SS Bashing

[mat69]

Interesting Jason, by giving some people what you think they are asking for, you betray everything people fought for to reach democrazy, human rights and completly ignore enlightment. And in the end it could turn out that you are as evil as the evil you wanted to destroy. That to morals ...

To recur I think only few people were "evil" before they joined the SS. I believe that they (or at least their actions) "became evil". I guess the today still popular believe "I'm just doing my job." or "I'm just doing what I'm told to do" helped them on their "mutation".

The thought that all Nazis, all Germans are "evil" is simply naive and makes you look like a "Übermensch", like you would be immune to manipulation.

PS.: Everything here is my opinion, but that should be obvious.

[Andreas]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Navscout - Italians make better suits these days. Hotter women too. Then there is the food.

I fiercely agree on all counts.

All the best

Andreas

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Runyan99: [snips]

wonderful, but it doesn't define that which is just, and that which is unjust.

"And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good - need we ask anyone to tell us these things?"

All the best,

John.

[Inola]

It is no good to take someone`s life, because it is not yours, and wasn`t created by you. Correct?

[JasonC]

"he willingly fails to concede the philosphical point that the strong ultimately are the ones who judge what is 'just' and what is 'unjust'"

Pace Socrates, only if by the strong you mean the many. Even then, I doubt the proposition. There is for instance the awkward matter of obscure and powerless teachers in remote provincal backwaters who end tortured to death, and 2000 years later have 2 billion loyal followers (of decidely indifferent quality, to be sure), while we can only read a line the supposedly victorious world empire that carried out the execution wrote down, because said adherents kept their form of speech. Or the awkward matter that nobody would know or care about the legislative majority that convicted a certain 70 year old busybody previously cited on this thread, but for the writings of the followers of said busybody.

In the long run, men are dust and power is ashes. Principles have vastly higher survival value, even putting everything on the cynic's own terms.

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by Yushal:

Put simply, this "point" seems to state that truth is only what we (whoever we may be) say it is.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I will illustrate. I've nothing else to do today but to debate philosophy.

Two thousand years ago, it was perfectly legal and just for a Roman to expose an unwanted child on a hillside. Also, slavery was widespread throughout the Mediterranean, and we don't have evidence that anyone, not even slaves themselves, thought that this was in any way against the natural order of things, or that it was contrary to morality. In Carthage, the sacrifice of children seems to have been going on, in furtherance of the very moral goal of keeping peace with the gods. A few centuries later in Scandanavia, a Viking funeral might include the immolation of not only the deceased lord, but several of his still very alive servants and concubines. All of this was considered well and good.

Today, if you travel to Rome or Tunis or Oslo, you won't find any of this stuff going on. What was 'good' then is no longer 'good' now. It's no longer moral or legal to engage in slavery or child exposure.

So, undoubtedly, morality has changed over time. And if people can change morality, then it is proven that morality is subject to human influence. In short, societies make it up as we go along. It's just a social contract that defines how the human animal is going to live with and interact with one another. The exact contents of the social contract however, vary by time and location, and are subject to debate and change.

As I've tried to argue, often that change in morality is brought about by war. Two groups with opposing values fight it out, and then the victor writes the history books (as we all know) and defines the morality. Consider a modern example:

What will be taught to Iraqi school children in the year 2056? What will the truth of the events of 2006 be, as told in 2056? Well, obviously that depends on what happens between now and then. If Iraq in 2056 is a Shiite muslim theocracy, then the child's textbook will say that the insurgent fighters were heroic patriots who kept their country free from evil crusaders from the west. It will hold no law more just than Islamic law. The Islamists will be the moral actors. And that will be truth. On the other hand, if Iraq is a moderate secular republic, then the child's textbook will say that the Coalition armies delivered the Iraqi people into a new era of freedom, and that democracy and religious tolerance are good and noble things. The Coalition and the Iraqi democrats will be the moral actors. And that will be truth.

Surely nobody can disagree with this. Can you not see how truth, how morality is shaped?

