My undergraduate is in philosophy and I wrote my thesis on ethics. When I talk to my students about ethics or morality (terms I consider close to interchangeable) I tell them that it is the study of whether there is Right (with a capital R) and Wrong (with a capital W) in the universe and, if so, if we can we tell.
This definition almost infallibly leads to consternation on the part of the students. They think it’s insane to even ask such a question. It’s always fun to then ask a few leading questions to get them completely twisted up. It doesn’t take long at all to make them realize that this is a bit more nuanced than they first imagined.
I wonder about the idea of “right” and “wrong” HANDEDNESS given that sinister means “left” and that the non-right was also considered the “devil’s hand.” That really seems to illustrate NS’s point that wrong as in “incorrect” or “different” was mixed in with “morally corrupt.”
Society brainwashes us to fall into line. There’s a mixed bag of value in that. Humans who don’t work together don’t become apex predators. But it’s also oppressive. Humans who “don’t fit in” often get marginalized. We see it today. Heinlein pointed out that geniuses didn’t fit in and got marginalized for it throughout his writing. He seemed to take issue with it though he also seemed to have his own underlying code of values.
This is one of the many reasons that I end up hating taboo. When we have “Wrongs” in a society that are so deeply ingrained that we’re not allowed to think about them let alone discuss them it makes some very dark corners and blind spots for all of us.
This “truth-morality-straightness” relationship seems like linguistic evidence for Pythagoras’ idea that the world consists of harmonious mathematical relationships, or Kant claiming we have to think of everything in terms of geometry. If you squint at it, the long period of attempts to prove Euclid’s fifth postulate followed by non-Euclidean geometry seem to mirror the ~1900 year history of belief in objective moral truth, followed by postmodern relativism. “In any situation there’s a single right course of action” starts to look vaguely like, “given a line and a point not on it, there’s precisely one line traversing the point making a right angle with the first line.” Postmodernism argues that attempts to define what’s right all require an axiomatic base, which can be selected arbitrarily. “That’s just your opinion, man” becomes something like, “ah but we are not in a Euclidean space here, the line only looks wrong because you’ve confused the topology of the space.”
Just devoured Polostan and am eagerly awaiting more!
My undergraduate is in philosophy and I wrote my thesis on ethics. When I talk to my students about ethics or morality (terms I consider close to interchangeable) I tell them that it is the study of whether there is Right (with a capital R) and Wrong (with a capital W) in the universe and, if so, if we can we tell.
This definition almost infallibly leads to consternation on the part of the students. They think it’s insane to even ask such a question. It’s always fun to then ask a few leading questions to get them completely twisted up. It doesn’t take long at all to make them realize that this is a bit more nuanced than they first imagined.
I wonder about the idea of “right” and “wrong” HANDEDNESS given that sinister means “left” and that the non-right was also considered the “devil’s hand.” That really seems to illustrate NS’s point that wrong as in “incorrect” or “different” was mixed in with “morally corrupt.”
Society brainwashes us to fall into line. There’s a mixed bag of value in that. Humans who don’t work together don’t become apex predators. But it’s also oppressive. Humans who “don’t fit in” often get marginalized. We see it today. Heinlein pointed out that geniuses didn’t fit in and got marginalized for it throughout his writing. He seemed to take issue with it though he also seemed to have his own underlying code of values.
This is one of the many reasons that I end up hating taboo. When we have “Wrongs” in a society that are so deeply ingrained that we’re not allowed to think about them let alone discuss them it makes some very dark corners and blind spots for all of us.
This “truth-morality-straightness” relationship seems like linguistic evidence for Pythagoras’ idea that the world consists of harmonious mathematical relationships, or Kant claiming we have to think of everything in terms of geometry. If you squint at it, the long period of attempts to prove Euclid’s fifth postulate followed by non-Euclidean geometry seem to mirror the ~1900 year history of belief in objective moral truth, followed by postmodern relativism. “In any situation there’s a single right course of action” starts to look vaguely like, “given a line and a point not on it, there’s precisely one line traversing the point making a right angle with the first line.” Postmodernism argues that attempts to define what’s right all require an axiomatic base, which can be selected arbitrarily. “That’s just your opinion, man” becomes something like, “ah but we are not in a Euclidean space here, the line only looks wrong because you’ve confused the topology of the space.”
Just devoured Polostan and am eagerly awaiting more!