Moral Relativism

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Even if it's a rare occurence, there is no justification for risking someone else's life for an unnecessary procedure without his consent

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I understand what you are saying, but if this were the way things
actually worked we wouldn't be allowed cars and aircraft.It's about tolerable risk, and that boils down to probability
of encountering a negative outcome.The above would mean we shouldn't take out kids in the car
until they are old enough to say whether they want to come
or not.Added by edit :- maybe we shouldn't I guess.[This message has been edited by Peter, 07-29-2003]

Peter responds to me:

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Even if it's a rare occurence, there is no justification for risking someone else's life for an unnecessary procedure without his consent

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I understand what you are saying, but if this were the way things
actually worked we wouldn't be allowed cars and aircraft.

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Sure we would.Or does the word "consent" mean nothing to you? Nobody forces you to get in a car or on a plane. And if you don't want your foreskin, you go right ahead and cut it off. But what makes you think you have the right to decide that for someone else? Especially if he might die from the procedure? And on top of that when the procedure is completely unnecessary?

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The above would mean we shouldn't take out kids in the car
until they are old enough to say whether they want to come
or not.

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Not at all. Once again, you're trying to compare things that are necessary to things that are unnecessary.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

There's no necessity to take kids in cars, we could
quite reasonably arrange our lives so that we could walk
everywhere (previous generations had little choice in
this).If it's about consent then wait till the kids can consent
before doing anything dangerous.That said I am actually AGAINST ANY unecessary surgery -- but
I'm not sure exactly why -- it's not to do with risk exactly
though. Hmmm .... I better have a think about why I'm against
it and get back to you on that bit.

I think I agree on the grounds of consent to a body
altering procedure.Not because of the risk, but because it's a permanent
body change and one should have the choice in that.None gives someone a nose job without asking so why do something
elective when the person cannot elect to have it done.

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?"

Crashfrog,In restarting this thread, you asked the question, Now it is obvious from your first post in this thread that you think such precepts come from human societies. In that post you said: Your reasoning confuses me. You claim that societies "must" develop rules that give the greatest quality of life to everyone, but is it possible that you only think this because it fits the morality of your society? Why must a society have rules which conform to your concept of morality? What is to prevent them from forming their own ideas of right and wrong? What if they decide that only a privileged few should experience the greatest quality of life? How can you say that this is wrong? What absolute do you use to defend the imposition of your standard of morality on an independent society?

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.

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Or did somebody just tell you what "moral relativism" means?

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What does it mean, I'm confused.------------------
Bible
Search Results
"love" was found 865 times in 751 verses.Thats a Whole Lotta Love

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Or did somebody just tell you what "moral relativism" means?

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What does it mean, I'm confused.------------------
Bible
Search Results
"love" was found 865 times in 751 verses.Thats a Whole Lotta Love

Crashfrog, Who does this? Out of all the nations in the world, how many follow your standard of morality? So are you saying that any society whose system of morality differs from yours will be unable to survive? Really? Is it not possible for the "disenfranchised" to view their position as morally rewarding and thus well worth any physical loss or suffering?

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Who does this? Out of all the nations in the world, how many follow your standard of morality?

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Crash quite clearly espouses not a system of morality, but a practical generalization: societies that do not optimize human enjoyment are prone to failure. Thus, given enough time, they will fall.

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So are you saying that any society whose system of morality differs from yours will be unable to survive?

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but nothing about that post suggests a particular system of morality at all. I would expect that the principle described would result in very different results in, for example, Saudi Arabia and Peru. Every culture has its own values and thus human enjoyment is served by different societal structures in different places, which leads right to your next point.

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Really? Is it not possible for the "disenfranchised" to view their position as morally rewarding and thus well worth any physical loss or suffering?

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It's possible, theoretically. If the masses place a high enough intrinsic value on hard labor and silence in the face of exploitation, why not?

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?

Crashfrog, Are you saying that there is a universal standard which determines how human societies develop their moral structures and that the survival of these societies is dependent on their moral conformity to that universal standard?

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.