, defend the child.

There's a suspected terrorist in a house full of non-combatants....fire the missile anyway.

It's a lose-lose situation, if you kill him and some civilians they are propaganda (to the tune of 2/3 maybe more) and if you do nothing he makes good on his threat.

I am not saying the resistance to terrorism is the cause for it, don't get me wrong they are the enemy, but can't we develop some orbital death ray that can single out individuals instead.

If we could just tell the civilians somehow that;

"there is a guy among you declaring war on the most technologically advanced battle hardened civilizations in the world, you might not want stand next to him"

They would probably start standing clear, after the first couple.

[MindForgedManacle]

Or they would see it as an instance of Western imperialism and blasphemy against Allah, or against their own freedom o.o

[JohnCrichton72]

.
[/quote]

Of course this requires every person being totally great at parenting or at least us having adequate fail-safes in place if some aren't, and a means for psychological analysis and identification of high-risk individuals, which currently we don't have. It is a nice thought, but it's just not achievable, not in my lifetime anyway.

Besides, killing him is the last resort, of course, and surely I empathize that people are often pidgeon-holed into positions like his in lots of ways, but we can't blame society entirely for him being in that 'last-resort' position. People grow up with great upbringings and kill, maim, torture or harm others.

If it's a choice between innocent kids, for instance, and his life, I'll take his any day of the week, if it should come to that black-and-white scenario. Since his uprbringing shouldn't destroy the lives and opportunities of those who have barely had one yet.

I do agree that there are more angles to morality and peoples' mental state than a lot of theories suggest, but then, I've not had the upbringing of a prince and I still hold myself generally accountable for my state of mind and personal choices.

Come the moment, should it come to life or death, I would consider myself to have no choice but to stop him any way that fitted the gravity of the situation. And I'd probably feel guilty for it for the rest of my life. However, a preferrable route would be treatment.
[/quote]

So you would agree with me if I posited that we have built a society that relies on sacrifice, we accept our own ignorance and inability to help said "Dr.No". We have created a, or contribute to, a societal construct that WILL fail somebody and force us to kill him before he kills others.

We, everybody, has a societal responsibility to deal with this (being the benefactor's) and it should be top of the agenda.

I kinda feel a little dirty, we aren't cutting their hearts out on a sacrificial table but we aren't far off it.

[Medi]

.

Of course this requires every person being totally great at parenting or at least us having adequate fail-safes in place if some aren't, and a means for psychological analysis and identification of high-risk individuals, which currently we don't have. It is a nice thought, but it's just not achievable, not in my lifetime anyway.

Besides, killing him is the last resort, of course, and surely I empathize that people are often pidgeon-holed into positions like his in lots of ways, but we can't blame society entirely for him being in that 'last-resort' position. People grow up with great upbringings and kill, maim, torture or harm others.

If it's a choice between innocent kids, for instance, and his life, I'll take his any day of the week, if it should come to that black-and-white scenario. Since his uprbringing shouldn't destroy the lives and opportunities of those who have barely had one yet.

I do agree that there are more angles to morality and peoples' mental state than a lot of theories suggest, but then, I've not had the upbringing of a prince and I still hold myself generally accountable for my state of mind and personal choices.

Come the moment, should it come to life or death, I would consider myself to have no choice but to stop him any way that fitted the gravity of the situation. And I'd probably feel guilty for it for the rest of my life. However, a preferrable route would be treatment.
[/quote]

So you would agree with me if I posited that we have built a society that relies on sacrifice, we accept our own ignorance and inability to help said "Dr.No". We have created a, or contribute to, a societal construct that WILL fail somebody and force us to kill him before he kills others.

We, everybody, has a societal responsibility to deal with this (being the benefactor's) and it should be top of the agenda.

I kinda feel a little dirty, we aren't cutting their hearts out on a sacrificial table but we aren't far off it.
[/quote]

Of course. Our society sucks, we haven't got the means (or more aptly the common desire) to fix problems at their roots and do what's best for the many rather than what suits the interests and desires of the few.

There's a hundred different things I can think of that we can do more honestly and more aptly; food distribution, legislation creation, childcare, education.

Our society is geared towards money and greed rather than social harmony on the extent we're talking about.

It's an irony of humanity that the most successful and socially influential people are usually psychopaths that couldn't give half a shit about the society they impress on.

