I agree with you in the real world because in the real world it isn’t possible to predict with 100% accuracy (or even anything close to it) that someone would abuse. But in the hypothetical where we can know with certainty, it seems to me that if you know that someone is about to commit abuse and you stand idly by because of sanctity you are culpable in that abuse.
Great! We agree on something!
A moral system purports to answer the question, “How should I act?”
To accomplish this goal, it must also be able to judge any decision, past or future. It must also be practical.
Personally,
And, personally, I take on the air of an apologist when answering these questions for myself. I also recognize that everyone disagrees on what is or is not unconscionable, and even I might not know just by thinking about something.
~Max
Awesome, let’s explore this.
You’ve described what a moral system does, but my question is, what is it’s purpose?
You can’t answer the question “how should I act?” without first answering the question “what am I trying to accomplish?”.
How do you determine whether a decision is unconscionable?
I may have other questions later but I think this is a good start.
I’ll say it: I don’t know what sanctity is.
So, there’s sanctity of life, but if I shoot someone with the intent to preserve life, it doesn’t carry the same moral weight? Why not? If I’m shooting them in a way that I can predict is likely to result in their death, how does my saying, “BUT I WAS TRYING TO SAVE LIFE” affect its sanctity? What is sanctity here?
Is the government in the wrong if they have a legitimate warrant? If not, what does “the sanctity of the home” even mean?
I find this concept–at least the way you’re using it–to be incoherent. Could you define this “sanctity” for us, and give us a way to determine whether sanctity exists around something, and a way to determine when sanctity is violated, and when violating the sanctity is wrong?
This argument has been around for a while, and I just think it’s untrue. I don’t think the right wing care about “Sanctity” as a rule. I think that, like the Framers of the Constitution whom they deify, they care about their own “Liberty” at others’ expense. “Dog eat dog” thinking. Any pretense that they are more morally complicated or more morally sophisticated than lefties is whitewashing.
The Sanctity of Marriage was discussed at length here and everywhere else when Homosexual Marriage was a hot topic.
Turns out it was just bigotry. Nothing more.
So I am still waiting for an example of ‘sanctity’ being a distinct virtue in our society worth protecting with law.
I agree. I still cannot tell what this sanctity @Max_S is talking about is or how to determine if I’m acting in accordance with it or not.
How do we determine what is sacred?
Yeah, so far it does appear like sanctity is just a way to say “I don’t like this so much that I declare it objectively bad”.
And maybe some things, like rape or murder, are objectively bad. But other things, like gay or interracial marriage, are not. Yet all four of those things have at times been said to violate “sanctity”. How do we differentiate the valid from the invalid here?
I would argue based on harm. But @Max_S disagrees - but hasn’t told us what he would use instead.
Marriage IS sacred, or at least MINE is to ME. How I choose to conduct myself every day shows the world, my wife and myself that I value the bond I have made. It is not only no one else’s business, even if I cheated on my wife and broke my sacred covenant that has nothing whosoever to do with any institution of marriage.
So what we are really discussing is limiting or changing the actions of others because of the feelings of a few. It isn’t a policy discussion on the best outcome for society or the preservation of individual liberty, it’s about feelings.
I am not interested in other peoples feelings about how I conduct my life if it also in no way involves them.
Yeah. At one point I had a post started, but deleted it because as I read through the thread (on which I’d gotten behind), it turned out that nobody seemed to be talking about the same sort of thing as I was talking about.
People are talking about human behavior as being sanctified or not, and about using the claim of impurity to, um, sanction people who aren’t behaving in ways that the sanctioners approve of. I was talking about sacred places, and about the feeling of holiness that people feel in such places and/or during particular rituals. I don’t think that ‘I feel upheld and at one with community/the universe while chanting this prayer/in this place’ is the same thing as ‘I think you are unholy because you have sex in a way I find yucky/I think God forbade!’. But we seem to be using the same words for both of these things.
Can we protect the first without condoning the second?
I think we can absolutely do so by having society not take sanctity into account directly. Instead consider the harm involved only.
Some guy marries another guy and you have to watch? Get over yourself, you weren’t harmed.
Some company wants to bulldoze the sacred forest your ancestors used to worship at and where you still do to build a strip mall? They can go somewhere else.
The government wants to stop you from worshipping the way your ancestors used to because Peyote is a Schedule 1 drug? They should stuff it.
The government wants to stop you from worshipping the way your ancestors used to because tearing out the still-beating hearts of your enemies and devouring them is now considered “murder” or whatever? Actually, yeah. You should stop doing that.
In order to consider the second as doing harm, it’s necessary to recognize the sacredness of that forest.
This society’s been pretty bad at that. We’ve generally recognized the sanctity of churches, and have made some moves toward including temples and mosques – but recognizing the sanctity of places that have nothing built on them has been a problem.
I don’t think so. You have to recognize that it is sacred to people, and that violating that hurts people. You don’t have to consider the church or forest or rock formation etc actually sacred to do so.
But that’s because we’re still relying on our own sense of sanctity. Churches (and to a lesser extent those other buildings) are sacred to our society so we protect them.
From the harm lens, the church and the grove are equal. Destroying them harms people.
At the same time I think that this should encourage us to take a look at the “sacred” things that our society does respect. For example, the confessional seal was brought up earlier. Certainly telling Catholic priests that the law will no longer protect them if they do not report information related to child abuse harms Catholics in that it restricts their ability to freely practice their beliefs. Just as telling Aztec priests that human sacrifice is illegal restricts their freedom.
