/lit/ - Literature

Is it

>>4403011
So I've heard

Sometimes

As opposed to Kantian transcendentalism? I don't think it's wrong, but I take issue with it when it's pushed to its logical extreme.

For example, if you own a smartphone then at some point in the production of that device, others have suffered. Where do you draw the line when applying moral relativism?

Wrong in terms of morality or in terms of truth?
It's wrong in terms of each.
Moral relativism is self-defeating. If good and evil are "relative" then there are no such things as good and evil, there are only preferences and perspectives. It's like saying that the position of the North Pole is "relative" and that some people have a different idea of where the North Pole lies than others. Nonsense; by definition the North Pole is at a fixed point on the globe. If the North Pole is relative then there is no such thing as a North Pole, because the entire point of the North Pole is that it is a universal standard, a reference.

I don't see a problem with it, besides making it harder for regular folk to have coherent, consistent beliefs. But that's a part of being an adult. Right wing nutties, crypto-patsies, and closet fascists that float around here think that it's causing the downfall of western civilization.

>>4403020
Well the other day my friend told me that no culture is better than the other because perception of said culture is subjective and depends on how you were raised.

I brought up radical muslims who stone women for holding hands with a man they're not married to, or if they get raped its their fault. I said that everyone can agree on basic moral principles like dont kill other people unless your life is in danger or something like that. He said nope, you have no right to judge their culture because it just seems wrong to you because you grew up in a western country.

I said the same thing about the holocaust and that its insane that you cant see how killing millions of people is wrong, and he said that wasn't their culture it was their ideology. So I said what makes a culture? And he said a culture is made up of traditions practiced for hundreds of years. So I said what if the Third Reich survived thousands of years like Hitler intended, would that make it okay? And he dodged the question

"All morality is relative" is a moral statement. If all morality is relative, then so is moral relativism.
It's the "only a sith speaks in absolutes" contradiction. It's a catastrophe of logic and common sense.

>>4403032
Your friend has been brainwashed.

>So I said what if the Third Reich survived thousands of years like Hitler intended, would that make it okay?


Yeah, that's the thing. The idea that all cultures are equal has been fostered in academia stereotypically by Jewish men. Hypocritically, however, these same Jewish men wanted to brand the Third Reich as the incarnation of Evil itself. They want moral relativism for goy cultures and the moral absolutism of the shoah for their own.

>inb4 banned because "no /pol/ outside of /pol".

>>4403029
that's just thinking in a very robotic way, always measuring one against the other. Is mt Everest "better" than all the others because it's the tallest? Why should the tallest invalidate and negate all the other mountains?

>>4403039
That's not my argument.

This is my argument. Mt. Everest is taller than other mountains. We know this because we have a fixed ideas of what "tall" and what "mountain". What the moral relativists are saying is that "tallness" is relative, and that to some people the hill they grew up on is taller than Mt. Everest.

>>4403033
>last days if 2013
>uses "common sense" in a philosophical discussion
>thinks logic maps 1:1 to the world of phenomena

pleb trip go

>>4403032
An ideology is a set of ideas that serves a particular group of people. Culture doesn't necessarily serve the people involved in it.

In terms of Muslim women, some third wave Islamic feminists would say that they are not subjected to the same sexual objectification that Western women are. Muslim women don't face norms of wearing provocative clothing or makeup etc. So they could argue that they are less oppressed, despite the whole stoning to death thing. . .or so the argument goes.

>>4403045
>uses "common sense" in a philosophical discussion
>in a philosophical discussion

Don't flatter us.

>>4403044
Morality and mountains are a false equivalency

>>4403047
Another point I had, and please correct me if I'm way off base here, was that humanity should strive to better itself through science and rational thinking. So we should abandon all illogical superstitions and religions and try to advance ourselves through learning and stuff. This means that cultures that are stuck in their fundamental religious ways are way behind and thus worse.

>>4403050
"Tallness" and "goodness" are equivalent terms in my argument/logic. A height relativist thinks that tallness is relative; a moral relativist thinks that goodness is relative. They are both complete nonsense, of course, it's just that people would be much quicker to see the insanity in the former but not the latter, and the reason for that is that they are thinking emotionally, not logically. They WANT to be kind to others, to accommodate for their feelings, and so they tell themselves that if one person says that a thing is good and the another person says that the same thing is evil they can both be correct . . . even though that contradicts the most basic law of logic, the law of the excluded middle (that something cannot be both true and false).

define moral relativism in your own words

>>4403014
It is either Universal Morality or moral relativity

Neither is wrong, but they are dependent on perspective and enforcement

>>4403039
>that's just thinking in a very robotic way

No, that's called thinking rationally. Why is reality such an abstruse concept for you people?

