From: Scott Badger (wbadger@psyberlink.net)
Date: Mon Jan 11 1999 - 14:58:51 MST
I believe that James Ganong wrote:
> I believe that rape, murder & genocide are wrong, but I cannot point to
> some Book & demand that sinners repent. At best I can point to economic
> analyses that show these things to be inefficient, but what are the odds
> that a rapist/murderer/genocide will be moved by such? I can only work
> to make a world where they are wrong because *we make it so*, just as we
> work to make our Transhuman/Extropian
> goals real.
Robert Wright speaks to this issue in "The Moral Animal":
"It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the prevailing moral
philosophy within many philosophy departments is nihilism."
Due in part to..."the one-two punch Darwin delivered: the
Origin's assault on the biblical account of creation, followed
by the Descent's doubts about the status of the moral sense."
"Sympathy, empathy, compassion, conscience, guilt, remorse,
even the very sense of justice, [snip] - all these can now be viewed
as vestiges of organic history on a particular planet."
"By the lights of the new Darwinian paradigm, a moral code is
a political compromise. It is molded by competing interest groups,
each bringing all its clout to bear." Moral values..."are shaped
disproportionately by the various parts of society where power
resides."
*************
Ridding myself of religious beliefs was a liberating and empowering
experience for me personally. Part of that cleansing was the letting go
of the notion of objective moral values. I highly recommend it.
Scott Badger
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:02:47 MST