a dawning realisation
Browsing round Christian blogs earlier today, I had the dawning realisation that many religious people view the world with the eyes of a child and the processing power of a Commodore 64. Here are some examples:
1. There are men and women in the human world. Therefore men should behave like my understanding of men, and women should behave like my understanding of women. In this simplistic world view, unable to grasp the depth and complexity of human experience, people should slot perfectly into predefined roles. Anything else worries the child seeking reassuring patterns, and therefore must be wrong.
2. I don’t know why we exist and I can’t understand science, therefore a higher power who understands everything must have created me. In this simplistic world view, all unanswered questions lead to imaginary forces. The idea that humans may never be able to fully understand how we came to exist, that there will always be infinite gaps in our knowledge, is childishly inconceivable.
3. Most mammals are heterosexual, therefore homosexuality is wrong. In this simplistic world view, common behaviour is right, and less common behaviour is wrong. It’s basic herd mentality at its worst.
4. I don’t like change because, like a child, it makes me anxious. Therefore, progress is dangerous. In this simplistic world view, the past is known, and therefore somehow safer. Adherents can hark back to a time when they imagine life made more sense and people lived according to set rules.
5. I don’t like the outside world because I haven’t experienced it. In this simplistic world view, the dangers and shortcoming of home are known, but the rest of the world is a socialist nightmare where you can’t carry guns or practice your religion. Like the child that sees monsters everywhere, many Christians of this mindset seem to twitch in a paranoid fashion not only about the horrors of ‘abroad’, but also about the boogeymen in their own government trying to control and ruin their lives by forcing them to do things like sell goods in a non-discriminatory fashion and educate their children.
I hope you’ll join me in a moment’s silence for these people, where we can wish to the Good Fairy Delilia that they can at least upgrade someday to a better processor.
Did this include the regular V commentary or that is from the said theist’s mouth? I can’t believe it. Maybe this is the period before chips and microprocessors. It would be ambitious to expect an upgrade. The best to hope for is that the disappear from the gene pool sooner without polluting it.
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Oh no, it’s just my commentary. It was mainly inspired by my muse Insanity but I’m sure she’s sick of me linking to her posts.
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Ah I see. That explains it
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I wondered if you’d have any commentary on the most recent edition over at your best buddy’s joint.
Indeed, if I don’t experience reality the same way you experience reality then your reality does not exist. You’re making it up.
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I’m so pleased you lurk round her site too! Isn’t she quite special? She posts so rapidly and frequently that I can’t count the number of posts worth further comment that have slipped through my fingers.
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I don’t exactly lurk around there but several of the bloggers I follow reblogged a post she did yesterday about feminism giving her high fives all round.
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I was about to ask you not to mock the good old commodore 64, because the Christians mostly refer to a database before the invention of actual bound books as their primary sourcecode, but then I had “a dawning realisation”, that they have – indeed – upgraded their system processors. It is just that they sometimes come a bit short from the progress of the world. For those who are now reaching middle age (pun intended) the commodore 64 exited when they were young and everything seemed better. By that I mean, that it is typical for a conservative – Christian, or otherwise – to value stuff and practices just because they are familiar. To do stuff as it was done when they were kids, because the world seemed more safe when they were protected by their parents, and they were more ignorant about all the evil in it. It reveals a level of insecurity as a result of a lack of ability to analyze reality around them.
If a person does not have even the basic critical thinking skills (and they are not promoted by any religious culture I know of), then that person is more bound to lean on intuition. But as intuition is an instinctive reactionary method of survival, it far too often causes people to act on their fears, rather than on facts. This might be why the opinions of some Christian conservatives appear as childish to us.
The entire idea of a benevolent personal deity, that is omnipotent is in itself such an infantile idea, that I have hard time to grasp how some people do not have even a dawning realisation of it themselves as they grow up to adulthood. 😉
What a lovely coloured sky behind the flowers. I am really taken.
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Thank you for the picture praise! You’re right that I shouldn’t have taken the name of the Commodore 64 in vain. It gave me much enjoyment in its day. It would be interesting to take a large sample of Christians and analyse how their parental experiences interact with their belief system. The lost father figure must be a big draw.
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Pingback: Dawn has broken… | See, there's this thing called biology...
That photo of the blooming tree is outstanding…I’d hang that in my living room. The stems almost look blue against the sky. Gorgeous!
I had to stop visiting Insanity’s blog, it made me insane. Though I like that she has a good sense of humor about most things.
As to the topic of you post Vi, of course christians are child-like. When you only ever have to worry about things ZAPPING into the universe by god’s magic, it takes a lot of pressure off. The world comes down to god’s will this and god’s will that…no reason to get stressed out about stuff like genocide, starving children, lack of medical care around the world, etc. All you need to do is pray.
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More picture praise, oh how it warms my childish heart! You should persevere with Insanity, there’s always a topic worth reading for squirm value, and the comments can be priceless too. She makes so many sensible statements followed up by WTFs.
“When you only ever have to worry about things ZAPPING into the universe by god’s magic, it takes a lot of pressure off.”
Love this!
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“She makes so many sensible statements followed up by WTFs.” Yes. Reading her blog is like driving in a car with my grandma. She’s going along just fine, and then she stomps on the breaks and your head whips forward. Then she stomps on the gas and your head whips back. Then she goes along fine for awhile until she has to stop again. It gives me a sore neck and makes me motion sick.
I think I got the ZAPPING comment from a snarky comment Arch left on my blog in response to Eliza. It made me laugh like hell. I’ll see if I can find it…you’d enjoy it.
My husband walked by, saw your beautiful blooming tree, and said, “god gave her a real gift with the camera!” He had to throw in “god” just to aggravate the crap out of me, so I thought I’d aggravate the crap out of you with it too. 🙂 If I reconverted, I’d still come to your blog just for the photos.
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Eliza said this about evolution: “It takes unbelievable madness to attest that order, purpose and complexity arose accidentally out of nothing.”
Arch’s response: “Yes, compared to your belief that an un-created entity, who has lived forever, zapped everything into existence with magic, I can see why you might find that ‘unbelievable madness.’ ”
In the end, Eliza told us god commanded her to stay away from my blog.
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You’re so lucky! God’s never commanded anyone to stay away from my blog. I feel … unworthy.
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Invite Eliza to your blog Violet…she’ll spice things up in a hurry.
I smiled for two days at her comment about being commanded to stay away from my blog. High praise indeed!
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Well, your grandma driving analogy for Insanity is pretty hilarious too! And you’re making me blush with all this picture praise, you’re the bestest blogging buddy ever! 😀
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These apparent childlike utterances don’t seem as insidious as what one usually comes across.
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They’re my utterances, reading into the minds of the simplistic little creatures, bless them.
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Ah …. I thought the second half of the sentences were you , but not the first. Sort of makes sense now.
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The Good Fairy Delilia is a drunk. She can’t help this disturbed proletariat. I think you’ll need to call Oberon himself out from the forest.
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Scrap that, I just found something far, far, far more powerful than Oberon:
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Fantastic! You may have inspired me to start visiting churches. You can’t get that kind of entertainment for free anywhere else on a Sunday morning.
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Exactly! If he sung at the church near me I’d go every Sunday, without fail.
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It seems terribly cruel, that this song has been posted on yo-tube as the “worst… ever”. Was the poster someone from his parish, perhaps? Christian brotherhood?
This dude puts an effort and clearly sings from his heart. It is comical, but he has my sympathy for being frowned upon and my respect for trying and bravely coming forward with his creative drive.
Do American churches have this sort of “karaoke” events? In Finnish churches, where nobody attends, they just have those ancient hymns, but the pubs are full of karaoke singers. I have allways hated karaoke, though I like pubs very much.
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Aw, you’re so nice Raut!
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He called a child, whom he put among them, 3 and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
Though I think that means a child’s trust and desire to explore, rather than conservative resistance to anything new. Children learn all the time, if allowed to do so.
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Fair point, but these are adults. 😉
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Marianne Dashwood, in her late teens, says something like by her age she has made her opinions, and sees no reason to change them. A child is open. “Become as a child” is one of my aspirations.
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Reading an atheist blog today, I had the realization that many unbelievers view the world with the eyes of a snotty teenager, and the processing power of a toaster oven.
1. Like teenagers, they are weirdly fixated on the role of sex in human life, and try to squeeze complicated sexual issues into simplistic identity boxes. They treat one’s attitudes about those simplistic identity boxes as a litmus test for dividing the world into good people and bad.
2. Having ceased to believe in God they display a touching faith in the mythical guiding powers of Evolution and Progress which endow man with ethical behavior even though evolution (dumb luck) has no moral content, and moral progress has no objective existence.
3. This ethical behavior endowed by the “forces” of Evolution and Progress is, unsurprisingly, indistinguishable from the ethical behavior pushed by actors and rich white folks, a shocking display of adolescent herd mentality.
4. Like teenagers they show a predilection for stupid forms of argument like caricature and ad hominem, which for some reason makes them feel smart.
Hey, this is fun!
You are onto something describing the temptation to paranoia that the conservative feels, but paranoia works both ways. Conservatives worry about who ruined the Golden Age, Progressives are always worrying about the wreckers undermining their Utopia.
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You might like this article. Conservatives are angry, seeking honour; Liberals are contemptuous, seeking sanity. These are apparently very bad attitudes in partners in a marriage: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-hidden-brain/201010/angry-conservatives-and-contemptuous-liberals
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Thanks. The article isn’t all wrong, but it relies on caricatures of how liberals want to see themselves and how they want to see conservatives. Liberals want to be cool and smart, and people like Colbert exploit that by flattering them. Real smart people don’t need to be told. And I’m old enough to remember how liberals reacted to GWB: it wasn’t all just urbane smirks, there was quite a bit of red-faced, spittle flecked rage. They did not smirk at Sarah Palin, they called her a cunt whom they wanted to hate-fuck.
I would define it this way: conservatives feel under siege, liberals feel frustrated. Either attitude, poked long enough, will erupt in rage.
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@dpmonahan, hello again…
1. Are you saying sex is not a big part of human existance? In my experience it is the religions that are fixed to controll sexual drives of humans. Am I wrong? The level of such obsessive controll works far too often as an indicator on how much a person has been coerced to give up their innate humanity and indipendence to social controll mechanism, we call religion. Does it not? Are the Christian conservatives not expecting other people to act on the very narrow sexual role models of their own?
2. I have not ceased to belive in any gods, so I guess this does not concern me directly, but what on earth made you think anybody thought evolution and progress as mythical guiding powers? That is absurd. Do you not see? The claim makes no sense at all. They however are forces we have and can recognize in the material, observable reality unlike gods. Are they not?
3. Any actual ethics are derived from reality, not from arbitrary commands from imaginary and unverifiable entities beyond reality – the material, observable reality we can actually evaluate on any even remotely objecive level. Rich and popular folks are often at the forefront of any social movement, because they feel safer from being ostracised. There is no herd mentality in that. On the contrary. Exeptional people, like pope Franciscus have the nerve to do exeptional things. Same applies to atheists.
4. You do not know if those you refer to are infact teenagers, but to claim this much of the atheist bloggers in general, you are painting with a too wide a brush. Are you not? Do you think the examples Violet gave in her topic post were not representative of the Christian conservative bloggers? If you do, then why not just say it?
I agree that anybody may be paranoid. The conservative relies on the past, as it has brought him and the society as far it is. It is a very primitive, but effective evolutionary survival mechanism to rely on something familiar. Almost instinctively animalistic. Fear is the key behind it. The progressives may sometimes bring the society into something worse than it was before and people get their fingers burned with new stuff, but without their drive for “utopia” no progress would have been ever made. Courage to take the risk is the driving force behind that. In human terms, having no willingness for a change for the better would be equal to leaving us as apes on the plains without tools or fire. Right? Or in the paradise ignorant of everything. Is it not a healthy mindset to try to make things better, than just being content that things are good for them personally? Wich is more responsible?
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1. I think there is a fixation on sex among people who call themselves progressive since the 1950s. Conservative reactions are just that: reactions. Yes, sex is important, no, it is not your identity.
2. Many people like to treat progress and evolution as if they are things or forces shaping events, or worse, making them the bearers of ethical content. The language “evolution does”, “evolution shapes” or “because of progress” is treating “stuff that happens” as if it were the Holy Spirit. I’m not accusing you of doing it, but it is a common error.
3. Rich and popular people are immune to the herd mentality? In my experience they are the herd. As for the source of ethical behavior, I don’t see any way to derive an “ought” from an “is” unless there is something obligatory about human nature, as in it is created by an absolute being (theism), or is itself absolute (pantheism).
4. Of course I am painting with too wide a brush. I think it is natural to wander the internet looking for grotesques, but it is wrong to say “these grotesques are the norm”.
Progress and conservation have no value in themselves. The question is whether the values we have are better than the values we are acquiring. The newness or oldness of the values is irrelevant to their goodness.
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Thank you! I do so love these mirror things. And you’ve done a not too bad job considering all your views are wonky. 😀
I see Raut has answered you point by point which thankfully saves me having to go there.
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I do my best
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@Violetwisp, now I almost feel chivalrous. 😉
@Dpmonahan, you do bring up interresting points, though I fail to see how any of these actually connects with the topic post.
1. Sexual orientation is typically part of our identities. I do not know, if that is so for you, nor am I trying to demand you align your identity according to your sexuality, but for many it is a profound part of their identity. Identity consists of many varying factors among wich sexuality is just one. But it is a social taboo issue, that often gets to be brushed under the carpet and as a result conservatively inclined people do seem to often ask for other people to conform into their particular sense of sexuality, that quite often, they themselves have not really ever faced, since they have rather not considered the issue at all.
Or why do you think it is the conservatives who oppose equal marriage rights? It is in no way taking anything from them, that they are in any way ethically justified. Is it?
Incidentally, did you notice, you did not answer my question? Or are you saying, that conservatives meddling in other people’s private issues, like for example, their sexual orientation, is just reactionary to being discomforted by other people dealing with their own and possibly varying views on the issue? That does not by any means justify it, does it?
2. The equation you refer to, is only familiar to me from the reactions of theists, who sometimes seem to be fixated to the general idea, that there must be an agent behind all events. This is a known evolutionary survival mechanism, to assume agency even when there is no immidiate evidence of any. To assume the noise in the brushes is a potentially dangerous beast, or an enemy rather than just the wind, is intuitional survival instinct to jump into to conclusion, that may make the difference between life and death, but when we have time to make the analysis based on actual information, we are able to better evaluate reality, and in most cases there is no agent behind the noise in the bush. Is there? That is, unless we have been crippled by superstitious, or otherwise overtly instinctive animalistic thinking.
3. I did not by any means say the rich and popular are immune to herd mentality. Where did you get that? Or are you jumping to conclusions? On the contrary, one can see herd mentality at it’s worst in the rich investors acting out their greed, hopes and fears in the markets. I say worst, because their herd mentality has dramatic effects on a great number of other people. What I said, was that people are more prone to come out and be heard with their new and exeptional ideas when they are rich and popular, like the pope. Is this not so? Blaming the pope to have herd mentality is just silly, but he is just a nother celeb man who wears a dress in the public, like his herd expects him to. Right?
4. Did Violet claim her examples were the norm? Were her examples not representative of the conservative Christian mindset, or the dangers of where it might lead?
I totally agree with you that progress, or conservatism in themselves have no value. As I said progress may take us to dark places, just like conservativism may keep us from reaching the light and vice versa. What is considered progressive, or conservative varies from society to society. Here in Finland socialism is a conservative value in itself. Even our right wing parties claim to want to protect the wellfare society our socialists have built. Funny that. Is it not?
Yet, in the social debate about wether we should hold on to something old or go for the new stuff – worldwidely – it is the conservatives who claim, that the old stuff is good just because this is what we have always done and look at how well everything is set allready, while the progressive people are in more need to reason and explain with what little evidence they can produce, why what they are aiming for would bring about a better future.
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1. You are right, I overstated. Yes, sexuality is part of your identity. But like a gay friend of mine says: it is part of who I am, it does not define me. I think contemporary identity politics overstates sexual identity, which is more fluid and complex than the boxes we put people into.
2) The point is, evolution and progress are not ‘things’. They do not influence, shape or guide, they are not forces, they are only “stuff that happens”. Yet, people treat them as if they are things, and make them into the source of ethical action. It is a pernicious mental error.
3) You really don’t have an argument here. If everybody is prone to herd thinking, then everybody is prone to herd thinking, including those who proclaim a cutting-edge morality which is in fact quite conventional and serves the interests of the wealthy.
4. The apologetic purpose is to insinuate it is the norm.
Socialism as conservative… yes, I imagine that is a common phenomena. Even over here when Progressives look for examples of successful Government programs they point to Social Security and the Highway Program, 80 and 60 years old respectively.
In the US the best predictor of political affiliation is attitude towards economic risk. People who chose high-risk, high-reward careers are overwhelmingly “conservative”. People who chose low-risk careers are overwhelmingly “progressive”. The words mean different things in different contexts.
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You went to the spam tin!
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@Dpmonahan, do not worry about being spammed. I have been spammed from a number of Theist blogs, even when I was making very short (well, short for me and a lot shorter than anything I have written here) and polite comments. Though, it did seemed they considered just disagreeing impolite.
1. I agree with your gay friend. To me it seems though, that it is the conservatives who are more prone to put others into boxes (and a smaller number of boxes even at that) according to sexuality, than progressives. Or rather more often they would put them back into the closet. Is this not so? If it is, then how can you possibly blame the progressive people for putting people into boxes, when it is generally considered progress that people are not evaluated according to boxes as much as they used to be?
2. Even though there is no intelligence behind evolution, it does not mean it is a totally random and chaotic set of events. I am sorry if you see things like this in black and white. However, evolution has to follow the rules of the reality. It is a phenomenon that has no particular purpose as if set by any intelligence, yet it is logical. Ethics are derived from reality. That is – ethics should be derived from reality, for them to actually be ethical. Evolution is part of that reality. And there you see, how what is defines what should be. Not too complicated?
We are able to mentally escape reality into all sorts of imaginary realities and one of the most typical one is such where imaginary divinities guide and help humans, or alternatively test and hinder humans. But pretending morality and ethics come from such escapist dreams does not provide better ethics, nor morality. Rather they hinder us from finding out what really is more ethical and moral, than our earliest assumptions of it. Fantasy can be a great tool to understand ethics, but it must not start to dictate our concept of morality. Right?
3. All are prone to herd mentality. However, some are more able to overcome it on occasion, and sometimes this is because of difference in social pressure towards them. Accusing a relatively small number of people for acting simply out of herd mentality, when they infact challenge pre-existing moral values or cultural expectations is silly. Is it not? Like I said, is the pope acting out of herd mentality, when he tries to renew some elements of the rigid form of the Catholic church, or when he decides – once again – to wear the skirt in public?
4. Apologetic purpose is to insinuate what is the norm? Were the topic post examples by Violet not representative of Christian conservatives? I am getting a bit tired to ask this over and over again without an answer.
So, proggressive people are more prudent in the US, than the conservatives? On what sort of statistics this was based on? Does it then imply, that the conservatives are more extreme in anything? That they are more prone to take the high-risk in their own lives, but then would like to save the society exactly as it is and not make it any better? Is it because such a society that exists without improvements enables them to take higher risks even at the expense of others? A sort of gamblers mentality? Nothing would be called high-risk if it did not involve a high rate of failure also, so did these conservative people take the high-risk without fully understanding the risks involved, were they from the get go less likely to be economically totally ravaged even by a high risk, or in hindsight, after failing economically do they still just cling on to the social values that bitch slapped them, because those form a part of their identity?
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1) The ever increasing number of “sexual identities” (LGTBAPB etc) is an attempt to define people according to labels.
2) Sorry, according to the dominate neo-Darwinin model evolution IS random genetic mutations; some survive, some do not. There is noting about past evolution that obliges contemporary human behavior at all, and future evolution is unknowable.
3) OK, so wealthy people set up a new fad that benefits them socially or economically, and a bunch of toadies go following and defending the fad, and that is not herd behavior?
4) She did not have to say it, the intent was obvious. I’m not mad, just pointing it out.
I said “conservative” and “progressive” have no value in themselves, and even mean different things in different contexts. American conservatives are risk-takers when it comes to money, progressives risk avoiders, which shows the relative nature of the terms.
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@Dpmonaghan
1. That assortment of ever increasing number of “labels” is an attempt to show how the old boxes of heterosexual vs. homosexual were limited and rigid in the first place.
2. Yes, yes. Mutations are random, but what gets to survive is directly and indirectly affected by the reality. In that sense, the system is not totally chaotic at all. But order does not require intelligence behind it. Our ethics and morality are derived from our empathetic ability – an evolutionary survival trait we share with most social species. There is nothing, that obliges human behaviour, exept material, observable reality. Is there? What could that even be?
3. Are you saying, that if the pope tries to renew the rigid forms of Chatholic church, it is just a fad, that the “cronies” are following just because of herd mentality, and they have absolutely no rational, ethical, or moral reasons to do so?
4. Mad? What intent are you referring to? What are you on about?
I allready agreed whith your assesment on “progressive” and “conservative” being dependant on the context. Did you not notice? In fact, I have allwayst thought that.
