Is moral relativism in conflict with the West's "humanist project"?

Pure said:

you make some good points mab (in your posting of 6:04 pm, regarding relativism).

To say morality flows from or is based on feeling is not Platonic, Christian (say, Aquinas), or Kantian, etc. But that position has a noble ancestry, e.g., in David Hume, and other writers who stress the relevance of 'sympathy', my willingness to feel and susciptibility to another's pain.

As to whether 'follow your feelings' leads to relativism, you'd have to show significant differences of feelings, e.g., that you [of one group of husbands] don't can't about your wife's adultery, whereas I[of another group of husbands] do.

As to whether 'follow your feelings' is a good moral teaching, I wonder mab; wouldn't you be a little worried about teaching that to a Gacy or Jeffry Dahmer, or even some of the Puritan luminaries of the US past
(Jonathan Edwards, say), or Pat Robertson. Only where feeling are trained in accordance with some common human practices is it sufficient (for morality) to 'follow them'. That's my view.

===
as to your post of 6:22 pm,

As for the equality statement that "all humans are morally equivalent", well if that were the case then there wouldn't even be a moral relativism, would there? I mean, relative to what?

You hit the nail on the head. With a NONrelativist premise, when these people had (e.g. , Leviticus author and Socrates, plainly), in general, the GR does not lead to relativism. To put it the other way, if you're a relativist to begin with [you, mab, for instance], using and applying the GR will be relativistic.

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Now we're talking. Between mab's posts and this one, we have it. And: of course a person needs to be schooled in order to use better ethics. Toddlers are the purest rational self-iterest people you'll find. The whole world is about them, and they know the Bad as precisely what they don't like.

As one matures, new insights inform ethics. Chiefly, this involves noticing that others matter. If others matter, then, as you internalize this observation emotionally, you begin to know that you are wrong not to act as though they mattered.

Ethics isn't a distant tablet in stone. Ethics isn't a Holy Judge of the Dead to fear. Ethics are used every day. They change as you mature, they are informed by your experiences and your knowledge. If it were not so, each baby would be a paragon, and we wouldn't need to talk about it.

But they are not Reason in other clothes. They are used with reason, but also with memory, with love, with common sense, with imagination, and even with intuition if a decision needs to be made. You have to have reason, and you always need ethics, which are not rational in origin. You proceed by using them together in the whole context of your life. Listening to wiser persons will help you mature your ethics, but to change them, an appeal merely to logic is ineffective. The new moralistic precepts from the wise person need to carry emotional conviction or it all rolls off you. If you would school your child to better ethics, teach her to value her empathy.

cantdog said:

Now we're talking. Between mab's posts and this one, we have it. And: of course a person needs to be schooled in order to use better ethics. Toddlers are the purest rational self-iterest people you'll find. The whole world is about them, and they know the Bad as precisely what they don't like.

As one matures, new insights inform ethics. Chiefly, this involves noticing that others matter. If others matter, then, as you internalize this observation emotionally, you begin to know that you are wrong not to act as though they mattered.

Ethics isn't a distant tablet in stone. Ethics isn't a Holy Judge of the Dead to fear. Ethics are used every day. They change as you mature, they are informed by your experiences and your knowledge. If it were not so, each baby would be a paragon, and we wouldn't need to talk about it.

But they are not Reason in other clothes. They are used with reason, but also with memory, with love, with common sense, with imagination, and even with intuition if a decision needs to be made. You have to have reason, and you always need ethics, which are not rational in origin. You proceed by using them together in the whole context of your life. Listening to wiser persons will help you mature your ethics, but to change them, an appeal merely to logic is ineffective. The new moralistic precepts from the wise person need to carry emotional conviction or it all rolls off you. If you would school your child to better ethics, teach her to value her empathy.

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Put much better than I ever could!

SummerMorning said:

Oh, intellectual debates are never about settling anything. They're a way of strutting about showing off "what a big brain I have." It's just another way of emphasizing status and getting laid.

Why do you think academics go to symposia and have debates? To find the truth? LOL Heck no!

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Well stated.

SEVERUSMAX said:

Well stated.

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Spoken from experience!

