Sinekein wrote:Alright, so let's push your Chewbacca defense one step further since there is no progress. Murder shouldn't be forbidden, after all, if I manage to kill someone, why should I be ashamed of it? Oh, well, rape, that's fine too. If I manage to overpower a target, then she surely deserves to be taken, and don't let any "progress" ideas try to discredit my opinion.
If you do not believe that there is such a thing as "social progress", then you deserve all the shit that falls on your head.
I was playing Devil's Advocate to lead you to that question, yes. It's the plot of Crime and Punishment, the enlightened, rational young man rejects all the traditional morality and superstitious nonsense of the past, and realizes the only thing stopping him from murder is the punishment. So he finds a thoroughly awful person, who everyone hates, and nobody would miss, and manages to murder them without being caught.
_My personal opinion_ is that we're in the last, fading embers of moral objectivity, so that we still recognize moral truths, but lack the foundation to support them, and pervert the expression. To give a nerdy example, Batman going to ridiculous lengths to save the life of the Joker, knowing he will inevitably break out to kill more innocents, is a perverted expression of the moral truth that murder is evil. We
know murder is evil, but cannot explain "why" except in ad hoc evolutionary psychology nonsense, so dealing with the fact that murder is wrong but people commit murder all the time and we shouldn't murder them turns into weird, logical pretzels. Like Batman. That's not progress from something lower and primitive to a higher, utopian ideal, that paradigm doesn't exist in nature at all.
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Mazder wrote:If they're demanding women HAVE to give birth because of a moral standard of allowing life to exist and thrive, then it's not am implication. it's expected. Elsewise the reason isn't morally based.
If you're not into helping people LIVE then you're not PRO-LIFE you're PRO-BIRTH.
And that's always been the case, even since George Carlin's bit back in the 90's, hell even before it.
Because the premise is that life is innately valuable, and more important than the mother's wishes, then to be morally consistent, pro-life people would have to value the life once it's born? That's a fair point, and I would largely agree, with the caveat that "thrive" is setting a vague, shifting standard.
Here's a question for you. Assume abortion is allowed for rape/nonviable babies/health of the mother. Every abortion that would be banned would be of the purely elective type. Why doesn't the agency of the mother, in choosing to have sex that resulted in a pregnancy, not void the moral responsibility of the pro-life society that compels her to give birth? In other words, if she knew what sex is, how to have it safely (double contraception), and what would happen if she did get pregnant, why would responsibility for the care of the baby fall on pro-life society instead of her and the father (beyond the care for the general welfare of all people, since this is framed as giving extra care to the unwanted baby)?
So by that reason we shouldn't try and change the ideals of today?
We should keep being mudslinging apes because it ultimately doesn't matter? That because some time in the future someone may look down on us the same way we do for our ancestors who enslaved, raped and murdered on the whims of an imagined sky-being, means that there is no need to even try and change?
Surely the fact that we are at all times trying to ensure there is a future that can be better than our present can be classed as some form of progress, no?
Right, that's what I was playing Devil's Advocate to get at. _What_ are we changing from and _what_ are we changing into, and _why_? Take slavery for example. The reasons slavery becomes abolished are moral and economic. In the case of the west, it was mostly moral. People believed God told them we're all descended from 2 ancient Middle Eastern men, and that we have to love each other or we burn in Hell forever. Because of _that_, abolitionist movements are (eventually) formed and succeed.
But you reject that premise, and I'm unsure of it. So their premise that we're all sons of Adam/Noah, and that there is a divine mandate to treat each other with a common human decency, is possibly false. The reason abolitionist movements formed and fought against slavery was factually wrong if that is the case. And because slavery is a universal human practice condoned by society, until relatively recently, we cannot say it's biologically disadvantageous, unlike murder. So you and I earnestly believe slavery is bad, but we cannot justify that claim, it's a social consensus, not something biologically or theologically true. So when we say, "change," "progress," "better," we're attributing absolute value in a void. To a Bronze Age city-state that relies on slavery to survive, our "better" is their "worse," and to lean on a tautology "It's bad because it's obviously bad," is not true.
