#the flaw in moral relativist thinking

[inthegardenpraying]

“Listen, now. On the other hand, you have fresh, young forces that are being wasted for lack of support, and that by the thousands, and that everywhere! | A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings that could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery! | Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from destitution, from decay, from ruin, from depravity, from the venereal hospitals—all on her money. | Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime? For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption. One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic! | And what does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and wicked old crone mean in the general balance? | No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach, and not even that much, because the old crone is harmful. | She’s eating up someone else’s life: the other day she got so angry that she bit Lizaveta’s finger; they almost had to cut it off!” | Dostoevsky, Fyodor/Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue/Vintage Classics/p. 68

[alburrito]

5.15.2024

"No doubt some of that is the sad result of mental illness, but a percentage that high represents a more far-reaching societal problem - a crisis in meaning and a poverty of purpose.

Relativism leaves us with no criterion for moral decision-making but personal taste.

Pope Benedict XVI said that 'relativism, which recognize[s] nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires.' That is because relativism leaves us with no objective truths to govern our behavior. The moral compass of a relativist has nowhere to point but to himself.

-Absolute Relativism, pg 8-9

This excerpt from this tiny, yet impactful book has hit me the hardest, probably because I relate to it the most. The percentages were referring to CDC's survey of how many teens considered suicide/how many actually attempted it. Granted by the time I was considering it, I was far beyond my teenage years, but the fundamental reason was still the same because I kept asking myself: "What is the point of living?"

When I had those thoughts, I was still a practicing Catholic but starting to have one foot out the door. Not sure I could remember the reason why, but maybe something along the lines of, "What am I even doing this for?" or really "I can do it myself without having to go to church."

Unbeknownst to me, as I was leaving, all meaning and purpose slowly fell apart. I was just going through the motions of graduating undergrad, finding a job, looking to move up career-wise to have stability in my life. That last part is what I hung all my hopes on, even as I moved into pharmacy school and what I thought I was gonna end up doing with my life. However, assigning that meaning soon fell apart when my moral compass did not have direction. A compass that does not have a North/South Pole assigned to it will just spin infinitely.

My behavior afterwards was simply doing what felt "right" to me and if other people had something to say, I usually had some kind of justification or simply just thought "they don't understand." Actually that is where it all went wrong. I remember discussing that thoughts/actions are not inherently right or wrong, but more so the justification that comes along with it, and as such, the justification is what evil constitutes. Even now as I write it out, it is no different than the Original Sin that Adam and Eve committed. In itself, eating the fruit was considered wrong, but it was the shift in blame and trying to play God by justifying the action that led to humankind's downfall.

My justification to shape a world where I was the one dictating it to always be in the "right" was my flaw and the cause for my demise. Whether it was speeding on the highway or binge drinking, I always found an excuse to justify my actions, which ultimately kept me going on this spiral. Because I wanted to maintain this control, I started pushing people away as well. I did not want to hear their concern because I believed they would not understand or would ruin my outlook. It was also why I procrastinated because it was perfect or bust, so I never opted to take the path filled with mistakes. I needed it shaped to what my vision was.

Will wrap this up before this gets to be too long and incoherent, but as much as I dislike relying on religion to explain things, I think this philosophy cannot be ignored. Being raised in the Catholic faith for more than 2/3's of my life, it has been baked in, and for me to throw it away completely would mean I would have to throw away my life as well. Catholicism has actually kept me from ending the short life I have lived, so I think it would be my task to repay the debt that I owe.

[saaiimmm]

Millennials are living through a unique historical situation. They are, I believe, the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously—at their schools, colleges and universities, by many in my own generation. This contradiction has left them at times disoriented and uncertain, without guidance and, more tragically, deprived of riches they don’t even know exist. The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative, at best a personal “value judgment.” Relative means that there is no absolute right or wrong in anything; instead, morality and the rules associated with it are just a matter of personal opinion or happenstance, “relative to” or “related to” a particular framework, such as one’s ethnicity, one’s upbringing, or the culture or historical moment one is born into. It’s nothing but an accident of birth. According to this argument (now a creed), history teaches that religions, tribes, nations and ethnic groups tend to disagree about fundamental matters, and always have. Today, the postmodernist left makes the additional claim that one group’s morality is nothing but its attempt to exercise power over another group. So, the decent thing to do—once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are—is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and who come from different (diverse) backgrounds. That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgmental.” And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice about how to live. And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect. The relativists of my generation and Jordan’s, many of whom became their professors, chose to devalue thousands of years of human knowledge about how to acquire virtue, dismissing it as passé, “not relevant” or even “oppressive.” They were so successful at it that the very word “virtue” sounds out of date, and someone using it appears anachronistically moralistic and self-righteous.

Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life - An Antidote for Chaos.

[surprisebitch]

i really suggest you take some time to read Adam Smith because some takes i've seen really demonises him. in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, one of the topics he talks about is inequality and how the pursuit of wealth can not lead to happiness. he sees that such ambitions can be hollow. like for someone who is supposedly the "father of capitalism", he literally sees that such ambition can be a curse that does not bring tranquility

he also wrote that slavery is horrific and condemned them. this was in 1759. Slavery was abolished in like 1832. He also found the oppresed (such as Indigenous peoples of America) "most able to engage in self-command, the consummate virtue." he found African slaves as "more magnanimous" than their European captors. he in fact was not an ethical relativist because he absolutely abhorred oppression in all forms even though such cases were considered acceptable at a time

yet it's so sad that people think he would condone inequality, imperialism or any form of tyranny. the more i read about him.. the more i feel he has been misquoted and his philosophy has been twisted by people to fit a narrative that justifies greed and violence for financial gain. people always highlight the Invisible Hand when he literally only quoted this once in all his works. "self-interest" also does not equate to "selfishness". he found other regard as important as self regard

yes, in the Wealth of Nations, Smith conceptualised the classical thought of economics and the free market. sure, this framework may be flawed which led to new schools of thought and Behavioural Economics since our economy is not as simple as that. but economic models were never meant to be prescriptive; they're descriptive. and considering he revised his works as time went, i feel if he were still alive, he would have much to say about the system we have today and it would mostly be negative

anyway, just something that i realised as im reading his philosophy. not really looking to argue either. i would love to read Marx next because it would be interesting to see how he used Smith's philosophy as a groundwork to argue why capitalism is flawed

[a-skirmish-of-wit-and-lit]

Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

"What is unthinkable is undoable."

For the members of this university clique in Vermont - who are more isolated from their peers than not as they imbibe, throw money around, engage in Bacchian rituals in an effort to "lose sense of self," and study the Classics under the tutelage of a charmingly peculiar professor named Julian Morrow - murder is the thing that is neither unthinkable nor undoable. In fact, it's inevitable. Unavoidable. The reason behind it becomes the only story worth telling. The only awful, riveting truth worth knowing: the way Bunny's murder came to be.

That which is heinous and impossible for the narrator, Richard Papen, and his close-knit circle of intellectual friends to condone let alone complete, soon becomes something disturbingly precise, premeditated, absurd yet well-schemed, and necessary to the point where they convince themselves that no other viable alternatives exist.

For them, killing is the only thing that'll set them free.

The delicate balance Tartt strikes between the abject horror and the detached hyperrationality of their actions and complicity is what, in my opinion, makes this such an intoxicating book. As a reader, she somehow forced me to be equal parts appalled, intrigued, and sympathetic to all the characters and their decisions. They're all quite flawed in their own ways - horribly fucked up, truthfully. However, because the story's being told by someone who was both on the outside then on the inside of the group respectively, it takes a while before you realize how skewed and unreliable the narrative perspective is. Which, of course, allows for a lot of morally relativistic enchantment and head-scratching.

I'd also argue there's an offness and a wrongness that pulses through the plot almost as readily as a logistical rightness and absorption. And it's that combination which keeps your finger poised, itching to flip to the next page so you can discover what shocking, disarming thing could trip the characters up in the paragraphs ahead. Or worse, could get them all either caught, exposed, or imprisoned. Or worst of all, may do nothing except riddle them through with numb indifference and complacency.

Although this book still technically falls under the murder mystery category, it's wonderfully unique in the sense that it's essentially the opposite of a whodunnit. Not only do you learn who's been killed in the prologue, but you come to understand who's responsible for the killing almost immediately while all the juicy details of how, why, and for what reason(s) are left dangling until the subsequent chapters fill them in, bit-by-bit. Piece by deliciously disconcerting piece. The slow unfolding of the particulars behind the Big Bad Ravine Event provides this lovely unbearable tension and gravitas. The early so-and-so-is-dead reveal only adds to the anticipation of what's to come instead of detracting from it.

Pretentiousness swirls with privilege. Idleness tangles with elitism at the same that time morbid longing mixes with a picturesque, drug-hazed, leather-bound book collegiate atmosphere.

Friendship is a central theme, a central tenet, and since I am a huge nerd myself, I was stimulated by how the characters' interactions and relationships are threaded together with literary allusions, philosophical ponderings, and cogent deduction on steroids. Everything they do or think or say is wrapped up in this messy little bow of "catharsis." (Perfect considering they're studying ancient Greek, no?) Intellectualism ends up being both the gang's saving grace and their ultimate downfall, and I don't know about you, but I find that to be captivatingly tragic. So much so, in fact, that my brain is still reeling from the multitude of ambiguous nuances in this novel.

Overall, this was fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

Rarely do I bestow a five-star rating to much of anything I read, but the fact that this book was capable of hypnotizing as well as horrifying me - sometimes in the same blink, in the same sentence - means it belongs to and among esteemed company. And it does.

I can't quite convey in words how I felt while reading this other than to say it was an unforgettable experience. I understand completely why people have been squealing about it for decades now because it is an uncomfortably thrilling, heart-thumping-beneath-the-floorboards, 500-plus-page ride and I cannot believe I've lived this long without submerging myself headlong into the labyrinth of mystery. I was missing out, and if you haven't read it yet, so are you.

5/5 stars

*You also can follow me on Goodreads (HERE)

[teabooksandsweets]

Very Long Post On Cancel Culture, Wokeness And Tumblr

Warning: This text is not one bit ordered because it all belongs together and I write it down as it comes to mind, and I also stray off topic a lot.

Also: This text is NOT about how all people are too soft or special snowflakes or too sensitive or anything of that sort. On the contrary.

I am glad that people finally begin to speak out against cancel culture, but their approach to it is usually wrong.

