I believe anything humans do can be viewed as good or bad; it depends on who provides their subjective theory into the mix.
Take the saving of one premature baby, and the medical costs associated with it. How about those infants already alive that are not provided the same level of medical attention at much less cost to save, because of environmental, money issues, or cultural limitations.
How about those cultures in the past that practiced cannibalism? How about the Donner Party that ate the others to survive? Who decides what is good or bad?
Right you are!
Here in North America, no hospital's actions would be considered good if they said "from now on all premature babies will be left to die, and those resources will now go to the greater good of feeding thousands of starving children in poorer countries".
What is happenng in essence? Hospital budgets are being used to preserve a very few lives at the expense of a great many lives.
The concept of good and evil is human-centric in that anything that hurts humans is considered evil. Now if we were cows what the cattle ranchers do to cattle would be considered 'evil' for cattle. It's a matter of perspective and our ability to conceptualize activities and events or processes. If you were a god then humans are just nothing and you do as you will with humans just as the God of the Bible. As the god and humans are two classes of beings the higher ones imposes its justice on the lower beings just as we do with animals.
Don't forget the plants....and the starving insects whom we deprived of their dinner cause we ate their plants and killed their weeds!
It does seem that many people, like Snood, feel that what they consider (acts they value as) good and bad would have no reality if not founded on absolute and universal forces (cf. Setanta) of Good-ness and Evil-ness. They even go so far as to reify, hypostatize or anthropomorphize these grand abstractions into Beings like God and the Devil.
God and the devil are man-made concepts without any proof of their existence. It's not logical to make supposiitions based on unknowns like "god" or the "devil."
JLNobody wrote:It does seem that many people, like Snood, feel that what they consider (acts they value as) good and bad would have no reality if not founded on absolute and universal forces (cf. Setanta) of Good-ness and Evil-ness. They even go so far as to reify, hypostatize or anthropomorphize these grand abstractions into Beings like God and the Devil.
It must be a peculiar feeling to have no sense of right or wrong unless it is backed by superstition. If their faith wavers, then by default, so must their perceived ability to assess right or wrongÂ….how odd!
Exactly, Chumly. There most likely occurs a deep moral crisis, such as that of the character, Roskolnikov, in Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment. Having lost his moral grounding in religion the character behaved as a moral nihilist, something I never see among my ethical atheistic friends.
By the way, so that Snood doen't think i'm ignoring him, i did not reply to his posts because it is so damned hard to log on here, that by the time i got back to this thread, Eorl had already answered with what i would consider the most plausible response to an allegation of "altruism." Absent the intellectual consideration of "enlightened self-interest," an evolutionary impetus to cooperation would constitute a powerful survival advantage.
The term "moral relativist" is an odious expression. It inherently assumes that there is such a thing as morality, which exists independently of subjective judgment--and it therefore begs the question of the thread. I am not a moral relativist, and apply the same standards to all of my judgments--it is an ethical standard, and doesn't rely upon anyone's superstition belief in omnipotent spooks and boogeymen.
Set, Well stated; "moral" is too subjective to define anything.
Setanta, let me see if I understand you. By rejecting "moral relativism" you are not embracing "moral absolutism": you are rejecting both because morality implies for you frozen ethics rooted in a religious ("superstitious") foundation. If that is so, I agree. I have always considered myself a "moral relativist", in opposition to moral absolutism, without sensing the presence of religion in the category. I should say that I AM an ethical relativist because my ethical decisions are generally influenced by my cultural conditioning. If I were a Dani tribesman of Highland New Guinea I would undoubtedly differ in much of my ethical behavior by virtue of my conditioning. This does not mean of course that I or the tribesman are cultural (moral) automatons, but we are to a great extent restrained and motivated (at least unconsciously) by the framework of our social realilty.
JLNobody wrote:Exactly, Chumly. There most likely occurs a deep moral crisis, such as that of the character, Roskolnikov, in Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment. Having lost his moral grounding in religion the character behaved as a moral nihilist, something I never see among my ethical atheistic friends.
