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Well, this is nifty. I tell the people in my chatroom that I'm going to rant about moral relativism, and this is what happens immediately thereafter:
[13:37] <Scolopendra> This week's rant
will be about Moral Relativism.
[13:39] * Eadwacer believes in Moral Relativism,
primarily because he believes that pretty much everything is relative and
the only way to make somethign
absolute is to make it relative to an absolute .... and that's circular logic
[13:40] * Cetaganda believes in this: Don'
[13:41] <Cetaganda> "Don't hurt other people who don't want to
be hurt."
[13:41] <Cetaganda> The rest is just details.
[13:42] <Treznor> "Don't hurt other people who want to be hurt in
ways they don't want to be hurt."
[13:42] * Eadwacer gives up much of his EMT training then
[13:42] <Cetaganda> Shush.
[13:42] <Eadwacer> I'd like to see you put someone in traction with that
being you're golden rule
[13:43] <Cetaganda> Yes, well, I assume that saving someone's life is
less important than a little bit more pain.
[13:43] <Cetaganda> Common sense and all that.
[13:44] <Cetaganda> Perhaps "Do the minimum amount of harm." would
work better or some such. Doesn't matter all that much.
[13:46] <Eadwacer> Ah, but now we're talking about amounts of things
to accomplish other things that I judge to be more important
[13:46] <Eadwacer> And what's nice varies greatly by both culture and
person
[13:46] <Cetaganda> ...
[13:47] * Cetaganda says screw it, changes his golden
rule to, "Do what's
best for me and mine."
[13:50] <Eadwacer> Any rule that contains a comparative (such as "best")
is by its very nature, relative
Rather interesting, that. Obviously moral relativism is one of those Hot Topics (and no, I don't mean the goth paraphanalia stores) that seem to press people's buttons... which is why I rant about it. If I can rant about religion and politics and all the other taboos of polite conversation (how stupid is that?) I can rant about this too. Let's start from the top:
Take your average, say, XV Century North German Lutheran Priest. It doesn't really matter what kind of Christian sectarian we're talking about; just take him as an example. He's generally a decent guy, chaste, and feels that chastity is a virtue. To him, his morality--which he sees as universal as defined by his faith in the Bible and the traditions of his people--says that killing is almost always wrong. It is better to be a martyr for the faith than a crusading conqueror for it; the Lord your God made it a commandment no less: Thou Shalt Not Kill. No ifs, ands, or buts about it; that is the goal to which you strive for and for which mitigating circumstance and special dispensation are so rare to be practically nonexistant. Proceed with this mindset for a few more centuries and you get the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose ethical concept of the categorical imperative essentially forces morality to be a universal thanks to human reason.
Now take your average, say, XV Century Aztec Priest. It is absolutely vital that this hypothetical man come from part of the priesthood of the sun-worshipping Mesoamericans. How he sees it, the world is a place where life feeds on life and if he does not cut the still-beating heart from the broken and bloody chest of the person on the sacrificial altar then the very sun itself isn't going to come up the next day and he would be condemning his entire people to death. The person on the altar quite possibly volunteered for the honor of sacrificing himself so the rest of his people could live. In their combined morality--which they see as universal based on their observations of cyclic nature on how the rabbit eats the plant, the jaguar eats the rabbit, the jaguar dies and plants grow from its corpse that life only comes from the death before it--killing is an absolute necessity if life is to continue for life is powered from death just as death is powered from life. This culture won't have the opportunity to continue this mindest for a few more centuries thanks to the white conquistadors of Spain, but their argument remains valid in that if death powers life and life powers death, then the concept of killing for life should be a universal morality attained through reason.
Well, I'm human and I've got reason, and I can see that Killing Is Wrong does not equal Killing Is Vital. Somewhere someone must've messed up the algebra or divided by zero, because one will never equal zero no matter what tricks your algebra teacher plays on you... not even for extremely small values of one. What this says to me is yes, Moral Relativism is true. What is moral for me may not be moral for you; what is right to the Aztec and Inca certainly isn't right to the Germans. The moral and social codes of Confucius are not necessarily compatible with the moral and legal codes of the shari'ah because the Feudal Chinese and the Islamic Caliphates grew up under different circumstances which evolved their mindsets differently. Both cultures may value hospitality and manners, but for extremely different reasons.
This does not help anyone, though. A major problem in modern 'enlightened' cultures is the reticence to declare anything as 'wrong' due to the concept of moral relativism. If my morality is right for me but may not be for him, what right do I have to impose my morality on him? This seems harmless enough at first: okay, so you may not like furries or light bondage kink or those sorts of things; this other person does and is absolutely harmless when exploring those avenues with consensual adult partners. No problem... but what happens when the other's morality is diametrically opposed? If you believe that all killing is wrong and the other thinks that killing is vital to life? Where does that put you if his concept is as valid as your own and thus imposing your morality on his would be oppression?
