captaindax wrote:Sonic# wrote:
All you are doing is putting a context to different situations. As a modern Christian, I probably would not kill someone who killed someone I love. As a seventeenth-century Italian, I probably would. What changes is not the ethics of the matter, but only our understanding of them in their context, and our justifications for and against those actions, not whether the actions are good or bad in themselves. (A cold-blooded murderer may well realize that they are doing something wrong, but do it anyway.)
"Some people" can be wrong. I must allow the possibility that I am wrong. But personally, I think I have a stronger argument for murder being wrong than you do for it being allowable in that situation.
How can you define right and wrong though? Wrong is considered to be something that is injurious, unfair, unfit, or without a just cause. Who are you to say what is without a just cause or not? There is no way to determine exactly what is good and bad unless it's defined by something else. Be it a feeling or religious doctrine there's no way to know the legitimacy of that which defines right and wrong either.
With all due respect I don't think there's any way to have a stronger argument for murder being wrong than someone else, or a weaker one for that matter because you can't truly define right or wrong. All options in my view are completely neutral as far as morals and ethics are concerned. Nothing can be justified or unjustified because there is no one solid definition for right and wrong.
Even if you saw indisputable proof that say, a religion was completely true and accurate and it's definition for what was wrong was correct, there's no way to verify what you saw because even your own mind is subject to alteration and deception. How do you know you're not currently in a very vivid dream?
(Normally I would admit that my deduction has the possibility of being incorrect, but then I realized since you can't properly define if something is correct or not there's no way of knowing if even a possibility exists.)
In the words of Doreen:
"Am I butterfly dreaming I'm a man? Or a bowling ball dreaming I'm a plate of sashimi? Never assume what you see and feel is real!"
Answer: Who am I to judge? I'm a human. I don't believe my right and wrong are absolute, but meaningfully relative, and I'm audacious enough to come up with a model that works for society and me. We are capable of making judgments on what is injurious and what isn't. Not perfectly, of course, but conditionally. I know my last word isn't the last word, and that even my word can be misread, misinterpreted. Of course. Any judgment is an audacious one, where we finally resolve that, whether we perceive right or not, we must take a stance in the reality that we perceive.
Sure, maybe it isn't real. I can't know. But I'd rather be faithful in a false world than depraved in a real one; put another way, I'd rather believe in a God that doesn't exist and do good by that than not believe in a God that does exist. There's no way of knowing whether God exists or not, or whether the world is real or not, but I don't see why I have to have absolute knowledge to do something right. Working knowledge is enough. I will be sometimes correct, and sometimes incorrect, but the hope is that the endeavor to be correct and to look at things critically will end up with more right than wrong.
You say that the possibility I'm ill in the head ought to wreck my judgment utterly. (How do you judge illness if you can't judge what's normal from what isn't?) But the possibility doesn't mean I'm certainly wrong in the head. I may be right, at least some of the time. All it does is produce constructive doubt. As long as I'm able to ask myself, "Am I crazy? Am I right?" then I'm probably not crazy, and I can still be right. That's more useful to me.
And most people are able to do this without too much complication (there's always some complication). There's tons of room for everyone to disagree, but at the same time, there is a consensus morality that operates, most clearly as law, but also other in other things. The sorts of things that allow me to walk down the street without expecting everyone to spontaneously stab me, or driving without expecting someone to shoot me. Both of those events can happen, but we see them as transgressive. So there's already a discourse of right and wrong - multivalent and unfinalizable - but not meaningless.
In contrast, the only language of nihilism is quiet. Even silence speaks too loudly for it, because the silence can be the silence of the subjugated, which still means something. What can you say that doesn't have a value judgment in assigning a meaning amongst a choice of meanings? I may as well be aware of the meanings I construct, rather than blithely indifferent to the meaning I nonetheless lapse into while speaking. (How can your words mean anything to you? How can mine? Obviously you have no trouble defining these, even if you want to say otherwise.)
By the way, great way to quote Finding Nemo.
It just seems like a very Finding-Nemo-Doreen thing to say. (And I happen to like the movie, B_G.)