Weren't/Aren't we omnivores?

We ate insects, as a matter of fact.

The retarded "herbivore ancestry" claim is usually just something dredged up by vegans to justify the fact that they're bat**** insane.

Well, you're still applying actions to an absolute standard. But which one? Who's to say that something embezzling money from the employee pension is wrong? What makes those actions good or bad?

The first part is false. The second part... wait, when did I get onto the MR side? Damnit.

We might have been omnivorous, but we weren't predators until we started picking up rocks. A better classification for our ancestors would probably be 'grazers'.

I am a vegatarian, becausing killing animals is wrong. I only eat vegans.

Mmmm... Vegans.

I've never understood why theres a morality issue involved in homosexuality. Except from a religious stand point.

There isn't. There is, however, a morality issue when any alternative lifestyle is exposed to children. Then it becomes a parent's rights issue. IE, a parent's right not to have their eight year old know about gay sex.

If you remove sex from the equation, then it's fine. And that is the biggest problem with 'gay marriage'. Spouse implicitly means 'sexual partner'. That's why I am for the total abolishment of common law marriage, and the institution instead of civil unions, which could be between any two people and would be totally de-sexualized. Let the religions keep the term marriage, and let any pair of consenting adults have the same rights marriage gives. Everyone is happy.

Except for you know, people who hate gays, interracial couples, and people who dress or think differently than they do.

Well, theres nothing we can do about idiots. Here, this sums it up nicely, despite the grammar.

Cool, I like that image

No. I watched a pair of chimps chase down and eat a monkey(Diff. Species). They didn't need any tools to do it...

I firmly believe that our ancient ancestors ate whatever they could get they're hands on that wouldn't kill them, which is a very broad category...

Besides, there must be an evolutionary reason behind my not so inconspicuous canines.

You have no idea what you're talking about. We've been killing and eating animals for hundreds of thousands of years. When we weren't able to do it by ourselves, we'd train animals to help us do it. It's what humans "do".

Even ignoring this argument, key amino acids and proteins cannot be synthesized within our bodies meaning we require them from external sources. Calcium is also a major problem - although readily available from animal sources like seafood and insects, it is incredibly difficult to absorb from plant sources. Most of the time plant sources of calcium can only be used by the body if they have been artificially processed. Chances are, because you are a vegitarian, you are also on an extensive regime of artificial supplements. (I do hope you check on the sources for those vitamins, because a lot of commercially-available multivitamins do use animal sources)

In effect, we are obligate omnivores. Without the use of our technology and a selection of food from across the entire planet, it is difficult (if not impossible) for us to survive on plants alone. It is equally impossible for us to survive only on meat.

And that is why Jon'C is the admiral of awesome.
*salute*

He forgot to mention how awesome a good steak is.

We were not always 'human'. And we picked up tools some time before the first Homosapien. When I say 'ancestors', I don't mean humans; I mean the species that evolved into humans.



I'm not a vegitarian, I'm a vegatarian. I believe this is the passage that has confused you.




Archeological evidence confirms that trips to the local supermarket were an important part of life for cro-magnun man.

Censored expletives are so much less satisfying, but I'll reply nonetheless. You can blame Flirbnic for this.

A man makes the claim "Eating babies is wrong." What sort of a claim is this man making?

Is this claim a truth proposition?
"The sky is blue." "Protons are positively charged." "The sum of two and two is five". These are all statements that assert something about the fabric of reality. Whether they're actually true can be determined empirically, rationally, or mathematically.

"Cheese is nice." "Flirbnic is sex." "Rocket science is difficult." These are all statements that assert a personal preference or judgement on something. There is no objective measure of the sexiness of Flirbnic , there is no objective measure of 'sexiness' at all. Even though there may well be a general consensus that Flirbnic is a sex god among men, this doesn't make the statement any less subjective or personal. These statements are not asserting anything about the nature of reality. Even a statement like "Most people believe that Pope John Paul II was a good leader" is not telling you anything about that papal figure, it is telling you something about the 'most people'. These sorts of statements are generally 'measured' by statistics and questionnaires.


So, the question that moral relativists ask: Which of these catagories does an ethical statement, like "Eating babies is wrong", fall under?

The reason you've all mostly been reaching ridiculous conclusions is because you've been debating entirely the wrong word.
In the statement "Eating babies is wrong", the moral relativist does not question the word 'wrong'. He questions the word 'is'. The issue is over the verb 'to be'. (E-Prime is an interesting constructed English dialect that is identical to standard English except the verb 'to be' doesn't exist, so all statements must be made using some other verb. It also avoids this epistomological nightmare.)


