John Page

Insufficient information. You asked why you should or shouldn't feel guilty about the act. The answer has nothing to do with me and everything to do with your own feelings and moral standards. Hence the questions. If you won't tell us about yourself I'll have to file an incomplete psychiatric evaluation which will not go well for you in court - the body vested with the authority to impose society's moral standards.

Cheers!

Sojourner553

Sorry, I thought my point was obvious.

There are really two types of individuals who would do the atrocious deed in your example:

(1) The first type would be a person who has no sense of empathy - ie, concerns for the feelings of others. Behaviorial scientists have discovered (from looking at CAT scans) that sociopaths do not use certain regions of their brains believed to the center of empathy. Some people appear to be "born" as sociopaths (ie without this mental processing capacity). Others appear to have turned this chemically "off" usually in childhood as a "defense mechanism" in the face of a brutal, cruel environment. Not everyone becomes "hardened" in this way, from living in a brutal environment; and sociopaths can come from good families/childhoods. (This means there appears to be a genetic component whether or not one becomes a sociopath.)

Behavior scientists note that social feelings for a family/clan can be seen in the animal kingdom. They speculate that those species that did not develop some innate group social feelings did not survive to pass their genes on to future generations in large numbers. In the animal kingdom, Jane Goodall and others have documented the social behavior of chimpanzees clans, along with examples of aberrant behavior by individual sociopath chimpanzees that would terrorize the rest of the community.

(2) The other type of individual that would do this deed is a religious fundamentalist who believes the EVIL done now is temporary and therefore small and irrelevent when contrasted with an infinite eternity.

That is why Andrea Yates could "kill" her babies for a greater good; also why the Inquisition torturers could justify to themselves torturing and killing infidels to save "others" from eternal damnation in hell. (The torture their victims endured on earth paled in comparison to ETERNAL torture, in their minds.)

I suspect the ringleaders of many past "religiously based" horrors were really sociopaths hiding behind the mask of religion.

But there have also been individuals, such as Andrea Yates, who sincerely believed the "evil" they did was offset by a greater good. To them, going to hell is far worse than any TEMPORARY torture scene on earth!

=====================================

The reason why I accused this of being a thinly disguised smokescreen to push a "right-wing" agenda is because it ignores:

* most laws are derived by the observation of what is best for a well-functioning society:

-- no stealing, murdering, lying, etc.

That is why all societies have this -- both religious and non-religious based societies!


* many of our humane, but secular laws were NOT derived from a Judaic-Christian background. Indeed, historically-speaking, there was religious hostility (primarily from the Right Wing) to impose them. Examples include:

-- laws outlawing torture (not in 10 Commandments nor are the rest...)
-- laws outlawing slavery
-- laws against child abuse (the Bible says in summary "spare the rod, spoil the child"
-- laws outlawing discrimination against gays, the color of one's skin, sex.
--not to mention our ideals of democracy and freedom (these were founded on ideals from deism which is a belief in God, But is is not Judaic-Christian based!)
-- laws to preserve the environment for future generations.

If you have followed any of my other posts around here, you will know I stand up for moderate Christians when I think some of the atheists on this board go to far.

I think this time it is the right wing Christians who have gone too far on this board by pushing the SIMPLISTIC assumption that there is a correlation between religion and morality.

Most serious religious scholars have been forced to admit there have been many atheists who were moral individuals; just as there have been theists who have not been moral and/or committed horrendous crimes.


Sojourner

[ April 07, 2002: Message edited by: Sojourner553 ]</p>

Mackjoy

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Hans:
[QB]Hypothetical, of course!!

I just brutally raped, sodomized, tortured, then burried alive a six year old child leaving the child in pure terror until the child dies of fright or sufficates.


My brother is mentally slow, I like to ask him these sorts of questions to get answers from outside the box.

In short he said:
That was fun and i would like to do it again.
I wish that I would have kept her alive.

To me, he showed guilty feelings, but only because he had deprived himself the pleasure of doing it some more. Strange heh?

bd-from-kg

Hans:

You say:

It appears that you have defined a “problem” which by definition has no solution.

In order to “demonstrate” to you that you’ve done something wrong, I would have to know what you mean by “wrong”. In light of your later comments it appears that you don’t mean anything by it. That is, you don’t believe that any statement of the form “It would be [or was] wrong for X to do Y” is either true or false. This means that, to you, such statements do not express propositions. And it is logically absurd to ask for a “demonstration” of a statement that does not express a proposition.

