Multiculturalism is dead

[al Roumi]

WARNING! WALL OF TEXT

Your point is something that is irrelevant? I don't think you mean that. Talk of mutually agreed arbiters (sounds like a person) and giant rulers in the sky is what's beside the point. Their lack of existence is what's beside the point, because they are not required for us to be able to say that something is wrong. All we need is an understanding of language, reasoning ability, and human feelings.

There is cross cultural difference in reasoning. An absolute or impartial means of measurement is needed to ensure equal understanding across cultural divides. Otherwise, without a mutually understood and appreciated scale or set of rules, people just talk past each other (as I suspect we have been doing for a good while now).

1) someone betrays us out of meanness, we have a human feeling about it
2) We understand what the word "wrong" means, because we understand how words get meanings and know that the definitions can't be made up by someone with no regard to that
3) We see that given the meaning of wrong and how we felt earlier, that person was wrong and we would be too if we did it

Fill in all of the other things that all of the non-sociopathic people with intact reasoning skills and an understanding of language agree on...eg killing our children for fun.

btw, as a pre-posting this note, my sincere belief is that you are simply using language incorrectly, nothing about sociopathy or reasoning skills. You can see how our disagreement stems from you defining morality differently. Yours seems to be "things taught by a childs parents" while mine generally follows the above framework. I think even rules that are told to children they learn through that experience. Don't you? Don't you think you have the ability to break away from a cultural rule that offends your senses and reason?

Yes and no, you are talking about harm, which is not always a determinant of cultural value. There are people oppressed in any society, they feel harm every day, their culture still accepts it –even perpetuates it. The individual who even feels harmed will often also accept it because it is the norm in their culture.

The point was simply that some moral conclusions are based on facts about the world that even you would agree can be wrong...and that people will often stop believing their conclusion in that case. You were painting with too broad a brush.

I’m sorry to be the punctilious but you’re not setting a great example to follow. This “broad brush” is a continuation of your own strokes, I was following your own example –or more accurately, Louis’.

But some of them are wrong. You are claiming that people (including you) can't be wrong about these things. But all you offer as an argument is repetition of the claim that they disagree, in gussied up language. You equivocate a lot, for example:

"I'm sure cultures have existed where murdering children for fun is acceptable"

Disregarding the fact that this is a bizarre claim to start with...it would never have been acceptable. Accepted is the word you are looking for--it just states a fact about how people treated it.

Acceptable [behaviour] – to that culture. 50 points to Sasaki.

When you say “some of them are wrong”, you mean that YOU think some of them are wrong. That does not make them wrong in a universal sense, just because you say they are.

The word you used says that not only did they treat it that way, they were not wrong to do so.

EXACTLY. Human societies can and do include a massive range of values and behaviors which can, when contrasted, appear utterly bizarre to one another. Yet, each will be “right” or accepted by its own culture, while denigrated by the other. Who is to say which one is more right than the other? We in the modern West think slavery is wrong, yet it was an integral part of many societies and cultures for eons. We can call it wrong all we like, contemporaries would no doubt not share such views. Please don’t fall for the hubris that we are better than our predecessors, different –yes.

You say that moral facts are things that someone can "have", but would be more appropriate for beliefs. Facts are something you know. Two people can have contradictory beliefs but they can't know contradictory facts.

You talk about "different moral scales" which implies equal validity (like celsius vs fahrenheit or something) when in fact all we have again is disagreement.

Disagreement, based on contrary cultural beliefs is rarely zero sum. This is why I am banging on about different moral scales, as two such scales (as with Celsius and Fahrenheit) will each measure the same behavior (temperature) with different but confusable outcomes, i.e. 30 degrees –which as you’ll agree means something quite different in Celsius than in Fahrenheit. The difference of opinion is caused by how each “scale” or culture interprets the behavior –the analogy being the equations at the heart of each scale and the interplay of values held by given cultures.

You say we can't assume that "morality is uniform across cultures" but here you are using morality in the descriptive sense--all you are saying once again is that people disagree. This says nothing about morality in the prescriptive sense.

By the “prescriptive sense”, do you mean a culturally prescribed value (which would be, to all intents and purposes identical to a culturally derived value) or a culture prescribing a value on others?

You say it could be "ok to someone else...because their culture values it" which implies that it is alright for them to believe it, but all you say is that they do in fact believe it.

What I am saying is that they are entitled to believe whatever they do, that no other culture is independently certifiable as better or worse than another, and so no culture has the legitimacy (beyond that which it awards itself) to accuse another of wrong doing/immorality.

Oh and one whopper of a falsehood at the end where you claim the disagreement is based on cultural values. How on earth do you think our conception of morality has changed so drastically over time? It's because we base it on our feelings and reasoning.

So you are trying to say that morality is a personal thing, determined by an individual’s feeling and reasoning? I have to agree with this to an extent, but I think you are, and you show it elsewhere, unaware or blind to the effect of the wider culture of which you are a member. You would have to be a hermit for your morality and values to be purely defined by personal experience. Do you not think your culture, embodied by people around you, have shaped your own morals and values in any way?

Basically at this point I'm just going to say, believe whatever it is you want to believe but talk about it plain language. Say "culture A believes one thing and culture B believes another" ok? And then if you want to argue that neither can be right, do so, don't fiddle with the English language to avoid it. Morality is something about which there are no facts, this is a claim you are making. Widespread disagreement is not evidence that there are no facts. You have to explain why words don't mean what the fluent speakers of the language say they mean--how they have a secret philosophical true meaning. I hope at least that even though you still disagree you can get that you aren't really arguing, just stating basics with a heavy dose of implication.

At least then our posts will be shorter

I am opining that cultural perceptions create a multiplicity of views on a given subject, each derived by reasoning, but differentiated in their outcomes by the variables that are cultural values. Furthermore, I am saying that no single culture is more “correct” than another, as the measures of correctness are determined by that same culture’s values. Yes, this is self deterministic but unless you have recognition of shared values across cultures, there can be no mutually recognized comparison.

In the case of the holocaust, don't you think the victor has set the moral argument, and that had the victor been different, our views on the holocaust and Adolf might be rather different than despisal?
Speak for yourself

They would have to have a hardcore indoctrination program to achieve a significant amount of people around the world believing what they did wasn't wrong. You have a scary view of the power of culture over the human mind. Are my views about the hiroshima bombings set by the fact that the US was on the winning side? How about the bombings of dresden? Japanese internment camps? How does the world feel about that today?

I’m a little flabbergasted. Don’t you think openness, liberty and freedom for self analysis are cornerstones of western democratic culture? Might your world view and values not be different were you Iranian, Russian or Chinese?

Also, can’t you see how your own education from birth to adulthood is a (benign?) form of cultural indoctrination?