shadow said:
Taking moral relativism to the extreme,
Taking any moral system to the extreme, you break it. (Just like any Logic system. Newtonian physics, anyone?) Moral systems always break under the stress of outliers. The success or failure of a moral system cannot be judged on extreme examples, only mediocre ones.
Using moral absolutism, you can find an extreme example such as: "thou shall not kill" and if you had a gun would you kill Hitler...
Hence why I use both systems, and use whatever tool works better for the situation: Relativism for killing Hitler and Absolutism for Hitler's killings.
.
.
shadow---
When it comes down to it, moral relativism is a contradictory philosophy.....This is one of the big faults of the moral relativism philosophy.
I am going to stand out on a limb here and ask for one single philosophy that is
not inherently contradictory.
(Not to prove that moral relativism is valid, just to show that all moral systems are inherently contradictory, and inherently logically invalid. Applying Logic to an entire Logic system always leads to a contradiction because Logic itself is a
giant contradiction.)
.
.
Umbran---
Emotions can be linked to morals, but they are not necessarily.
As an example - a child can be angry about being disciplined by a parent, when they know full well that they deserve the punishment and there's nothing unjust about how they were treated. A child can also be angry because they feel the punishment was unjust. Sometimes emotions are connected to morals, sometimes they aren't.
By your definition of "morality", justice and fairness are "moral" while mercy, love and hate are "emotions". What is the difference? Are some rational while the others are irrational? Do you make this distinction because one is more readily definable and compartmentalized, and thus able to be cut by your "logic knife"?
I actually would contend that you can go the other way: that justice and fairness are feelings because I feel like being just and fair. Maybe the child in your above example does not "know" that they deserve the punishment, but they "feel" like it.
Not to say that this interpretation is any more correct than yours, but that, IMHO, Morality = Value = Good = Quality. A single moral system cannot possibly live up to the above interpretation. But I believe that all of them added together, in various proportions, does just that...
.
.
I guess what I am saying is this:
Relativism = Chaos = P
Absolutism = Law = J
Feelings = Irrational = Romantic = F
Logic = Rational = Classical = T
...and many more variables...
Good = Quality
Evil = Not Quality
Any combination of P, J, F, and T that equals Quality is Good.
To say that any one of the above variables is not needed is to limit the Universe, and thus limit Good. I get annoyed when T's use Logic to disprove F and/or P. "Disproving" is a logic function. To use it outside of its system does not work, and leads to ideas such as "irrationality is bad" and "contradictions are bad", which are only necessary within the confines of Logic.
Is my belief correct? I don't know. I am a very small human in a very large Universe. I just know that it can describe more situations than any of the above variables alone.
