Test Your Morality.

[Phemar]

Logically that is an argument of course, unless you believe in an outside defining moral force of some kind. However, practically it is plainly wrong and utterly revolting. I suspect that if anyone you love is ever raped or murdered (and I seriously hope that will not happen) you will change that view.

I'm sorry, what's that go to do with anything? I said morals are arbitrary and subjective - that doesn't mean I don't have any of my own. They are subjective, so of course I have my own opinions as to what's moral, - I'm anti-rape and anti-murder - I'm just saying that a universal standard of morals cannot be established.

Go ask a serial killer or religious terrorist if what they're doing is wrong. They believe there is nothing wrong with what they're doing, so their morals are different to ours. The Mayans were notorious muderers (or sacrificers) and they believe what they were doing was right.

Therefore, morals are not universal. Other people's morals are different to your and my definition of morals.

[Stupot]

Morality is a communal/societal phenomenon.  What you say, Phemar, about morals being arbitrary and subjective is true, but I disagree that they come from within ourselves.  They come from the society around us, from our parents, teachers, friends, from history, religion, TV, books and so forth.  A psycho serial killer may think what he is doing is right, but he's a mentally disturbed anomaly.

Morality is arbitrary to the extent that some communities have slightly differing views on what's right and wrong.  Theres no reason that English people should have anything against, say, eating dog, other than the fact that we arbitrarily choose to keep them as pets rather than put them in the oven.  Also, some individuals within those communities have slightly differing views from his neighbours.

Everyone has a capacity for morality, just like everyone has a capacity for language, both of which separate us from the animal kingdom and both of which are equally arbitrary phenomena.  The sounds that come out of our mouths when we communicate depend enitrely on input from the community around us, of the same set of things I listed in the fist paragraph.  Language differs between people from different cultures (I say 'dinner', Japanese people say 'ban gohan', French people say 'le diner'), just as some things that might be considered immoral by most people in England are seen as a way of life in other cultures (stoning, cutting hands off as punishment for stealing, whaling, eating dog), and if those things are gradually being frowned upon even in their own cultures, that is because of increased globalization and the influence from 'The West', 'The UN', foreign protest, chaities intervening, etc... So in this sense, a universal set of morals is being enforced, to a certain degree.

Even within smaller communities, my friend says 'tea' instead of 'dinner' because his parents grew up in a different part of the country, so he had different influences to his langauge.  In the same way, my sense of morality undoubtedly differs from his.  I'm considerably more in favour of the death penalty than he is.  He's a vegetarian, I'm not.  He's strictly anti-animal testing, I'm for it on the condition that the animals are treated humanly.  These opinions are based solely on the external factors listed above, even if we use those external factors, and mull them around internally to generate our opinions.

[Snarky]

Certainly morals are socially transmitted, but that doesn't mean individual morals are not an internal matter. People have the capacity for reason and emotion, and can use those powers to arrive at ethical views that are different from what they've been taught. Morals are not simply a matter of imitation (though I'm sure that happens to some extent), but of inspiration.

Of course, this doesn't affect the central point of moral relativism, that morals (or values) are unprovable: that there's in principle no way to establish the superiority of one system of ethics over another without circular reasoning. (Though of course in practice no two systems are completely disjoint, and no system is perfectly consistent with itself, so it's often possible to work from common ground and try to show that it implies one's preferred conclusion.)

[Intense Degree]

Logically that is an argument of course, unless you believe in an outside defining moral force of some kind. However, practically it is plainly wrong and utterly revolting. I suspect that if anyone you love is ever raped or murdered (and I seriously hope that will not happen) you will change that view.

I'm sorry, what's that go to do with anything? I said morals are arbitrary and subjective - that doesn't mean I don't have any of my own. They are subjective, so of course I have my own opinions as to what's moral, - I'm anti-rape and anti-murder - I'm just saying that a universal standard of morals cannot be established.

Go ask a serial killer or religious terrorist if what they're doing is wrong. They believe there is nothing wrong with what they're doing, so their morals are different to ours. The Mayans were notorious muderers (or sacrificers) and they believe what they were doing was right.

Therefore, morals are not universal. Other people's morals are different to your and my definition of morals.

Naturally some people have different moral standards, but it is only in very few cases that someone will consider murder or rape etc. perfectly fine. It is this general concensus that permits us to make laws and why moral standards can and are used as a basis for dictating behaviour by those laws.

What I was taking issue with was your idea "but do not judge another man for doing what he believes is right, however insane and absurd you may deem him to be."

Murder and rape are not acceptable and those who do them should be judged. If they were not the world would be massively unjust. You also said that you did not really believe in morals and that you have your own morals. Apart from making no sense, this shows the theoretical, or removed from real life, style of your statements.

Therefore what I said means that if someone you loved was murdered or raped I think you would change your view about judging them. In practice your current view is plainly wrong, utterly revolting and in my view purely theoretical.

[Atelier]

It's a bit irrelevant but might be of interest. During a lucid dream (100% lucidity mind, when you can control your actions and the environment, not just being dream-aware), some people are nonetheless unable to do things which they personally consider bad in a state of wakefulness. For example, a squad of 'dream police' turn up when you'd try to rob a shop, and mentally prevent you from doing so. Perhaps you'd just shot someone and run them over. Later on karma would come and bite you as a direct result of your actions.

I had a lucid dream once when I was in the front of a police car. I wanted to turn the siren on but physically couldn't because I knew it would get me into more trouble. I suppose the point is, that these 'physical' barriers stopping us doing things in lucid dreams, are always present deep in our subconscious. If they weren't they wouldn't exist in the first place. But with practice and enough mental willpower people can change any aspect of the dream construct. Override their morals if you will.

So, were the dream police put there artificially by society or have they always been innate? Are the 'dream police' just a convenient embodiment of morals? A really good (but impractical) experiment would be to see whether somebody's dreams are still policed by their own subconscious creations, if they have no concept of a police force or a legal system. I would hope it's likely they still hesitate when doing bad things.

Just think of how many things we'd find an answer to if the Forbidden Experiment wasn't forbidden.