It’s not just that it doesn’t matter if people maybe were not perfect(ly woke/pc) in the past, and can change. What really matters is that people don’t have to be perfect and woke and pc at all.

And I am saying this for an entirely different reason than you might think, for a different reason than people usually speak out against political correctness, and “sjws”, etc. The problem is: all this makes people less kind, less considerate, less caring and open towards others. It makes them hateful and hostile and selfish.

In the late 00s/early 10s everyone was a relativist, saying how there was no right or wrong, etc. and luckily that’s over. But in the mid-to-late-10s people began to be absolutely obsessed with morals in an entirely corrupted way.

The thing is this: people should always strive to learn and to behave well and kindly. Generally. Everyone. Always.

But people ought to be generally kind and good, not specifically perfect in regards to very specific things, and otherwise absolutely hateful, as is nowadays encouraged, especially on tumblr.

Tumblr cares about specific social issues. All of these are incredibly important. But tumblr doesn’t see the Big Picture, doesn’t connect humans to each other, fails to recognise that all humans are human and should treat each other well.

Instead, to tumblr, the smallest offence of a Very Specific Kind, one careless word, one lack of knowledge, is seen as the worst crime imaginable. But truly bad, truly evil behaviour of another sort, a sort that for some reason isn’t condemned by tumblr, is seen as unimportant, sometimes even encouraged. “It doesn’t matter if you harm people and make them suffer, if you are hateful or dangerous, as long as you remember the strict codes we have made up.”

All this is done without any sort of coherent logic or consideration. Different social issues (e.g. sexism and racism) are sometimes played out against each other to make a point, sometimes blended to make a different point, as long as the person making the point can use it to appear as woke or good as possible.

It is seen as absolutely fine to harm great many of the people in whose name one claims to do good, if that brings one closer to the goal of Doing Good In Their Name For Everyone To See.

Minorities and people who are for some reason often oppressed are taken up by people who are (in that sense) more privileged as a sort of “cute little pet” to be infantilised and misused, in order to make a point, or maybe just to offend a family member one doesn’t like, or simply to Appear As Woke As Possible.

(The patronising attitude towards minorities also often shows in the context of religion. There are so many posts on tumblr claiming to support a specific (often oppressed) religion, only to make plenty of other posts on how they hate specific aspects of another religion (usually Christianity, but not necessarily) or of religion in general, which this particular religion shares. But of course—some people (usually people of colour) are “excused” for being religious, even if their actual faith is looked down upon.)

Groups of people are only seen in the context of one Time And Place (today’s USA) and members of these groups in other times and places are judged and treated in exactly the same one as one would judge and treat their people in That One Time And Place.

Good manners and generally kind and considerate behaviour are rejected for being elitist and snobbish and antiquated, and instead replaced by a perverted sort of Political Correctness, which is by far more elitist and excluding, overly specific and only benefiting a few people, and free of any sort of warmth or kindness, instead expecting people to pass a test of sorts, to remember the latest overspecific information, and to repeat it correctly, regardless if one understands it, regardless if one actually applies it towards actual people.

Being considerate of others, treating them well, not behaving absolutely horridly should not be special. And the idea to take away all good manners, all kindness, all consideration, because they are supposedly outdated or even elitist, and to replace it with a stiff and superficial degeneration of what used to be political correctness, so that people behave well in certain circumstances (and not at all otherwise) out of nothing but fear is Not Good.

Pseudo-PC behaviour is even sometimes used to disguise hostility towards the people it should actually protect, you can harm people as long as you are Saying The Right Things.

(This also shows in the treatment of fictional characters. A serial killer might be a fan favourite, but once they say something racist or otherwise bad it’s like “uh, I can’t believe they did that! Now my fave is problematic!” No, your fave has always been very problematic and now there’s just another bit that shows what you should have known for a long time!)

Groups whose actual intention is supposed/claimed to be of a social and helpful nature are destroying themselves from within, attacking their own members or subjects of care in precisely the manner in which they claim outsiders do.

People are actually speaking out in favour of bullying people “if they deserve it” even though people always find “good reasons” to bully and harm people, and claiming that particular people deserved it is their go-ahead. As someone who has been bullied, I can assure you that people always find reasons, and if they are encouraged to bully people who “deserve it” they will make sure that they appear to deserve it.

People are encouraged to denounce people, which specifically means to accuse people of something to the personal benefit of the accuser, usually either made-up or twisted. I repeat this: People are not encouraged to report people for doing something bad, they are encouraged to denounce them, which has a very different and very specific and very, very harmful meaning.

Even more so, whatever accussation of a person is made, is believed. “Innocent until proven guilty” has been abolished. The moment a person makes a claim on someone the judgement has been made.

Even more so, well-meant, but politically incorrect things are considered worse than pc hate. If a person knows all the language, has all the background info, they can be personally hostile. If a person actually means to be kind, but is doesn’t go about it the “right way” is considered horrible (eg. a man who may be a unintentionally sexist but who doesn’t mean any harm is seen worse than a true misogynist who knows feminist lingo).

Even more so, “tumblr swjs” much too often adopt concepts of their actually hateful people. For example, while actual Cultural Appropriation is a horrible thing, people on here take it as far as “all cultures are valuable but they Need To Stay In Their Place and Never Mingle and Make Them Impure”. Which is precisely the argument of many... what? Ah, yes, white supremacists. Yes, you here me right. Not all WPs openly admit that they hate all people who aren’t white. No, many claim that they just want to keep people seperate, just like so many of the people on here who claim to be anti-racist. But cultures have never been seperate, many cultures people think to have nothing to do with each other have influenced each other greatly, and others that people were one and the same culture are actually not.

(In that vein, people on here also don’t understand that racism is always bad, but also always different, and that that dividing people into “white” and “poc” is once again a very Modern Day USA thing, and that people can be racist in many more shapes, and that what people have been considered white or not has changed greatly over the years. All racism is bad, but not all is the same.)

But even more so, in the name of social justice, many methods of actual fascists have been adopted. People don’t notice it, because the primary focus is not on what things are done, but on who does them and to whom they do it.

But that’s a particular problem. Consider the concept, not the victim or the culprit. Even if you apply it to people “who deserve it” it does. not. help. if you model for path to social justice after bloody revolutions that led to fascist governments, or if you systematically (help to) ruin people in the same manner as fascist states did and do. Perhaps I am biased. Perhaps I am simply a German who is frightened of seeing people on the internet telling others it were their moral duty to persecute people in manners common in nazi times and/or the gdr. But perhaps people should also consider whether it really makes sense to condemn people for using the term “witch hunt” outside of sexism. Because it’s also a method, a structure, no matter to whom it is applied, or why.

But to get back to the terrible lack of proportion. This is especially relevant in regards to celebrities. The bar is so high and so low at the same time, and so randomly adjusted, that people are praised and put on pedestals for absolutely no proper reason, simply because they acted like normal decent people, and then, just as quickly, pushed off it, and condemned, just for acting like normal decent people. Normal = nonetheless flawed, because: human. There’s so much undeserved hate following so much praise, usually unexplained, so that people just join in nwithout even knowing what “good” or “bad” that person has done. People are glorified for nothing, and then ruined. And what does it teach normal people?

To always look out, to always be frightened. To worry about every thing one says or does. Not about the way one treats others—treating people badly is a power move, of course, and general decency is entirely insignificant. Just to remember the special jargon of a superficial political correctness, and sometimes even the in-jokes of people. (I have once witnessed people bullying a child out of this site, claiming she was homophobic, because she didn’t understand a gay in-joke. You only get that on tumblr. I hope.)

And because people constantly have to prove that they are not bad, they can not even be normal. It’s not enough to be normal, considerate, kind, but imperfect people—everyone has to absolutely perfect, by standards set by some random people who claim to know better, and whenever people just appear particularly good by those people’s standards (especially if they are something Inherently Evil, like men) they get praised to be Especially Different Someones And The Only Good People Of Their Sort. Until they got found out, are finally proven to be normal, decent human beings, like the majority of all people, and are suddenly brushed aside, hated forever, another point made to prove that This Sort Of People Is Always Bad. (To this adds: Too many bad things are immediately attatched to a specific group of people, even if it is commonly done by various groups/all people/actually the people complaining about it.)

I mean, sure. Tumblr is the first place in which I’ve seen people who criticise Christianity don’t do it for the obvious problems in churches and with some of their members, but for the concepts of loving one’s neighbour and forgiveness. The first place in which I have seen people who “advocate” for human rights also support the death penalty and vigilante murder. The first place in which I have seen people talk unironically in favour of the French revolution and the USSR.

But, kids, I know, most of you are over-excited and extremely well-meaning teenagers, and it’s important to rebel, and all, and I hope you will never outgrow your social conscience, but you should really outgrow the way you apply it. Because there’s people among you who don’t mean well, and who take advantage of you.

I mentioned the (luckily) outdated relativism earlier, and I need to say more about it. It’s mingled its shades of grey with today’s black-and-white mindset. In the past, nobody could citicise people for doing something because nothing was seen as really good or bad. Now everything is either good or bad, and people still can’t critise someone for doing something they don’t like—unless they prove it’s bad. You can’t just say “Oh, this is not for me. I don’t like it.” Or even “This or that aspect of this should be looked at critically.” No. You have to say “Here I Will Prove Why This Is Evil And Shouldn’t Be.” Criticising someone, or just disagreeing, can’t be done out of worry over hurting their feeling, just as it was in the olden days (aka ca. 10 years ago) of Everyone Should Do As They Like, so what to do instead? Prove they are Bad and Everyone Who Doesn’t Agree That This Is Bad Is Also Bad. “Not my cup of tea” is over, everyone has to drink the same tea, always.

To this adds that things that people don’t like are always equated to things that are really undoubtedly bad. Thanks to this, actual terms used for actually bad things lose their meaning, and the demonisation of harmless things ultimately leads to the trivialisation of what’s truly bad. Words have lost their meaning and are used just as one pleases in order to “call someone out”.

(A particular common matter on tumblr is the equation of pedophilia and age gaps between adults; but the issue that many adults on tumblr seem to consider themselves children and seem entirely concided that they could also become victims of child predators, whereas they themselves can prey on children because they like Disney movies or whatever; and many children on tumblr think they had a right to patronise adults, is a different issue about which I really don’t care to talk right now. The idea that people also shouldn’t be in relationships with people who may have some sort of societal advantage over them, also holds plenty of implications that make me very uncomfortable, but about which I also really don’t care to talk right now.)

