The Moral Maze
Posted: Sun Feb 11, 2018 7:57 am
The Moral Maze
The radio series The Moral Maze has had one of its usual structureless debates. On the role of females as it happens. It is structureless because ‘right and wrong’ are discussed in a vacuum. No philosopher can define ‘right’ without preconceptions of society and the world in general.
Several people are invited who ‘know what is right’ and seldom a person who does not know what to think. But, more partcularly, everyone may well use similar language but not mean the same thing at all.
They may all employ a language of altruism and respect but do so from different social perspectives of independence, duty, responsibility. The result being an opinion poll like Brexit in which nobody knows what it means other than as a piece of arithmetic.
A debate about sexual attraction can be related to the general social end values, consonant with but not entirely tied to them.
A society of the autonomous individual will allow everyone to do as they will, without overt coercion.
A society based on service [Christianity uses ‘Gods will’ ambiguously to signify ambiguous ‘love’ an English word long before altruism was coined] and at the extreme that could mean as sexual slaves.
A society based on altruism which would be quite opposed to the previous alternatives, and imply at least mutual respect as an expression of ‘love’.
And none of that includes the natural purpose of sexual attarction which is the family. Which if not included in the question can only distort the conclusions.
The radio series The Moral Maze has had one of its usual structureless debates. On the role of females as it happens. It is structureless because ‘right and wrong’ are discussed in a vacuum. No philosopher can define ‘right’ without preconceptions of society and the world in general.
Several people are invited who ‘know what is right’ and seldom a person who does not know what to think. But, more partcularly, everyone may well use similar language but not mean the same thing at all.
They may all employ a language of altruism and respect but do so from different social perspectives of independence, duty, responsibility. The result being an opinion poll like Brexit in which nobody knows what it means other than as a piece of arithmetic.
A debate about sexual attraction can be related to the general social end values, consonant with but not entirely tied to them.
A society of the autonomous individual will allow everyone to do as they will, without overt coercion.
A society based on service [Christianity uses ‘Gods will’ ambiguously to signify ambiguous ‘love’ an English word long before altruism was coined] and at the extreme that could mean as sexual slaves.
A society based on altruism which would be quite opposed to the previous alternatives, and imply at least mutual respect as an expression of ‘love’.
And none of that includes the natural purpose of sexual attarction which is the family. Which if not included in the question can only distort the conclusions.