How about exiting a black hole intact & alive. Unless of course her name is 'Jezebel' or 'sum ting like dat'.
Name a single universally prohibited act
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You're wrong on just about every count. Morality is absolutely subjective, as evidenced by the fact that we cannot come up with one single act that is universally prohibited, or even looked down upon. If it is the man's legal right to have sex with his new wife whether she likes it or not, no matter how hard she fought it would not be considered immoral. Quite the opposite, actually.
That's true. But consider the innocents that die. Was it morally acceptable to kill them, who did nothing to deserve their deaths? Was ruining their lives worth saving people half a world away? I'm just saying, there are like a dozen angles you could take to any moral question, and you could come out with a dozen different answers.
Again, it may be morally right to you, but there would be a bunch of people who disagree. That terrorist, for example, might believe he is doing what he has to do in order to change the ways of an evil regime. Perhaps if you swung the equation around, isn't he morally right? Think about it. He's willing to sacrifice his own life for the betterment of the world, and to save the lives of thousands of innocents in his own country.
I'm glad my parents lied to me about santa clause and the tooth fairy when I was 3. And it's generally accepted to lie to kids about those things.
Politicians (all politicians) lie all the time. We still keep voting for them.
What else have they lied to you about that they've never told you? Perhaps that you were adopted? If they lied to you about one thing, then you should be aware that they lied to you about other things.
Baron Max
Raping your granddad.
Even if it is true that no single act is universally outlawed, it doesn't follow that therefore morality is "absolutely subjective". It may well be that some acts are universally "looked down upon", yet not universally prohibited by law.
The problem is that laws can never take all specific circumstances into account. Therefore, there is no law that says, specifically "Do not murder your brother with an axe, chop him into small pieces and feed him to the dog." But I'm fairly sure that this act would be "looked down upon" in most circumstances. On the other hand, even this description may not be specific enough to satisfy swarm's universality argument, because I can think of exceptions, such as "Do not murder your brother with an axe, chop him into small pieces and feed him to the dog, except where he has previously murdered your entire family in a mad rage and is threatening you with the next immediate death and you're far from law-enforcement authorities and your dog is starving."
Requiring a universal prohibition is far too strict a requirement, and obviously not one that can establish that morals are all relative.
Simon Anders
Valued Senior Member
Raping the leaders.
actually SA hit on the right answer. Every sociaty i know of prohibits the killing of there own leaders.
Now there are two ways to look at this, one is the damage assinating a leader does and the pain it causes when the leader is doing what they were elected to do. The other is its there to make sure the dictators can keep the plebs in line.
Either way as far as i know its universally prohibated, wether its moral or not is another debate
Now there are two ways to look at this, one is the damage assinating a leader does and the pain it causes when the leader is doing what they were elected to do. The other is its there to make sure the dictators can keep the plebs in line.
Either way as far as i know its universally prohibated, wether its moral or not is another debate
Just like the sourcecode in your computer which when compiled generates your operating system is SUBJECTIVE, but programs which result from those compiled sourcecodes are OBJECTIVE. If you don't understand this then you are one of those people who are not capable of abstract reasoning. Reason is how we know right from wrong, based on the outcomes, and that is OBJECTIVE. It's the basis for scientific method that we use to go into space and reach the moon. The math solutions we found which allowed us to reach the moon are OBJECTIVE because we all agree that the math worked and allowed us to reach the moon, but yes we could have all used different symbols to represent the formulas and equations, the SYNTAX is the only thing which is SUBJECTIVE. Like I said, the outcomes are OBJECTIVE and thats not up for debate.
FACT: Survival of the human species is morally justified based on reason. Self preservation is at the basis of reasonable behavior. It's OBJECTIVE, because species who disagree will commit suicide and their genetic code will go extinct.
