Where do we draw the line on what is ethical,, moral or the reverse thereof?

@deepthot,

deepthot;144800 wrote:

Alan Grant McDougall: You once wrote this: "
Love conquers all, is the enemy of time, and leads one to merge with the infinite. Hate leads to destruction, its friend is time, and so it must ultimate end in eternal darkness.
Adore, appreciate, esteem, reverence me and prize Me the giver of life show your love by virtue of worship. I am the word of life and the arm of the absolute and lead all to the omega-point."

So I guesswe both engage in the 'preposterous.'

I don't have an "avatar title." I have a nickname. What don't you like about it? Are you implying that I didn't have to think deeply in order to write my five books? Are you indirectly saying that what I post here is thoughtless? I am not paranoid so I'll not take it that way. Do you have any suggestions as to what would be a better nickname that would fit more appropriately?

Perhaps I have encountered harsh philosophical debate......

I once informed Jacob Bronowski of a thesis by Suzanne Langer that I had learned from reading one of her books. He retorted: "She has gone though the labours of an elephant to bring forth a mouse!" It got a big laught from those assembled in the room --- but it didn't deal with the issues she raised.

I find much philosophic discourse to be of that nature ...a clever put-down but not logical reasoning.

Yes, Fido, I do define terms that were formerly considered to be indefinable. Maybe they were ...before I defined them. I find that defining what one means - rither than slinging vague terms around - makes for clarity of thought. ...But that's just me......

And you are right to add "to me" after what I said. However if we all inserted that all the time it would get quite boring to behold.. It kind of goes without saying: everything anyone says about a subject is their perception (or conception) of it. Illustration: The scientist stated "It seems to me that every atom has a nucleus within it." Accurate, but redundant. If he just said the last seven words we would know that he accepts The Standard Model.

Ya man; we all do it, trying to define the infinites around us, and we do so with our lives, and it is our life's labor, and when we die the infinites will all be yet undefined waiting to be defined by other lives, because as they are defined so they support life...We give infinites meaning, and if we give them the right meaning, they give us life...

@Alan McDougall,

Well I am a moral nihilist. I don't think anything can be objective in regards to morality. The only kind of morality that can exist is the subjective kind, and I think this makes morality more of an ego support system then anything really.

@OntheWindowStand,

OntheWindowStand;145188 wrote:

Well I am a moral nihilist. I don't think anything can be objective in regards to morality. The only kind of morality that can exist is the subjective kind, and I think this makes morality more of an ego support system then anything really.

You have it absolutly wrong, and the evidence of this is found all over anthropology... The fact is that morality is strongest among those without a defined sense of the individual...The ego, individuality are the destruction of morality... The ego's clock is always fixed at party time... Society, communities must have a longer sense of time, of the eternal life of society, and it is in that eternal sense that morality makes sense, because from the point of view of the community, health and life are essential, and the individual is expendable, hardly missed... Look at the ethic of self sacrifice among primitives... Jesus was more foreign to the Europeans who exported him than to the natives who made him to home... Giving his life for his friends made Jesus one of them before they even met him

@Fido,

Fido;146458 wrote:

You have it absolutly wrong, and the evidence of this is found all over anthropology... The fact is that morality is strongest among those without a defined sense of the individual...The ego, individuality are the destruction of morality... The ego's clock is always fixed at party time... Society, communities must have a longer sense of time, of the eternal life of society, and it is in that eternal sense that morality makes sense, because from the point of view of the community, health and life are essential, and the individual is expendable, hardly missed... Look at the ethic of self sacrifice among primitives... Jesus was more foreign to the Europeans who exported him than to the natives who made him to home... Giving his life for his friends made Jesus one of them before they even met him

Please don't tell me that you are a religious nut. Jesus was evil he has propagated more lies than any human being up to this point.

@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;63511 wrote:

I am aware that there have been similar threads,

My question revolves around what is ethical and moral and what are the boundaries to them?

To a wife of an aboriginal , it is both moral and ethical to eat the brain of her dead husband to keep his essence within herself

To me killing a bird gives me a guilty conscience and I feel it as subjectively immoral (I have never killed a bird)

What I am aiming at here is not some ethical philosophy, but to find by debate if there is an innate ingrained universal morality, which no human will step over.

Is there a bar that no one will step over, or is it constantly being raised or lowered due to circumstances of the day?

These differencing in morals and perceptions of morals might account for most of the troubled history down the annals of human history and suffering

we draw the line at Humans killing other Humans

sense-lessly

@OntheWindowStand,

OntheWindowStand;146466 wrote:

Please don't tell me that you are a religious nut. Jesus was evil he has propagated more lies than any human being up to this point.