It puts you up a creek, that's what it does.
What people fail to realize concerning moral relativism is that it only applies in groups of people generally distanced from each other. There was no interplay between the Aztec and the Germans, and only minimal cultural mixing via trade between the Arabs and the Chinese. Within each individual culture, however, moral relativism breaks down as the members of a society adhere to a moral standard greater than their own individual concepts and mores, and this is absolutely vital for the functioning of any society with a structure greater than that of a collection of animals banding together for self-interest. Within any contiguous society, it is of absolute importance to have a system of moral beliefs that allow individuals to determine whether a course of action is 'good' and thus to be done as often as possible or 'bad' and thus to be avoided. Even in the Aztec culture one couldn't just walk around murdering people for life--it had to be done a particular way to appease the gods and with a very specific ritual. While the gods may demand blood sacrifice to return, not just any random killing will do. Non-sanctioned murder is detrimental to the greater society because it kills productive members needed to sow and harvest the crops, to run or protect the Empire, or to create and maintain the temples where proper blood sacrifice must be done. Likewise, non-sanctioned murder is disallowed almost universally for analogous reasons because of Equivalent Evolution Under Equivalent Circumstances.
What kinds of murder or killing become sanctioned, however, differs from culture to culture due to differing needs and opinions. While individuals may think execution is wrong--like our Lutheran above--the society itself sees a need for the services execution provides (by eliminating an unproductive member of the society without making it a liability in terms of resources and safety like putting it in prison would be) and ignores the moral relativism of the individual for that greater good.
What's happened since then to cause the problems of today? Us monkeys have gotten too smart without gaining much in the way of reason and still holding true to the irrationalities in emotion. From the greater confluence of ideas from across the world that is the modern age, we're seeing our old traditions and moralities as outsiders, seeing that almost nothing seems truly universal. We wish to believe in a universal truth, even if that universal truth is untruth--that there is not and can not be a universal morality. The problem with this is that even as cultures come closer, they create supercultures that must have their own mutual yet standard relative moralities so they can interact appropriately... and these supercultures, made up of individuals which doubt the possibility of universal morality, are loathe and incapable of effectively setting up the moral structure needed to communicate effectively. Thus people complain when a foreigner bypasses copyright law or canes a kid for spraypainting obscenities onto some cars--we do not believe in universal morality and are loathe to call anything in particular 'wrong' and so we expect our local systems to work, which simply means that differing local systems of morality will inevitably clash. Also, because people are loathe to call things wrong, there is a slide towards total moral libertarianism in that while outsiders continue to move in, they bring their ideas and because morality is relative and therefore unenforcable (OPPRESSION!) even natural deviation from those internal to a morality are not brought back up to the standards the community held.
I think we are seeing the existentialist period of morality. Having realized that all moral structures are a matter of a nearly absurd choice from infinite possibilities, people are erring on the side of caution and choosing none. That does not work. If the existentialists of the early XX Century were misunderstood about anything, it was that they did not deny the importance of making the choice that defines one's existence. Wandering about aimlessly truly accomplishes nothing, and while it may be the 'truest' form of life it certainly prevents people from living happily in a human fashion. Likewise, people must--almost absurdly--choose what they wish to be and what they wish to believe and stick to it because society cannot function any other way. Standards must be set and enforced because humans are not, as much as they may learn Kantian or Aristotlian ethics, morally self-sufficient as a whole; while they may crave freedom through anarchy they cannot live in it happily nor sustain it happily without it falling into the most anarchic of control structures, that of despotism.
But wait, Tim, I hear you cry, what about the supercultures you mentioned previously? If you're saying that people have to establish standards, and people everywhere are getting closer together, doesn't that reasonably mean that a global superculture is forming and that thus we will have to establish global standards of morality on an equally absurd basis if we're expected to live as the 'global village' that the hippies that partially got us here in the first place thanks to their good intentions croon about? Wouldn't that lead to a de facto system of... universal morality?
"Penny for the smart lady!"
There is already a starting point for this because there are so many similarities between local moral codes. Generally, not killing people is a good thing. There are various qualifications and semantic differences between the local codes, but I'm not about to assume that I, a lowly senior of Aerospace Engineering, am qualified to solve all of Humanity's ills off the top of my head. The fact is that there already is a sort of de facto system of universal morality that keeps us from really being at each others' throats; it is that sort of mutual respect into which any discussion of assembling a proper code, the process of finding the solution can be undertaken. With this understanding, we could at least start to find something that works.
And like I like to say--it's all about what works.
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