But, this argument is only very tangentially related to the SS. What about the topic of the thread?

I don't want to defend the SS. I'd only like point out that the SS was not an organization of supernaturally evil demons who came to earth from another dimension. It was an organization of men. Very ordinary German shopkeepers and clerks and carpenters and policemen became the heart and soul of the SS, and as someone else pointed out, so did men from Estonia, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Croatia and other places. Men who were not even raised under the Nazi regime and yet still joined.

If we hate and fear the SS, it's because we hate and fear that aspect of human nature which made the SS possible. In my opinion, that has always been the most important lesson to take away from the SS and the Nazi atrocities - it's window into the depth of human capacity for killing. Thus, the need of a morality to suppress our most violent and vicious impulses, and to make civilization possible.

What most people don't fully appreciate in my opinion is the powerful influence that Nazism and the SS have had on changing our modern morality and culture. The pendulum has swung very very far in the opposite direction, and our world today is a very different one from say, the 1920s.

[General Bolt]

Runyan99 very good points.

So whether the SS were born evil or became evil in a culture of evil they were and did despicable acts. There can be no denial that by 1945 they were indeed evil. It’s just a mind game trying to determine its root cause. Why should any group that did such evil acts be defended in any way? Rationalization and justification are like masturbation. The only person getting ****ed is your self.

And to take it to another level, if in the next 10 years Iran does develop nukes and pops a few over Israel, then like the 20's/30’s the world will have failed to stop them, just as the world failed to stop Hitler and his culture that bred Nazism and the holocaust. Is not the president of Iran’s rhetoric like the Nazi rhetoric and the book Mien Kampf? Or is it just harmless talk? That’s the determination the good world must make and the action they must take or not take...

[JasonC]

So, if people once thought there were 4 elements, or a fifth because heavenly bodies were not made of terrestrial matter, it was so. And if they thought the earth was flat. And if they thought magic spells worked.

Silly on its face. So charity says it can't be what you are trying to mean, even though it is what you are saying. You would want to distinguish truths of fact about which there is truth as distinct from opinion, from matters of value about which there is opinion only. If so, you commit a category error when you announce that "so it was true". The term does not apply with its usual sense, else your position reduces to the silliness above, denying the existence of error. (Protagoras already had that problem).

So instead you want to restrict the category of truth to matters not about values or perhaps not passing through human heads aka "subjective" as the loose and inaccurate term has it. But this does not work either. Trying changing the laws of economics by having a different opinion about them. Doesn't work. Subjective constraints are every bit as real as objective ones. If people believe all value is added by labor and none by the services of capital, to take one example that was believed historically, then they are simply wrong, and trying to act on the belief will be self defeating.

Going further for the sake of charity, the claim that moral truth is whatever a society declares to be moral truth is incoherent on its face, since societies in the past have declared that moral truth is objective and transcends human opinion. Either they were wrong and you admit the possibility of error that way, or they are right and you give up standing to your own argument the other way. You require a place to stand outside of the systems you attempt to describe, but there is no such place.

All history can give you is that opinions change. It cannot reach the question of their truth, because it is not an arbiter of it.

But in addition, the claim rests on a false empirical position about the trajectory of moral opinions. It asserts that opinions on right are manufactured by political power. This is a testable proposition and history refutes it violently. Opinion of right does not follow presence of political power. Victors may write history books, but they can't make people 100 years later read them, or believe them, or care. They can try, subject to all the limitations of rhetoric, but take a crowded field against inexpungable opponents.

The argument itself is at a minimum 2500 years old, hardly evidence that vagaries of political power determine anything in the matter. Nobody knows or cares the position of Hittites or Hurrians on the subject, and 2000 or 5000 years hence, nobody will care what the position of this or that potentate or state is on the matter today. Anyone trying to legislate "Protagoras shall be right", is plowing the sea. Power simply cannot grip the matters in play. It is far too ephemeral.