Once more: Were the topic post examples by Violet not representative, what they were meant to be representative of? And why do you find answering this simple question so hard?
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1) Agreed, so we should probably scrap identity boxes all together and admit that sexuality is more fluid than we like to admit.
2) The capacity to empathize, if it is a product of genetic mutations, does not oblige anybody to in actually empathize, which is proven by the fact that we always pick and chose with whom to empathize anyway. When we have chosen, our capacity for empathy does not give us any clear course of action.
If the standard of behavior is random mutation and dumb luck (“survival of the survivors”, no one talks about “survival of the fittest” anymore), then there is no reason it could not have been different, and no reason for someone to not act differently now.
3) I’m not talking about individual actions but general trends. For example, American divorce laws are economically convenient for rich people, so everyone treats those laws like fundamental human rights, even though they have proven economically disastrous for the poor and working class. “Class creates consciousness”, said a bad man who was right about a few things.
4) The apologetic purpose of the post was to troll the internet and find grotesque examples of christian belief, or common christian beliefs given a false psychological interpretation, in order to present Christians as infantile. All in good fun, of course, but not to be taken any more seriously than my counter examples above.
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@Dpmonahan.
1. Agreed, I am all for scrapping unnecessary boxes. And especially against putting other people into boxes we have invented or learned from third parties who had no clue. However, I think people have a right to self-identify as it is a part of the process of understanding ourselves. Most people self-identify on various different levels and some recognition of their own sexual orientation is usually a part of it. Correct? How about you? Are you totally ambiguent about your sexuality to self and others? And when we have self-identified are other people then not justified to identify and recognize us by those labels?
2. The current scientific understanding is, that the ability to emphatize is a product of evolution and naturally of beneficial genetic mutations to the survival of the fittest. The capacity does not oblige one to be empathetic any more than the capacity to walk obliges one to take a step. What obliges us? The capacity to breathe, perhaps? Breathe or die. It has direct and imminent effect in your life in the reality. But so could not taking a step, if a leopard is on the prowl it might well eat the human individual refusing to run away. Or in modern society a person who never walked could develop serious illnesses through his/her immobility. Correct? In a similar fashion, not empathising is likely to have very serious negative impact on your life and even possibilities to procreate. Right? Humans are fairly weak animals in comparrison to our size, but our strength lies in our capacity to think and form social bonds. The latter requires the use of empathy. The former enables us to come to the best awailable solutions in our reasoning, for example, how to employ our empathetic ability to form the healthiest and most favourable society. Nothing at all obliges us as individuals to use those capacities, but as we are enabled through them we often also do get satisfaction by utilizing them. Do we not?
Why would no one talk about the survival of the fittest anymore? It is still the scientific norm of how evolution works? I have noticed several fascistically inclined (often religious) people imposing their own misunderstanding (thinking it says strongest instead of fittest) of the term on it and that might explain why the terminology has become difficult to use, but I do not think, that would require the science to be changed. Of course there is the addition of luckiest, but that does not rule out the fittest in any way. What we percieve as luck may be totally random occurance, but fittest still is the term that best describes the most likely abilities, that enable the best likelyhood to become “lucky”.
Once again, you did not answer me, what ever would oblige us to anything morally? If you claim evolution does not explain our morality, because it does not oblige us to anything, then you need to represent the alternative, that supposedly obliges us. Even though I claim, that morality does not require anything to necessarily oblige us to anythig. Or are you satisfied with that you do not know where morality comes from?
3. Yes, your version of democracy in the US seems like politics were very much be run by the richest people. That inevitably will lead to laws that mainly benefit the rich. But then, some of the rich people also have conscience as a result to have the natural evolutionary ability to emphatize. Do they not? I have also read a lot of bitching by your self-identifying religious conservatives, about the laws that enable poor divorced single mothers to live a decent life. Is that representative of religious conservatism, that they do oppose any attempts to make the lives of the poor better in this regard? Who now are the “cronies” with the “herd mentality”?
Divorces being destructive to human lives, are not stopped by limiting the right to divorce, because nothing at all would be repaired by that. People do have their reasons to divorce. It is a painfull experience. By far most people who divorce do not do that because it is fashionable, anywhere, but because their relationships have ended up in a dead end and are hurting them emotionally and sometimes even physically. If someone did divorce just because they thought it was a fad, they were too infantile to even marry (as it seems so were their spouses), so it was better even for them to divorce. Yes?
The purpose of the society is to enable humans. It is our choise wether it only enables the richest people to take advantage of the rest, or wether it is to make life for everybody better. By enabling your natural empathetic ability, you should be able to tell yourself wich is better. Right? Unless of course, if you have been traumatized by something like your upbringing to be a bit handicapped not to be able to fully enable your empathetic ability in this matter… In wich case I am sorry for you.
The pope is an institution. As an individual he has very little possibilities to change anything, but as long as the “cronies” go along he can move mountains – so to speak. Are those “cronies” only following a herd mentality, or do they choose to follow the pope because they have their own moral and ethical causes, that they too want to change the world and the church as part of their own and the global society for better?
4. So, wich is it? Do you think these examples Violet posted in the topic post were not representative of the conservative Christian mindset? If not, would it not have been better then to make a representation of what you think better describes the Christian conservative mind set in these issues, than to jump to making non-representative claims about progressive atheists as some sort of an attempt at sarcasm? I for one would have been interrested in your view, as to not make false assumptions about Christian conservatives based on such examples as the one Violet posted in the topic post, as those have been very much in line with my own experience about the conservative Christians. But my scope is limited, as is Violets and yours, but we could by uniting our forces in this issue to make a wider and more accurate picture of reality. Could we not? Unless of course, you too really think Violet has actually chosen representative examples and that infact, is our common view on people who self-identify as Christian conservatives?
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Rutakky,
1) People can notice their own tendencies, but the labels we provide don’t exhaust their experiences. Make too much of the label we lose the individual. I don’t really see where we are disagreeing.
2) Fittest, taken in the sense of adapted enough to a changing environment to pass on genes, means luck, because as far as the organism is concerned, environmental factors are as much a matter of luck as mutation.
You go back to empathy, we must use it because we have it. No, we don’t. We chose not to use empathy all the time according to our political prejudices. (Palestine or Israel?) Or we can use empathy to damage others: my enemy hurts most when I do this, so I’ll do it some more.
Is hatred of other tribes also an evolutionary trait? Probably. Why would we not be obliged to use it?
Of course I have a different belief of why some things are objectively wrong.
3) The example I used, that no-fault divorce is treated as sacred, and is of benefit to rich people, but economically disastrous for the poor and working class, is an empirical fact that can’t be argued against. Class creates consciousness, rich are just as prone as anybody else.
4) Sarcasm is an appropriate response to sarcasm, though perhaps not the only one.
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@Dpmonahan
1. It indeed seems we agree on this matter. Curious though, how many comments it took us to find out as much. I guess it is because it is indeed hard to fit any ideas to short blog comments and that may cause such comments often seem like we were trying to fit complex ideas into simplistic forms. 😉
2. While we can not nor rule out the luck factor out from such a complex process as evolution, it does not mean by any means, that evolution is totally random. It is still confined by reality. In that reality there would be no evolution without the slightly different and sometimes the more likely = fittest, to survive and procreate in comparrison to the less likely to do the same, despite sometimes getting lucky. Think about the timespan – please.
Never did I say we “must” use empathy and I do think human history is full of examples when it has not been applied and that has served the survival of some individuals quite well. However, it is clear that empathy is a very strong and usefull evolutionary trait and that morals is derived from it. When it is combined with the best awailable information, it just works mate.
Yes, hatred is an effective evolutionary trait and that needs to be combined with the best awailable information as well. But ignorant, overtly empathetic, or hatefull and often fearfull people make the worst choises ever. Woud you not agree? Without empathy towards the victims of the nazies and hatred against them would their crimes have been stopped? Nothing at all obliged anyone to do so. People chose to do this because they had information about it and they understood consequenses of the actions of the nazies and realized the harm they were doing. That is what acting morally is all about. To understand the harm and benefits of actions and inaction and then acting accordingly. Not because any divine arbitrary commands had said the nazies are bad. Right?
How political attitudes divide in the western world between Palestinians and the Israeli is mostly about the understanding of morality, or lack of it. The conservative Christians seem to set them selves as firmly behind the Jewish nation as they did in Europe only some 70+ years ago set themselves behind the nazies and the fascists. Perhaps it is because their empathetic ability has been handicapped by some form of religious indoctrination, that they seem unable to evaluate the situation according to what is being done, but rather evaluate it according to who is acting. A form of most ignorant tribalism. The Christian conservatives set themselves in the same camp with the Israelis and refuse to see the issue from the Palestinian side, maily for some unfathomable reasons derived from superstition, not from what is actually happening.
The opposite view of the progressive non-religious people are much more formed according to the fact, that the state of Israel is the one organized political body in the area with effective military might at it’s disposal, but it does nothing to dissolve the crisis, rather it utilizes it and as the nazies has succumbed to racism, might makes right attitudes, collective punishment and the forming of wall enclosed ghettoes, while it continues to steal the land from the Palestinians to settle in it’s illegal settlers.
This ever ongoing situation and success the state of Israel has had against it’s neighbours has made it ever more arrogant and is the main cause for such religiously motivated criminal terrorist organizations such as Hamas to give rise at the expense of the desperation of the Palestinians. The Israeli people are then frightened by them and vote for their conservative goverments to power again and again, because they so much fear the Palestinians. This in turn feeds racism and religisiosity among the Israeli nation and the vicious cirkle is ready. This is of course a harsh generalization and there are good willing people in every group, just as there are selfish people in every group. But I am talking here about the natural ability, it being either handicapped, or enhanced by culture.
Empathy is best utilized by looking at any situation through the vail of ignorance. If one looks at any situation in a society, but does not know in whose shoes (for example the victim or the guilty party) one is going to be in that situation one tries to make the society fair for anyone. That choise is enhanced by as much of objective information as possible. Correct? Selfishness, that is much advertized in modern idealistic capitalism is also a natural survival trait, but with better information people are able to come to the natural conclusion, that a fair society is better for all, while totally selfishly run society only serves the most selfish, talented, or lucky people and after a while it crumbles. So, it is ultimately selfish to support a fair society. Right?
3. Did you even read my previous comment?
4. Oh, you have every right to use sarcasm, but I am not so sure if Violet was merely being sarcastic. Are you? Do you think the examples Violet gave in the topic post were not representative of Christian conservatives? Why would you not answer this? Is it because, you know they actually are – tragicomically – rather representative indeed?
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1. Not uncommon for people to approach a subject from different perspectives to find themselves in more agreement than they thought.
2. Luck is not a factor in evolution, but the essence. Most evolutionary theories are all about eliminating finality as a cause: order does not have a purpose, but is the result of random events: mutation in a changing environment.
Looks like we agree that the trait of empathy does not determine morality, because some other element determines when and how to use empathy and not hate.
2b. To make a huge aside: I don’t think conservative identification with Israel has as much to do with religion as a predilection for the Westphalian model: the state of Israel is a modern democratic state responsible to its own citizens; the Palestinians are anything but. In the Westphalian model, the Palestinians simply don’t have an argument, and the Israelis are generally justified in their actions.
Most Latin-American Christians I know are anti-Israel, not because they are Christians, but because they are from nations run by gangsters, so the Westphalian model makes no sense to them. Many Italian clergy I’ve known are anti-Israel because they prefer the Medieval model to the modern. Progressives are anti-Israel, because at some level they have bought into the Marxist critique of the nation-state.
Anyway, my purpose in bringing up the Israel-Palestine question is to point out selective empathy. I recall an AP headline from a few months ago that said: “Palestinian Man Shot by Police”, failing to mention that a few minutes before being shot, the Palestinian in question intentionally plowed his car into a crowd of Israelis, killing a little girl.
3. I don’t really get what you are trying to say. My point is simple: progressive morality is too conveniently aligned with the economic interests of the well-to-do, which is a sign of toadyism and group-think.
4. I do not think the examples are representative, because I happen to know quite a few conservative Christians. I don’t define atheism by the cranks and crazies I discover on the internet. But I also understand that the point of the post is not to be fair, but to tease and provoke a discussion, which is OK. I responded in kind.
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@Dpmonahan
1. Agreed.
2. Well, without empathy morality would be totally different. Would it not? Empathy as it exists and interacts with reality determines morality. Morality is about human behaviour, right? Humans are social animals, even if we do have other evolutional traits like hatred and selfishness as well. Therefore human behaviour is much about our behaviour towards each other, but of course also about our behaviour towards rest of the reality we exist in. Whith better information we are better equipped to make better judgement and empathy is a tool that informs us about the reactions our environment is going to have on any of our actions.
2b. In my experience, most conservative Christians have no clue about the treaty of Westphalia, nor of the social model it represented. Do you have different experience on the matter? Even if there are some that assign to what you said, by far most of them are not at all interrested in such political principles, but in a herd mentality preached to them from the pulpit supposedly representing the authority of the alledged creator entity of the entire universe, or from political pundits sharing their unwarranted faith in unnatural superstitious notions about such gods. The arguments they represent over and over again, in internet, TV and over the radio that I hear, are that all the land in Palestine belongs to the Jews because some god once promised it to them and that the Israelis have a right to defend themselves. I can see how appealing the idea is, that the Israelis have a right to defend themselves and of course they do, but the thing about it all being supernaturally assigned to one nation is a sick and totally unverified fantasy, that can only lead to conflict. Is it not?
Do you think any of it justifies Israel to land grabs, stealing the property of the Palestinians, the forming of walled in ghettoes, systematic destruction of the infrastructure of in the Palestinian territories, open racism, and indeed collective punishment? How would you feel, if you were punished for what your relative has done? If you had been wronged, would you feel justified in avenging to the relatives and family of the guilty party? Perhaps bulldozing their entire house?
3. Well, from where I look at the world it seems to me to quite the opposite. The conservative religious politics have for generations been standing behind the rich and their interrests. Hardly ever have I seen them set themselves to support the poor, exept under pressure to loose the status quo of the society that promoted the division of power allready existing in wich the poor have ever had very little to say. But democracy is all about sharing power. Is it not?
As in your example about divorce, the right wingers oppose the helping of single poor mothers with their divorce and instead would not allow them to divorce at all, wich would leave them in their failed marriages. Luckily the rich need to divorce too, so they have agreed to make it legal even though the unmarried priesthood fought against it for quite a while supposeldy because their god did not like the notion. Of course it is easier to the rich, but the society could make it more easier to the poor too. It is a political choise. Do we want a better society with less misery in it, or not? Would it not be better for all of us?
Evolution is not a political agenda, it is a scientific fact. The reality in wich we live in as according to the best possible, if not the only, method we have to get any even remotely objective information about anything- namely science. Right? Religions are all about politics. A political system that is not backed up by some form of religion shall find it hard to controll the minds of people to accept the division of property and resources between the powerhungry rich and the rest of us. But it is possible in a democracy – and better informed the voters are, the better the society. That is where the social morals comes from, spiced up by the reality that we are social empathetic animals.
4. See, how hard was that? I do not define Christians solely by the cranks and crazies that I find in the internet, but sometimes they are representatives of their own ideals and the ideals they subscribe to. Do you then define the examples Violet posted in the topic post as “cranks and crazies” of conservative Christianity? You do not subscribe to their agendas?
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2a) Of course morality would be different w/out empathy, but I’ve demonstrated it is not the foundation of morality.
2b) A person does not have to know about the treaty of Westphalia to expect a government to act according to the Westphalian order.
I’ve never seen anybody on TV argue Israeli claims in terms of divine right, think you are making that up. Zionism is a secular project.
3) In the old days, a couple seeking divorce had to prove to the state that one partner was breaking the marriage contract. Now it can be broken at will by one party.
Rich people and their kids can survive the economic impact of divorce. Poor and lower middle class people are destroyed by it and never recover lost status. Every statistic done on divorce and class bears this out.
So simply: cui bono? Not the poor. And yet here you are treating no-fault divorce as a human right. Class creates consciousness. You are sucking up to rich people and can’t see it.
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2 a) You have not demonstrated anything of the sort. Human morality is founded on our empathetic ability and the reality of cause and effect. What is wrong in reality – as in harmfull – would be wrong even if we did not have the empathetic ability to understand that it is, but then, if we did not have the ability we could not percieve it being wrong. Could we? What else could our morality be based upon, than our understanding of it? The maximal and minimal harm, or benefit to humans, perhaps? Or some contradictionarily interpretable alledged and totally arbitrary commands by an entity whose existance has never been demonstrated on any even remotely objective manner?
2b) Well, obviously you have not then being paying attention when following the arguments the conservative Christians make for the Zionistic cause. Again and again have I wittnessed them argue, that the Christians have a special bond with the Jews and because your common god supposedly promised the land to the “chosen” Israeli people and how holy it is to them. As if it was not equally holy to the Muslims. How could you have missed all this propaganda? Are you a conservative Christian only because you are not aware of their causes?
Oh, they do make up all sort of nonsensical seemingly secular excuses as well, such as Nute Gingrich – that comes to my mind – who said, that the the Palestinians could have just moved to somewhere else in Arabia to give way to the Jewish nation, because Palestinians are not really Palestinians, but Arabs. But would you – if you put your empathetic ability to work – or for example most of Caucasian Americans be ready to leave everything without any compensation to move to Europe just because Native Americans demanded you who are not real Americans and should move some other continent from where your ancestors came from? In addition, that of course applies to any Israelis, whom I am not demanding to move out from their homes, but I am demanding they stop inhumane and illegal actions like the land grabs, stealing of other peoples property and collective punishment. Of racism they might find harder to give up, but their government should not support any such. Should it? Nor should anybody support racism on religious reasons as the Christian Zionists are doing today. Should they?
To me it is a great tragedy, that the people who have most suffered from racism within the last 100 years have become racists themselves when the opportunity gave rise.
3) No, I am not. You are by assigning to conservative values, that keep up a status quo in the world where the rich are pretty much free to oppress and exploit the poor.
Best way to prevent divorces is let people have proper sex education, premarital relationships and by not being expected and pushed to marry too young. Do you support any of these? Most conservative Christians seem rather opposed to such. Why? But even in the US divorces do happen more in the states that are run by conservative Christians? Why do you think is this?
By denying people the chance to divorce does nothing to improve the situation in wich people find themselves when they would rather divorce. Does it? We have allready seen how well that society worked. Rich people still moved to separate bedrooms, houses and lives while the poor were stuck with failed relationships and ended up in terribly complex relationships with third parties, that in turn, led even to murders. People should be free to divorce when they need and want to. Marriage is a private and emotional contract between the spouses first and only secondly with the government. Who is the outsider to determine, that the marriage “contract” has been broken between the spouses? The poor divorcees should be supported in their predicament, not judged. Which one of us is in this matter now closer to what Jesus taught? 😉
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2a) I will freely admit that empathy has a role in morality, but you already admitted empathy is not the final arbitrator of morals because it is selective. QED.
The original discussion whether evolution could be a bearer of moral content. You said it was because empathy is an evolved trait. But empathy is not useful for determining moral acts, see above.
2b) Rather than look for secret motives of has-been politicians like Gingrich, why not just look at what they say? I’m sure if you broke down the remarks of someone like Gingrich or similar politicians, you will find that they expect a government to act according to the Westphalian tradition.
In my experience, when someone criticizes Israeli actions (and ignores the rather revolting acts of the Palestinians) the unspoken premise is the illegitimacy of the modern nation-state. When someone supports Israel against the Palestinians, it is because they implicitly accept the modern state, and reject the pre-modern politics of the Palestinians.
Your insistence that these motives are secretly theological doesn’t cover exceptions: why do Christian Latinos almost universally hate Israel? Why do all the Italian and Irish clergy I’ve ever known hate Israel? Because the Latins come from nations traditionally run by gangsters and the Catholic clergy would prefer a pre-Westphalian world.
The original point of this was to point out that empathy is selective. Here it is determined by a political world-view that has little to do with theology.
3) I never said that people should not be allowed to divorce, but that they should prove breach of contract. Civil governments enforce private contracts all the time.
No-fault divorce sets up perverse incentives: the woman gets custody of the children if she initiates the divorce, she receives government welfare and a portion of her ex-husband’s income. Divorce is for her short term benefit. Long term however she is “damaged goods” having children and an ex she is less attractive to ambitions men. She is highly attractive, however, to men who don’t want to work, since she has an income. Her long term prospects for economic advancement are ruined: in fact, she will lose economic standing over the long run.
Her ex-husband meanwhile is now supporting two households, making saving or home-buying impossible. If he misses child-support payments, he goes to jail. (In some states, up to 10% of inmates are there for unpaid child-support.) With jail time on his record, he is less attractive to employers. His prospects for economic advancement are destroyed.
But if you are rich, you have more room to fall, more assets to split up, more social contacts to use. For rich people divorce is a temporary setback with long-term benefits. For poor people it is economic disaster.
As for children, it is well known that divorce is terrible for their development. But no one cares about them, because empathy is selective.
So when it comes to contemporary divorce laws, cui bono? Not poor people. Not children. But they don’t matter, do they.
