Due to popular demand, I've decided to create a thread regarding moral relativity. This is directly opposed to the idea that there are absolute, universal moral laws regarding what is right and what is wrong.

Note: I put this in the Philosophy section because it's a debate that can only be argued philosophically. I don't have any proof for any of my claims, but I can certainly argue them using reason and logic.

My stance is that there are no concrete morals. Everything is based on opinions. This is backed up by what you see in the world. Take the issue of gay marriage. Is it right or is it wrong? Some people see it as right, that is, anyone should be able to get married to the partner of their choice. In the eyes of these people, love is the overriding factor, not gender. However, there are other people who find gay marriage quite wrong. To them, gay marriage is an affront to nature, God, or moral decency. Obviously both groups cannot be right in terms of whether gay marriage is right or wrong, good or evil. This leaves us with two possibilities: one of the groups is right, or neither group is right.

My argument is the latter: neither group holds the "right" set of moral views regarding gay marriage. How would you go about proving gay marriage is inherently "good" or inherently "bad"? In order to do this, you'd have to show some kind of proof for a universal set of morals that everyone holds. However, I would say that people merely assign labels, so to speak, to different things, based on their own personal beliefs of right and wrong. But ideas, things, actions, etc. do not have an inherent "rightness" or "wrongness." They just are what they are. Ideas of good and bad are assigned by individual people or by groups of people holding similar moral views. But there isn't a universal set of moral views, considering people view different things differently. Not everyone sees the world the same.

It could be said that some things are inherently good or bad, since they are things that virtually everyone sees the same way. Take, for instance, murder. I'm sure most people would agree that this is bad, no questions asked. But is it really bad, or do we just believe it's bad? What of people who murder and feel no remorse? If murder was bad, wouldn't they feel guilty for having committed it? True, they could just ignore the "wrongness" of murder, but that would still leave a tiny shred of remorse. Clearly they find nothing wrong with murdering another person, indicating that murder can't be inherently bad.

Take Hitler as a good example of this (I just had to bring him up, didn't I?). I would wager that Hitler felt as if he was doing nothing wrong by purifying the Aryan race, even though that purification involved the wholesale slaughter of Jews, gypsies, and anyone he saw as not worthy of belonging to his Third Reich. If Hitler felt any remorse, any guilt at all for the mass killings of completely innocent people, wouldn't he have shown it? Wouldn't he or his cronies have come up with a slightly less "wrong" thing to do to undesirable people, like, exile them to Russia or something? Being directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of people would leave most people completely guilt-ridden...unless they felt that what they were doing was right. Universal morals would dictate that nothing inherently wrong could ever be seen as right, especially on the scale of the Holocaust.

I kind of dragged myself a bit off-topic there, so I'll get to the bottom line: the only morals that matter are individual morals. Without any universal set of moral laws, the individual is the only one responsible for determining what he sees as wrong or right. This carries on into society, where the largest (or strongest) group of people sharing the same moral views gets to say what is "right" and "wrong" in their society. Gay marriage is another example of this. In a country like Spain, the voting majority felt gay marriage should be accepted and legal, leading to the legalization of it in that country. In the United States, on the other hand, the majority (a slight one, really) feels it is very wrong, which is why there have been numerous attempts to keep male-female marriage as the only "right" form of marriage.

Moral relativity isn't pretty. It inevitably leads to conflicts over who is "right" regarding certain issues (slavery, abortion, etc.), which usually ends up with the strongest group enforcing its morals on everyone else. Slavery was once viewed as acceptable by the majority of people, but when the minority who despised it became a majority, slavery was abolished. Was slavery ever right or wrong? No, it was merely viewed as such by the respective groups.

If you only get two things out of this, remember that things aren't inherently wrong or right, and that there is no universal set of morals that everyone holds. Morals are, as they say, quite relative.

Sorry if that was too long. I invite anyone and everyone to discuss, rebuff, or agree at their leisure. Make sure to actually back up your arguments with reasons and such. I won't stand for any "your wrong!!!1!11 lolz" posts. I'll sit and laugh, but I won't stand.

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Basically, the biggest or strongest group decides. It's not quite fair, especially to the minority, but it's probably the only way to establish semi-universal ideas. Of course, there's no way to make everyone agree with or follow these ideas, so it's not a perfect system.

And why should we strive for a perfect system. Perfection and humanity seemingly don't go together. In fact, the concept of perfection only exists because any set thing can allways improve in some way, thus we consider a drastic improvent on various levels to be perfect. But once this is achieved we unlock new path's to new improvements, thus redefining perfection as an unattainable goal, and rendering ourselves with standard.

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I feel like there has to be some universal thing like that we should all have equal rights(independently of gender, race, etc.) but again it's the same thing, who decides this?

Basically, the biggest or strongest group decides. It's not quite fair, especially to the minority, but it's probably the only way to establish semi-universal ideas. Of course, there's no way to make everyone agree with or follow these ideas, so it's not a perfect system.

Yay! Good thread clpo!

Anyway...well I kinda' agree. To the contrary of what I said about slavery being "wrong" period, I do realize this is all a matter of opinion. Like we made up the terms "right" and "wrong" or these "laws" so there's nothing outside of ourselves that dictates that. I guess unless you believe in a God, in which case you could think God decides what's "right" or what's "wrong?" But how would you even know what "it" would think, want, etc?

I don't believe this though because there are murderers who feel no remorse in killing(because I think they are disturbed), but because who is to say what's good and what's not? Obviously to live in society we have to come up with a sort of guideline and laws to keep order, and we categorize things as "right" and "wrong", but that's what we've decided on.

Where I have a hard time though with this is when we take extreme cases. I feel like there has to be some universal thing like that we should all have equal rights(independently of gender, race, etc.) but again it's the same thing, who decides this?