11/30/11

On Moral & Space-time Relativism and the Pursuit of Right Directions

Moral relativism might be taken as comparable to space-time relativism. One might ask why anyone should have a direction or purpose if all locations exist in relation to other coordinates. Yet of course we might believe that it must be so of necessity if a completely deterministic ontology isn't to prevail a priori.

One may not assume that with relativism in moral judgments that all judgments are of equal worth. Certainly that can not be the case subjectively unless one abnegates the value of one's own existence and fate. It is possible to do so subjectively of course, yet the self-deprecation is itself subjectively relative and of little consequence if a Supreme Being exists who donates worth to each individual soul for-himself.

Within a given moral context or moral set of values the navigational buoys are set to guide individuals toward particular empirical goals such as social reason considers valuable. Life, social harmony, education- such means and ends as reinforce individual education and pursuit of the aforementioned are indicated with moral values of a pragmatic application. Individuals may apply their own innovative style upon a course through social life and regard such moral beacons and guidelines as parameters for the ascent of aging and transitions-stages in life's way as Kierkeguaard might have said. Plainly the need to invent one’s own morality, own's own physical theory of causality and so forth entirely de novo for oneself in each individual life would be too time consuming as well as a perennial reinvention of moral primitivism. Social morality becomes a reinforcing pedagogical sketch of fundamental parameters allowing social passage through the shoals of chaos and conflict.

Moral concepts of right and wrong may evolve-they obviously have in many areas such as in the elimination of slavery as a basic human norm of captives not executed, yet morality tended to evolve in relation to the social structure of the time a posteriori rather than a priori. Besides the Lord Jesus Christ the ability to obviously set new social morals significantly differing from the prevailing social ethical and religious practices has been often insubstantial.

Morality it is said is what people actually do in a society rather than what is said about a theoretical moral environment optimized for efficiency. Moral procedures tend to cohere within a prevailing political and ethical system. The difference between an Aristotelian polity and that of a democracy would vary, as would that of an oligarchy and/or aristocracy in regards to the social permissiveness of behavior between classes socially.

Christians have a preferred direction ontologically in relation to a transcendent God and that is a kind of hyper-relativism. Human beings are mortal creatures each with a body and mind that fails like a plant withering under the frosts of fall. Regardless of one's moral positions eventually death overtakes each life and is completely triumphant. The cold, dark abyss of a universe without meaning or moral disposition arrives to reclaim its phenomenally upsurge conscious subjects and return them to nothingness.

That ontological phenomenality of human experience is a reason why mankind looks to Jesus Christ as a transcending Savior able to surpass the failings of moral relativism that is the common experience of mankind as a temporal creature. Being and nothingness of experience for-itself elicits a human response that is not morally relativistic. So far as the Universe and moral experience are real they are also finite for human purposes of experience. Moral relativism seems to require a kind of infinite set of possibilities without finite, not relativistic delimitations in order to be fully relativistic. One might expect such infinite relativism in a multiverse of infinite expanse yet within each universe boundary conditions of physics would exist bringing the human experience of infinite relativism down to finite lines.

Moral relativism may as a voyeuristic moral study of other cultures find that different navigational buoys for moral guidance may not be of equal effectiveness in sheparding the flocks toward its optimal actualization as temporal beings. One might assume that some systems of social governance and moral instructions produce better results than others. One might also assume reasonably that the design of particular moral guidelines must be adapted for each culture's challenges. We learn of somewhat different moral structures in the Mosaic laws and deuteronomical-Levitical applications than in the Gospel of Jesus Christ yet understand that rather than being an existential temporal moral intervention the teleology of God was in a process of actualizing a relationship with human beings and their history. The Phenomenology of Spirit that G.W.F. Hegel described has a corresponding individual experience for each life that might be discerned within the sequential incarnative processes of individuals mentioned in the Brahmanist tradition. Each individual should given enough opportunities realize himself as a part of God's creation. The moral changes from time to time or culture to culture are believed to build toward something greater-an encounter with the Creator.

Christians of course believe that can be accomplished in this one lifetime through a relationship with Jesus Christ. In that way the grace of God may reconcile the fallen human condition trough the atoning blood of the Savior.

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