Moral Relativism

[jonfawkes]

Non sequitur.

Obviously!

Begging the question.

Another non sequitur.

c’mon you can do better than that.

 

[jonfawkes]

jonfawkes

*Wonderful - Please show them, and how we know that they are absolute. *

Here is one moral absolute:

It is wrong to torture people for our pleasure.

Please cite an instance in which it may be right, and explain how you know it is right.

Remember, you present yourself as a Catholic, so you can’t use cat logic here.

What is cat logic?

 

[jonfawkes]

To quote granny,

“The human person is worthy of profound respect.”

This is an absolute as no relationship to others nor relationship to time or space affects the worth of the human person.

It is still a subjective statement from a human about humans. It doesn’t address when humans persons come into conflict - who life is deserving of more respect? It sounds nice but ambiguous when the rubber hits the pavement.

 

[Betterave]

c’mon you can do better than that.

Let’s see…

Strategies for defending Relativism:
When someone points out the rational problems with your defense of relativism, do one or more of the following:

1. ignore his argument and make some new claim with no relevance to the issue at hand or repeat some old claim, ignoring the fact that it has already been refuted (be sure never to explain the relevance of your remarks);
2. pretend he has said something funny and roflyao;
3. express outrage and exit the conversation;
4. say something that makes no sense whatsoever, complemented by an appropriate smilie.

I guess you’re going with strategy 2 this time (your old standby).

 

[InSearchofGrace]

Thought of sneaking this in as this thread on moral relativism comes to a close, discussing a portion in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

*People today are generally at ease with the first part of morality, the fair play in our social relationships. But many are not at all comfortable discussing the second aspect of morality, which focuses on the individual’s life choices and moral character. Many think they should be free to do whatever they want with their lives, as long as they do not hurt other people. “What I do in my private life is my own business. If a certain action does not cause someone else harm, how can I possibly be doing anything morally wrong?”

Lewis responds to this objection by returning to his fleet analogy. “What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all?” Lewis asks. “What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behavior, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them?”[2]

The modern tendency to focus on social morality (“Don’t hurt other people.”) while neglecting personal morality is like commanding teenagers to obey the traffic laws without training them in the practical skills they need to drive a car. They might know that they are supposed to drive on the right side of the road, stop at red lights, and stay at least three seconds behind the car in front of them, but unless they have the personal skills to use the accelerator, the break, and the steering wheel, they are going to get into a lot of collisions.

Similarly, unless individuals are trained in generosity in their so-called “private lives,” they are going to do selfish things that will hurt other people. Unless individuals are trained in chastity, sobriety, and other forms of self-control, they will do out-of-control things that use and damage other people. Social harmony is built on the inner harmony of individuals. A great society is built on men and women of great moral character. Or, as Lewis put it, “You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”*

From Don’t Impose Your Morality on Me! by Edward P. Sri

Peace and blessings,
,

 

[jonfawkes]

Let’s see…

Strategies for defending Relativism:
When someone points out the rational problems with your defense of relativism, do one or more of the following:

1. ignore his argument and make some new claim with no relevance to the issue at hand or repeat some old claim, ignoring the fact that it has already been refuted (be sure never to explain the relevance of your remarks);
2. pretend he has said something funny and roflyao;
3. express outrage and exit the conversation;
4. say something that makes no sense whatsoever, complemented by an appropriate smilie.

I guess you’re going with strategy 2 this time (your old standby).

YAWN - c’mon - who says what is right and what is wrong?

 

[jonfawkes]

Thought of sneaking this in as this thread on moral relativism comes to a close, discussing a portion in C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:

*People today are generally at ease with the first part of morality, the fair play in our social relationships. But many are not at all comfortable discussing the second aspect of morality, which focuses on the individual’s life choices and moral character. Many think they should be free to do whatever they want with their lives, as long as they do not hurt other people. “What I do in my private life is my own business. If a certain action does not cause someone else harm, how can I possibly be doing anything morally wrong?”

Lewis responds to this objection by returning to his fleet analogy. “What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all?” Lewis asks. “What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behavior, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them?”[2]

The modern tendency to focus on social morality (“Don’t hurt other people.”) while neglecting personal morality is like commanding teenagers to obey the traffic laws without training them in the practical skills they need to drive a car. They might know that they are supposed to drive on the right side of the road, stop at red lights, and stay at least three seconds behind the car in front of them, but unless they have the personal skills to use the accelerator, the break, and the steering wheel, they are going to get into a lot of collisions.