[gashead31]

An absolute morality is of course, absurd... however I would argue there are both objective and subjective moral values, murder for example, is objectively bad for the propagation of a species, weather the species subjectively wishes it to be so or not

[max-greece]

Stumpy is a killer whale that has been severely injured and is no longer able to hunt for himself. He has been observed with several pods over the years. It appears that each time the whales go out to hunt Stumpy tags along with a different one of them. That whale catches fish, bites them in half and allows half to fall for Stumpy to swim up and eat. This has been going on for years.

http://www.freemorgan.org/wp-content/upl..._orca1.pdf

Notes:

Whales don't normally change from one pod to another more than once or twice.
The behaviour appears to be unique.
There is no obvious, tangible benefit for the other whales of keeping Stumpy alive. In every other species (that I have ever heard of) Stumpy would have just been allowed to die by his family.
As Stumpy changes often from one pod to another we know there can't be a familial link for all of them.

Question - basic morality? Altruism?

If this is proto-morality of some form doesn't that mean definitively that morality is a geneticaly triggered behaviour that we have merely expanded upon through ever more complex social structures?
Doesn't it rule out any idea of an absolute moral law giver?

[Godscreated]

I'm not sure how this fits into a religion thread, most of the discussion is of human morality. If however this was suppose to be about religious absolute morality, then which one? The God of Christians is absolutely moral and Christians do not claim they are or can be in this life. God doesn't expect us to be absolutely moral, if He did then why Christ.

GC

[Zen Badger]

I'm not sure how this fits into a religion thread, most of the discussion is of human morality. If however this was suppose to be about religious absolute morality, then which one? The God of Christians is absolutely moral and Christians do not claim they are or can be in this life. God doesn't expect us to be absolutely moral, if He did then why Christ.

GC

Yep, so moral that he murders children and condones rape and slavery.

Yep, indeedy.

[Medi]

Stumpy is a killer whale that has been severely injured and is no longer able to hunt for himself. He has been observed with several pods over the years. It appears that each time the whales go out to hunt Stumpy tags along with a different one of them. That whale catches fish, bites them in half and allows half to fall for Stumpy to swim up and eat. This has been going on for years.

http://www.freemorgan.org/wp-content/upl..._orca1.pdf

Notes:

Whales don't normally change from one pod to another more than once or twice.
The behaviour appears to be unique.
There is no obvious, tangible benefit for the other whales of keeping Stumpy alive. In every other species (that I have ever heard of) Stumpy would have just been allowed to die by his family.
As Stumpy changes often from one pod to another we know there can't be a familial link for all of them.

Question - basic morality? Altruism?

If this is proto-morality of some form doesn't that mean definitively that morality is a geneticaly triggered behaviour that we have merely expanded upon through ever more complex social structures?
Doesn't it rule out any idea of an absolute moral law giver?

Not necessarily, since the bible, and most theist orientated religions would agree that the 'one' created the animals as well as humans. And to my reading, the bible can coincide with evolution. That concept would make sense. For us to become something beyond animal thought yet to have derived from it; it's evident in our brains, for a start, which from a biblical view; God made. It's evident in human history, physics, science, nature; all things which (taking the view of the beliver) God created and thus designed to be as they are.

It's absolutely irrational and illogical that the world was made 6000 years ago. It's just not true.

In Hebrew, the word for 'day' can have three meanings, one being 'indefinite period of time', like the word 'age'. Another thing to note is that God sees a day as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day, so to speak. Evolution's a blip in God-time (if you believe in god of course).

Another point is, how can there be days when no sun was created?

For all intents and purposes, taking the position that there's the 'one', it would make sense that animals have some form of morality on some level.

And what you're saying suggests that the 'one' actually IS an absolute moral law-giver. Which I dispute. Since God (again, taking the stance of a believer), would have made the immoral with the ability to be so, since the 'one' is the creator of everything.

---

I'm not sure how this fits into a religion thread, most of the discussion is of human morality. If however this was suppose to be about religious absolute morality, then which one? The God of Christians is absolutely moral and Christians do not claim they are or can be in this life. God doesn't expect us to be absolutely moral, if He did then why Christ.

GC

Yep, so moral that he murders children and condones rape and slavery.

Yep, indeedy.

'Condones' is strong. Think of it this way; Abraham and Moses were men with barbaric minds, far far far away from the type of person able to emotionally and mentally comprehend 'have compassion for your enemies'.