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Originally Posted by
Redzeppelin
Well, b, that may be true. The other option available is that I saw your post and did not find that it sufficiently answered my question. I'll let you decide which one is true.
I get to decide? Gee that's nice. Not much of an argument, was it, just saying your question hadn't been answered when it had. OK, I'm going to decide you didn't see it. ;)
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Your father was very practical in his outlook. So what philosophy does his answer point to?
Pragmatism? Libertarianism?
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From where I'm standing, his answer suggests that the only thing that controls our behavior is fear of retaliation. But isn't that fear predicated on the idea that the other has the power to retaliate? What if I'm stronger? Then what need I fear? Why do the right thing if the other whom I wrong doesn't have the power to return evil upon me? Now what stops me?
I don't think fear of retaliation is really the main thing that's going on here. My question was based on a childish, solipsistic assumption that we, as a family, represented an unquestionably right-thinking majority and it should be a simple matter for the right-thinking people of the world to put a stop to what we thought was wrong. What I really began to understand at this point was that other people held different opinions and our own moral superiority wasn't guaranteed. The further insights that flow from this make it clear that it's not even a desirable position to be able to oppress and silence the opposition because then you don't learn anything. Anyway, from families to governments, tyranny creates instability.
This is all still in the realms of the practical, but I don't see that that necessarily implies it's not also a philosophy. If it's not, I don't see why that should lessen its validity.
Of course, situations do arise constantly in which one individual or group oppress and silence all opposition. Many of these situations are driven and supported by philosophies of one sort or another. The practice of religion is, sadly, no bulwark against this and, in a number of these situations, the religion has actually been the driver of the oppression: the Spanish Inquisition, say. And in others, religion has been a constituent of the oppression or religious leaders have been collusive in it. Please note, I'm not saying this to designate religion the only driver of oppression - Stalinism was dogmatically atheistic, to give a notable example - just to suggest that using a too coherent philosophy may not be the best method of creating a stable society.
The philosophy that drives European and American-style democracy may be a little more ethereal, but it does, to use your term, lead to philosophy. Richard Rorty, with his attempts to come to terms, philosophically, with the multiple voices of modern democracies, might be said to be an example.
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While there will certainly be cultural norms that come into play, once we entertain the idea of "a diversity of moral codes" we now step into ethical quicksand because not all moral codes will agree - and without a transcendant moral code that exists beyond human establishment and manipulation, how do we adjudicate conflicts between moral codes? If they're all equal, then who are we to criticize those inflicting genocide in Darfur, female genital mutilation in Africa, piracy in Somalian seas?
I'm a bit surprised at this question since I'd already laid out, if not a philosophy, a governing principle. I'll use the Wiccan version: 'An it harm no one, do what you will.'
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Doesn't Mills idea require that we have some sort of frame of reference in deciding what "harm" is? Just because someone says they're "harmed" by my behavior, are they really? And, conversely, just because someone tells me their behavior really doesn't hurt anybody, can't that also be denial in action? How do we decided the nature of "harm" and whether or not it's legitimate?
These discussions are ongoing in democracies, which, as a founding principle, allow freedom of speech to navigate just such conundrums. However, I must say, your examples seem to me to be pretty unambiguous instances of 'harm'. Shucks, maybe I'm just a victim of cultural conditioning.
Wow I'm being mocked by synchronicity. Darfur's on the news right now and they're talking about the difficulty of establishing someone's guilt as a war criminal.
But the difficulties of these kinds of question are the precise reason we need room to manoeuver without overly strict dogma, freedom to judge each instance on its merits and try to arrive at the fairest outcome. Yes one can certainly have discussions about what words like 'merit' and 'fairness' should properly mean and philosophers since Socrates have, at millennial length, but even the religious ones, such as Socrates, have not found that religion helped decide the argument.
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But that's part of the problem, b - how do we - selfish and self-interested humans - fairly decide on our own what is "fair" and "causes the least trouble"? History has shown that human law can be bent to serve the will of a tyrant. Without the higher law of nature/God, who can look at the legal slaughter of people under Hitler and Stalin's regime and challenge it? They were LEGAL as judged by society. That is the ultimate end of humanly established law and morality - it can be tweaked to serve power.
See my remarks above. However, the designation of humans as selfish, at least as a defining characteristic, is highly open to question and both philosophers and scientists have been busy questioning it. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek has referred to the way in which humans are frequently 'spontaneously moral'. Richard Dawkins, though he posited the theory of the selfish gene that does everything it can to survive, states emphatically that this must not be assumed to apply in human personality, suggesting that qualities such as empathy, compassion and the desire for social interaction and cooperation are genetically embedded and a big part of what has allowed us to survive as a race.
Perhaps that's why philosophical approaches to morality such as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics so often seem, rather than laying down the law, to be telling us what we already know implicitly. What this points to, obviously, is a sense of morals that goes beyond the practical - but still without the need for a divinely imposed moral law.
