My Take On Absolute Morality.

[David Sklansky]

I have said that there is no absolute morality. By that I may mean something different than what people think I mean so I will explain it shortly. First though the issue of and morality and God. When I said there is no absolute morality without God, I phrased it that way merely to prod people not to argue with Not Ready about a side issue. I really don't think that there is an absolute morality even with God, even if he exists. All there is is God's wishes.

Furthermore even if you want to equate God's wishes with absolute morality you still have big problems. The biggest of course is that there probably is no god who cares what we do. And even if there is, how do we know what he wants? The bible? No good reason to believe it tells us what he wants. There are so many alternatives. Including the alternative that he hasn't yet bothered to tell us. After all that was the situation people 6000 years ago were in.

Yet another problem is that not all situations are covered. If I tell a virginal young girl I'll feed 1000 starving children if she strips naked for me is she doing good or evil if she accepts? Maybe the bible or Koran covers that type of thing but I'm sure that some things aren't covered.

Anyway that is off the subject. My point about absolute morality is not a deep one. It is simply the same point that you can make about something like beauty. It is in the eye of the beholder. Remember the Twilight Zone where the girl wakes up to her failed plastic surgery operation? Not farfetched at all. Imagine that on a different planet there were humans exactly like us. Except they had no ears. Just small holes in the side of their head. If Shana Hiatt visited that planet almost no man could bear to get near here. She would look grotesque.

Lets skip to those Nazis who were a willing part of the Holocaust. An obvious case of evilness? Why? I'm quite sure that the majority of Nazis were not licking their chops at the thought of killing Jews. And that they were not sociopaths either. This is probably even more true of the doctors who performed medical experiments. What at least some, if not most of them, were is people who had figured out a way to turn off enough of their empathy instinct to rationalize doing horrible things to fellow human beings because of the greater GOOD they thought would result.

They were for the most part not anywhere close to being evil by most peoples standards but were simply stupid and perhaps psychologically weird. But they would disagree with that assessment. Just as researchers who torture animals for the sake of better medicines would.

Meanwhile if you invoke Hitler to talk about this subject you are going too far anyway. Because even if everybody agreed that somehow Hitler was absolutely immoral it wouldn't have much affect on our lives. Few people wrestle with the desire to kill 6,000,000 Jews.

That's why I would rather talk about slavery. In America. Unlike extreme Nazism which can be chalked up as an aberration affecting a handful of Germans (I'm not counting the thousands who I believe were just reluctantly following orders), slavery was condoned by tens of millions for several generations. The same slavery that is now considered by most people almost as clearcut an example of absolute evil as the concentration camps. Yet it was condoned by millions of otherwise highly moral and usually religious people. And I don't want to hear the excuse that they truely thought blacks were subhuman to the point of animals. Nonsense. They were subjected to enough free blacks or intelligent slaves to know that blacks were in the same ballpark as whites even if possibly inferior. But millions tuned off their empathy instinct because they were stupid or because they needed to rationalize what they were doing out of selfishness. And I'm quite sure most of them who were religious were sure they were not sinning. So much for God providing absolute morality.

And for those who try to claim slavery is another abberation not likely to be widely repeated let me point this out. Right now you, me, Pair The Board, Not Ready, and Andy Fox, are choosing not to save at least 100 childrens's lives in Africa just so that our lives can remain a tad more comfortable. We have all turned off our empathy instinct. Unlike the Germans and the Southerners who rationalized a greater good, our excuse is that they actually did something while we are simply avoiding doing something. Rationalizing using the morally suspect (and illogical) principle that sins of omission are not nearly as bad as sins of commission. But it seems pretty commonsensical to me that if killing Jews or enslaving blacks is absolutely immoral so is letting all those little children die. The only reasonable excuses I can see is that you are already poor or that in the long run the excess money you don't donate will save even more lives.

I can see 1000 years from now, on another forum, people talking about Americans lack of help toward Africa in almost the same way as we now talk about the holocaust or slavery. When they are debating absolute morality.

Bottom line is that if you want to claim there is such a thing as absolute morality, either with or without God, it seems to me that you got some serious self evaluation to do.