Of my personal Holy Trinity, empathy is the most important.

rgraham666 said:

Of my personal Holy Trinity, empathy is the most important.

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I empathise with that.

Roxanne Appleby said:

I met a woman from Lalastan who was describing her nation’s new policy of exterminating the Lulu minority. I felt an urge to say, "That’s wrong, it’s not good to commit mass murder!” But who am I to assert that something is good or evil? I mean, her “good,” might not be the same as my “good.” I can’t know for certain that my version is true, because all such notions are purely social constructs. Who am I to imperialistically impose my society’s version?

Instead I urged her to be reasonable and responsible. She assured me that wiping out the Lulus was a supremely rational act, and the Lalas took very seriously their responsibility to get them all.

That didn’t quite feel right, and sensing my discomfort she sought to reassure me: “You must understand, life is cheap to Lulus – they’re not like you and me. In the last war their young men jostled each other in their eagerness to charge the machineguns.”

I almost exclaimed, “But they’re human beings, they just want to live and enjoy life, the same as you and me!” But I remembered the infinite permutations of human societies, and that the only thing we share across them is our basic physical structure. While there seems to be much evidence that in all societies people do want to live and be happy, I can’t disprove that there might be one where they don’t – maybe the Lulus are it?

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cantdog said:

. . . ethics are not rational in origin.

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dr_mabeuse said:

. . . morality (is) an emotion we feel inside . . .

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Reading these last two posts I thought, “Oh, here is the answer!”

I phoned the woman from Lalastan and explained with earnest sincerity that the Lalas should not kill the Lulus, because I had a very strong emotion inside that doing so was immoral. She sympathized, but explained that she and the Lalas felt a very strong emotion inside them that it was very moral, for the reasons explained earlier.

I hate to burst the ethicist's bubble, Roxanne, but really, the sort of ethical systems derived in academia by fellows writing books are not the ethics everyone daily uses to inform their mundane decisions.

I can be wrong. I know this from repeated experience. So let me ask if I'm discussing the wrong thing, here. When you say 'absolute' and 'universal,' do you mean to indicate something that is actually, presently, universal? Or something that ought to be acclaimed universally because of its obvious virtues? Or something else?

Because I don't see a whole lot of universal agreement on a lot of ethical questions. I also see quite clearly that my morality changed as I aged.

Me, I approach it from a biological point of view. Much of our behavior as house apes, as human beings, is not hard-wired. This fact carries the implication, for me, that largely instinctive behaviors (characteristic of, for example, clams or spiders) are available in humans to conscious choice. We still have an automatic and programmed portion of the brain in charge of heartrate, breathing, digestion, and whatnot. But we are conscious beings and get to make choices about things that other animals don't have to even consider.

There are advantages to consciousness and free will, but also costs. We have the chance, not available to spiders and clams, to fuck up royally.

But it's just there, in the ability to choose, that we see the evidence of our sentience. Honeybees and fleas have a universal economics and a universal ethics. Instinctual behavior is always consistent. Conscious creatures exhibit individuality and make idiosyncratic choices. That, in my view, is how you discern that they are self-conscious in the first place. It is a dogmatic pipe-dream, accordingly, to imagine a universal ethics or economics for sentient creatures capable of choice.

Another thing. What 'humanist project"? If you are referring to the imposition of liberal democratic Western values on the rest of the world, I suppose that moral relativism, as mab describes it, is of necessity opposed to it. I think even some absolutists would be opposed to it, when it takes the form of large-scale death and maiming by means of starvation, disease, bombing and siege.

cantdog said:

. . . let me ask if I'm discussing the wrong thing, here. When you say 'absolute' and 'universal,' do you mean to indicate something that is actually, presently, universal? Or something that ought to be acclaimed universally because of its obvious virtues? Or something else?

Because I don't see a whole lot of universal agreement on a lot of ethical questions. I also see quite clearly that my morality changed as I aged.

Me, I approach it from a biological point of view. . . . we are conscious beings and get to make choices about things that other animals don't have to even consider.

There are advantages to consciousness and free will, but also costs. We have the chance, not available to spiders and clams, to fuck up royally.