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@Dpmonahan
2a) Of course empathy is usefull in determining wether an act is moral or not. How would you go about to determine wether an act is moral or not? We can reason even without empathy, wether an action is harmfull or not, but to reach the conclusion empathy serves both as the intuition and a measuring stick what can be considered harmfull. What else could even be used as a similar measuring stick on the emotional level of harm?
What is the final arbitrator of morals, if not our understanding of it?
2b) Am I to understand you think, that Gingrich and those who think like him in this matter are once again “cranks” and not at all representative of what Christian conservatives think about the matter? How very little you seem to know of the agendas of the Christian conservative movement.
Who ignores the acts of Palestinians? We all know Hamas is a criminal terrorist organization. Who in the western world does not condemn religious violence, or terrorist attacks? But who is it, that ignores the fact that such organizations are the direct result of Israeli politics and the way the Israeli government has dealt with the Palestinians? The Israelis have barely kept any agreements they have ever made with far more moderate and secular Palestinians like the PLO and Fatah. No wonder that such extreme groups as the Hamas has gain popularity among the Palestinian nation, and if Hamas is going to be crushed by military might, it will only give rise to even more extreme groups, if the reasons why it rose are not dealt with.
Why is it that the Israelis think they do not need to respect the treaties they have signed? Because what ever they do, they know they will be supported by the US. Right? And why is that? Is it because there is a very strong and religiously motivated Christian Zionistic movement in the US politics? Do not come to tell me their motivation is purely secular. That is just ridiculous, even if there are secular reasons like the US using Israel as a tool in their foreign politics to keep up their “divide and rule” in the oil rich territories of Near- and Middle-East.
Should I conclude, that you accept the land grabs, stealing Palestinian property, collective punishment and open racism by the Israeli government, because a modern state has right to treat some people like that, if they do not comply with said modernism, or simply because they want these people to pack their bags and leave their ancestral homes? It is precisely because of the fact that Israel is THE modern state in Palestine, that it also bears the responsibility of how the situation has escalated there and what the future will be. By treating the Palestinians as humans with equal rights to the citizens of the Israeli state, or at very least as humans at all, they could have awoided what has happened between them. But the segragation, oppression and dehumanization of the Palestinian population the modern state of Israel will only escalate the violence even further. The concept of a modern state based around a religious and ethnic group as a nation state may be modern, but to really be modern and just it requires it treats people with equal respect despite and regardless of their religion and ethnicity. And you know what? There are a lot of very rich Israeli rich who have benefited from all of the violence and oppression inevitably resulting in corruption by exploiting the cheap labour of the poor Palestinians and fearmongering in politics.
But if both sides could employ empathy and reason of reality to the issue, they should know that as societies both would greatly benefit from treating each others as humans. The greed of individuals, lack of vision, fear, lack of understanding of moralty beyond tribalism and religious zealotry has lead them all to where they now stand. That they all need to fear their neighbours.
Latin American rejection of the Israeli politics may partly derive indeed from the fact, that in Latin countries the large populations of Native Americans can relate to the Palestinians, but mostly I would suspect it is only the ancient and strong antisemitism rooted in the Catholic Christian church, that plays a big part in the political understanding of the world in the poor and poorly educated parts of the Americas.
As you very well know theology is not a precise science. Infact, it is not really a science at all, even though because of historical reasons it is treated as one among others. Theology is, however, a very effective excuse to promote a political agenda, but it also creates models and ideals as those are borrowed from “scripture” and set to later times and society. It also is a cause of a bundle of contradicting motives as people try to please the gods they worship or achieve some goals set by ancient revenge fantasies, illusions of supremacy, and all manner of absurd prophesies. Therefore, theological fantasies of any one religious group – say, as in our example the Christians – are divided into any number of sub groups and movements within those. Like the religiously motivated zionism or equally and by the very same religion motivated anti-semitism. Funny and tragic, but also sets a very big question mark on any claims of the god worshipped by all these people acting in good faith against each other. Does it not? What sort of god would ildly sit by and not provide clarity to people acting according to their conscience and what they really think the scriptures as the alledged ” word of god” say on these matters? An evil god? A totally indifferent god? Or most likely an imaginary god? I am sorry, but those are the options, are they not?
3) Mothers getting custody of children by almost default is not the result of there not needing to be any breach of contract. It is the result of conservative values, and roles of women and men in such backwater thinking. Why on earth would you make any such nonexisting connection between the two? Grasping straws, are we?
Divorce is the choise of an adult person as much as a marriage. If a person is mature enough to evaluate whom to vote for, or with whom they are to marry, we should expect them to be mature enough to self evaluate the reprecussions and benefits of their divorce. Right?
Whom ever finds a nother person attractive does not work on such cold and emotionless benefit analysis as you present. Is that really how you would go about choosing a spouse? That is emotionally so poor, that it sounds almost clinical. Sad really. What an unromantic and unenchanted world you must live in, if that is really what you think. It also inevitably sounds like any average woman with normal human emotions would want to divorce you, if you really think this way. That in turn would then also explain why you would want the government to enforce a need to show a breach in marriage contract, because it would be very hard to have a legal clause for breach of contract for just emotional handicaps such as not really having married for love, but for social position. Love can be imitated by even the most unloving people, but a person not having actual love for their spouse would be very difficult to show in a court room. But such can be a very real strain to any relationship and a proper reason for a person to want to divorce.
Most people by far however, come to love some other person not by their social standing, but rather by much more personal attributes. Of course the fact that where do people meet potential companions and love interrests affects with whom they are more likely to liason, but by not supporting the poor divorced society is only going to widen the social gaps and create classes, that do not interact and thereby causing segragation between people into such silly gategories as you have described. The more egalitarian the society is, the less the problems you just described, but I have very rarely met Christian conservatives campaigning against social segragartion. Are you?
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2a) If empathy is selective, then it is not moral. If morals are a result of luck, then there are no morals.
2b) To whom is the modern state accountable? To God? To international opinion? To the coming socialist utopia? No. It is accountable to its own citizens, and exists for their benefit. If you want to argue that the state of Israel should be accountable to someone other than its own citizens, you are arguing that it should not be a modern state, or not a state at all. Which is OK, but you need to be clear about it.
You like to make boogey-men and martyrs out of Israelis and Palestinians and attribute it to theological problems, when the reality is one of cultural perspective: modern state v. non-modern. As for American support of Israel, the two nations have similar views on foreign policy because a) they are modern democratic states and b) unlike Europe or Latin America which exist under American hegemony, they have to fight their own wars.
To go back to the question of empathy where this began: you ask who ignores Palestinian atrocities, you see it in reporting all the time. A few months ago there was the AP headline: “Jerusalem Police Shoot Palestinian Man!” You had to read well into the article to find out that before he was shot he had intentionally driven his car into a crowd of Israelis, killing a little girl. Selective empathy.
3) I’m a firm believer in true love, and a firm believer in common sense. The state should not set up short term incentives to break the marriage contract. Poor people who stay married end up middle class. Working class people who divorce end up poor, even with gov’t assistance.
Selective empathy: you defend the party that decides to break up the marriage over feelings. Why don’t you empathize with the party who does not want to break up the marriage? Why don’t you empathize with the children who are inevitably crushed by the experience?
Why do you defend a system that ensures the perpetuation of poverty?
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@Dpmonahan.
2a) Let me get this straight. Do you think that if I win a sum of money by gambling, that obviously is a result of luck, then that money does not exist? How would evolution being affected by luck make the evolutionary explanation for morals invalid? Empathy is dependant on the perspective and limited information. Just like human morals is limited by the perspective and quality of information. There is no absolute morality as there is no absolute information, but there can certainly be better information and better morality. Empathy is one of the venues to gain information in order to have an informed and moral perspective.
2b) Of course a modern state is accountable to it’s citizens, but that does not justify terror, or oppression against those who are not citizens of the particular state. Does it? If it did, then what the nazies did to the Jews would simply be OK if they had removed the rights of the citizen from the German Jews. And it would all have been all right for the nazies to kill all the Polish, Ukranian, Russian, French and Dutch etc. Jews, because none of those ever were citizens of the nazi-Germany. Is that what you think? Is your chosen avatar a reflection of a Fascist in you? Are you advocating for moral relativity? The Israeli government has exactly as little justification to use the collective punishment as the nazies did, wich is to say, none at all. Or do you disagree?
For the citizens of Israel, it would be better if a peace could be found with the Palestinians, would it not? But how could they expect peace when they are stealing generation over generation the land and property of the Palestinians, building infrastructure to the illegal colonies on Palestinian private property, while destroying infra that the Palestinians use and show open racism towards them? Or are they striving for some sort of “final solution” to the Palestinian problem, like the nazies did with the Jews? The Israelis are holding all the cards in this game, because they are the modern democratic state, that has an actual army, not the palestinians who are becoming more and more desperate in the face of injustice, oppression and exploitation. That is why the modern state of Israel is also responsible for what is going on and for what happens next. Because the US supports Israeli government what ever atrocities it does, or treaties it brakes your country also shares that responsibility. Does it not? If the US attitude towards human rights violations by Israel is because you accept it all, support Israel despite of them and are willing to do the same, then all the talk by the US about human rights violations by some other nations are empty rhetorics. Are they? I sure hope this is not so.
Are you saying Europe and Latin-America need the US to fight their wars for them? Why would you make such a wild and unreal claim and what has it got to do with anything? Have you been watching a little too many heroic Hollywood movies? The US has certainly never fought any wars for my country. What hegemony are you referring to? The one that the US has grabbed in Latin America by the Big Stick policy? Or what? If such a misconception of things is one of the secular excuses for the US religious right to support Israeli apartheid policy, it just goes to show how far off map the Christian conservatives are from the real world and how diminished and tribal is even their secular moral.
Even if it were true that you guys feel sympathy for having similar political goals, does that in any way justify the oppression, segragation, theft of land and property, or indeed collective punishment Israel is using? Honestly, you have not answered this, even though I have posed the question time and time again. Why? Is it because you do not dare to say you support such atrocities, or because you do not, but you would still like to give your support to Israeli politics even if you are able to recognize the inherent racism in them for some other reason – perhaps a religious reason?
I admit that I do not follow the AP news, so I do not know enough of the particular news flash to evaluate it at all. But in my experience news headlines are rarely representative of the entire report. And the report rarely represents the entire story. The report did not rule out the story about the car being driven into a group of people. Did it? Did the police officer shoot the man after the car had stopped? If the man was not armed and the car had already stopped then the police executing the man on the street would be the bigger news flash. In a modern state that is. Would it not? Did the report tell what will happen to the family of the shot man? Do you know what is the standard practice of the Israeli state in such a situation? They go and destroy the home of the family of the man who did this. Do you think it is justified? If the report did not tell that much, then was it, indeed, one sided?
I condemn the terrorist attack by car and feel sorry for the victims. But I also feel for the family of this man. I even feel for the agony that led him to do the wrong thing. Do you? Is your empathy selective in this matter? I also suspect that this man and several like him were motivated by the desperation of the Palestinian people as they obviously are oppressed by the Israeli government. Are they not?
3) I am glad to hear you belive in love and do not evaluate the potential love affections on as ridiculous standards you presented earlierly. So do I. Common sense is however even more elusive term than love. People making the most absurd choises often refer to their common sense, especially when they have next to nothing as it comes to actual information or understanding gained by good information -nor as it is, common sense- about the situation.
If poor people are destitude for powerty when they divorce while married poor people are more likely to end up middle class in your country, even with government support, then that is because the support is poorly managed, and/or insufficient. But often enough, believe me, people do rather choose to live in poverty, then to stay in a poor marriage, regardless if they could reach middle class by staying in it. Wich I doubt, if the things in the relationship have ended in such a bad state in wich one or the other would rather choose divorce. And as we respect them as adults capable to make the choise to marry by their own free will, so should we respect them as adults capable of making the choise to divorce. Should we not?
The rights of an individual end where the rights of the other individual begin. Right? That is the code of a society you would rather live in, is it not? That is why the party who wants to stay married may not hold the party who wants a divorce as captive in the marriage. Simple really, if you think about it. No especially selective empathy required at all. It is absurd to claim, that the kids end up better in a family where one of the parents would rather have a divorce, than when they are taken care of by a single parent. That sort of marriage is almost bound to get emotionally abusive and very traumatic to the kids, even in the rare case it is not that allready. Marriage is not some magic band aid that makes it all go away. If the divorce is in the heart in one of the married couple (kids or not) then it exists in effect. But to bind these people to each other by the legal system of a government would be abusive.
Did someone leave you, or why do you have these twisted ideas about divorce? If that is the case, you have my sympathy, but you should let go. It would be better for you and for all involved. Would it not?
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2a) Morality which is not absolute is not obligatory. When we experience a moral impulse it is “do this, do not do that”, we feel it as an imperative. A luck based morality can’t command.
3) In a Westphalian system, once the Israelis pulled out of the West Bank and Gaza they had no responsibility for policing the people there. If the Palestinians decide to launch terrorist attacks from those places the most reasonable thing (in the Westphalian model) would be to close the border. Do other Palestinians suffer loss of trade? Sure, but they should police themselves by now. Israel should take care of its own citizens.
If you want to propose another model for keeping the international order, try it. But right now this is the one we have.
Yes. My empathy is selective just like everyone else’s.
If the US does not exercise military hegemony is Western and Central Europe, what is the US army doing there?
Vacationing?
3) All available statistical evidence says children of divorce are worse off economically, emotionally, educationally. It is categorically bad for children. Why do you hate children?
True love exists, but if a girl tells me she is “in love” with an unemployed alcoholic, I’ll tell her to leave him: common sense.
No, never been divorced, but I live in a low-income community and I witness how it plays out all the time.
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@Dpmonahan.
2a) There is no obligatory morals. If morals was obligatory, there would not be moral or immoral choises. Would there be free will? Morality is dependant on the quality of information. Abslolute information is impossible to reach, because even if you were a god that created the entire universe, you could not possibly know what you do not know. It is a logical impossibility. Do you understand this? Therefore absolute morality is impossible to reach. Yet we can strive for better morals, and without the information empathy provides us it is ever more difficult to reach better morals. Right?
Look, morality is about what is harmfull or beneficial in human conduct. Right? Think of a family mother in the fifties who was happy about her new refridgerator and the new car in their family, and had every right to, but she could not possibly know that such items could be harmfull to the environment. Is it moral to protect the environment? Is it immoral to harm the environment? We all are ultimately dependant on the environment and even if the harm we cause would only be suffered by the future generations we owe them, because it is moral to act towards others as we would want others to act towards us, if were we those other people. That is what the empathy informs us about. Correct? Now we know the harm of such items as in my example and should act accordingly, but we can not blame the ignorance of the example mother for what she could not have known. There are no absolute morals.
2b) In practice the Israelis have not pulled back from Palestinian territories. Have they? The state of Israel continues to support immigrants to build settlements onto Palestinian owned land and the Israeli army protects those. Did you not know this?
There are several better models to the present situation. One is the two state model and the other would be to incorporate all the Palestinians into the state of Israel with full rights as citizens. Of course in a very short time the name of the country would propably have to be rethought, but the state of Israel is very young and it’s name was pulled out from ancient history, so nothing new there. And if zionism is indeed a secular cause as you would claim there should not be any difficulties about this, nor would have been from the start. That is if Israel was indeed a modern state. But because of racist and religious reasons the Israelis are not signing to either solution despite the obvious benefit of peace it would bring to all it’s citizens.
Here in Finland we have several different religions and people can still coexist we also have several different ethnicities and we can coexist because we are a modern state. If Israel is a modern state I can not see why this would be a problem to them. Do you?
Well, I must admit I am wondering what is the US army doing in Europe. Certainly they are spending US taxdollars for the interrest of some of your big military enterprizes and the benefit of their shareholders, many of whom sit in your parliament. Correct? There are no US troops in Finland exept in the embassy, and according to what I hear they are not very impressive as military goes.
Of course the US military presence in some of the Western European countries has been an economic benefit for these to cut down their own military spending. And US having been the only country that really economically won in both world wars has spend money to rebuild Western Europe in exchange for having military presence there. But do not take Europe as some demilitarized zone. The US has been trying to expand it’s military hegemony over the entire globe, but your armies are not mere peace envoys. Are they? What the f*** is Guantanamo bay prison? Has terrorism decreased or increased since your government declared a war against it? A bit like you declared a war against drugs in Latin-America. Has it resolved the problem or made it worse? You guys are allways declaring wars agains all sorts of things, like I hear one has been declared even against fat. How is that faring?
3) Of course the statistics say, that the divorce children are less well off than those in a marriage. There is no dispute over this, but if you are unable to read even what this means from the statistics, that may explain how difficult it is for you to see where morals comes from in the first place. I understand that it may be hard, if your cultural heritage has handicapped you by religious indoctrination to evaluate reality. One more reason for me to call out the evil of religiousness, that it has damaged you. Let me explain. The fact that the divorced children are bound to have less support, than those from intact families is exactly why those single parent families require proper help from the society, that the conservative Christians seem so often to oppose. You see, those statistics you refere to, tell us nothing about how well children from families that were forced to keep together even though one of the parents would have wanted to divorce – as is what you suggest – would have fared. But we have historical experience of that and that is why the system has been changed, because it was not good for the kids any more than it was for the parents.
I do not hate children, where on earth did you get that fantasy from? How did you jump to that conclusion? By the same method you jumped to the conclusion, that morals has to be absolute and obligatory? Have you used the same method to conclude, that Israel has earned the support of the zionistic US Christian conservatives by secular reasoning alone? Do you not know that we atheists simply love children, especially the babies with the right flavour of sauce? 😉
If there would be a need to have a breach of contract before people could divorce, as we once used to require, then who could be able to divorce even from the most abusive and worst marriages? The rich person who could afford the private detective to dig out or fabricate evidence of such a breach, and the person who could afford a good legal coucillor to push their agenda. We have been there and it was not a good society. It is very hard to provide evidence of emotional abuse or emotional coldness in a court room and any attempt of such would be liable to get very expensive, but such behaviourial models are very damaging to a marriage, not to speak of children. You do realize this much? Now if your society is not much better, than it used to be even though nobody is no longer required to remain married against their free will, and it still causes the divorced to be destitute to powerty, then try to make it better by demanding support for the single parent families, but do not demand we return to the former even worse situation. Please.
In my society a divorce of the poor is by no means, a road to powerty. Yes, some women and some men are never going to learn how to choose a spouse that was not abusive, but that is not because there is a possibility for divorce. That is most often the result of very ultra conservative role models like for example the idea that masculinity needs to be controlling, violent, obsessive, possessive, or otherwise abusive, lest it be weak. Have you noticed this much in your neighbourhood? Do you recognize what I am talking about?
I am happy to hear you have never divorced. Me neither. However as much as I appriciate your personal experience from your neighbourhood, I plead you to explore this issue deeper, so that you would not back up (ultra conservative and regressive) solution models, that in reality help nobody exept possessive and abusive spouses. That does not really help even them, as it would diminish their possibilities to become better people, by coming to terms with their nature, as they would not really need to.
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2a) There is no contradiction between an absolute moral precept and free will. The conscience commands, the will obeys or disobeys. One does not need very much information to make a moral judgement: a decent person makes moral judgments regarding his own actions almost instantaneously.
The problem of absolute information refers only to utilitarian ethics. A second flaw with utilitarian ethics is that any quantity of information is useless without a paradigm, and multiple mutually contradictory paradigms can exist, which is why utilitarianism is useless.
2b) The 2 state solution is a Westphalian solution. I meant, pick a non Westphalian one like a Caliphate or Holy Roman Empire. Ideally, 2 state may be the way to go but in practice it is doubtful that the Palestinians could ever manage a modern state. Their ideology is a strange mix of pre-modern (tribe, paranoia & jihad) and post-modern (victimhood, & terrorism) and they display all the other Arab dysfunctions which have nothing to do with Israel.
I’m glad you agree with me that the US exercises military hegemony in Europe. But don’t worry, it seems American interest in Europe is fading and soon you’ll be back to arms races.
3) I’m just observing your utter lack of empathy for the children of divorce. Small children usually don’t know much about the ups and downs of their parents’ marriage, until mom or dad decides to tear their little world apart. Then if they are poor or working class their odds of economic advancement are ruined. They are more likely to be delinquents, more likely to fail in school. If they live with their mother and her boyfriend, they are more likely to be be sexually abused. Yet you keep defending divorce laws that only benefit the rich, insisting that the solution is more of the same failed medicine.
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@Dpmonahan
2a) Are we now agreeing that there is nothing obligatory about morals? That we are indeed free to make moral choises?
A decent person makes instantenous and moral choises, but based on what? Empathy and information. Right? Even the most intuitive choises are affected by those two elements. Are they not? The actual harm and benefit of those choises can only be evaluated based on quality information of the ultimate results and our empathetic skills.
Most people think themselves as decent, do they not? Their cultural heritage very much defines what they consider decent, while their empathy informs a big part of their conscience. But what is conscience if it is not the amalgam of information and empathetic ability? There are indeed cultural contradictions about what is moral. Are there not? How then to evaluate what is objectively moral? By appealing to the ultimate moral authority in this or that cultural concept of a god, as those never contradict each other? You know they do. Then choosing a god by it being a more moral god than the other would be impossible, would it not? How then should we choose wich god is most likely as for none of them has ever any actually even remotely objective evidence ever been presented for? By the cultural heritage of each and every one as is done in most cases? That does not seem like a likely method to reach any objective analysis. Correct this far? Perhaps, after all, the best way to evaluate morals is by evaluating the actual harm and benefit by some as objective as possible information about the consequenses of any particular action or inaction and putting that information into test by our empathetic ability?