Similarly, unless individuals are trained in generosity in their so-called “private lives,” they are going to do selfish things that will hurt other people. Unless individuals are trained in chastity, sobriety, and other forms of self-control, they will do out-of-control things that use and damage other people. Social harmony is built on the inner harmony of individuals. A great society is built on men and women of great moral character. Or, as Lewis put it, “You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”*

From Don’t Impose Your Morality on Me! by Edward P. Sri

Peace and blessings,
,

So what’s the difference between personal guidelines, social guidelines and laws. They are all behavior standards that we voluntarily adhere to.

 

[John21652]

I guess your god has you so confused that you can’t recognize an answer when it’s given.

The world can be known through reason. Our understanding grows as our knowledge grows. We are in progress. Change is the only constant.

Let me ask you a question - if your god is so into the inherent worth of the individual, why is individual interpretation so threatening?

You avoid giving direct answers and pretend that any answer is relevant. What is it you are afraid of?

Your statement that the world can be known through reason answers half my question.

In light of the fact you agree the world can be known through Reason, how about attempting to answer the other half. Which is -

" Is the universe and the world you said you belong in held together with objective laws".

 

[jonfawkes]

You avoid giving direct answers and pretend that any answer is relevant. What is it you are afraid of?

Your statement that the world can be known through reason answers half my question.

In light of the fact you agree the world can be known through Reason, how about attempting to answer the other half. Which is -

" Is the universe and the world you said you belong in held together with objective laws".

Does you god tell you to lead paint chips?

Our “laws” are the extent of our knowledge. Unless we become the infinite there will always be more to know.

Take the " law " of gravity - Galileo, Newton explained some it, Einstein explained it further. These “work” for large bodies but fail at the quantum level. Another theory has to be used. And there are gravitational anomalies like dark flow which none of our current theories account for. So there may be clockworks that are knowable but we aren’t close to knowing them. My people lack the hubris to thing we do. We base our laws on the extent of our current knowledge, with the understanding that we may (and probably will) learn more.

I’ve answered your questions, ( multiple times) answer mine.

If your god is so into the inherent worth of the individual, why is individual interpretation so threatening?

 

[sidbrown]

sidebrown

*Why then, if morality is absolute, and if everyone knows what is right and what is wrong, do we have such a strong disagreement on the morality of these issues? *

Being torn between two contradictory ways of behavior is not evidence that in every case either way of behaving is right.

That some thought Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified does not mean that those who thought it was unjustified were wrong. Either the act was right or it was wrong. Truman came down on the side of right. Pope Pius XII came down on the side of wrong.

Pius XII was right. You do not, in wartime, rain down destruction and death indiscriminately on whole cities and their tens of thousands of innocent occupants.

In ancient Greece, long before the Catholic Church was established, such warlike behavior as total annihilation was considered more typical of savagesthan of noble warriors.

Yes. i do agree with you that it was morally unjustifiable to drop the A-Bomb on Japan in WWII. However, when I have presented my case, I am invariably faced with arguments that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets, the bomb saved millions of lives by shortening the war, WWII was a just war, etc. And these arguments justifying the use of the Atomic Bomb in many cases come from Catholics.
BTW, I would like to see the document or quote from Pope Pius XII on the use of the ABomb against Japan in WWII.
If this is supposed to be an argument concerning moral relativism, wouldn’t this be an example of where one group of people see this as immoral, but the other group will justify it ?

 

[sidbrown]

Is the universe and the world you said you belong in held together with objective laws discoverable through the use of reason?

We do hope that it is so. However, we are faced with counterintuitive results from quantum physics.

 

[sidbrown]

I realize that there are disagreements in practice as to what is right and what is wrong. I was merely pointing out that it is easy to get past the idea that there are no absolutes. There are moral absolutes; thus you can now actually address the question of what is the correct moral position rather than endlessly debating whether or not there is a correct position. Some people use moral relativism as a red herring to sidetrack real debate about right and wrong, and many people unknowingly fall into this trap. I just wanted to let people avoid this particular trap.
I never said that “everyone knows what is right and what is wrong”. Some people are truly just ignorant of either the facts or the moral principles and just need to be educated, others have a poorly formed conscience and some people unfornately operate out of self interest or greed or whatever. Such is the state of our fallen nature.

What you say sounds good, but then as we think about the question of “moral absolutes” we might ask ourselves what is the moral absolute when it comes to capital punishment? There is a thread where Catholics here are quite happy that Catholic clergy have come out against capital punishment. But it was not always so. There was a time when it was thought that burning a heretic at the stake was the morally right thing to do. Notice that the heretic did no physical harm to anyone, he just had a different idea on whether or not the Bible should be translated in the vernacular, or similar things like that. And it was thought to be morally correct to execute this person by burning him at the stake? But today many Catholics, including Catholic clergy, are opposed to executing even the most vicious of criminals, someone who has caused terrible harm to innocent people, including children.