But it's just there, in the ability to choose, that we see the evidence of our sentience. Conscious creatures exhibit individuality and make idiosyncratic choices. It is a dogmatic pipe-dream, accordingly, to imagine a universal ethics or economics for sentient creatures capable of choice.

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As I said in post No. 76 of this thread, "What I have done in all this is to use a very limited description of man’s nature (to derive) an even more limited prescription based on it about how we should live - ethics. Don’t confuse the prescription with the description – because we too-often don’t follow the prescription does not make the description wrong."

So the answer of course is I propose an ethic that "ought" to be universal, not "is" universal.

You know, I come very close to agreeing with every word of your post here. Your last sentence is "(It's a) pipe-dream to imagine a universal ethics for creatures capable of choice." If by this you mean there will always be some group that thinks rape-victim honor-killing or Lulu-killing is moral, and my standard will never be universally accepted, sadly you are probably correct. What I have tried to do is derive from some basic empirical observations a universal standard by which we can condemn those things on some basis other than cultural bias. As my previous two satirical posts demonstrated, the position held by most on this thread can't even provide a standard by which mass murder can be condemned without the absurd qualification, "but 'my' bad might be different from 'your' bad" !

In your post you write, "Much of our behavior as human beings is not hard-wired." Correct. But there is a big difference between "much" and "none," and the idea that nothing about our nature is "hard wired" is not empirically tenable.

Look closesly at my assertion: "It is the nature of man to want to live and enjoy life." That is a true/false statement. I don't make any prediction about how any group will define "enjoy" (beyond preferring to not see their babies starved or murdered), nor do I pretend that many individuals act contrary to their nature. But if you reject this assertion then you are completely disarmed when the woman from Lalastan says, “You must understand, life is cheap to Lulus – they’re not like you and me."

SEVERUSMAX said:

....

To me, human society is a conscious development past the primitive and primordial society that existed previously. As with most inventions, it has a few flaws, in the form of unwise and arbitrary mores.

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You are correct. Conscious development, indeed. But I think the forms of human societies are progressing further from a natural, comfortable way of life all the time.

Each time an innovation occurs, be it structural or simply technological, and that innovation results in an advantage to the society which adopted it first, every other culture in contact with the first one has to follow suit. If the first can suddenly project power better, the choice becomes to make the change, alter the nature of your own way of life for the sake of parity, or to be absorbed into the other culture, or to be destroyed as a culture. We have seen this with fascism, which concentrated and made available the power of certain cultures in a new way. There are fascist elements now in most Western societies. They have been incorporated into the model.

You can show this effect with thousands of examples throughout human history. Weapons tech, corporations, conscription, divine-right kingship, feudalism, Islam's ayan-amir system of civil government, civil service exams, bronze, iron, the stirrup. Adopt the new or perish as a culture!

So a lot of the conscious development has been willy-nilly. The choice to alter your way of life in order to preserve your culture doesn't necessarily accomplish the preservation. How many such changes can be made before your culture is unrecognizable? And so very few such changes can take into account the happiness of the citizens within it.

We evolved with a social system geared to small troops, clans and tribes at the largest. Now we live in cities of millions. The social system is more or less overwhelmed by millions. People in big cities become a bit schizoid. To walk the crowded street and actually acknowledge them all is very difficult. People ignore most of the others they meet in large cities, producing the feeling of anonymity, atomization.

But you dress and project an identity, and you do acknowledge certain people. You have a tribe still-- hose whom you meet with the correct identifiers in dress and manner, speech pattern, style, music, whatever it is-- and you acknowledge your tribe members within the mass. Also, you notice the tribes you prey on, the tribes who are your rivals, the tribes who prey on yours.

But the sort of life we now live-- watched constantly by the eyes of total strangers using a technological panopticon, surrounded by walls and teeming masses or strangers, breathing toxins, you know the list-- was not chosen for its fit to our human nature, but for other, more practical and urgent reasons. A society which did not allow megacities would lose out.

The web of arrangements which support the tech which prevents the demise of the culture depends on megacities, now. Its defense and maintenance demands surveillance and intrusion by distant authorities. This is not least because more and more of us are crazy, living in it. Nihilistic and pointless violence is a problem in all such places, and it seems to proceed from a need to assert identity and vent frustration.

