LiveJournal 2002-03-19a

2002-03-19 10:02:28

Ethical relativism. And doped spiders!

First, yesterday corrections and additions: SM64, actually was up to 84 stars. I didn't actually check, and my quick self-LJ-search for my most recent number missed my Friday playing, where I hadn't updated the actual star count. Second, yesterday's convo was actually pretty nifty. A talk about the early history of paperback books, and it was actually pretty interesting. The talk was by, and I quote now our convo listing, "well-known author of science fictiona nd mysteries, Richard A. Lupoff", who also wrote _The Great American Paperback_. I've never read, and don't think I'd even noticed hearing of him before, but maybe I'll have to give his stuff a look. Now onto today. First, another nifty ilnk from Fark. <a>Webs of spiders drugged by various substances.</a> Caffeine farks it up the most. Also, today in philosophy we covered ethical relativism VS absolutism. I wish I was a better real-time discussor, so I could have said what I mean well. Most people, including the professor, were for absolutism. Ethical relativism just seems so... the way things are to me. When we were split into small groups to discuss, most groups came back saying that while some things seemed relative, there were also absolute truths, like how people shouldn't kill innocents. I have several problems with this. 1) Just because it's one very common thing (but not omniprevalent) throughout the societies of the world past and present doesn't make it absolute. Absolutism merely states there IS an absolute; it could just as well be true that the absolute moral truth is to kill everyone, and all the societies of the world have it all wrong. Many people were obviously going this way for religious reasons. 2) OF COURSE societies are going to instill rules like that in people. If your members just go around killing each other willy-nilly, you're going to have some severe disadvantages to other groups, like lack of people, and the quality of life of those you do have. So over time groups like that would get phased out, leaving some basic self-preservation rules very strongly ingrained all around the world. Professor Naragon also said something like "If ethics are relative, it would make ethical discussions we have pointless; you'd merely poll society to see what you should believe. We wouldn't have reason to disagree with things like genocide which might be OK by this other group's context. Any social revolutionaries would be wrong by default, which we of course don't think." I also have problems with this. Just because there's not an absolute absolute doesn't mean there's not a relative absolute, so to say. I don't believe in absolute morals, but that doesn't mean I don't feel strongly about the way I DO see things, and try to make things that way; believing in absolute morals doesn't make your beliefs on what's right any closer to the truth. I don't believe there's an "absolute good" in games, but that doesn't make a debate on, say, Materia VS Junctioning any more pointless than it already is. Just because one isn't striving for the absolute right way of things doesn't mean one shouldn't try to change the world to their liking as they see fit. If something is going down we don't approve of in some "other" place, we can still try to get our input in. I also dislike the use of Nazi Germany as an example of a place where genocide was considered the correct thing; some very big things happened there, and much more quickly than a normal type of social moral evolution. You can't easily say that Germany has always had a strong pro-genocide slant. Nor can you easily convince me that in a very short time period that that truly did become an accepted and unquestioned way of thought, so as to make people participating doing a right thing by their own standards. Of course, I even have some problems with my own above sayings. One could very well boil "might makes right" out of it, which I don't really intend... plus the "change the world as you see fit" would validate even things that irk me, like intolerance toward some particular group of people. Current Mood: surprised Current Music: MC Frontalot - Indier Than Thou <a>Original</a>