Reply #37: Once again, fatuous... [View All]

Sure, you could make the justification that killing, robbing and raping fits your personal sense of morality, but that's why we have ethics, and therefore laws. It kind of works like this:

Imagine there's a society with no laws.

Everybody in a society gets together and has kind of a quorum about what is, or isn't acceptable morality. Some people may say, 'well, isn't rape, murder and robbery cool?' and many of the other people might say, 'well, no - not to us; we might get raped, robbed and killed. Let's have a meeting about what is, or isn't cool. That way, we'll all be on the same page.'.

So, you get a list of rules that outline when killing is cool, and when it's not; what behaviors are acceptable, and which aren't, and in which circumstances. Largely, you'll find this early codification in religious texts; it's as old as the hills...how a group of people codify their shared values in the formation of a community. But those values vary from religion to religion, and from society to society, dont they?

Look to the New Testament, the Old Testament, the Talmud, the code of Hammurabi and the Koran for examples of this. No, not all examples of early ethical codification are religious in nature. Yeah; there's lots of shared ideas between these texts, but also many differences.

But, we have a pluralistic society that's a bit more complex than that...there are multiple sets of morals that are taken in to consideration when authoring the law that will govern everybody, regardless of religion.

So in this way, there's another, secular, convention. This gives our society a set of guidelines from which it will draft its laws. Ethics aren't as simple as 'professional guidelines', they're the underlying set of morals codified by agreement in to a set of rules for behavior.

This hasn't always been the case. Time was, leadership thought it ruled by 'divine right', that God was the foundation of the right of rule, and therefore the law was founded on a leader's individual sense of morality and personal relationship with the Almighty.

Turns out, some people didn't find that cool either, because the morals of one leader in the same society could be radically different from that of another. This inconsistency is anathema to peaceful living, and this underlying conflict is kind of how we got the Magna Carta, a secular convention that really opened up the road to Constitutional Law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

It was the first time in human history that an ethical codification of law proved superior to executive moral whim. It's literally the foundation of our own Constitution.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is that trying to govern by morality is a very fickle proposition, and is not done in our Country with damned good reason; it's not consistent, and it's not cool.

For instance, you can be morally certain that torturing people to save democracy is just fine. You'd also be breaking the law, and wiping your ass with the canon of ethics and the Constitution.

Here's what happens when you start using absoloute moral justifications:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_war

Those guys used 'moral' justifications to commit horrible, horrible atrocities. Here's a great quote, ""As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure," Videla declared in 1975". This fucker killed 30,000+ of his own countrymen to 'protect the greater good'.

People of faith tend to think that there's an absoloute morality, ordained by God. The trouble is, not everybody believes in the same God you do, and not every society is organized in the way yours is, and you'll find that there's ultimately a lot of killing of those who don't agree with what your God says is the truth. It's happened again and again, and every time it does, the perpetrators are ABSOLOUTELY CONVINCED that they're doing the 'moral' thing.

Ask yourself; what happens when you believe that there is absoloute morality, and someone in a different part of the world believes in absoloute morality, but your versions of absoloute morality are totally different? Think there might be some kind of conflict? Maybe violent conflict?