Do You Have Any Moral Absolutes?

I agree, rape and torture are always evil acts and never justified.

For me, I’d also add child abuse. Now, by child abuse I don’t mean all forms of corporal punishment. I don’t like corporal punishment for children in general but I’m not necessarily 100% against it in all cases. But there is a big difference between corporal punishment and the act of getting drunk and beating the crap out of your child (or doing something even worse) because you’re mad at the world. As far as I’m concerned, that is another evil act that is never justified.

The genocide of a People.. Rape. Torture. Abuse of children. Engaging in the manufacture, distribution, and sale of modern weapons and weapons of mass destruction. Use, development, threats to employ nuclear weapons. Destruction and poisoning of any environment that provides shelter for non-human persons, and human persons. Slavery- explicit/implicit.

Any person or nation deliberately engaging in these offenses is disqualified from loyalty, respect, or cooperation, recognition of territorial borders, or any compliance, when possible, with its self appointed authority.

Given their savagery and willingness to do harm, asymmetric resistance against these people or nations is justified and tactically advisable. I understand that this may all of the present nations that are constituent parts of Global Industrial Civilization, all persons willingly invested in, and incentivized by the demonstrably omnicidal “Business as Usual”. It’s important to avoid having one of these entities murder you.

Do I fail my own standards? Yes. Do I continue to embrace these standards, understanding my own complicity and endeavor to overcome my own failings? Yes.

Overshoot is the machinery driving the achievement of Fermi’s Paradox. I am watching a madness spread like a wildfire through humanity. A toxic eruption of the collective Shadow and humanity’s utter blindness as it stumbles into an obvious dead end.

As far as I have the strength, courage, and luck, I will not fucking comply.

Children – any harm to children and by extension, pregnant women

Absolutely no absolutes in my moral worldview.

ASSUMING civilized conditions, anyone who advocates allowing rape and torture as part of war (I can’t imagine that anyone would advocate allowing these outside war) loses soft power, because uninvolved parties will be reluctant to give power to or cooperate with such advocates. But this is not moral absolutism, but rather pragmatism: we all agree to forego some behaviors so we all benefit from not being victims of these behaviors.

If civilization breaks down, whoever refuses to use rape, torture and every other atrocity may lose to those who will do anything to win. War is ultimately about terror: terror of death and destruction is how we usually think of war, but no absolute reason to rule out terror of rape and torture and any other terror the mind can conceive. Unilaterally deprive yourself of a terror weapon and you become weaker and evil wins and so rape and torture and the other atrocities occur despite your moral righteousness. Bilateral pragmatic agreements to outlaw some behaviors require some sort of civilizational framework.

There may be situations where you have to choose between two evils, and you never know which. So no, there are no moral absoutes.

Concerning your two absolutes, Ian, they are included. But I believe my body would say no even if my intellect doesn’t.

And that is the point. Our moral is hardwired. It is transmitted through evolution, weeding out those who don’t conform to our being social animals depending on eachother for our survival.

However, evolution is no foolproof mechanism. Among other things, we are provided with fallible brains that are able to convince us that we are smart when we are actually quite stupid, and that we are acting morally when we do morally reprehensive things. But to do that, they have to be pushed by a social surrounding – e.g. a mafia, an army or a course in neo-classic economics.

Advocating harm to vulnerable people. Once you start after a vulnerable other you’ve crossed a red line for me.

@Jan Wiklund

Doesn’t history make abundantly clear that morality isn’t evolutionarily hard wired? Morals are social fictions devised by cultures to try and navigate the world and potential conflict. Different societies can arrive at extremely different solutions that they call moral to similar problems.

Also of course the material basis of much morality. ‘Theft is wrong’, insists the class that wants there to be private property and wants it to be considered sacrosanct.

Rape and torture are among my moral absolutes also. Driving someone into misery comes to mind, such as brutal poverty or withholding help when someone is in agony. I can’t respect anyone who does this to others and I would never do it myself. If, say, someone captured one of my loved ones and threatened to torture them unless I okay’d the torturing of someone else, even if that someone else were a bad person, I would still see it as a violation of my moral code, even though I’d do it to save my loved one. And of course I hope to never be in that situation. That would be awful karma.

Perhaps on a a level below rape, torture and child abuse, I submit trophy hunting and baiting. Some may say all hunting is bad. Not gonna argue. Hunting for food and thanking the creator and the animal for the life sustaining food adds has spiritual connections to nature where everything is food to something else. Killing the biggest and most beautiful animals, then displaying their likenesses on walls for a competition is disgusting. Add baiting into the the activity and it becomes more revolting.

