fucking prop 8

[awepittance]

though i do think that this will have extremely problematic effects on society in general, i just really don't care about society in general very much; the political is very unimportant to me. 005244.html[/url]

 

your opinion is interesting to me and your responses still seem to be a means to not fully elaborate on your own opinion, but i will read that article and check it out if it is as you say very close to your own opinion.

these 'problematic' effects you personally view as a possibility i would very much like to hear about in your own words

[playbynumbers]

i'm 10000% fine with calling them 'civil unions.'

 

why?

 

 

 

for the reasons given in the article, among other things. actually this is the usual conservative position

 

We cannot say that "gay marriages are wrong" because we cannot demonstrably prove that people

suffer from them.

 

we can't yet, sure. the point of the conservative argument against gay marriage is that when you tamper with basically the oldest human institution, it's going to have adverse effects. again, let me point everyone toward this article:

 

http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html

 

 

 

So I'm still waiting to hear why PBN thinks the author is correct even though he's had personal experience that argues otherwise.

 

everyone seems to have missed the point of what i was saying; the point is that despite the many happy civil partnerships between gay people, calling this 'marriage' and mainstreaming it is not necessarily a good idea

[playbynumbers]

Amazing because it's complete sentimental hyperbolic horse-shit. You really agree with his vision of masses of men heroically sacrificing their interests to the institution of marriage? Please. I don't suppose it's because they actually love their spouses. He sounds like a poncy twee flamer himself.

 

lol, yeah, this is somewhat true

 

 

 

 

It's interesting that you say you had two gay dads as last night I was reflecting on this thread and wondering to myself if your Christian leanings arise in whole or in part from being conflicted about your own sexuality. I'm guessing you'll say this is reducing your well-considered beliefs to psychobabble, but I think Awepittance and others are on to something here - would be interesting to hear how you think your upbringing shaped your beliefs, if at all.

 

When it comes to drug use you've been very open about how a nitrous overdose led to a big shift in your consciousness; I wonder if you could draw as clear a line between your own experiences and your beliefs about sexuality and society.

 

again, lol; my christian leanings arise from a series of near-death experiences and revelations and then working through religion after religion until finding what i certainly feel to be the true one. i couldn't be less conflicted about my sexuality; in fact, my only problem seems to be too much sexual passion directed at women, to where i've slipped into sin a couple times (twice in the last three years) with girls in the sense of pre-marital etc.

 

my upbringing --- and this is my point, again --- was completely and perfectly normal. gay people are just people. it had no effect on me either way, other than making me wonder why people are terrified of gays.

[playbynumbers]

how the positions of the majority of Californians are more sophisticated than simple bigotry.

 

for many, it isn't more sophisticated than that, but it doesn't really affect the argument

 

 

 

Also, when you write things like "anyone who isn't a white european male automatically gains some sort of magical insight into truth --- hence the contemporary obsession with, among other things, the gnostic gospels or native american spirituality" what I get from this is that you equate the opinions or insight that a group of people, other than white males with european ancestry, could bring to the American conversation as almost a passing fad, like pet rocks or fucking Pokemon.

 

they absolutely can; i mean, seriously, come on ... i was a buddhist for three years, i'm not exactly on board with the white european male thing. the point is that multicultural postmodern types DEVALUE everything in the west and OVERVALUE everything else

[playbynumbers]

it just seems like an attempt to pour convoluted academic rationalization on top of what is a base emotional feeling. which i find often members of Watmm do when they emotionally react to something, ala PBN's reaction to the movie Antichrist. The movie offended him on an emotional level and as a result tried to rationalize academically why. and when i or others accused him of being too sensitive we were met with 'you are a typical young person relativist' (in so many words).

 

I think it's dishonest to hide behind this critique of 'relativism' in order to not express your own personal feelings on why you don't give a shit about gay marriage or not

 

 

guys, here's the thing --- "i was once like you," as it were. everything that i'm critiquing, I ONCE HELD. if you'd asked me at age 17 if i was pro-gay marriage, i would have automatically said yes, since anything else would have "been" closed-minded and bigoted. i later would have come up with reasons to support the position, of course, but that would have been my starting point. i've "argued against/with" such views for years, and have thought it all through.

 

again, the idea seems to be; anyone who disagrees with gay marriage is retreating to some bigoted abstract ivory tower where various distinctions about effects on society are just some sort of weak attempt to shield my seething hatred for "teh gays", or whatever.