We were led by circumstance to build and inhabit a desperately unpleasant madhouse society, compared to the hunter-gatherer paradise we were designed for. In hunter-gatherer bands, people largely do not work. They hardly need to make an effort compared to the dozens of hours a week of work urbanites put in.But each change has been inexorable. Hunter-gatherer societies are now being absorbed or destroyed wherever encountered, so we cannot doubt the sense of our choices, to that extent.

But still, from the point of view of a happy way of life, we have given ourselves some rather large handicaps along the way.

SEVERUSMAX said:

That's why natural law is superior. It is concrete and practical, not to mention objective, empirical, and universal. These human societies develop in a process of trial and error, which is why some civilizations lasted longer (Rome, for instance, endured over a thousand years). Some values are subjective, and each nation has the right to believe in them (provided that it doesn't trample the right of dissent on the part of the individual). Other principles are natural and objective. These principles transcend and supersede the relative values of a particular culture. That's my view and I don't expect to be dissuaded from it.

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Interesting statements. However, is it "imperialist" to non-violently encourage local and native struggles for personal freedom? Should the West be selfish and hoard its freedom because it came up with it first and doesn't want to "impose" it on others? Is this a matter of "well, tyranny is as good as liberty, so let's not tamper with the development of their society"? I see no moral equivalence here. Tyranny is NOT equal to liberty; it is and always will be INFERIOR. If that sentiment makes me "arrogant", "imperialist", and "culturally chauvinist", because I believe that freedom, justice, and brotherhood are universal values and not mere "Western idioms" (a term used by that great Middle Eastern cultural icon Ayatollah Khomeini), because I believe that the rights of the individual are something that civilizations should all learn to respect, then SO BE IT.

The truth is that we can learn some things from the East (some of their Eastern philosophy), but they can DEFINITELY learn something from us: respect for the individual. I'm sorry, but I don't agree with the "communitarian" ideal. It reminds me too much of the mass hysteria of a lynch mob or the mindlessness of the Borg. It reminds me of the execution of Socrates for opposing the majority or the ostracism of Themistocles because he was too "influential". We left tyranny (and hopefully, the tyranny of direct democracy without guarantees of personal freedom too) behind with the fall of the despots. If we can do it, so can the Chinese and the Saudis. The key difference from President Bush is that I oppose using invasion (for the most part- invading Nazi Germany was sort of unavoidable and morally imperative).

Help, I'm in the type of debilitating quandary so often found in relativists!

Where does one go with these premises. Can one build a system of morality from them?

I'm stumped even on a simple example (see ##)

Two main premises:
I. All humans** [according to their nature, fundamentally] desire to live.
II. All humans [according to their nature, fundamentally] desire to enjoy life.

(**Descriptive definition: All humans, simply by virtue of being human, have a rational capacity for use [to be used] in judgments and decisions.)

Auxilliary premise III:
It would be irrational not to view the other as a rational agent, not to recognize another's rationality and agency (not to show consideration for the other as a rational agent).

First and prime consequence of III.; It is always irrational (immoral) to initiate the use of force-- for that is not to respect their rationality or your own.
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##Question: If my enjoyment is enhanced, why should I not cause another (who is assumed innocent in respect to me and anyone else) to die, provided I do not use force against him/her?

(He is rich, and I will gain lots of money when he dies; he has just stepped off the curb, lost in thought, into the path of an oncoming car. I'm safely on the curb, and a quick shout at him [Car!] would enable him to move back to safety.)

Possible answers:

0. Causing another to die always involves using force against them, by definition.

A. The other is a rational human agent like myself. A rational human agent cannot rationally (and morally) justify treating another rational human agent as other than that (esp. when the latter has done no harm to anyone)--which killing the agent does do.

B. A reason that justifies taking a life would have to be very strong (serious)--e.g., to save a life--self or family defense; to save a free community.

C. [A prime set of Virtues is: independence, integrity, honesty, productiveness, justice, pride. ] It would be unjust to treat another rational agent as (in morally relevant ways) different from myself. One would be dishonest in not recognizing the other as a rational agent. One, as rational human agaent, could not be proud of treating another human so.
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None of the above seems plausible and adequate to get to the conclusion not to let the fellow die.

