Different situations need to be handled differently.  If someone is trying to kill you, the innocent victim, and it comes down to either his life, or your life, why shouldn't it be okay for you to kill them in order to protect your own life? –raining_misery

Excellent point. Absolute rules like “Thou shalt not kill” leave no room for mitigating circumstances like killing for self-defense. We get more questions like, can you kill to save your life?  What if someone is going to injure, but not kill you?  And then, can you kill animals?  What kinds of animals, and under what circumstances?  I don’t think it’s possible to come up with a general principle that deals with every situation.

Still, absolute standards are a nice reference point. Without a set of rules, we would all be drinking spoiled milk and hugging strangers on the street. Maybe rules is the wrong word to use, but expectations of our behaviour guide us constantly, making it all a little more predictable. Human society would not exist without some form of regulation, because i think its in our nature to prohibit things, if only so our brain doesn't get overloaded by all the possibilities. -blished

I agree completely. Our society would never function if we didn’t have rules to guide us. “Thou shalt not steal,” although far from absolute, is a good rule of thumb. It means I won’t drive off with my neighbor’s Porsche. In 95% of all situations, it’s wrong to steal. But what gets tricky is those borderline situations. That’s why the federal courts don’t make all their rulings based on abstract principles. They rule based on precedent, using their previous decisions as a guideline. Certain actions, like armed robbery, will always be punishable by society, but others, like killing in self defense, will always be argued according to the circumstances. And exactly where the line is drawn will vary highly from culture to culture. If there’s an absolute set of values, then one culture would be right and all the rest would be wrong, but I can’t see any reason to think this is the case.

Definitions can be tricky too. What constitutes theft?  You’d get into a mess of questions involving property rights, and how ownership is determined. Did Abraham Lincoln “steal” the southerner’s slaves?  When you download music, is that theft?  The answer to that one is still up in the air. Unfortunately, I think the record industry’s going to win out because all its money and political connections give it an iron grip on the legal system, and the ability to terrorize Americans with lawsuits.

Now, the nagging question is: What is the source of our values- religion, law, culture, or something else entirely?

Do you guys believe in moral absolutes?

I'm a relativist- I think all values are relative to the situation and there aren't any absolutes. And I dont know why, but we relativists have a bad name- people think it means we have no morals. So I'm going to try to explain my thoughts.

Usually, people see religion as the source of their values. Whether it's Christianity or Buddhism, all religions have some sort of code that peopel live by, or at least pretend to live by. The most famous example's the ten commandments- simple statements to tell you what not to do- things that are wrong in all cases: killing, theft, lying, adultery, etc.

Let's talk about "Thou shalt not kill." A simple, four-word statement. It's hard to find anything with a clearer message. Killing is absolutely wrong. But then, what gave America the right to enter World War 2, an act that involved killing millions of Germans?  You'll probably say it was necessary in the situation to save the world from a genocidal dictator. ANd you'd be right.

But the commandment doesn't say "Thou shalt not kill unless A, B, or C." It says "Thou shalt not kill." So FDR's decision to fight Hitler, clearly the moral thing to do, directly contradicted perhaps the most central pillar of our moral system. So if "no killing" isn't even an absolute value true in all cases, it's hard to imagine anything that is. All morality is relative to the situation.

You've probably heard plenty of religious fanatics say "Gays are evil because blah blah blah," and then giving a contorted argument for why its wrong, supposedly derived from absolute principles. They're not using their "absolute" standards to help themselves do the right thing, they're using it to support their unjustified prejudices in ways they can't express through common sense.

The thing about logic is that although it can be a powerful tool if used correctly, it's easy to twist it around to lie to yourself. I don't think there's any way to reason through morality deductively. You can't bubble the facts into a SCAN-TRON machine and have a computer tell you Right or Wrong based on abstract principles. You have to look at the situation and the people in it, and see who is affected and in what way. And I think it's almost never an easy decision. As much as I'd like to have a set of principles that would neatly divide the world into black and white, I don't think such a set exists.

So I think far from being a lack of values, relativism is an acceptance of the complexity of life. What are your thoughts?

Democracy Made Easy

I was just checking out a nifty web site, www.accelerateddemocracy.net that showcases some ways technology can affect voting. Just to summarize, here are some proposals they came up with:

A Personal Voting Agent that asks you for your political views and then recommends candidates to vote for. This one scares me a bit, because if people won’t pay enough attention to the news to make up their own minds, what are they doing voting?  And the people who write these programs might be working for a politically motivated group, such as the Christian Coalition. (Imagine: Do you like terrorists?  No?  Then vote John Ashcroft for President.) And finally, democracy could turn into a set of black and white yes/no questionnaires, where candidates advertise their views by filling out SCAN-TRON forms. I really hope we don’t have this one in our future.

Exercise Your Vote, a technology that determines your voting power based on how informed you are of the issues. Essentially, the more times you read a newspaper, view a political ad, or do well on an issues quiz, the more points you accumulate, and the more your vote will count in the election. The point of this is to incentivize voters to become more in tune with the issues so they can make informed decisions. This kind of reminds me of the system the Netherlands has in place, where someone with a doctorate can have five times the voting power of an illiterate person.

I can see the benefits to such a system, but it would be not just unconstitutional, but a complete disaster, to do away with the One Man, One Vote system. Why should one person’s vote be worth more than another’s, just because he “knows” more?  And even worse, who would determine how the voting power is apportioned?  A Fair Elections Chair appointed by George W. Bush?

I think something like this has applications, just not on the national political scene like the article proposes. For example, a lot of TV shows offer polls online to help determine the direction of the show. They could administer quizzes where you have to prove you’re a consistent viewer before you can cast your vote. Or, someone could post current events quizzes online to guilt you out of voting in November if you do badly.

