What is good for humankind? Gee I dunno, lets ask every philosopher that has ever lived. You get different answers every time, though there is often overlap.
"What is good for humankind" is faaar to big of a question to tackle, and there can never be unanimous agreement on it, so we just have to come as close as we can to it.
The constitutive and conceptual frameworks between cultures regarding morality are really quite striking at times.
So then we shouldn't look to religion for our answers then, because they can often contradict each other... but you can't really claim that many of the worlds most popular religions don't have similar themes in morality, because they do. The stuff that overlaps most often should be taken more seriously when debating the broad and slippery topic of "morality". When I say "noise" I mean that obscure shit that most rational people don't look to for inspiration. Like the majority of the Old Testament.
Is the death penalty immoral? Maybe, maybe not. Your answer just shouldn't derive from a religious text, and you personally say it doesn't. You say your opinion on the death penalty happens to coincide with it. That would mean its mere coincidence, right? Maybe my opinion on the death penalty coincides with the Scientology doctrine (I don't know what Scientology says about the death penalty, just using it as an example), but by no means did it influence me on my decision. Where do my opinions come from? The basic principles of equality, humanism, and the right to pursue happiness as long as it doesn't prevent someone else from doing the same. Kind of like what was established in the constitution.
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Date: 8/3/10 19:15 (UTC)What is good for humankind? Gee I dunno, lets ask every philosopher that has ever lived. You get different answers every time, though there is often overlap.
"What is good for humankind" is faaar to big of a question to tackle, and there can never be unanimous agreement on it, so we just have to come as close as we can to it.
The constitutive and conceptual frameworks between cultures regarding morality are really quite striking at times.
So then we shouldn't look to religion for our answers then, because they can often contradict each other... but you can't really claim that many of the worlds most popular religions don't have similar themes in morality, because they do. The stuff that overlaps most often should be taken more seriously when debating the broad and slippery topic of "morality". When I say "noise" I mean that obscure shit that most rational people don't look to for inspiration. Like the majority of the Old Testament.
Is the death penalty immoral? Maybe, maybe not. Your answer just shouldn't derive from a religious text, and you personally say it doesn't. You say your opinion on the death penalty happens to coincide with it. That would mean its mere coincidence, right? Maybe my opinion on the death penalty coincides with the Scientology doctrine (I don't know what Scientology says about the death penalty, just using it as an example), but by no means did it influence me on my decision. Where do my opinions come from? The basic principles of equality, humanism, and the right to pursue happiness as long as it doesn't prevent someone else from doing the same. Kind of like what was established in the constitution.