0. seems false. A. seems to be true only if the auxilliary premise III is. B and C, construed simply, do not seem plausible.

What I have tried to do is derive from some basic empirical observations a universal standard by which we can condemn those things on some basis other than cultural bias. As my previous two obnoxiously sarcastic posts demonstrated, the position held by most on this thread can't even provide a standard by which mass murder can be condemned without the absurd qualification, "but 'my' bad might be different from 'your' bad" !

In your post you write, "Much of our behavior as human beings is not hard-wired." Correct. But there is a big difference between "much" and "none," and the idea that nothing about our nature is "hard wired" is not empirically tenable.

Look closesly at my assertion: "It is the nature of man to want to live and enjoy life." That is a true/false statement. I don't make any prediction about how any group will define "enjoy" (beyond preferring to not see their babies starved or murdered), nor do I pretend that many individuals act contrary to their nature. But if you reject this assertion then you are completely disarmed when the woman from Lalastan says, “You must understand, life is cheap to Lulus – they’re not like you and me."

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This amount of agreement is really quite nice. I had imagined us further apart than this, and I am gratified to find it otherwise.

Where we seem to have a poor fit in some ways, still, is in our understanding of the human experience, particularly in regard to the limbic, mammalian-brain portion of it. Because there is a cline here as well.

Some functions are beyond conscious control, ordinarily, although I stipulate yogini who can regulate blood pressure consciously, the possibility of training oneself to hold the breath underwater for extended times, and all that. Choice in such matters can arguably be seen to have little evolutionary advantage. A being who had to devote thought to moving his food along his gut would gain little from the ability.

Some things human are utterly cerebral, on the other end. They wouldn't even exist without consciousness and sentience. Cryptanalysis, for instance.

But there are components of the instinctual and also of conscious regulation by choice, in a cline, between. Politics is idiosyncratic and innovative, creative, yes; but dominance is important for reasons of a more primordial nature. And politics is about dominance, partly. The urge to it, its fascination and urgency, depend on the importance attached to dominance emotionally, because there is still, as you say, quite a little bit of animal in us.

Literature is cerebral, yet communication is social, and the emotional content is undeniable in it.

I won't go on, since I imagine you have this down. Dogs seem to do very little creatively, but they have a lively emotional brain. The whole point of being around dogs by choice, of entering into their pack relationships as we do, is that we identify their emotional communications and can respond and appreciate them. We have the same sort of emotional mammalian brain they do, with the cortical higher functions on top.

Fathers and their sons, as the boys mature, find themselves in conflict; mothers and daughters also. The ape social system requires that one or the other be dominant, and we all need to exercise a conscious override to avoid snapping at each other all the time.

In our debates of this kind, we are living in the cortical brain, and reason sits there, but the older brain is always present. We see faces in the clouds, such is the importance of the social. We respond automatically to the short muzzles and domed heads of infants with nurturing responses, even in other species, sometimes; we behold the upturned ass and respond sexually. The conscious brain has to suppress or direct these impulses, but they arise without reason.

That's what I mean by the emotional origin of the ethics

I've been thinking about this thread a lot. Can't help it, it's the way I am.

And it occurred to me that 'relativism' allowed us to escape from a 'universalist' ethic.

Back when philosophy began to assert itself, when it started to influence our lives, people lived in a 'universal, absolute' tyranny. That of The Fates and The Gods. A person's life, its arc, was set from their birth, nothing could change it.

Then people like Socrates and Solon came along and started to question that. They started the belief that there were other ways to look at the world and that the individual could act. It was the beginning of our idea of freedom.

So I can't help but wonder, will a new 'universal' ethic be nothing more than new absolutist system?

It seems to me that it will be. After all a 'universal' ethic will always tell us what to do and not do. The element of choice will be removed entirely.

Is such a state desirable?

Note: I've yet to receive any help from Roxanne in arguing with the Lala's about their honor killing.

Don't think there is any need, Pure.

By treating their women this way, the Lulus are cutting off over half the energy available to their society. And even more as their men are hedged in by their 'honour' making it difficult for them to change.

So their culture is given the standard options. Change, assimilate or die. They'll probably die. Other cultures are expanding and the Lulus won't be able to handle it.