 

and sure, i'm annoyed both by von trier's film and by the rabid left-wing demonizing of reasonable people as bigots. both are symptoms of something far wider, and i'm not the first to point this out; nietzsche would probably be the first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am personally very interested in hearing PBN talk about his own experiences being raised by gay men and why he may have come to the conclusion gay marriage doesnt work or should not exist.

 

again; it worked just fine, and there's no REASON to call it marriage, but plenty of reasons not to.

 

also i mostly agree with everything grue said.

 

anyway, look, the internet makes me a little more snarky and annoyed than i am IRL; probably i wasn't saying things entirely in good faith, earlier. sorry about that

[awepittance]

it just seems like an attempt to pour convoluted academic rationalization on top of what is a base emotional feeling. which i find often members of Watmm do when they emotionally react to something, ala PBN's reaction to the movie Antichrist. The movie offended him on an emotional level and as a result tried to rationalize academically why. and when i or others accused him of being too sensitive we were met with 'you are a typical young person relativist' (in so many words).

 

I think it's dishonest to hide behind this critique of 'relativism' in order to not express your own personal feelings on why you don't give a shit about gay marriage or not

 

 

guys, here's the thing --- "i was once like you," as it were. everything that i'm critiquing, I ONCE HELD.

 

but can i just point something out, everything you're critiquing you are frankly projecting to be the truth about a particular group of people. It would be one thing if you had correctly 'nailed' us all but so far the development of this thread is far away from that. The level in which you've enjoyed putting people in categorical boxes in this thread is kind of off putting. You are being just as knee jerk reactionary as the 'bigot accusing liberals' you criticize t. Whatever critiques you have about 'relativists' or accusation throwing liberals thinking in in absolute terms seems to have infected whatever line of reasoning you have been trying to use to validate your own position.

 

 

the article you posted was an interesting read but i kind of laughed at this splitting hairs the author attempts to do at the end

 

o, a lot of readers are saying that I'm wrong about marriage always being between a man and a woman, citing polygamy. I have been told this is a "basic factual error."

 

No, it's not. Polygamous societies do not (at least in any society I have ever heard about) have group marriages. Men with more than one wife have multiple marriages with multiple women, not a single marriage with several wives. In fact, they generally take pains to separate the women, preferably in different houses. Whether or not you allow men to contract for more than one marriage (and for all sorts of reasons, this seems to me to be a bad idea unless you're in an era of permanent war), each marriage remains the union of a man and a woman.

 

this author is really good at 'mental gymnastics'

[Guest zaphod]

pbn's arguments in this thread don't seem very rational, to me.

[Guest catsonearth]

This isn't a reason to be a relativist, it is just a statement of the relativist's view. Why do you think right and wrong are constructs of human culture? Of course, the words "right" and "wrong," their meaning, and so on, are constructs of human culture, but the same is true of the word "round," of geometry as a science, and so on. Yet the facts about what is round, the properties of shapes, are not constructs of human culture. Something real in the world answers to our geometrical words and concepts; why not think that something real in the world answers to our moral concepts, and that some people might be correct (and others incorrect) about how?

 

all this talk about who is and isn't a relativist, what is or isn't relativistic thought is hyperbole. it's a verifiable fact that there are things in this universe that are absolute and there are things that are relative. things that are absolute remain the same whether we are around to observe them or not and things that are relative exist only in the heads of creatures that are perceiving them. colors, or the perception of color, is relative to the person/creature viewing it, but light and the refraction of light are absolute. your statement that "fire hydrants are red" is generally accepted, but it's not necessarily truth. we've come to define the appearance of certain light waves being reflected as "red" because more people than not perceive that reflection in the same way and as a society, for the sake of simplicity, have decided to label that refracted wavelength as "red". but of course, there are people and animals who see red as green or who don't perceive color at all and perceive red as grey. therefore, the refraction of light that creates the phenomenon we define as color is absolute, but the perception of color is relative.

 

That doesn't mean that in order for me to think that "Murder is wrong" is true, or in order for it to in fact be true, I am committed to being able to explain what, exactly, makes something wrong.

 

again, you can think whatever you want to think, but just because you think something and can find a large number of people that agree with you does not make something truth. you don't have to explain what makes the statement true, only that it remains constant whether or not you're there to judge it. if murder is only wrong if a human is around to judge it, then it is not an absolute truth.

 

the statement "murder is wrong" is again, generally accepted amongst humans, but it is not absolute. many people use natural law as a way to prove the innateness of morality, making the case that since murder is counter productive to the propagation of a species it can be viewed as "wrong", but that's not my belief. even natural law is a construct of the human mind's attempt to rationalize the universe based on the assumption that there is a natural order that exists, which so far has not been proven.