Then as to your contemporary example, um, you are decidedly misinformed about the opinions of Shiite theologians. If, as is entirely possible, Iraq is a Shia theocracy 50 years hence, they will teach that blowing up other Muslims with car bombs is murder and disunity, and damnable.

We can also predict with some confidence that there will be a strong correlation between opinions on morality in the future, and the state of society. There are regions in which morality is widely regarded as a crock, seen as manufactured by political power, where strongmen think they are above decency and can dictate what shall count as decent. And the entire wealth of the people in those regions consists of assorted manure piles, political unity cannot be found, and the life of man, nasty poor brutish and short.

So no, you can't just have any opinions about right that you like. Nature imposes consequences on certain opinions on the subject, just as it imposes certain consequences on those who disbelieve in gravity at the edge of cliffs. And one of the consequences it imposed on Nazis is, if you decide morality is a crock and take on everyone who thinks otherwise plus anyone else who gets in your way, you will be bombed into oblivion. It doesn't matter how many 8 year olds you try to indoctrinate for how long - a generation hence, few of them will believe a word of it and those that do will keep their heads down - or lamely troll for wannabes on internet forums.

It is useful in this context to understand the thought behind Nietzsche's conscious resurrection of Protagorean relativism. The idea is indeed to see morals as products, as engineered goods. He was marginally less crude than the Nazis and did not simply ascribe their production to raw political power, imagining a special role for "philosophers", by which he meant blind philologists in exile as the rulers of the world. Not exactly brimming with political power, he expected to make up for it with wit.

But there is a curious thing about wit - it can invite but not command. The verdict is always in the hands of the audience, however much the rhetor deceives himself about his own role. If the masses listening decide to interpret philosophic legislation as raw terror through mass murder, then who is a relativist to say they are wrong? If they decide that actually, equality is more attractive than listening to blind philologists, then said philologists are - I use the word carefully - *powerless* to stop them. Or if they simply decide to interpret rank order as worldly success, in ways that would make Calvinists blush, then what was written is erased and their crudities substituted.

What was the thought behind it? The atheistic hard right on the continent had come to disbelieve traditional religion, but they saw a civilizational role filled by it despite its (to them, axiomatic) error. Truth or error therefore seemed a matter of indifference - if a lie believed for 2000 years makes civilizations in its image, then the important bit is the civilization making, not that it is a lie. And anybody can lie, it is as easy as breathing, or at least as writing novels. The attitude toward traditional religion was one of *envy*. Why can't -my- tall tales shape civilization for 2000 years, since somebody else's obviously have?

But the opinion that indifferent lies imposed by whim or accident drive history, propogated as a doctrine, is open to all the gales of whim and accident, and can't drive anything anywhere. Something will happen but it does not care what.

The automatic result is drift, shallowness, and the worship of immediate "expediency". The only remaining content is purely negative - indifference to every moral claim purporting to have more enduring sources. Which predictably means strong opposition and nothing to offer (all have power to dispense worldly favor or worldly harm, it is not a policy). In practice, the cynic hits upon some shallow piece of current idle pseudoscience, trying to fool people today.

Compared to a standing policy of justice, regarded as an objective standard controlling and unifying a faction and determining its leadership and direction, it simply hasn't got a chance, in pure power-political terms. As a mere piece of political technology (let alone its vapid and self-refuting truth-claims), the thing is just hopelessly broken. Empty headed sophists did not rule the ancient world either, that was left to men who knew what they were doing. And even those did not last, when real moral principles took the field.

There is such a thing as philosophical gravitas, heavy weight status for principles and ideas. And Protagorean relativism just does not have it. Didn't in the 4th or 5th centuries BC, didn't in the 1870s or 1930s, and doesn't today.

As for the straw men about otherworldly demons, who told you that demons are otherworldly? Of course men came up with the description of them, thinking of men at their worst. Naturally men at their worst are accurately described as demonic - it is just taking back out of the concept, the original poetic thought that crafted it in the first place.