To come back to an example mentioned earlier. Take misogyny and racism. Two bad things, two things to fight against, two things that shouldn’t be exploited to fight the other. To say “I want to fight the bad treatment of women, and specific things are prevalent in specific cultures therefore I can be hostile and prejudiced towards these people.” is not good feminism, not even bad feminism, it’s plain racism, and nothing else. But to say “This thing may be really harmful to a lot of women is valuable to people of this or that culture, so one has to support it.” is also not anti-racist in the least, it’s just an attempt to appear open minded by people who are in no way affected by it. And these are two examples—it goes far beyond racism or misogyny.

There’s plenty of very right and good posts on tumblr on how people should benefit from society, rather than society benefitting from them. The same should be applied, for example, to feminism, and anti-racism, and other social causes. They should be positive and helpful to the people who need their help, and they need to work together. These are just two examples, to all other work to help people of all sorts applies the same.

If you don’t ask yourself “How do I help individual human beings, and how does my cause help some of them?” but instead ask “How do I help My Specific Cause That I Care About, regardless of the people?” you are doing it wrong.

And tumblr woke culture teaches that all humans are are seperated into little groups, which sometimes overlap, and that all people within these groups are exactly the same. But all humanity is one big group, and every human being is an individual, and some individuals have more in common with each other than others, but all in all, we all do belong together.

But I am not saying this to encourage even more people to attack others for caring about a specific social issue, seeing that as prove that they only cared about that. People cannot probably handle everything, and all things to play into each other anyway.

And yes, I believe in social mindfulness, in work to help others and especially to help those who are in particular need of help, in care and in consideration. But I believe that the means to these things, whether it’s a specific group with which people choose to identify or even join, or a concept such as political correctness, etc. should serve the people and their well-being and safety and happiness. People should not serve them out of fear or being torn down by strangers on the internet.

And people shouldn’t alienate each other, they shouldn’t attack those who want to help, they shouldn’t refuse people to grow and to learn, they shouldn’t seperate social issues from each other as if we weren’t all people, as we shouldn’t cooperate to b help those who need help. And to do all this, we must allow humans to be human, to be imperfect but generally kind and well-intentioned. This striving for over specific perfection combined with disregard for general kindness can not possibly help. It only alienates people, frightens them, and paints those who actually want to do good in a bad light.

Please: My writing was perhaps very muddled up, and it may be that I took up some strings that I didn’t finish, or phrased some things badly. So if you wonder about anything I wrote here, or dislike anything of it, please tell me so that I can explain myself. I’ve seen so many people lately write things that in the end got negative responses that were in no proper relation to the original text and obviously based in misunderstanding, and I don’t want that.

[parrotvoid]

Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape (2010)

“The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values is a 2010 book by Sam Harris, in which the author promotes a science of morality and argues that many thinkers have long confused the relationship between morality, facts, and science. He aims to carve a third path between secularists who say morality is subjective (e.g. moral relativists), and religionists who say that morality is given by God and scripture. Harris contends that the only moral framework worth talking about is one where "morally good" things pertain to increases in the "well-being of conscious creatures". He then argues that, problems with philosophy of science and reason in general notwithstanding, 'moral questions' will have objectively right and wrong answers which are grounded in empirical facts about what causes people to flourish.”

The “moral landscape” is an abstract concept where a 3D grid plots every conceivable form of human moral system.  You can imagine a gridded landscape where each grid represents a belief system.  Similar belief systems will be located next to each other and extend out making a plane.  On this map, elevation is the measurement of well-being among the users of the moral system.  Sea level (the zero), could the be set as the well-being conditions of hunter gatherers in the wild.  Any system which produces conditions on average better than living in the wild would produce a hill and any system producing conditions worse would produce a valley.  The result would be a topographically diverse landscape plotting out the ‘worst’ and ‘best’ systems for managing humanity effectively.  

An interesting result of this idea, is that it would produce a scientific model of objective morality while still preserving multiculturalism.  In most forms of objective morality, it is taken as fact that there is one set of principles, either given to us by God or through Nature, that must be followed or else suffering will result.  The Moral Landscape approach preserves multiculturalism by allowing for multiple hills, representing different moral systems which produce similar peaks of average well-being, to exist simultaneously on the grid.   

Sam Harris’s book is deeply criticized by the majority of moral philosophers.  This isn’t exactly shocking considering that the main theme of the book is the replacement of moral philosophy with a new science of morality.  Ever since Natural Philosophy mutated into Science, philosophy has struggled to maintain relevance.  This is just another case of science’s potential to engulf a field of philosophy and leave philosophers further pushed into the gaps untouched by science.  In many ways, philosophy has suffered a fate similar to religion.  

The main criticisms of The Moral Landscape involve: (1) pedantic fussiness over category errors presented in some of Harris’s thought experiments, (2) Harris building off of thought experiments which are highly speculative, (3) the problem of defining well-being, (4) the book presumes a utilitarian model of morality, and (5) the book puts the moral impetus on the State and not of the individual.     

(1)  Fair enough, although I see these criticisms as getting so far into the weeds of the book that they end up missing the fundamental message.  It’s intellectually dishonest to dig so deep into the details of a specific example that you throw the baby out with the bath water. If we flushed every philosophical idea down the drain because the philosopher who argued for it had flaws in their logic, then we would be left with exactly zero philosophical ideas.

(2) This invokes a similar response to (1) with the added point that Harris is advocating for the creation of a comprehensive field of science.  It’s absurd to demand anything other than speculation from a field that doesn’t officially exist yet.  That would be like asking what quantum mechanics has done for us back before quantum mechanics was discovered.  Also, all philosophy uses thought experiments, so a philosopher criticizing the use of thought experiments is highly hypocritical.  

(3)  It’s certainly possible to scientifically analyze the effects of certain behaviors, rules, and cultural values on human health, wealth, innovation, luxury time, system stability, etc.  Psychology can then be used to study what variables define individual well-being (something like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).  Once you have that knowledge, you can use it to guide society towards the outcomes that maximize individual well-being while balancing social goals.  Really we are already do this science guided morality with issues like climate change, pollution control, public health, occupational and consumer safety, and plenty of other applied fields. 

(4)  The book does assume a utilitarian approach when plotting average well-being.  To be clear, Utilitarianism is a recognized philosophical moral system that some modern philosopher still advocate for, however, it has come into much controversy as people have demonstrated how pure Utilitarianism can produce awkward conclusions.  For example, pure Utilitarianism has a hard time grappling with the difference between a system which achieves a high average well-being through individual liberty for all versus a system which achieves high average well-being through a system which greatly benefits a majority at the oppression of a minority.   

The Moral Landscape, as is, has this same measurement problem.  To solve this, we can add a 4th dimension of time to the landscape to measure the stability of a system.  It’s conceivable that some systems will initially produce a huge spike of well-being but are doomed to collapse and average out to a much lower peak over time.  An example of such a system would be one where a majority of citizens initially benefit from the oppression of a minority group but the eventual violent rebellion of the oppressed minority will destabilize and/or collapse the system.

(5)  I think this is just a misunderstanding of the book.  Plotting out different moral systems for average well-being and stability does abstract up to the State level, but it can also be embraced at the individual level.  Morality at the State and individual level ultimately comes down to the choices of individuals.  I think Sam Harris's book is calling for a type of science to better equip people to make moral choices easier and organize institutions to increase one's ability to make moral choices.  Certainly, if we all better understood how the normalization of a specific behavior or public policy would bring down the well-being of society this would dis-incentivize this behavior from being embraced.  

[rederiswrites]

I made a distinction in my last post that maybe I should have expanded on. So media representation is pretty much all "flawed", if for no other reason than that platonic perfection doesn't exist and everyone has a different take on the ideal. But there are flaws that you can take note of and keep going, and flaws that ruin the thing for you. BUT, and this is key, those are different for different people.

I grew up reading used copies of speculative fiction from the seventies and eighties. I am totally inured to casual sexism in older fiction. I can read Fuzzy Sapiens and see his thousandth version of a long-legged, "clever" woman and be like "you dumbfuck" and go right on enjoying it. Maybe someone else, someone younger and blessedly less jaded, would tell H. Beam Piper and his background radiation of decorative women to fuck off.

Sometimes we see bullshit and recognize it and move on. Sometimes it's too much. And the distinction is deeply individual.

I don't even think it's directly correlated to how personal something is--as the parent of an adolescent girl, I live with daily concern about fuckers seeing her as a sexual object, but can consider Sapowski's sexualizing of teenage girls a gross footnote. On the other hand, if I see another iteration of "black man everyone loves sacrifices himself for the team" I will fucking scream, even though I'm not a black man. Some survivors of sexual assault want nothing to do with fictional portrayals of it, some seek and create that fiction. I have no intention of condemning either. We all deal with life a little differently.

Personally, I think it's well worth having a thick skin with older stuff especially. Not from a moral relativist point of view, either, but from a historian's point of view. People of the past were what they were and being mad about it now won't change that. But saying that won't change what a person can or can't handle. My logic ultimately has no effect on what anyone's brain, mine included, will find upsetting or repulsive.

Still, I think it'd be good if people could read a book like Little Fuzzy and both observe that the author was oblivious to his own sexism and also enjoy the book, because otherwise we'd lose the joy of a book about sentient teddy bears.

[onionjulius]

I just read your post comparing why Catelyn is set up by the narrative to be seen less positively by the audience in comparison to Ned and one of the reasons is that she isn't a Stark snowflake. Do you know of more metas exploring in particular how the Starks/Starkness/Stark morality tends to be viewed too positively? And I don't know how much the audience exaggerates and how much GRRM intends to.

I don’t off the top of my head, no! But meta on the characters who are outsiders at Winterfell – Theon, Cat, and Jon – may contain elements of that. Jon to a lesser extent, but things like how Ned and Cat didn’t serve him well as he grew up in Winterfell might fit. Also there could be some in Dany meta and meta about Tyrion in AGOT since they are also “opposed” to the Stark POVs in a sense at the start of AGOT.

As for GRRM, I do think that the Starks are supposed to deserve our sympathy as good people (moral compass is a different thing), and I don’t want to suggest like they’re less entitled to their flaws than anyone else. But I think a number of aspects about them are romanticized and/or idealized, and style matters in addition to substance, insofar as they’re separate things. I think to an extent it’s “on purpose” but lots of contradictory things in the story are “on purpose” so that the reader can look at different sides of things. Since the story is so big, it’s really possible to read “too fast” relative to the optimum rate that maximizes absorption, and then you miss what’s there or don’t leave yourself enough time to absorb. Also, while I do think GRRM believes in good and bad, and is not purely a moral relativist, not every single aspect of the characters and story are meant to espouse consensus in the audience, and consensus isn’t always required for the narrative to function (although I think a certain amount is).