2b) Wow there! Sounds a lot like you are blaming the victim. We allready agreed that Israel is the modern state in the area. Does that not in your opinion make them responsible for the future development? Or are they only responsible to their own citizens (as you implied abowe) to their own citizens, like the nazies were only responsible to the supposed Aryan Germans? Do they not have the only actual army in the area? Is that army not being used for collective punishment and protection of the settlements on stolen Palestinian property?
You are not suggesting that there is some racial quality in the Palestinians why they could not be integrated or form a modern society? What would that even be? It is true, that their cultural history at the moment is formed around bitterness for the lost property and land and dignity the Israelis have stolen and because of it criminal organizations such as the Hamas has risen to take advantage of their miserable situation. But that does not mean they would be unable to forgive, if they were treated decently like human beings, their human dignity and property was respected, and compensations were offered for their losses. Does it? In fact if they were treated as equals, the base on wich such criminal guerilla organizations like the Hamas has been built would be totally annihilated. Would it not?
Remember that the Israelis are suffering also, they live in constant fear of the Palestinians and their actions keep working as a cause and an excuse for all sort of Islamist extremism all over the Near-East. This is a direct result of how they have treated the Palestinians and how they keep treating them, not because there is some cultural, or racial baggage that prevents the Palestinians from forming an actually functioning state or in reacting better to treatment worthy of humans.
How could the Palestinians ever form a country on their own accord, when every five years or so, Israeli army invades the refuge camps and towns the Palestinians live in and destroy all infrastructure from schools to water purification stations and from powerstations and housing to hospitals, regardless if any of those are under UN mandate, killing hundreds or thousands – mostly civillians – in the process? If the excuse for that is, that a few of pitiful home made rockets are being shot by extremists as more like demonstrations of frustration, than actually as military action achieving anything against Israel, it hardly serves as an excuse for killing hundreds of children. Does it? That is not a police action against a few terrorists, it is an attempt to make the lives of all the Palestinians so miserable that they would all just move away. Is that not blatantly obvious? That is the true face of terror and terrorism.
Let us employ a little bit of empathy here and imagine Mexico was an actual military might in the world, and that it had decided, based on some ancient stories and actual documents, to invade and annex most of southern and western states in the US and the US army was unable too meagre to defed the US borders. What then, if the Mexicans would every now and then destroy most of the infra in the rest of the US killing hundreds of children at the same time, would you not fight back? What if they destroyed the house of the families of everyone who fought back? Would that make you less willing to fight? What if most the people from those conquered territories had moved into big refugee camps in the still remaining free US? What if the Mexicans would build concrete walls around the remaining free US and restricted their oversees commerse by the excuse that there are guerilla groups fighting against Mexican supremacy? What if the Mexicans would not keep any treaties they ever made with the US, simply because they would not have to and since China and Russia would support their every action regardless what atrocities the Mexicans would do? What if the Mexicans kept on demolishing farmsteads and towns in the still remaining free United States and building their own settlements on the stolen land? What would you do? Most Palestinians do not fight. They just try to live their own lives as best they can even when they know they are exploited as cheap labour by the Israeli “land owners”.
If in my country the Saami people were equally ill-treated by the government, not recognized as citizens and their property was constantly being wasted or stolen and my government would treat them like the Israelis treat the Palestinians, then regardless if the Saami people would react by terrorist bombing I would still fight for their rights. I would not demand them to move to other Nordic countries to where the rest of the Saami population lives, but would demand that they be granted their own land or that they be incorporated as equal citizens to my nation. Would I be wrong? The Saami have never formed a modern nation, but I have no doubt they have exactly as much capability to do so as anyone else and though they were once malltreated they now are a capable part of our nation just like they are in all the other Nordic countries.
How could you ever know if the Palestinians have the ability to form a modern state? What second sight or prophesy have you, that could ever inform you of such things in the future? The US culture is a strange mix of enlightenment era utopian dreams, space age technology, high profile science and totally backwards ignorance and superstitious tribal moralism. The US is the last western country that employs capital punishment (even Russia has given up on that) and it does not have a public healthcare system. US founders were atheists and deists, but US money says “in god we trust”. US has a public school system, but it has totally failed half of the population as so many still in this time and age think the world is six to ten thousand years old and how high exactly is the illiteracy persentage? Social dysfunctions fill US prison system, even though the US has some of the leading universities in the world. Is the US not a modern state? In social values and rate of religiosity it resembles more of the Arab countries than any other Western nation, including Israel. Maybe all the Palestinians should move to the US, rather than stay in Palestine? The Hamas dudes would fit right in nicely whith the NRA. Would they not? They share all the same values, from conservatism and homophobia to patriotism and love of guns.
3) Did you not read what I wrote? I put a bit of an effort to it and you did not even bother to read it? Or is there some serious disability in your comprehension of written material? Or perhaps it is just my poor English skills? I did said that I do not hate children. What I also said was that children from a marriage in wich the other party would have rather have divorced are not in any way better off than from single parent families, did I not? You know what, divorced people do get married again. Not because their new spouses offer them social climbing possibilities, but because they fall in love.
For sure you seem to have some sort of disability in understanding statistics, if you still think that there are statistics, that tell you that children from single parent families are less well off than those from a forced marriage to obsessive spouses would be. You do realize (I can only hope) that, that is what you are advocating, if you would demand legal breach of contract to be shown at a court of law before divorce could be granted by the state – especially for the poor people who can not afford private research agents, private detectives or legal councillors to their aid? FYI the statistics do not support your cause. They only tell us that from happy marriages the children are more likely to be better off than from unhappy marriages, that ended in a divorce. That is the extent of information any such statistics can yield. And by that information the right conclusion is that single parent families need better support from the society. Why do Christian conservatives oppose to such support? Do you?
What sort of person exept possessive, controlling and frankly a narcistic individual would ever demand, that their spouse remain whith them in the marriage even after the other has clearly demonstrated that they no longer have love and want to divorce? What sort of parent do you think such a possessive, controlling and obsessive person would make regardless of their social standing? If you really love someone you let them go, when they want to. Right?
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2a) Here there is confusion about language: in English “obligatory”, that one “is obliged” to act in a certain way, does not mean it is an unfree act, in fact it implies freedom. It means that one feels a rational impulse or command to do something, but he may or may not follow through with it in practice.
In the moral act the information available is obvious: I see an apple and want to eat it. Is it mine? If not, I don’t take it (certain extreme circumstances aside). The vast majority of moral acts are like this. Hardly any information is needed.
2b) The discussion of whether or not the founding of the state of Israel was a good idea is purely academic. The fact is that the state exists, and in a Westphalian model it is responsible to its citizens. That means defending your citizens from things like rocket and terror attacks. That is why the government exists. The fact that the ones launching the terror attacks are the weaker party is irrelevant.
To attribute all the problems of the Arab world to Israel is obtuse. Educated Arabs know that, it is just the mobs that are paranoid.
If I found my country attacked by a foreign invader would I fight? Yes, to a point. I would not wrap myself in a suicide vest, I would not blow up buses full of tourists, I would not murder whole families in their sleep. I would not hide my rockets in UN schools or under hospitals. Such acts are always and everywhere evil, no matter their utilitarian value.
Arab-Americans do quite well for themselves. I’ve known a few Palestinian ex-pats, most smart Palestinians left a long time ago.
3) “Sally, I don’t love your daddy anymore, but here is your new daddy who is just as good.” Of course the new daddy is exponentially more likely to rape Sally than her real daddy, but whatever suits mommy’s whims, right?
It is ludicrous to suggest that destroying a child’s home will not also break the child’s heart, and that just marrying someone else will make it all better. I haven’t got time to go statistic hunting, but I’ll bet you are making that up.
In theory I’m not opposed to a govt taking a role in the support of a broken family, but in practice that support becomes a short-term economic incentive to divorce.
Usually when one party is an unwilling divorcee, his or her reaction is to want to work on the marriage, not end it, which is wise, because if they are poor they will be ruined. I think the law should be weighed in their favor given the economics involved, and especially when they have children.
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2a) Of course the morality of the act of eating an apple is all about information and the quality of the information. Even if that information is very simple, as in your extremely and purposefully simplistic example, it does not mean no information was needed. You need to have information of wether or not you actually do own the apple and you need to know wether or not you eating the apple causes more harm than not eating it. It is a harm benefit assession informed by your empathy towards for example a nother person beside you dying of hunger you could have given the apple. You see, you owning the apple (assuming the information about the ownership of the apple was high quality and not false information) does not make eating it absolutely moral, like in my twist about the hungry person to your example. Right?
Who obliges us to be moral? We ourselves, our closest family and friends, or the society? Or perhaps it is Vishnu, or Allah? In the end moral choises are the results of harm benefit analysis. By acting immorally we impose harm on ourselves, and/or on to our social relations. By acting immorally towards people we are never even going to meet, like for example future generations, we are causing harm to ourselves. Right?
2b) Now you are putting out red herrings? Why? Did you just run out of arguments? I never said anything about the founding of the state of Israel being a good or a bad idea. Did I? But now that you brought it up, in hindsight, it was not a very clever descision, now was it? It has brought an immeasurable amount of misery to both the Jews and the Arabs. Especially so, because of how it was conducted. Nor did I try to justify the pitifull rocket attacks or suicide bombing by the fact that the Palestinians are the underdog in this fight, but you must admit the Isralis have not been able to resolve the problems causing these attacs by their use of force and that it has been exessive when in their retaliatory attacks hundreds of children have died. Yes?
Or do you think such use of force will end the conflict? How? If terrorists would hide their rockets in the basement of a US hospital, would the solution be that the US air force would level the hospital? Or that the tank core opened up on the hospital at full force? Of course not. That would be absurd. Would it not? It shows inherent racistic attitude and arrogant disregard of any international treaties, that the Israelis excuse their attacks on schools and hospitals by such claims, that infact are never even proven. It is possible that Hamas does this, but then we do not know, do we? The Israeli army is hardly a very reliable source of information, now is it? It has been caught lying several times over and all its own investigations find all it’s personnel blameless regardless of what atrocities it is involved in. It never allows any international investigation of any of it’s crimes. Why?
Yes, it is often the clever people who leave from such conflicts, if they can. But the division of who can leave is not divided just on who is clever. And then there are the patriots. Are you a patriot? You said you would fight if your country was invaded by a stronger party, so you would not be among the first ones to leave. Would you? At wich point would you be among the clever ones who leave? You say you would not become a suicide bomber, but what would you do against an organized occupation force? Build roadside bombs or rockets, or what? It is easy to say you would fight, but when the other party weilds overwhelming assets and all you have is stuff found in a refugee camp, it may look like a very different story.
When the French had captured the Algerian resistance leader they asked him how dares he use the suitcase bombs against the French population in Algeirs, he replied, that if the French were willing to exhange their bombers to the suitcase bombs, he was all for the bargain.
Have you noticed, that dispite me repeatedly asking, you have not answered wether if you do accept collective punishment, nor wether you accept the land grabs and theft of Palestinian property – land or otherwise – ever going on in the Palestinian territories? Why? Or do you have a religious reason to think that the land belongs to the Israelis, and not the Palestinians? Or is it, that you do not have enough information about the situation there to actually make any moral assesments of the situation and you just think “hardly any information is needed” to make your “moral” assesment on the situation in wich your country is an active agent in?
3) Are you serious? You would prevent pedophilia by making divorce difficult for the poor? That is an absurd idea. You do understand that you are talking about an exeptional situation? Not some inevitable result of a divorce. Either way the child is screwed, if the choises are between an obsessive and possessive biological father, and a pedophile step father, wich certainly sounds like even a worse possibility, but this is starting to sound like you are really grasping straws here. Is it not?
Of course the childs heart brakes when her/his parents no longer get along wether if they are married or divorced. Of course if the couple that has children and has run into trouble in their marriage should seek counselling, but that does not by any means require legistlation, that would require a breach of contract between the married parties to be presented in a court of law before they could divorce. And if the law required something like that, then the party that did not want the divorce would by no means be even encouraged by the society to seek counselling, now would they?
I am not the one referring on statistics, I rely on you to give me actual information about the statistics, you claim to support your cause. Did you make those statistics up, since you haven’t got time to go statistic hunting? I am not making anything up, I am merely pointing out that the statistics you claim to have presented do not support your cause. Not in the form you present them anyway. How many times do I need to explain this? If you have a statistic that says children are better off from intact marriages, than from divorces, it tells nothing at all of how the children would be off, if they lived in marriages that were not allowed to get a divorce when one of the adults in that relationship wanted one. Do they? It simply is not a logical conclusion to jump to the assumption, that if people were forced not to get a divorce, when they want one, they automatically move back to the happily married group that is more likelier to have economic prosperity and the children get proper support. That is just stupid. We have allready been there and that society was dysfunctional, that is why it was changed for this better, if not perfect model.
A broken home is a broken home to the child, and the longer the situation continues, the worse off the kids are likely to be by the infected situation. Only a possessive and self centered person would grab on to their spouse if the relationship has ended up in such a dead end, that the other party actually wants a divorce. How is that so hard to grasp?
Nobody gets divorced just to get social support from the government. That is a ridiculous claim. Especially, if the most likely result is, that they lost all their social possibilities – as you claim – in the process and ended up marrying pedophiles. If they did, the answer to this imaginary problem would be to inform people of the realities, not to make divorce harder to achieve. We are talking about adults here.
How is it, that even after all this conversation it seems to me, that you have not really thought this through? Actually, none of the subjects here seem like you had put an effort to resolve them in real life terms. Why?
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2a) The information involved in the vast majority of moral decisions is of like simplicity: I want to have sex with this woman. Is she another man’s wife? Then don’t. I want to punch this man. Is he attacking you? Yes. Do it. The apple example is not meant to be simplistic, but typical.
As for where the absolute-obligatory aspect of the moral impulse comes from (speaking philosophically and not as a person of faith) from something absolute, whatever it may be.
2b) By mentioning the foundation I was trying to separate hypotheticals from the reality that Israel is a modern state and acts as such.
Yes, I’d rather lose a war than commit evil acts. And if I could not live with any dignity in my conquered country I’d leave. I like America but it has only a relative claim on my actions, not absolute.
The distinction between a legitimate act of war and an act of terrorism is a Westphalian one. There is a tradition of war among modern states (not always lived up to) that separates combatant from non-combatant, that judges the acts of soldiers one way and the acts of governments another, etc.
One of the key distinctions in judging responsibility for civilian deaths is taking into account the intentions of the combatants: if one’s intention is to kill an enemy combatant, and some care is taken to avoid collateral deaths of civilians, the civilian deaths that might result are not considered the soldier’s fault. This is how modern states fight wars.
A non-modern reality like the Palestinians don’t make this distinction: civilians are intentionally targeted as a means to an end. They are used as human shields as a means to an end. To the modern perspective this is an unspeakable evil.
For a utilitarian like you there is no distinction between the collateral deaths of civilians and the intentional targeting of civilians because it is all about results: dead civilians are a bad thing, but since the Palestinians actually achieve something by intentionally hacking a handful of innocents to death it is better than Israeli unintended collateral killings which are greater in number but achieve less.
You do not seem to realize that this undos the traditional western legal limits on warfare. That it is a fundamentally anti-Westphalian way of looking at things. You do not have a modern mentality on this subject.
All of which goes back to the original point that worldview determines our selective empathies.
3) Children are rarely raped by strangers or biological fathers. The most common rapist is mom’s boyfriend. Google it.
I am pointing out economic and social realities: children are hurt by divorce in myriad ways. Adults are hurt by divorce if they are poor or lower middle class: it is an economic disaster. These are facts against which you present feelings and appeals to government solutions which you do not define and which do not exist. All very bourgeois, which is fitting because no-fault divorce exists for the convenience of wealthy people.
I think at bottom your concept of marriage is a purely sentimental one. Marriage is about love, but love is a choice to act for the well-being of another person, not primarily a feeling. Marriage is also about economics, because it is fundamentally about raising children. If it is only about feeling then I can see why you would sacrifice children, economics and the well being of one’s partner on the altar of what feels nice.
As for not deeply engaging: I try to keep my comments short and ignore points I think are unimportant.
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@Dpmonahan, to be honest, if I took your lead on the matter and ignored comments, that I thought were not important, I would not engage you at all, but for the sake of curiosity I do. And for the sake of politeness, I try to engage all of your points. I have no idea wich ones are important to you, but I must say that many of my comments and questions you have bypassed have been essential to the issues in question. In fact, it is obvious, that you have bypassed many of my questions, because if you recognized them, your entire argument would collapse. Correct? Well, perhaps we leave that to be evaluated by anyone else who ever might be barmy enough to read this through. Anyone out there?
2a) It does not matter wether the information required for making moral descisions is simple or complex. It is still needed and the quality of the information often determines wether the conclusion is actually moral or not. In examples like the one you present about sex with a nother mans wife, it is far from simple. You have to first have enough information that you do understand why it is immoral to have sex with a nother mans wife, before you can make either a moral or overtly selfish descision. Correct? Empathy is the ability that helps you to percieve this issue from the perspective of the other man. Right? That is how you know it is wrong, or is there a better method?
You could come to the same conclusion just by reasoning, if you had enough information about how social relations work even if you were a totally unempathetic person, but empathy enables you to make the descision when the question arises without complex contemplation. Arbitrary commands or lists of rights and wrongs do not really inform you why these things are right or wrong. If you do not have information about why the person who came up with the lists (be it a god or human), decided that particular thing was moral or not. That information is, to say the least, hard to obtain. Is it not?
The existance of simple moral questions does not by any means rule out complex ones. Complex moral questions require better and more information than the simple ones to make a moral choise. Right? If there is some absolute morals it is totally an academic question because we do not know enough to reach it and we might still miss some information, existance of wich we are not even aware, but that does not matter, because to make actual moral and informed descisions we can only use the information we can achieve. They might later be revealed to be totally immoral choises because of some new information, in the absolutist sense. Could they not? That is if you accept that what ever is the greatest moral or immorality is the harm and benefit analysis of the situation in question.
2b) The modernity of Israel gives absolutely no excuses for it to act as it does against the Palestinians. The collateral damage Israel is wreaking is just as real and it happens to just as real people as the Israelis that suffer in the rocket attacks and the suicide bombs and it is the cause of why such terrorist organizations like Hamas get support from the Palestinian population. Is it not? How dare you accuse me of promoting or even accepting the terrorist attacks? I allready have condemned any such abowe. Have I not? I demand you take back what you said about me accepting any means to achieve an end. How did you even come to that conclusion? Are you actually even arguing with me, or are you just engaged with your own imaginary “demons”? Or is it just that your ability to come to logical conclusions is compromised by something?
Wich of us actually supports utilitarian view of morals? I say that the Israeli politics are causing the ongoing violence and that they as the modern state hold all the cards to end the crisis, while you say the state of Israel, it’s government and army, are only responsible for the citizens of Israel no matter what suffering they cause in the process of their defence to the Palestinians?
In my view both the Palestinians and the Israeli citizens are victims of the apartheid policy the government of Israel has utilized for decades.
By the way, as obviously you did not know this, but the terror attacks on civillians in Palestine were first orchestrated by the Jews. Was it OK when they did it, or does terror become acceptable only when it is done by an organized “modern state”?
Do I get this right then, that you are not a patriot? You would leave? Would you leave your loved ones behind, if they could not follow you? It seems you need to practice your empathetic skills a little bit more to understand desperation and commitment.
Let me ask if you thought that the hypothetical conquest of the US by the Mexicans would be morally acceptable, if it was the result, that the US could not organize itself to stop it?
It is morally reprehensible to demand that the Palestinians should just give up their claim on their huma rights, ancestral lands and property, because when they were invaded they had just been released from under the thumb of a colonial empire, and could not really resist. It is just as reprehensible to claim, that because they are unable to win back their country by the means of conventional warfare, it is ok to oppress them, steal their property, land and submit them to collective punishment, regardless of wich terrorist, or liberation organizations work for their cause. Supporting any such reveals intentional, or possibly unintentionally fascistic values. Wich is it for you? Or did I get this somehow wrong?
3) And what about the uncles that rape kids? Should people not have relations with their uncles because one of them might be a pedophile rapist? What about their Catholic priests? You only brought up this rape thing because your absurd idea, that by forcing people who would rather have a divorce to remain married somehow raised their chances for economical success, did not really fly. Did it? There were no statistics that would have supported it and the types of statistics that you claimed to exist could not even possibly support your idea, if you had any idea how statistics work. Correct?
Pedophiles are a problem in the society. But that problem is not really resolved by forcing people to stay in abusive marriages against their will. Is it? It was a bit ridiculous for you to even bring this as some sort of solution to the problem. Now, was it not?