The pretence that there was nothing especially bad about the Nazis is entirely false. It is a mere matter of history and empiricism. You try to claim the contrary because you have something riding on human equality in some abstract sense, not because of any evidence of your senses or of the case.

There is a species of pacifist relativist - I don't know if it applies to you, you can include yourself out if you like - for whom the motive behind the attitude is clear. To seriously admit the existence of moral evil means acknowledging that there are some things that can only be fought, fought in the literal sense.

And pacifists dream of appeasing all conflicts somehow, or getting people to cease to care about them, because their goal is not justice or the prevention of evil, but merely the prevention of fighting. But there is no way to prevent fighting Nazis, except to offer them your throat, which they will happily rip out for you, even if you call them brothers of all men yada yada.

Relativism is attractive to this mentality, because they are looking for ways to blend away all differences. But some positions simply won't accept being blended. The pacifist relativist can't do anything about them, so he tries to avoid the subject, or pretends the problem arises from such positions being opposed by others (as Churchill experienced), or rests on the safety of their present non-existence.

Since, however, the last is entirely imaginary - cynics and their brutality are always with us, are as old as the jungle and require no theory - the relativist pacifist is simply screwed. The rest of us, not having cut off our own balls and having nothing at stake in the obvious failures of pacifism, can easily and happily deal with cynics in the natural way. We just feed them to worms and get back to business.

[ May 21, 2006, 04:28 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[JonS]

Timely

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

So, if people once thought there were 4 elements, or a fifth because heavenly bodies were not made of terrestrial matter, it was so.

Obviously, you are arguing that moral values are as concrete as are scientific or physical reality.

What is the source of this objective and eternal morality, this "standing policy of justice, regarded as an objective standard controlling and unifying a faction and determining its leadership and direction"?

[Yushal]

Two thousand years ago, it was perfectly legal and just for a Roman to expose an unwanted child on a hillside. Also, slavery was widespread throughout the Mediterranean, and we don't have evidence that anyone, not even slaves themselves, thought that this was in any way against the natural order of things, or that it was contrary to morality. In Carthage, the sacrifice of children seems to have been going on, in furtherance of the very moral goal of keeping peace with the gods. A few centuries later in Scandanavia, a Viking funeral might include the immolation of not only the deceased lord, but several of his still very alive servants and concubines. All of this was considered well and good.

Untrue. There is evidence aplenty that slaves felt themselves misused. Rome suffered greatly from slave revolts, as did Russia and I would hazard anywhere else that opportunity presented itself.

The Scandinavian rituals and their ilk cannot be ripped out of their cultural bounds and used by themselves to illustrate your point. I would say that its quite possible that those subjected to this practice felt it an honor or a duty, or at least feared the shame of resistance to it. And if any did not go willingly, then I say they were misused in an immoral manner, and I'll wager so would they.

And much like those imolated children, we dont know that it was considered "well and good". Perhaps they merely felt that it was a necessary evil, due to ignorance.

At any rate, this argument does not make sense. You say that because they felt it was moral, and we do not, that morality changes. That is not necessarily so.

Furthermore, if we DO grant that morality changes, it doesnt follow that humans are the ones changing it. Especially seeing as two out of three of your examples derive from supernatural influences and not human. Saying a people did something because of religious beliefs either allows the supernatural, in which case morality is taken from human hands, or points to the ignorance of humanity, in which case we have demonstrated that they were WRONG.

As I've tried to argue, often that change in morality is brought about by war. Two groups with opposing values fight it out, and then the victor writes the history books (as we all know) and defines the morality. Consider a modern example:

What will be taught to Iraqi school children in the year 2056? What will the truth of the events of 2006 be, as told in 2056? Well, obviously that depends on what happens between now and then. If Iraq in 2056 is a Shiite muslim theocracy, then the child's textbook will say that the insurgent fighters were heroic patriots who kept their country free from evil crusaders from the west. It will hold no law more just than Islamic law. The Islamists will be the moral actors. And that will be truth. On the other hand, if Iraq is a moderate secular republic, then the child's textbook will say that the Coalition armies delivered the Iraqi people into a new era of freedom, and that democracy and religious tolerance are good and noble things. The Coalition and the Iraqi democrats will be the moral actors. And that will be truth.