 

The insect case is difficult because insects don't have beliefs about what is right and wrong (I assume), but that's beside the point. All the example shows is that different cultures hold different beliefs about what is right and wrong. No one is disputing that claim. What it doesn't show is that both of these conflicting opinions are equally correct. From the fact that people disagree about some claim x it doesn't follow that there are no objective facts about whether x, or about which of the people is right, or that their opinions are equally correct; some cultures have thought that the earth is flat (and they had what they thought was compelling evidence for their view and against ours), but that doesn't mean that their opinion is as plausible as ours on that matter.

 

you're proving my point for me here. the judgment of right and wrong are beliefs - they vary amongst people, they vary amongst species, so by nature they are not absolute. you can't talk about right and wrong (morally speaking, not factually speaking) in an objective manner because they don't exist without the human mind. as i said before, murder may be labeled counter-productive, but that judgment has no moral value assigned to it because there are plenty of circumstances where being counter-productive is a positive influence as opposed to the commonly perceived negative, so to define counter-productive as "wrong" is applying an interpretive belief to it.

 

to bring this discussion full circle, it's silly to come into this thread and rag on people for speaking in relativistic terms about a subject that is COMPLETELY RELATIVE. people are talking about two things in this thread - morality and law. some are talking about moral right and wrong and some are talking about legal right and wrong. morality is 100% relative and anyone who wants to make the claim that morality is absolute is free to attempt to do so, but i can tell you right now that you will fail because no matter what you offer up as proof that proof is going to be relative to something else. law is not quite as relative based on the fact that (most of us) live in the same country and are held to the same legal standards (in essence, at least), so we have a somewhat absolute foundation to build off of (ie, the written laws). but still, there is a lot of interpretation going on because of the vagueness of areas of that foundation. these are both, by nature, relativist discussions.

 

so while PBN (if it really is him...what he's been saying in this thread doesn't really jive with other debates i've had with him in the past) might be right in a general sense saying that "many young whippersnappers today default to a relativist mentality without ever questioning it", implying that people are somehow less justified in their beliefs because they hold relativist sentiments is just insulting and egotistical because it's holding them to an arbitrary standard. it basically amounts to saying "well, obviously since you don't believe the same thing i believe, you must not be smart enough to come to the same conclusion as me". yes, there are tons of people, young and old, that hold beliefs that they've never bothered questioning, but assuming that's the case here just because someone holds a different view than you is egotistical.

[awepittance]

'you must think ______ because you are a _______ '

[Guest catsonearth]

'you must think ______ because you are a _______ '

 

seriously. i remember having very similar debates with rook and PBN at some point and PBN's statements in this thread are sounding more and more like rook's twisted rationalization. and in the end, all rook could really do to counter anything i said was the same thing PBN is doing here - saying that he's essentially elevated to a higher level of understanding that the rest of us simply aren't able to comprehend yet. bullshit, in other words. anybody whose been on this board for more than a week has probably figured out that i think about things a lot - possibly to a fault, and can back up most of what i say with concrete examples, so to have someone dismiss it as juvenile is incredibly insulting, especially if they can't be bothered to even try to disprove what i'm saying.

 

[playbynumbers]

but can i just point something out, everything you're critiquing you are frankly projecting to be the truth about a particular group of people. It would be one thing if you had correctly 'nailed' us all but so far the development of this thread is far away from that. The level in which you've enjoyed putting people in categorical boxes in this thread is kind of off putting. You are being just as knee jerk reactionary as the 'bigot accusing liberals' you criticize t. Whatever critiques you have about 'relativists' or accusation throwing liberals thinking in in absolute terms seems to have infected whatever line of reasoning you have been trying to use to validate your own position.

 

i agree, it's been a little unfair and offputting; basically i'm just doing a shorthand instead of bothering to go through all of the arguments, frankly. and i'm certainly not saying this is the case with everyone on watmm, or certainly not with you, e.g. i'm actually being as knee-jerk-ish, though i agree that it comes across that way; this is actually the result of five years of reading posts on watmm, so, it's very slowly built up and is quite reasoned.

 

there are two entirely different things that i'm saying; (1) gay marriage may not be a good idea, because tinkering with key foundational things in society tends to go badly (see article).

 

then, after people began dismissing what i had linked with the usual tired arguments, and not actually addressing anything of substance, i became somewhat annoyed and bored and began talking about: (2) the rabid left-wing groupthink of the under-35 age cohort, which is often expressed on watmm, though not always.

