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The Loony Left on war

All ethics are situational. Can you imagine taking an ethics test where one of the questions is "A client asks you to do a job. Should you do it?" If you answer "...uh... that depends on what the job is", then you're accused of being a moral relativist.

Do you think that every act can be classified as "good" or "bad" completely independently of the situation? For instance, is firing a gun always good or always bad?
 
PogoPedant said:
I've never studied moral philosophy, but if you are of the opinion that an action must be judged relative to its context, does that not make you a moral relativist? What does moral relativism mean, if it doesn't?

ETA: Note to self, reload before post. You already answered me. :)
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I'll post more sometime tomorrow. Got to head in soon. :)
 
Art Vandelay said:
All ethics are situational. Can you imagine taking an ethics test where one of the questions is "A client asks you to do a job. Should you do it?" If you answer "...uh... that depends on what the job is", then you're accused of being a moral relativist.

Do you think that every act can be classified as "good" or "bad" completely independently of the situation? For instance, is firing a gun always good or always bad?
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Of course not. Not every act will have a moral value. But some do, at least in the opinions of many.
 
Then now that's established that there are actions that don't have a moral value, the possibility must be considered that killing a person is such an action. You cannot say that advancing that position is automatically moral relativism.
 
Art Vandelay said:
Then now that's established that there are actions that don't have a moral value, the possibility must be considered that killing a person is such an action. You cannot say that advancing that position is automatically moral relativism.
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No, but it's a necessary first step.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Shocking. Have you no moral standards?

Killing someone is a bad thing. It's an absolute.

Sometimes it is necessary to kill someone. Sometimes it is necessary to be bad. But that doesn't make it good.

Unless you're some kind of moral relativist, which isn't generally the position admitted to by "the right".
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I'll agree with you, TM. War is always a bad thing, as is killing people. It's just sometimes not as bad as the alternatives.
 
Mycroft said:
I'll agree with you, TM. War is always a bad thing, as is killing people. It's just sometimes not as bad as the alternatives.
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Yes, not as bad as the alternatives.. but i feel we MUST be able to find a solution that is not just less bad, but actually good.
 
Art Vandelay said:
It seems to me that there are two strains of the Radical Left:

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, . . . . And all in the name of being "progressive".
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Logical fallacy alert.
I was feeling sorry for Art - with his orderly little pigeon holes. I'm was sure it makes things really really simple for him.

Then he blames progressives for all the evils he attributes to his simplified version of the radical left.

Classic.
 
Art Vandelay said:
All ethics are situational. Can you imagine taking an ethics test where one of the questions is "A client asks you to do a job. Should you do it?" If you answer "...uh... that depends on what the job is", then you're accused of being a moral relativist.

Do you think that every act can be classified as "good" or "bad" completely independently of the situation? For instance, is firing a gun always good or always bad?
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So would you agree that at least some of the loony left anti-war crowd is anti-situational ethics?
 
Mycroft said:
No, he's only talking about the lunatic left.

When you start your own thread about the lunatic right you may feel free to exclude any mention of lefty lunatics without being guilty of any fallacies.
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Since the mention of the lunatic Right had nothing to do with his exercise of the excluded middle, I'd suggest that you consider brushing up on your rhetorical fallacies.
 
Maybe we should just agree that there are lunatics on all sides, and that killing them would be wrong, possibly because of an absolute ethical standard against killing, possibly because the situation doesn't call for it.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Maybe we should just agree that there are lunatics on all sides, and that killing them would be wrong, possibly because of an absolute ethical standard against killing, possibly because the situation doesn't call for it.
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Can we fling poo at them?
 
jj said:
Since the mention of the lunatic Right had nothing to do with his exercise of the excluded middle, I'd suggest that you consider brushing up on your rhetorical fallacies.
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I mentioned them because you did.

jj said:
Wow man, look at this exercise of the excluded middle.

You left out, at the very least, the lunatics, who tend to inhabit the radical right as well as the radical left.
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Lunatic right, radical right, same difference.
 
Skeptic said:
No. Wars of self-defense, for example, are a good thing, morally speaking.
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Then you are saying that people being killed, maimed and so on is a good thing (because that is what a war is) or that torture is good thing to do (because it may be justifiable in say winning a war) - which I don't think you do believe?

Just because something can be undertaken for good or morally good reasons does not mean that the thing you are doing is good or moral of itself.
 
Skeptic said:
No. Wars of self-defense, for example, are a good thing, morally speaking.
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This is in danger of devolving into a semantic debate, where you're talking past each other by using the same word but meaning different things by it. So let me propose a few ideas for uses of various terms to help avoid that. We can use the term "negative" for results that causes suffering to people, and the term "positive" for results that releive suffering or create enjoyment for people.

Now let's introduce the terms "good" for those actions which maximize positives and minimize negatives in comparison to other possible actions one could have taken. Similarly, a "bad" action is one which maximizes the negative results and minimizes the positive results. What's important to note here is that it is possible to have a good action which produces negatives, provided the alternatives produced more negatives, and it is possible to have a bad action that produces positives if the alternatives produced more positives.

Under the terms I'm using, war can indeed be good, as you have said. But I think the point Darat is trying to get at is that it still produces negatives. And I'd agree on that point as well. My guess is that you're mostly talking past each other.
 
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