A location-based voting system, where you have to spend a certain amount of time on a plot of land before you can decide how it’s used. They propose a sort of satellite tracking system to carry this out- something people would never agree too, not least for privacy concerns. But we can do similar things without such invasive technology. For example, there was an online vote last year to determine the future of the World Trade Center site. If they instead held the vote at Ground Zero, then the vote would be decided by people who actually had an interest in the site.

A Post-Vote Tracker that shows you whether politicians in office carried out their campaign promises. I think this one has a lot of promise. I know that if the service is run by a biased source, such as Fox News, it would be next to useless. But Google News could run something like it. For those of you who have never used it, it collects articles from about 3000 newspapers and sorts them according to importance. You can also search for any topic just like you would on the regular Good. It’s done completely automatically, without any human involvement, and the service is free. All they’d have to do is modify it a bit to find information on particular officials and a particular issue, and they’re done. No extra charge, no human bias, a good way to keep the politicians honest.

Do you guys think there’s any potential in these ideas?

Choosing between doors 1, 2 and 3. That's an interesting example. If your choice was independent of external influences then it would be random. Computers can make random choices too, in fact, they are sometimes programmed to. Does this prove free will? Does the computer I am sitting in front of have control over its actions? Just because nothing obvious is determining the result doesn't mean that YOU are. I think random chance can be given the credit for most of human "decisions", and others are more complicated probabilities derived from experience and other factors. –blushed

Interesting point. You say that many human decisions are, in fact, random. And sometimes it sure as hell seems like it- half the shows on TV probably could have been written by 1000 chimps at typewriters. But then, you have to ask, what is randomness?  If you look at random numbers generated by the computer, you can’t find any pattern, and hence they look random. But actually they’re generated by a very specific formula that takes an input and gives a resulting output. It’s only our failure to understand the formula that makes it look random.

I’m sure that my decision to pick door number two must seem random to an outsider. But who can tell what’s going through my brain?  It could be a conscious and deliberate thought process. As far as I know, there’s no direct way to observe free will. You’ll look at me and decide I made a random choice. But that’s far from saying it was completely random and there was no deliberate intention behind it.

Anyways here is what i say, i think that debating the ability and choice of life is in and of itself pointless.-kingdommadebymao

Are you sure?  There could be some practical applications to the concept of free will. For example, I’m sure we’d agree that your free will is severely limited if you’re addicted to crack cocaine. But if free will does exist, then you have freedom at other points in your life, such as choosing not to snort in the first place. And if we can understand ourselves and figure out which decisions we’re free to make, perhaps we can bring more sense into life.

At that point i think that we look to the delusion whicht he moajority of soceity would enjoy living. I don't think we can comprehend a world without total choice and capcity for determinign things on at leat a personal scale. At that point i think that real question comes not at if choice exists but instead at whether we want to belive choice exists. Since i think the majority of us would like to think i'm writing this post out of free will and not some unconcious coercion i think it is safe to say that we assume what is true and it is futile to debate otherwise.-kingdommadebymao

I see your point. And it’s entirely possible that my determination to hold onto some glimmer of hope comes from my fear of being an automaton. I think we’d all like to assume free will exists and then go on living our lives. After all, if we can’t learn the truth, we might as well believe what makes us happy. I’m an agnostic, but I understand people’s need to have faith in God without any definitive evidence one way or the other. If worrying’s going to cause you pain, then settle down and go with whichever answer suits you. But if you find it interesting like I, and I’m assuming most of you, do, then I’d say go on searching for the truth.

Raining_misery made a lot of insightful comments to my last post, lemme reprint a few of them here.

I think free will is only an illusion.  yes we make choices, but the decisions that we make are decided based on past experiences and inherited genes.  so in reality, we really DON'T have control over our choices.

What you're saying is that, no matter what I do, you can always trace my decision back to environmental and genetic factors. And it's easy to see why my upbringing would cause me not to go to a rave and take ecstasy. But I wonder, if I'm asked to choose between doors 1, 2, and 3, if my response is dictated by genetics and experience. Is every little decision I make due to factors beyond my control?

If you decide to sleep late due to procrastination, this will cause you to wake up late. which in turn will cause you to perhaps drive faster so you woldn't be late for school. By driving too fast you may cause a traffic accident. Suppose you plow into the other car and kill the other driver. Likewise, the other driver had also been driving by that exact location, at that precise moment because of the same chain of cause and effects.  So can you really say that it was it free will that allowed him to die in that accident? Yes he chose to make the decision to drive his car that day, but it was the chain of events that led to his decision.

I don't think you made a conscious decision to crash into him, and in that sense, it wasn't a result of free will. But it seems like you made a number of other decisions that increased the likelihood, e.g. speeding on the way to school. That's why the laws don't say "don't crash your car," they say "obey the speed limit" and "don't drink and drive." If you go to a bar and drink a beer, you make a conscious choice to surrender part of your free will for the next few hours. The laws apply to the times when you still have control over your actions.

Everything has a cause and effect. Causes get grouped together and cause a group of effects, and a single cause can cause multiple results.  If I do something, it will have multiple effects on others. This is beyond their control and to a degree, beyond mine as well. So is it possible for them to act freely or change what will happen to them in the future?

In short, all people are interconnected. All of my actions, at least indirectly, can have some influence on you. But the key word there is influence. I'm still not forcing you to do anything. I can stronly caution you not to drink and drive, but ultimately, the choice is still yours. There are so many thousands of influences pulling you every which way. Don't you have some degree of choice which ones to follow?

I still don't know where I stand on free will. There are so many scientific arguments against it, but then, it really FEELS like we have it. Somehow, my intuition still tells me that we make legitimate choices every day and fundamentally have control over our lives.