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From: bch@mcnc.UUCP (Byron Howes)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Hitler and Moral Relativism (reply to Byron Howes)
Message-ID: <498@mcnc.mcnc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Apr-85 10:25:18 EST
Article-I.D.: mcnc.498
Posted: Tue Apr 23 10:25:18 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Apr-85 04:29:14 EST
References: <5504@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: bch@mcnc.UUCP (Byron Howes)
Organization: North Carolina Educational Computing Service
Lines: 52
Summary: 

In article <5504@utzoo.UUCP> laura@utzoo.UUCP (Laura Creighton) writes:
>I think, though that you are committed to some sort of absolute
>morality when you write:
>
>	Certain cultural traits or social structures increase stability and
>	the ability of a society to ``survive'' so to speak. These will vary
>	with the set of conditions under which that society exists.  Such
>	 structures are passed on as long as a they remain viable. 
>	Dysfunctional traits wither and die.
>
>Thus you have a morality based on ``the things that increase stability and
>the ability of a society to survive'' are good -- and (presumably) ``the
>things that decrease stability and decrease the ability of the society to
>survive'' are evil.

Not so, or at least not *absolutely* so.  If functional traits can be
deemed "good," they can only be classified that way from within the society
under scrutiny at a particular point in time.  The same holds for dysfunc-
tional traits being labelled as "evil."  Personally, I do not see the
charismatic leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini as a "good" thing, though it
stabilizes Islamic Iranian Society.  I'm looking at it from a particular
cultural bias, however.
 
>of course, this is not so useful when you meet someone who wants ``the one
>permanent and absolute truth on whether Birth Control is moral'', but I think
>that it is an absolute moral standard. Now, if you believe in ``human nature''
>(whatever that is) it follows that there are certain patterns which are
>never going to be anything but dysfunctional - (say a soceity where the
>citizens all go on rampages on fridays and kill as many citizens as they can)
>and these can be labelled as ``unquestionable evils''. Anything which is
>never going to be anything but functional will make the ``unquestionable
>goods'' list. Do you think that after long study of ``what is human'' and
>``what doe human societies do'' that it would be impossible to develop a
>better understandingof what these things are -- and perhaps some basic
>principals which could be referred to in the field of morality?
 
When I was much younger (in the days when we called moral relativism
"situational ethics") I used to engage in thought experiments where I
would envision social/cultural systems wherein things thought of as "moral"
could be considered "immoral" and vice-versa.  Something very close to
the situation you describe (random murder) is hypothesizeable in a
society very overpopulated with respect to available resources -- your own
lifeboat situation!  Remember, too, that any "absolute" morality must
apply to non-human societies and cultures as well as to human ones.  An
analysis of human nature is, at best, "insufficient data" for the divi-
nation of an "absolute" morality -- what we would find is morality 
relative to being a member of the human species.

-- 

						Byron C. Howes
				      ...!{decvax,akgua}!mcnc!ecsvax!bch