Surely nobody can disagree with this. Can you not see how truth, how morality is shaped?

I think you are confusing truth and morality. You seem to be using Truth as 'what happened'. I will concede that the victors write the history. But history is fact and as such is either true or false. If I steal a bicuit and no one knows, that doesn't mean I never stole a biscuit, no matter how many people I convince of it. And whatever I may happen to say about myself and that biscuit, it has no bearing on whether it is moral to steal biscuits or not.

It doesnt matter what Iraqi children are taught. If they are taught to blow up Americans, that doesn't make it right... Even if they are the last people on Earth.

Surely nobody can disagree with this. Can you not see how truth, how morality is shaped?

So yeah I disagree wholeheartedly and I dont think you have made any solid points, Im afraid.

Anyway, from this post I believe your position is boiling down to "Might makes Right'. May as well just state so outright.

Just remember to duck when Jason comes to visit, lol.

[Yushal]

Woah, your rebuttal is quite good, JasonC.

I feel like the dilettante that I am...

[Runyan99]

In furtherance of my education, I'd like to set up a hypothetical scenario.

Let's say a cruise ship with an international makeup of passengers sinks, and 100 survivors make their way to an uncharted island.

This new society of 100 people must decide how they are going to live on the island. They can shape any kind of rules they want.

Because entertainment on the island is sparse, they all agree to engage in wife-swapping as a normal part of their new island culture. There are no dissenters to this decision.

Are the islanders immoral for engaging in this practice? Isn't the morality of the island simply that which they all agree is 'okay'? Why not?

[JasonC]

If the principle is correct, it applies to hard cases not to the murkiest straw you care to think of. So the honest problem is 100 people are stranded on a desert island, and 99 agree to eat the 100th. Having considered the matter over dinner and written victors history, they are right, according to the principle. Next 98 agree to eat the 99th. Again, right. When there are 2, someone might detect a brief wavering, but actually they agree on the maxim but not on the application. Leaving one solitary relativist philosopher and a pile of bones. Deprived as he is of aid from others, worms soon second the motion. And they are right, too. Except "right" means nothing, it has been axiomatized out of existence. What they really are, is food for worms.

[Black Jack Pershing II]

If the principle is correct, it applies to hard cases not to the murkiest straw you care to think of. So the honest problem is 100 people are stranded on a desert island, and 99 agree to eat the 100th. Having considered the matter over dinner and written victors history, they are right, according to the principle. Next 98 agree to eat the 99th. Again, right. When there are 2, someone might detect a brief wavering, but actually they agree on the maxim but not on the application. Leaving one solitary relativist philosopher and a pile of bones. Deprived as he is of aid from others, worms soon second the motion. And they are right, too. Except "right" means nothing, it has been axiomatized out of existence. What they really are, is food for worms.

I would like so tune into Survivor if instead of just kicking the losers off the island, they ate them. That would be sweet.

[Runyan99]

Originally posted by JasonC:

If the principle is correct, it applies to hard cases not to the murkiest straw you care to think of. So the honest problem is 100 people are stranded on a desert island, and 99 agree to eat the 100th. Having considered the matter over dinner and written victors history, they are right, according to the principle. Next 98 agree to eat the 99th. Again, right. When there are 2, someone might detect a brief wavering, but actually they agree on the maxim but not on the application. Leaving one solitary relativist philosopher and a pile of bones. Deprived as he is of aid from others, worms soon second the motion. And they are right, too. Except "right" means nothing, it has been axiomatized out of existence. What they really are, is food for worms.

Can't you just say yes or no?

Importantly, can there be a 'morality of the island' at all, or are they obliged to adhere to a timeless morality which applies to all peoples at all times?

