Pain Paien

I find it nearly impossible to believe that you could be this obtuse without intending to do so. I'll give you a short answer because anything lengthy would be a waste of time: because we don't wish to die, and we have empathy for other human beings. You may lack these qualities, so this may be meaningless to you, but this is the answer, the same as the other dozen times it was answered.

Please quit repeating the same questions that have already been answered. Terrorists may think it justified by their moral system, but if they choose to force this decision (which results in unwanted deaths), we are justified by ours to take preventative measures.

They are not under "moral obligation" to us, under their morality, this is a strawman. They are not obligated to "conform" to our morality, but if they wish to coexist with us, they have to take ours into account. Obviously, this means not killing us.
The aim is to reach a morality that everyone can agree to. No one claimed we were there yet.


Only you see this "contradiction" and it's not because there is one, but because you fail to understant the issues of this "debate".

Mageth

No, and I and others have explained all this to you already I don't know how many times on this thread. If you're just going to keep repeating the same questions over and over, I'm outta here. I honestly don't know how else I can explain it to you.

I note that Pain Paien gave an excellent reply just above this. Refer to that; I concur completely, and am damn tired of having to repeat myself.

Pain Paien

He never said anything about it being his standard, you're just wooing strawmen, as usual. "The standard" is pragmatism. This is why one can be said to work better than the other: efficacy is the criteria.

Mageth

Oh, and the contradiction that comes to mind is in you defending the actions of the Israelites depicted in the OT as being moral simply because your God (YHWH) told them to while at the same time declaring as immoral the actions of the Terrorists who justified what they did because their God (Allah) told them to.

yguy

It's only a contradiction if YHWH is a pretender. If He is not, then the Allah the terrorists believe in is.

Pain Paien

That does not follow. First, you'd have to establish that this diety exists at all, then that Allah is not the same diety under a different name.

Vorkosigan

That's purely your own opinion, but under your moral system I can't help wondering why it's so terrible (morally) that the terrorists did that!

Well, under my moral system, and that of everyone else here, including yours, it is wrong to fly passenger aircraft into office buildings. I do not need to have the same morality as you or Mageth or P/P or anyone else here in order to believe that crashing airplanes into office buildings is wrong. In fact, I am sure I do not have the same morality as Mageth or the Paean of Pain, since everyone has their own take on what is moral. But because we are very willing to negotiate through our disagreements, Mags, Pain Paien and I will always live together in peace.

Please explain why the terrorists were "wrong" to fly planes into buildings when their own morality says its morally right to do it.

The terrorists were wrong because it was murder. Does that require any more explanation?

If moral relativism is a legitimate viewpoint, why are the terrorists under any moral obligaton to you, or anyone else, to conform to your morality?

They are not under any obligation to conform to my morality. The terrorists are free to ignore my moral entreaties. If they don't like my behavior, they can attempt to change my mind. Failing that, we can take the dispute to some third party whom we both recognize as having the authority to settle it -- a court, the UN, my parents, whatever. After that, if negotiations continue to fail, we will probably have a conflict of some kind. That is generally how the world works. Since everyone has their own morality, negotiations are common in every culture.

Your problem is that you see morality as a set of authority relations which must be imposed on the minds and bodies of others. Your claim of "absolute morals" is simply a rhetorical strategy to get others to accept your moral demands without negotiation and without a concommitant need on your part to accept theirs. In other words, your goal is to short-circuit the moral negotiation process and assume absolute authority over the minds and bodies of others. This lack of good-faith willingness to live with and negotiate with others is why authoritarian societies -- Christian, Communist, Islamist, or Facist -- are generally such Hells that people will brave the open ocean in small boats to escape them. Your "moral system" is simply lust for power, codified.

Do you see the obvious contradiction here?

Yes, it is between your moral authoritarianism and the urgent reality of human behavior and human needs on planet earth.

Vorkosigan

yguy

Of course it does, because the truth of the statement is not contingent on the truth of the premise. Logic 101.

Remeber, I said "the Allah the terrorists believ in". That would not be the God of Abraham, since that God never countenanced the extermination of Jews, and never promised anybody an eternal orgasm for doing the right thing, as this particular "Allah" evidently does. Therefore, the only way they would be the same deity under different names is if both are lying, which my statement doesn't allow for.

Mageth

It's only a contradiction if YHWH is a pretender. If He is not, then the Allah the terrorists believe in is.

That does not necessarily follow. Maybe he's both YHWH and Allah, playing both sides for fools. Maybe there's really two gods, and all that stuff in the respective holy books about "I'm the only one" is just braggadocio. Maybe both are make-believe (yup, I agree with that one).

In any case, expressing the belief that What God tells you to do is right, as Keith has done on this thread, and defending the actions of the OT Israelites as moral because God told them to, leaves him with little if any moral wiggle room to criticize the Terrorists' actions. How can he, or you, know that God didn't tell them to do what they did? How can he, or you, know that your God (if he exists) won't tell some Christians to start the killing tomorrow? If He did it in the OT, I would imagine He could do it today. What's to stop him?

On top of that, since YHWH told the Israelites to commit acts of genocide etc. every bit if not more bloody than the actions committed by the terrorists, it indicates that God does not think such actions are objectively immoral. They seem to be fine under his "Nature", if he says to do them. Under the "What God tells us to do is moral; what God tells us not to do is immoral" rule, the only thing the Terrorists would appear to be guilty of is perhaps doing what YHWH told them not to do, as God doesn't appear to think killing large numbers of people, women and children included, for one reason or another is necessarily immoral.

The only hope for humanity to escape this horror is to do away with this whole morality-is-based-on-what-God-says bit. The examples presented by the Abrahamic religions indicate that this attitude invariably leads to bloodshed and suffering.

Pain Paien

Your statement was not true. There, that was easy, no need for obfuscation.