Is there such a thing as right or wrong?

[heydaralon]

Even though you end up with moral relativism which has been abused by faggoty academics, politicians, and businessmen, I think that attempting to equate morality with a logic based empirical system is kind of a Utopian project in a way. In fact, I doubt you would enjoy the outcome of it, because it is very similar to the ideology you see Globalists pushing.

Logical Positivism is basically taking things like Physics, Chem, Mathematics, and hard sciences, and using the universal empirical conclusions of these sciences and extrapolating them to the murky business of human affairs. They wanted to take all of the complexities of these issues, and reduce them down to mathematical laws that would govern societal morality and behavior. This belief system set up Churches of Humanity throughout Europe and South America, and its religion was basically seen as a farce. However, it did end up influencing a bunch of academics and influential people. These people are running the EU, banks, and global institutions. They believe most if not all of Positivism's major points, such as the fact that science can lead to greater morality, humanity is converging on one economic system, one moral system, and that man will be unified by these iron laws of humanity.

If you like this current system, you have the Positivists to thank for laying down its foundations. Personally, I will take relativism, if it means that I can have a say in the moral destiny of my own country.

[Speaker to Animals]

I'm not trying to make a Paul Feyerabend type argument that science and math are relative and based on perspective. However, I think it gets less certain when you get into morality.

Here's an extreme example: There is a autobiographical book written by a Jewish guy named Roman Frister who was in the camps. Every morning at roll call, each inmate had to wear a hat. Those who didn't were shot. A male guard raped Frister, then stole his cap. The guard knew that Frister would be shot in the morning and the evidence for the rape would disappear. So Frister waited until another prisoner went to sleep, and stole his cap. In the morning at roll call, the prisoner without a cap was taken from the group and shot from behind at the base of the skull.

Do you think what Frister did was right? What was the most moral thing for him to do in that situation?

You would not find anyone on this forum who would defend child rape or mass shooting, but there are plenty of other things we make 200+ pages fighting fiercely about, from abortion, taxation, government programs and charity, hate speech, homosexuality etc. I could make a pretty good system of morality that would make perfect sense for me, but I would be hard pressed to convince even a single other person on this forum to fully agree with.

Under no system of ethics I know of was what he did right.

Most systems can broadly be categorized as utilitarian, rule-based, or hybrid. A utilitarian line of argumentation needs to show he maximized good and minimized evil. He did not. He merely shifted the cost of evil to another person. In the traditional rule-based system derived by applying reason to human nature, he committed murder himself, which is immoral.

The usual line of attack against moral realism is to demonstrate where utilitarianism and rule ethics contradict one another, and imply there can be no objective morals because the two moral systems do not even agree.

But to that I would point out this argument, though fallacious, would if true undermine even science itself, since we always find different models contradicting one another, and we assume our current model will someday be contradicted, but we do not therefore assume it impossible that objective reality does not exist.

All good points, but consider this:

How do we determine what is good and what is evil, much less minimize one and maximize the other? Sometimes, evil actions lead to good in the future, and war crimes can cruelty can lead to long periods of peace. Since present morality can lead to bad outcomes in the future, does that make it a net evil overall? If a member of organized crime embezzled and extorted so that his children would be able to get a great education and live an honest life helping others, does the evil outweigh the good? In many belief systems, good and bad are not separate, they are simply reinforcing eachother.

Also how do we view intent? If I attempt to do something good, but it ends up leading to a future horror show, does my intent matter and alleviate some of the blame? Even very spiritually and academically educated Christians debate this sort of thing. In the past, I read that Jansenists assigned morality to action and duty, whereas the Jesuits argued that intentions were of more important to determining right and wrong. I have no good answers, I just do not believe that you assign empirical numbers and data to something as vague as right and wrong. However, I still have very strong opinions on what I think is right.

The mistake is this: Just because some truth is difficult to reason out one cannot then infer that truth does not exist in a real sense.

If that were the case, then there could be no objective truth at all. You don't just end up with moral relativism. You end up with solipsism.