Question of morality.

If morality is subjective, and an extension of rationality, and my morality dictates that killing little boys due to cultural ethos is just and moral, am I a rational being? Or maybe morals are relative truisms and nothing but conventional accords that hold little or no universality?

What exactly constitutes a moral and rational being?

Deep

Aren't morals and ethics dictated by the culture that they encompass?

Things that are moral in one place, don't quite fit in another?

So, at a topical level, I assume that they are conditional and really, really fleeting.

A moral being is one who fits nicely into whatever the current paradigm is, eh?

There is no such thing as absolute morality, therefore I agree wholeheartedly with the above posts.

When people have a 'heart', that helps find the right thing to do. When you're about to do something, ask "is it good?"

This however is different from want and selfishness which will lead this heart astray. The problem is a lot of us have to go down that wrong path to realize it's wrong. Contrary to this, and the reason why I hold to the Book, we can travel down the right path as it advises and discover why it is the path right as we go. It comes back to that heart that was given to us in the first place.

Hope this helps some way.

Cannibal cultures think its moral to eat eachother... some African tribes believe that having sex with 9 year old and even younger girls makes them stronger....Mormons believe the more wives the better....to me all of the above are sick and distorted views of morality, ...i guess morals sums up as the set of rules you are raised in??

Originally posted by saint4God
When people have a 'heart', that helps find the right thing to do. When you're about to do something, ask "is it good?"

The question becomes: Good for who? Is it you or your ideals or your group or your country or etc.

Quoting myself here:

This however is different from want and selfishness which will lead this heart astray.

Let's apply this rule for the examples listed.

Originally posted by BaastetNoir
Cannibal cultures think its moral to eat eachother...

Selfless act? Nope.

Originally posted by BaastetNoir
some African tribes believe that having sex with 9 year old and even younger girls makes them stronger....

Deep down, out of want and selfishness? Yep.

Originally posted by BaastetNoir
Mormons believe the more wives the better....

Really? What Mormons have you talked to say this? I thought there was a 'revelation' that now prohibits the behaviour. Shouldn't that say something?

Originally posted by BaastetNoir
to me all of the above are sick and distorted views of morality, ...i guess morals sums up as the set of rules you are raised in??

Apply the test:

When people have a 'heart', that helps find the right thing to do. When you're about to do something, ask "is it good?"

[edit on 16-3-2005 by saint4God]

Originally posted by Jonna
The question becomes: Good for who? Is it you or your ideals or your group or your country or etc.

Good for all. Here are some phrases that may help:

Spirtually advantageous to others as well
Full of positive results
Well-founded in amiable practice
Cogent, bringing people and hearts together
Honorable and righteousness to friends, family, and neighbors
Virtuous in action
Commendable in character
Kind to all
Benevolent beyond any personal gains

Relative morality is a great thing -- for morally lazy people.

But there has to be some validity to a viewpoint that is as close to being universally accepted as to elicit (at least lip service to) acceptance by most of the world -- such things as universal suffrage, fights to life, and all the other things that are delineated and hopefully protected by international treaty.

Of course, I'm fully aware that some rulers acquiesce because of lip service and break the rules whenever they can, but the bottom line is that they know that such actions are the correct (although perhaps not the expedient) thing to do.

I believe that hurting people unnecessarily, taking things without the owners' permission, and imprisoning them without cause, are close enought to being accepted by the world that I consider them to be exhibits of a universal morality.

Of course, if you want the opportunity to do things and not be held responsible for them, then arguing for a relative morality is a wonderful cop-out ...

...until that same relative morality works against you.

[edit on 16-3-2005 by Off_The_Street]

You have voted Off_The_Street for the Way Above Top Secret award. You have one more vote left for this month.

I hope you get it. This was the second stellar post I've read of yours in the last 2 days. Loved the 'Chem-trails' one. Forgot to give kudos for that too.


[edit on 16-3-2005 by saint4God]

Originally posted by Off_The_Street
Relative morality is a great thing -- for morally lazy people.

But there has to be some validity to a viewpoint that is as close to being universally accepted as to elicit (at least lip service to) acceptance by most of the world -- such things as universal suffrage, fights to life, and all the other things that are delineated and hopefully protected by international treaty.

Of course, I'm fully aware that some rulers acquiesce because of lip service and break the rules whenever they can, but the bottom line is that they know that such actions are the correct (although perhaps not the expedient) thing to do.

I believe that hurting people unnecessarily, taking things without the owners' permission, and imprisoning them without cause, are close enought to being accepted by the world that I consider them to be exhibits of a universal morality.

Of course, if you want the opportunity to do things and not be held responsible for them, then arguing for a relative morality is a wonderful cop-out ...

...until that same relative morality works against you.

[edit on 16-3-2005 by Off_The_Street]

Hi Off_The_Street,

Really enjoy your posts, but we still have at a deeper than topical level defined acceptable morality for all.

Understand, I'm not for what you are calling relative morality. I know what is moral and ethical for me. But it may not be the same for you. My point was that there is little to no real baseline that is totally acceptable to the world. Saint4God has his answer, and I am sure he wears it well, but the person in the far away place who believes he gets stronger by having sex with very young girls, and honestly believes it, is doing what he considers both moral, and ethical. Saint4God It behooves people who feel like you do to proselytize and spread the word, and I think they call them missionaries.

The person who eats a fellow human being and truly believes, due to culture, that it ok, is doing something absolutely moral and ethical.

If the world is to ever be a total moral/ethical place, our definition, then we have to have a meeting of the minds and declare some universal level that we all can agree on.

BTW.... What type of guitar is that you are playing? I recently acquired an Alvarez classic with a cut away, but your cutaway looks larger somehow.