The moral absolutist will claim that, in the statement "Eating babies is wrong", the verb 'to be' is being used in the same way as in the statement "The sky is blue" and its truth can be asserted by the same methodology.

The moral relativist will claim that, by the absence of any objective measure of ethics, the statement "Eating babies is wrong" must fall into the second catagory, that of personal preference or judgement.
An ethical proposition does not manifest any universal moral truth but rather an assertment upon those making the proposition.

Neither the absolutist or the relativist has asserted any judgement on the issue of baby-eating itself - only how you would go about asserting it. How does the moral relativist make a sound ethical judgement without an objective measure of ethics? This exact topic is one that dominated philosophy in the 19th and 20th Century, particularly existentialists.

The moral absolutist will inevitably find it very difficult to find any objective measure of ethics, and instead rely on wishy-washy 'common sense' assertments. Albert Einstein makes the sharp critique of 'common sense' - "Common sense is the collective prejudices acquired by age eighteen" - because the theory of relativity follows a rigorous logical thought process and arrives at a statement that is decidedly at odds with 'common sense'. While 'common sense' may be fairly useful for day-to-day tasks, it offers no useful judgement of reality at all.

The moral relativists provide thorough, logical and highly involved arguments and form some of the most important philosophers of all time, such as Nietsche, Sartre and Marx.
It is unfortunate that many people are unaware of these philosophers and the progress made upon moral relativism, and as such adhere to 'common sense' or otherwise entirely arbirtrary measures of ethics. Moral relativism is much more involved and more difficult to grasp intellectually; this is not a fault, but rather a realisation that ethics itself is involved and difficult, and the evaluation of it ought not be quick nor simple, and certainly not common or absolute.

It is best charactertised by Hume's Is-Ought problem. Unless you're Ayn Rand, in which case you casually pretend it doesn't exist.

Human jerky tastes good.

First of all, how is it possible that the statement that something that is desired by no one is undesirable false? Isuwen?

Second, try this: watch a video of someone's hand being cut off and eaten (no links, please). Look at pictures of mass graves. Read 1984. Kill someone in cold blood for no reason. Look at Guernica.

If you can do all of those things and not have a reaction of "this is wrong" on some level, then maybe Moral Relativity is true. Otherwise, where did that reaction come from? If Moral Relativity is true, shouldn't you have no reaction to these things?

I was discussing this with someone else last night and realized that we have the problem that something as complicated as morals can't effectively be discussed on an intellectual plane because it is too complicated. Words confuse and obfuscate. Art, though, works on a low level and can access that level that morals works on.

And that is precisely why any ethical proposition must be the second sort of claim, as I said above.

I really don't like licorice. When I eat licorice, I feel sick. I'd have a very hard time explaining why licorice makes me feel sick, maybe the sweet oil-like texture, especialy when other people love licorice for precisely the reasons I hate it. The statement "Licorice is horrible" is my personal preference, personal judgement of licorice.

When I see racism, I also feel sick. It is the same 'gut reaction' that I'd have quite a difficult time explaining. I could put some deep sociological and historical thought into it and come up with a short essay on why the acceptance of racism (as was the norm throughout most of the world up until the 20th century) makes for a less favourable society by a variety of standards, but the immediate 'gut reaction' I have to racism I cannot rationalise about easily. "Racism is wrong" is my personal preference, my personal judgement of racism.


If we take a statement like "Electrons possess spin 1/2", we can test this empirically and theoretically to see whether it is true.
We cannot do the same with an ethical proposition like "Racism is wrong". It doesn't matter if everybody agrees with the statement; even if everybody agreed with the statement "Electrons possess spin 1/2" that alone wouldn't give us any information about electrons. That is the value of empiricism and rationalism.
It is precisely by this measure that an ethical proposition must be a personal preference, by the lack of any objective measure of ethics. This is moral relativism.

I think there's a slight flaw in your analogy of the electron. It's not a matter of everyone agreeing with the statement "electrons possess spin 1/2". Of course that's not a measure of electrons' spin. But what if everyone gathered their own data and came to an individual conclusion that "Electrons possess spin 1/2" then we would accept that we now have correct information about electrons.

In moral cases, it's not simply a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with a statement, it's reacting to data (an image, an idea; whatever) and coming to a conclusion on a gut level.