I think sometimes GRRM means for us to sympathize a certain way and it’s obvious/straightforward. Sometimes GRRM means for us to sympathize a certain way but also reconsider it, and be able to hold a certain contradiction in our heads. And some aspects of audience reaction(s) are unintended/unforeseen. I think you just have to try to read the text as closely as possible and make a good faith interpretation. Like, in my case, I think Ned is a more “noble” figure but also because he has the privilege to be so. And I’m not sure if GRRM intended quite that exact interpretation complete with sociological terms like “privilege”. But I do feel safe in saying that I think he intended Cat to be sympathetic and I think that her less varnished humanity is part of that, and it may not even occur to him to ask himself if Ned is more sympathetic than Cat or vice versa (although I think it’s clear that some characters are more heroic, moral, sympathetic, etc than others). On the one hand it sometimes still rankles me, but on the other hand, different characters are different so that we can go on different journeys vicariously through them and explore different existences.

I don’t know if this is what you were looking for, i’m trying to be substantive but quick :o Certainly there’s sentiment out there along the lines of “The Starks ain’t all that,” although I think w.r.t. popular Tumblr meta the wheel has come around on the other side such that there’s more a trend of a sort of anti-post-modern defense of the “good guys” right now (not issuing a blanket opinion that it’s right or wrong btw – I think that’s earned, but you can’t lead all horses to the water with the same result and lots of readers will still gravitate towards an uninvestigated romanticism). 

[an-incurable-affection-blog]

Ivanhoe

Sir Walter Scott. 1819. “Romanticism and Gothic” list.

“Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe” by Eugene Delacroix.

“The knights are dust, And their good swords are rust, And their souls are with the saints, we trust.”

In the style of Sir Walter Scott, whose books and chapters open with epigraphs, I begin with a quote that Scott adapts from Coleridge’s “The Knight’s Tomb” (although in Ivanhoe we find this in the main body of the text). 

The quote is just one of countless places where the narrator calls attention to the fact that the book is set in an earlier age (the reign of Richard I, in the 12th century) than its time of publication (1819). Whereas a contemporary historical novel typically presents a self-contained story, without extradiegetic references to its nature as a period piece, Ivanhoe scuttles between its setting and (Scott’s) present-day: for example, to contrast what a certain building looked like in the period with how it does now; or contrast the customs of the time with current customs, sometimes to help readers understand an event (“And as there were no forks in those days, his clutches were instantly in the bowels of the pasty”), sometimes just because; or offer reasons why we should believe in the plausibility of his fictions, naming his historical sources. As the first historical novelist, Scott seems to feel called upon to explain and justify his new genre even within the text itself. In their context, the Coleridge lines are trotted out to justify why the narrative declines to include lengthy descriptions of the devices and colors of the knights at a particular tournament⁠—contrary, the narrator explains, to “my Saxon authority (in the Wardour Manuscript).” 

Of course, no work of fiction needs to justify why it includes certain details and leaves out others—it is the author’s job to decide what material is relevant, and there are far too many choices involved to justify each one. But the narrator brings up his reasoning behind not describing knights’ heraldry—namely, because they’re all dead now—to play up the theme of nostalgia, a staple of the Romanticist movement. Not only are we, in the nineteenth century, looking back at knights (how nostalgic), but remember, readers, they no longer exist (aw!). 

But the Romanticist project here is ambivalent, with the narrator both criticizing (explicitly) and glorifying (usually more implicitly) the Age of Chivalry. The narrator frequently opines on “the disgraceful license by which that age was stained,” and how “fiction itself can hardly reach the dark reality of the horrors of the period,” and so on. “In our own days...morals are better understood” (he’s no relativist). But on the other hand, as Richard the Lionheart comments upon hearing the Saxon noble Athelstane detail how he escaped from a crypt, “beshrew me but such a tale is as well worth listening to as a romance.” That’s because it’s a tale within a romance, and romances, the implied author seems to agree, are well worth listening to. “The horrors” are seductive. The horrors are romantic. (Cf. the Gothic.)

The title may be Ivanhoe, after its chivalric Saxon hero Wilfred of Ivanhoe, but the real hero(ine), arguably, is the beautiful and long-suffering Jewess Rebecca. Here we can see the real divergence of this 19th-century Romantic work from its medieval-romance inspiration. In what can be read as an implicit criticism of medieval romance and the age that gave rise to it, the show, I think, is stolen from the titular knight-errant by a Jewish woman. 

The only character with no flaws or foibles, Rebecca is even more perfect than the heroine we would expect to star in this romance—Ivanhoe’s lady-love, the Saxon princess Rowena. As the similarity of their names suggests, Rebecca and Rowena are doubles. They appear in back-to-back chapters, simultaneously unfolding chapters that feature them, imprisoned in separate rooms of the same castle, spurning the sexual advances of their respective captors. Heroines locked up in castle chambers, besieged by would-be rapists and the threat of forced marriages; heroines demonstrating their noble character by rejecting wicked seducers—all tropes. Less predictable is the use of these tropes as a means of contrasting the situations of women from different classes, and with a Jewish woman emerging as the superior character, no less. 

Both women do triumph in their goal of averting the fates their captors intend. But Rowena, normally haughty, crumples in a flood of tears when she realizes De Bracy’s power to force her hand in marriage. (Luckily for her, De Bracy is soft at heart—this would not have worked on Rebecca’s admirer, the still more wicked Brian de Bois-Guilbert.) Rebecca, though bearing herself with “courtesy” and a “proud humility” (in contrast to Rowena’s haughtiness), shows herself to have more spirit and strength of character. As a member of a despised race, Rebecca is approached with an offer far less honorable than marriage. (Also, Bois-Guilbert’s vows as a Knight Templar forbid his marriage to anyone.) Instead, the Knight wants to make her his mistress. In such a station she will be showered with riches and glory, he promises. She answers with true fighting words: “I spit at thee, and I defy thee.” In a classic (literally, going back to classical mythology) heroine move, Rebecca threatens to commit suicide, jumping to the ledge of the high turret and warning him not to come a step closer. This both dissuades Bois-Guilbert from his original intent and heightens his passion for her: “Rebecca! she who could prefer death to dishonor must have a proud and a powerful soul. Mine thou must be!...It must be with thine own consent, on thine own terms.”

Thus Rebecca finds herself at the center of a Gothic-heroine-threatened-with-rape-in-castle-chamber scene turned into a Samuel Richardson-style seduction narrative—that gives way, at this part, to a Gothic castle siege passage. Whereas Rowena’s persecutor uses the interruption presented by the siege as an excuse to desist in his ill-fated suit, the Richardsonian plot starring Rebecca continues as a dominating strand of the novel, another respect in which her character appropriates the literary territory of the highborn Englishwoman. Before Brian de Bois-Guilbert closes his first scene with Rebecca to go defend the castle, he established himself as that tantalizing character-type, the potentially reformable rake. “I am not naturally that which you have seen me—hard, selfish, relentless. It was woman that taught me cruelty, and on woman therefore I have exercised it...” He came home from knight-errantry, he explains, to find that the lady-love whose fame he spread far and wide had married another man. Here the reader can glimpse the possibility for Rebecca to be a Mary (another Jewess) to the former lady’s Eve, the means to redemption for a man who was led by a woman into corruption. Whether the Knight Templar will turn out like Richardson’s reformable Mr. B or the irredeemable Lovelace remains to be seen.

In another aspect of Rebecca’s and Rowena’s doubleness, Rebecca’s (rejected) lover is antagonist to Rowena’s (accepted) lover, the hero Ivanhoe. Brian de Bois-Guilbert is the ultimate 12th-century bad boy: he has “slain three hundred Saracens with his own hands,” and he slays with the ladies, too. He is described, in the Ann Radcliffe tradition, with all the dark fascination of a Gothic villain: 

“His expression was calculated to impress a degree of awe, if not fear, upon strangers. High features, naturally strong and powerfully expressive...keen, piercing, dark eyes, told in every glance a history of difficulties subdued and dangers dared...a deep scar on his brow gave additional sternness to his countenance and sinister expression to one of his eyes...” 

and so on. One of the most interesting things about the novel for me is the way that Bois-Guilbert—over and above whatever is appealing about bad boys—is a strangely sympathetic character, more so than Ivanhoe, and to what degree that was built into the narrative intentionally. When the narrator weighs in with moral judgments (as he often does), it can offer insight into what his take might be on those scenes unaccompanied by commentary. So for example, when the narrator calls “the character of a knight of romance” (here, describing King Richard) “brilliant, but useless,” it implies an author for whom Rebecca is a mouthpiece when she comes down on the anti-chivalry side of a debate with Ivanhoe. So the narrator—and most modern people—likely agree with Rebecca’s opinion of the laws of chivalry as “an offering of sacrifice to a demon of vain glory,” to which a highly miffed Ivanhoe responds that she can’t understand because she is not a noble Christian maiden (unlike Rowena, is the unspoken subtext). 

Applying this to the case of Bois-Guilbert, the villain, we might conclude, to our confusion, that his views of race are closer to the narrator’s (more progressive). I have already discussed the novel’s treatment of Rebecca, one of two major Jewish characters; the other, her father Isaac, conforms to some offensive Jewish stereotypes (stingy, money-hoarding, obsequious etc.) but is ultimately portrayed as good-hearted. Moreover, anytime the narrator draws on negative stereotypes he accompanies it with vindications of the Jewish people based on their historic oppression. As in other areas, the storytelling is here flavored with a decidedly 19th-century sensibility (even perhaps progressive for 1819, when Jews still could not hold public office in England). The narrator repeatedly describes the anti-Semitism of his characters as “prejudiced” and “bigoted.” All the characters seem to feel Rebecca’s beauty and greatness, but Bois-Guilbert is the only one who sees her as an equal, without qualifying her noble traits in terms of her Jewishness. Her race seems to be a non-issue for him. Contrasted with Ivanhoe, whose admiring male gaze turns into a demeanor of cold courtesy when he learns Rebecca’s descent, the medieval villain looks more and more like a hero for the 21st century. Could he be Scott’s real hero? 