If there is a Universal Morality, again, where does it come from? Does it come down from God, or is it an inherent part of the universe, like oxygen and hydrogen? If it is inherent, does it apply to all animals, or to humans only? Why shouldn't a Universal Morality apply to lions? Would the Universal Morality apply to intelligent life forms on the planet Ipsilon 5? What if the life on Ipsilon 5 exchanged female sex partners, much like the inhabitants of my cruise ship island? Would the aliens of Ipsilon 5 be ignorant?

If morality does not change, as I have suggested, then clearly many practices of the ancients, like slavery, child exposure, gladatorial games, live sacrifice, and many other aspects of ancient culture were immoral, but carried out in ignorance of the exact contents of the Universal Morality. If that is so, how many of our current practices will the people of 4006 deem as ignorant? Or, are we living at the epogee of human enlightenment now, thereby accepting no immoral practices?

If this morality is as straighforward as you seem to believe it should, as you say, apply equally to every case, from virgin sacrifice to online poker, and I shouldn't have such a hard time figuring out what is moral, what is not, according to whom, and when.

Anyway, I guess you're saying that cannibalism and wife swapping are obviously immoral, and you need not deign to spell it out for me.

But seriosly, what about the online poker I mentioned? Here in America, the Department of Justice is working hard to clarify the laws, and some lawmakers are arguing that online gambling is immoral. Personally I don't think it is immoral for an adult to use his or her own money in this fasion, and thousands of Americans seem to agree with me, and there is a small movement to ensure that online poker is legalized in the United States, as it is in some other countries like the U.K.

What does Universal Morality have to say on the issue? I'd really like to be on the Just side of the issue, but it's terribly unclear to me.

[ May 22, 2006, 09:14 PM: Message edited by: Runyan99 ]

[Guest Mike]

Whether wife swapping and cannibalism are moral or not will never be known.

Because morality cannot be measured.

Which is not to say that it doesn't exist - something is either moral or not, and you have a 50% chance of correctly guessing which.

but you will never know whether you were right or not.

[Runyan99]

delete

[Cinnamon J. Scudworth]

Oh. I thought this was going to be a thread for SS bashing. Darnit.

[Runyan99]

Oh wait, delete this too.

[ May 22, 2006, 09:36 PM: Message edited by: Runyan99 ]

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Originally posted by JasonC:

URD - my reasons are entirely consistent. I give people exactly what they ask for. If they say morality is a crock, for them it is a crock and they have no appeal to it. If they say they recognize only the law of the jungle, tear them apart with red tooth and red claw. They ask, they receive, the worms rejoice.

If they say one thing and do another, say whatever you please and treat them as their actions dictate, ignoring their words. If they say morality is the highest principle and act like it, morality is the highest principle when dealing with them. It is a military alliance of the just against all others, not a suicide pact.

exactly, you don't seem to realize that the war has been over for 60 years. we are not fighting a war here, we are trying to discuss what actually took place back then. so please cut the dishonest misinformation nonsense.

[JasonC]

Nazis, and pacifists, are still with us. It is not ancient history. How little they can handle the former remains the most instructive point about the latter. And what to do about the former is only the single most pressing matter in present world politics. Defending Nazis is a popular enough sport at the present time. And wholly indefensible.

[JasonC]

SO - I know I am right that cannibalism is immoral. And anybody pretending there is any doubt on the matter is simply exploding the concept "knowledge". It is as clear as the sun at noonday. If a Humean skeptic wants, the sun at noon is marginally less clear than pure mathematics, but who cares?

[JasonC]

Runyan99 - you ducked your chance to defend cannibalism.

On ancient barbarisms, they did plenty of things they knew were cruel, not because they thought they were moral but because they were uninterested in being moral. Anybody who thinks they couldn't know better can read Epictetus. They knew better. They just slacked and indulged their bestial desires, not caring how horrible they were being to others thereby. Someone placating Moloch was not trying to serve benevolence, but to enlist malevolence, superstitiously. Which was criminally insane, no matter how many others believed the guff that justified it.