And before you use it on me: find one person who doesn't react negatively to a video of someone's hand being cut off and eaten.

What you, Smock, are doing, is trying to defend the moral absolutist position by finding an objective basis on which to evaluate claims about morality: namely, human reactions to stimuli. There are a couple problems with that position. First of all, you have to demonstrate that there's a good reason to use this as a criteria for determining what's moral. It has some intuitive appeal, yes, but religion, for one, would object to that: they would say that the objective standard is imposed by their higher power, not our own feelings.

More importantly, though, what your reaction to a stimulus will be is heavily conditioned by the society you've grown up in. I find the idea of slavery repulsive, but many people being raised in the US in the 18th/19th century had no problem with it. So, if we go by your standard... slavery is immoral to me but moral for them? Sounds like moral relativism, doens't it?

You assumed that, with the examples you were using, there would be universal agreement. Ignoring individuals who we would consider mentally ill (why? because their reactions don't agree with the majority), you still have the problem that you'll only have complete consensus on a very few moral issues. So you can define those things to be wrong, but what do you do in all of the cases that aren't absolute? Not everybody looks at a gay couple and feels their immoral sense start to tingle. So your standard fails on the vast majority of moral questions that it should be able to answer.

I never took the gut reaction idea that far. Notice that I never mentioned slavery or gay marriage as examples of a moral absolute. These are things that I agree might be relative. Certainly, people's views have changed throughout the ages. I believe that Moral Relativity exists in some form, but I also believe that there is a base. That was what I was trying to bring out in my first post on this idea. I've been trying to choose examples that have no rationale to why they bring out a reaction. What really got me thinking about this was 1984. (I'm assuming you've read it here) What was really scary about 1984 was that it forced to clutch to your base reaction. The government men are able to provide logical justification for what they are doing (changing truth by history, for example), but you still know that it's wrong. Why is it wrong? Logically it seems perfectly fine, but where is that feeling coming from?

I'm saying that feeling is the moral absolute. It may not come out often, but it's there.

[quote=Mort Hog]things[/quote]And the asses of everyone have been kicked.

*swoon*

Prior to 1909, the J.J. Thomson 'plum-pudding' model of the atom was by consensus the accepted model. The famous Rutherford scattering experiment showed that the atom could not be a positive sphere with negative charges within it, and must instead be a tiny massive positive nucleus with a cloud of negatively charged electrons a great distance from it.
Empirical observation and mathematical derivation was at odds with 'the consensus' but achieved a more accurate representation of reality nonetheless. Consensus alone tells us very little about the truth value of such a proposition.

This is precisely how it differs from a personal preference or judgement, where the only thing that can come close to a 'truth value' is consensus, like the statement "Most people like cheese". The more and more people you find that like cheese, the closer you get to making the statement "Everybody likes cheese". But neither of those statements tell me anything at all about cheese or whether I will like cheese were I to eat it, they only give me information about the people you asked. "Everybody likes cheese" does not equate with "Cheese is good".

Ethical propositions are the same. When you say "Murder is wrong", you actually mean "Most people think murder is wrong" (or, "Murder ought to be wrong" and if you can go from an 'ought' statement to an 'is' statement then you're a strong contender for the greatest philosopher of the decade). This tells you something about 'most people', not 'murder' (what it actually tells you is entirely up to your personal judgement of 'murder'). But "Most people think murder is wrong" does not equate with "Murder is wrong", and cannot be a statement of the fabric of reality (like "Electrons have spin 1/2") due to the lack of objective measure.



It is 'that feeling' that is precisely why I consider myself a moral relativist. Were 'moral absolutes' to exist, you wouldn't have that feeling. 'Murder is wrong' would be a simple fact that everyone would know. I know that (sin(x))^2 + (cos(x))^2 = 1. I don't have any particular 'feeling' on the matter, it's just something I know and can derive logically if I have to. 'Murder is wrong' is an entirely different sort of statement.

Hehehe, bringing Mort Hog to a debate on Massassi is like detonating a nuke to kill a toddler.

Do we know exactly what an atom looks like yet? As far as I know, our model is still the best possible explanation for the phenomenan caused by atoms. Does this mean that we are exactly right? How is this different from morals? (Not ethics)

I know there's more to this, but I'm too tired right now to figure it out. Let me ask, if you were to see brain scans of people from all over the world reacting in the way I've discussed, what would you say?

Actually, I'm not sure I want the answer to that. What are you arguing, by the way? I've forgotten.

