| sapphi_snake said: Actually, you're quite wrong. Normative rules don't need any justification other than our own will. If madmen want to kill themselves, they're free to do it. If they try to kill me, I won't allow them. And me and all the people who don't want to be killed will band together and protext ourselves from the madmen. The lack of a higher instance to regulate morality doesn't automatically lead people to resort to nihilism. And Pi commited something that I find despicable, and what's worse he won't admit it, and created this whole delusion so he can live happily without suffering any consiquences. Such a thing could permit someone to commit any atrocity. |
So, nothing is then 'good' or 'bad' in itself? If the majority of people on the planet decide that it is 'good' to kill children and eat them, then that is indeed good?
Your example uses a higher instance to regulate morality, so you need to come up with a better example. In your model 'the will of God' is replaced with 'the will of most people'. If the will of most people is just a random configuration of atoms then there is still nothing that is ethically bad or ethically good.
I'm not saying this position is wrong, but it is not my position. I think killing another person is wrong no matter what the current consensus might be. This means that there is something outside of the relm of matter that makes somethings 'good' and somethings 'bad'. It also means that actions are 'good' or 'bad' regardless of the convictions of the person who commits them.
This approach to morality makes it possible to make an ethical assesment of something like the 9/11 attacks for example. Either mass murder is wrong, and will always be wrong, or there is some sort of moral relativism where the people who felt that 9/11 was justified are right and the people who feel it was not are also right.
This question can not be solved by science, at least not with the knowledge we have today, since there is no way to measure if there is a 'law of morality' in the universe or not. It basically becomes a question of faith (if you can separate the meaning of faith from the religious context you keep going back to).
This ultrainteresting discussion is the real story in Life of Pi by the way. Your interpratation of it as an unwilling exposure of the dangers of religios delusion pretty much misses the mark.