You do realize that your agenda raises a number of problems the modern society has allready put behind it? How would you resolve the abusive marriages then, if they needed to show some sort of “breach of contract” in a court of law? What then would be the options for the person married to a controlling and abusive spouse? Do you honestly think the kids traumatized by such bad relationships between their parents have better chances in life, than kids from loving single parent families, or from families where their custodian parent re-married with someone they love?
Marriage is so totally not just for the kids, nor has it ever been. This is a common revisionist historical lie, that the Christian conservatives spout out to defend what ever silly agendas they have, though most often to stand against gender equal marriage laws, so I do not blame you for inventing it for the occasion. But it simply is not true.
If marriage was fundamentally only about the kids it could be engaged only when people are expecting their first one and absolved when their last kid has grown into adulthood. But no such society has ever existed anywhere. Has it?
Marriage in the modern society is a state recognized emotional commitment between adults with children or not. For centuries it has also been a union between larger family units and clans, but as people in the modern society should no longer be dependant on such, that matter has been put aside, exept in some of the richest families, who still compete over money, influence and power. Today even the royalty marry for love. Did you not know this?
As I said before in my society the single parent families are far from becoming destitute for powerty. Our government openly supports them economically and all the poor for that matter. Child daycare and healthcare are provided by the government etc. Even university education is for free, and I have had the pleasure of knowing some single parents studying to raise their social standing in one. There is nothing especially “bourgeois” about this. On the contrary, it is rather socialistic. It is not a perfect, or perfectly moral society, but it certainly beats living in any society where becoming single parent (regardless of the reasons for your divorce) is not destitute for powerty and by far beats living in any society in wich one would need to show some obscure breach of contract in a court of law to get a divorce. Does it not?
I am not sacrificing children on any altar. You would sacrifice the happiness of the children and the parent who would want a divorce to the altar of satisfying the possessive need by the spouse who would not let go of the other spouse when she or he as an adult person had assessed the situation in the family to be intolerable and incurable. It is despicable on your part. You would sacrifice the children of divorced families because you thought it as an incentive for the government to give up their marriages to support these people, despite the fact you do not know why they got divorced and how much their spouses abused them or the children, just because it is less likely that they actually raped their own children. Wich one of us it is that actually “hates” children?
Do you actually think people get divorced just and only because they could get government support as single parents? That is absurd, is it not? People marry for love and almost without exeption would keep on loving their spouses and having intact marriages, especially when they have children, regardless what support the government gives to the divorce families. They sometimes divorce, but believe me, the reasons are serious to these people and they have twice thought it through before they make the life altering, drastic and dramatic descision to give up on their marriages. These are all adult people, are they not? Do you think they do not love their own children? What are you even on about?
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Sorry Raut, just read the first paragraph. I tuned out of this conversation long ago. Way too long for my attention span. I hope to try and read it all at some point. I agree though that dp has a tendency to move conversations where it suits him and avoids specific questions.
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Feel free to break off the conversation any time if you find me so vexing.
2a) When someone tries to make simple moral questions complex it is because he is trying to get away with something. Why is adultery wrong? Because it is breaking a promise and betraying a third party: if that is not evil then what is?
As for why it is evil, because it goes against human nature, which is normative because it is the will of God, or part of the Tao or the Logos, or whatever we call the absolute.
2b) If you are so offended by the assertion that you are a utilitarian, stop arguing for utilitarianism.
I said before that I’m not arguing whether founding of Israel was a good idea (I don’t know), nor am I going to argue that Jewish terrorism was a good thing, (it wasn’t). My point has always been the same: Israel (today) acts as a modern state and its supporters are people who expect a state to act that way. It has nothing to do with theology. Your problem is not with Israel, but modernity.
I never said collateral killings are a good thing, I’m describing how modern states fight wars. If you deny the moral distinction then your other option is either pacifism (Israel or any other state should just let its citizens die) or embrace terrorism and total warfare.
Of course I’m a patriot, but I will not commit evil for the sake of my country. There has to be a limit to war and there is nothing wrong with honorable surrender.
3) If a husband is abusive there will be witnesses. If a wife has a gambling problem there will be records. If a husband has a drug problem there will be doctors. I never argued for an absolute ban on divorce.
Guess what, my country has plenty of anti-poverty programs too.
The problem is not that divorced families will die of starvation, it is that they will not advance beyond dependence. They will not follow the normal path of a family from working class to middle class, in fact they will take a step backwards and never recover.
If you set up perverse short-term incentives to divorce, they will not cause divorce, but they do make the option more attractive, and therefore more likely.
Economic calculations go into decisions concerning marriage all the time, I don’t see why you are so offended at the notion. The economics of marriage are important because children need to be fed.
If love is shown by actions, someone who divorces a spouse for a frivolous reason does not love their children as much as they should. No one inflicts that kind of pain if they can avoid it.
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@Dpmonahan, I will continue, for now, as I said I am curious – as to how far you are ready to go to defend your ideals.
2a) Even your example of adultery kind of proves my point. All that, wich you listed, you need to know, in order to come to the conlusion you came. Empathy did informed you on that path did it not?
But it is in human nature to betray as well as it is to realize that it is wrong. Is it not? Concepts like the will of a god, are nonsense as long as no existance of any gods have ever been established by any even remotely objective method. The concepts of different gods and what they might “will” have been influencing and distorting the sense of justice in people in good faith and pure consciences to do the most horrid acts. “Deus Vult!” Remember that?
2b) I have not argued for utilitarianism. I have never stated that the ends justify the means, it is more like one of your arguments. You have argued that I support utilitarianism, when I have not presented anything of the kind. You have failed to demonstrate what you argue. But your attitude towards the human suffering in Palestine and Israel is very utilitarian when you consider it just and right for a modern state to act like the state of Israel acts against the Palestinians and in result hurts it’s own citizenry when they steal the human dignity, human rights, property and land of the Palestinians. Do they not?
Israel is fighting a war against all the Palestinians while only few of the Palestinians are actually fighting against Israel. Yes, it is true that the Israeli governments for generations have kept a state of war going on, because people like you take the bait, that this state of war somehow – in a very utilitarian way – excuses apartheid policy, theft and human rights violations. But I still argue it does not justify any of that.
I wonder why you and other Christian conservatives in your country are so keen to go for this crap? You would claim there are no theological reasons for the Christian right to uniformly set themselves on the side of the Israelis, but what are Christian zionists then? That is, if what you say Zionism is a secular cause? For some ethnic Jews it may have been when the escaped the pogroms and the holocaust, but clearly not to all of them and what is the secular reasoning for it, from an outsiders view? Or are those Christian conservatives who DO have religious reasons to support Israel again only a “few internet cranks”?
If your reasoning is purely secular, what is the actual reason for you to abandon morals and any empathy towards the Palestinians? Is it your fear of Islam, or simply terrorism? Or something more sinister, like excusing US war crimes around the globe, by claiming that it is normal and justified for a modern state to annihilate entire nations, retaliate with extreme force, any real or imagined threat, to use torture as a means to get results and such? If it is just terrorism, you should be able to realize by now after decades of failure, that the methods Israel is using are not helping, let alone resolving the problem. Are they? No, they are creating the problem.
Or perhaps it is some inherent fascistic set of value base set in Christian conservatism, because it reminds me very much how the religious right, not so long ago supported the German nazies and Italian Fascists in similar might makes right claims. They too were keen to support the rights of the modern state to act in exessive violence against people who they considered outsiders to their modern states. Remember?
The situation between Palestinians and Israel is like the US declaring a war during the prohibition on the entire city of Chigago and using the airforce and artillery to level the city, it’s hospitals, schools, energy stations and everything, because there were gangsters hiding there. The only difference is, that the people living in Chigago during the prohibition were not a specific ethnic, or religious group. But what if they had been, would that have been then the right and justified action? How long would it take for the Chigagoans to learn to be bitter towards the rest of US?
No, bombing of hospitals and schools and refugee camps, stealing the property of the conquered, nor collective punishment are not the actions of a modern state even at war. And even if they were common in practice, they would still be totally immoral. Would they not? So, why support such?
So you are a patriot, but would not commit evil to protect your country or loved ones. Are you a pacifist? Because killing a nother man is an evil act if we keep morals as simple as we possibly can – the way you would prefer morals. Is it not? Or is the moral choise involved in this a bit more complex than that? What about just hitting someone? is that just evil, or could there be a justification?
Indeed you are right, there has to be a limit to warfare. What is then justified collateral damage? Blowing up a school full of civillians seeking refuge there, because alledgely your enemy has hidden weapons there? Shooting a home made rocket made out of building materials towards enemy territories on occupied land? I call both of them terrorist attacks. The difference between them is not so much the actual scale, though that is a factor in the full aritmethics of the situation, but the fact, as you have acknowledged, that the other one was done by a modern state, and the other by criminals. But who is acting does not justify the means any more than the objective. What is done and what really results from taken action are the actual questions of wether what happened was moral or not. Correct? However, one can hardly expect a criminal or a terrorist to act morally, and you must admit the Palestinians have very limited options, exept to surrender all and leave without compensation for their ancestral lands, or the victims of the Israeli terror. But a modern state, now that is a completely different ball game. A modern state could be expected to be responsible for the long term effects of the actions it takes and the morality of what is actually being done. We do expect that modern states show responsibility and take action to decrease violence rather than to increase it. We do expect modern states to exact justice regardless of the religious or ethnic backround of people. All of this is what the state of Israel has totally failed in, because it is not interrested in the rights of the Palestinian population who have no modern state to protect their rights. On the contrary, the Israelis seem to be adamant at hindering and stopping any sort of state to be established by the Palestinians. What the Israeli state is also doing is supporting squatters on Palestinian property, by building infrastucture and even military force.
The protection of the Israeli citizens has become an excuse for the Israeli government to abuse the Palestinians and it is ever ongoing, because the only thing achieved by the abuse is more acts of desperation by the Palestinians, so the Israeli population fears them even more and feel themselves ever more in need of more protection by the government. But you as an outsider to the conflict should see it as it is, and not spout out some lame excuses about the historical baby steps of the modern state hundreds of years ago.
Once more, I demand you take back your claim that I support terrorism, because I have clearly stated that I do not, nor have I even hinted at something like that.
3) What sort of evidence would you provide for emotional abuse? You do realize that this is a big and not at all so rare problem in marriages and that it often involves and traumatizes the children seriously?
What about when there is no evidence to provide for even the physical abuse? Many a violent husband claim that they only sometimes loose their temper, but for some reason even when they have supposedly lost their temper, they are able to keep cool enough to hit only where it does not show. Did you not know about this?
It is nice to hear your country has plenty of anti-powerty programs, but it also sounds like they are not functionin very well because you also stated, that in your country a single parent is not going to be very likely to raise themselves from powerty to the middle class. Yet your Christian conservatives often act against more help? Why? Would you? Why?
But getting from poverty to some obscure middle-class is not the goal of everybody in life. The primary goal of people is to be happy, not to be a part of this or that economic class. If the cost for being better off in economic sense was to live in a marriage you really would not want, would you not rather give up the chase for money and the dysfunctional marriage?
Free and equal chance for education, free healthcare, support for single parent families, free daycare are all things that lessen the need for people to strive for a middle class. Being middle class is not some universal virtue, that all people should achieve. Is it? Is it possible to be happy and poor in your country?
In the big picture people generally would prefer their rights and liberties, like having the right to get a divorce without having to try to prove to a court of law emotional coldness, emotional abuse, or any other sort of abuse, or just the fact that the spouses have grown into separate sets of values over time, wether they have children, or not.
Do you realize that today when people have realized, that they do not have to take bull from their spouses, just because the Bible demands obidience from the wife to the hubbie (because it is an immoral demand in the first place and has caused immense amounts of suffering around the globe for generations), the court rooms would simply get stuck for decades and beyond, if your idea that there should be a breach of contract to be shown before a divorce could be allowed by the state? And in that mess a great many families would be stuck for years not even counting the amount of totally dysfunctional families, that decided it was not worth the bother. Do you have any idea of how much hurt that would cause to the children?
Your suggestion is not only wrong, it is also impractical, because all of these processes would ultimately be a lot more costly to the society in the long run, than to give proper support to the single parent families. It would require your country a great many more police officers, legal aids, solicitors, judges and juries, not to mention all the other personnel to keep the cours up and running to make your dream possible. It would be a lot more cost effective to give the single parents proper social support.
The “incentive”, you are referring to, as in the social support for the single parent families, is actually a lifeline to help people who have ended in that dramatic situation nobody really wants to go through, that they have had to recognize their marriage has failed and as a result have needed a divorce for what ever reasons, wether those were actually provable in a court of law or not. If that is then an “incentive” for people who need to divorce to divorce, then let it be that. Why not? Their marriages have allready failed and have lost the value to support their children. In reality, it is more likely such ongoing failed marriages are damaging to the children. Especially so, if one of the parents is so possessive, that they are not willing to let their spouse go, who would rather get a divorce than continue the failed marriage.
It shows a certain lack of empathy from the Christian conservative to value the ideal of marriage so much that they would be ready to abandon the divorced and their children, who are in no way responsible for their parents actions in need of help. Does it not?
Yes, there are economic realities to consider when people get married, but it is absurd to claim, people today in a modern state marry because of economic incentives, rather than because of love and how the value the ideal of marriage, in that it shows commitment to the spouse. Similarly people do not get divorced because of economic incentives, their reasons for the divorce exist before they even start to consider their actual possibilities of surviving economically after their divorce. We once had a society in these western countries you and I live in, in wich many people were too affraid of the economical catastrophy to divorce even from really abusive marriages. Is that the society you would prefer? Does your conservativism reach so far back? Why?
Now, what would be a frivolous reason to get a divorce? I mean really something stupid enough to be worth calling frivolous, but at the same time frequent enough to justify the change in law, that forced a lot of people with good reasons to get a divorce to go through the motions in order to try and prove the worth of their reasons to a court of law?
Who would be the idiot who would want to stay married to a person who would want a divorce for a “frivolous” reason and showed disrespect and an actual lack of love towards their own children by such contempt?
This is getting more absurd by every comment you write while you stomp yourself deeper and deeper. Do you see what I mean?
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2a) The proximate standard of human behavior is human nature: the behavior proper to a rational, social animal. But nature is only obligatory if it refers to some absolute. Empathy, your favorite standard, cannot give norms for behavior, as I’ve repeatedly shown.
2b) Utilitarianism is the theory that the morality is not absolute, but that the moral action is that which benefits the greatest number of people. You have argued that.
Speaking of lack of empathy: I have argued that the actions of the state of Israel, and the opinions of their supporters are determined by their expectations of the actions of the modern state. You have argued that they are determined by racism and superstition. Supposing that people who disagree with you are not simply mistaken but are in fact evil (racism) and stupid (superstition) shows a remarkable narrowness of mind on your part.
3) All the social and economic facts are on my side. I live in the real world.
I have no time for any more today, sorry.
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Turns out I have more time than I thought.
All modern states use the concept of collateral damage or “double effect” when fighting a war, because otherwise war would be a moral and legal chaos. If there is no moral distinction between the accidental death of a civilian, and the intentional targeting of a civilian, then we must opt for pacifism or total war.
Your Chicago example is bad because Israel withdrew from Gaza and the West Bank. They cannot police those territories without reoccupying them.
Let me offer a counter example: the gangsters of Chicago launch rockets at Canada in revenge for Canada’s role in the War of 1812. The United States Authority is either unwilling or unable to police its own citizens. In such a case, Canada would be justified in launching a military attack against Chicago and attempt to destroy or weaken the gangsters, knowing that such things are messy and civilians will inevitably be killed in the crossfire: Canada must protect its own citizens, and has no authority, responsibility, or capacity to do the job of the American Authority.
That is how modern states do things. If you don’t like it, go join ISIS, re-start the Holy Roman Empire, or live in tribal Pakistan.
Killing a man, even a terrorist, is an evil thing per se, but it is not always a moral evil.
3) I’m not interested in “what if” contingencies of husbands who cleverly hide abuse. Law does not concern itself with exceptional cases.
US anti-poverty programs keep people housed, fed, and educated, but also tend to keep them dependent on government kindness forever.
People should aspire to escape poverty to the point that they can support themselves and not rely on others for their needs: it is being a good citizen, and contributing member of society. You cannot be “happy” while drawing a govt check your entire life unless you are truly incapable of work.
Plenty of people, when their spouse wants to leave, react by wanting to work on the marriage. It is a very typical reaction. It isn’t anybody’s business to say the reaction is wrong.
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@Dpmonahan.
2a) We have absolutely nothing absolute to wich tie our morals to. Do we? God is a non-known, Tao and such philosophical contemplations are not absolute, we simply do not know anything absolute, because that is virtually impossible. Morality is about human conduct and how we percieve it.
Why is mustard gass seen as evil enough weapon to be forbidden by the modern states in combat? Yes, I know your country, just like all former and present empires since the first world war has storaged it, but it is seen as immoral to be used. Correct? What absolute standard of morals tells us that it is too evil to be used? Empathy towards the victims, perhaps? No ancient scripture for sure makes any comments about it. Wonder why? Because the gods that alledgedly inspired such could not forsee such a weapon to enter the field of battle, or because these gods have “washed their hands” from the evil that men do, and are actually as such immoral themselves?
2b) As utilitarianism is a form of consequentalism and as it implies that ends justify means I do not subscribe to it. Hence, I am not a utilitarianist. Do not try to put me into a box. We allready agreed abowe, that forcing people into boxes they do not recognize is not very fruitfull, nor does it represent reality, did we not?
To me it seems the Christian conservatives who support Israel because of some Biblical prophesies, or because they consider the Jews now to still be somehow the chosen people of their particular god see the Jews moving to Palestine as a means justified because of an end. Infact the entire set of Christian morals seems very much about ends justifying the means, in the sense that right and wrong are actually totally unknowable, what is seen as important is to bow down to the assumed commands and wishes of the particular godly trio, whose justificatiton and right to do anything is derived from their might, and ownership, who then according to level of obidience then either grants a reward or a punishment in the alledged afterlife. Of wich there exists absolutely no evidence of. Have you noticed this? A all in all self centered and infantile view on morals, that sadly has twisted the sense of justice of generations of Christians. Has it not?
I did not say religious superstition equals stupidity, you did. Do you actually subscribe to your own statement? To me people with religious motivations are not acting rationally, but that does not mean they are stupid. Rather it implies they have an emotional handicap, from wich they may even heal. But it causes them to be wrong about a great many things, even when they were right about a number of other things at the same time.
If racism is not rampant in Israel, why are the Ethiopian Jews demonstrating and rioting against the Israeli police? And why do extremely religious orthodox Jewish Israeli youths from the settlements on palestinian property keep yelling out in their own demonstrations, that the Palestinians are not humans?
Why is racism wrong and immoral? How do we know this? By our empathy towards people of different ethnic backrounds, not because some ancient scripture with any alledgedly absolute moral arbitrator as the inspirator even implied as much. Correct? And even if they did, how would we know wether what they tell us is moral? By randomly choosing a seemingly moral god and scripture most likely from our own cultural heritage and faithfully following what the ritual experts of our own culture tell us, the scripture is supposed to tell us is the absolute morals?
There are limits to what is seen as acceptable collateral damage by the modern states, you know? Israel has gone over that limit again and again, at least according to the United Nations. Hardly something a truly modern state would do? But it can ignore the UN because it has the unwavouring backing of the US. But wich is the higher moral authority in the world. Any one or two nations or the representative of allmost all more, or less modern states on the planet?
When Israel is attacking the Palestinian controlled areas they then in effect re-occupy them and could very well conduct police actions. The Palestinian governing bodies are basicly powerless to stop the terrorist attacks, because by their continued violations against Palestinian human rights and property in the occupied territories make the general population and no doubt to a degree also the Palestinian police sympathetic towards the terrorists. That is exactly what I mean. Have you not been following the news about what goes on there? Do not try to deal this issue, like it was just about the Israeli attacks against some terrorists. Or like all the Palestinians were some sort of terrorists.
What Israel does to the Palestinians is not at all what a moderns state does to anyone, and even if they all did, it would not make it any more justifiable. Whose morals are utilitarian here?
It is not at all like not being a pacifist per se, would demand me to accept the overt violence, theft of property and violation of human rights by the state of Israel. Nor the obviously intentional and brutal terror attacks on civillians and silly attempts to hide them as collateral damage. Why would you demand such? Because you have long since run out of actual arguments and you are madly flailing about, instead of answering me do you accept collective punishment, perhaps? Or maybe you really do not know the actual situation in Israel and Palestine and you think that when I speak about the theft of property and land I am merely referring to the founding of the state of Israel and when I am referring to levelling the house of the terrorist, you really think I am speaking about the couple of latest Israeli operations in Gaza. Is that it?
Why would I want to join ISIS, re-start the Holy-Roman Empire or live in Tribal Pakistan? You are the self proclaimed conservative, you go join them. They certainly all share more of your values and concept of marriage, than I do. Those are all ultra conservative groups of humans. Did you not know that much? To re-establish an ancient empire would be the utmost conservative action. Are you asking me to become even more conservative than you are? Why? That makes absolutely no sense at all. Not even in the context of this silly conversation. I have nothing at all to do with them. ISIS certainly shares your concept of moral absolutes coming from an unnatural source. So did the folks in Holy-Roman Empire and they even had the same particular god, did they not? Both of them share also the idea that collateral damage is OK no matter about the amount and as such the ends justify means. Do you subscribe to that idea? It certainly seems like you did according to your previous comments.