The question is which restrictions are valid. There is a debate to be had over, say, confession. But to simply declare it sacred and therefore off limits for debate is ludicrous, and unfairly favors those faiths that resemble those held by the Founding Fathers.
Queensland is one place where they had that debate.
Ah. That distinction does make sense.
This one gets tricky to me, because I think the harm aspect is tied to judgments of sanctity. Consider these scenarios, all of which concern land that Walmart has bought and wants to bulldoze and build a store on.
Are some of these claims to sanctity more valid than others? Why?
My gut feeling is that I listed them in descending order of sanctity, and that #1 should probably be protected and #6 shouldn’t be. But I’m not entirely clear on whether that’s a valid moral argument.
That sounds like a place whose destruction would both hurt lots of people (Cherokee who feel a bond to the site) and which would destroy a site of archaeological value (which reduces our total knowledge which is bad because knowledge helps us make better decisions).
There may or may not still be an emotional bond between the Cherokee and this site, and if there is that should be taken into account. Otherwise, it sounds like the site does have ecological value, which is good both for the sake of knowledge and because healthy and diverse ecosystems make the production of food possible and gives us the opportunity to find new medicine, genomes, etc.
If the Cherokee own the land than obviously taking it would harm them. There are times when this is justified (eminent domain) but considering the history maybe we can give the Cherokee a break.
I think the remaining three are categorically different in that the site is only special to you.
4 and 5 are often shared by a number of people who live/lived in the area. That’s how the Cherokee came to be connected to their land, after all. I don’t think emotional connection should be entirely discounted, just because it doesn’t come from a recognized group.
They can sometimes be kind of iffy because the beloved houses were often built on, and destroyed, land that somebody else loved the same way up until those houses were built. However, the decision to build the house may not have been made by the person who doesn’t want more development, and may have been made multiple generations earlier.
4 and 5. however, can even under current law be considered an issue if it affects real estate value. The house right across the street from Big Box Mart may be worth less than the one across from the woods – at least to live in, if not to build another Big Box Mart (until they’re oversaturated and all go out of business . . . )
I agree that there does seem to be a sort of descending order in that list. But I also agree that I’m not entirely clear on it.
– and at this point we’ve already damaged so much ecology that I have rather a knee-jerk reaction to Save All The Rest; including the partially damaged areas that might be able to recover. But that’s likely not to be possible.
I disagree. I think the purpose of a moral system is to guide human action. People develop and rely on moral systems to try and guide their actions. That is its end, its purpose, it’s raison d’être.
I specifically reject the notion that a moral system must serve any other purpose. I consider myself an existentialist, practically speaking. To have a higher goal is fundamentally incompatible with my philosophy.
This also applies to my perception of other people’s moral systems. Your philosophy in life may be to reduce the harm and suffering in the world, yet so far as I am concerned, the purpose of your moral system is to guide your actions.
I mean it in the literal, subjective sense.
~Max
The doctrine of double-effect is ancient and the debate over its propriety well known (especially with regard to self-defense), so I would rather not detract from the thread by debating it further.
If you will allow me to present another scenario, consider a pedestrian who runs onto a highway. The person is killed by oncoming traffic. Who destroyed his life - morally speaking? Was it the driver who caused a vehicle to crush him? Was it the victim who ran out into the road? I think it would depend.
Consider these alternative circumstances. Perhaps the victim was suicidal and left a note detailing his plan to die on the highway. What if a third party had pushed the victim onto the road? What if the victim had run out on the highway to push another person out of harm’s way? Maybe the victim used a crosswalk, but the driver wasn’t paying attention. Maybe the driver was under the influence of drugs. Or, what if the driver’s car malfunctioned unexpectedly? What if the driver had a seizure or heart attack?
I can imagine more bizarre circumstances. Suppose the ‘victim’ was in fact convicted and sentenced to death by automobile. Maybe a jury imposed the sentence or maybe it was a mandatory death sentence imposed by statute. What if the man is actually innocent? What if the people who passed that statute had all died years ago?
The way I see it, the questions are whether sanctity has been destroyed, and if destroyed, who destroys it, and when it is destroyed. I do not doubt whether it exists at all.
If I invite you in my home, you are not violating the sanctity of my home by walking through my door. If I buy a home where the housing association dictates annual termite inspections, is the sanctity of my home violated when inspectors arrive, or have I consented to their presence by making my home in that community? If the county ordains inspectors to examine wells, or if the state ordains inspectors to investigate well-being of children, or officers who may under certain circumstances enter my home, are these violations of the sanctity of my home, or have I implicitly consented to such measures by making my home in that community and reaping the benefits of citizenship?
I wrote is inviolable, but it should read should be inviolable.
It follows from the definition: can it be rightly violated?
Violating sanctity is wrong per se.
~Max
How do you distinguish analysis of the church from the seal of confession, for example, in the context of institutional child molestation? I would think you’d use the same analysis in both cases. Is there a point at which you say letting this church stand causes more harm than closing it down? Is there a point at which you would say letting people worship causes more harm than abolishing religion entirely? I mean, religious persecution is very harmful. But religions can cause a lot of harm, too. Especially when there is heavy social shaming involved in a tight-knit community, i.e. certain Hasidic enclaves, Jehova’s Witnesses, ultra-orthodox Mormon communities, Scientologists, etc.
~Max