Morals are finicky little buggers aren't they?

For myself, I do not find it difficult to denounce slavery and and at the same time recognize how much easier it is for me to do that now than it would have been 200-250 years ago.

Is it not odd to us today that Stonewall Jackson, the Confederacy's greatest general never owned slaves and thought slavery was wrong?

I'm a genealogy nut and I find it very interesting that none of my ancestors who fought in the Civil War owned slaves even though they were all residents of the Confederacy.

It's even more interesting when you consider that I have one ancestor who ended up fighting for both sides (and died in Andersonville) and that all my Alabama ancestors fought for the Union.

Though there's no surviving written record of my earlier ancestors owning slaves, I believe they likely did because they owned land of plantation size.

I claim no moral inheritance from any of them. They were what they were and they did what they thought necessary.

What strikes me as so terrible is that some today insist on fighting those battles of morality over and over again. Really... why?

No country is all goodness or all evil.

Moral absolutists hold that there is but one universal standard. I've long thought this breaks down in the face of undeniable historical facts as well as the undeniable existence of different cultures with different views of morality, so to that extent I'm a relativist.

I'm curious what makes you say that. I strongly adhere to the opposite view: I think there are universally true morals that can be defined, and one must measure cultural values against those absolutes to judge a culture (and if one belongs to the culture, refine it).

For instance, one universal truth is that people should be free from harm by other people. Another is that one person should, to the extent possible, not limit another's freedom.

I've always said a moral relativist is someone who doesn't judge the cannibal who is eating him alive.

But does that mean I have just condemned George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as immoral, while exonerating John Adams? Hardly, because what they did has to be judged according to the standards of their times, not ours.

I think we do have to (faintly) condemn them for practicing slavery, even as we praise them for establishing our wonderful republic which has evolved into something much more moral than it began as people began to recognize and apply the universal truths of morality. I do agree that if we condemn them, we must do so with the understanding that modern life affords us many luxuries our ancestors did not have which make it far easier to behave morally.

(...i.e., it's not a coincidence that slavery ended at the same time that the Industrial Revolution began).

Talldave... is the result of the coincidence of the Industrial Revolution possibly a reason that the Civil War did not have to happen at all, if it were only about slavery?

Perhaps the Civil War kept the Industrial Revolution from the South, resulting in an inexcusable poverty?

It's not that I really think that such is true, but more that I think absolutism and extreme relativism both get in the way of human progress.

What we have to acknowledge where George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were concerned are the moral constraints which kept them from "simply" freeing their slaves.

They knew there were no jobs for their slave to get. They knew that they could "hire" them to do exactly what they were doing and by paying them wages actually erode their living conditions.

Society had to change before slaves could be freed without pain. That didn't happen, thus we got the Civil War and especially, Reconstruction.

There is an objective standard of morality, which upholds the rights of the individual human being of any sex,race,ethnicity, religion, or physical description, to own his or her own life, and to be free from force or fraud by other humans.

This is the standard of morality that inspired our forefathers,and to the degree they departed from it, they morally erred, and they knew it. Jefferson and Washington, to name two famous examples, acknowledged that they did wrong in holding slaves. They and every slave holder who followed them absolutely knew that they were committing a crime, and the social order of the antebellum south reflects their guilt and unease with its emphasis on brutal force and repression to keep the slaves in line and force everyone else to support that.

This core immorality compromised our founding ideals and helped pave the way for every abrogation of our rights since,up to and including the abuses of the Welfare State. Our founders knew they were undermining everything this country stood for when they permitted slavery to continue. Even pre-revolutionary France banned slavery within the boundaries of that country, years before the Revolution.

We've succeeded economically, and as a haven of social justice and progress, to the extent that we have upheld individual rights. We're failing because we permit them to be violated, and because we no longer know the philosophy that teaches us how to tell the difference between a society that protects the rights of all from force and fraud, and the one we have now, a Welfare State that designates some people to be the pray of others.

Much as I agree with Dave and Laura about an objective standard, history belies the claim that it is absolute.

Is there really an absolute universal right in all places and all times to own one's own life, and to be free from force or fraud by other humans regardless of circumstances? Even now, we countenance slavery in retaliation for the commission of a crime (as payment of an individual's debt to society perhaps, but the 13th Amendment has an exception). It is thus legal to enslave someone for possessing drugs, not filing a tax return, etc. Many cultures believed slavery was appropriate treatment for enemy captives, and you could make a good case that it was kinder than execution. The idea of slavery as absolutely wrong is essentially modern, and however much we adhere to the view, history shows it has been far from an absolute.

I used slavery as an extreme example, because we all condemn it. But there are other moral rules, where analysis gets murkier. Many people believe that homosexuality is evil per se, and they assert this is a moral absolute. Again, history shows it is not. It originated as a religious rule, and is believed in by some people but not all.

An emerging form of modern morality is that animals are not ours to eat or wear. The people who believe this think it is an objective truth, consider themselves abolitionists, and believe the rest of us are evil. It spreads among children, like a disease, and if it follows the abolitionist pattern similar to that which John C. Calhoun decried here --

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=71

-- it will prevail, and our current animal uses will become "objectively immoral." For now, I still have an objective property right to own animals and eat meat.

So, while I agree with the objective standard proferred by Dave and Laura, I don't think it has always been absolute and universal.

Eric,

I guess I like to think the standard is absolute, even if human application of the standard has not been, often for reasons of practicality that may even make sense in certain times and places (e.g., a preindustrial society that wishes to grow must place a huge emphasis on fertility, resulting in taboos against homosexuality).

I tend to view this as being on a par with our understanding of physics: humans may not have known e=mc^2 until very recently, or have been able to do much with that knowledge even if they had known, but it was always true.

Simple question: are there any circumstances in which torturing infants for one's own amusement could be held to be moral? If not, congratulations, you're not a relativist. All that remains now is to figure out why that might be the case and how one might build on that insight. And FWIW, the mere existence of variable cultural standards is not in and of itself an argument that there is no trans-cultural standard by which to judge. It would also not have been news to, say, either Plato or Moses that there is variability among peoples and disagreement as to rules.

The problem is that it is relative.

Baal was into torturing infants. I'm sure many who did it enjoyed it and yet, were considered moral paragons of Carthaginian virtue. Or take some of the rituals of the American Indians living in Mexico. Again, I'm sure that at least some just enjoyed their religious butchery and yet, they were paragons of Mixtec virtue.

I was going to say dishonesty was the one moral absolute, but that's not true either. Many cultures believe that you only need to be truthful with your (Insert group, whether clan, tribe, family, etc.), like Taquiyya in Islam for instance. And I'm sure you could find a culture where lying to your family was a moral imperative. Like ummmmmm, today when kids are encouraged to lie to their parents about oh.... say abortion for instance, at least a part of our society belives that's not just moral, but a legal imperative.

There are very few absolutes, but I would say that "Everything is relative" is one of them.

I never said there was no morality, but I don't think there is a universal standard defining it. Do the good? Fine, but the devil is in the details.

Saying that, I have railed against moral relativism.
Perhaps it should be "ethical relativism".

I think that some practices are evil, like slavery.

But that has been considered moral by Americans.

Eh, you do the best you can and that's all you can do.