That it might well tell you something interesting about the people, not the issue they're reacting to.

The point is that ethical and moral propositions must be judged in the same way as any other personal or individual preference, by means of sociological or anthropological or historical means. These propositions are not the same as statements about reality.

The only objections I have to moral relativism is when it's used by fanatics to declare things like 'That mass murderer can not be punished because he did not think his actions were wrong'. By fanatics I mean those people that take these ideas of Moral Relativism and use them to assert that there is no 'wrong'. Just as I cannot assert that something is absolutely wrong, they cannot assert that something is absolutely not-wrong. But they do anyway.

Wether or not that mass-murderer's actions were wrong is irrelevant; he has a contract with his country. His country gives him rights and freedoms, and in exchange he agrees not to take those rights or freedoms from other people. When he violates that, he loses the rights and freedoms he was granted. In the case of the mass-murderer, he forfieted his right to life when he violated his contract with society. The moral issue is involved with the creation of that contract, not with the fullfillment of it's terms.

Can't I get an amen on hu-jerky?

/_\

Amen!

Okay, my previous argument fell apart.

But I'm still not convinced. This thread actually kept me up last night thinking about it. Then I realized today what my problem with Moral Relativity is.
Exactly. What's annoying about arguing against Moral Relativity is that it's position is right in the middle. I agree now that we can't know if there is a moral absolute, but we also can't know that there isn't. It seems like it's interpreted this way sometimes.

Moral relativity isn't an ethics position. It won't tell you if 'murder is wrong' is a true statement or not. Moral relativity is meta-ethics, it will tell you how to determine whether 'murder is wrong' is true or not.

If moral absolutes were to exist, then you could evaluate an ethical proposition in exactly the same way as you evaluate a mathematical proposition - but, by the lack of any objective non-arbitrary measure of ethics, you cannot. This is where moral relativity comes in.

Seems to me that it's just a fancy way of saying "We don't know."

...How?

It's like trying to use a 'How to screw in nails' textbook instead of a screwdriver to screw in nails. The textbook will tell you which tools to use, but you can't use it to screw in the nails directly.

Moral relativism won't give you any particular position on any particular ethical proposition. It only tells you that ethical propositions cannot be tackled in the same way as mathematical or scientific propositions.

There is no objective measure of ethics. This is really the only sentence you have to remember about moral relativism.

How exactly you go about evaluating those ethical propositions then, well that's precisely the subject of some of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century.

I'm not sure what you suppose to mean by 'We don't know'. It seems to be an odd trend in these sorts of discussions; any dilemma is solved acceptably by suggesting that humanity is incapable of solving it, when in most cases it already has been solved (see the ****ing countless 'evolution' threads - there is no ****ing 'evolution controvesy', we ****ing know that evolution is true already, ****ing accept it).
A lot of you are far too despondent about the human intellect and what it has achieved.

That's almost exactly what I've said. I'll say it again: My problem isn't with moral relativism; it's with people who use moral relativism to label all behavior as 'good'.

I have a feeling that if I add anything here things will get nasty. (Not to say that what I add will be nasty, but just that there isn't really an argument left so anything I say might get picked up as a new argument).

Question: Is truth that can be claimed objectively (the first type of claim) "more" true than truth that requires the second sort of claim?

On another note, I prefer the type of truth-claims that solve a problem more than either of the other two types of claims. Note, however, that it's not really a "legitimate" third option. Oh well.

If anything I said above didn't make sense, I'll try and re-word it more clearly.

Oh no, I'm not getting into this debate.




(No. >.>)

That's a very good question, and I was going to include it in my first reply but I figured it might get us off on a bit of a tangent before people really understood what moral relativism is.

The first type of statement makes some claim about the nature of reality.
The second type of statement makes some claim about the nature of you, or a population as a whole.

Is either 'more true' or 'more important'? Some people would definitely think so, but I consider merely that the two are different, very different, and that the important factor is that the two sorts of claims must be evaluated in different ways.


Even if you have statements like "500 people think that murder is wrong" or "6 billion people think that murder is wrong", that only tells you that so and so many people consider murder to be wrong. It doesn't tell you whether murder actually is wrong, or not. It only tells you something about those people.

Does that make it impossible to determine whether murder is wrong? Well, no, not exactly, but it does make it difficult to make a statement like "murder is wrong" when the statement you're more likely to be making is "murder ought to be wrong".

But Mort, my god says that murder is wrong. Since god is not a people it doesn't matter how many people agree or disagree. God > people. QED.