Which is a long way of saying we need to be careful with our terminology. Either God says what ideals are or we talk each other into agreeing on subjective ones, either is workable, but we can't conflate them. If we agree slavery is always wrong, which it is, and we can't justify it, which we can't, but we never want slavery to be practiced in our countries again, then that social consensus needs to be powerful and sustainable enough to last "forever."
Surely empathizing with your fellow human being is the progress. There doesn't NEED to be an end goal. Nothing will ever be "perfect" because perfection doesn't exist. The universe is chaos, even in it's most beautiful elements. Nebulas are nothing but the remnants of a supernova. Doesn't mean there was no progress for it.
Being powerful and taking whatever you want from your fellow human being is also progress. Many civilizations rose and fell on that idea. Some still exist. I agree that empathy is a more noble goal than exploitation, but I'm also the product of western civilization that taught empathy as a divine commandment for two millennia. We're biased in what we consider "progress." To say our progressive empathy is better than a brutal steppe barbarian's belief in valor and strength as progress requires us to make a universal moral appeal that what we believe, right now, is the absolute truth of humankind.
Because Yanks are scared of taxation in order to fund them, or workers for them via actual liveable wages...
It's quite the opposite. We spend a great deal of money on many different things, we're a very wealthy country after all, but corruption is so severe that it's not uncommon for $.99 on the dollar to disappear before it gets to where it needs to be. It's not joke that some projects, like "fixing the roads" or "improving the schools" are impossible to fix no matter how much you spend. You lot in Europe have much more efficient usage of tax money, I imagine you don't feel robbed because you can see the fruit of it.
If you have to scare people into it via the morality of a religious basis then you've not got a charity, you've got a Guilt-Tax. Because that's all it is in religion. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism. All have a "charity to get into heaven" aspect about them
So it's not out of the goodness of their hearts, it's about getting in to heaven. And seeing as it's a Guilt-Tax you know what that makes it? Tax refundable! So that charity work just comes back as profit. So it's now no longer about giving kids lives but making them a moral commodity.
Just say sod it and make better taxes in the first place and then this religious loophole for "morality" is never needed.
That's more how the pagan systems worked, you make payments via ritual to acquire a boon. Can't speak to the other ones, but from what I've read of Christianity, you absolutely do not get into Heaven for doing good works. The quibbling point between denominations is on how to phrase that. Protestants tend to say, "faith alone," whereas the older traditions will agree, but add, "But if you are genuine in your faith, you will do good deeds too." The further out you get from the Catholic/Orthodox churches, the more muddled it gets, granted, as pagan/gnostic habits start to overtake the million splinters of Protestantism.
So...wouldn't that mean social services are a secular guilt-tax then?
Where your citizens get fuck all paid time off, fuck all sick days (to the point where some mothers who have just given birth a week before MUST return to work because their boss says so. Thanks Family and Medical Leave Act!!), have to deal with the extremely costly venture of actually giving birth in the first place due to medical bills as well as the absolute dog-shit tier of minimum wage that hasn't kept up with inflation since the 70's?
That "easy affordability"?
Because unless you're also advocating for a MASSIVE restructuring of the American workplace laws, time off, sick pay and the medical system in your country I really don't see how anyone under upper middle class can even begin to afford it with sacrifice, let alone comfortably.
Yeah, I agree it's fucked up and wrong. But I blame the cultural revolutions of the 60s, as well as government/corporations exploiting my people, for this outcome. The idea that women need to juggle a career and being a mother is insane, but due to the aforementioned factors forcing that to be a consideration unless their husband (if they even have one) is wealthy, or live in abject poverty, it's where we're at. I really don't like the idea that because government helped create a problem, we need more government to fix the problem.
Well, I certainly am advocating for a massive restructuring, heh.
It seems unsustainable.
Oh, it is. It's all very unsustainable.
