Moral Relativism

Since Grace4u keeps talking about universal laws of morality I thought I'd bump the moral relativism thread. Hopefully we can restart the discussion and steer away from the specific cultural acts that we might find offensive, and ponder the question "what is the source of moral precepts?"

It would be more accurate to say that I think that they do this not because it's moral to do so, but because if they don't develop morals in that way, they don't survive.Societies that base morals on the arbitrary demands of the few or priveleged don't survive, because the disenfranchised people they rely on to do work don't stick around. It's not exactly "wrong". It's more like "fatal." There's no moral imparative for them not to have poorly-formed morals. There is, however, a survival imparative. Survival.

Moral relativism is the view that there is no source of moral absolutes. I thought we had covered that earlier in the thread.

They all do. They may justify the moral codes they develop through religion or what have you, but ultimately they're all just picking whatever morals they think are necessary for their culture to survive. You're confusing my personal system of morality, which I don't hold to be universal, with the universal method by which systems of morality are determined. Any culture where the few determine morals for the many, and the powerful determine morals for the powerless, is not ultimately stable. Not for long, they don't. Would you?How long do you think Fumdamentalist Islamic cultures are going to remain that way?

What I'm saying is that there's only one way that societies get morals - they pick them. Where else would they get them? God? How would you get morals from a being that doesn't exist?So, all societies pick their morals. Societies that pick morals that disenfranchise large portions of their populations don't survive. Societies that pick morals that make as many people as possible as happy and fulfilled as possible tend to survive. What those specific morals are is up to them.There's no standard. There's just people who are happy and people who are suffering, societies that survive and societies that don't.

Yes. What, you didn't think a moral relativist would have a way to judge moral structures? I dunno. I suspect that successful moral structures share some precepts, like "the lawgivers shall not be above the law" and "all adults of sufficient maturity will be allowed to participate in the political process." The golden rule seems to cover most of the rest - i.e. you wouldn't like it if people stole from you, so don't steal from other people.On the other hand, there's no reason why a moral code could exist that was the opposite of these things, and yet everybody in the society was happyand prosperous. I could hardly look down on such a structure, even if it wouldn't suit me personally.

Maybe the discussion would be a little more fruitful if you actually read my statements as opposed to trying to trap me into saying what you want me to say. You've been trying to do it for 3-4 posts now and it's starting to grate.Why don't you actually read what I wrote. It's all there, and I've explained it several times. I highly doubt you're having trouble understanding it.Again, what I'm saying is that societies either gravitate towards those morals that produce happiness, or else they don't survive. People want to be happy. They don't want to suffer. Societies don't survive unless they acheive those things for their members.It's not about good or bad. It's about survival.

It doesn't beg the question at all, because it doesn't matter what the source of happiness is. For that matter there's no reason to believe that your source of happiness is anything like mine. Maybe Solomon's happiness comes from doing the will of God or whatever, but mine doesn't. The people in your articles don't sound happy to me. Or did you miss at the bottom of your first article:

quote:

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I am afraid some people’s heaven will be a very small one They want to go to heaven on tip-toes, without anybody knowing it, I fear nobody will know they are there.

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You challenged me to present a society that was happpy without God's Word? I submit that you have failed to present a society that was happy with God's word. Let me ask you - does Wales still cleave to the Word to this day? Or did that society decide that they wanted something else?

Trial and error. Intuition. Observation. You say to yourself "you know, this moral precept seems to have no practical value, and just makes people plain unhappy. Why bother with it?"It's resoundingly easy, and requires no recourse to 3000-year-old books. Woah, wait a minute. Don't put words in my mouth. What I pointed out is that Wales doesn't cleave to the same code. But they're very likely more happy as a result. You hardly substantiated that they were happy in the first place.How do you explain that Nigeria is the happiest nation currently if what it takes is following God's word? They're largely Muslim there, you know.

You haven't established that Wales was happy, just that they followed God's word.

Um, no. You've presented two newspaper articles that imply that the writer thinks the Welsh are happy. What was his methodology? Who did he talk to? Or did he simply say "well, they're following God's word, so they must be happy?" There's absolutely no indication that the writer of the articles actually interviewed enough Welshpeople to know if they were happy or not.So, sorry. There's no reason to believe that the Welsh of that time were any happier than anybody else, and considerable reason to doubt that they were, as they changed their mind about the whole god's word thing, presumably in an effort to be happier. I've presented the fact that the Welsh don't cleave to the same code. Why wouldn't they, if it made them so damn happy? Why would people decide to be less happy? As yet this point has be unrebutted.It's been presented to you that Buddists tend to be more happy. This contradicts your position as well.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 12-02-2003]

Come to think of it, Dan can probably handle this himself.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 08-19-2004 03:24 PM