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Originally Posted by ScandalAndy
Well, this is kind of what I was getting at in a way. If your Da didn't care about the environment (morality) and knowing the repercussions of poor ecological stewardship, your own beliefs wouldn't have been influenced the way they were. That's using morality to influence morality.
I'm saying there's no set of data you can use to measure whether something is more or less moral, more or less worthy of being enforced as a standard. I'd go so far as to say most people believe that killing is wrong, that is a moral judgment. There is no scientific data to back this up, though. That tenet of their personal beliefs is influenced only by opinion and not fact.
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Yes, this precisely. The closest I think we can get, using your killing example, is that we should expect that in any given population P, there will be rules about killing and that those rules will be harsher for in-group killing than out-group killing. Can we observe that anywhere? Yes, as a matter of fact we do. From various HGF (hunter-gatherer-fishing) cultures to modern, complex urban societies we see a distinction made. If some bloke goes out, grabs a gun and shoots a random person we call him a murderer. If some other bloke, wearing a uniform, goes out and kills some number of other blokes who are wearing different uniforms, then we call him a soldier. We may even call him a hero. What is the difference? In the first case, the guy did not have sanction but in the second case he did have sanction because in the second case we call it war. Soldiers cannot be charged with killing the enemy in wartime, *provided* that the enemy was shooting back or could be expected to do so. There are very good reasons a given society would strongly prefer that any violent impulses were directed outward rather than inward.
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Conversely, depending on your beliefs you can end up on either side of the argument when it comes to something like the "gay gene" mentioned previously. Some people want to prove there is one, others don't. Some people want there to be a cure, others want to prove homosexuality is innate and therefore cannot and/or should not be "cured". You use your personal opinions to decide what you deem "important" research.
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I think that the question of what causes homosexuality is an interesting question but I do not think it will, ultimately, make much difference on the issue of rights. At any rate, the way rights are framed in the West is not predicated upon it being genetic or on human beings being identical (i.e. there are no differences between different ethnic groups). Although it is in vogue to say that racism is wrong because race doesn't exist, that doesn't work. To take one example, two or three years ago my doctor diagnosed me with hypertension. When she did my response was "well, that's no big surprise". The reason that was my reaction is that I knew that ~85% of all black Americans will have high blood pressure sometime in middle-age. We are 28% more likely to have high blood pressure than whites and just under 20% more likely than Hispanics and 32% more likely than Chinese Americans. Now, is that entirely genetic? Probably not, some of it is certainly diet and stress. However, since that number just leaps out at you it strongly suggests that there is a genetic component to the issue. Now, if races 'don't exist' how can we even say that blacks are more likely to have high blood pressure than whites, Hispanics or Chinese? We can't.
This can *all* be true without, even for an instant, giving aid or comfort to racist ideologies.
Cheers
Aj