Do I wish things were different? Yes. Do I do what I can to help the Lulus change so that the women are treated better and the men do not have to act and believe they must act with such cruelty? Yes.

But ultimately, the choice is theirs.

Rg

It seemed to me that to have a moral or philosophical position esp a universal or 'objectively justifiable' one entails that one is to be able to argue it against others.

As far as I see, you're simply saying, "These people are backward; they will disappear; for now, let them stew in their own juices." Maybe I'm wrong and don't see what you're driving at; your point.

Look, some "cultural contamination" is impossible to avoid, even if one wished it. The slightest amount of contact will affect a culture. I suppose that will say that the Tianamen Square incident was justified as "cultural self-defense". A Prime Directive, as in Star Trek's universe, would be impossible to practice completely.

'Let them stew in their own juices' sounds a great deal more hard hearted than I meant to sound.

There are many ways we could change them, all uncertain, and some unethical.

We could invade them, set up a Western style government and enforce Western ethics on them. If we were willing to spend the energy, money, time, and lives, this would most likely be successful.

Ask cloudy about how much such a thing is appreciated.

Or individuals and groups can go there, do what they can to help, knowing that they're unlikely to be successful except in rare cases. Most Lulus accept their way of life and see little wrong with it. They may not like it, but they believe our way is worse.

There's only so much we can do. And only so much we should do.

My position is best summed up in this quote by the 6th President, John Quincy Adams. "We must be the FRIEND of liberty everywhere, but the guarantor and provisioner of ours alone." Befriending liberty means moral support, not military invasions and occupation.

Roxanne Appleby said:

Reading these last two posts I thought, “Oh, here is the answer!”

I phoned the woman from Lalastan and explained with earnest sincerity that the Lalas should not kill the Lulus, because I had a very strong emotion inside that doing so was immoral. She sympathized, but explained that she and the Lalas felt a very strong emotion inside them that it was very moral, for the reasons explained earlier.

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*L* Okay. Nice one, Roxanne. Point taken. I see where you're coming from now, and yes, I agree. Some attempt has to be made to codify the basis of morality or to find some premises we can agree on.

The problem is, of course, that your friend in Lalastan probably feels the same way you do about the wrongness of killing human beings, but has managed to convince herself that her victims aren't really human beings at all, and has thereby assuaged her conscience. If she doesn't feel its wrong, I doubt very much that you'll be able to convince her by rational argument.

The USA considers itself a supremely moral country, probably the most moral in the world, and yet we've gone into Iraq and killed somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000 people, most of them innocent civilians, in the name of helping them. I don't know how your rational system would come down on this. I know my own moral feelings make me sick about it though, and I think I'd be sick about it no matter what your system said. It's this feeling of sickness that bothers me rather than any feeling of cognitive dissonance.

I tend to trust my feeling of sickness more than I'd trust your arguments. Just as in Lalaland I'd trust my feeling that what they're doing is wrong rather than trust her arguments that the things they were killing weren't really humans.

Pure said:

Where does one go with these premises. Can one build a system of morality from them?

I'm stumped even on a simple example (see ##)

Two main premises:
I. All humans** [according to their nature, fundamentally] desire to live.
II. All humans [according to their nature, fundamentally] desire to enjoy life.

(**Descriptive definition: All humans, simply by virtue of being human, have a rational capacity for use [to be used] in judgments and decisions.)

Auxilliary premise III:
It would be irrational not to view the other as a rational agent, not to recognize another's rationality and agency (not to show consideration for the other as a rational agent).

First and prime consequence of III.; It is always irrational (immoral) to initiate the use of force-- for that is not to respect their rationality or your own.
=========

##Question: If my enjoyment is enhanced, why should I not cause another (who is assumed innocent in respect to me and anyone else) to die, provided I do not use force against him/her?

(He is rich, and I will gain lots of money when he dies; he has just stepped off the curb, lost in thought, into the path of an oncoming car. I'm safely on the curb, and a quick shout at him [Car!] would enable him to move back to safety.)

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Another derived virtue is "benevolence." Philosopher David Kelley has a lovely little book called "Unrugged Individualism" in which he describes this, and the logic chain by which it is derived.

