Greta wrote:
I don't believe in much but one thing I do believe in is relativity in all things, including morality. What is good for one is not necessarily good for another. Even with foods, some perfectly healthy foods can kill, eg. peanuts. As it is in all things. So I cannot abide by any all-encompassing script. While animals/humans share many commonalities, we all ultimately have different wants and needs.
That may seem to make sense when one is only considering one's own situation and needs. But take it to the social scale, and it's less satisfactory.
It's easy to be overly-impressed with the divergence among people's moral views and their range of choice-making. But we can lose focus on the commonalities...which are substantial. The goal of ethics is to articulate the core that all human beings ought to be reasonably committed to, and to provide guidelines for situational particulars. This is not too ambitious a task to do if objective morality exists.
And if it does not, then ethics are impossible anyway. What use is an ethic when one is the only human being alive who believes in it?
The way we resolve the conflicts of interest is utilitarianism, simply aiming for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. That can be a problem for those with minority interests but you can't please everyone. Today, however, society is restructuring itself along roughly feudal lines - with pockets of wealth becoming ever more dominant.
As you point out, utilitarian steamrollers the minorities. Some of us think that's immoral. But more importantly, we don't all agree on what is "the greatest good." Do we really want the conception of the good held by the majority in a particular locale and time to be forced upon everyone? If so, Nazi Germany would have been right to be Nazi.
I don't think society is going back to feudalism...not if we understand that term literally. More likely, global dictatorships (hello, EU), angry cultural factions (hello, Islam) and monolithic governments are going to become the rule, along with very powerful multinational companies (hello, Monsanto). That's the direction we're travelling right now.
Immanuel Can wrote:Flawed as my mind is, I want to remain independent and neutral - to be an observer rather than a promoter.
C.S. Lewis said that neutrality and independence could only take a person so far. As he put it, "The point of
seeing through some things is to see
something through it. To see through everything is the same as to see nothing at all." I take his point.
Clearly we need to acknowledge the subjective, although even then, stepping back and taking a third person view is considered a time-honoured way of developing clearer perspectives. [/quote]
Yes. But again, the point of getting new perspectives is to
see something. If doing so just reveals another thing we "see through," then we are functionally blind.
Immanuel Can wrote:Whose values are they that offend you? What are the sticking points, for you?
A few for starters: Treatment of women as less capable beings and creation of hard barriers in some cultures and subcultures. [/quote]
Well, I can't speak for all traditions, but women's rights would never have come around except in the Christian West. In fact, that's where they DID appear. Did you ever wonder if there was a rational link? There were more human beings in India and China, and very, very smart ones -- why did they develop no conception of women's rights? I suggest it had something to do with their ideology, not their intelligence.
Fundamentalist creationism that distracts people from the beauty and wonder of evolution. For me, Sagan and Neil DG Tyson's Cosmos series was a spiritual experience and, as you noted, if one finds something that makes them feel so good, we might want to pass it on to others.
I saw Sagan's offering. But I have to admit that I found it rationally incoherent. For one thing, he says that even though we're all stampeding toward impending death and ultimate cosmic heat death, this somehow makes "life mean more." I never could understand that point: it seems to me as though his cosmos makes us infinitely unimportant. But he doesn't explain in the film, really.
I also have big problems with theistic interference into people's personal decisions regarding childbirth and end-of-life.
Actually, Christianity is highly respectful of right-to-life, both at the beginning and at the end.
