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| Thread: moral relativism vs. moral absolutism |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 · «PREV |
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JollyJoker
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posted June 13, 2011 09:00 AM |
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But DO we judge our actions because of morality?
If one stabs another, we don't judge the stabber because he did something "immoral". We judge him because he broke the law.
And the law and morality are two different things.
For society two things are decisive:
1) Society wants to protect "itself" from something like that happening again.
2) Society overtakes the role of "the family" of the stabbed, avenging the dead (or compensating the disadvantaged) INSTEAD of the family.
Punishing for immorality is not on the agenda.
You might say, there are two components:
a) breaking the law; this is a disruption of the order of society, and society is intent on making sure that doesn't happen again with the perpetrator.
b) compensation/vengeance; someone has been done wrong. If it's a capital crime others have been done harm as well who are now suffering for a loss. If compensation is possible, society determines the height; if not, vengeance comes into play, and the evildoer is "punished".
That becomes obvious when we look at the purely "moral" wrongs. For example homosexuality. This has been forbidden by the law for PURELY moral reasons, but that has been lifted, because there is no harm done. Consequently, if God wants to judge gays, he ccan do it in his time, but men won't judge them anymore.
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mvassilev
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posted June 13, 2011 04:01 PM |
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Quote:
If one stabs another, we don't judge the stabber because he did something "immoral". We judge him because he broke the law.
It's against the law because it's immoral. The government protects people against private entities who initiate aggression - an act of immorality.
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Corribus
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The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted June 13, 2011 04:05 PM |
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Quote:
The government protects people against private entities who initiate aggression
Or negligence.
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Fauch
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posted June 13, 2011 04:09 PM |
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Edited by Fauch at 16:09, 13 Jun 2011.
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what is the fundamental difference between laws and morality? at the basis, they both involve an authority, no?
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del_diablo
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posted June 13, 2011 06:33 PM |
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If you do something bad, society will shun you, since you broke a moral.
If you do break the law, you have broken the law.
There is no difference, except what it concerns in contrast to what it is for society.
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mvassilev
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posted June 13, 2011 08:30 PM |
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what is the fundamental difference between laws and morality?
You decide what morality is, lawmakers decide what the law is.
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Fauch
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posted June 13, 2011 08:56 PM |
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yeah from that point of view. maybe I should have said moral code instead of morality?
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Keksimaton
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posted June 13, 2011 09:04 PM |
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Laws are juridical norms for regulating a society and protecting the interests of the society. I guess there's the fact also that a monopoly on violence is used to enforce these norms.
Morality on the other hand concerns what is seen as right and wrong or good and evil/bad. Moral codes would then be sets of moral norms or much rather systems of belief on what is right and what is wrong. A moral code would this way serve as a vantage point for an individual or group to judge his or its and other's behaviour in the moral sense.
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JollyJoker
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posted June 14, 2011 10:55 AM |
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Quote:
Quote:
If one stabs another, we don't judge the stabber because he did something "immoral". We judge him because he broke the law.
It's against the law because it's immoral. The government protects people against private entities who initiate aggression - an act of immorality.
Untrue.
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GrayFace
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posted June 17, 2011 04:56 AM |
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Non-theistic evolution
1) is based merely on chance--random events. It is a blind, with no purpose other than to benefit the propagation of one’s genes.
2) is merely survival of the fittest with the weak dying out or being exterminated to make way for "the strong ."
3) implies there is no such thing as a moral or immoral action.
Indeed taking the study of evolution as some sort of model for morality leads to unfortunate results, but evolution is a mechanism that doesn't need our help. Regardless of people's origin the morality is within. It is evolutionary important that people don't kill each other. Evolution is about survival of species, not individual survival, so charity is also totally sound, etc. The fact that there ere exceptions is totally normal for evolution. There are people for whom it's okay to kill or rape babies. In case of God these exceptions are explained by devil's involvement. So, both theories do well in explaining why there are moral beliefs shared by most people.
The only difference is that in case of theory of God you have to imply there is an absolute moral. What was proposed as an absolute moral by religion is really fragile if you consider sexual relations before marriage or masturbation. They are carried out by most people, yet are against the proposed moral. That's the opposite of 'rape babies' situation and your arguments work against the proposed morality in this case.
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GrayFace
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posted June 17, 2011 06:18 AM |
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Edited by GrayFace at 06:18, 17 Jun 2011.
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because Russell did show that no logical system is free of contradictions.
Wow! That's not true. Russell's paradox lead to a change in axioms of set theory that removed the contradiction. The real interesting fact is that any logical system containing natural numbers is either not full or contradictory. E.g. a mathematician could make a yes-or-no question that God will not be able to answer definitively.
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JollyJoker
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posted June 17, 2011 08:00 AM |
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Yeah, sorry blush:
I've mistaken a couple of things with each other there. It's a problem of logics and semantics anyway, not one of mathematics.
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