Jesus was a philosopher, and I trust, a better one than thou... I am certain that Jesus understood, that morality is community, that religion is not only between a man and his God, but is a form of relationship between each man and his community; which is to say -not different from morality, but perhaps the spiritual expression of morality, as morality is always a practical consideration even while moral forms generally express spiritual forms...

So; I may be a nut, but not a very religious nut.. And it is hard to say of Jesus that he was evil any more than we can say of Mohamid that he was evil...It is forms serving one people and one generation expected to fit all people and all generations that are evil...Religious forms require a prophet, a role I am not up to, in order to be changed, and some forms should die, and I trust religion will die when people can act in their social lives as though rational...If government worked, for example, few would bother with religon which seldom works...

@Fido,

Fido;146576 wrote:

And it is hard to say of Jesus that he was evil any more than we can say of Mohamid that he was evil...It is forms serving one people and one generation expected to fit all people and all generations that are evil...

This is an interesting post. Nietzsche emphasized that each people has its own tablet of good and evil. And you are saying that when a people imposes its tablet on others, that is when it is evil. But you are, I think, taking the more radical view that the tablet only applies to the present generation, and that it needs to be reworked for subsequent generations. (I seem to recall Thomas Jefferson having said something to that effect, but can't produce the quote offhand. If anyone knows it please chime in, even to prove me mistaken.) Is that so?

@PappasNick,

PappasNick;146792 wrote:

This is an interesting post. Nietzsche emphasized that each people has its own tablet of good and evil. And you are saying that when a people imposes its tablet on others, that is when it is evil. But you are, I think, taking the more radical view that the tablet only applies to the present generation, and that it needs to be reworked for subsequent generations. (I seem to recall Thomas Jefferson having said something to that effect, but can't produce the quote offhand. If anyone knows it please chime in, even to prove me mistaken.) Is that so?

I do not know that quote but I do find this one to be interesting.

"Nothing can be more exactly and seriously true than what is there [the very words only of Jesus] stated; that but a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandising their oppressors in Church and State; that the purest system of morals ever before preached to man, has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions, into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves; that rational men not being able to swallow their impious heresies, in order to force them down their throats, they raise the hue and cry of infidelity, while themselves are the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the real doctrines of Jesus, and do in fact constitute the real Anti-Christ:detective:

@PappasNick,

PappasNick;146792 wrote:

This is an interesting post. Nietzsche emphasized that each people has its own tablet of good and evil. And you are saying that when a people imposes its tablet on others, that is when it is evil. But you are, I think, taking the more radical view that the tablet only applies to the present generation, and that it needs to be reworked for subsequent generations. (I seem to recall Thomas Jefferson having said something to that effect, but can't produce the quote offhand. If anyone knows it please chime in, even to prove me mistaken.) Is that so?

Jefferson understood forms, and the meaning of the word... What he may mot have understood, that I understand, is that all human progress requires a change of forms...

@Fido,

Fido;146938 wrote:

Jefferson understood forms, and the meaning of the word... What he may mot have understood, that I understand, is that all human progress requires a change of forms...

And, I think you'll agree, not all changes of form amount to progress.

---------- Post added 03-31-2010 at 09:50 PM ----------

Fido;146938 wrote:

all human progress requires a change of forms...

But, one might wonder, what of changes in form occurring within a larger form that remains unchanged? Do you see progress happening then?

@PappasNick,

Quote:

PappasNick;146949 wrote:
And, I think you'll agree, not all changes of form amount to progress.

No??? Yet all progress demands a change of forms...People have to be able to consider their reality before changing it to suit...We no longer live in caves, but we still dwell...It is our form that has changed, and which will continue to change, but to do it we must know it... What is the essential goal of a dwelling??? Does the present one serve the purpose??? The same question must be asked of governments, even marriages from time to time... Does the form serve the relationship???
---------- Post added 03-31-2010 at 09:50 PM ----------

Quote:
But, one might wonder, what of changes in form occurring within a larger form that remains unchanged? Do you see progress happening then?

There is always reform within the form... Forms represent stasis... When humanity finds anything they like, or which works, they try to hang on to it...Uncertainty is the devil, and we hate it... Within every form is a relationship, and that is the life of the thing, the people who relate through the form...They are change, and need change, and for lack of a better word, even the most common of forms can become stiffling, and defeat the relationship...

Something must give, and clearly some forms kill the relationship by killing the people; but some times the people can survive by changing the form... And just as with our government, the force for change is relentless, but that can go against the people as well...

We are less democratic when we started...The very existence of the parties adds another layer of intractability to government, and they are not provided for in the constitution, nor are set numbers in the house of Reps, because the house was designed to grow... No more... Extra constitutional changes which have never received a single vote of the people have made the government impossible to reform... A whole new form is required... As Jefferson said...