Moving forward, the evidence piles in favor of Rebecca as the real star (despite her complete lack of mention on the back cover of my 1994 Penguin Classics edition). The penultimate chapter, the novel’s denouement, decides Rebecca’s fate in the Richardsonian narrative. The two chapters prior, separating the conclusion from when we last left Rebecca, in danger of being burned at the stake as a Jewish sorceress, are sort of like...okay, Ivanhoe, Rowena, Richard the Lionheart, blah blah blah. Every chapter in Ivanhoe is fun, and there’s a surprise in these chapters, but it’s ultimately an example of Scott’s mastery of the suspense trick of drawing out a cliffhanging moment by switching to a different plot, one that is slower and more predictable and less emotionally captivating. It’s all great reading, but whether or how Rebecca will be saved is what we really want to know, what we will read through anything to find out. Rebecca’s importance—and Rowena’s as her foil—is also borne out by Scott’s choice to close the novel on their farewell scene. 

The penultimate chapter contains Rebecca’s trial by combat. Rebecca’s life is at stake, but the real trial is Brian de Bois-Guilbert’s. Since backing off the whole raping Rebecca idea, he has saved her life and then put it at risk again. Bois-Guilbert’s rescue of Rebecca from the burning castle of Torquilstone, by the way, is an example of Scott’s practically cinematic sense of humor and flair for dialogue. Essentially, the Knight Templar appears in the room where Rebecca has been nursing Ivanhoe, when they’re all about to go up in flames; Rebecca is more fiery than the fire (“Rather will I perish in the flames than accept safety from thee!”); Bois-Guilbert picks her up and carries her off anyway (“Thou shalt not choose, Rebecca; once didst thou foil me, but never mortal did so twice”); Ivanhoe, unable to move, yells hilariously impotent threats of rage from his sickbed: “Hound of the Temple—stain to thine order—set free the damsel! Traitor of Bois-Guilbert, it is Ivanhoe commands thee! Villain, I will have thy heart’s blood!” The perfectly timed next sentence: “‘I had not found thee, Wilfred,’ said the Black Knight, who at that instant entered the apartment, ‘but for thy shouts.’”

After this daring rescue, in which the Knight Templar uses his shield to protect Rebecca at the risk of his own life as they gallop on his horse through the flying arrows of the battle, he spirits her to the prefectory of his Temple with the purpose of keeping her captive until she feels forced to “consent” to sex with him. As one might expect in the case of two equally indomitable people with a difference in values, this isn’t going well, until it goes even worse: the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, a stickler for all those pesky rules about not drinking and fucking, makes a surprise visit and finds out about Rebecca. The leader of the prefectory, who knew about Rebecca and was cool with it but has to save face for himself and his most important Knight, convinces the Grand Master that the Jewess has literally bewitched Bois-Guilbert (an easy sell). So in all fairness, she should really be burned to death and he should be given a few Hail Marys. Learning of this horrific prospect, Bois-Guilbert returns to Rebecca with his final offer: he will leave England, abandoning the Knights Templar in all its attendant glory and ambitious prospects, in order to save her, on the condition that she accompany him to start a new life back in the Middle East, where he can conquer everything (his reigning passion) there instead; if not, he’s not giving up his whole life for nothing, and she will see that “my vengeance will equal my love.” For the third time, Rebecca’s answer is that she’d rather die. Bois-Guilbert despairs, wavers, makes a plot to save her without compromising his position—he gets her, when inevitably convicted, to request a trial by combat, imagining that he can be her champion in disguise. Then he is required to fight for the Knights Templar against her champion (if she can even find a champion). Brian de Bois-Guilbert is like the third best knight in the world, so that’s probably a death sentence for Rebecca. He offers to save her again when she’s at the stake, with no champion for her yet appearing and time running out, and is again rebuffed. Ivanhoe rolls up at the last minute to be Rebecca’s champion, still really wounded, and his horse is totally exhausted. Under these conditions, the Knight Templar knocks Ivanhoe off his horse, as everyone expects. But no one, not the live audience, certainly not me, expects Brian de Bois-Guilbert to fall off his horse for no reason, practically untouched, and die. The Grand Master says, “This is indeed the judgment of God.” True to genre, the narrator replaces divine intervention in human affairs with a very Romantic and scarcely more probable explanation: “he had died a victim to the violence of his own contending passions.” 

Rebecca’s would-be seducer dies of being unable to decide whether he is a Mr. B or a Lovelace. Some readers may be left in similar indecision about how to judge him. Not so Rebecca, who has actually loved Ivanhoe the whole time, "imput[ing] no fault to [him] for sharing in the universal prejudices of his age and religion.” Rebecca is very unusual among Romantic heroines from the long 18th century in that her love goes unrequited. She may meet the type’s standards of perfection notwithstanding her Jewishness, but ultimately she cannot escape its limitations to claim her full literary-generic inheritance, the hero’s adoration. Happily ever after goes to the less deserving Rowena, and Ivanhoe only has the decency to recall Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity “more frequently than [Rowena] might altogether have approved.” Rebecca must withdraw and devote her life to God. In this genre, there is no such thing as second love, and that is one of many points on which the narrator remains silent.

[anti-marxistcult]

omgerd Cindy, where do i begin??   they are pieces of shit low life subhuman scumbags that hate humanity, human nature, natural law, and have a god complex to use conditioning, bio, mental, and economy manipulation to reform anything they are against to mirror what they want it to be.  They got a superiority complex, that they can do all things they accuse others of, and that they are allowed to get away with it.  they seek to undermine, and cause chaos, division, damage, and spread lies based on their false beliefs that are unsupported by any measure, and form of reality, truth logic, and evidence.  they also are hypocritical, they want the benefits of freedom, and capitalism - property rights, and all the good things that go with it like independence from the state, and then they claim the flaws, and horrific failures of socialism, and corporatism is due to capitalism.  the fuckers resort to indoctrination, propaganda, lies, fear, intimidation, threats, social engineering, shaming tactics, and exploitation to further their selfish goals of planting themselves, their lemming envious hateful cult minions in positions of power as they mask themselves behind equality, human rights, and any other thing that they can co-opt as they destroy it from within as they praise themselves as saviors and the most virtuous, the most accurate thing you can compare them to is a fatal ugly disease.  And their grand daddy impregnated his maid, and kicked her out on the street, and Marx is hailed as a feminist  XD  cant make this shit up, it fits the cunts perfectly because they are the opposite of what they say they stand for. but that the problem with people that fall into it, they think they are being part of something ‘’virtuous’’, same thing happened with the poor mislead victims of the People’s Temple aka Jonestown cult.  political correctness is what enforces the marxist dogma onto society. and political correctness is an oxymoron and based on lies and batshit theories cooked up by morons that couldnt give a shitty fuck less about society. p.s ‘’commie morality’’ is also an oxymoron, i cant believe there are retards who think that or any form of morality linked to the far left is an actual thing lol they are relativists, morality means nothing to them. speak with survivors from the soviet union or the chinese that fled from communist china, they’ll tell ya how fucked up the modern left’s embrace of their totalitarian ideologies are ;) if the dead could talk you’d get more out of the mountain of millions corpses caused by the far left tyrannical leaders last century >_^v

[pamphletstoinspire]

Why Growing Up with Relativism Has Millennials Searching for New Rules for Life

Written by: Isaac Withers

How growing up with ‘you do you’ without ‘practical wisdom’ has left young people searching for rules for life:

‘They try to accuse people like me who believe in empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism, as if its some appalling sin, where what it actually means is thought’. This was a statement that Stephen Fry made in the 2009 Intelligence Squared debate entitled ‘The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World’ and it captures well the cultural conversation around relativism and truth. Is relativism a damaging and destabilising thing, or is it in fact just free thought?

Well, before we get in to it, a definition for the term would be helpful. The Oxford English Dictionary defines relativism as ‘the doctrine that knowledge, morality, etc, are relative rather than absolute’. Put simply it’s the belief that your morals are not universal truths but are in fact more personal opinions ‘relative to’ or ‘related to’ your upbringing or class. At first that may seem like a totally inoffensive idea but it is a debate that has continued passionately over the decades between liberal and conservative thinkers. Paul Ryan, four years before he became Speaker of the House said, “If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics—I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.” How could this idea possibly be that important?

How Prevalent is Moral Relativism and Why?

Across the generations we can see a statistical rise in the idea that morals are relative. In their research, ‘The End of Absolutes: America’s New Moral Code’ the Barna Group found that over half (51%) of millenials were moral relativists compared to only 39% of the pre Boomer generation of Elders. It is then perhaps not surprising that in Barna’s more recent study of Gen Z (those after millennials) found that only 34% thought that lying was morally wrong. Jonathan Morrow, one of the researchers stated, ‘When only 34 percent of Gen Z can agree that “lying is morally wrong” – that’s a big problem. Not only is our culture deeply confused about moral and spiritual truth, gender and sexuality, but we are getting to the point where no one will listen to someone else’s point of view unless the completely agree with them.’

Young people will also be aware that society has held too collective moral norms that were wrong not too long ago, with Jim Crow segregation laws only ending in 1968 and with marital rape only being made illegal in 1993 (both in the US). Clearly, we have collectively been morally wrong before as a society, which would suggest that morals are relative to the time period.

The Greek Response and the Moral Animals

An interesting counter to the idea that diversity encourages moral relativism however comes from Dr Norman Doidge (author of ‘The Brain that Shapes Itself’). Doidge writes ‘When the ancient Greeks sailed to India and elsewhere, they too discovered that rules, morals and customs differed from place to place, and saw that the explanation for what was right and wong was often rooted in some ancestral authority. The Greek response was not despair, but a new invention: philosophy. For the ancients, the discovery that different people have different ideas about how, practically, to live, did not paralyze them; it deepened their understanding of humanity and led to some of the most satisfying conversations human beings have ever had, about how life might be lived.’

Doidge’s comparison of the ancient response of philosophy, to the modern response of relativism, is really fascinating; that cultural differences in the ancient world did not get rid of long held truths but encouraged comparison and philosophical conversation. That certainly sounds like more fun to me. Doidge continues that, ‘Aristotle argued that though specific rules, laws and customs differed from place to place, what does not differ is that in all places human beings, by their nature, have a proclivity to make rules, laws and customs. To put this in modern terms, it seems that all human beings are, by some kind of biological endowment, so ineradicably concerned with morality that we create a structure of laws and rules wherever we are. The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.’ Doidge goes on to describe humans as ‘moral animals’.

