Subject:
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Re: Latter Day Saints (was:Re: God and the Devil and forgiveness (was Re: POV-RAY orange color))
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 10 Sep 1999 00:21:10 GMT
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Viewed:
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1393 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> That is an unpopular view. I was excorciated (sp?) by most when I got on
> Eric's case back in the price tagging debate (I think that was on RTL)
> for saying that if he felt it was OK to change or remove price tags, how
> did I know he wouldn't cheat me. I just don't buy the "well it's OK to
> steal from X, (where X is, a big corporation, a government, a taxpayer)
> but I'd never steal from YOU" as 100% solid. I never will do a deal with
> Eric either unless I am convinced that a) the merch he's dealing me
> wasn't obtained that way and b) none of my money is at risk, completion
> risk is 100% the other way.
On this subject, I wonder if we're both making the mistake of trying
to rationalise people's motives too much. There are a few of us
here - people like you, me John DiR, Christopher Weeks, and others,
who have come to different conclusions, but all of whom are
seriously attempting to delve into morals and how we decide
what is and isn't right.
Many people don't do that - in fact I'd say most people don't.
Most people aren't sufficiently interested
in the finer points of moral philosophy. I suspect a good few people
would look at some of our longer, more theoretical, posts, and
think 'boring idiots, stuck in their ivory towers. Get back into
the real world'.
A lot of the time our behaviour isn't determined by standards
we've reasoned out, but by this-is-what-people-do
cultural standards that have been installed in us since
childhood - so they have become instinctive responses. And
those standards often include areas where one sort of
behaviour is tolerated in some situations but not others.
Because of that, loads of people *will* have inconsistencies in
their moral standards. Hell, I'm sure even all of us, despite all our
theorising, have inconsistencies somewhere. To some extent
because we haven't them through adequately, to some extent
because we don't live in an ideal world and sometimes the
practicalities of a situation make our normal morals look irrelevant
in the circumstances. There *are*
people who would be totally opposed to stealing from an individual
but who see nothing wrong with using removing company notepads
to use at home. There *are* people who most of the time are
opposed to lying, but who don't have any problems when it's
the Government they are lying to. There *are* people who are
extremely fussy about road safety, but only when it's someone
else driving.How many army generals are - in principle - totally
opposed to killing? And so on.
Simon
http://www.SimonRobinson.com
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