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October 24 - December 19, 2016
What is right for one person isn’t necessarily right for another person, regardless of the culture in which they live.
I Say Relativism is often characterized by the response, Who are you to say how I ought to live?
Some issues are personal, the apostle argues, and are therefore matters of individual conscience.
Third, Sumner argues that each group thinks its moral values are right and the others are wrong.
Eso no es cierto... entre laa culturas se encuentran más valores comunes que diferentes.
Unjustified killing of human beings (murder) has been wrong in every culture at every time in history; what has changed is the concept of justification.
Exacto... las justificaciones son las que varían, no la moral del hecho.
the dispute over abortion,
Much of the debate turns out to be a conflict about facts, not fundamental values.
the apparent moral differences arise not because of conflicting values but because of facts pertaining to common values.
“If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.
True moral conflicts are those that remain when all factual differences are eliminated.
apparent moral discrepancies between cultures represent only a difference in the perception of the facts of a circumstance, not a conflict in the values themselves.
Just because cultures differ on moral viewpoints doesn’t mean objective moral truth is a fiction.
How does it follow that because each group thinks it is right, therefore no group is correct?
The simple fact of disagreement on morality does not lead to the conclusion that there is no moral truth.
The only thing one can safely conclude from anthropology is that people have different points of view about right and wrong.
You must put all the parts together to find out what an elephant is like.
“Each one of us knows only a part. To find out the whole truth we must put all the parts together.
The Rajah was in a position of privileged access to the truth, enabling him to correct those who were blind.
Objective assessments are illusions, he claims, but then he offers his own “objective” assessment.
“We’re all blind,” and then adds, “but I’ll tell you what the world really looks like. ” This is clearly a contradiction.
Si todos somos ciegos, ¿cómo es que uno de nosotros puede opinar sobre lo que no ve?
First, it wrongly assumes that each culture has a unique set of moral values. Second, even if cultures differ radically in their basic moral beliefs, it only shows that there are differing opinions, not that no opinion is correct. It proves nothing about the nature of morality. [10] Third, it denies that objectivity is possible. But the only way to know that our cultural biases blind us to the truth is to have an objective and unbiased point of view.
Resumen de los fallos del relativismo moral.
If there is no law above society—no external standard— then that society cannot be judged.
If one is obligated to obey society, then which society does one obey? This ambiguity is a weakness of conventionalism.
Which group is primary?
Do we grant French anarchists and German Nazis moral justification on this basis?
“The most telling defense offered by the accused was that they had simply followed orders or made decisions within the framework of their own legal system,
Society Says Relativism violates our deepest moral intuitions, the foundational “assumptions of civilization. ”
If conventionalism is an accurate take on morality, then governmentally sponsored genocide can only be quietly observed, not judged.
conventionalism teaches that people have an obligation to obey whatever their society says to do.
If society is the final measure of morality, then all its judgments are moral by definition.
what is right with what is legal.
This is the tyranny of the majority.
When any human court is the highest authority, then morality is reduced to mere power—
Corrie ten Boom and other “righteous gentiles” risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. William Wilberforce sought the abolition of slavery in the late eighteenth century in the United Kingdom. Martin Luther King Jr. fought for civil rights in the United States in the fifties and sixties. In Germany during World War II, Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged Christians to oppose Hitler.
Ejemplos de Reformadores morales
A social code can never be improved; it can only be changed.
Improvement means an increase in excellence by raising to a better quality or condition.
A bowler improves when she raises her average closer to 300, the perfect game. A baseball pitcher increases his skill by decreasing the number of batters he allows on base. If he strikes out every batter, he’s attained perfection. In either case, an outside standard is used as the measure of improvement.
El mejoramiento de algo implica comparar con un estándar externo a lo que se requiere mejorar.
Moral change is possible, but not moral improvement.
when a crime is committed, we seek to find the one to blame and praise the prosecutors who put the criminal behind bars.
we use our senses
we know through pure reason.
One need not explore the universe to know that such a claim is false.
A theory is either good or bad, depending upon how well it is supported by the evidence.
“immediate knowledge of the truth of a proposition, where ‘immediate’ means ‘not preceded by inference.
you don’t have some things in place to begin with—
“If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.
For it is quite impossible that everything should have a proof; the process would go on to infinity, so there would be no proof.
If we always have to give a justification for everything we know, knowledge would be impossible because we could never answer an infinite series of questions.
not every bit of knowledge requires justification based on prior steps of reasoning. Eventually we are pushed back to something foundational, something we seem to have a direct awareness of and for which we need no further evidence.
We know our own pain—and all of our mental states—through the faculty of immediate awareness or intuition.
