popeye1945 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 27, 2025 4:19 am
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Oct 27, 2025 1:02 am
popeye1945 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 27, 2025 12:44 am
...the natural foundation of human morality is our common biology, its survival, and its well-being.
This logically cannot be the case. You can't know that "common biology" is a moral orientation point, or that "survival" is a moral value, or what "well-being" would be, without already having in the back of your mind some conception of morality. In other words, you've begged the whole question, assumed that the morality you are familiar with is real morality, and then run to the conclusion. Your questioners have no reason to believe you know that survival is a moral goal (lots of species go extinct, of course), or that you know what "well-being" involves, and how you extract it (ignoring Hume) from your knowledge of "common biology". You'd have to show why you think these things are moral values, and how you got that they are.
Do you have such an explanation? Or will you simply pretend you don't need one, and forge ahead? If you do the latter, we have no reason to believe you.
By the way, I am not a Marxist; I have never been.
Then I apologize for believing Veggie on that. I would never want to call somebody something as brain-dead as "Marxist" if they weren't. I retract.
HI Immanuel,
I don't have an opinion on Marxist philosophy, as I have never even read about it. Personally, I find your difficulty with the idea of the foundation of morality being our common biology strange.
It's actually quite simple, and David Hume put it concisely: you can't get an "ought" from an "is." That is to say, there's no way of telling -- if one is merely observing how things are -- that they "should" be some other way, or that there's anything wrong or right about how those things are.
A simple example: a lion kills a gazelle. Is that moral, or immoral? How would we know? Lions need gazelles for food. Gazelles don't want to be killed. So what's "right" or "wrong" about the action?
In the same way, a rock falls off a cliff. Is that "right," morally, or "wrong," morally? It's not even clear that the term "moral" can be applied to such a situation. But doesn't the Materialist origin story tell us that we are just as accidental in our origins as that rock? So what makes what we do more or less "moral" than a rock falling off a cliff?
That's Hume's critique of morality, basically. And while I'm not a Humean, I can see that he has any secularist in a bind. What does "moral" even mean, in a world that is the mere product of cosmic accidents, and in which the forces that led to our being here are not even capable of caring what happens to us, or what we do?
Our civic laws and court system certainly use the survival and welfare of people as that which is violated and so punishable when violated.
But our civic laws, like everything else, are, according to secularism, just another "is" happening, and could just as easily have been their opposite. We may like to survive: but our liking counts for nothing in a Materialist universe.
No doubt, gazelles prefer not to be eaten; that doesn't even remotely imply they shouldn't be, or won't be.
Help me out here, what do you think should be the foundation of a common morality?
Well, step one: whatever it is, it must be objective, if it's to be real and obligatory. If there's no real thing as "morality," then there's no special status to the games we play with that word, and it can all be ignored. But morality is only as good as the authority behind it: when we say to somebody "You ought to do X," and they ask "why?" we need to have a better answer than, "Because that's what I just happen to prefer at the present moment."
Even in nature, there are moral behaviors among animal species,
That's not apparent.
There are certainly patterns of animal behaviour. But patterns of behaviour are just another "is," just another "way things happen to be." What gives us the means to assess them as "moral"?
Again, lions killing gazelles is certainly a pattern of behaviour. But what is its moral status, and how do we judge it?
The idea of a morality based on our common biology is to draw the world into community, with no nation left out.
That's just globalist ideology. But ask yourself this: why would that even be a good thing? Why should we wipe out the distinctiveness and independence of other nations, in order to create a homogeneous global thing? Why would it be good for decisions about what happens in Indiana or Yorkshire to be made by some globalist elite group that meets in Brussels or Hong Kong? How do we know that would even be something that would "work" for some purpose we can assess as moral?
In fact, we don't know any of that. What we do know, though, is the larger the conglomerate of people we create, the less sensitive and responsive it is to minorities, and the farther the center of decision-making is moved away from the influence of the people it affects most. So a globalist government would have no reason to be particularly concerned about you or me. On the scale they'd be dealing, we'd be even less important than random epidermal cells to a living person.
Humanity is moving away from Empire and colonialism
Not at all, actually. There's nothing more ambitious by way of "empire" than globalism. And there's nothing more "colonial" than using some areas of the world as resources for others -- which is exactly what globalism would do.
...the BRICS federation of nations...
It's almost funny when you realize that the "R" is Russia, and the "C" is China. Those are the two most totalitarian places on the planet, each with an outstandingly awful record of mistreatment of human beings. And do we look to them for salvation? When have they even given their own people basic human rights? What is the evidence of their competence to understand, let alone run, global economics? And what is their moral record?
Big BRICS is, no doubt; but both economically clumsy and hideous in terms of its moral orientation, by way of being dominated by those two nations, neither of which has a credible record of moral behaviour.
Expect disaster.