3) No, the economical and social facts are not supporting your agenda. How would you even know? By your own admission, you do not look at the statistics, but instead you make up your mind about such issues by peeping at your neighbours.
You are not interrested in “what ifs” of husbands (or wives for that matter) hiding their physical and/or emotional abuse, but you are interrested in the “what ifs” of single mothers possible pedophile boyfriends? Really? Is this once again, because you have not read any statistics about the issue, or because you are somewhat illiterate about statistics, as you have allready demonstrated yourself abowe? Indeed laws are not mainly set to deal with exeptional cases, and that is exactly why the pedophilia problem, even though there is such a problem, is not dealt by a law that would hinder people from divorcing. That is exactly the same as why the law does not concern itself with Catholic priests dealing with children, even though there are numerous cases in wich such a law could have prevented the pedophile to do their horrid deeds. But the abusive husbands hiding their violent behaviour is not some “what if” story. It is a hard reality much more frequent than pedophilia in western societies. Violence within a family is very hard to prove, or have outside confirmation for it, but the victims know, and it is just right that they can leave such situations without having to try to prove such to the courts of law. Is it not?
Yes, people should aspire for escaping total powerty and try to support themselves, but sometimes that is not possible. Should we abandon such people to their own devices? Even when it is not their own fault? If they have lost their job, or their very own enterprize, because of economic situation? If they have escaped an abusive spouse, let’s say for the arguments sake, that was provable in a court of law? Or what if it was not possible to prove it to the courts, but they just had to leave to survive, regain their own dignity and protect their children? There are a lot of nations on this planet even today where such abandoning is the norm. Do you have no empathy towards such suffering? Are you unable to set your self in their situation?
A lot of clever people fall in love and do marry narcists, whose character flaw only becomes obvious when they have children. A narcist, may not be physically abusive, but they can be terrible parents and even if they were economically well off, they still may be very very harmfull to the kids. Luckily they usually do not even want the custodianship of the kids exept just to hurt their spouse, who had the nerve to want a divorce. Have you observed any such in your neighbourhood?
Did I say it was wrong to work on the marriage, if it has hit a snag? No, I did not. Where did you came up with that rubbish then? However, the other person is an individual and an adult, and as such considered to be capable of making their own descisions – like getting married. If, however, it is to leave, then that is their descision and it should be respected. If they are not willing to “work” on their marriage, then that too is their own descision and could hardly be altered by some couselling or whatnot. Could it? But if couples who end up in hard times are both willingly seeking help, then there is yet hope for the marriage as well. However, many of those even do not end up continuing their marriage despite there not being any evidence admissible in a court of law of any particular breach of contract.
What would you even consider the minimal breach of contract to marriage? Violence? Being raped by the spouse? Infidelity? Emotional abuse? Continuously and repeatedly failing to keep any promises to the spouse and the children? Emotional coldness, or never being with the family, because of work? Or simply moving out of the family home? So, that the person who needed, or simply wanted to leave would only need to confess (regardless wether if they were actually guilty of such, or if it indeed was the other party, but it was impossible to give enough evidence of it) to a court of law having themselves breached the contract by one of these? Would such a law make many marriages last any longer than they do? What would be the actual consequenses of such a law? What sort of marriages would last longer as a result of your law? Would such confession then rid the person admitting to be the one who breached the contract, then from possibility to become the custodian of children if the couple had any?
You have not given an example of a frivolous reason to a divorce. I wonder why? Is it because you actually could not come up with any “what ifs”, that it would not be such an exeptional case that the law would not concern itself with it anyway?
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2) If the ends do not justify the means, then some means are always wrong, some choices are always evil, which is absolutism. You can’t say there are some deeds you would never commit, and then say there are no absolute morals.
We know that there are actions which a good man will not commit because they are evil. That only happens if he interprets the command of his conscience as absolute, not relative. I’m not making any claims as to what the absolute may be, just pointing out the structure of the moral act, which suggests an absolute reference point beyond the contingent.
I see you are ignorant of Christian moral theology. The mainstream of Christian moral theology borrows from and develops the Roman notion of natural law, based on Paul’s description of “the law” (moral, not ritual) being “written in the hearts” of pagans. The proximate standard of moral action is a flourishing human nature. But the better side of human nature is only normative if it refers back to the absolute.
2b) You are right: when it comes to collateral damage, there is a sort of proportionality that comes into play. Commanders in combat have to make a prudential decision about whether risking civilian lives is “worth it” to achieve objectives in every case.
It may be that Israelis are secretly attempting maximize Palestinian deaths, but that would be hard to prove, and if all they wanted to do was kill Palestinians there are much more effective ways of doing it. It is pretty well established that both Hamas and Hezbollah intentionally use human shields, which means most of the moral responsibility is on them.
Though I’m not expert, I am forced to pay some attention to military technology since I’m in aerospace: I doubt any army (even the Finns) could manage to invade a place like Gaza against an enemy like Hamas and not inadvertently kill thousands of civilians.
The American army, for all its advantages, is not as good as the Israelis in close air support and precision bombing, and would probably have killed many more civilians in such an operation. But that is just an opinion.
If you don’t want to join a pre-modern outfit like the Holy Roman Empire, maybe a post-modern one like the FARC?
3) What would I consider “frivolous”? Anything that is essentially emotional: “not being in love anymore”, “coldness”, “not able to achieve orgasm”, I’ve heard it all.
Nobody can stop one party from abandoning the other, divorce is about dividing the spoils. If one party leaves for something frivolous, they should not expect to get joint custody of the children, a percentage of the estate, or alimony.
I never said poor people should receive no support, I said support should be considered temporary and extraordinary. The ordinary state of the ordinary citizen is to be self-supporting.
I’m not going to do statistical research during my coffee break: the negative effects of divorce on finances and children are well known.
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@ Violetwisp, honestly speaking, this is not going much anywhere, so continue at your own peril. 🙂 But, as I said, it is somewhat curious.
@Dpmonahan, I am sorry that I have not answered you untill now, but I have been drinking and partying wildly, and then I had a bit of a hangover. I also feel a bit sorry for you to have spend your coffee breaks for this, but I hope you get out of it something like I do. 😉
2a) As we do not know what any absolute is, it is a useless proposition to try to tie morality on some imaginary absolute. If the absolute you are referring to is the conscience of each and every man, then it is not absolute at all, but a subjective perspective dependant on the amount and the quality of information and the empathetic skill of the person making the moral choise.
I may be unaware of some of the apolgetic excuses for the failures of the Bible, but I bet my understanding of the Chirstian morality is far better than that of most self proclaimed Christians. After all, I have actually read the Bible, unlike by far most people who consider themselves Christians, or even Christian conservatives. To me, knowing what I know about ancient cultures and myths, it made sense only as a mythical epic, and a description of the cultural heritage of the people who wrote it, but not as a source for any morals, let alone anything at all absolute.
We know there are good and evil actions, but how do we go about to recognize them? Sometimes people choose to act against their consciences, often for selfish reasons, but I am not doing so when I refuse the pathetic claim, that there is a god that determines what is moral or not. The conscience of generations of Christians have told them, that it is just and right to torture a confession from the lips of the heretic, before that person is burned alive. Would your conscience subscribe to that? How should we go about determining wether if it was a good or evil action? By refering to what we think a character in a book, like Jesus, or his illigitimate father character would have thought about it? By information about what we think we are justified to know what these characters of a book would have wanted? No, that does not work, because the people who came to the conclusion, that people should be tortured and burned alive did so in good faith that was exactly what Jesus and his imaginary father wanted. Or by clearly better information of what our empathetic ability tells us about becoming tortured and burned alive for just what we believe in. Correct? What was absolute about that? Either way it was all about what we wanted and how good was our information about the issue at hand. It might very well be that in reasoning according to the information we have and through our empathetic ability, we actually got closer to some unknown absolute of least harm and maximum benefit to all parties involved, but we can not know that. What we do know, is that the world and our social morals got better when we decided to abandon burning heretics alive and torturing confessions out of them. Did it not?
Now, even if there was some absolute moral thruth, we do not, nor are we able to know it, because it is logically impossible. However, even if there was and it was possible for us to know and understand it, our choises would still be directly dependant on the quality of our information about that alledged absolute.
2b) No, it is not at all hard to determine wether the Israeli forces have exeeded the amount of necessary violence towards civillians in Gaza. The UN has allready condemned it as such. Is there some higher moral arbitrator on such issues, that I am unaware of? The UN officials are the most likely impartial people in the area to make any even remotely reliable and objective evaluation of the situation. Are they not? The world is watching. What has blurred the eyes of the conservative Christians? Some limited idea of the modern state to have rights to walk over other people’s human rights, from the very beginning of modernism, that they themselves are blisfully oblivious about? I find that extremely unlikely. Call it “theological” or not, but I do know that the Christian conservatives spout out all the time stuff about Jews moving back to Israel being some sort of fulfilled prophesy, that promises the end times are near, and some of them are even actually happy about this. Are they not?
The Finnish army has very little air to surface capabilities, so if we went in to any terrorist hideout, it would most likely have to be rather personal, up and close. Sure it could mean more casualities for us, but less civillian victims, if the alledged terrorists were hiding among civillians. It is the moral responsiblity of the modern state using military force to minimize the civillian casualities. Is it not? Finland has a modern tank core and a substantial artillery capability. So, it would not only be a military descision, but also a political descision not to level schools, or hospitals. All modern armies have precision strike forces, that could deal with any arms catches, rather than bomb (wether by a helicopter, bomber, drone, tanks, or artillery) a school in wich such are alledgedly hidden and in wich civillians are – as is well known – seeking refuge, well, because it is a school. However, we do not know wether there were any such hidden weapons, even if Hamas and Hizbollah have a history of using human shields. Do we? All we have the Israeli army telling us so, of the schools and other infra they themselves totally levelled and in the process killed hundreds of children. Right? The side using human shields does wrong, but their evil practice does not necessitate, nor justify the slaughter of those civillians by the other party, not in the “real world”, as you so gracefully put it. Does it?
This is not just about how exessive the collateral damage in Gaza has been. Is it? What about the continuous and extended building of settlements on Palestinian property, the collective punishment and even torture? You have not commented those at all, even though to anyone following the situation between those two nations is bound to observe, the direct results of such and even though I have referred and asked your opinion on those on several occasions abowe. Why? Is it because you are unaware, or willfully ignorant of these? Or because you can not find them justifiable, but would rather choose to live in denyal of such being a direct cause to Palestinian population giving support to such organizations as Hamas and Israeli people being targeted by these terrorists? What then would be the reason for such on your part?
The forming of the Jewish state of Israel on the property of other people was a terrible mistake, that has lead to immeasurable and ever surmounting suffering. But it can not be altered, what has happened, has happened. Yet, we should be on the side that are seeking a way to solve this crisis. Should we not? To resolve the and put right the wrongs, not by hurting even more people, but by these two people coming to terms. You say the Palestinians are unable to do so. If that is true, then all the more are the Israelis responsible to help them out, and they are in need of a compromise themselves. It is just that now when they can do what ever they please, largely with US support, they live in the illusion that they do not need to pay heed to the suffering of the Palestinians. Should they not? Might has started to make right for the Israeli government. Does it?
It would seem we are very different patriots. If my country was invaded I would fight. I would fight even after it had become hopless to win, just to show the invader, that it will cost them to have invaded. Even though I like foreign trips and could live in foreign countries for a number of reasons, I would never leave my ancestral land, if it was invaded. Like you I would not succumb to hurting civillians. I would rather not even cause any collateral damage, if it was possible for me to awoid it, even at my own risk. And I would act against exessive use of power against any civillians. Are we so different?
I am still waiting for you to apologize for claiming that I support terrorism. Why? 😦
3) Those are not at all “frivolous” to the people concerned. I plead you to use your empathetic ability. In societies, where not being in love anymore is considered not a good enough reason to get a divorce adultery runs rampant, exept if they have decided to put the utmost extreme and disgusting physical punishments on it, and even then it is merely hidden from the naked eye. I doubt if you would find such a society really any better for children or marriages. You see, by saying they are no more in love, people express a variety of emotions, but then you do not care what people feel. Or do you really not?
Emotional coldness is a serious problem in families and very hurtfull and traumatizing not only to the spouse, but to the children as well. Such emotional handicaps often cause the inability to show emotions to transfer from generation to generation and a terrible emotional anguish to be caused to all involved. Even to the cold person. But if these people could not divorce, there would not be any incentive for the emotionally cold or otherwise poor spouses to seek the advice to become less cold, or any other ways to make the marriage work. Would there?
Would you really like your only chosen sexual companion never to have orgasm by you? Have you never experienced an orgasm? This may not be essential to all people, but it is far from frivolous. People should marry with people who have similar sexual needs and desires, otherwise we are going to have some very unhappy marriages. Are we not? And such do allready exist. People marry for a myriad of reasons among wich the main issue they do describe being love, but it is also true that they later may discover some new sexual traits and desires of themselves. Especially so, if they have married very young and did not have the chance to learn about others and discover themselves before marrying. Right?
These are not at all frivolous issues. Sexuality is a very big part of who we are and us as the biological and psychological beings that we are. If you do not think these are important issues in a marriage, do not judge other people by your limited scope and emotional capacity. Learn about the joys of life other people have, and you might learn to understand their despares and needs as well. Besides, these reasons, you descibe “frivolous”, are very rarely the sole reasons why people come to the painfull descion of having to have a divorce. Rather they are expressed in a cumulative cloud of various reasons. Correct?
So, if one parent leaves for what ever you personally would esteem as “frivolous”, you would punish the children, by limiting their contact with one of their natural parents? And you dare accuse me of hating the children? What is wrong with you? Conservative Christianity, perhaps?
Of course the state of the citizen should be self supportive, but when people are in a position that they are unable to do so, it is extremely rarely in any way their own fault, nor was it ever their intent. Even if it was, how could we possibly evaluate who ended up in this situation deliberately? And even those people are in need of help. For sure it is never the fault of their children wether they are married or single parents. Right? Should the kids be punished for the deeds of their parents? Should humanity be punished by the choise of Adam? Of course not. That would be evil.
Well, you do not have to do any statistical research in your coffee brake, but try to understand the statistics you claim to know. After all, it was you who brought in the statistics and presented them as authority to support your case, when you clearly had not even understood what it would really mean, if the statistics you suggested existed, did existed.
Again, as I allready have stated several times over and over again. Divorce may have negative effects on the economics of involved individuals, but people are aware of that. Yet they get divorced to escape even more serious problems within those marriages, that would most likely have prevented the economical rise as seen on some of the more succesfull marriages.
You can not possibly read statistics as you have done here and expect anyone who understands any statistics to think you have reasoned something real from them. I really hope your work does not require you to understand statistics. You have not referred to any real or imaginary statistics, that would in any way prove, or even give evidence, to the idea, that if these failed marriages were forced to remain intact, it would have somehow magically lead to any sort of economical raise on part of these people, and even if it did – wich I very much suspect could be true – it is their free choise between the suggested economical raise and the failed marriage. These people love their children just as much as the next person and have the right as adults and parents to make the choise between two evils to themselves and their children. Do they not?
Did your constitution say something about the pursuit of profit, or did it say “pursuit of happiness…” And all that? Even if you disagreed with some of those Deist founding fathers of your nation about Christianity, were they right, or not on this particular issue about the great importance of happiness?
I will be off to Sweden for a while, and though they have the internet there too, I imagine I will not have too many free time to spend on this conversation, as I will be otherwise engaged. So, bye…
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2a) If the conscience acts in reference to an absolute, it is reasonable to suppose it exists.
Having read the Bible according to your own lights and cherry picking Christianity’s less glamorous historical moments does not make you familiar with traditional Christian moral theology which is based on natural law theory.
You fail to explain this: why do you simultaneously insist there are evil acts that should never be committed, and then say there is no such thing as objective morality, or moral absolutes?
As for your assertions about how you would fight a foreign invader, I don’t doubt your character, just your intellectual coherence. You want me to take back the claim you support terrorism: I will as soon as you admit it is absolutely wrong, but you can’t, since you insist absolute morals don’t exist.
I can justify why I won’t fight an unlimited war: intentionally killing an innocent person (murder) is always and everywhere evil.
2b) Without a contemporary airforce, the Finish Army would find itself fighting a 2D battle against an entrenched urban fighting force, without close air support, precision weapons, and intelligence. The battle would take months instead of weeks, and many thousands of civilians would die. I don’t mean this as a slight to the Fins, I’m just pointing out the realities of modern warfare.
3) I did not say the party abandoning the marriage for frivolous reasons should not have limited visitation rights, but that they should not have habitual custody of the children, or claim to economic support from their ex. Often, nowadays, they do. (Perverse incentive.)
Once you bring children into the world, their well-being takes priority. Children should not have their emotional lives shattered or their economic well-being threatened by emotionally incontinent adults.
Enjoy your trip.
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@Dpmonahan, thanks. My trip was very enjoyable.
2a) How would you go about determining wether the consciense of this or that man acts in reference to a specific absolute? Is there some other method, than to comapare the harm and benefits of possible action/inaction through our empathetic ability? Is that reference then not entirely dependant on the quality of the information about the actual results of the action and/or inaction? Is that information not then being provided to us foremostly by our empathy? What sort of conscience could a person have without any empathy? Is concience not entirely based upon the information we have about the reality we occupy and on our empathetic ability?
How could you possibly know what I fail to explain, before you have even asked the question? Do you consider yourself a prophet? You had not asked me before, wether there is actually any objective morality. Objectivity of morality is exactly as objectivity in everything else in reality. We simply do not have the absolute view on the objectivity, but our information about the objectivity of any issue, including morality, may get better as the quality of our information about the reality increases. For that we need information as objective as possible, not some metaphysical guesses based on ignorance, like religions.
Your fellow Christians keep telling me there are no innocent people and thus only the mercy of a god can save us from a just and rightfull punishment in the alledged afterlife. Some even go as far to recite a burning lake and eternal torment, from the imaginations of the men who wrote the Bible. Do you subscribe to this nonsense? If it is true, then does that render murder an acceptable act in as it is impossible to kill an innocent person since alledgedly none at all exist? What about the situation in wich a person killed a nother in an attempt to protect their own life and in the process ended up killing an “innocent” person? It happens you know. Was it less wrong and by what measure?
The less glamorous historical moments of Christianity require no cherry picking. What they tell us just by existing, is that Christianity is not really a phenomenon run by the divine intelligence of an absolute moral arbitrator, but rather just a nother superstitious social movement among other religions. At the very least they make the moral character of this alledged (but sorely lacking of any even remotely objective evidence to back it up) god character under suspect. Do they not?
Was it terrorism, when the Allied forces decided to destroy German workforce habitat by carpet bombardment? They knew very well that they were going for mainly the civillians working in the factories, that produced both the military and civillian material for the German wareffort. Civillians who had very little freedom not to participate and even slave labour. Or could there be a justification in your absolute sense of morals for that?
Where do you really draw the line for collateral damage and terrorism? The UN has clearly drawn the line between bombing schools full of civillians seeking refuge there during open hostilities, despite the – as of yet unproven – allegations that the Hamas was hiding some of their weapons there (even though it would fit perfectly to their mentality of religious zealotry). Did you not know this? Or would you rather not have known it, for your position to support Israeli apartheid government for some other reason? What might that reason be?
Again you are trying – and at this point, I am warranted to say desperately – to awoid the actual reality of the conflict and only discuss the issue as if there were no other oppression, than the strikes by the Israeli government to Gaza. How do you feel about the theft of Palestinian property by Israeli squatters, that the Israeli government protects the squatters? What about the collective punishment? Do you think that is how a “modern state” acts and should act? And torture? Or is it OK because your own (conservative Christian) government, quite recently, degenerated on that level of despicable human rights violations?
2b) I did not say the Finnish army would have no intelligence. Where did you get that from? The only actual “precision weapons” are hand weapons, such as rifles, and those only when used as such. No weapons that produce shrapnell can honestly be considered precision weapons, what ever the advertizing said, or the pakage material claims, when considering a cityfight with civillians on the site. Now are they? Well, perhaps in comparrison to carpet bombing, but that is not really a good way to measure wether something is a precision tool. It is like saying a machete is a precision tool in comparrison to a sledgehammer.
Any soldier armed even with a machete and affraid enough and especially with racistic attitudes is going to be a hazard to the civillian population in such a situation. Yet, the descision by ranking officers to bomb a school full of civillians, with “precision” weapons, or any kind of weapons from a distance, be it artillery unit, tank, or an air to ground system is effectively targetting those civillians. Is it not? As such, actually murdering those civillians, that is, if killing the innocent is absolutely wrong. Right? And actually wrong even if it was only an objective view on killing them. Right?
So, if there was an absolute, that we could claim to know and to determine the murdering of an innocent person totally wrong, then in effect, the Biblical god goes against such an absolute when in that god sends the ancient Hebrew to attack other nations and to kill children. Hence, in effect, this Biblical god can not possibly represent your concept of absolute morality. Correct?
