Old Dog wrote:
Hmm, I note that once again our new resident philosopher attempts to equate restrictive firearms laws to slavery. I am evidently the only one who feels this way, but I take issue with someone who alleges to believe that restricting magazine capacity on firearms or prohibiting convicted felons (who cannot be troubled to petition their state for restoration of their gun rights) equates to the same level of immoral law as the governmental allowance of human slavery.
Sans Authoritas wrote:
Now, do you have any idea what I believe, Old Dog? Because what you think I believe sounds nothing like what I know I believe.
Old Dog wrote:
Actually, I was trying to determine exactly what it was you do believe, SA, and whether you can debate while differentiating between personal ethics and social ethics.
Is that how you "try to determine" what someone believes? Accuse him of what he does not believe? Because saying, "I note...that [he] attempts to equate restrictive firearms laws to slavery," and accusing me of being a hypocrite in my beliefs (to find out what my beliefs are) are rather unmanly, unscholarly ways to find something out. Not unlike throwing a grenade into a house to see if anyone lives there. Or slandering a man's reputation to see if anyone else springs up to defend it.
Old Dog, based on your attempted insults and your butchery of my words, I have developed a tendency to not to take you at your word when you tell me what you were "really" trying to do.
In your estimation, what is the difference between "social ethics" and "personal ethics?" Some people believe that "social ethics" means there is only a code of ethics if society creates one. In other words, that there is no objective moral norm. To such people, things are only moral or immoral when society says they are.
As for "personal ethics," some people believe that every individual person has his own "moral norm" that is not subject to any objective moral norm. But then, as Fagothey says, if every person has his
own moral norm, there isn't such a thing as norm at all, is there?
Do you consider yourself an adherent to one of these two schools of thought, Old Dog?
If not, what do you believe? (I won't try to find out in any other way than by asking you what you believe.)
Old Dog wrote:
If I can harken back to my undergrad class that covered Applied Ethics (way back, around '78 or so IIRC, was that before you were born, SA?), not every social issue can be so simplified, so black-and-white as you desire to make seem.
Old Dog, what greyscale moral issues do you see in the world? Is something not either wrong, or right? Or have you made the cardinal mistake of ethicists and reified evil?
Evil is not a thing, but the absence of a thing. This fact is something that is seldom discussed in modern ethics classes. If there is any "grey" area, it is only because people have not bothered to take the time to realize that something is either good, or evil:
not because good and evil acts are somehow mixed and inseparable. For example, raping someone is not wrong because it consists of sexual behavior, which can be good. Raping someone is wrong because it denies the dignity to which she is entitled as a human being and a woman, and is a contradiction of the sexual act, which by nature, is voluntary. At its core, rape is wrong because it is sexual behavior
without consent from one of the parties: a lack of something that should be there.
Moral issues
are black and white in themselves. Always. If there is any blurriness, it is not due to any defect in the difference between right and wrong, but only a defect in our capability to see clearly.
-Sans Authoritas