 

[sidbrown]

Here is one moral absolute:

It is wrong to torture people for our pleasure.

Certain things are universally agreed upon, and I would agree that it is wrong to torture people. But then again, there is a problem because we have the papal bull
Ad extirpanda, promulgated on May 15, 1252, by Pope Innocent IV, which authorized the use of torture (under certain guidlines) to extract confessions. Suppose you were happy when this confession finally came out? Would that then make the torture morally wrong, even though it had been authroised by the Pope?

 

[sidbrown]

“The human person is worthy of profound respect.”

Yes, most people would fall under that category. Something like 99.9%. But I can see where there would be hesitation to say that the man who beheaded his wife and killed his children was worthy of profound respect and admiration?

 

[jonfawkes]

j

It is wrong to torture people for our pleasure.

Please cite an instance in which it may be right, and explain how you know it is right.

Remember, you present yourself as a Catholic, so you can’t use cat logic here.

Certain things are universally agreed upon, and I would agree that it is wrong to torture people. But then again, there is a problem because we have the papal bull
Ad extirpanda, promulgated on May 15, 1252, by Pope Innocent IV, which authorized the use of torture (under certain guidlines) to extract confessions. Suppose you were happy when this confession finally came out? Would that then make the torture morally wrong, even though it had been authroised by the Pope?

I’m still waiting to see what cat logic is but S&M seems to be a moral example of torturing someone for pleasure. Two *married * consenting adults doing what they find exciting.

 

[John21652]

Does you god tell you to lead paint chips?

Our “laws” are the extent of our knowledge. Unless we become the infinite there will always be more to know.

Take the " law " of gravity - Galileo, Newton explained some it, Einstein explained it further. These “work” for large bodies but fail at the quantum level. Another theory has to be used. And there are gravitational anomalies like dark flow which none of our current theories account for. So there may be clockworks that are knowable but we aren’t close to knowing them. My people lack the hubris to thing we do. We base our laws on the extent of our current knowledge, with the understanding that we may (and probably will) learn more.

I’ve answered your questions, ( multiple times) answer mine.

If your god is so into the inherent worth of the individual, why is individual interpretation so threatening?

Let me start with your last question.

What do you think is meant by God ‘being so into the inherent worth of the individual’? What do you think constitutes the ‘inherent worth of the individual’? How about if we start with the concept of ‘Dignity’. Are you able to accept the notion that all people should be afforded the opportunity to lead a dignified life? The preservation of one’s personal dignity is something which can be applied to anyone, of any shape, size, colour, sexual persuasion, gender, ability, or whatever. I’m sure you have come across many philosophers, politicians, churchmen, even Popes, who have spoken, or written on the notion of human dignity. Dignity can be hard to define, but just about all of us know what dignity represents and we can recognise the lack of it when we see it. You agree? So maybe we will just let the concept of God being ‘so into the inherent worth of the individual’ rest there for the moment.

You then ask “why is individual interpretation so threatening”? I have to ask you, “individual interpretation of what” and “threatening in what sense”? Without waiting for an explicit answer from you (none of us will live that long!) I will say that there are some things in this world that are not open to interpretation. They are facts, independent of any particular mind and discernable through reason whenever any individual cares to exercise it. If it can be said that individual interpretation is “threatening”, maybe it is because there are a good many people who do not exercise their reasoning powers and so distort, even deny, the existence of things which cannot be denied. Some people even do it deliberately and perhaps threaten the good commonsense of others.

I will now move onto your explanation of gravity as a “law”, even though you are attempting to show that it is not properly understood. You said “these work for large bodies but fail at the quantum level”. By “these” I take it ou mean the various theories regarding gravity? Is that correct? No matter. The theories which attempt to describe and define it might fail, but the existence of gravity does not, does it john? Now, harking back to my previous paragraph, we now have one thing which cannot be denied, no matter how anyone attempts to play at semantics. True john?

You have seen this coming for a while and you know that I know that you knew this was coming. True? That is why you have performed all sorts of intellectual acrobatics to avoid answering my questions directly and you do the same to others.

Basically, your insistence that there is nothing objective in the world is indefensible. If it were the case, all of science would be false and a good many scientists would have your guts for garters. If there were no objective laws governing the universe, the internal combustion engine would not work and the tyres on your car would fail to take you around a corner. Even making that hypothetical metal cooking pot of yours must be done according to a set of objective principles, or else there would be no cooking pot. And as for that fire under it, well, nuff said…Even your pedantic arguments over poor granny’s chair can not deny the existence of that chair, regardless of its shape, size, or anything else.