@Alan McDougall,

The Ten Commandments is good yardstick to measure morality

@Alan McDougall,

Alan McDougall;147465 wrote:

The Ten Commandments is good yardstick to measure morality

While the ten commandments are a good formal standard of behavior, and a good example of the whole genre, it is not a measure of anything, let alone, morality...

It is good because it addresses the rationality of men, the recognition that what men do they first think... And yet it cannot get at the core of human misadventures in the fact that little of what we do is rational, and that within our communitiies where morality has meaning -we are forever ever acting in ways that are destructive of self and the ones we love out of self motivation...

It is one thing to say that civilization is sin; but the fact is that man is sin because we came into being in our myths with an act of sin, and not of self sacrifice, as in other cultures... We know that to be conscious means self consciousness, and there is the poison which strangles society...

Formal standards of behavior do not work because people cannot ever let them work...Make a law and make a loophole...That is how law is done, and how communities are finished... Let me offer a presumption of the facts as they are: Presuming that all people know morality, that in order to get along with mother, every child learns formal moral behavior, and yet, the feeling that gives moral meaning is also taught...The love essential to every community is found in every relationship between mother and child, but this love is often lost in the transition of the individual from familiar relationships to national ones...The larger ones group, the more diversity it will contain, so that personal advantage outweighes identification and emotional attachment to the group... Even within our groups we begin to look for prey, and think none the worse of ourselves for it... And no formal standard will ever address what is inevitable at some point...

Rather than standards that do not work, that are hardly written before they are danced around, what we need is a way of feeding that natural relationship between mother and child in order to parant the relationship between nation and mankind... If people act as though raised by wolves, though not as moral as, it is because that is perhaps the way it is, That society has raised them so, that laws allow too much true immorality that injures the young, and will destroy the whole of society, and that no moral person should accept immorality whether legal or illegal....No law is a substitute for morality -which can only grow between the breast of a mother and the lips of her child...

I will admit that some people look at all of society as a baby sees a breast, as something they can suck their lives out of, and that there are many of all ages who are trapped in mental infancy who can never know justice, nor virtue, nor morality because they cannot sense the meaning...We cannot at once teach the individual the philosophy of the individual -which is antiphilosophy, and then expect a moral mankind to result...Individualism is immoral, and self consciousness is immoral, and is, in that sense: Sin... When people are conscious of their socieities, and that the welfare of society is their welfare, that we stand or fall together, then they are moral...

When individuals see themselves opposed to society, standing apart from society, standing alone except for their nearest relatives, if that, as an individual, alone and aloof; then they are poison and death to society...If you want people moral, hunt the individual... Disallow that such nonsense can be taught... We are not individuals if we are moral and morality is an essential part of society...If we cannot escape the individual we should always make certain that individuality is expressed in a fashion healthful to society... If people are destroying themselves with iindividuality they are destroying society, and how does one frame a law to prevent that???

Laws that challenge what people do, and ignore why people do cannot discern the motivatons of all people to be accepted by their communities and recognized for who they are... Now; the Ten commandments addressed the psychological fact of immorality, that it found its beginnings in the mind, but it did not address the fundamental pathology of human kind that is the very thing which most makes us human in our own estimation: Self Consciousness... Why would anyone prey upon their kin except out of a deep pathology, and yet, when people sin against each other or break moral standards they do so as individuals, and as an expression of individuality... What does religion, our religion teach??? Is it not the abnegation of the individuality, of self sacrifice??? Yet we stand by while the whole community is made to sacrifice for the benefit of a relative few individuals...

Even in the baby we see the first stirring of self consciousness, but better than any true individual, he sees his well being inevitably bound with his mommy, and with her welfare and the welfare of his whole community... Even the most primitive of people often suffered their individuals, but so long as there was active social control, and a dynamic relationship between man and society then individuality could be controlled and harnassed to society to drag it forward... No formal standard of behavior can address what a fluid mind has man, that all that is not forbidden is allowed and even encouraged, and so sin and immorality can become what it should never be, which is a means of self expression that society has no effective means of turning toward its benefit...

Laws are a static, and passive defense against immorality... Every fence has its ladder, and every river has its raft... Rather than laws and standards and codes that do not work, that people as soon consider as find a way around, know that only a moral people who know the meaning of morality in their first encounters with life can enforce morality as a living dynamic sort of relationship with ones others...If you are not yourself willing to address immorality where ever you see it why promulgate a law??? BE the law you want others to accept... Make of your life a moral argument, as we all do regardless...

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Where do we draw the line on what is ethical,, moral or the reverse thereof?

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