Relativity of morality

I’m going to sell my kids on the live organ market. Figure I could gross a few hundred grands from them, maybe a million. If anybody objects, I’m gona say that morality is relative.

Do the ones who do it object to it ?
...or do they need to do it no matter how far fetched the needing seems ?

I just need a bigger swimming pool. Morality is relative.

...yeah...is sort of relative to an absolute !
...just a 2 degree cousin don't worry much about it...

And what absolute would that be?

He wrote me a letter before I was born but I never met him in person...
...the letter is real intelligible and has patterns ! (no it was not the bible)

Your father?

...as much as maths father's and shapes your everyday life.

Taking care of your own children is a biological imperative. We evolved to take care of our own children and almost every human culture has had rules to that effect.

Humans evolved in tribes. We are social animals and we form societies. Again, there is survival value in this and we evolved with behavioral traits that make us care about the children living in our society.

However, humans evolved to not care about children in other societies... and this is a behavioral trait that has lasted until today.

A cute blond American kid who is missing for a couple days will be on TV for hours with American viewers who don't know the family will obsess over it until the kid is found. The hundreds of children in Guatemala being lost, beaten and killed every day don't cause the same emotional reaction.

The fact that Americans act as if American children are far more important than Guatemalan children makes perfect sense... from an evolutionary perspective. American kids are part of our society, they are like us and we feel a connection to them as part of our social group. Americans don't care about Guatemalan kids in this way.

I don't know if this can be considered morality.

And yet, when we must chose between our lifestyle and our kids' future well-being, we tend to choose the former. "Apres moi le deluge", "global warming is fake", etc... Many people don;t care for their kids... There's no biological imperative that I can discern.

My point was: if morality is indeed relative, what's so wrong with selling kids on the live organ market?

Depends on whose kids. Selling your own kids is universally immoral (I believe in any culture). Selling the kids in your own culture (in my case Americans) or ethnic group is likewise considered immoral. Both America and England participated in socially sanctioned buying and selling kids in the past 200 years.

America (and England) are now taking actions that kill kids in the Middle East in the name of security... with only a muted outcry.

I know it is considered immoral, and I consider it immoral too. But that's because I think of the protection of decent human lives, especially young ones, as trumping any other moral value. I am NOT a moral relativist so for me it's pretty easy and simple... Just wondering how moral relativists can deal with such issues tho.

What is good for me might not be good for a pig and vice versa...in that sense moral might perhaps be relative...relative like Einstein said time is relative.
...but that explained away, just like time can inflate at speed of light wherever you are in the Universe...so relative moral conflicts behave the same way whatever the species you are in the Universe. Its is both relative and absolute.
...relative because it depends on species or cultures conflicting goals and absolute because its bound by the same Neo Darwinian rules that brought up group bounding for maximizing efficiency at complex tasking.

I honestly hope both sides come to understand this is a much simpler problem then it seems. That's why I don't waste much time speaking about ethics. I rather reserve my mental energy for ontological problems.

This was a terrible attempt to create a logical argument. You have attempted to combine concepts that don't necessarily support each other and keep building on them as if they do.

Even from your first statement;

"If morality is relative, then anyone can believe anything."

Morality has little to nothing to do with belief. Morality isn't built upon things that you believe. In fact they can even be in opposition yet you can still adhere to either of them separately.

Here is an example. You can believe a god has commanded to not take the life of another human being. Yet at the same time turn around and justify the killing of a person. In the first case you are suggesting your moral stance through your belief in a god and his commandment. But in the second case you are building upon your own case as to why it does not break the commandment and is justifiable. I see this all the time. Humans are really good at being inconsistent with their beliefs. This shows that morality is not strictly connected with beliefs, otherwise if it were, it would be far more consistent.

Another great example is the conflict between societal laws and personal opinion. If you are following a law just because you are wanting to avoid the punishment for breaking that law, then you are not morally in line with the law you are just not wanting to suffer the consequences for breaking it. If the law was lifted would you be inclined in carrying out the action? Many people consider themselves morally upright people but in reality all they are really is punishment adverse.

This can go either direction as well. For another simple example is that I personally feel that taking drugs is not morally wrong, yet I do not use drugs. If I am not morally opposed to it, why do I not use them? The moral conclusion has nothing to do with my belief system. Not to mention that a huge majority of my morality is actually imposed upon me by society and since I want to be able to function within this society I decide to adhere to them. It doesn't make me a moral person by doing that.