I’m actually wondering if you aren’t a dissembler.

 

[inocente]

Personally, we all should recognize that humans can sincerely seek to know God in ways which may be called an alternative to the Christian Gospel. The operative words are sincerely seek because obviously humans live in a variety of situations.

I’m going to try to answer your post in one go instead of by multiple quotes.

There are perhaps three ways of dealing with all the many long standing religions: (a) all are wrong except our own, (b) all are right up to a point but only our own is totally right, (c) they see God from different perspectives, and so none see the totality. My view is (c), if born in India I might see God through a Hindu’s eyes, perhaps see a thousand forms of God instead of the Trinity. From there it’s a short step to say no religion actually knows God’s mind and that’s why their moral codes differ, therefore morality can be informed by our religion but should be a matter of individual conscience.

We could go on from there and ask how Christianity would be different if the Adam and Eve creation story had never even been written, for example whether the doctrine of original sin would have arisen without it. It’s unique to Christianity anyway, I think, and even then not accepted by all Protestants, a concept not captured in other religions. On the other hand the concept of “soul” is a widespread intuition, although I’m not sure intuitions can replace reason, and don’t know whether there’s any real agreement about its exact form (independently immaterial, etc.).

So exactly what is revealed by Divine Revelation is for me relative to a number of things: what is and wasn’t written, what was and isn’t lost in history, which religion’s holy book we’re looking at, who’s doing the reading. The only condition I know of to God’s friendship is we both keep the line open, neither of us denies the other, and it’s certain He would never do that to us. He’s a zillion times more powerful than Adam or me of course, and in that sense we have no option but to submit and trust Him, but like a child Adam’s curiosity got the better of him. We have differing interpretations, it’s all, well, relative.

I have this feeling that this answer wanders around your question. Please help me out if I missed the point of your valid question.

No, that’s fine, you’ll know I’m against such things as trying to explain the Eucharist via quantum mechanics, too much deconstruction takes away all meaning.

God willing and the creek don’t rise.

A Great Blizzard and now a Great Flood?

 

[inocente]

I have to respectfully point out that “ways of seeing” refer to actions or decisions. Humanity itself doesn’t change according to different strokes for different folks. Unless the strokes are delivered by a lethal baseball bat.

I thought “respectfully point out” is your virtual baseball bat.

First, Adam knew right from wrong because he knew what he as the created one needed to do to remain in God’s friendship.

May I respectfully point out that it’s called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, so before Adam eats the fruit he could be incapable of being immoral, much as an animal or small child.

Regarding the question – Can a healthy rational person exist who can’t make moral decisions? I would not dare judge anyone.

I was pondering whether it would be possible for any healthy adult to have no feelings of rightness or wrongness at all.

*I agree with you that there is but one humanity and none of us are perfect but most of us are definitely in the process. :hug1:

May I suggest that there is the core truth regarding our purpose in life and in death. That truth is that we are meant to reside in peace and love forever with our Creator. The first human knew that and decided against it. Fortunately, God did not abandon us.*

That’s a bit hard on Adam, I think this cat’s curiosity would have got the better of him too, with or without Adam as my ancestor.

Regarding the human condition, Catholicism is spot on.

I did respond to this earlier. Here’s another thought. Folks can change their strokes.

Absolutely. It’s called relativism.

How does gay marriage respect the procreative purpose of human nature? in the bronze age? in the modern age?

Not convinced that procreation is the purpose of human nature, or that civilly recognizing a bond of love between two people could in any way disrespect human nature.

 

[inocente]

Moral Relativism is the same; it bascially says that there are no absolutes and that therefore person A cannot tell person B that he is wrong. Yet in telling person A that he cannot tell person B that he is wrong, you are in fact telling person A that he is wrong which violates the whole premise of moral relativism, i.e. it is self-contradictory and therefore cannot be true.

No, it says person A cannot dictate to person B, common morality comes by agreement not by tyranny.

 

[inocente]

What do you think is meant by God ‘being so into the inherent worth of the individual’? What do you think constitutes the ‘inherent worth of the individual’? How about if we start with the concept of ‘Dignity’. Are you able to accept the notion that all people should be afforded the opportunity to lead a dignified life? The preservation of one’s personal dignity is something which can be applied to anyone, of any shape, size, colour, sexual persuasion, gender, ability, or whatever. I’m sure you have come across many philosophers, politicians, churchmen, even Popes, who have spoken, or written on the notion of human dignity. Dignity can be hard to define, but just about all of us know what dignity represents and we can recognise the lack of it when we see it.

So presumably civil union between homosexuals is to be welcomed as it accords them equal dignity to heteros.