 

 

 

 

 

 

the article you posted was an interesting read but i kind of laughed at this splitting hairs the author attempts to do at the end

 

o, a lot of readers are saying that I'm wrong about marriage always being between a man and a woman, citing polygamy. I have been told this is a "basic factual error."

 

No, it's not. Polygamous societies do not (at least in any society I have ever heard about) have group marriages. Men with more than one wife have multiple marriages with multiple women, not a single marriage with several wives. In fact, they generally take pains to separate the women, preferably in different houses. Whether or not you allow men to contract for more than one marriage (and for all sorts of reasons, this seems to me to be a bad idea unless you're in an era of permanent war), each marriage remains the union of a man and a woman.

 

this author is really good at 'mental gymnastics'

 

yet, she actually has a point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

pbn's arguments in this thread don't seem very rational, to me.

 

i haven't made any arguments yet, really; mostly i've pointed to two articles that make the relevant arguments well enough that i feel, why bother adding my own.

[playbynumbers]

and in the end, all rook could really do to counter anything i said was the same thing PBN is doing here - saying that he's essentially elevated to a higher level of understanding that the rest of us simply aren't able to comprehend yet. bullshit, in other words.

 

honestly what i'm thinking of is the college students that i've taught, in philosophy, and seeing the same ridiculous relativism and lazy thinking on places like watmm. so, sure, if you want to say that i'm saying i've been "elevated to a higher level of understanding," then, guilty as charged; i've spent the last 10 years doing basically nothing but think about things like this.

 

but again, this isn't an attack on YOU, or indeed on most of the people posting in this thread. what i'm thinking of is a sort of combination of (1) the general drift of most posts i see on watmm; (2) college freshmen that i've taught; (3) people on sites like digg, etc.; (4) high school and college friends of mine.

[playbynumbers]

yes, there are tons of people, young and old, that hold beliefs that they've never bothered questioning, but assuming that's the case here just because someone holds a different view than you is egotistical.

 

it's not an assumption because it is in fact very often the case; what can i say? in my experience, with people that i've talked to IRL and online, it really does seem to just be the unthinking unquestioning atmosphere of youth culture --- anything that can be construed as pro-embattled-minority is automatically unquestionably good, and 'truth' is 'whatever makes me feel good.' there is no possible ground on which to argue against gay marriage because the only value worth considering in the debate is "a small but vocal segment of the gay population want to do something that doesn't directly physically harm another person at this precise moment in time" and therefore, "HOW COULD ANYONE POSSIBLY BE AGAINST IT ... YOU'RE A BIGOT OMG". i don't doubt that some people have really thought through the principles and decided that they're pro-gay marriage, but i guess my point is that the principles are the problem, whether they're consciously or unconsciously held (and it's often unconscious, frankly)

[Guest catsonearth]

and in the end, all rook could really do to counter anything i said was the same thing PBN is doing here - saying that he's essentially elevated to a higher level of understanding that the rest of us simply aren't able to comprehend yet. bullshit, in other words.

 

honestly what i'm thinking of is the college students that i've taught, in philosophy, and seeing the same ridiculous relativism and lazy thinking on places like watmm. so, sure, if you want to say that i'm saying i've been "elevated to a higher level of understanding," then, guilty as charged; i've spent the last 10 years doing basically nothing but think about things like this.

 

but again, this isn't an attack on YOU, or indeed on most of the people posting in this thread. what i'm thinking of is a sort of combination of (1) the general drift of most posts i see on watmm; (2) college freshmen that i've taught; (3) people on sites like digg, etc.; (4) high school and college friends of mine.

 

i understand where you're coming from and i agree that the case of people simply using "well...it depends" as an argument against anything is pretty annoying to anyone who thinks about things for more than the second they're put on the spot for an opinion, but to dismiss relativism as a whole just because a segment of people fall back on a half-witted variation of it is being dogmatic because relativism is provable...moreso than not. the only way to counter relativistic opinions is with rhetoric and assumptions. i've yet to hear anyone make a case for moral absolutism that didn't rely on the person first assuming that some facet of their argument is true without sufficient proof.

 

but relativism is not synonymous with nihilism. you can still see the value in subscribing to cultural norms while understanding that they are based purely on constructs of the human mind. just because subscribing to certain ethics makes a lot of people's lives easier and less dangerous, doesn't mean that those ethics come from anything but our human desire to create cultures of comfort in which we rely on the actions of countless others to ease the functioning of our own existence.

[Guest zaphod]

i actually meant posts, not arguments.