I hesitates to say I have any moral absolutes; because:

a) As Phaedrus said, what are the consequences of having a ‘moral absolute’? How is it different than having situational morality? In international relations, you usually have to talk to and strike deals with all sorts of thugs in suits.

b) that being said, I can’t imagine any situation where torture would be justified, so it’s as close to a moral absolute as you can get.

c) I’d add to torture the general notion of the exploitation of anyone or any being which is helpless or even greatly weaker than you. This includes everything from mistreating POWs to selling couples timeshares to scamming seniors of their money to overcharging people who are in desperate need. But hell, much of this is our very economic system, trying to scam people to buy something that is bad for them (the tobacco industry and alcohol industry).

That’s another reason to despise Trump, who (according to Micheal Cohen) thinks that if you and he alike are happy in an agreement Trump then concludes that he didn’t “win” enough. He has to be happy and you have to be miserable for an agreement to have enough “win” for him in it. Of course, in foreign policy, such a policy leads to disastrous consequences (i.e., China and Russia both feel, and justifiably so, that the West took advantage of their weakness and force ‘unequal’ agreements on them). As individuals and as groups, the best agreements are where both sides walk away from it feeling good.

d) The great rape debate–that’s something I’ve not wanted to touch. But some points:

Part of the problem is ‘what is rape?’ Is it something where someone either threatens you with a weapon, or overpowers you with force, often injuring you in the process, to force a sexual act from you? Or does it include cases where someone doesn’t quite say ‘yes’ or ‘no’; not something that someone sought, but something was passively accepted with no or little fuss?

I’ve never experienced the former. I have experienced the latter, many decades ago. And the latter really wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t a big deal even though the other person latter bragged about it later, in front of friends, much to my embarrassment. I just made a note “don’t let yourself be put in that situation again” and let it go at that. I would have been aghast if someone had actually prosecuted the other person for rape.

I’ve also been groped—not like in TSA groped, but sexually groped in another situation. The other person was intoxicated, and I calmly refused and gently pushed the other person away. Again, neither one of these events has caused me even minor trauma and I haven’t lost a wink of sleep over either. Thus I have a hard time understanding others who make this sort of thing a bigger deal than I perceived it to be.

I also have know people who said they experience the more abusive form of rape, as either a child or young woman too. But Soredemos is right–it’s not worse than murder, The person I’m referring to was a friend who told me about her horrific childhood in Appalachia, where she was sexually assaulted by relatives and where there were shootings and stabbings galore; sometimes in her house. But even then, she wouldn’t have agreed that her living was worse than dying. I also had a female relatives of mine abducted, and feared for her body and her life, but she managed to escape her attackers.

But even there, recalling a visit to a Vietnamese POW camp last year (one where NVA and NLF prisoners were held, not US prisoners), where prisoners endured blowtorches to their genitals, being boiled alive, having bones broken or teeth chiseled out, and if I were a POW and told I either had to endure one of those things, or submit to sex with Bubba over there–well, for me that’s an easy choice. I’d submit to Bubba in a heartbeat, the injury and pain if any will be short-lived and not likely permanent, where the other things may kill or your leave you crippled for life. Not a hard decision.

Mind you, I don’t discount emotional trauma. I’ve experienced it too, just not over things sexual. And I’ve read it or seen it among others. The famous Soviet marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky was held by the NKVD and tortured pre-WWII, losing his teeth. However, one of the cruelest things done to him was his captors would awaken him in the dead of night, marching him outside to a forest with his hands tied behind his back, read execution orders to him, and then place the cold barrel of a revolver against the back of his head, holding it there. Then a “CLICK”. (The revolver had no rounds).

Then they marched him back to his cell. This mock execution was done to him several times. That had to be unquestionably hellish. THAT would cause me nightmares; and apparently Rokossovsky carried a pistol with him for the rest of his life, to end his own life if he were ever arrested again.

Similarly, I had a elderly relative who suffered a break-in in the 1970s, the robber had a gun and led her around her own house with a pillowcase over her head, threatening to shoot her. She survived (and saved a cousin of mine in the process; long story, and even I played a small bit role in this story) but after that she sold her house and moved in with her daughter as she was afraid of living by herself. That’s quite understandable.

I have thought philosophically about my answer and I realize that my moral philosophy, such as it may be, lies in the interstices of a great jumble of half-baked notions. An “absolute” connotes a certain detachment from context or consequence, a consideration of which certainly figures in the rationalizations of many of my jumbled notions. I am still enough of a Catholic to respect the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and to credit temptation to sin in every person. I do not think anyone is justified by faith alone, or immune from doing evil. Human nature is simply incapable of keeping a promise to self or others to refrain from the narcissistic self-indulgence at the root of hostile, cruel, sociopathic behavior. So, if “absolute” is meant to denote “this I would not do”, I simply do not believe you.