How has Moral Relativism Affected Young People? All the above quotes from Norman Doidge are actually from his introduction to Canadian clinical psychologist Dr Jordan B. Peterson’s ‘12 Rules for Life: an Antidote to Chaos’. This book rose to be a number one Sunday Times and International Bestseller, and Peterson has been called ‘one of the most important thinkers to emerge on the world stage for many years’ (Spectator). His lectures have been watched on YouTube sixty-four million times to date. His rules for life are ‘traditional wisdom’, presented through the collective stories and religions of many cultures, calling people to unifying human truths and to live responsibly in order to find meaning. Why would this become a sensation – especially among the young audiences he attracts?

Doidge, in his introduction, presents his theory about Petersons’ millennial audience. ‘They are, I believe, the first generation to have been so thoroughly taught two seemingly contradictory ideas about morality, simultaneously… The first idea or teaching is that morality is relative … the additional claim that one group’s morality is nothing but its attempt to exercise power over another group. So, the decent thing to do – once it becomes apparent how arbitrary your, and your society’s, “moral values” are – is to show tolerance for people who think differently, and who come from different (diverse) backgrounds. That emphasis on tolerance is so paramount that for many people one of the worst character flaws a person can have is to be “judgemental.” And, since we don’t know right from wrong, or what is good, just about the most inappropriate thing an adult can do is give a young person advice about how to live. And so a generation has been raised untutored in what was once called, aptly, “practical wisdom,” which guided previous generations. Millennials, often told they have received the finest education available anywhere, have actually suffered a form of serious intellectual and moral neglect.’

When I read that, I totally understood why a book that was just ‘rules for life’ had become a phenomenon – because to progress your life in the right direction, you have to believe there is a right and a wrong direction – a relativistic society would never offer that to young people. But it goes deeper than that too. Peterson believes that without these foundations it is impossible to find meaning in life.

‘In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act. In fact, they can’t even perceive, because both action and perception require a goal, and a valid goal is, by necessity, something valued. … We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing – and the very idea of progression implies value. … We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being. We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair. … So: no value, no meaning.’

But this is not merely intellectuals making statements about young people; this is what Peterson says young people tell him all the time.

‘They say one of two things … a quarter of them say ‘when I listen to you talk it’s as if you’re telling me things that I already know’. It’s like yeah well that’s exactly right because that’s what archetypal stories are … the other thing that people say and this is more like three quarters of them is ‘I was in a very dark place, I was addicted, I was drinking too much, I had a fragmented relationship with my fiance and I wasn’t getting married, things weren’t going very well with my family, my relationship with my father was damaged, I didn’t have any aim, I was wasting my time – some variant of that. I’ve been watching your lectures, I’ve decided to establish a purpose, I’m trying to tell the truth and things are way better. … People stop me on the street all the time and tell me exactly that story, which is just wonderful! … It’s like the lights are going on.’

New Rules: Guilt vs Shame

And yet, Peterson is not the only sign of a secular reawakening to objective morality. We are seeing this come through on the political scene too in America. In ‘How the American left is rediscovering morality’, you have former Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders saying ‘It’s hard to imagine why anyone would be involved in politics if one didn’t have a moral sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice’ and newly elected New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying ‘Everyone’s going crazy about socialism and democratic socialism. For me, that’s not my seat. My seat is a moral seat.’ Whatever you think of their policies, those are interesting things to say.

In some ways, we are seeing a new emerging culture of moralism, but perhaps in not as healthy a way; David Brooks, in his piece ‘The Shame Culture’ for The New York Times, claims that, ‘College campuses are today awash in moral judgment. … Those accused of incorrect thought face ruinous consequences. When a moral crusade spreads across campus, many students feel compelled to post in support of it on Facebook within minutes. If they do not post, they will be noticed and condemned. Some sort of moral system is coming into place. Some new criteria now exist, which people use to define correct and incorrect action. The big question is: What is the nature of this new moral system?’

Andy Crouch writes compellingly that we are moving from a culture of guilt to a culture of shame. Crouch draws this from anthropologist Ruth Benedict who wrote about her discovery of shame culture in Japan in her 1946 book, ‘The Chrysanthemum and the Sword’. This book, ‘popularized the idea that Japan was a “shame culture,” in which morality was governed by “external sanctions for good behavior.” In other words, you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you. By contrast, in a guilt culture such as the West, you know you are good or bad because of an “internalized conviction of sin”—by how you feel about your behavior and choices.’

Crouch thinks that Benedict’s statements about Japanese culture are ‘sweeping’ but that the insight ‘that some cultures place a higher priority on preserving honor and avoiding shame—has remained.’ Crouch points to the online mob that manifests on social media as proof of this, as well as how university campus controversies egnite so fast. He also claims though, that whereas the opposite to shame in Japanese culture was honour, we are not evolving into an honour-shame culture but ‘are starting to look something like a postmodern fame–shame culture. Like honor, fame is a public estimation of worth, a powerful currency of status. But fame is bestowed by a broad audience, with only the loosest of bonds to those they acclaim.’

Of this theory, Brooks remarks,‘The guilt culture could be harsh, but at least you could hate the sin and still love the sinner. The modern shame culture allegedly values inclusion and tolerance, but it can be strangely unmerciful to those who disagree and to those who don’t fit in.’

How do we help young people in this?

It’s a messy issue, but perhaps the most helpful things the Church can do for young people is offer them a space for the existential conversations, and to offer them that strong guidance on right and wrong whilst engaging their search for meaning.

Bishop Robert Barron sums up the classical morality versus modern morality debate humorously. ‘The modern approach is boring. I say it because it locks the subject so much into himself, there’s no thrilling adventure of discovering formal truth or discovering finality and purpose. All that matters is my little world of my desires, my identity, my sense of myself. I think classical morality … is a much more thrilling, much more adventurous project.’ The Church might first have to convince younger generations that truth exists, or even potentially exists, but when it does that, it also needs to provide a space to explore the different truths in that philosophical tradition. Something like the Alpha course springs to mind here, just the space to thrash the basic ideas out and not be told you are wrong, just to have the conversation of meaning that people are starving for.

Essentially the Church needs to hold to its guns on morality, though it could do with some explanation on the term sin. Again to a generation scared of judgement, sin sounds awful, but its Hebrew origin comes from the archery term for when an archer missed the mark, meaning in a moral sense that sin is a misdirection of our truest desire. An important emphasis too would be that the Church has these morals to protect people from harm. When Jordan Peterson was asked why people are responding positively to his message, he replied, ‘well I’m actually on their side.’ Young people need to be able trust that the Church is on their side, not moralising for no reason, that in the words of Saint John Bosco: ‘Enjoy yourself as much as you like-if only you keep from sin.’

Ultimately, a society without a belief in sin has no need of a saviour, and even Jesus in his famous ‘do not judge’ teaching says ‘why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the great log in your own?’ (Matthew 7:3) There He’s calling for a deep knowledge of our own flaws first to enable our interior transformation, but He is not refuting that there are things in life that are damaging, as His core teaching was ‘repent and believe in the good news’: that balance of the two.

Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College and The King’s College, says it well in his book ‘A Refutation of Moral Relativism’:

‘What do you think Jesus meant when he said “judge not”? Do you think he meant “don’t judge deed, don’t believe the Commandments, don’t morally discriminate a just war from an unjust war or a hero from a bully?” He couldn’t have meant that. He meant “don’t judge the motives and hearts, which only God can see.” I can judge your deeds, because I see them. I can’t judge what your motives are, because I can’t see that.’

In all this we have to remember though that it is not just about rules and morals, that that is not the primary reason for Christianity. As Pope Benedict XVI put it so perfectly, ‘Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.’

[bek-eneltec]

Reflection 3 | IV Semester

Since the start of the semester I have been learning a lot about literature, and through these past month we learned what postmodernism is and what is feminism in literature. To start, I didn’t know what postmodernism really is about, I thought that it was only about words in quotations or something related to modern art. But to my surprise it was about other things that weren't related to my initial thoughts. Postmodernism is a form of literature that is a reaction to modernism, that can involve paradoxes, fragmentations, unreliable narrators, has unrealistic plots, and rejects the boundaries of ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of art and literature. In general, postmodernism is skeptical, ironic, morally relativistic and it can be a voice to the voiceless. Some examples of stylistic techniques that are often used in postmodern literature are: Pastiche, Intertextuality, Metafiction, Temporal distortion, Minimalism, Maximalism, Magical realm, Factor and Reader involvement. The importance of postmodernism can be reflected in the purpose it has, that is to give ‘voice’ to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world.

Another form of literature that we checked during class was feminism. Feminism in literature is a criticism towards the ways women are oppressed in literature, and expose the misogyny in writing about women. Its main focus is to reinterpret old texts and show the importance of women’s writing, and avoid it to be forgotten or ignored. It examines the character’s portrayals, the text’s language, the author’s attitude and the Inter character relationships.

One author the we saw in class was Margaret Atwood, that for me she can be considered as a feminist writer. Margaret has different ways to define feminism, and she portrays these different types of it. The first is women as a perfection, the second as women are victimized and the last one about women being full and flawed human beings. The way she interprets these different feminism is what makes me think that she can be considered as a feminist writer.

The literary movements we saw in class made me realize what Literature is about in different aspects. I can see how an author can portray and convey certain emotions in the readers in order to present their ideology onto someone. Postmodernism and feminism is a form of literature that is different from the other, they are unique in their own way and both of them tend to critique certain topics that involve the society as a whole.

💛

[permetscore]

i cant stop thinking abt that death note character hate post so heres my opinions

did nothing wrong:

near

naomi

rem

matt but he was on 2 pages

side female characters such as sayu and sachiko but do they count? do they

did some things wrong:

misa - love her but that was probably a little more murder than necessary. seriously tho. lov her

mello - kidnapped a teenage girl for like 3 days which is pretty #yikes but compared to most people on this list he did alright so go mello

matsuda - his only flaw is that hes a cop. aizawa also goes here also he gets less 'stupid' excuse points

souichiro - a cop and also kind of morally questionable as a father

did real, real bad:

light - obvious. but also fandom tends to portray him as purely malicious for no reason. gets bonus points for having a moral structure at all even if its entirely relativist and self serving

L - literally locked misa up in bondage on camera for at least a month (2 iirc?) while letting the men imprisoned actually have some dignity by comparison. king of no morals and human rights violation for funsies

watari - sure did enable #allofthat including the horrific child abuses of wammy's house. no wonder mello's so weird

ryuk - bad but also he was upfront about it so cool i guess

[standtoreason93]

Street Tactics – Part 1

By Greg Koukl

The tactical game plan I often speak of is a powerful strategy, but it has a modest liability; there is a speed bump I want to help you navigate.