So your original first argument does not support itself therefore the rest of your arguments are unsupported.

You claim that there is a contradiction, but you don't demonstrate that any contradiction exists. Morality is an artificial construct, a description applied after that fact. It has been created by humans. Humans are a part of the natural world.

The implication of your remarks is that morality exists independently of the natural world. The obvious inference to that would be that morality has a supernatural origin--i.e., that it is the product of a god or gods. That is the only way one could allege that morality exists independently of nature. It is part and parcel of the Abrahamic tradition that humans are independent of the natural world, that "god" gave humans dominion over the natural world. Keep your religious claptrap to yourself.



"Rising above?" Once again, the implication of your point of view is that there is some kind of supernatural state to which we should aspire. Don't try to drag your feeble notions of some magic sky daddy into such a discussion--at least not with me. I'm not buying it. This is precisely why i am contemptuous of the idea of any objection morality.

It appears to me that you don't reason well, and that your failure of imagination, your failure to grasp the implications of what you write is at fault.

Not at Setanta. I am saying there is no absolute morality; not from any deity, not from any Truth about nature. Morality exists only as a social construct.

Of course morality is informed by our evolved behavioral traits... but each culture has its own moral understanding informed by its own history and survival needs. In this way morality is similar to language. Each culture develops its own language. Every language is based on evolved biological traits, but each language has rather different ways to express things.

A moral absolutist believe there is one true understanding of morality. They believe that their understanding is largely right... and that every other culture in any other place or time is wrong.

My understanding of morality (which, since you and I are members of the same culture is very similar to yours) works very well for me. This system of morality functions perfectly in 21st century society.

It works as a social construct, whether you believe it is based on some absolute Truth (be it God or some pattern in nature) doesn't matter.

(Tangentially... this personal attack is rather amusing. Generally religious people, particularly the fundamentalist ones, are moral absolutist. I love irony.)

Its all about detail when it comes to morality. There are things which are biologically essential, others, species related, race related, group related, and finally individual related. In that sense, some pillars for moral ought to do behaviour, are more fundamental then others. None of it has anything to do with constructs or the free willing of men and society at large. It just unfolds from sheer necessity of cooperation for increasing efficiency at complex group tasking to ensure survival. The specificities of X or Y cultures are conditionally related to the particular details that relate such groups with their surrounding environment interaction by which the moral history of any given culture unfolds.
...having to constantly listen to the freaking "construct" word is an oxymoron.
We do indeed construct but that is not what the wording tries to imply. We invent nothing.

Fil,

Every culture that has every existed "unfolds from sheer necessity of cooperation..." The human cultures throughout history have had radically different ideas about war, marriage, rights, wealth, slavery and a host of moral issues. All of them that lasted for a significant period of time were "efficient".

Are you willing to say that our modern culture has a better understanding of "moral truths" than these cultures (some of which featured slavery and arranged marriage and a bunch of things we now consider immoral)?

If all that matters is biology and "efficiency"... then any system of morality that is developed by humans and is successful is equally valid, no? If not.. then there must be some other way to judge between them (other than just saying.. my understand is right and anyone who disagrees is wrong).

The sun is the sun and yet started as a gas cloud.
What I am saying is that things take time to emerge. Like species do as biology progresses. It doesn't mean the underlying principle is not the same. Cooperation was not all build in a day. First it requires brains evolving, and more recently it requires memes evolving in cultural paradigms....but the force driving the wheel is the same old natural selection. Groups that do not cooperate well enough (sometimes because their environment does not require them to) will end up technologically inferior and eventually go extinct.
Do you know for instance that northern birds are smarter then southern close cousin ones ? Yeah those had to figure out better how to get seeds because of the environment not being so forgiving...cultures are subject to the same logic...some were forced to bound more then others do to the aggressiveness of the environment...and now I better shut before I speak to much.

The dominant cultures today (and that is economically, militarily and culturally dominant) had important periods of economic expansion that were characterized by genocide and slavery. This includes my own culture, which finished what would now be considered a genocidal act just 180 years ago.

I don't know of any cultures that haven't done things that are deeply troubling to my sense of morality that have every been successful.

I am curious on how this fits in with your point, Fil. But the technologically superior cultures don't have a very good track record (according to my understanding or morality).