I would like to believe I would not torture someone. Certainly, I am adamantly opposed to torture as state policy. But, if you made me angry enough, I would want to hurt you — I could conceivably punish you for your offense against my sense of fairness and it might hurt rather a lot. “Absolute” might not save you much. Which makes me wonder if “torture” is distinguished by the cruel infliction of pain or, is it possibly the Narrative that is dispositive?

I am suspicious of Narrative as sheep might be suspicious of a border collie. “Absolute” implies that meaning is inescapable. No story, no context can redeem some acts is the supposition. Yet, I watch others “justify” war and acts of war — or worse not even feel they have to bother rationalizing the barbarities of war. War is the suspension of the rules and norms of social cooperation in favor of violence because . . . Conflict. Like conflict is not a constant of social, political life. The narrative of just war isn’t a narrative of a fair fight.

I credit the notion of morally wrong. And, morally wrong regardless of intention or expectation of consequences. “Torture” — the deliberate, cruel infliction of pain by the powerful against the helpless — yes, that seems “absolutely” wrong to me because wrong in the context just specified. Sinful. A scar on the soul.

Jan Wikilund

– No, it doesn’t. People are bad at hurting eachother. They feel bad, and they do it incompetently. They have to be at a safe distance to do it, so that the hurting is abstract, and/or they must have superiors to tell them to do it, a “chain of command” with the top being completely isolated from the result of the hurting.

I agree with you. One telling factor is that while cultures are perfectly capable of turning boys (and it’s usually boys) into hardened killers and torturers, it doesn’t happen naturally with the vast majority. No, it takes a sustained period of indoctrination and brutalization to achieve this end. In our culture, we call this “boot camp”.

And even then, survivors of war pay the price. When I was a boy, returning Vietnam veterans told me what they saw and what they did, so the later bruhaha over a movie like “Apocalypse Now” was so surprise as it matched everything they had told me. At least two of those veterans later committed suicide.

I would argue that it’s our cultures, which were forced by cultural evolution to embrace warfare (as once one group did, then all their neighbors had to embrace it or be exterminated) that turn us into something more cruel than we would be by our natures.

On reading the post I thought . . . well sure . . . I too would absolutely never rape or torture. Then I read all the comments and thought . . . well . . . if Life Itself plunged me for real into the world of Soredemos Scenarios . . . what would I do? Probably still not rape or torture, but that is not because of Inner Moral Absolute but because of Inner Squeamishness-based Incapability.

So at the pure morality level, what do I have? Some very firm dashed-red line moral near-absolutes. I can look back on what I have done when Life Itself offered me a choice and realize what I would/ wouldn’t do based on what I have/haven’t done in a few strange real-life scenarios.

Would I take passive silent secret advantage of someone else’s unknowing mistake in my favor? One time a new-and-learning bank teller gave me $400 too much when giving me some cash-back out of my account. I gave the $400 back and noted the error. One time when visiting someone in Astoria, New York City, I was walking a hundred or more feet behind someone. A big chunk of money fell out of his pocket. I picked it up and yelled out to him “you dropped something”. He didn’t hear me so I ran up to him to get his attention and gave him back the chunk of money. At times people have mistaken me for homeless ( looking homeless is a talent I apparently have sometimes ) and tried to give me money. I have noted that I am not homeless and don’t actually need the money, but then thanked them in principle. But I can’t promise I wouldn’t let such an error in my favor go by if I “really needed the money”.

Would I make an implicit promise while being tempted to break it later to my own benefit? I suppose that could be considered putting oneself in an “occasion to sin”.
I do remember when first reading the masienda.com website and reading all the rare and unique heirloom corns they sold, often sourced from a single or very few Mexican growers, that I could buy some of them and then try growing them here in Michigan to see what would happen. But every variety description said something like “buying this corn carries the implied promise that you will not do ANYthing with this corn except EAT it, in compliance with the Biodiversity Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol”.
I realized that was an implied promise I could not/ would not keep, so I never bought any of their corn. ( I see that lately they have dropped that phraseology from their corn-type descriptions, and I suspect they were self-preventing so much business that they realized they should just stop saying that.)

I suppose the closest I come to a moral-behavioral absolute is to not abuse children.
And it doesn’t have to be physical to be abuse. Brilliant intellectuals can leave their children damaged for life with forms of abuse that no policeman or social worker will ever spot. Don’t ask me how I know that.

Am I prepared to benefit from the past crimes of others? Of course. I benefit every day from the settler colonialist conquest and creation of MexAmeriCanada and I have zero intention of ever going back where I “came from”.
Putting oneself in that position