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The Templar
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People's Republic of the East Village
Oct 2001
time: 00:29
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Never mind.
Last edited by The Templar on 24-06-2003 at 08:01
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:29
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quote:
Originally posted by Spiffor
No. The failure of colonializations, especially African colonization, was to assume that the encountered people were savages. In America and Australia, these people were simply slaughtered. In Africa, things were a bit more subtle, as these people have witnessed the utter disappearance of all their cultural bearings (notably, African tribes didn't get their identity out of the territory they occupied, but out of their assumed ethnicity). The cultural void that is Africa right now partly explains why there are so many bloodbaths and so little willingness to solve problems together there. All of this because we were convinced our culture was inherently superior and that imposing it could only benefit the Africans. The disappearance of their obviously inferior culture was not a problem, it was a blessing. |
What percentage of the indiginous population of the Americas do you think was "slaughtered?" I would guess about 1%. Count up the attrocities, the Europeans kept prettty good records. Now take a look at how manu American societies are amalgams of Europeans, Americans and Africans. It is the majority. Compare this to Africa.
There are very many reasons why Africans have done so poorly since the departure of the Europeans, and most of those reasons were present before the Euros set foot in that area. Mostly, Africans were very far behind Europeans in technology, economics and politics. Many were already ravaged by the wide-ranging effects of the Bantu "explosion" and Arab culture and slave trading long before the "scramble for Africa". I doubt very much whether Africa would be in better shape had the Europeans continued to ignore it. Rather it would be more Muslim, and the cultures that people shed so many tears for would still have been destroyed.
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Az
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MACEDONIA - It's the name of the sovereign country to the north of Greece
Apr 2000
time: 07:29
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[QUOTE] Originally posted by Giant_Squid
Azazel:
quote:
You're assuming that just because something is subjective it doesn't exist. Metaphor: in the "real" relativism, Einstein's theory of relativity, he proves conclusively that speed, as classically conceived of, does not exist and is a subjective perception. Everyone agrees with Einstein on this. However, if you were to go 90 down the freeway and tell the policeman it's all right because speed is a subjective concept, I highly doubt you'd get out of a ticket. (note that this is a metaphor, and I'm not saying in the least that the situations are exactly alike)
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And because the situations are not alike, the metaphore doesn't prove a point. A point that has to be made, though, is that morals and ethics are NOT the same. Morals are, just as you've said, subjective feelings that one may hold, while ethics are philosophical theories.
quote:
My morality is entirely subjective. I like it because it's elegant, it's well-thought-out, it contains no contradictions, it accords with the natural and inbuilt views I have on the subject, and it presents a clear goal and leads towards it.
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Once again, this is morality. Ethics are not built up from the ground up by case-examples, but rather constructed logically from certain axioms.
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I believe the deontological position contains several logical errors, which I hope to point out on that thread. If I turn out to be right and can prove it, then people can still hold it if they really want, but holding it will be inconsistent with logic, which is something most people wish to be consistent with, as well as inconsistent with some of the most deeply rooted human beliefs on morality.
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If you'd prove it, you'd be right, and they would be wrong.
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I believe that the whole argument about not wanting to force stuff on cultures against their will is based on the desire not to want the people in these cultures to be unhappy (which I would sure be if someone else forced their culture on me).
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Stamping this as a utilitarian decision makes me raise an eyebrow. You cannot consider such an action without all of it's consequences, you've got to examine each case-in-point. There is no reason why any such change of culture wouldn't be utilitarian.
Unless of course, you're not replying from a utilitarian perspective, and in such a case, why should one care about them being unhappy, at all?
quote:
That being said, it's entirely utilitarian to not do so, unless the people in this culture hate the culture and want to change, in which case it's hardly forcing, is it?
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No, it's not. Let's have a culture called "****ism". The people of the culture regularly sacrifice their children to a stone deity, so their people hardly grow in numbers. They LOVE their culture. They think it's cool, they think it's fun, and they're afraid of the deity, that he'd punish them if they stray away from his path. Do you think it would be wrong to change their culture?
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I'm not sure if that's such a "merely". Take the postulates of geometry. Considered in isolation, any set of postulates are equally good. We have the standard Euclidean postulates, which work great. We have the Riemannian ones, which work well too. Or we can make up totally random and absurd postulates like that every straight line intersects itself exactly seven and a half times. Since these are postulates, none of them can be necessarily better than the others, but if we start working with that last one, we'll run into major contradictions, and we usually use an unspoken rule that logical contradictions are bad. If we use Riemannian, we get a consistent system, BUT we kind of already knew what we were aiming for (at least if we were aiming for something that described the world well enough to build a pyramid or something) and this isn't it. Even though a system may work right, if it tells us that we can never make a decent pair of parallel lines then it's never going to be helpful in engineering. So we keep the Euclidean postulates, which as postulates aren't any superior to the others, because we happen to like where they lead.
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we keep them, because they're useful as tools. What we discuss isn't a tool, but the correct way to look at a healthy life.
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With morality, I already know what I want, in an entirely irrational sense - I want the world to be a better place in which to live.
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Who told you that? there are various moralities. Ask the libertarians if they give a **** about the world being a better place to live.
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I could just as well want the world to be a worse place to live or a place with more things colored purple, but I don't hold those desires and see no reason to find logical systems that work on those principles. |
That's just you. Many other people and cultures disagree. But you seem to claim that their pov's are just as valid as yours.
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24-06-2003 07:40
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