>>4403057
Muddy thinking. You're under the false impression that what you have is "science" and "rationality" and what they have is mere "religion" and "superstition". That is nothing but bigotry and blindness.
"Humanity should strive to better itself through science and rational thinking" is the premise of secular humanism, which functions as a religion, a belief system. What you have is a belief system, not something called "rational thinking". Rational thinking is a tool, a means - not an end. Muslims apply reason to their religion, Christians apply it to theirs (see: the great philosophers in both traditions). When you make "rational thinking" your end, what you have is idolatry, worship of something worldly. This happened in the French Revolution - they dressed up a woman as the "goddess of Reason" and worshipped her as though she were divine. That ought to strike you as abhorrent, and ought to enlighten you as to the true nature of your beliefs, that "humanity should strive to better itself through science and rational thinking".

>>4403058
If there are only 2 people left in the world and onE thinks they should paint their dicks in red, while the other thinks they should paint them in blue? Who is there to decide who is correct? Who is the arbiter in this case?

>>4403066
Everyone is entitled to think what they want and they are right.

>>4403057
Read some Weber if you're interested in rational thought and human progress.

Postmodernists will critique this kind of 'Enlightenment' thought because if you are left with truth without religion the world could turn into a pretty shit place. Weber, who isn't a postmodernist i'll add, argues that pure rationality is dangerous as it can become more important to us than human wellbeing. He's applied this idea to the study of the Holocaust. Weber argued that the Holocaust was the natural step for humanity to take in order to further itself. He remains very ambivalent about progress, it is a double sided coin that both removed us from the dark ages whilst bringing about previously impossible types of suffering.

>>4403080
God. He is the arbiter in every case.

>>4403078
Well put. Have you read Bruno Latour?

>>4403081
hm but that has nothing to do with morality
that's just a particular postmodern attitude, maybe subjectivism, or relativism in general (without a qualifier) - not sure

>>4403073
Objective reality exists outside of mind of people, and people are privy to it without coloring it? Wow, such reason

>>4403058
"Coolness of a Mountain" and "goodness" are equivalent terms in my argument/logic. A coolness relativist thinks that coolness is relative; a moral relativist thinks that goodness is relative. They both makes total sense...

>>4403085
I've not read Weber but some of his instints seem sound to me. Like when he diagnosed Modern consumerism as being a late term symptom of Protestantism - that's something that I think only a few people are far-sighted enough to see, I think.
Kierkegaard said something similar.
>"When Catholicism degenerates, what form of corruption will show itself? The answer is easy: mock holiness. When Protestantism degenerates, what form of corruption will show itself? The answer is not difficult: shallow worldliness. But in Protestantism this will show itself with a refinement which cannot occur in Catholicism."
>"[I]t can come to the point in Protestantism when worldliness is honored and venerated as godliness. And that, I maintain, cannot happen in Catholicism.... No wonder Luther very quickly got such great support. The secular mentality understood immediately the break.... [T]hey grinned in their beards ... at Luther ... that chosen instrument of God who had helped men so splendidly make a fool of God."

It's a shame that Weber could not see that the very idea of "Progress" is ULTIMATELY nothing but a pantheistic notion that History itself is God and God is "revealing himself" as History transpires, "culture" becoming more and more cultured and "truth" becoming more and more true and "morality" becoming more and more moral. Hegel summed it up pretty well. He tells you what it's all about, because he takes the naive notion of "progress" that the secularists have and reveals the spiritual reality beneath it, he shows you what it really means to BELIEVE in "Progress". It's kabbalah, a messianism. Everybody is waiting for the Messiah who will give us the Great Revolution and usher in the New Utopia, the New Atlantis.

>>4403090
No, I haven't. I will look him up.

>>4403098
Well some Mountains are colder than others . . .
I suppose if a man stands at the bottom of the mountain he can assert that it's colder than the where the other man is at the top of the mountain, where he is freezing to death - but he would be wrong.

>>4403103
well, my bad. by 'coolness' i meant mountains being cool, like they have a lot of friends, a girl they want etc.
My point was: You can't compare tallness of a mountain to morality.

>>4403098
And if by "coolness" you mean Vanilla Ice coolness, then that it isn't relative either, because clearly Vanilla Ice is cooler than you and I.

