Skip wrote: ↑Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:26 pm
no loss or gain there: police will continue to be needed.
Ideally, the police enforce laws that we have rational arguments to believe are
right. When they don't, then that's the job of something more akin to the "secret police" -- the Stasi, the Gestapo, the Cheka...and so on. Now, there's some examples of force being used to compel a morality in which nobody has good reason to believe. It's never a good thing. Freedom of conscience surely has to be a primary democratic value. Let that go, and bad things always happen.
and b) if nobody questions it...or is allowed to.
How deaf does one need to be not to hear anyone questioning the secular laws of democratic countries? Never noticed the protest marches, parades, demonstrations, strikes, pickets, leaflets, editorials, petitions, court challenges?
Absolutely. But the cacophony of different voices and interests is nowhere near being resolved, because at present we lack any common moral reasons for what we advocate.
The truth is that the freedom of conscience that makes such things possible in the democratic countries is borrowed from the Christian ideal espoused by John Locke. You find his wording in the human rights codes around the world, including that of the UN.
In fact, taking the secular regimes of the 20th Century, the "pragmatic" of which you speak killed at least 148 million people.
Coulda sworn that was political conflicts among factions and nations, not legal or ethical disagreements.
Secular ideologies, actually...mostly, but not exclusively, Socialist. After the idea of the intrinsic dignity of human beings has been eroded, all one has left is "us" and "them": "us" being the ones with the political project that matters, and "them" being the bad seed that prevents our ideology from being realized. Then the "us" kills the "them," without much conscience. At least, that's how the 20th Century played out.
Okay, so the religious wars are more moral than the political ones, because a) they're less efficient at killing? or b) there were more people in the 20th century than in the 13th?
I guess you could also ask, if "religious" wars had at least a couple of millennia to do all their killing, how did secularism manage to kill so many more in just one century? Can we really account for the difference by, say, modern mechanization and population counts alone? No doubt that closes the gap somewhat, but nowhere near enough.
Now, of course, wars of all kinds are immoral. Even ones people call "religious." But even to say what was actually a "war of religion" is often very hard. For example, the various Huguenot-Catholic wars in France, which would at first glance seem a pretty clear case of such wars, were just as much wars of regionalism and culture, and wars arranged in the interests of political factions like the Bourbons and the Valois -- with the "religion" being little more than a flag to wave and a thin gloss over a lot of bad behaviour the motivations of which were clearly rather unreligious, as the way they played out clearly confirms. Given such mixed motives, it's often very hard to say how much a "religion" can be said to be the true cause of a war.
However, even taking the most generous reading of "religious war," and defining anything which even seemed to have that motive as significant, it is not possible to get a statistic higher than 7% of the war deaths under that count. And of those, half, or 3.5% of all, were due to one religion in particular: Islam. The remaining 3.5%
has to be divided among all other religions -- Catholics, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Animists...and so on. Which means that by the most generous reckoning, "religion" is a very minor cause of war. And some religions (such as the Zoroastrians, Anabaptists or the Quakers) have actually been responsible for
absolutely no wars at all ever.
Perhaps we'd all be better to be Quakers.
The upshot is that whatever else you want to add into the equation, it's not possible to get the statistics for secular wars within a country mile of those for supposedly "religious" wars. Secular ideology is by far the biggest force for gratuitous homicide in the history of the world. And it's very clear that second place isn't anywhere close.
But now to the question of the moment:
Can subjective morality give us a rational legitimation of why we ought not to kill millions of people?
Let's get started.
Premise 1: Subjective morality entails....X.
Premise 2: X....requires that it is immoral for us to kill millions of people.
Conclusion: Therefore, subjective morality means we must not kill millions of people.
So there's a valid syllogistic form. All it lacks is a workable middle term, "X". Moreover, we've chosen what ought, by all rights, to turn out to be a very straightforward moral to defend -- because even intuitively, most of us (I trust) would tend to agree it's got to be immoral to kill millions of people, even if we are not familiar with the right reasons for that. But if such reasons exist, and if the crime is so great, how hard can they be to find?
Let's see if anybody can fill in the blanks.
There could be no one. Name somebody, if you've got somebody.