Skeptic Project

My stance: garbage.

Discuss.

Isn't this a symptom of white liberal guilt?

useful and garbage?

it's useful to recognize that other people have different moral systems and parts of those moral systems may be perfectly reasonable. but garbage since other parts of those moral systems are pretty clearly abhorrent and detrimental to others and/or society.

I minored in philosophy at least!

Oh, I didn't minor in music and I'm awesome at singing

Useful.

If one considers Friedrich Nietzsche's central thesis from "Genealogy of Morals" it should become completely apparent that, at the very least, there is a strong case for considering morality in a relativistic way. The establishment and perpetuation of moral systems is dependent upon a structural support for those moral codes. Even within "western civilization" (of which I a primarily concerned with Western Europe) the morality of usury has changed dramatically. Usury was, throughout the majority of the part millenium, a taboo. To engage in usury was an immoral, or perhaps the avoid anachronism, sinful action. This of course coincided with the dominance of Christian paradigms within the governing sphere of human life. Government, social hierarchies, regulatory institutions, and educations were founded deeply upon a Christian framework, and thus such actions as usury were firmly abhorrant to society. (In fact, only Jews were permitted to engage in usury, and this eventually would lead to a great deal of Jewish conspiracies even back in the Middle Ages). Now, when we look at the secularization of "Western civilization" (or the death of God) we find that social structures were no longer explicitly dominated by a Christian paradigm, and thus the social order and its moral center altered tremendously. In American society, which quickly grew up along with Capitalism, usury lost its immediate moral abhorrence and instead became an innate quality to any good entrepreneur.

What all of this is meant to illustriate is the necessity for self-reflexiveness in assessing the position of moral relativism. It is remarkably difficult to dismiss moral relativism on the grounds that it is "useless" because it certainly does provide a framework for understanding even our (and we are the "west") own history. Now, if the contention is that moral relativism opens the door to a slippery slope in which inaction because the norm, I would urge such a reader to consider the divide between analysis and action. We can of course use moral relativism to understand a social structure, how that structure influences the moral codes that exist in that culture or society; but that does not mean that we do not uphold our own, relative morals. In a certain sense, we really can't change our moral position all that much because they are constrained by certain structural aspects. You can hold the position that usury is amoral, but it changes little about how the socio-economic system works. We may ultimately make arguments and cases for the harm or good of a system as a whole, but it makes little to no sense to expect members of a completely different context to be held up to one set of moral behavior. And this of course, is where theories of social change and interaction may of course be entered. But that certainly is messy business.

Exactly. You said it much better than I

I read that it is a part of Nigerian culture for a person to be regarded highly if they can make a living off of someone else's back, which is why we have all those 419 scammers in Nigeria. This is a situation where I think we can rightly judge their moral system to be abhorrent, no?

BAD ANALOGY IS BAD

Here's some moral relativism for ya

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39899002/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/

click the link

some parents think the pics are ok because it's their kids. other parents think it's not ok because it's not their kids.

it seems like a moral issue to me.

definition of moral: of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical: moral attitudes.

The article pertains to an argument about whether it's right or wrong to post pictures of your naked child on the internet.

sometimes things aren't black and white

sometimes they are

it's one or the other

choose one

so pedophilia isn't a moral issue?

i feel better about my hobbies now