>>4403107
Coolness isn't relative either. Like I say above. The thing with "coolness" is that it isn't very well defined, but it still not relative as everybody understands that the characters on The Big Bang Theory are not meant to represent "coolness", whereas Vanilla Ice is.

>>4403086
I am a believer.
The main thing I see about moral relativism is that it encourages tolerance of other people's views, and by that other people.

>>4403111
it also encourages killing people.

>>4403109
Yea but what happens when you introduce Flava Flav, it blows the scales, vanilla ice is profoundly uncool now. Surely you can grasp this

>>4403112
You think in black and white, something along the lines of slippery slope

because the middle ground is relative, doesn't imply that the edges have to be.

>>4403101
progress is simply the universe awaking
on a micro scale that is the human race there is tension / separation pain between the parts that will stay and parts that will attempt to leave

>>4403119
yeah but i can think, that there's nothing wrong in killing. for example amercian forces killing sandniggers, and its cool. so why cant i think, that killing christians is cool? that's moral relativism.

>>4403008
Because the Holocaust.

>>4403129
what's wrong in Holocaust?

If it is morally acceptable to one person to kill another, and another thinks it is morally wrong, but morality is relative, then what use are morals? They would just be ideas that can't be communicated for lack of common ground surely, because nobody can/has to imagine that it is wrong to anyone else.

>>4403136
morality still guides those individuals in their actions

>>4403153
But what use is it to call this morality when there is nothing to compare it too, if morality is relative then all morals are right, and it is to one person acceptable and another unacceptable to kill a person with both being fine.

>>Why is moral relativism wrong?

Because it assumes that reality is subject to your personal whims and desires.

>>4403071
false dichotomy, there is also non-cognitivism (needless to say the true ubermensch option)

>>4403198
>does not understand what moral relativism is

Cultural and moral relativism are self-contradictory.

If cultural relativism is true, then you should act according to your culture's accepted morals, because there's nothing outside that. That itself is a universal "always do what you culture tells you to do."

Kant and Mill are wrong, but we don't and shouldn't succumb to moral relativism or nihilism just because we can't formulate rules to guide ethical action.

Return to Aristotle and realize that ethics is about having virtuous character traits, not about following rules and applying formulas.

>>4403101
Dude, I have no idea what to make of you. One day you're railing against Marxism because it's supposedly zionist, the next day, (I'm assuming you're still a Catholic) you're praising Hegel.

I gotta ask, do you even read?

>>4404431
What a stupid question, I just finished Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's newest book by the title of Elements of the Philosophy of Right and it was very interesting.

The bulk of the book is devoted to discussing Hegel's three spheres of versions of 'right,' each one larger than the preceding ones and encompassing them. The first 'sphere' is abstract right, in which Hegel discusses the idea of 'non-interference' as a way of respecting others. He deems this insufficient and moves onto the second sphere, morality. Under this, Hegel proposes that humans reflect their own subjectivity of others in order to respect them. The third sphere, ethical life, is Hegel's integration of individual subjective feelings and universal notions of right. Under ethical life, Hegel then launches into a lengthy discussion about family, civil society, and the state.

Hegel argues that the state itself is subsumed under the higher totality of world history, in which individual states arise, conflict with each other, and eventually fall. The course of history is apparently toward the ever-increasing actualization of freedom; each successive historical epoch corrects certain failures of the earlier ones. At the end of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel leaves open the possibility that history has yet to accomplish certain tasks related to the inner organization of the state.

Don't you dare tell me I'm stupid you prole. I am very smart, Lord Jay Z assured me when we had our daily skype chat. Pathetic marxist worm.

>>4404443
> Hegel's newest book
> calls me a prole
> pathetic marxist

Dude, you're reading Hegel. Marx is THE Hegelian. The communist state is the final stage of freedom.

How can you like Hegel and consider yourself a Catholic and praise Kierkegaard at the same time?

Do you realize that Kierkegaard was against Hegel?

naive relativism is unrealistic and uncritical and because the end of ethics is action, those criticisms are fatal

>>4404469
nice word salad, did you use a sentence generator?

>>4404476

yes

>>4404457
>How can you like Hegel and consider yourself a Catholic and praise Kierkegaard at the same time?

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that, but I agree with the implication that Incognito is a naive idiot.

>>4404457
Kierkegaard, the first Atheistic philosopher (despite his personal predication towards rel.)

Spinoza's panentheism may also be in the running...

>>4404492
I guess there's nothing wrong with it. But it's hard to like Hegel and then call me an idiot Marxist.