In essence it comes down to it would make me feel good to cry "Car!" and save the rich guy, or any other fellow human (well, maybe not Hitler or Idi Amin, but you know what I mean.) And it would make me feel bad to not save him, even though I might benefit in some way from his death. My self esteem would not allow me to enjoy riches gained in this way.

Edit PS. However, if you don't accept the premises, what difference does it make whether you fail to follow the logic path that leads from them to certain ethical presriptions? If you do accept them, then you can apply the concept of "sympathy" and "the golden rule" (per the post below) and map the logic path yourself.

I may have discovered a source of confusion. Several people have asserted that the origin of ethics is emotion or feelings, specifically, sympathy or empathy. (Pure cited David Hume’s explorations in this area.) You will get no disagreement from me on this.

Here is my problem: In the examples of the Lalas and Lulus, or the rape victim honor-killers, to whom do I give my sympathy? The Lalas claim that they experience great pain in having to share the world with disgusting Lulus. The rape victim murderers claim that they won’t be happy unless they stone the poor girl to death.

Must I just throw up my hands and say “who am I to judge?” Unless you are prepared to be ethically disarmed in these or similar conflict situations, it is not sufficient to stop at “ethics is based on emotion,” although there is truth in that.

We all agree that ethics based on narrow cultural or religious biases are not useful when dealing across cultures. But no one can be satisfied with having nothing to say to the Lalas besides, “In my culture mass murder is considered wrong, but my culture’s ‘wrong’ and your culture’s ‘wrong’ may not be the same, and who am I to impose my version?” Some might even claim that this abdication is equivalent to giving sanction to mass murder or rape victim honor-killing.

As I pointed out in my satire, if you refuse to accept that we have nothing in common as human beings besides our physical nature, you are disarmed when the Lala says, “You must understand, life is cheap to Lulus – they’re not like you and me.”

So I have posited an extremely limited assertion about human beings – it is our nature to want to live and enjoy our lives – and suggested that on this basis we can say to the Lalas, “It is wrong for you to murder the Lulus, because they are no different than you and me in just wanting to live and enjoy their lives.” Our condemnation of their genocide is based on empirical observations about humans, not cultural bias. Once the accuracy of those observations is accepted then “emotion,” “sympathy,” “empathy,” etc., plus “the golden rule” (eastern or western version) complete the ethical loop.

The bottom line is that there need not be a conflict between my position and the “roots of ethics are emotion” position that Cantdog and others have asserted (see his post, number 114 above for a good recap). As a practical matter we may not be able to stop the genocide or the honor killings, but we have a basis to condemn them that is more than just "cultural bias."

dr_mabeuse said:

I agree . . . some attempt has to be made to codify the basis of morality or to find some premises we can agree on.

. . . I tend to trust my feeling of sickness more than I'd trust your arguments. Just as in Lalaland I'd trust my feeling that what they're doing is wrong . . .

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Dr. M.:

Please refer to my previous post, which responds to your general point about feelings. As I also say there, in practical terms there may be nothing we can do to prevent bad things from being done in the world. Plus, my system only provides a standard of judgment, it does not do the actual hard work of, say, a jury, or a wise statesman.

With regard to the Lalas, you "tend to trust my feeling of sickness that what they're doing (against the Lulus) is wrong," and condemn the genocide. I don't want to put words in your mouth or play semantic games, but this looks like a judgment. You might say “your feelings” made it, but I don’t think that sufficiently describes what you did. Call it “informed feelings” if you like, but informed by what?

You judged that the Lulus have a legitimate call on your sympathy, while the pain the Lalas genuinely feel at having to share the earth with Lulus does not. You made this judgment automatically, without having to explicitly think it through, but it nevertheless has some basis beyond just feeling.

For a Christian the standard of judgment would be your belief system. That is a culturally-based conclusion, and as such has many shortcomings and dangers.

Under the system I describe your judgment would be based on an empirical observation about the nature of human beings: Because they are human, it is the Lulu’s nature to want to live and enjoy life. The statement, “Life is cheap to Lulus – they’re not like you and me” is false, not “just in my society’s version of true and false,” but empirically, because they are human. As such they have a legitimate claim to our sympathy, and “the golden rule.”