1of63
Posts: 126
Joined: Dec. 2007
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Dear God, if BarryA is typical of legal smarts on the ID side no wonder they lost at Dover.
| Quote | Is There At Least One Self-Evident Moral Truth?
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A self-evident truth is a fallacy. It's circular. It assumes as true what has yet to be proven. So your self-evident truths are a non-starter right from the start.
| Quote | | There are certain things that, as Dr. J. Budziszewski says, ”you can’t not know.” You can’t not know that ripping babies from their mother’s arms, throwing them in the air and catching them on a bayonet is evil. Everyone reading this post knows this to be true without the slightest doubt or reservation. Jack is simply and obviously wrong when he says a soldier is free to choose moral standards in which such an act is good. There is no such freedom. |
Sure there is. If there's no "transcendent moral standard" - and, so far, you've given us zip in the way of evidence for one - then we can choose whatever moral system we like.
That doesn't mean we're going to choose just any one, though. We're free to walk off the top of a fifty-storey building if we want to but - mostly - we don't do that. Why not? Well, generally, because it results in a bloody mess all over the sidewalk. In other words, there's a pretty good reason for not walking off the top of tall buildings. It's a rational choice.
Same goes for moral codes. We choose them because there's good reasons. Like preventing people from doing bad things to each other.
| Quote | | Anyone who says that it is not self-evident that the soldier’s act was evil is lying. It is quite literally unthinkable to imagine a moral system in which such an act is good. |
Read Armageddon by Max Hastings. He decribes how Russian soldiers pursued a most appalling campaign of rape and other atrocities against German women as they fought their way into Germany. And they felt entirely justified because of what the Nazis and their puppets had done during the invasion and occupation of Russia.
Suppose US forces had found al-Qaeda bases immediately after 9/11, would it have been a breach of some "transcendent moral standard" to have bombed the hell out of them? I don't think so.
| Quote | The fact that the soldier’s act was evil transcends time, place, circumstances, opinion, and every other variable one might imagine. From this I conclude the act violated a transcendent moral standard, and from this I further conclude that a transcendent moral standard exists.
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No, Barry, all you're saying is that because most people would agree that those acts are evil, there is some transcendent universal moral standard.
Based on the beliefs of the majority of the people who've been living on one little planet for what amounts to the blink of an eye in terms of the age of the Universe.
There was a time when most people were certain the Sun went around the Earth. Didn't make it true just because everyone believed it then, did it?
Why do we mostly agree on basic moral standards? Because we're all human and most of us have the same interest in trying to survive for as long as we can and making the best of such time as we get. Pretty much everything else follows from that.
As for the Bible being evidence for this mythical "transcendent moral standard", I'm not surprised you want to keep the Old Testament out of it because it shoots that claim down in flames very nicely. There's some really nasty stuff in there coming from a God that's supposed to be the source of this supposedly unimpeachable transcendent moral standard.
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I set expectations at zero, and FL limbos right under them. - Tracy P. Hamilton
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