I outline the plan itself in detail in the book Tactics—A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions.[i] It’s a formidable tool to keep you in the driver’s seat of otherwise difficult or discomfiting conversations with skeptics and challengers—yet in a safe, genial, and amazingly effective way.

Using tactics has transformed my ability to make a difference for Christ. Simply put, the key to maneuvering effectively in spiritual conversations with others is to use questions. Carefully placed queries are the core of the tactical game plan. I call the plan “Columbo” after the iconic Lt. Columbo of a bygone TV era who was amazingly successful using the same approach.

The final stage of the plan, though, has a limitation.

The first two steps of the 3-step plan are simplicity itself, of course, allowing you to make tremendous headway in a conversation even when you have zero insight into the challenge you’re facing and no skill at verbal maneuvering.

Step one has a single purpose. Your goal is not to preach the gospel or to give evidence for Christianity or even to mention Jesus. All you want to do at this point is get the lay of the land. You need a clear picture of what you’re up against.

To find out what you’re facing, what the other person believes, or what his precise objections are, focus at the outset on one task and one task only: gathering information. Ask clarification questions in a gentle, curious, probing way (“I’m confused a little by what you said. Can you clear this up for me? What did you mean by that?”)

Step two builds on the information you gathered with the first step. Once you have clarity on what a person believes, you then want to know why he believes it. I call this reversing the burden of proof since it’s your friend’s responsibility (“burden”) to provide reasons (“proof”) for the claim he’s just clarified in response to your initial question. It’s not your job to refute it—at least not at first. Initially, it’s his job to defend it.

Notice that at this stage of the game plan you haven’t taken on any risk since you haven’t advanced your own view in any way. You’re simply using questions to ease into the shallow end of the pool, so to speak. No pressure; no worries. So far, so good.

The final step is the trickier one.[ii]

The Speed Bump

The third step of the game plan is a bit more challenging since you will not be using questions passively to gain information of some sort (either your friend’s ideas or his reasons for them). Instead, you will be using questions actively to give information of a specific kind­—in this case, to point out a weakness or a flaw in the other person’s view.

Which brings us to the speed bump. The final maneuver of the game plan requires three things you may not have: one, insight into the weakness or flaw; two, insight into what questions to use to exploit the liability; and three, a basic blueprint in your mind of how you will direct the initial moves of the unfolding conversation—your opening query, your friend’s likely response, and your next couple of moves.

This final phase takes you into the deeper end of the pool, and that is what I want to help you with. In the next few issues of Solid Ground, I’m going to give you a primer on what I call “Street Tactics.” I use this phrase because this last step in our strategy is usually where the verbal sparring begins.

First, I will introduce a standard challenge you’re likely to face “on the street.” Then I’ll go into some detail on how the challenge falters. Finally, I will provide mini-dialogues showing the questions I would personally use to initiate and prosecute my critique. I’ll follow up, in some cases, with variations that will help you respond to possible turns the talk might take as the conversation unfolds.

These mini-dialogues are not complete conversations, of course. My goal isn’t to give you a rigid script. Rather, I want to provide ways of getting you started on a specific challenge so you can move forward effectively in a friendly and disarming fashion.

Certain questions (rendered in bold in the dialogues below) are key, though, especially the initial ones, since they provide a launching pad to get you started. I suggest that you memorize them or at least have the gist of their substance clear in your mind. I want you to have these opening moves at the ready so you can immediately take the initiative, going on the offensive yet in an inoffensive way.

Usually, my first questions are designed to give me valuable information that sets the stage for what follows (Columbo #1). Further questions may probe the rationale for a person’s belief (Columbo #2). The key to Street Tactics, though, is using carefully selected queries to expose an objection’s flaws and thus disarm it (Columbo #3).

Let’s tackle our first challenge, arguably one of the toughest a Christian has to face—the problem of evil.

The Problem with the Problem of Evil

Answering the challenge of suffering and evil is a constant task for Christians, and understandably so. There is one thing every person knows, no matter where he lives or when he lives. Everyone knows the world is broken. Things are not the way they’re supposed to be. That’s the complaint. But there’s a problem with this protest most critics don’t consider.

Contrary to popular belief, the problem of evil is not a good argument against God. It’s actually one of the best arguments for God. The “problem” with the problem of evil is that if God does not exist, there can be no real evil to object to. Here’s why.

Put most simply, in order for the world not to be the way it’s supposed to be (the problem of evil), there needs to be a way the world is supposed to be (perfectly good). Pretty basic.

Three significant concerns undercut the atheist’s challenge at this point.

Here is the first. In a strange way, the atheist is skewered by his own objection. The problem of evil—the challenge of one’s worldview accounting for the existence of staggering human misery and stunning moral depravity—is not merely a Christian problem; it is a human problem. Getting rid of God doesn’t get rid of the perplexing complaint. Everyone has to grapple with it—even atheists.

So how do atheists answer their own protest—the charge of an incurable worldview contradiction—when it’s turned back on them? They can’t. What could it possibly mean for them to say that the world is not the way it’s supposed to be? Their materialist worldview provides no resources to account for the existence of genuine evil.

It gets worse for the atheist, though, since he faces a second hurdle.

When someone protests that bad things happen, there are two ways to understand this complaint that need to be distinguished from each other but rarely are: a relativist’s way or an objectivist’s way. Here’s what I mean.

On the one hand, those who have a relativistic impulse are quick to describe moral judgments as mere personal matters. That’s the “don’t push your morality on me” crowd. “I have my morality; you have yours,” they say.

Here’s the rub. If they stick to their relativism, then the problem of evil vanishes since the word “bad” simply refers to an event or an action the relativist doesn’t happen to like. Good and evil are reduced to personal preference. Who’s to judge? One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, after all.

This is not what the objector has in mind, of course, when he raises his grievance against Christianity. He means something else. In that moment, his complaint is about real, objective evil—evil “out there, in the world”—ergo his challenge.

So which is it? Does he mean things happen he doesn’t like (relativism), or does he mean things happen that are actually bad (objectivism) regardless if people like them or not? He can’t have it both ways—both his convenient relativism and his favorite objectivist complaint against God—since they conflict. Most skeptics, though, have never considered this clash within their own worldview. [iii]

If the atheist surrenders his relativism to rescue his protest, though, a final obstacle assails him, arguably the most daunting.

As we’ve seen, the complaint about evil itself requires transcendent, universal laws that govern the world—objective morality—in order for real evil to exist as a violation of those laws. Transcendent moral laws require a transcendent lawmaker—God. Saying the world is “supposed” to be a certain way requires a “sposer,” so to speak—someone who intended the world to be much better than it is.

Think about this comment: “I read in the newspaper that writers don’t exist. The article seemed convincing. What’s your opinion?”

You see the problem immediately, of course. Without writers, there would be no articles in newspapers to deny the existence of writers in the first place. The second—the newspaper article—depends on the first—the writer. The claim self-destructs.[iv]

In a similar way, if there is no God, then there is no transcendent moral lawmaker. If no lawmaker, then no universal moral laws we’re all obligated to obey. If no moral laws, then no broken laws. If no broken laws, then no problem of evil. Simply put, then, if there is no God, there can be no evil (or good, for that matter).

Yet there is a problem of evil (we all know this), so there must be broken laws, so there must be laws, so there must be a transcendent law maker, so there must be a God.

Now that the problems with the atheist’s challenge are clear in our minds, here is the strategic thinking that will guide our tactical response: Before we answer the atheist’s concern about God and evil, he needs to show that the challenge itself is coherent—that the very concept of evil is intelligible in a world without God.

Philosophers call this the “grounding problem,” the difficulty of asserting morality when there is no basis for (“grounding”) or source of morality to account for it. As I have written elsewhere, “Atheism cannot even make sense of the notion of a ‘broken’ world to begin with, so the problem of evil turns out to be just as lethal for atheists as it appears to be for theism.”[v]

In sum, then, there are three hurdles for the atheist who raises the problem of evil against theism:

A worldview problem: Making sense of evil in the world is a problem that plagues atheists, too, yet their materialism provides no way to resolve the difficulty since they cannot explain the existence of evil from within their worldview.

A relativism problem: If there is a genuine problem of evil, then moral relativism is false because objective evil exists.

A grounding problem: Atheism cannot explain the source of the very moral obligations that are necessary for there to be a problem of evil in the first place.

Our strategy on the street will be to exploit these problems using questions. Note, though, that in this case we will not be answering the atheist’s challenge directly by showing how evil is compatible with a good, powerful God. That more complex issue is difficult to untangle quickly, so we will sidestep it for the moment.[vi]

Instead, our strategy will be to press the skeptic on the incoherence and inconsistency of his challenge.

Evil in the Street

Now that we know the flaws in this objection, we can look at the best tactical ways to expose them when someone raises the problem of evil against theism in conversation.

I find it’s always best if I’m prepared with a move to get me going right out of the gate. Here’s my standard opening question regarding the challenge of evil: “What, exactly, is the problem?” [Columbo 1] The query may seem like an empty one (the problem seems obvious), but it accomplishes two tactically significant objectives.

First, this question immediately buys me time—if only a moment or two—so I can collect my thoughts and strategize my next moves. Second, it’s always to my advantage to have a challenger spell out his concern in precise terms since it removes ambiguities for both of us by pressing for precision about an objection.

Here’s my second move: “So you believe in evil then?” [Columbo 1][vii]

Again, this seems like a restatement of the obvious, but it confirms an important detail in the conversation, plus it provides a smooth bridge to any of the dialogue strategies below.

The Worldview Problem

“So you believe in evil then?”

“Yes, of course I do. That’s my objection.”

“So as an atheist, how does your worldview account for the existence of evil? How would you answer your own question, given the concern you pose?” [Columbo 3]

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s evil in the world, right?”

“Of course.”

“As a theist, I think evil happens when someone violates a perfect standard of good, when things deviate from how they’re supposed to be. That makes complete sense to most people, and it fits my own worldview perfectly. But how does atheism make sense of that?” [Columbo 3]

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“Well, the rules have to be real before they can be violated to cause the evil you’re objecting to, right? And, on your view, they’d have to be physical to be real. But moral rules aren’t physical. So how do you solve that problem?”

