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Universal Right and Wrong? Goto Page: [] [<] 1 2 3 4

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Are morals universal?
Of course
20%
 20%  [ 7 ]
No way!
35%
 35%  [ 12 ]
Some are...
44%
 44%  [ 15 ]
Total Votes : 34


Old Man Ryver

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PostPosted: Thu Aug 19, 2010 11:09 pm


Morals are cultural. I look at it like this:

The beliefs of the people in the area, as well as natural and physical conflicts like weather, low food supply, oppression, et cetera would cause different morals. To name a few examples, we have Germany, post-WWI:

Germany is in a slump. The economy is in the shitter, the German Mark was the equivalent of .0000000001% of the U.S. Dollar. 1/2 of the population of Germany is homeless, starving, and other misfortunes. So, who comes to save the day? Mr. Adolf Hitler is elected and promises that the economy will get better under his rein, as well as their military restored along with their territory and much more. He needed a scapegoat for the economic problems, and he chooses his most hated group of people: the Jews.

The German people found it morally right to kill off millions of Jewish people, for they were supposedly the cause of the problems. But it wasn't morally right to do such a thing in France, the United Kingdoms, or the United States of America.

Maybe that example is a little extreme. Here's one from a little earlier:

In the early years of America, before they were the United States, Britain's morals on religion was that everyone should believe as the King did, which would cause a chain from King to King to believe in the same religion. This caused lack of religious freedom. But in America, laws were established in which religion was allowed to be practiced as willed and one could not make laws against a particular religion's practices, disallow access to religious centers, et cetera.

Of course, the United Kingdoms did change their morals over time, but their morals were different for a majority of America's early years. Another example was that cannibalism was morally repugnant to the United Kingdoms during the Dark Ages, but in many other countries, cannibalism was allowed and sometimes a necessity for survival. In some areas, cannibalism is still practiced, along with human sacrifices and martyrism and so on and so forth.

You be the judge. I believe that morals are cultural by the sheer fact that morals are different from culture to culture.
PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 4:48 am


Differ between Morals and actual Right/Wrong, please.
Morals are pure cultural, Actual Right & Wrong is easily summed down, if one ignore the cultural differences, as i see it.

Simple:
Right to do what is good, wrong to do what feels bad'n'worse.

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Eltanin Sadachbia

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PostPosted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 5:44 am


Yeah, I would say that the Hitler thing is a bit extreme as an example. The majority of the German people didn't think it was right to kill Jews. Most were kept in the dark as to what were happening to the Jews.

Because of the state of the economy, and the probable rewards one could get for turning over a Jew to the authorities, people could justify to themselves why they should rat out their neighbors. Didn't mean they felt it was morally right, it just shows how desperate many of those people were.

By the end of the war, people were scared s#17less of not ratting their neighbors out. They had heard rumors and they had figured out that those taken probably would never be seen by anybody again. So, instead of subjecting their families to that, they continued to cave on their neighbors. They thing is, there really weren't any Jews left, and it was the Germans themselves who were bearing the brunt of the regime.

So, it wasn't really a matter of morals as much as it was a matter of self preservation. You could say that all ties in with morals, but not really in a way the argument was first suggested.
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