If the OUTCOME/RESULT of these actions improved the condition of your life, the quality of your life, the length of your life, the security of your life, and all the lives of the people you PERSONALLY care about, then it's absolutely right. It's honorable and reasonable to protect the people you love at the cost of people you don't know. Once again its self preservation.
In the situation of a war, it's morally right to protect and preserve innocent life. However the terrorists aren't innocent, and neither are the soldiers on our side fighting them, they are combatants fighting for their family. Like I said, right and wrong is ultimately OBJECTIVE by design based on the RESULTS or CONSEQUENCES of the actions.There are rules of war because even warriors have an OBJECTIVE concept of right and wrong. We have international law, because GENOCIDE is OBJECTIVELY wrong. The reason we can say it's OBJECTIVELY wrong is because it serves no purpose in a military context.
A. Genocide does not win wars, it actually can cause you to lose the war because you lose focus on the goals of war (securing natural resources).
B. Raping innocent women and children does NOT help win the war, it helps make the enemy hate our guts, which makes it harder to win the war.
Objective morality is based on the results of an action. Just because you and others aren't capable of doing the reasoning necessary to see and understand objective reality, the laws of nature, and realism, it does not mean that objective reality does not exist. The laws of nature are like the laws of physics, clearly they exist and are proven to exist through scientific method and observation, you what goes up must come down, and even if you don't understand the math of why it must come down, it doesn't change the fact that it will eventually come down. Objective morality is the math which not only tells us that it will come down, but how it will come down.
It has nothing to do with how you feel. Therefore it's not subjective. Your emotions are subjective, and your emotions cannot tell you the right answer to moral problems.
The basis of objective morality is the harm principle. The harm principle basically says, as long as you aren't harming anyone else, you should be able to do as you please and be free from harm.
This means live and let live. Now, if someone wants to commit genocide on the human species, say they want to release a biological weapon which would infect us all with mad cow disease, then yes this would be a universally prohibited act and only crazy people would want to see the entire species die out by slowly going insane with mad cow disease.
Read J.S. Mill
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22046628
This means live and let live. Now, if someone wants to commit genocide on the human species, say they want to release a biological weapon which would infect us all with mad cow disease, then yes this would be a universally prohibited act and only crazy people would want to see the entire species die out by slowly going insane with mad cow disease.
Read J.S. Mill
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22046628
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Just so that I understand-The person who commits the act's opinion is to be taken into consideration? Pedophilia is acceptable to the pedophile, and thus, it isn't universally prohibited? You're kidding, right? By those terms, nothing is universally prohibited. From surgical experimentation on the disabled to sterilization of "undesirables" to pedophilia to murder/suicide. As long as the person committing the act, by the given definition, accepts it, it is not universally unacceptable.
Well, that's interesting in a philosophical sense, but it presumes that one can know the future effects of ones actions.
Dr. Joe Scientist, working in a lab, might concoct some chemical in the hopes of curing cancer ...but inadvertently releases a deadly chemical which ultimately kills millions. He didn't harm anyone at first, and he was, in fact, trying to help people, but months later millions of people are dead and dying. Was his act moral? And at which time?
Baron Max
Well, yeah ..."universal" means everyone on Earth. How else could we view the term?
But, see, I think most people are trying to "weed out" the very deviants who are doing the dirty deeds. Which is, in my view, incorrect if we're talking about "universally prohibited". In which case, you're right ...nothing that's actually done could be termed "universally prohibited".
Baron Max
Yay! I was right! Twice in less than a decade! High Five Max! 
It's the same risk we faced sending a man to the moon. Sometimes the rocket will crash and burn and people will die. But if you do enough tests beforehand you can minimize the risk of the experiment. While it's difficult to predict precisely what can happen, everyone is cause and effect and for the most part everything is predictable within a certain degree of accuracy. As the events increase and the degrees of seperation between individuals increase it becomes difficult to control or predict events without the help of some kind of computer.