*  *  *  *

“So you believe some standard of good has been violated, resulting in evil.”

“That’s it.”

“Well, you’re an atheist, right?”

“Sure.”

“And you don’t believe in God or in anything outside the physical world. Is that right?”

“Right.”

“Are the moral laws you’re talking about physical or nonphysical?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Well, on your view, if the broken moral rules causing evil are not physical, then they don’t exist and there can’t be a problem of evil. But if they do exist, they must be physical—have physical shape and weight, extend in space, be governed by the laws of chemistry and physics, etc. So which is it?” [Columbo 3]

The Relativism Problem

“So you do believe in evil then?”

“Yes, of course. That’s my objection.”

“What do you mean by ‘evil’? How would you define it?” [Columbo 1]

“Well, I think it’s a matter of opinion.”

“So there are no universal rules governing all people at all times in all places?”

“Of course not. It’s all relative.”

“Now I’m confused. It sounds like you’re asking how God could allow so much evil in the world when there is no real evil. How would you fix that?” [Columbo 3]

“But I do believe in evil. That’s my complaint.”

“But you just told me everything’s relative, that there’s no absolute standard. So then evil would just be a violation of your personal opinions.”

“Right. It’s what I personally believe is wrong.”

“So you’re asking me how can there be a God who allows things to happen that you don’t like? Why is that a good objection against God? What am I missing here?” [Columbo 3]

*  *  *  *

“When you object to evil, are you saying that certain things bother you emotionally? Or are you saying that certain actions are wrong in themselves regardless of how you feel, and that’s what makes God’s existence unlikely?”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Let me put it another way. Is rape wrong?” [Columbo 3]

“Of course it is.”

“Now, do you mean it’s wrong regardless of what a person or a society thinks, or is it only wrong from your perspective?”

“It’s wrong for me.” [relativism]

“Then I don’t understand your complaint. You don’t think God exists because some things happen that are wrong for you? How is that a problem?”

The Grounding Problem

“So you believe in evil then?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You’re an atheist, though, so I don’t understand your question.”

“What do you mean?”

“If there is no God, how can there be any evil in the world?” [Columbo 3]

“I don’t get your point.” [Be prepared for people to be confused about the grounding concern.]

“Well, when you talk about evil, you’re basically saying some kind of moral rule has been broken, that the person doing evil has broken that rule. Right?”

“I guess so.”

“Then who made those moral rules?” [Columbo 3]

*  *  *  *

“What exactly is the problem?”

“It’s obvious. Bad things happen. If there really was a good God, like you say, then He wouldn’t allow all that bad stuff.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ‘bad.’ Can you help me out?” [Columbo 1]

“You know, things like rape, torture, murder—that sort of thing.”

“You just gave me examples of evil. But why would you label those things evil and not call, say, kindness or heroism evil? You must have some standard in mind. Where do you get the standard that distinguishes good from evil?” [Columbo 3]

*  *  *  *

“Is there a speed limit on the street by your house?” [This question is meant to set up Columbo 3, below.]

“Of course.”

“If you exceeded the speed limit, would you be breaking the law?”

“Sure.”

“Where did that law come from?” [Columbo 3]

“The sign is right there. It’s obvious. Anyone can read it.” [Here he’s confused how he knows the law with the source of the law itself—a common mistake. Your question is about the second, not the first.]

“Sorry. I’m not asking if you can see the sign. I’m asking you where the sign came from. What if I made the sign? [relativism] Would you be obligated to obey that sign?”

“Of course not. Individual people don’t set the speed limits. The government does.”

“I agree completely. So what governing authority makes the laws of the universe that are violated when people do evil things?” [Columbo 3]

“I’m not following you.” [This confusion is common.]

“Well, you’re saying that people are breaking the speed limit of the universe, so to speak—the problem of evil. If there are no real speed limits, then there is no real evil. I’m just asking where the speed limits come from. Any idea?” [Columbo 3]

That’s Street Tactics—maneuvering in tough conversations by using a plan with specific questions meant to expose a weakness or a flaw in someone’s view. It’s easier than you think if you follow the steps.

First, get a clear take on your friend’s view. Make sure you understand it. If there are any ambiguities, use your first Columbo question, “What do you mean by that?” (or some variation), to clear them up.

Second, reflect on the challenge or do some research to zero in on its weaknesses or its failings. Most of the maneuvers in Part 2 of the Tactics book are meant to help you find flaws and exploit them.

Third, chart a course for your conversation—as I have done for you in the examples above—using a mixture of questions (especially clarification questions) to keep your friend engaged while you move forward to expose the liabilities you’ve discovered. Be sure to have the first couple of moves clear in your mind—even memorized—so when the challenge comes up, you’ll have your first question at the ready. This single bit of prep will save you lots of stress.

At first you’ll need to plan ahead and practice a bit by doing a conversation dry run, of sorts. As you employ these principles, though, the process will become almost second nature—a kind of mental “muscle memory.” You’ll be able to move ahead easily in conversations that used to be daunting and discomfiting, staying securely in the driver’s seat on a productive route—all without speed bumps.

__________________________

[i] See Gregory Koukl, Tactics—A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions, 2nd Ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019).

[ii] If you’re not familiar with the basic game plan, the first five chapters of Tactics will get you completely up to speed. It’s good to have that foundation in place before you attempt the slightly more advanced step, Street Tactics. Be sure to get the expanded 2nd edition of Tactics, though.

[iii] In Tactics, I call this particular version of self-refutation “Sibling Rivalry Suicide.” Keep in mind that not all atheists are relativists, or materialists, for that matter. The vast majority are, though.

[iv] In Tactics, I call this error “Infanticide Suicide.”

[v] Gregory Koukl, The Story of Reality (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), 87. I go on to explain why the problem is not lethal for theists at all, since there are additional factors that decisively nullify the objection.

[vi] I engage that question thoroughly in The Story of Reality, chapter 14.

[vii] Notice, by the way, the persistent use of clarification questions (Columbo 1) both to confirm important information and to keep the conversation moving forward in a friendly, interactive way.

[abhimannue]

Calling out the bullshit cop-out tactics used by nihilists, to justify their own intellectual laziness in order to absolve themselves of any personal responsibilities of actually living in a dignified and meaningful life.

Oops. the title is a tad bit long. I guess i’m trying im trying to attract some trouble with this one. 

It’s very likely that since the time that cavemen were capable of thinking beyond where they can hunt down their next big buffalo, there was one lazy limping fool who just went “this is bullshit. How long are we going to hunt like this. Whats the point. we’re going to die anyway”. If the whole tribe thought that way we wouldn’t be here today like, 100,000 years or whatever later. That line of thought should have died with that damn fool - but that’s the problem with ideas. Even the bad ones outlive the brain that thought it, and it spreads faster than fucking ebola because words are disembodied vermin and ideas are non biological meme pathogens.  That idea of “whats the point, no one cares, it’s all made up, it doesn’t matter” has made it through to this day and age - made utterly poetic with Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot monologue by making the Human Endeavor sound banal and insignificant in the larger scale of things. Here’s the fundamental flaw in the assumptions on which Nihilistic, Moral relativistic (i’m going to call this group NRs for the ease) world view rest - that we are the end product, and that history ends with us, and life is going to confine itself to earth. It doesn’t consider the possibility that the human race has the potential to actually conquer the whole universe. It ignores everything about humanity that makes it light years ahead of our distant relatives. We have literally bent the laws of physics to use it to our advantage. In the cosmic scale we may be insignificant today. But look what we started as, what’s to say that we won’t one day be on every planetary system? Imagine if the first single celled organism on earth said, “fuck it, whats the point”. Using the same damn cosmic scale, our time has just begun. It’s just seconds that we’ve been here. Who knows where we can end up. To think we’re not significant speaks to the highest abstraction of Low Self Esteem issues. We’re going to go intergalactic one day. The whole “It doesnt matter because we’re going to die” is another way of admitting that significance can only assigned to an individual life starting at birth and ending at death. Bullshit. Individual life is a single unit in a continuous spectrum called Life with a big L and what we do has a ripple effect going into the future and around us. It speaks to the utter selfishness and self centered-ness and myopic vision of individual life if we assume that we are no more than our assigned 80 years. Afterlife or no afterlife. rebirth or no rebirth, what we do has butterfly effects. Our actions can resonate through time in ways we can’t even predict or imagine. Therefore the onus to live valiantly, to live big, to choose right (and to strive to be as aware as we can so that we can make the right choice) falls squarely on our shoulders. Nihilism, is a  convenient cop out that absolves you from doing the hard work of living well in an unpredictable and harsh world instead of being bold enough to face this son-of-a-bitch head on. The moral relativistic stand that follows from nihilism, that since “it doesn't matter, values don’t matter, so i can do what i want and you can do what you want who are we to judge is also Bullshit. Values have hierarchies. Some values are better than others. Our need to respect diversity has been pushed ahead so far that we are just afraid to challenge ethical standpoints obviously morally reprehensible. Philosophies and Religions are the amalgamation of values transmitted through stories in order to inform humanity about transcendent ideals that will maximize human prosperity for the longest possible extent. The ideas have evolved and will continue to evolve until we learn to how implement the most suitable ones for stages of development of the human civilization. The quest to identify the right code of moral living has not ended yet. “Anything goes as long as we’re chill” is just the refusal to do the hard work of examining the merit of a moral stand point over another and battling it out, out of fear of confrontation and disharmony. Political correctness has made us intellectually weak. I have to call out the bullshit of atheists here because their understanding of religion is too juvenile and they choose to debate/fight/attack bigots who actually are incapable of articulating the rationale behind their beliefs. Religion in its most benign for takes the most complex philosophies and turns them into codes of conduct and articulates them in story structures so that they are easy to transmit and imbibe. To dismiss religion is to throw the baby out with the bath water. The call of the hour is to tell the old stories with the words of today. The perennial truths will always be constant. 

Big Question – whats the point of saying this? What is the call to action? What are we to do with these facts?

1) Either nothing matters, or everything matters. We must live as if we are responsible for our lives and making it better instead of just getting by.

2) We must rediscover our value systems by wrestling with it everyday until we have re-established our own ethical standards we can apply to navigate our lives.

3) Use our imaginations to create new cultural artifacts that communicate the transcendent ideals to live by and strive to live up those ideals.

What will help achieve? A new humanity. A better humanity. Yes, of course it matters.