On Sat, 09 Jan 1999, Samael wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Randall Randall <wolfkin@freedomspace.net>
>
>>On Sat, 09 Jan 1999, Samael wrote:
>>>Do you honestly believe in objective, universal standards of right and
>>>wrong?
>>
>>Don't you? I'm not sure whether such things exist, but I can accept
>>the possibility that they might...
>
>A moral system is (according to my dictionary and what I was taught when
>covering this at university) a method of telling good from evil (or good
>acts from evil acts). Evil tends to be defined as either the opposite or
>absence of good and good appears to be defined as 'morally excellent'. It's
>all a bit of a mess. I don't believe that there is any real meaning to the
>words 'good' or 'evil'. They are not referents to any actual structure in
>nature and they don't tend to be applied outside of the human sphere:- You
>don't get saintly goldfish or evil giraffes (Eddie Izzard does a brilliant
>sketch on how an Evil Giraffe might act "I shall eat more leaves than I
>really ought to").
So it seems that if we were to find a definition of "good" you would accept the possibility of an objective morality? Would an example of something that *everyone* considers "good" do, in the absence of a formal definition?
<snip>
>We at least have evidence that these theories do not contradict. Moral
>theory does not offer anything to be scientifically tested.
Once we were agreed upon a definition (or example, per above) for "good", any such theory could be tested to see whether it produced more "good", no? So this problem reduces to the previous one.
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