• YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
    0·
    17 days ago

    But morality wasn’t (unless you are, and may the Creator forgive me for uttering this word, a relativist), and that’s important to remember! Ideally, laws follow from moral truths but alas…

    • Slotos@feddit.nl
      0·
      17 days ago

      Any claim of universal system of morality existence shatters at the minutest contact with history.

      The idea of morality is dominant and potentially universal across human societies. The actual definitions are invented and reinvented constantly and fairly rapidly.

      • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
        0·
        17 days ago

        Just because people have been wrong in their understanding of right and wrong many times and in many places does not mean objective, factual things cannot exist and be said about them. I’m sure that if we sat down the entirety of humanity to talk about it, we’d reach consensus about everything major and simple and concessions about anything minor and complex (and we’d understand the Ted Bundys of the world and their utterings in the similar fashion to our understandings of people born with major genetic defects… without the moral disgust, ofc).

          • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
            0·
            16 days ago

            I don’t think you do necessarily… if you’re very clever, honest, empathetic and/or honourable, but it will certainly keep you more accountable and remorseful even in that case! And for the vast majority of people, who simply don’t have any of those qualities to the necessary degree to competently move around in the world righteously, belief in God and fear of the Day of Judgment will be the main/only barrier to stop them from transgressing greatly. It would certainly help in this amoral, self-serving, anti-intellectual, post-truth USA, for example (and don’t say these people believe in what Jesus believed in or anything like that, cause any cursory reading of the Sermon on the Mount could show you these so called religious people don’t conduct themselves in any prosocial, selfless way, nor do the believe God will judge them for their atrocities/troublemaking).

        • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          By far, society is more moral than it’s ever been. There have been ups and downs and some people are better than others, but if you look at all the atrocities that have been justified by the morality of the time, we’ve made a lot of progress as a whole.

  • yesman@lemmy.world
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    17 days ago

    Yea, laws are made up. So is currency, boarders, sovereignty, human rights, and democracy. Made up things are consequential.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      17 days ago

      Made up things are consequential.

      Sometimes

      All those things operate on Tinkerbell logic:

      currency, boarders, sovereignty, human rights, and democracy

      They can all be thrown away in an instance if people (for whatever reason) don’t fight for them.

      There will always be people who fight against those things, and people that don’t give a fuck too. But we always have to have enough willing to fight for them, the % necessary just fluctuates.

    • Hegar@fedia.io
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      17 days ago

      Identity too! That’s like the most important one I think. A lot of our worst behavior is in service of these completely made up identities which none-the-less help us secure access to resources.

      I heard someone talking about how a lot of our rituals are these imaginary actions we take to reify these imaginary but vital institutions like identities and nation states.

    • Siru@discuss.tchncs.de
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      16 days ago

      Exacly this, all of pur societally functioning things are based on our exceptance of enforcing rules upon purselves. Without laws, you can’t have human rights.

  • falynns@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    “Laws are a threat made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army, you know what I mean?”