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Originally Posted by Christian Nelson  So, what you are saying is, that there is no right or wrong, essentially moral reletivism. |
I am and I am not saying there is no right or wrong; it is very much the case in one way and very much not the case in another. Morals, being based on ought statements, are necessarily "relative" in the strict sense of the term: they are never logically compelled by a set of facts alone. Science can tell man the way things are (facts), but man ultimately has to make a decision to act or not act. The decision is informed (hopefully) by the facts, but is made by some belief that cannot be justified by any other statement than "that's how I feel about it."
Say science works out to a certainity (and informs me ahead of time) that if I wake up tomorrow promptly at 6:00 a.m. my decision to get out of bed will cause 5,338 people in Manila to die in a rather nasty storm; but that if I hit the snooze button once, my arising at 6:35 a.m. will spare the 5,338 souls in Manila while causing 7,891 to perish in an earthquake in California. Assume further that I am given the facts of all of those lives: I know everything they have ever done, and can make some guesses about what they each might do if they got to live.
At this point I know a great deal about the "is" of the situation, but none of those facts can logically suggest whether I should get up on time, sleep in, of just take a whole bottle of sleeping pills tonight and dodge the issue entirely. It will always be a fact (or a set of them) coupled with some irrational valuation: those 7,891 in California are all America hating hippies, so I'll sleep in; the man who is well on his way to inventing cold fusion lives in Manila and I own rather a lot of ExxonMobile stock, so I'll wake up on time.
If you won't concede that in the end, all of our choices and values are based on the same thing--a subjective, irrational feeling that cannot be logically justified--then you either cannot or will not think rationally and there's not much point having a conversation with you.
Of course, the logical relativism of morality isn't the end of the matter: the vast bulk of humanity will tell you there's a big difference between someone who believes that killing those he or she believes are threatening the bodily integrity of self or others is moral, and someone who believes that killing those he or she thinks are contributing to the national obesity epidemic is moral. And there's a reason for that, which (given the vast breadth of human experience compared to the narrowness of any given religious doctrine) is based on some very generalized core irrational feelings that most "normal" human beings share. I just like the conversation to procede from an exploration of what those shared beliefs are, rather than an exploration of how a narrow subset of humanity has tried to codify those irrational norms (religion).