5/23/19

On Morality...cont.

 In post-Calvin Geneva some of the pastors were described by outsiders as Socinians. They were unhappy with that. Socinians had taken the trinity out of theology and some of the churches promoted reason over scripture. Much of the American church has gone that way. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania apparently were Socinians and the left wants to make the Protestant branch a cuddly promoter of all leftist platform ideas. That can trick people of course regarding true doctrine and scriptural interpretation. The trouble is that the Holy Spirit does allow people to interpret scripture for-themselves and their understanding. Because of reformation tolerance or even accentuation of self-interpretation instead of Catholic authorities the rise of fake Christian churches was inevitable. Within those structures the left can claim whatever they like as righteous doctrine including murdering the unborn. Plainly from the life of Jesus while in Mary's womb there was implicit recognition of the sentience of the unborn, although for Jesus the sentience range was increased.

 One shouldn't forget Marcus Tullius Cicero's 'On Natural Law'. It is an argument that nature itself has an evident preferred moral behavior- such as parents don't eat progeny. I took a course on-line from Yale/Coursera recently on everyday morality. It was interesting to learn what they think in academia. They tend to write-off deontological ethical systems, including that of Immanuel Kant and his idea of the categorical imperative. There is a kind of list of moral values that people select from, and the left tend to value individualism and freedom from harm as about it, while conservatives also include a few others like honor that is lacking in the left. Morality can be defined in several ways, objectively. The easiest way is to regard it as social behavior and norms that people actually have in fact, and then describe that as their moral system, rather than describing some ideal way they might say they have or aspire to. The left also want to find a primitive morality hard-wired in babies. Calvin believed that God communicates basic moral values through conscience, and Christians go farther through the Holy Spirit toward realizing what right behavior is. Here is more on that topic--Searching for some sort of innate morality in babies that could be taken as a cognitive characteristic such that people are hard-wired to certain behaviors that he can regard as moral seems sketchy.

Morality is an ability to differentiate between abstract values rather than natural behavior for-itself. The difference between defecating in public or in a toilet stall is a moral and legal question perhaps, yet a dog or a baby defecating on the floor isn't taken to be a moral question they have flunked.
Moral philosophy isn't about unavoidable deterministic behavior. Animals pursue with personal egoism perhaps, things that are good for them, or that they believe to be good. An example would be youthful alcoholism. maybe a child discovers that drinking gin and orange juice or whatever is good, or tastes good, so they continue even though it is bad for their health. If creme puffs were actually poisonous and bad, people would eat them anyway of they didn't know better. The pursuit of what is thought to be the immediate good is not a moral question.

Socrates wanted to show that human children may have innate knowledge in one part of The Meno in a famous passage of 1900 words where he interviews a slave boy. Cicero wrote a discourse On Natural Law. The babies interpreting fair distribution or unequal distribution were not perhaps showing a moral sense. They have have transferred their own worldview into the two characters and preferred a balanced rather than an unfair or unequal distribution for-themselves. The babies may have liked or disliked a triangle shape more than a square, or alternatively have required more time to understand a complex image in regard to a triangle and sphere vs a square and sphere in motion. A triangle has slope and a square has only angles.

While morality may be what people actual do. It is a culturally based social dialect and an evolutionary praxis of change. Its realm may be stretched and broken as a society expands or is broken, so chaos and moral breakdown occurs.

One should not overuse moral reductionism to posit that like a Universe expanding from a singularity, the moral state of mankind is a kernel within babies that grows into adulthood. While some adults are simplistic regarding moral behavior and world view, and some societies are simplistic in behavior and world view in some historical periods, in the modern world, given the possible ranges of freedom of motion and action of human beings as a physical being, moral values are chosen, accepted as true dogma, and so forth, intentionally rather than automatically.

Anyone can understand that putting a hand on a stove burns. Babies vicariously understand that about others. Adults often lack that capacity and willfully persecute others at a distance with modern tools of they can on the basis of rumor. The gang morality of organizations and collectives for pursuing people to victimize is an exaggeration of the profit motive or pursuit of the good narrowly that is expanded into mass organizational moral values.

Organizational morality can have good or bad values, and designate those values like algebraic literals wherein one drops in the meaning such that it supports organizational goals.

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