3) You have as for now failed to show any “frivolous” reasons, nor a method by wich a reason could be determined “frivolous”. That’s all right. I do not expect you to be able to. Because, if you could, you would have referred to such allready when you claimed these could determine different treatment of the divorcees.
I find it terribly irresponsible of you to say, that emotional coldness could effectively be evaluated as a frivolous reason enough to deny custodianship of the children to the person who had this reason to brake their marriage. That you would rather give the children to an emotionally handicapped person, than to the person who tries to save their mutual children from the trauma such a mental state may cause to the children. You do, understand that if this was the case, it would put the emotionally cold person in a position to effectively blackmail the other party through the fact that the other party could not possibly get the custodianship of the children, and that is exactly what an emtionally cold person might do – and have done when we still had the system you would rather be installed back to the western society? Or what do you suppose would really happen in your neighbourhood if your demands were answered by the legistlation?
Do your divorce courts not have any method to determine to whom the custodianship of the children should be handed over to in a divorce situation? Is it totally random? Here we have licenced professional psychiatrists to evaluate the situations. They do not allways get it right, but that would not be in any way remedeed by denying people the chance to get a divorce from a dysfunctional marriage – what ever the reason for that dysfunction.
Alimony is for the kids, not for the single parent, but as children are not eligable to handle their own affairs, it is the parent who has the custodianship, who then handless the money. Right? Why should it be denied from the parent who takes care of the children? To work as an incentive for the parents not to divorce even from dysfunctional marriages? One more reason why the other parent – the one causing the other to wish to have a divorce – would have no incentive to seek help for said problems within the marriage. Correct?
If you really think the wellbeing of the children takes priority, then to work on the marriage, so that it would not get into the position where one party wants a divorce is part of that equation. However, if it has ended up in that situation despite the best efforts of the parents, it is not by any means reapaired by forcing the couple to stick together, if no clear breach of contract can be established and such marriages are very harmfull to the children. This is a known fact. It is not like the parents are really able to hide from their children when something has gone seriously wrong between them. Children do sense it, and if prolonged the situation is more likely to get infected even more, in wich case it is the children that suffer most. If the harm is bad enough for even one of the parents to wish to rather divorce and risk the economical hazards of single parenthood, then it seems they have reason enough.
If the parents can not agree to whom the custodianship of the kids is to be assigned, it is the job of the legal system to determine it with the best and most objective information they have on the particular case. Whom ever that is, it is only fair for them to get economic support from their former spouse, despite whom it was who wanted a divorce. It is to the interrest of the kids, not the divorced individuals.
You do realize that when people get married it is very likely that they do expect to be with that person for the rest of their lives? That this is indeed their dream and what they strive and struggle for, each to their own capacity? That it is a big descision and most often a desperate act despite what ever help the society may be ready to grant them if they end up in a desperate economic situation and possibly even with children? Do you?
And what about the couples with no children? There are a lot of those. Would the same rules as you suggest to the parents of little children apply to married couples that have no children? Get real.
It is like you are attempting to repair a hole in some pants by cutting it out. But effectively that will only lead to an even bigger hole.
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2a) I am speaking about the structure of conscience in general, how we interpret the commands of conscience: we either see them as absolute or they have no moral force.
If the reference point is empathy, we have no objective morals, a) because empathy is selective and b) empathy does not prescribe any action.
If the reference point is “the greatest good for the greatest number” then there is no such thing as objective morals because a) people don’t agree on ‘the good’ and b) there is nothing to keep someone from choosing an evil means to secure ‘the good’ about which no one agrees.
Again, quantity of information is nearly irrelevant. Three or four obvious facts suffice to make a moral judgement in the vast majority of cases. Only in the rarest of cases does more information help in a decision.
2b) There are two criteria on questions of collateral damage. The first is obvious: is it your goal to kill the innocent, or is it a side effect of a legitimate act of war. The second is less obvious: is there really no other choice. (Letting your own people be killed is not a valid choice for a modern government.)
For the UN to condemn attacks on their buildings as war-crimes while they know those buildings are being used for military purposes is hypocritical.
I shudder to think of the poor Finns launching an offensive into Gaza with just their rifles.
3) Such reasons are frivolous because the emotional and economic well being of children are more important than the feelings of adults who should keep the promises they made. Why you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge what everybody knows, that divorce is bad for children, is beyond me. Your selective empathy is entirely with irresponsible and emotionally incontinent adults, not with the children whose lives they are hurting.
The idea that children are “worse off in an unhappy marriage” is sentimental mythology, because a) post divorce experiences are anything but happy, b) the ‘unhappy’ refers to the parents, not the children, who are often ignorant of their parents struggles.
You suggest a system that gives economic incentives divorce, and preference to the party initiating the divorce: whomever strikes first with more complaints wins. This results in more divorce, more poverty, more broken children.
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@Dpmonahan, it seems we are running around in circkles. And neither has much anything to add to the subject. I have failed miserably to inform you about the reality as I see it. I can understand your points, but you are wrong. From my perspective, you have a limited scope to these particular issues, and obviously I am unable to widen your vision. But because we have come so far away, I shall try once more.
2a)Conscience is not a magical thing inside the human mind. It is a biological construct of our biological capacity for empathy, that is a result of our biological evolution within our biological electorchemical brain interacting with the material reality outside of it. There is nothing absolute about it either.
Conscience does not prescribe any action, nor is there anything in it, that would require a person from choosing evil. As in my examples about the Christians burning heretics abowe, people may act in the most horrible ways and be totally in line with their consciences, if they get even one out of their few facts wrong. Quality of information is vital, for the choise to be actually moral and not just be moral within the context of the subjective coscience.
If there is a “greatest good for greatest number”, it can only be reached by the best and most objective information awailable. Regardless of how little information is required in each case to be achieved, some information is always necessary. Absolute information is impossible to acheive, even by any creator entities, because it is an illogical suggestion in the first place. However, better and more objective information is possible to achieve and thus better and more objective morals.
2b) How do you know the UN knew their schools and hospitals were used for military purposes? There is nothing hypocritical about that. Even if they knew, they had no means to prevent any weapons to be hidden in the schools. Does storing weapons in a school (as alledged, but as of yet unproven, even if it were true) constitute an actual justification to bombard the school full of “innocent” civillians seeking refuge there, in your honest opinion?
Me and the UN concur, that it was an act of barbaric terrorism. The disregard for the innocent civillians by the Israeli military was unacceptable and infact nothing short from a war crime. How did they, as the modern state, end up doing something as barbaric as this? Because they act out of fear, hatred, racistic attitudes, religious zealotry and because they know they have the support of the only actual superpower on the planet, despite almost what ever they do. Why do you refuse to see such action as it is? What more horrid could Israel do, that you would find it condemnable?
In the context of what has passed, the alledged weapons hidden in the basement of some shcool, full of innocent civillians, are mere excuse to terrorize and murder the innocent civillians. The desperate religiously motivated extremist terrorism by Palestinians, or a few pitifull rockets made out of building materials do not justify such action from a modern state in response. The dispute should be resolved by making it possible for these two nations to share the land they both now claim as ancestral home, rather than by apartheid policies. Right? It is not unimpossible, though it may be a long and hard road, as it has been in for example South Africa. Eventually the economic disparity can only be levelled, if the two ethnic groups get equal treatment. Fencing in the other group like Leshoto, or Gaza, or the Warsaw ghetto, is not going to resolve the problem. Is it?
You say you ignore my uninportant comments, and I do make many, but I have now again and again asked what do think about Israeli government supporting extremist Jewish squatters on Palestinian property, collective punishment and torture. You have not replied because you really think these are uninportant issues? Or because the excuses you give for the Christian conservatives to support Israeli government regardless of it’s actions, do not actually cover those issues?
But you must understand, that these issues are the cause of the terrorism, wether you, I or anybody outside the conflict accept terrorism as such. The apartheid policy of Israel is the cause of the conflict as is the founding of the state of Israel. We can not reverse what has happened, but the current policy is not helping anybody, exept the criminals, terrorists, extremists, exploiters and the industrialists producing weapons. Are those the sort of people who should benefit from the actions of a modern state?
You may shudder on the idea of Finnish army to act in a way, that it takes a bit more casualities to awoid to become bunch of war criminals. I do not. Why should I?
3) No, divorce is not always the worst choise for the kids. As “everyone knows” it may have very bad and difficult reprecussions for them emotionally and economically, especially if the society decides not to support single parents, but it is the parents who presumably love their children who choose this rather to their children than for the kids to live in an unhappy family. Incentives or not, some people end up in this situation anyway. Should those people be abandoned in order not to create incentives?
People do not make such life altering situations just because there are such minute economic incentives. If people acted according to the best economic incentives and your position, that by remaining in even a failed marriage makes it likely for them to raise from poverty to the middle-class, then nobody would divorce, regardless of the help given to the single parents by the government, unless it was in such amounts, that it surely would provide better economic situation, than the middle-classes have. I doubt it has ever been so abundant in any country. Has it?
In reality people divorce because they have real problems in their marriage – real enough for them to abandon their dreams to live together for the rest of their lives with the person they married, sharing those dreams with that person – and you or I are not the people to tell them what they think are real enough problems. Are we? But those problems, what ever they are, are reflected to their relationship and if they are unable to resolve them, the problems are likely to become bigger and bigger and eventually will hurt the kids. Seriously. Even if the kids were not aware of the actual problems.
If you think the parents are able to hide the anguish between them (what ever the original cause of it), big enough for one of them to make the very life shattering descision to actually recognize that they would want to give up their marriage (even if they could not), you are simply being unrealistic – and unempathetic. Murders have been made, because people could not get a divorce in a society, that we have given up in the western culture decades ago, because it was moralistic, not moral. And before you go there, no I do not accept any murders, but it makes one wonder what is the responsibility of the society towards it’s members. Wether it is to force them to remain married despite their situation, or to give support when their dreams have failed them. It is a bit childish to bring out such arguments as “everyone knows”, now is it not?
Is it really for the government to step in and stop marriages from falling apart by arbitrary demands about breaches of contract to be established in courts of law to somehow magically protect the children from the fact, that their parents have in practice fallen apart and away from each other in their failed marriage? How is it too difficult for you to understand, this does not protect the children on any level from anything? The marriage has allready failed, if one of the adults wants a divorce, for what ever reason. If no divorce is possible, it does not heal the family, it makes things even more hurtfull for everybody involved. A mentally stable and healthy person, lets their spouse to go, but a sick obsessive and possessive does not. But if the law demands a breach in the marriage contract. Do you not see, that your method would not make these failed marriages happy and succesfull in any way. The number of happy marriages would not be increased in any way, just by forcing people to stay married, now would it?
And indeed, what about the couples with no children? Would you apply different rules to them? And do not try that marriage is about the kids bull again, because it simply is not true. Kids may not come and kids eventually grow up, but couples remain married. Correct?
You have not really stated what then in your opinion would be a suitable minimum breach of contract for one of the parents to get a divorce. Is it something that might reduce the number of marriages? As if people would consider before getting married the arbitrary demands for breach of contract, before making the pledge to love and hold on to the one person unless a breach is detected. Think about it.
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You can stop talking whenever you want.
2a) So conscience makes absolute, categorical commands “do this, do not do that”. But if you do not believe in an absolute point of reference, conscience is an absurdity. If the commands of conscience are not absolute, they have no force.
Yes, we know by observation that conscience can in fact be wrong, but that does not change how it is built, and how it is seen as being authoritative.
The information need to preform a moral act: who am I? what am I doing? why am I doing it?
2b) Read an interview in the times last summer with a UN official who ran the Gaza ops for a while. His points were a) Israel is evil b) Hamas stores weapons in the basements of UN schools and hospitals c) but Israel is still evil.
I ignore your questions about the broader context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because they are meaningless once missiles start flying. The Israeli govt is responsible for Israeli citizens. Once Hamas starts shooting rockets the question is not “gee, I wonder if our housing in East Jerusalem is problematic”; the question is “How many of our citizens are we going to let die?” The answer should always be “0”.
Such an hypothetical Finnish invasion of Gaza would not end in victory with higher casualties and no civilians killed. It would be a clusterfuck of enormous proportions with needless suffering on all sides. Lets not romanticize war.
3) People make bad decisions based on short term economic incentives all the time. The younger and poorer you are, the more likely you are to make such bad decisions.
Currently, the party who chooses to break contract, make the bigger accusations, hit first and hit harder, is rewarded with money and custody of children, even though they are doing damage to self, spouse and children. That is perverse. Such incentives should not exist.
Parents hide their problems from their children all the time. Just last week I was sitting with three friends, all men in their thirties, and the four of us agreed that we were in our 20s before we realized just how difficult our parents’ marriages had been. That is normal.
The only reason the institution of marriage exists is for the production and education of children. It is possible (and not wrong) for people to get married and not have children, but it is not normal.
I don’t know what minimum breach of contract would be. It would have to be something that threatens the objective health or well being of the family: compulsive spending or alcoholism, etc.
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@Dpmonahan, of course. Of course I can stop at any time. I am fully aware of that. And this is getting a bit tedious…
2a) No, conscience is not an absurdity. It is part of human intuition. A natural process of thought. Having good conscience is part of human wellbeing. But there is nothing absolute about it.
So, now you finally do accept that you need information to make moral choises, do you?
2b) Having not read that particular report, I am unable to evaluate it much, but in your opinion, howcome had, the UN official you refer to, come to the conclusion that Israel is evil? Is it not evil to bombard a school full of innocent civillians seeking refuge there, regardless of what is being hidden in the basement by terrorrists? In my book it is and obviously it was in the book of this UN official wittness to the actual events. Why would it not be so in yours?
“Housing in East Jerusalem”??? You obviously do not know jack about the situation in Israel and Palestine. So, it is ignorance of the actual situation, that allows you to hold immoral views on the question. There is not enough room here and I doubt if you would believe me, so I can only suggest, you go find out more about how the torture, collective punishment and “housing in East Jerusalem” affect the situation.
Who is romantizising war? Is it a romantic view, that even in war we should awoid unnecessary civillian deaths?
I confess to be a bit of a romantic, but I also have military training to asses what sort of action results in what sort of collateral damage, do you? Let me sum up what I have said: All armies have specialist units to engage with hidden deposits of weapons, rather than to bombard civillians in the same building.
What you are offering is not at all how a “modern state” should act in a terrorist, or even war situation. You are offering tribal moralism and I can’t help but to think, that this might have something to do with your twisted view on moral absolutism and not really requiring actual information of the situation before making moral descisions, rather relying on one’s subconscious intuitive instincts like the conscience – wich as you have allready admitted easily makes mistakes about the actual situation, given too little, or poor quality, or even down right false information.
3) Let me get this straight: You think people make bad choises based on economic incentives. You would deny a single parent the help they and their kids need, because some other parent might take this help as a bigger motive to divorce, than the fact “that everyone knows”, that it is better for their kids and their personal economics to remain married? That is ridiculous. If people really make such hasty and bad choises, what they need is better information about the “realities” you think they allready know. Right? Not some strange government legal juggling of their actual situations through marriage and divorce laws.
However, I doubt, what you claim “everyone knows” that it is better for failed marriages to remain intact, for them either economically or emotionally, is actually true and people do have very real reasons to give up their dreams of remaining married with the person they married under that pretext, and get a divorce even at the threat of economic disaster it will be to them – and even with some economic support from the state.
Why is it so hard for you to see, that if the parent is prone to make “bad” descisions, that parent is even more in need of the support by the society, than a parent that is good at descision making. Punishing them for having made a bad choise of spouse, or even if their divorce was a hasty choise, is only punishing their children and not teaching them anything, but to become bitter. Preventing people from getting divorces is not going to magically make their marriages happy. Is it?
It is interresting to hear about you and your friends. But you can not evaluate what would result by forcing couples to remain married, if one of them actually wanted a divorce, by assessing families that voluntarily remained together. Can you?
I have several friends whose parents divorced when they were children and it did not affect these friends in any especially negative ways. It was sad for them, but it would no doubt, have been hard and more likely even harder for them, if their parents, who could not resolve their differences, had remained together.These friends of mine have grown up healthy and prospered, but it is true that our society supported their single parents when these needed it.
Infact, to be honest, I do not know any adult, that could possibly blame their own misfortunes or misdeeds really on their parents divorce. Yet, a divorce can have very negative effects to a kid, like for example when the spouse, to whom the custodianship was not given – and for a reason – is a possessive and obsessive self centered jerk, who uses the children as tools to hurt their spouse who had the audacity to leave them. However, it should be clear, that in such situations, it was still better for the kids to be removed from the imminent influence of such a problematic person. Correct? But what you are suggesting is, that such a jerk could easily prevent the other party to leave and protect the kids from their influence. Is it not?
You wrote: “I don’t know what minimum breach of contract would be. It would have to be something that threatens the objective health or well being of the family: compulsive spending or alcoholism, etc.” So, in effect, you do not have actual idea what and how these limits on marriage you would want the government to impose should work, but still you would everyone else to submit to such? What nonsense?
What about fat? I hear it is a serious problem and an actual threat to the children and their future adult lives in your country. If you read the statistics, it might even be a far worse problem in the long run, than divorces. Should the government step in and restrict what people can buy from the shop and what parents can feed their kids? How much government intervention in the choises adult people make for their lives and the lives of their children is necessary in your opinion?
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The cure for tedium to to do what I do: limit your time for responses to 15 minutes.
2a) Yes, conscience is all you say it is, but if it is not interpreted as absolute it has no force. If it is not absolutely wrong to murder innocents, you will do it.
2b) Exactly, no space to discuss the issues. Torture is evil. What you call collective punishment the Israelis would call keeping random Palestinians from blowing up pizza shops. The UN thinks the Israelis are evil because (surprise!) the UN is against the Westphalian system, and that determines their sympathies, which was my point.
I never said you need no information for moral judgment, but minimal: who am I, what am I doing, why am I doing it.
EVERYBODY agrees one should avoid unnecessary civilian deaths, (well, everybody except Palestinian terrorists), the problem is judging what is an acceptable risk and what is not. If a terrorist is targeting my civilians while hiding behind his, I am not responsible for what happens to his. If I am a very good person I might make a reasonable effort to avoid killing his human shield. In a combat situation that reasonable effort is necessarily limited.
Here is a question, next time Hamas starts shooting rockets how many Israeli civilians have to die before the Israeli government is justified in trying to destroy the rocket launchers which will inevitably be hidden in schools and hospitals? This isn’t about abstract rights to occupy homelands, this is about the responsibilities of modern governments to its citizens.
3) There is nothing wrong with me not having a concrete alternative, I’m not some kind of statesman. My point is that divorce is bad for children, economic disaster for poor people, that current divorce laws benefit the rich and set up perverse incentives for the poor, making them fundamentally unjust. Sometimes it is impossible to fix an injustice, that does not make it right.
No-fault divorce laws were democratically adopted in the US in the 60s and 70s using many of the arguments you put forth. The results have been a net increase in human misery: more broken families, more people dependent on government, less social mobility, more men in prison for unpaid child support, more women on the government dole, more delinquent children.
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@Dpmonahan, the tedium of trying to say the same thing in a new way so, that you would even understand what I am talking about is not cured by putting in less or more time, than it takes to form the idea so that it would be comprehensable to a nother person. The only question is wether it is worth while or not. I have my restrictions, one of wich is that it takes time for me to accept, that I am too poor to argue my case in a foreign language to get through, even as much as to make myself understood.
2a) And yet people who think their conscience is absolute have murdered innocent people throughout times. And most people who do not believe their personal subjective view throught their conscience is absolute have killed nobody. Hence, better ethics and morals do not come from the emotional and empathetic intuition of conscience alone. It requires better and more objective information about what is actually harmfull or beneficial to support it. All absolutes are unknown to us, hence taking something as absolute is just extremist failing of logic.
2b) Finally you admit at least, that torture is evil. Why was that so hard?
Could even such a thing as torture be the reason why the government of Israel, among other questionable and evild things they do, like bombing shools full of refugees, stealing the property and land from the Palestinians, setting up an apartheid system and exacting collective punishment, better explain why some people see them as evil in that sense? Never mind the excuses for why they use such methods, if we can agree – as stated abowe by both of us – that the ends do not justify the means. We know Israel is torturing some of their Palestinian prisoners, so then is the UN official (you referred abowe to) not right to call out evil in a government, such as Israel , that actively engages in using torture?
It does not make all Israelis evil, or responsible for torture, any more than the terrorist attacks of some Palestinian religious zealots makes all of them evil, but it speaks loudly about the motivations and ethics of their government. It puts a shadow over all their operations especially when they refuse to allow any outside investigations to alledged human rights violations and war crimes during their operations. Does it not?
