StarWarsStarTrek wrote:According to the majority of ALL society, racist. Legalized slavery does not exist today in any recognized country. Granted, you could argue that some harsh economic conditions in many countries could be construed as "slavery", but no country openly supports slavery like they once had.
In many cases, solely because they fear political and economic sanctions from the West.
However, this is mostly irrelevant. Morality isn't democratic. A thousand years ago anti-slavery people were a much tinier minority than pro-slavery are today. Surely you don't argue slavery was right back then.
Hardly. Where did you get that from?
Government in modern democracies exerts control over the average citizen like not even the most authoritarian state in 1900 could or did. In places like many cities in Britain, you can't walk a block without the cameras seeing you. In the US, Uncle Sam keeps detailed track of what you earn, and with the help of credit card companies, can trivially watch your purchases. Taxes, even in the US, are a hundred times what they were back then. In most places public school is mandatory for all children. In most (though not the US), legal gun ownership is difficult to impossible due to state regulations. Just for starters. Even Big Brother didn't have the technology for the comprehensive surveillance state we can build up.
As for Brave New World, surely I don't have to inform you of modern society's social engineering, consumerism, decadence, sexual immorality, anti-Christian atheism, multiculturalism, disrespect for the value of human life, etc, which would drive any good Edwardian into the loony bin if he got to see this was how people in the future would live?
In one old sci-fi book I read (from the 1940s) one sign of how totalitarian a vaguely Orwellian crypto-Nazi state (the novel's bad guys) was, is they had the equivalent of social security numbers.
It's called using logic to deduce moral values. And it works very well. Nothing is completely objective.
Exactly, nothing is. Logic can be used to derive a full-fledged and somewhat consistent system of morality from a set of basic principles and rules. Utilitarians do that, and so do Bible thumpers and Salafists -- it's just the principles themselves and their source that vary.
But the principles themselves are entirely arbitrary. "Decrease net negative utility" is in no way any more fundamentally logical, rational or objective, than "stone everyone who gathers firewood on Saturday."
Listen Donner, you can think that you're being wise by going on a rant about moral relativity, but it's a red herring. Unless if you're going to openly contest my claim that conservatives were wrong on all of the issues I have listed, you're just grasping at straws here. It's annoying how I point out that conservatives were wrong on slavery, civil rights and child labor, and you respond by claiming moral relativity. That doesn't change the fact that they were on the wrong side of history.
I'm not contesting your opinion. What I am contesting is your belief that you're apparently qualified to decide what's "right" and "wrong" for everyone in all Earth's history ever solely on basis of your own morality and ethics.