But perhaps I have misunderstood you. Perhaps you are asking whether there is a reasonable way to construe such statements as expressing propositions. By “reasonable” I mean a way that does not do violence to the “logic of moral discourse”, and such that, in all (or at least almost all) cases where the great majority of people agree that such a statement is “true”, it is true under this interpretation. In that case it might be possible to say something meaningful about your challenge.

Note that, even if one were to show that there is a reasonable way to construe moral statements as expressing propositions, anyone would be free to say “But that’s not what I mean by such statements.” And of course there’s no way to answer this. Anyone is free to use words to mean whatever he pleases. I can use the words “blue” and “green” in such a way that it is objectively true that the sky is green and grass is blue. Armed with such definitions, I would have no trouble “refuting” any attempt to prove that the sky is blue and grass is green. Or, of course, I could simply insist that these words are meaningless, meaning that I personally don’t assign any meaning to them. In that case, for me statements like “the sky is blue” wouldn’t express propositions at all, so it would be silly even to ask whether they’re true or to ask someone to “demonstrate” that they are.

In view of all this, could you clarify just what it is that you are challenging your respondents to do?

tronvillain

Tom Piper:
It shows that the lesser moral offense is not wrong in that context. Saying that something is wrong implies that it is something one should not do, and if in an extreme context it is something one should do, then it is innacurate to say that it is wrong. The problem may be the different senses in which we use the word "wrong" - the descriptive sense and the prescriptive sense.

I imagine that this is another case of the conflict between the subjective and the objective. I mean that it would be permissible from their perspective, though it is not from mine or yours.

It shows that what they did wasn't wrong from their perspective, and morality appears to be a matter of perspective. When you say that what they did was wrong, you mean that it is wrong from the perspective of the rest of us.

Tom Piper

tronvillain,

I said, To which you responded, If what you mean is merely that given the choice between two acts, either of which would be wrong, one could be the 'right choice' over the other, then we agree. For example, if, in order to achieve my desired end, I must kill hostages that I have taken in a bank robbery, the fact that I choose to kill an elderly single man who volunteers to be the first hostage killed over a woman who is pregnant with triplets, doesn't make my killing of the man any less wrong.


I said, To which you responded, If what you mean is merely that she (the sociopath) believes it is permissible, then this may be so. But, even if it is so, it doesn't show that it isn't wrong. Simply changing the phrasing from 'believes it to be wrong' to 'wrong from her perspective' doesn't show anyting.

You said, Once again, it may be that what was done, was 'not wrong from the perspective of the perpetrator' (the perpetrator believed it was permissible). If you mean to say more-- that such examples show that whatever a person believes to be right is right, that there is no legitimate standard beyond what the individual who is acting happens to believe, these examples don't make that case. You may believe it, but that is not the upshot of my argument, and your examples don't show that my argument is unsound.

Tom

Hans

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Hans

Tom Piper

Your argument states nothing more than it is wrong because it is wrong. Your premis and conclusion are one and the same. You simply added more detail to the word harm in the conclusion.

Tom Piper

Hans,

You say,quoting part of my argument, There is a straightforward, obvious sense in which what you say is false. Among other things, (i)there are logical consequences of premise 1 that are not logical consequences of 4, and,(ii), premise 1 is not a logical consequence of 4. If the premise and the conclusion were "one and the same",then (i) and (ii) would be false.

This is a trivially true response intended only to prompt you to rephrase your objection.

Tom

Sojourner553

I assume the reason you do not respond to my post -- is because you CAN'T!

*Empathy -- or sympathy for others -- is not based on religion.

* Most laws are derived by the observation of what is best for a well-functioning society:

-- no stealing, murdering, lying, etc.

That is why almost all societies have these basic laws -- both religious and non-religious based societies!


* many of our humane, but secular laws were NOT derived from a Judaic-Christian background. Indeed, historically-speaking, there was religious hostility (primarily from the Right Wing) to impose them. Examples include:

-- laws outlawing torture (not in 10 Commandments nor are the rest...)
-- laws outlawing slavery
-- laws against child abuse (the Bible says in summary "spare the rod, spoil the child"
-- laws outlawing discrimination against gays, the color of one's skin, sex.
--not to mention our ideals of democracy and freedom (these were founded on ideals from deism which is a belief in God, But is is not Judaic-Christian based!)
-- laws to preserve the environment for future generations.

Sojourner

[ April 08, 2002: Message edited by: Sojourner553 ]</p>