>>4404499
Yeah, you're right. The Knight of Faith is just a murderer.

>>4404418
>If cultural relativism is true, then you should act according to your culture's accepted morals, because there's nothing outside that. That itself is a universal "always do what you culture tells you to do."

This is a misunderstanding. All moral relativism reveals is meta-ethical, it does not provide a *should* for the agent (meaning, it does not tell you what you should or shouldn't do). It merely shows that concepts like "good" and "evil" change over time and space, ie they are not constant. Whatever conclusions you reach based on this are your own relative morals.

>>4404492
I will wipe that smirk off your face when my heavenly Dad comes and beats the shit out of you, you objectively bad faggot.

Merry Christmas.

>>4404443
This is not the true Incognito, obviously. I should probably be flattered that people would bother to inpersonate after my short stay here (as a name, I've been anonymous here for a few years).
Anyhow, I'm leaving off posting about these kinds of matters on /lit/ and elsewhere. I think they are too serious to be discussed on here among anonyms. That's not an insult to anybody here, it's just the nature of the place is not conducive to really serious discussions, and the things I have been talking about are really serious. Plus, I shouldn't be preaching about things I don't fully understand yet, it makes me a hypocrite. I'm not retracting anything that I have said (anything that I remember saying), but I do think people should take what I've said with a grain of salt. HOWEVER, I do believe that the subjects that I have been talking about (religion, art, secret societies, occult, etc.) ARE of the utmost importance and that I am building myself on a good foundation by saying that there is a God, that "spirit" is real (contrary to materialist beliefs), and that Christ is indeed saviour. The nature of God and Christ's salvation I do not understand as well as I need to, but I am growing in conviction that these are realities which concern every one of us more than anything.

>How can you like Hegel and consider yourself a Catholic and praise Kierkegaard at the same time?

I despise Hegel. I've said multiple times that his "philosophy" amounts to kabbalah/gnosticism/mysticism and that he resembles a sorcerer more than a teacher.
As for MY views on Kierkegaard (because that guy is not me), I have a lot of respect for him. I don't think Kierkegaard is THAT far off Catholicism - http://perennis dot blogspot dot co dot uk/2004/07/kierkegaard-critic-of-luther dot html The problem with Kierkegaard, I feel, is that his theology is too fideistic and that he became too obsessed with fighting the counterfeit Christianity that he saw around him. I think he was a bit too literary and needed to be a bit more religious, even though I consider his literature just about the best of the Modern period and some of his religious sermons to be profound (Works of Love, Sickness Unto Death, Fear and Trembling). On the one hand I think that he is a kind of antidote to the Modern world in that he offers people a shelter from which they can hide from the dominant secularism / scientism of our times and start to become aware that they DO in fact have a soul. I think that his "subjectivism" can be reconciled to Catholicism in that it is not an opposition to defined Catholic dogma, it is just stating that what ultimately matters is Spirit, how you know the Word of Christ in your spirit - and I think that is close to Christ's message to the Pharisees in that he states that the Pharisees obsession with laws, codes and doctrines is useless if they abandon true faith.

Anyhow, I'm stopping posting here. See you, /lit/

>>4404499
>Kierkegaard, the first Atheistic philosopher (despite his personal predication towards rel.)

I think that this is absurd. There is a place where he says that Christian truths are a matter of DOGMA. So he is not disputing those dogmas. He is only saying that it's one thing to know the dogmas and another to really believe them and work them out through faith.

>>4404510
This isn't me either.

>>4404566
>I shouldn't be preaching about things I don't fully understand yet, it makes me a hypocrite.

Amen and good riddance.

No post after this time will be by the "real Incongnito".
I'm leaving now, and I'm sorry if I've left any questions unanswered. However, there isn't a question that I can answer that Christ can't answer better, so look to Him for guidance.

>>4404579
G-d bless you, Incognito. Your posts shall be missed.

>>4404582
>implying "god" is god's name

>>4404579
He dead yo.

I don't know who this smartass is but neither of those posts are mine:

>>4404579
>>4404571
>>4404566

I'm getting tired of you pretentious leftists trying to reach my level of comprehension of Hegel and Kierkegaard and failing miserably. I think it is time for you to stop and accept authority here.

You will pay dearly for your haughtiness, you tryhard impostor. When LORD Christ finally comes and anoints me as the Peter of the Holy City to command his heavenly armies I will spare none of you heathens.

Hail Mary, full of grace.
Our Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

Everyone against it seems to be a nitpicker whose autism goes through the roof.