Because i plan to post my opinion on here a lot, and further, because i expect you all to disagree periodically, i want to quickly subvert a common misconception about morality and Truth, or at least how I and 99% of you look at it. I am an Moral Objectivist (Moral Realist). That means when i say doing X is immoral, doing X is immoral. Not doing X is immoral for you, your society, your culture, your gender, your other distinction, arbitrary or not.
This might be disconcerning for some of you at first glance. (1) If their is a moral Truth then some things are right and some are wrong and isn't that just a drag? (2) More than that, i'm a fan of tolerance, and if you are right and i am wrong or vice versa, then why would we tolerate differences of opinion?
Before i get into the answer to the first and second questions i want to make it clear that you probably really do agree with me, so even if my answers to make swallowing the truth of one Truth easier are still not that convincing, you won't reject Truth all together and become one of those annoying nihilists.
Imagine a person electrocutes a white male child, just for fun, is it wrong for that person to do this? Presumably you clearly agree, let me work our way down the traditional chain to the point where it gets less and less intuitive (to some of us) that something is wrong. Is it wrong if its a female child? A non-white child? A adolescent chimpanzee? An elephant? A sentient fish (vast majority are btw)? A possibly sentient animal? A non-sentient animal? A plant? Is it okay to destroy a rock? A ecosystem? My point here is that we all agree its wrong to cause unnecessary suffering, at least at some point along the line, where that point is i will discuss in a later post. I could ask a similarly obvious example about slavery or rape, most of us agree that these things are wrong, they are immoral.
So in response to the (1) the fact is we need to bite the bullet here. It might be a drag, i might enjoy not working and having a slave do it for me, but that is immoral. We resigned ourselves to this for good reason, to preserve what is right. Likewise, if morality brings us to a position that we may rather not have to deal with, if we want to stay rational or consistentant, we must deal with it. Might suck but it is what is right.
(2) Tolerance is great. I believe tolerance is important because we are all human, we make mistakes and though we might be pretty sure about right and wrong but "we" have been wrong. Witness how long it took to condemn slavery in our legal thinking or to enfranchise women. More than that, subjective/relative truth cannot value tolerance in the way most of us want. I want to value tolerance even for ideas we disagree with. I am not a Nazi, but i think Nazi's should be able to peddle their garbage because i value freedom of speech. If Truth was relative, then i might think tolerance is good, while you kill me cause i am white. If we accept moral realism we can criticize the person who murdered me. If not we can't. I think what we mean by tolerance is that we should be cautious participants in the moral arena, not that we should boycott participation.
So in conclusion, we can disagree about WHAT is right or wrong, but don't disagree with me about the existence of a right or wrong. I'm not that interested in that debate, at least not till the 99% of us who do believe in morality get onto the same page. Thanks for reading, soon i'll be posting some controversial shit that we can all disagree on it will be a real riot! In the meantime, Go Vegan
The Vegan Guy
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