Slimebeast said:
No it's not. Read a bit about absolute morals first. Well, actually in philosophy books there might be something labeled "moral absolutism" but that's not what I'm refering to and you should have understood it by now, I'm talking about universal morals (they're absolute too). And your examples are bad because they're moral gray areas. With slavery and abortion you not only have very different premises - like I said one person believes it's a baby with a soul while the other believes it's a lump of cells without personality and value - you also have a significant benefit for the negative action. It's too difficult to dicuss those gray area scenarios at this point. One would say abortion is wrong because it kills an individual while the counter argument is that you save a mother and an unwanted child from miserable lives. Stick to drastic examples. Like torturing babies without benefit (other than let's say a mild pleasure for the perpetrator because he gets some kind of kick from watching other organisms suffer). Show me how that is not wrong. |
You want me to argue on the side of infant torture? A point I don't agree with? It's bad that you want me to agree with that to try and prove my point, as it wouldn't add anything to your position and wouldn't add anything to my position. It's an attempt at character assassination, that's all.
What's baffling to me is that you just don't get it. Trying to get me to prove that torturing babies is not wrong just shows that you're confused and you seem to think I accept a different set of absolute morals, as opposed to relative morals. You did it by saying that I'd be cool with the cannibalism too.
I wouldn't be cool with it and that's the whole point. We have two separate sets of morals, and I'd be outraged at their different moral code. That's the whole point of relative morals.
Why do you seem to be confusing moral relativism with having a differing set of absolute morals?
You claim that I don't understand absolute morals, well you've shown to me that you don't get relative morals either (and sorry if I'm being rude, but I don't think you understand relative morals just as much as you claim I don't understand absolute morals).
I don't want to prove that torturing babies is correct, because I don't think it is. But I do know that many people and many societies have accepted torturing babies, infants and children throughout history. A quick google search provided many examples. Heck there's even a whole wikipedia page that goes over infanticide* in societies that has been carried out throughout history to the modern day (source).
My argument doesn't rely on having to accept the position that other people hold, it relies on me proving that that position exists... and there it is on Wikipedia.
A whole article on infanticide in societies around the world. Different morals on infanticide in other parts of the world, it's exists, some people are sick by our standards but it's accepted it as theirs. It's there in plain black and white and for me that is case over. No absolute morals, because a variety of sides exist, even on the drastic example you wanted me to prove.
(* for my argument I accept infanticide as equal to torturing them)
I would like to note here as well that I started off with a drastic example, that being of murder and cannibalism, and yet you just discarded it; Despite me showing that another society have a different moral line they draw on murder and cannibalism than us. My point is that two or more moral lines can't be drawn if absolute morals were the case, and I see my example as proof of two clear lines existing.
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Slavery has been anything but a grey area. There has always been a clearly defined line of what is acceptable, but the line has changed as societies progress. This could not be the case with absolute morals.
