MORALS in Nature?

Dec 13, 2006 01:45

Morals, some say, should be left up to the individual choice of the person. My morals may be slightly different than your morals, and that’s OK. Is there a natural Moral Law? What would happen if we all had different morals ( Read more... )

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pablopy December 13 2006, 08:46:35 UTC
Well, natural law has certainly been part of a lot of philosphies. I mean, Lcoke,Hobbes, Rousseau they all believe in some certain law that is regulating for all of us. Having a law in nature is interesting, and to certain extent biblical. I mean, God created nature right. Being creative means pouring yourself into something else, you are giving something of you into something new. Hence, humans are made in the image of God. The Bible also supports that for example Sabbath is ingrained in nature. I.e. There must be a sabbath year for nature (Lev. 25). And the examples could go on.

Now, on the negative side. If there is a law of nature, do we need Jesus. Do we need Jesus and his grace, or do we just need to follow the law ingrained in nature. I mean, if we get our morals from nature, or the morals that are floating out there somewhere in the ether, were does God's grace come in. For we could argue then that people who have never believed in "our" God or in Jesus, but have followed certain morals are saved. So it becomes about works, rather then faith. I am not sure if this is bad or good, but certainly there is a need of further nuancing this.

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exiled_avatar December 14 2006, 04:02:41 UTC
Raf, you beat me to Locke and Hobbes etc.

What then would you say about people who talk about rights and freedoms not moral right as being the driving force behind this moral evolution? [counter-point] Surely if I am pregnant [which I'm not] surely I have ownership over my body and can do what I choose becuase I have ownership, in much the same way that I can put a brick through my computer moniter because it's mine.

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jf0806 December 14 2006, 04:38:02 UTC
I'm not denying people their rights and freedoms, but I do believe that morals have been laid down that ought to be followed. I will readily admit that I do not follow all the morals I preach. That's another one of the things that I preach.

A baby - or fetus - is not, in my opinion, a part of a woman's body. The DNA is different, and it is simply there because for the first 9 months of its life it cannot live on its own. The fact that it becomes its own entity is proof enough to me that it is not a part of the woman. Any other organ - her head, arm, toe, heart, liver, stomach - would be incapable of surviving on its own, even if we gave it 900 millenia rather than 9 months to grow.

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pablopy December 14 2006, 07:19:44 UTC
Hey, good one. Exactly my point however. As Christian, socialized through my Christianity and the Bible [not a negative thing] would say that is completely wrong. Besides having, in my opinion a completely wrong take on property [namely a personal version of capitalism], religiously there are many factors playing into this decision that are not so much conditioned by natural rights, but I would say, other way around, natural mores would naturally have their foundation in the bible.

But here is our crux. Moslems will say the same thing, except that they will substitute the bible with the coran, and so on and so on. If you take a step back then you will see that a lot of what we proclaim to be natural rights or morals, depending on the angle, such as for example human rights are a product of our socializiation in the Western world, which to be really really honest hinges on Christianity.

I am not arguing against human rights, although I believe they are a wrong step in the right direction, however, what I am saying is that the whole idea of natural law comes out of this idea of the social contract and the natural state, which is hypothetical and which totally ignores forces such as culture and society, or rather argues that they are based on the natural law, which would in my opinion, then not account for the many different types of socialization and cultures.

What I am saying is that whether we talk about moral right or just rights, I think we are talking about the same. The right in your example to abort for example is as much a questions of morality as anything else. when we talk about universal human rights we talk about a universal code of conduct to be respected, again, a certain morality. I think we need to take a step back and approach this whole thing differently, for when we start talking about the "universal" or "natural" we become fastly entangled in a net of oppression and to be honest, forms of neo-colonialism.

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