Thanks.

Dan

Originally posted by saint4God
Apply the test:

When people have a 'heart', that helps find the right thing to do. When you're about to do something, ask "is it good?"

Nope. Don't ask if it's good. Good or bad are relative. Ask if it's something that you would like someone else to do to you.

Originally posted by TheBandit795
Ask if it's something that you would like someone else to do to you.

Hey, this part sounds familiar. Good answer

[edit on 16-3-2005 by saint4God]

as posted by zerodeep
What exactly constitutes a moral and rational being?

Is this an Ethics/moral philosophy101 question? The same question that has been debated by philosophers since before Aristotle?

A simplified response would be the natural moral reasoning skills attributed to 'self' (the individual, the person in relation to the whole: poeple) and how 'self' is conditioned or influenced by the culture and society that one resides in.

If 'right' and 'wrong' and 'good' and 'bad' are subjective to each of us, then are we not appealing to certain norms and reasons (rational)? Ethics (moral philosophy), itself, simply asks basic questions about the 'good' life, about what is good and bad, better or worse, about whether there is any objective right or wrong, and how we know it if there is.

What you ask is a question that would require taking an Ethics/moral philosophy class to answer indepth, for a simplied answer would seemingly not do it justice.

define: ethics





seekerof

[edit on 16-3-2005 by Seekerof]

Sorry but Yuk.. there must be something less horrifying to make a point -yes?

Dallas

Morality is only valid on the first level; basically the moral act is the decision that forces you to sacrifice something (i.e. pride, pleasure, time) for an ideal that you hold as personally important.

Because many people do not think independantly, leaders or legislatures try to develop morals for other people. As soon as you move to this level, we are no longer talking about morals (an individual question), but politics (a group question). This is how the Republicans won last year : they called their politics "values". Much of organized religion also works in this political way where the cult members are taking their orders from the interpretations of followers.

This is why no one can say whether abortion is moral or immortal except the mother aborting. Only the mother aborting can absolutely know which ethical system he or she perscribes to. This is not relativism, but as soon as an observer enters the picture, the question is no longer about morals but politics.

Which is more immoral, to let two men or women get married to each other, or to continue to live like US citizens do when many of our human brothers and sisters around the planet (and even in the US) aren't fed, medically treated, or housed? The true moral questions of the 21st century, like the increasing disparity between the richest and poorest humans, the preventable death of millions of children a year in Africa, and environmental citizenship; pose a threat to 'the American way of life'.

There is no "right" or "wrong"...there are just people making decisions based on their own beliefs of what is right and wrong. Although in order to function in a society, you have to compromise your own morals by agreeing to others.

Great question to post!

If we think in terms of survival and base our ethics and morals from the viewpoint of forwarding survival then you can see that there is good and there is bad. That's not to say that it's either black or it's white.

Lets say that you had a society that kills it's children because of some misguided idea that it's good. What will eventually happen to that society with no children to grow up? If you said "the society will die" then move to the front of the class. So you can see that the society was definitely committing unethical and antisurvival acts by killing their children.

Troy

I'm going to use terms I don't like to use, and make analogies I don't like to make; but I can't think of other ways to make my point. My apologies in advance.

Humanity, like it or not, is not every single organism commonly identified as 'homo sapiens'. When we look at "people" in a moral sense, our "people" is a "sigma-loaded X-bar", a mean with a very big fat set of standard deviations -- maybe four or even five standard devs.

The X-bar can be intelligence, in which case the anencephalic and the Stephen Hawking are so far outside the null-acceptance that they are considered "outliers" and don't even count in our definition of "normal" intelligence, "above normal" intelligence, and "below normal" intelligence. to a person doing IQ tests those outliers simply don't exist, because they tend to skew the bell curve to the point where its statistically worthless.

The X-bar can be a (define it yourself) morality-set, where the outliers are Jesus one one side and John Wayne Gacy or Hannibal Lecter on the other.

Pick any X-bar, whether height, weight, neck size, or whatever; even in a four- or five-sigma population there will be outliers who do nothing but mess up the sample. They don't count.

When it comes to getting along with others and being a part of a society defined as "whenever you take ten people randomly from anywhere in the world and put them together", there may be a person or person whose activities or thought processes are so outside the norm that he must be excluded from the sample or the whole sample becomes meaningless as a culture.

And who defines these statistical outliers, these six-sigma anomalies? Society itself, of course.

Hopefully, we have progressed beyond the stage of the flock of chickens pecking the different chicken to death, but the same basic approach obtains. There are certain activities which are so detrimental to any society that we must "peck to death" those particular chickens, not because they're different, but because their difference would, quite simply, destroy the “flock”.

Of course, our "pecking to death" is figurative, not literal; in our case, it is subjecting the “bad chickens” to constraints ranging from overt disapproval to death. This is the way that society -- all societies, including non-human ones -- have managed to survive.

And we call these people who are such statistical anomalies as "bad people" and we do not use their activities as anything but an object lesson -- not because you or I may disapprove, but because you and I and everyone else out to the three- or four-sigma level believes these outliers will destroy our culture.

And we stop their "badness" by imposing our "morality" on them. You may think of it in Biblical or Darwinian terms -- it's one of those rare cases where the two approaches are perfectly congruent.

Hey, sigung86!

It is a Cordoba, a guitar made in portugal. They range in proce from about 600 to 4000; mine is on the very low end of the scale LOL. But for a mahogany back and sides buitar, it has an almost flamenco sound, as though it were made with cypress. I like it a lot, but my favorite axe is a steel string that I play in a band -- a 1971 Martin D28. What kind of music do you play?