From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 23:00:48 MDT
--> Harvey Newstrom
> On Sunday, May 26, 2002, at 04:30 am, Reason wrote:
> > Hmm. Well I'm not in the devaluation boat (or any sort of valuation
> > boat). I
> > was trying to separately out the more interesting factual choices (where
> > society draws the line) as opposed to the less interesting ethical
> > choices
> > (less interesting to me because most people can't discuss these things
> > rationally, and the final answer seems like a roll of the dice).
>
> Deja Vu! I've been through this before with someone else!
>
> Can you specifically state your viewpoints now? Have we all merely
> misunderstood your position? Are you NOT claiming that genders or races
> be valued differently, or that violence toward races or infants is
> acceptable behavior?
My position is that:
1) societies seem to have to come to some conclusion on hard choices (like
what is human, what is acceptable to do to things that are and aren't human)
2) these conclusions form an ethical system, but based on "facts" that are
established by agreement. The establishment of "facts" and the ethical rules
based on them can be viewed as fairly separate things, although are usually
intertwined. In particular, people seek to change "facts" to support their
desired ethical ruleset
3) I really don't see that any of this is anything other than aribitrary and
relative; there is no preferred state, it's all human opinion, there is no
outside standard by which to judge.
Violence towards races and infants is acceptable behavior if it's acceptable
to you and you're in a society that has agreed it's acceptable. That is to
say, it's acceptable to you and to that society. Because there is no
"acceptable" without some sort of qualifier as to who finds it acceptable --
acceptibility doesn't exist independant of humans and human society.
Please note that I'm not saying anything about whether such violence is good
or not from our point of view -- we all know that we don't find it
acceptable. That's not the issue -- the point I am trying to make, again, is
that our point of view is just another opinion, and there is no outside
standard by which to judge it. Any and all standards have been created by
humans and are thus relative.
I am also *not* saying that we should not make choices because nothing can
be judged objectively.
> It seems strange that we have had this huge argument, but all the people
> who seemed to be arguing this position have melted away. I guess we all
> imagined that these positions were being presented on this list. They
> never existed, no one ever proposed them, and there are no proponents of
> them. Samantha was sickened by nothing, Gina offended my nothing, and I
> have been arguing with nobody.
Well, I don't know. I wasn't involved in most of that -- I was just arguing
this bit about "facts" and relative opinions.
> But why do such issues keep recurring over and over?
Because the terminology is bad and we're not sufficiently clarifying. E-mail
is a bad medium for discussions that get people heated.
Reason
http://www.exratio.com
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