 

i had a much longer point i was going to make sort of defending pbn but attacking him as well, but i've forgotten what it was. as far as prop 8 is concerned: i don't really care. i could pretend to, to satisfy some basic moral requirements for liberals under the age of 30, but i'm gonna go play in the rain instead.

[Guest grue]

This isn't a reason to be a relativist, it is just a statement of the relativist's view. Why do you think right and wrong are constructs of human culture? Of course, the words "right" and "wrong," their meaning, and so on, are constructs of human culture, but the same is true of the word "round," of geometry as a science, and so on. Yet the facts about what is round, the properties of shapes, are not constructs of human culture. Something real in the world answers to our geometrical words and concepts; why not think that something real in the world answers to our moral concepts, and that some people might be correct (and others incorrect) about how?

 

all this talk about who is and isn't a relativist, what is or isn't relativistic thought is hyperbole. it's a verifiable fact that there are things in this universe that are absolute and there are things that are relative. things that are absolute remain the same whether we are around to observe them or not and things that are relative exist only in the heads of creatures that are perceiving them. colors, or the perception of color, is relative to the person/creature viewing it, but light and the refraction of light are absolute. your statement that "fire hydrants are red" is generally accepted, but it's not necessarily truth. we've come to define the appearance of certain light waves being reflected as "red" because more people than not perceive that reflection in the same way and as a society, for the sake of simplicity, have decided to label that refracted wavelength as "red". but of course, there are people and animals who see red as green or who don't perceive color at all and perceive red as grey. therefore, the refraction of light that creates the phenomenon we define as color is absolute, but the perception of color is relative.

 

That doesn't mean that in order for me to think that "Murder is wrong" is true, or in order for it to in fact be true, I am committed to being able to explain what, exactly, makes something wrong.

 

again, you can think whatever you want to think, but just because you think something and can find a large number of people that agree with you does not make something truth. you don't have to explain what makes the statement true, only that it remains constant whether or not you're there to judge it. if murder is only wrong if a human is around to judge it, then it is not an absolute truth.

 

the statement "murder is wrong" is again, generally accepted amongst humans, but it is not absolute. many people use natural law as a way to prove the innateness of morality, making the case that since murder is counter productive to the propagation of a species it can be viewed as "wrong", but that's not my belief. even natural law is a construct of the human mind's attempt to rationalize the universe based on the assumption that there is a natural order that exists, which so far has not been proven.

 

The insect case is difficult because insects don't have beliefs about what is right and wrong (I assume), but that's beside the point. All the example shows is that different cultures hold different beliefs about what is right and wrong. No one is disputing that claim. What it doesn't show is that both of these conflicting opinions are equally correct. From the fact that people disagree about some claim x it doesn't follow that there are no objective facts about whether x, or about which of the people is right, or that their opinions are equally correct; some cultures have thought that the earth is flat (and they had what they thought was compelling evidence for their view and against ours), but that doesn't mean that their opinion is as plausible as ours on that matter.

 

you're proving my point for me here. the judgment of right and wrong are beliefs - they vary amongst people, they vary amongst species, so by nature they are not absolute. you can't talk about right and wrong (morally speaking, not factually speaking) in an objective manner because they don't exist without the human mind. as i said before, murder may be labeled counter-productive, but that judgment has no moral value assigned to it because there are plenty of circumstances where being counter-productive is a positive influence as opposed to the commonly perceived negative, so to define counter-productive as "wrong" is applying an interpretive belief to it.

 

to bring this discussion full circle, it's silly to come into this thread and rag on people for speaking in relativistic terms about a subject that is COMPLETELY RELATIVE. people are talking about two things in this thread - morality and law. some are talking about moral right and wrong and some are talking about legal right and wrong. morality is 100% relative and anyone who wants to make the claim that morality is absolute is free to attempt to do so, but i can tell you right now that you will fail because no matter what you offer up as proof that proof is going to be relative to something else. law is not quite as relative based on the fact that (most of us) live in the same country and are held to the same legal standards (in essence, at least), so we have a somewhat absolute foundation to build off of (ie, the written laws). but still, there is a lot of interpretation going on because of the vagueness of areas of that foundation. these are both, by nature, relativist discussions.

 

so while PBN (if it really is him...what he's been saying in this thread doesn't really jive with other debates i've had with him in the past) might be right in a general sense saying that "many young whippersnappers today default to a relativist mentality without ever questioning it", implying that people are somehow less justified in their beliefs because they hold relativist sentiments is just insulting and egotistical because it's holding them to an arbitrary standard. it basically amounts to saying "well, obviously since you don't believe the same thing i believe, you must not be smart enough to come to the same conclusion as me". yes, there are tons of people, young and old, that hold beliefs that they've never bothered questioning, but assuming that's the case here just because someone holds a different view than you is egotistical.

