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Originally Posted by tame_deuces
Two good posts MB, and the debate is a bit of what I aimed for when making the thread. I'm thinking there is an "affordability" aspect to morality, i.e. we live in civilizations where we often have the luxury of not always thinking out of necessity.
Thanks, and yes, I agree. I'm still at the 'Rachels' level of the Philosophy of Morality but I find it fascinating. I'm a fan of Virtue theory, even though it's incomplete and has flaws, I like the idea of just being nice, but 100% that's a luxury you can only afford in a civilization with a high level of personal safety and security. If I were fighting for my survival, 'nice' would go right out of the window.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tame_deuces
If we think like an insurance company (which might be a bit cold, but they are very good at calculating these things down to numbers) the college senior has the "highest value". If we think from "our" cultural values, we often see the child has having the highest value, while we have a tendency to look at the elderly as "past their worth".
Yeah, but an elderly person, with a lifetime of accumulated experience and knowledge may in fact have great value to some societies or contexts where their limited life span wasn't an issue. On paper though, I choose the college senior.
So, where does that leave us? I don't believe that morals are relative because that way they could never improve and we could never question the morals of another society if they worked for that society, but we need something better than that. Sometimes I envy theists their moral certainty. It might surprise Zumby to know that his arguments in the thread where I talked about it being morally wrong for Christians to urge their beliefs on their children, have caused me to back away from that position. I'm still not a consequentialist though.