JL, I was also thinking of Roskolnikov. I didn't actually "buy" the character. He seemed to be behaving in a way that a Christian might imagine one would behave without his religion, rather than how I think they would
really behave. Do you agree? (Sorry if I'm slightly off-topic)
Possibly so, Eori. When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, he predicted that Europe would fall into a condition of nihilism. Nietzsche was not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems that he believed that in the wake of "God's death" (i.e., the rise of secularism) people would require an alternative earthbound morality. Dostoyevski wrote without knowledge of Nietzsche 's thesis and was himself religious. Perhaps this is why Roskolnikov's reaction to his own realization of the non-existence of God drove him to such dispair before the terrible freedom he faced.
(While Nietzsche knew of and admired Dostoyevski, I see indication that the latter knew the former)
JLNobody wrote:Setanta, let me see if I understand you. By rejecting "moral relativism" you are not embracing "moral absolutism": you are rejecting both because morality implies for you frozen ethics rooted in a religious ("superstitious") foundation. If that is so, I agree. I have always considered myself a "moral relativist", in opposition to moral absolutism, without sensing the presence of religion in the category. I should say that I AM an ethical relativist because my ethical decisions are generally influenced by my cultural conditioning. If I were a Dani tribesman of Highland New Guinea I would undoubtedly differ in much of my ethical behavior by virtue of my conditioning. This does not mean of course that I or the tribesman are cultural (moral) automatons, but we are to a great extent restrained and motivated (at least unconsciously) by the framework of our social realilty.
The environmental conditioning of individuals in a society applies to the religious "moral absolutists" as well as it does to a tribesman in the rain forest. I rely upon my ethical judgment. Do i consider those judgments objective? Not in the least. My basis for judgment is as subjective as is anyone else's, but a significant difference between me and the religious or other forms of "moral absolutists" is that i recognize the subjective basis of my judgments, while those who argue against me are subjective without having either the honesty of the self-awareness to acknowledge as much.
This thread has wondered way off topic.
That said, to take it further off topic, I started a thread a while back (it upset two people very much - one more than the other), the subject being something like 'are we religious even if we aren't religious'...the basic gist being that even if we don't believe in a god (and the associated religion) we all have beliefs that bear the hallmarks of religious beliefs - that is to say, the characteristics of religious beliefs if not the content (content being the belief in a god etc).
(Btw, I'm not religious, though I was brought up in a Christian home. But I have no problem in someone believing in any religion if it doesn't hurt others)
People here have made some admissions to what I'm talking about - the condition of culture, but also the simple fact that we identify ourselves through our values (which are beliefs), general beliefs, and our personality/character (which is effected by our beliefs). That's the short version anyway.
So to my way of thinking, to say that ones moral relativism is more anchored than anothers moral relativism (because one is based on culture and self beliefs, while the other is based on religion (which is a form of culture), culture and self beliefs)...appears somewhat hypocritical.
Unfortunately me making such statements like that will probably take the topic way off track. It is about good & evil, not about whether aetheists or religious people have the most moral beliefs.
vikorr wrote:(Btw, I'm not religious, though I was brought up in a Christian home. But I have no problem in someone believing in any religion if it doesn't hurt others)
By what set of objective criteria do you discern if it is hurting others? If you have no set of objective criteria by which you discern if it is hurting others, how do you "know"?
Chumly, Good point; a religious person would think it's helping others if the religious convert others to their religion. Some see that as hurting them, so it depends on one's own belief system, and how they perceive good and bad - all subjective reasoning. Even a christian converting a muslim can be seen both ways.
To me, the harm that religions do is mostly mental. This would include the brainwashing of children in any religious mythology that does not provide them the most useful model for coping with life. And physical damage would include the bombing of a mosk, temple or church out of ideological indignation.
Setanta says "My basis for judgment is as subjective as is anyone else's, but a significant difference between me and the religious or other forms of "moral absolutists" is that i recognize the subjective basis of my judgments...." I make the same claim for myself.
The argument to both you and Set would be .... that you only assume your judgements are subjective, while in fact my god made you the way you are, and you are simply denying him as the source of your morality.