 

I probably shouldn’t get into this, since I don’t want to prevent people from discussing prop 8, but I just want to say a few things.

 

What PBN (if he doesn’t mind me speaking for him) and I are denying is precisely what you’re saying, namely that "you can't talk about right and wrong (morally speaking, not factually speaking) in an objective manner because they don't exist without the human mind." What independent reason is there to accept this claim? The point is that people assume it as a starting point in their reasoning, but it’s not clear why they do so or whether they should.

 

Again, I want to point out that one can reject relativism and yet agree that people should be entitled to hold whatever opinion they want and that, as a matter of fact, there are many different views about what right and wrong consist in. So I agree with you that "the judgment of right and wrong are beliefs - they vary amongst people, they vary amongst species" but it doesn’t follow from this that "they are not absolute," if by that you mean that whether those beliefs are true or false is not objective. Judgments about the shape of the earth are beliefs, they vary amongst people, but it doesn’t follow that whether the earth is round is not objective.

 

I also agree with you that "if murder is only wrong if a human is around to judge it, then it is not an absolute truth." What I don’t see is why we should think that murder wouldn’t be wrong if there were no humans around to judge it. Of course, the sentence "Murder is wrong," and the belief that murder is wrong, would not exist without people, but the act might still be wrong without people. Similarly, the sentence "snow is white," and the belief that snow is white, would not exist without people, but the stuff, snow, would still be white (or have whatever physical property underlies our perception of color), regardless of whether people existed. What you are assuming, and what I’m questioning, is that rightness and wrongness are not real properties of things in the world, that the universe is intrinsically void of value. And let me just note that although denying that claim can seem to commit one to certain religious notions, it doesn’t need to; as just one example, Kant thought that we could derive objective values from reason or logic alone (and although people do use reason, they don't create it, and whether principles of logic are true or truth-preserving doesn’t depend on the existence or beliefs of human beings).

 

The details of the fire hydrant example are irrelevant; as I said before, if you think colors are projected, then pick a different example (“electrons are negatively charged”) – the point was just that I can express a truth by using a sentence without being able to fully explain the meaning of every term in that sentence or without being able to verify it (there is a difference, for instance, between a sentence’s being true and my being able to know that the sentence is true). I think we agree about that though.

 

Also, just to clarify, my motivations for getting involved in this discussion concerning relativism are largely the same as PBN’s; in teaching and just generally interacting with students in universities and high-schools, one comes across this kind of relativism all over the place and one can get frustrated with it. Sorry to drag it onto watmm.

 

[Guest catsonearth]

yes, there are tons of people, young and old, that hold beliefs that they've never bothered questioning, but assuming that's the case here just because someone holds a different view than you is egotistical.

 

it's not an assumption because it is in fact very often the case; what can i say? in my experience, with people that i've talked to IRL and online, it really does seem to just be the unthinking unquestioning atmosphere of youth culture --- anything that can be construed as pro-embattled-minority is automatically unquestionably good, and 'truth' is 'whatever makes me feel good.' there is no possible ground on which to argue against gay marriage because the only value worth considering in the debate is "a small but vocal segment of the gay population want to do something that doesn't directly physically harm another person at this precise moment in time" and therefore, "HOW COULD ANYONE POSSIBLY BE AGAINST IT ... YOU'RE A BIGOT OMG". i don't doubt that some people have really thought through the principles and decided that they're pro-gay marriage, but i guess my point is that the principles are the problem, whether they're consciously or unconsciously held (and it's often unconscious, frankly)

 

but again, there's a difference in what we're talking about here. legally there is no reason to outlaw same sex marriages. you may have moral reasons (like believing it will somehow degrade society and whatnot), but since morality is so relative you can't apply that to the legality otherwise anyone who thinks interracial marriage degrades the purity of races would be able to justify inflicting discrimination on others because of that opinion. we simply have to base it on whether or not there's justification for denying someone the access to the same rights as others if they are offering the same contribution to society as others and in this case, the unfounded belief that the moral fabric of society will be destroyed (not taking into account whether or not the moral fabric of this society needs to be destroyed or not) by same sex marriages is not justification for such discrimination.

[playbynumbers]

i actually meant posts, not arguments.

 

i had a much longer point i was going to make sort of defending pbn but attacking him as well, but i've forgotten what it was.