Should the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis be resolved? It creates insurmountable amount of human suffering on both sides, so obviously yes. Yes? By whom should it be resolved? If the Palestinians are unable – as you say – to even form a modern state, then should the conflict be resolved by the modern state in the area – the government of Israel? In any case, they have far greater chance to resolve it than the Palestinians do, if they want to. If the goverment of Israel simply unable, or is actually benefiting from the situation while it is harmfull to their society and citizens who sould resolve it then? Should the international community step in? What would that intervention actually involve? What would be the resolution to the problem? A final solution in wich all the Palestinians are removed from their ancestral land, by the conquering Israeli forces? Should the Palestinians get some compensation for their loss? Maybe a new homecountry in some other part of the planet, where they could then set up their own apartheid system to oppress the locals, who could then be removed somewhere else and so on… The two state model, in wich Israel lets the Palestinians form a modern state without constantly harassing them and grabbing every bit of fertile land left to them by forming colonies on the Palestinian property and sabotage by bombing infrastructure like water cleaning plants, housing, roads, schools and even hospitals, or giving incentive to terrorism by torture? A system in wich the state of Israel and the international community help the Palestinians out in their efforts to achieve a state of their own? Or could the solution be, that the modern state of Israel would hand out citizen rights to all people regardless of their ethnicity and religion, living in the area of Palestine, much like east and west germanies once united, or how the very similar system of apartheid was ended in South Africa? Or is there a nother solution? If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, at leat as long as you as a voter of the one superpower on the planet can influece on what happens next.
Yes, some moral questions need seemingly minimal information, but there are a lot of moral questions that require a wealth of information. Even thought the questions as you put them who am I, what am I doing, why am I doing it, would seem simple, the information to answer them objectively might be anything than simple.
However, when engaging in making moral judgement those are not the questions you should be asking yourself foremost, because those are easily answered even by a nazi stormtrooper: I am Hans Hanson – SS sturmbanfuhrer, killing Jews who are a threat to the Third Reich and conspiring to murder citizens of the “modern state” of Reich, because I am a good nazi who wants to protect the good citizens of the Reich and this is what my coscience tells me to do. Or alternatively: I am an American voter John Johnson, voting for a conservative politician, because he has promised to stand behind the god’s chosen people in Israel from evil Palestinian terrorists, no matter what it takes, because the end is near and it will be seen by this judgemental god as a pious act of me to support the prophetized homecoming of the Jews through the democratic process in my own country. Or alternatively: I am an Israeli officer Avram Baruch, planning the protection of the Jewish settlement on Palestinian property, because I fight for my nation and the Palestinians are my enemies.
By far better questions to ask before making a moral judgement is what harm, or benefit factually follows and am I being overtly selfish, or is my selfishness socially acceptable regardless of my ethnicity, social standing, or who I am, and does it cause exessive harm to others.
Is it really honest to say, that Israel with it’s unarguably well equipped and effective army, does not hold other options to destroy the rockets shot at it, other than when they were alledgedly hidden in the basement of the school at the same time hundrends of families and innocent civillians were seeking refuge there? Of course not. The rockets were an exellent excuse to make a terror attack against the Palestinians to create an incentive for them to move out from their ancestral homeland and to exact overwhelming revenge for the murder of few innocent civillians by murdering hundreds of civillians. This process creates also an incentive for more terrorists, because all of those murdered civillians had a relatives who survived alive, but traumatized, to exact exactly as futile vengeance through pitifull rocket attacks or horryfyingly desperate terrorist suicide attacks.
Who benefits, we ask when a crime needs to be resolved, do we not? Hamas and even more extreme groups of resistance to the wanton violence Israel is using in it’s apartheid policy, land grabs and terror tactics benefit, because they gain more support from the embittered Palestinian population, but they are not by far the only ones. The conservative politicians who claim to protect the Israeli citizens, even if it requires for them to submit to tribal moralism benefit, because the fear becomes the main issue of any elections and fear is a highly emotional state to make rational conclusions. The conservative US politician benefits as well, because he is seen by his voters as the good and god fearing man through whom they all can achieve a bit of the grace of this judgemental god in protecting the chosen people from evil enemies, and/or because their moral standing and sense of justice is mere tribal morality in wich one side has the right to exact revenge on the other by the pretence of “protecting their own side” and in wich the ends of “protection” seem to justify any means including collective punishment, exessive use of violence and even torture.
3) Well, If you suggest one way is better than the other for the society to go to, then the minimum requirement for you – be you a statesman, or not – is to present what the other alternative is and how it would cure the problem. There is a lot of this going about, that people recognize a problem (wich is healthy, because nothing can be cured if we do not first see that there is a problem) and then suggest something vague to resolve the problem, even though they have absolutely nothing at all to go on why their solution was any better than the problematic situation, other than that it is not the exact same as the problem they think they have recognized. But if we would run down that rabbit hole, we would only end up creating more problems.
However, we in the western countries have been through the society in wich divorce was restricted in a number of ways, and it was not a happy, healthy and good society. You may claim all you want that those problems you list have increased, but unless you are willing to present any actual data, or even to seek it out for yourself, I am not going to believe you. You have clearly made your mind up about this without that information, or the legwork to achieve it.
You can not possibly know if there are more broken families now, than there were in the golden 50’s, just by looking at a statistic that says there are more divorces, because we do know that when divorces were more restricted, than they are today there were more broken families, that were not officially divorced – yet broken they were. This is exactly what I mean when I say you should learn to read statistics, before trying to appeal to any, even if you were actually ever to give any statistics to support your claims.
There are many factors that lead to people becoming dependant on the goverment support. The easiest way to restrict that number of people would be to pull out all the goverment support all together. And acracadabra, there would no longer be people dependant on goverment support! Hooray! But honestly, you do realize that this would not limit their need for such support in any way, do you?
Is it not your misconseption that by restricting divore we could mend broken families back into happy families on economical climb part of the same problem of you not really understanding how statistics, or society in general works? This is what I mean when I say your solution seems like cutting the hole in your pants away.
Men in prison for unpaid child support??? Does that really happen in your society? That is just mad. It seems there is something inherently wrong in your justice system. Why and how did they end up in prison? Did they not want to support their own children? Or were the child support payments so badly deviced, that they simply could not afford to pay? If they did not want to pay support for their very own children, what kind of fathers would they have made in the first place, regardless of their economic situation? If they were unable to meet the legal demands, why were the demands set so poorly that the fathers could not possibly meet them? Clearly, there should be other solutions to such problems, than to force the parent who wanted the divorce not to get one. That is a ridiculous suggestion. Putting people into prison for not paying what they are legally due, might be the only solution in a lot of societies, to deal with such criminal minds, but in most western societies such people are usually only stripped out of their money and a bit more for braking the law. The law should not require anyone to pay more than they really are able to. Should it?
There are many reasons for juvenile delinquency. Divorces per se are not a reason for anybody to become deliquent. Are they? Yes, there is a great deal of emotional distress involved, but if the parent who gets the main responsibility for the child is a stable, healthy person and if the child does not suffer much emotional manipulation from the other party in the divorce afterwards, that child has exactly the same chances of not becoming a delinquent as the child from the intact happy family. And consequently, if the parents are not stable and the child suffers from emotional distress and manipulation within a marriage that child will also become likely to deliquent behaviour. If the divorce creates an economic gap in wich the single parent and subsequently the child fall into, and that creates delinquent behaviour, then it is the economic disparity and desperation that creates the delinquency, not the divorce. I know, it is a bit more complicated and requires little bit more information than who you are, what are you doing, nor why are you doing it, to make this moral destinction. But it is a moral question for us citizens and voters to support either a society where such economic desperation creates incentives for immoral behaviour, or against it and for a better society in wich the youth wether after surviving a divorce or not, would not have such incentives to become delinquents.
The cure for tedium to to do what I do: limit your time for responses to 15 minutes.
2a) Yes, conscience is all you say it is, but if it is not interpreted as absolute it has no force. If it is not absolutely wrong to murder innocents, you will do it.
2b) Exactly, no space to discuss the issues. Torture is evil. What you call collective punishment the Israelis would call keeping random Palestinians from blowing up pizza shops. The UN thinks the Israelis are evil because (surprise!) the UN is against the Westphalian system, and that determines their sympathies, which was my point.
I never said you need no information for moral judgment, but minimal: who am I, what am I doing, why am I doing it.
EVERYBODY agrees one should avoid unnecessary civilian deaths, (well, everybody except Palestinian terrorists), the problem is judging what is an acceptable risk and what is not. If a terrorist is targeting my civilians while hiding behind his, I am not responsible for what happens to his. If I am a very good person I might make a reasonable effort to avoid killing his human shield. In a combat situation that reasonable effort is necessarily limited.
Here is a question, next time Hamas starts shooting rockets how many Israeli civilians have to die before the Israeli government is justified in trying to destroy the rocket launchers which will inevitably be hidden in schools and hospitals? This isn’t about abstract rights to occupy homelands, this is about the responsibilities of modern governments to its citizens.
3) There is nothing wrong with me not having a concrete alternative, I’m not some kind of statesman. My point is that divorce is bad for children, economic disaster for poor people, that current divorce laws benefit the rich and set up perverse incentives for the poor, making them fundamentally unjust. Sometimes it is impossible to fix an injustice, that does not make it right.
No-fault divorce laws were democratically adopted in the US in the 60s and 70s using many of the arguments you put forth. The results have been a net increase in human misery: more broken families, more people dependent on government, less social mobility, more men in prison for unpaid child support, more women on the government dole, more delinquent children.
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There is nothing wrong with your command of the English language or your capacity to communicate, I simply disagree with you.
2a) Your principle of not doing harm however fails in the examples you gave: everybody is aware of the pain and suffering that is being inflicted. That pain and suffering is justified in their minds by a greater good: the race, the perfection of society, etc. They can empathize all they want with their victims, the evil is done for something greater. Ends justifying means.
You say people acting in accord with their conscience are murders… fine. Then where do you get off claiming murder is absolutely wrong? You simply cannot.
Could you please give an example of a moral choice where large quantities of information are involved?
2b) I’m not going to speculate as to the secret motives of Israelis, but if they really just wanted to kill Palestinians there are more effective ways of doing it than limited incursions into Gaza or letting Arab Israelis participate in parliament. The fact remains that in a Westphalian system a state is responsible for the lives and well being of its citizens, and that is it. If you stop looking at the issue in terms of race and black-hearted Jews, and as a simple working out of classic Westphalian power politics, Israeli actions would, in general, become quite rational.
3) I could claim I want to return to the staus quo before the advent of no-fault divorce, since the results have been so awful, but that is not realistic: the culture has changed. Politics is about the possible, not the perfect. Some problems are unsolvable, and I accept that. So I simply condemn the evils of the current system.
Yes, men are jailed for not paying their child-support. How else is the state going to make them pay it? You need coercion to enforce a law.
I’m not against government support, but it should be temporary. If you let people sit forever on the dole, they will. Check out this article and ask yourself if this lady would be better off in a cold but stable marriage or living the government funded life she has: http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_2_tina-nash.html
Since the introduction of no-fault divorce, there is more delinquency and more government dependence, not less, which means your argument that stable but cold marriages are worse for children unlikely to be true.
We seem to have different ideas of marriage: you emphasize a romantic involvement for the emotional enjoyment of the spouses, I emphasize the contract for the procreation and care of children. Since the latter aspect is much more important (unless you hate children), I think I am right in emphasizing it.
Feel free to take the final word, I will read with interest.
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Sorry, I messed up by copying the latest response of dpmonahan to the end of my latest comment. It was because this strip of conversation has grown so long that copying the previous comment is the only way to see what the other has said at the same time while responding to it. My humble apologies to anyone possibly following the conversation and especially to you dpmonahan.
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@Dpmonahan, thank you for letting me have the final word and for your kind words about my language skills. Perhaps it is then best for us to agree to disagree on this matter. Yet, since you offer me this chance to reply, I shall.
2a) You can hardly claim that the nazi stormtroopers, let alone their commanders and politicians with the final responsibility empathized too much with their victims. And that is where their morals failed them, not in their consciences. I bet that these depraved individuals did not fully comprehend the hurt they caused. Thus, their information of the situation was limited and corrupted as much as their empathetic skills. I wonder what in their cultural heritage made them subject to such singlemindedness…
You continiue to refer to the quantity of the information, while I have stated several times that the quality of the information is more vital. However, since you asked, a founding of a nuclear powerplant requires a terrible quantity of quality information. It is a moral choise, wether we decide to create the open craters of uranium mines, leave the toxic waste to the insurmountable line of future generations and take the risks involved to even present generations in exchange for the energy we need for our society to run and profit for the very few to fill in their emotional need to have many zeros on their bank accounts. Even in this case the quality of the information is more important, but just a couple of simple questions are hardly sufficient and we as voters in western democracies bear the burden of responsibility of such a moral descision.
A nother example could be the descision to go to war. In a democracy it is the political representatives of the people who have to make that descision, knowing full well, that it might result in the deaths of thousands of innocent civillians. Then the information provided by intelligence sources, international community and reports by impartial research is abundant, but vital for that descision to be even remotely moral. If the main casus belli is – for example – chemical weapons of mass destruction alledgedly hidden by a dictatorship, then it is crucial that those allegations about such weapons are indeed verified. The quality of the information on wich the descision is made will be later evaluated and the choise to act on poor knowledge or imagined messages from beyond real-time and space might be seen as immoral. And in a democracy, the alligable voters do hold an ethical responsibility of their choises. The ends seem to be justified by the means in a war situation. If the ends to end tyranny and murder justify some collateral damage in the form of killing innocent civillians – even a minimal number – then we are discussing situational ethics rather than some imaginary absolutes.
The fact that vast majority of moral everyday choises may be reached easily and most often with a minimal use of intuition – call it conscience, or empathy – so much so, that we most often are not even aware that we made a moral choise not to kill the ice cream salesman to save the money we spend on the ice cream, but it does not, by any means, rule out the big descisions.
In everyday life we make moral choises that require a level of information to even understand we are making a conscious choise. But for the choise to be conscious moral choise there needs to be information, for the choise to be even remotely conscious, never mind actually moral and not just moralistic, nor down right immoral. For example when you buy a product in the shop, you are making a moral choise, if you consciously choose a product produced by a company, or a corporation that exploits the poor conditions of workers, or producers in the developing countries. The morality of your choise is then dependant very much on two things. Wether if you have enough quality information to make the moral choise and if you have any empathy towards the other people somewhere along the production line. The empathetic intuition, or conscience if you will, is a form of information as well, as it is the social information about in what sort of world would you choose to live in. A world where people cared about such things, or a world where everybody just held to their own. All that is an awfull lot of information and if any of it is poor quality, or simply false, you might end up doing the immoral choise. There is nothing absolute about any of this, yet it is all about social morals. If you decide not to care about any such and it does not bother your coscience, your conscience did not help you to make a more moral choise, rather an immoral and selfish choise.
2b) There is nothing secret about the fact that the Israelis want revenge and expect the amount of terror to snuff out the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian religious fanatics. If they wanted to stop the rocket attacks alltogether, they would not storm into Gaza bombing hundreds of innocent civillians and children. It has been tried out again and again, and this method simply fails. It is rather obvious, that the hatred caused by such action is going to create even more violence, even though the few rockets were destroyed. But at what prize? It is a very short term response to a much bigger problem, that reminds me of a Finnish proverb: If you piss in your pants to get warm from the frost, it is going to help out only for a very short while and then you will get a lot colder than initially were.
The peace treaty of Westphalia. I knew you were a conservative, but I have hard time to believe very many people even among Christian conservatives would see the 17th century social model formed as a desperate compromise between Christians murdering each other in grand scale as how a “modern state” should act. That treaty was only the beginning step of a long and ardorous road to where we are now – several hundred years after.
I do not see the Jews any more black hearted than the Palestinians. I thought, I had made as much obviously clear in all my comments abowe. What I have said, is that they are better equipped to solve the crisis than the Palestinians. Terror is not going to solve it, wether the terror is by the Palestinians or by the Israeli government. Injustice, like collective punishment, violation of property, segragation, apartheid policy, security walls, theft, fear, hatred and yes, even torture, are not going to solve it. They are the causes and fuel of the ever ongoing crisis.
The majority of Israelis have been deluded into thinking that violence solves their problems, but it has not really solved the problem in decades and the same applies even worse to the Palestinians, though the deluded part of society seems more desperarte. Everybody suffers, wether they are Jewish, or Islamic citizens of Israel, or wether they are Islamic, or Christian Palestinians.
It is the Israelis, who have the modern state and functioning democracy, and therefore they carry the main responsibility in comparrison to the Palestinians. As higher ability, power and might do not make right, but on the contrary increase moral responsibility. Logically, with more power there follows more responsibility.
3) As you have allready admitted, that your ultra conservative suggestion about marriage is not a practical solution to the problems you brought up, then I guess we really are done with this subject.
However, it needs to be stated, that there never was any status quo. That is a figment of your imagination and romantization of the past culture. It is easy to condemn what is wrong, but if your solution is something you yourself acknowledge as impossible, then that is not a solution at all. It is like suggesting we should return to a society that had not acknowledged the problems of pollution and be happy and content in our ignorance.
It is ridiculous to put people into prison, because they could not pay for their childrens support. Clearly, either they could not meet the unrealistic sums set by the legal system, or they are spitefull, sick evil men who would not want to support even their own children. Clearly the childred are better off if they are not under constant influence by such emotionally twisted men. Yet, in my country, even the latter group are not put to prison, they are simply forced to pay. The money is extracted from their accounts by the legal system, and possibly depending on the situation they are fined for not paying in time.
The story behind your link is appalling, but it has nothing at all to do with our discussion. It is an anecdotal story about how badly some very disturbed men, most often with very conservative values about the human value of women as secondary to men and/or might makes right mentality, treat women. It is a false dichtomy to demand, that she would have been better off as a disappointed wife in a forced marriage, than to be beaten up by a boyfriend. This gets to blaming the victim. It is exactly the same as saying that she would have been a lot more happier as a slave, than to have been killed. Yes, of course, a live slave is more likely to be happier than to be killed, if those were her only options, but even that by no means makes slavery OK. You see, the fact that something is better than the other, does not mean it is by any means right.
Once more I have to say, you really need to learn how to read statistics to get any even remotely objective information out of them. Even if you could produce statistics that said there are more reports of delinquency after such marriage laws you refer to, than there were before, you would still need to establish a link between the increased divorce and the delinquency rates. The delinquency rates might be a result of a number of other factors in the society, or even by just quantitative methods, like what is counted among delinquency. These issues are much more complex, than just straight forward one isolated thing following a nother equally isolated phenomenon. Much more likelier reasons for such rates to delinquency to grow, than divorces, are the growing social separation of the poor and the rich (wich appears to children in divorce situations, if the society sets such kids in an unequal position with other kids), the commercial culture, that creates unrealistic expectations of what social success is to the voulnerable youth and even just increased competitiveness within a society. Those are then the real reasons, that need to be dealt with, not the divorces. Perhaps they all needed to be done a bit better, not to work as incentives for delinquency, wether the kid is from a divorced, or an intact family. And still, it might be, according to what I have heard from you and others, that divorces are really poorly treated by the legal system and rest of the society in your country. That might establish a link between the delinquency and the divorce, but you see the divorce is not the problem, that causes the delinquency, but rather the problem is how badly it is handled by the society and by how poor the support for the single parets is.
As there are plenty of adults in the society who have grown to become productive members of it despite the fact that their parents divorced and who were not any sort of delinquents in their youth, it indicates, that the divorce in itself is not the cause of any delinquency rates growing. If there are more delinquent behaviour by kids from divorce situations, then it needs to be established what causes the correlation. But correlation is not causality. Then that problem needs to be dealt with, but it is not cured by forcing less people not to get a divorce. That would be totally ass backwards. If the reason is, that the kids are in a social and economic gap, then that gap should be dealt by the society, and any other kids who become delinquents because of social or economic gaps, should recieve similar help to lessen the delinquency problem.
No, no society is perfect, there I agree with you totally, but there are important questions and methods to make the society better for everybody, that do not involve such barbarism as demands of ability to show legal breach of cotract in an obviously failed marriage, since one of the adults in it wants to dissolve it, what ever the reasons or reprecussions.
It may be, that some people do get married just because they want to have children, but it sounds to me there is something seriously wrong about them, if they want to have children with a person they do not feel romantically involved with. Nobody signs out all their own rights and liberties to enter marriage in western world, not even in case there be children. People change and all the time too young people get married with people they really do not know. Marriage is not just about emotional enjoyment, but we are talking about emotional wellbeing here. The emotional wellbeing of all involved. If there is no real emotional wellbeing in the marriage for the parents, it is going to reflect to the children wether they even acknowledge it or not. Most often if the wellbeing has been totally lost it is clear to the children as well. Civilized adults are even then able to resolve their separation to seek out such happiness from elswhere with minimum emotional distress to the kids, while less than civilized adults are going to hurt each other and their children only just a little less if they are not forced to remain under the same roof to ponder upon their problems year after year.
The amount of government dependency is derived from two factors, the need for support and the evaluation of situations where people are infact in need of it. Both may increase the amount of dependency. In most western countries the government dependency has increased since we as societies decided not to abandon the unemployed and otherwise poor to their own devices. The other reason is capitalistic economics in wich the industrialist and the shareholder are not interrested in the misery or wellbeing of others, just about the – and let us be honest – rather vast profits. The total need for help may be increased by divorces, but the government dependance is the lesser evil, if you compare it to human emotional and economic wellbeing. At least that is the way it is evaluated by moral empathetic people in a modern state. If such needs are not met, then there will be social unrest and even more delinquency and criminal behaviour within the society as we can easily observe by looking at many of the developing countries.
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