[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Ciaran

You have done a great job at taking a sentence and twisting it for your own ends in your rather long reply.

I didn't twist anything you said. In fact, I took the most limited reading possible and assume that the statement 'values are not absolute' means just that. Values are not absolute. That means that there is no way to argue that we should prefer, if given a choice, value set A over value set B.

Values are not absolute. That does not, by definition, make society nihilistic. Rather, it means that values, and what's commonly accepted as right and wrong, changes over time. For example, what's most commonly referenced as an intrinsic value is the right to life. However, scratch under the surface and you'll find that sort of value means very different things to different people and, in fact, for some, their right to life means a right to end the lives of others i.e. death penalty states for prevention / punishment of serious crimes.

That would be a nonsensical reading of a right to life. It's one of the reasons why many on the American Left (such as it is) rightly object to the characterization of anti-choice partisans as being 'pro-life' because they are not 'pro-life'. What they are is anti-abortion. A consistent pro-life stance can't square itself with support of the death penalty.

Much of what is accepted as "good" today will, no doubt, be viewed very differently by subsequent generations. Values are partly cultural - hence, your example to slavery. Most of us (not all of us) may be sickened by the idea of slavery today but, centuries ago, some of our forefathers and foremothers clearly thought otherwise.

Yes, and they were wrong. Not just expressing a different but equally valid set of values. Their values were wrong. In the mid 1930s one of my mother's brothers was lynched. The people who did so *genuinely* believed that my uncle, his father and mother, all his siblings, all his nieces and nephews who had not yet been born, and every single member of his line stretching up and down through the eons, was not *actually* human. Because they were not fully human, their lives were not particularly valuable. Because their lives were not valuable, it was no crime to take his life because a white woman accused him of attacking her because he bumped into her. That wasn't just a cultural peccadillo but a sign of a culture with a bad set of values. Not different bad. Jim Crow was an evil system. Not a regrettable one, not one that I should be glad mostly had only secondary effects on me but an actually evil one. What we have now, imperfect equality as it is, is far and away better than the one my parents were living in from the 1920s until pretty much the time of my birth in the mid-1960s.

Similarly, your reference to torture. You may believe that torture is wrong but clearly not everyone does - include many in senior positions in US society. As for racism? It's actually enshrined in law in some way or another in most countries that I've been to.

Torture *is* wrong. It is wrong on moral grounds, it is wrong on utilitarian grounds and it is wrong on ethical grounds. I'm not opposed to torture because it was my government doing the torturing. I'm not opposed to torture because it was poor and middle-class whites torturing poor non-whites. I'm opposed to torture because it is morally indefensible.

You appear to be conflating the violation of intrinsic values with their not being intrinsic. Are you prepared to argue that because racism is enshrined in the laws of many nations that racism isn't wrong? If you aren't, and it is vanishingly improbable that you are prepared to do so, then by what do you justify preferring to live in a society that is not explicitly racist than one is? By what argument are you prepared to state that American society circa 2012 is a better society than America circa 1942. I *am* prepared to make that argument because there are things that are intrinsically wrong and to violate them means that your society is behaving wrongly. Just because societies break the rules and take some action that is intrinsically wrong doesn't mean that it isn't wrong.

Just because someone breaks into a house to steal the stuff inside and, discovering that the owners are home, kills them, doesn't mean that neither murder nor theft are wrong. In the same way just because Germany slaughtered millions of innocents in adherence to a racially eliminationist philosophy doesn't mean that genocide isn't wrong. What the German people allowed themselves to become was evil. What the German people did during the period of 1932 to 1945 was evil. It wasn't just a cultural practice that we cannot and should not try to judge because trying not to say that the Germans shouldn't have done what they did puts us in very ugly and vile moral territory.

If there are not intrinsic rights and wrongs, things that under almost no (if not absolutely no) circumstances a people should not be allowed to get away with, how do you argue that Britain is a better nation without the Empire or that America is better without Jim Crow? Personal preference? It's better today because now we recognize it is better but it was better then because they thought it was better back then? I knew a whole generation, all deceased now, that would argue strenuously that the America their grandchildren or great-grandchildren live in now is far and away a better one than the one they were born to, all self-interest put aside.

Cheers
Aj