 

yeah, i think i could be both attacked and defended about equally well in terms of my posting in this thread, lol

[playbynumbers]

he only way to counter relativistic opinions is with rhetoric and assumptions. i've yet to hear anyone make a case for moral absolutism that didn't rely on the person first assuming that some facet of their argument is true without sufficient proof.

 

as i said in sort of a cryptic way in response to chen; yes, this is the hilarious catch-22 of postmodernism, that you have to use rhetoric to escape rhetoric. but you really can escape rhetoric, is my point. (yet ... that's just 'my opinion,' or whatever.) aristotle put it best: "it is difficult to know whether or not we know." as someone who has converted religions twice, believe me, i'm very well aware of this; but certain things can be argued with almost-near certainty, and i think the gay marriage debate falls SLIGHTLY closer to the 'certainty' side than the 'relativism' side.

 

 

 

 

but relativism is not synonymous with nihilism.

 

quite right; but i think that relativism ineluctably leads to (and is indeed grounded in) nihilism. as nietzsche very correctly points out.

 

 

 

you can still see the value in subscribing to cultural norms while understanding that they are based purely on constructs of the human mind. just because subscribing to certain ethics makes a lot of people's lives easier and less dangerous, doesn't mean that those ethics come from anything but our human desire to create cultures of comfort in which we rely on the actions of countless others to ease the functioning of our own existence.

 

you're begging the question that they're all just constructs of the mind. culture/tradition is malleable to a slight extent, sure; but there's way too much uniformity to just dismiss tradition outright. there seem to be basic things that are just foundational to culture.

 

there has been interracial marrying for thousands of years; insitutionalized gay marriage is utterly and completely novel.

 

 

 

 

 

but again, there's a difference in what we're talking about here. legally there is no reason to outlaw same sex marriages. you may have moral reasons (like believing it will somehow degrade society and whatnot), but since morality is so relative you can't apply that to the legality otherwise anyone who thinks interracial marriage degrades the purity of races would be able to justify inflicting discrimination on others because of that opinion. we simply have to base it on whether or not there's justification for denying someone the access to the same rights as others if they are offering the same contribution to society as others and in this case, the unfounded belief that the moral fabric of society will be destroyed (not taking into account whether or not the moral fabric of this society needs to be destroyed or not) by same sex marriages is not justification for such discrimination.

 

 

this is a very intelligent and articulate statement of the liberal position; the best argument on this front is probably given by andrew sullivan (the author/blogger), and he argues it so forcefully that he sometimes gives me pause. again, let me say; i don't really care either way about the law being passed --- and i'm 100% certain that all 50 states will recognize gay marriage in my lifetime, so it doesn't really matter --- but i would just like to register some concern and some caution about what it will do to society, about what it implies re: traditional institutions, and so on and so forth. (again; there has been interracial marrying for thousands of years; insitutionalized gay marriage is utterly and completely novel.)

 

and then also, frankly, a lot of the people supporting gay marriage (and opposing it!) are doing so in a very annoyingly knee-jerk sanctimonious way.

 

(also, again, i basically agree with grue.)

[Guest catsonearth]

What PBN (if he doesn’t mind me speaking for him) and I are denying is precisely what you’re saying, namely that "you can't talk about right and wrong (morally speaking, not factually speaking) in an objective manner because they don't exist without the human mind." What independent reason is there to accept this claim? The point is that people assume it as a starting point in their reasoning, but it’s not clear why they do so or whether they should.

 

personally, the reason i accept the claim is because i can observe instances that prove to me that value is projected by humans. we have a set of notions that positive = good and negative = bad which form the basis of most of what we believe morally. as i said before, murder is counter-productive, so it's considered bad. our way of rationalizing the universe is based on our own life cycle, we are born and our lives progress in a straight line until we die naturally - anything that cuts that line short falls in the negative category and anything that extends that line falls into positive - we assume that we are all meant to live and die naturally, so we've projected this same concept onto everything around us. destruction is wrong, murder is wrong, but if you remove humanity from the equation you see that many of the things we identify as negative are nothing more than changes, neither good nor bad, and that many of the things we define as positive have negative effects for other creatures/objects/whatever long after we've already left this reality. let's take the example of two galaxies colliding in space. it's an incredibly destructive event, it smashes planets apart and is an all around chaotic occurrence - in a way, we can equate this to our own perception of murder. but is it wrong? how can anyone posit that a change is a positive change or a negative change? it's like saying that wind is morally wrong because it causes erosion in rocks.

 

just because most of the world have accepted the concept that everyone has an equal right to live without having that opportunity cut short by someone else, doesn't mean that it's innate in the universe. it's something we all concede so that we are able to live and function in close proximity, but it's created by us for the benefit of us. the universe is generally uneffected either way.

