rgrekejin said:
Lightknight said:
rgrekejin said:
Lightknight said:
It is a true statement that all laws and beliefs of crime are moral based, however. Murder is not "inherently" evil but is so because we as a society agree it is.
...I'm pretty sure that, like, 75% or more of all the major schools of philosophy that have ever existed would take issue with that statement.
And they'd be wrong. Things are only classified as evil because enough people or powerful enough people call them such.
Ask yourself, why is something like "murder" inherently wrong? Wrong because of what it is rather than due to what religion, laws or social constructs say about it?
Morality is purely relative unless you adhere to a construct for whatever reason.
That's not to say that truth is relative, far from it, but morality is what it is purely because we say it is or a construct we believe in by faith and not empiricism has willed it to be so.
So you're just asserting that thousands of years of philosophical discourse over a particularly thorny question dating back at least to Plato can simply be solved with a "because I said so" and a wave of the hands. Forgive me if I don't take that position particularly seriously. Especially as it seems rooted in a form of Empiricism that is itself a philosophical position rather than an observable truth, and merely one position among many.
Not really, I'm just asserting that evil is only evil because we say it's evil. Philosophy doesn't disagree with that and has discussed, affirmed debated it for as long as philosophy has been around. The question of good and evil is a central component of philosophical studies.
Most philosophies that say evil is evil because of a universal truth are called religions.
The question on good and evil has been all over the place in philosophy. If you are honestly under the impression that "The mythical school of philosophy" asserts that evil is absolute then you're wrong. I'll gather some philosophers thoughts and present them here.
Instead, just the area of Moral Absolutism and Moral Objectivism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_absolutism
Moral absolutism: There is at least one principle that ought never to be violated.
Moral objectivism: There is a fact of the matter as to whether any given action is morally permissible or impermissible: a fact of the matter that does not depend solely on social custom or individual acceptance.
The school of philosophy I am advocating is Moral Relativism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
This notion has been discussed for several thousands of years.
"the ancient Jaina Anekantavada principle of Mahavira (c. 599?527 BC) states that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth"
It generally falls into three categories: Descriptive moral relativism, Meta-ethical moral relativism, and normative moral relativism.
Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.
There are a huge number of philosophies that fall under any of those three areas. But the gist is that morality is a construct.
Sorry to basically cite Wikipedia for explanation. If it makes you feel any better I only know this so well because various courses in philosophy were required for my first degree.
Just keep in mind, I firmly believe in absolute truth. That there is a true identity to things. But morality is opinion, not truth.
Let give you an example:
Statement: Murder is wrong.
Response: Why?
Statement: Because it hurts people.
Response: Why is it wrong to hurt people?
The responses to the second question are usually boiled down to constructs "like because it's a social contract" or pointing to religious tenets which a person may or may not believe in. Interestingly enough, I am a member of a religion. But I know that I am so because I choose to and not because I know it is empirically true. Ergo I like to distinguish between what I believe as a person of faith and what I believe as a person of science with the understanding that the former is relative to me and cannot be used as evidence whereas the latter is the only solid ground upon which absolute truth can be passed along.