On the island, it is easy enough. First, they won't agree on such a proposition. The premise is false so anything follows. Second, if they did, they'd have fun for 3 days or so. But after 3 weeks things would look a bit different, and again after 3 months, and 3 years, and 30 years. Here is the likely progression.

Within 3 weeks, some couples uninterested in the goings on would have retired to more distant parts of the island to have each others company securely and to avoid that of the others. In the knot remaining, a few males would have assumed a dominant position in the pairing game. Resentments over initially free choices would have begun to grow. Humor, referral to prior statements, and peer pressure have been used, and are begining to be supplimented by exterior "linked" forms of pressure, to get what individuals want, even if the partner does not want it.

Within 3 months, violence over the matter is common, the first rapes have occurred, and the status differentiation within the knot that remained is sharp. There are leaders with harem rights and followers with limited ones, and others not so favored. No agreement was necessary to bring it about. It starts from preference and extends via intimidation. Men with more than they need trade it for other things they want, first of all leisure. Some islanders are more equal than others. The core has probably fissioned once already. And the first pregnancies have appeared.

Within 3 years, the first wave of kids have arrived. Being on a deserted island without modern medicine, a number of them have also died, as have a few of the women, in childbirth. The first murders have occurred, over status within pecking orders, over particular actions or violations or revenge for fistacuffs started over them. The splintered couples have increased. They have had their first conflicts with the "packs". Women do more than their share of the work in those, with the leaders shiftless and irresponsible toward them.

Now raise an entire generation under the two conditions and the contrast. In one subset of the population, permanent couples cooperative over the welfare of their offspring and build for a future beyond their own lives. In other subsets, there is much less of that, only mothers care for their offspring, and are basically discarded once past their bloom.

Free societies with large amounts of capital, a developed division of labor, a responsible state that can provide where a family fails to, might (at least temporarily) indulge such fancies. But in primitive conditions, stateless and from absolute poverty, it is societal suicide.

It is not entirely clear it isn't suicide even under the more favorable circumstances, though it is certainly slower. We are very far from such morals in the modern west, still mostly conventional. But already the population does not replace itself. Leaving aside deliberate avoidance which is certainly the norm, at least a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion, a quarter of those brought to term are illegitimate, half of those born to married parents will see them divorce before the child's 18th birthday. And every indicator of social disfunction (poverty crime etc) is multiplied 3 to 10 fold in those circumstances, than in the opposite "norm" case of legitimate child, intact family throughout childhood, etc.

Men can trying just making up their morals, but they can't make up their passions or their acts, or the general consequences that follow from them. Any given individual might well prefer a looser morality and navigate it readily enough without disfunction of any kind, enjoying its benefits and avoiding its hazards. Bully for them. But the society as a whole pays for everything it does, including large and completely unimaginary costs for widespread deviations from sexual propriety.

That those indulging are not the ones hurt (mostly their kids are, or the fact that they don't have any), makes it easy to push things in that direction for while. Especially if the circumstances are otherwise favorable (rich welfare state etc). But either not for long, or with mounting costs, which will prevent anything like consensus on it, 100 years later.

On imaginary aliens, the principle that free intelligences ought to be respected and that their happiness, intellectual life, etc are good in themselves, is universal. Clearly matters that turn on accomodating human nature and its specific instincts would vary. That such are to be accomodated pragmatically with a view to the previous principle, is invariant, but instincts etc are not.

As for matters of utter indifference like where people pay houses to hand them variance, people can legislate it for themselves as they see fit. It is possible to do so badly, or to act irresponsibly, and doing so will always have consequences, completely indifferent to what people wanted to be true about the matter beforehand. But equally, people may govern themselves well enough in such minor matters than nobody needs to care.

[Guest Mike]

Originally posted by JasonC:

SO - I know I am right that cannibalism is immoral.

Yes of course you do Jason