It's like doing math, or playing chess, on a basic level humans can apply their own reasoning ability if they have it to determine the likely consequences based on probability. However as more and more people get involved, you'll need to have a super computer run a simulation and even the computer sometimes gets it wrong because humans aren't reasonable and are hard to predict. The super computers could have never predicted 911 or suicidal terrorism because suicide is so unreasonable that a computer would never even consider that an agent would destroy itself to destroy the enemy.
But for the most part it's all predictable, like traffic lights. We can see most things coming. And no if a scientist kills millions by mistake his act wasn't moral. It's not about intent it's about the outcome. If you are a soldier tasked with protecting something, and you fuck up, you basically failed your mission, the intent has nothing to do with whether or not the mission is a success or a failure.
Morality is based on moral calculus. Just as we can measure the distance between the earth and the moon and determine precisely how much thrust and how much fuel it will take to get there, we can generally do the same thing with moral judgements. You measure the results of your creation, if you create problems then you measure the damage you created, but reality is your creation and it is objective. It's not like the earth is flat for me and round for you, it's round for us all and the subjective part is how we interpret the round earth.
The Bible is subjective, ethics and morality are not. Thats why there are patterns of right and wrong across cultures, there is a universal basis behind it. An act is only as right as it is reasonable. It's only as reasonable as the results of the action indicate through objective measurement.
That means we have to measure how right or how wrong each individual action is, AFTER the fact. Thats how we learn, as a child we do some stupid action and we don't like the results, thats how we come to the conclusion that it was a stupid act and a mistake, and then we learn to regret, and feel guilty. As we become more reasonable as adults we learn the unwritten rules of life, the natural laws, the code of the street, and this is what we call street smarts. When an individual step out of themselves and their subjective feelings and can look ahead and see the results of their actions, and through pure calculation decide against the actions which lead to the undesired results. It takes practice and most people never learn to do it, even most smart people never are both street smart and book smart.
Book smart people memorize the book answers. They memorize the bibles commandments and follow the rules in the book. Street smart people, you put them in an environment and they observe nature and can figure out the rules through reason alone, without help from bibles. A street smart person would figure out right from wrong regardless of if there were a script or bible telling them what they can and can't do, while a book smart person will not be able to function at all morally without a list of rules, a book, or a script. They need a recipe for success.
The Bible is subjective, ethics and morality are not. Thats why there are patterns of right and wrong across cultures, there is a universal basis behind it. An act is only as right as it is reasonable. It's only as reasonable as the results of the action indicate through objective measurement.
That means we have to measure how right or how wrong each individual action is, AFTER the fact. Thats how we learn, as a child we do some stupid action and we don't like the results, thats how we come to the conclusion that it was a stupid act and a mistake, and then we learn to regret, and feel guilty. As we become more reasonable as adults we learn the unwritten rules of life, the natural laws, the code of the street, and this is what we call street smarts. When an individual step out of themselves and their subjective feelings and can look ahead and see the results of their actions, and through pure calculation decide against the actions which lead to the undesired results. It takes practice and most people never learn to do it, even most smart people never are both street smart and book smart.
Book smart people memorize the book answers. They memorize the bibles commandments and follow the rules in the book. Street smart people, you put them in an environment and they observe nature and can figure out the rules through reason alone, without help from bibles. A street smart person would figure out right from wrong regardless of if there were a script or bible telling them what they can and can't do, while a book smart person will not be able to function at all morally without a list of rules, a book, or a script. They need a recipe for success.
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The point is that one man's sin is another man's...well, not sin, I guess. I mean, even if you take away the "prohibited act" question, what are you left with? You still can't tell me something that everyone agrees upon as being immoral. In order for morals to be objective, you'd have to be able to provide an example.
Cannibalism of a conscious woman who is being sodomized with a baseball bat and raped. Or perhaps just standing by and masturbating while watching it all occur, I wonder which would be worse?
But both could be accepted ritual in some places. Such as my apartment, for example.
Er...I mean...uh...