[Root5]

I probably shouldn’t get into this, since I don’t want to prevent people from discussing prop 8, but I just want to say a few things.

 

What PBN (if he doesn’t mind me speaking for him) and I are denying is precisely what you’re saying, namely that "you can't talk about right and wrong (morally speaking, not factually speaking) in an objective manner because they don't exist without the human mind." What independent reason is there to accept this claim? The point is that people assume it as a starting point in their reasoning, but it’s not clear why they do so or whether they should.

 

Again, I want to point out that one can reject relativism and yet agree that people should be entitled to hold whatever opinion they want and that, as a matter of fact, there are many different views about what right and wrong consist in. So I agree with you that "the judgment of right and wrong are beliefs - they vary amongst people, they vary amongst species" but it doesn’t follow from this that "they are not absolute," if by that you mean that whether those beliefs are true or false is not objective. Judgments about the shape of the earth are beliefs, they vary amongst people, but it doesn’t follow that whether the earth is round is not objective.

 

I also agree with you that "if murder is only wrong if a human is around to judge it, then it is not an absolute truth." What I don’t see is why we should think that murder wouldn’t be wrong if there were no humans around to judge it. Of course, the sentence "Murder is wrong," and the belief that murder is wrong, would not exist without people, but the act might still be wrong without people. Similarly, the sentence "snow is white," and the belief that snow is white, would not exist without people, but the stuff, snow, would still be white (or have whatever physical property underlies our perception of color), regardless of whether people existed. What you are assuming, and what I’m questioning, is that rightness and wrongness are not real properties of things in the world, that the universe is intrinsically void of value. And let me just note that although denying that claim can seem to commit one to certain religious notions, it doesn’t need to; as just one example, Kant thought that we could derive objective values from reason or logic alone (and although people do use reason, they don't create it, and whether principles of logic are true or truth-preserving doesn’t depend on the existence or beliefs of human beings).

 

The details of the fire hydrant example are irrelevant; as I said before, if you think colors are projected, then pick a different example (“electrons are negatively charged”) – the point was just that I can express a truth by using a sentence without being able to fully explain the meaning of every term in that sentence or without being able to verify it (there is a difference, for instance, between a sentence’s being true and my being able to know that the sentence is true). I think we agree about that though.

 

Also, just to clarify, my motivations for getting involved in this discussion concerning relativism are largely the same as PBN’s; in teaching and just generally interacting with students in universities and high-schools, one comes across this kind of relativism all over the place and one can get frustrated with it. Sorry to drag it onto watmm.

 

I see where you are coming from more now, and the defenses of relativism that you say your reacting against do seem pretty feeble. I can see why you would get frustrated at that. I'm sort of in a similar position, I'm constantly surrounded by naive absolutists, who defend objective ethics with arguments like "if morality is subjective then everything in the world is meaningless" and "moral relativists are defending the nazis". So it goes both ways. There are stupid people on both sides.

 

I've already given my reasons for thinking moral judgments cannot be true or false. I can understand what it would take to make a statement like "the earth revolves around the sun" true or false. It doesn't matter whether I can verify it or not, I'm not a verificationist. You can't verify whether you ate cereal for breakfast this morning, but that doesn't mean it isn't true or false. What matters to me is that I can understand what it would take to make something true or false, or that I can have some idea of how to even go about figuring out how to understand that. I have no idea what it would take to make a statement like "killing people is wrong" true or false, and I have no idea how anyone would go about figuring that out. Of course, that doesn't mean it ain't so. I havn't proved anything. But this is why I find it so hard to even consider.

 

The statement "that fire-hydrant is red" is ambiguous, because, as I'm sure everyone knows, there's been a lot of debate about what colour is. (Is the colour out there in the world, or is it your perception of the colour, yada yada yada) But you get what I'm saying here.

 

[playbynumbers]

also, please address this (edit: delicious) argument ---

 

http://xs539.xs.to/xs539/09224/chickendance2289.gif

 

http://xs539.xs.to/xs539/09224/kfc3595.gif

[kcinsu]

I don't know guys, I think it's all pretty relative.

[lumpenprol]

so I don't remember which thread I asked it in, but did you ever say whether all this pissiness was due to a breakup with your gf?

[Guest grue]

also, please address this (edit: delicious) argument ---

 

http://xs539.xs.to/xs539/09224/chickendance2289.gif

 

http://xs539.xs.to/xs539/09224/kfc3595.gif

 

lol I was listening to a Skream track when I opened the second and it synced pretty well.