Subject:
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Re: Essay on Emerson vs. Thoreau; civil disobedience
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 31 Jan 2001 19:26:27 GMT
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Viewed:
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440 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> > It boils down to relative morality. When David talks about someone acting
> > morally (or immorally), he is making that call in relation to their own
> > moral code. If someone has no moral objection to keeping slaves, they are
> > moral to do so; by the same lights, if someone has a moral objection to
> > being kept as a slave, they are moral to try and escape.
> >
> > Since you reject moral relativism, obviously you disagree.
>
> Yep. That is a good summation of both David's position and mine, I think.
>
> Now back to might makes right... *isn't* moral relativism a kind of "might
> makes right"?
>
> I think it is (without too much, if any, twisting) and that's one of my
> issues with it (but then, what do you expect, I'm a "being human gives us
> natural rights" kind of guy...).
No, I think you've got it backwards. Moral relativism is (essentially)
stating that morality is subjective & internal, while 'might makes right' is
stating that moral action is anything that can be enforced.
I've started to go further about half a dozen times now, but keep
backtracking because I'll get to a point where I realize it depends an awful
lot on what you think moral relativism and 'might makes right' are.
Can you give me a starting point definition for those two? I'll do the same
for 'might makes right', but for me, moral relativism is a derivation
(rather than a defintion), and so inherent to my thinking that I'm having a
hard time explaining it well.
Might makes right is, simplified, the belief that force is the ultimate
arbiter of any conflict; in other words, that morality is external, and
derived from enforcement.
Moral relativism holds that morality is ultimately a subjective belief, and
doesn't go any farther than that. There are derivations from and
consequences of that basic concept, but that's it, in a nutshell.
James
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