Any cites for children younger than 12? There must have been some age recognition, or toddlers would also be locked up or executed. 12 seems like an age when a society can consider one old enough to know what the heck they’re doing.
Strange that so many people seem to think that rape is the obvious example, and yet rape in and of itself, i.e. not involving adultery, does not seem to be a serious offense in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Mosaic Law contains several statutes dealing with rape, but they all seem designed to protect males, not females.
It is a capital crime to mess with another man’s wife or fiancee, but those laws are pretty clearly aimed at protecting the honor of the offended man, not the woman, to the point where the victim is executed along with her rapist if she is raped within city limits. The supplied logic is that she should have cried for help, I assume even with a knife to her throat, or after being knocked unconscious (Deut 22:23-4).
There are also laws to protect a father’s right to get a bride-price for his virgin daughter. For a virgin not married or betrothed, the only punishment her rapist receives is that he gets to marry her after paying a fine. So if some rich old goat wants a teenage bride, no problem. And since polygamy was not prohibited, really no problem.
Unless I missed it, there doesn’t seem to be any law covering the rape of an unattached woman who is not a virgin. No husband or fiancee to dishonor, no father expecting a price for a virgin bride, no harm, no foul.
And of course, this same Lawgiver orders the Israelite army to execute all the male prisoners (including children) captured in a battle, but the soldiers can keep the women (and female children) for themselves.
In the Gospels, Jesus is asked several times how to get to heaven. He says, in e.g. Luke 18:20, don’t murder, don’t steal, honor your father and mother, don’t bear false witness, don’t commit adultery. Nothing against rape.
In fact, the New Testament never mentions rape that I know of. There are a very few sentences against sexual immorality, which I guess would cover rape, but would not distinguish it from consensual sex outside of marriage.
My first thought was infanticide, but some cultures held to the idea of “kill the children of our enemies so they don’t become the enemies of our children.” Not to mention incidents of wholesale slaughter.
Maybe killing close family members? But fratricide was know and tacitly accepted in some royal families. Prohibitions against killing one’s own parents and children seem universal.
Murder in general: The tricky bit is how we differentiate murder (prohibited) from other forms of killing (allowed). There may be something in the fact that all cultures have that distinction, which UDS got more in depth on.
Murder, theft and rape are the three infractions almost every society has rules against.
Taboos against incest are universal, but not the definition of incest.
The same for murder, theft, and rape.
Through time and place what are the norms. Humans have been on the planet how long? How long was slavery the norm for example? Or spousal rape the norm or even being a concept? Infanticide?
Morality depends on moral axioms and those aren’t provable as being universal.
Property rights? That a person can reasonably assert ownership of a thing or place.
Maybe moral relativism itself, any bad thing can be determined to be moral based on ingroup/outgroup dynamics (okay to enslave our enemies), situation (during war) or status (the king can eat all the swans he likes)
Certainly not places; there are societies which do not consider that land can be owned, or that it can be owned by a person (as opposed to by the people as a community).
And there are societies which recognise very limited concepts of ownership of things - e.g. you can own a thing if, and only if, you made it yourself. And even then your ownership is limited; while you can trade the thing or give it away, you can’t assign the full right of ownership that you have. The transferee can’t own the thing in the full sense that you do, because he didn’t make it.
Haven’t most societies that don’t believe in place ownership been replaced by those who do, and then violently assert that ownership?
Even with nomadic societies, it’d probably be bad form to hop on someone else’s horse/wear their clothes without permission
Actually, this is a very modern concept. In the past children were routinely punished (including torture and execution) the same as adults for crimes and breaches of cultural norms. I believe the youngest victim of the Salem witch trials was only five years old. It was only in the twentieth century, sometimes late twentieth century, that some states raised their age of consent for sexual activity past 12. Prior to that in some places it was as low as 7.
Ever hear of the Spartans. They considered it a civic duty to expose physically deformed infants. Hunter-gatherers have long had traditions of when and how infanticide is permissible. Usually it’s done at birth, without the mother ever holding the child and before any sort of initiation rituals are performed. Infant farming in past centuries was also not often acknowledged, but frequently used form of killing unwanted babies.
This is about as wrong an answer as one can give.
Morality is a human construct, that is always changing with the passage of time, and quite often changes across geographical lines.
Incest prohibitions are by no means universal. Sibling marriages are nearly always frowned upon of course, but after that things are mostly fair game in many societies. Charles Darwin - ironically - married his first cousin, and his sister married his wife’s brother.
It depends on how one interprets your question.
I don’t believe there’s any rule or law that exists purely because “it’s the moral thing to do.” We have laws and ethics because without them, we would run the risk of living in a world of chaos, always sleeping with one eye open. The most “universal” morals and ethics are laws against the most disruptive of behaviors, like behavior that involves bodily harm and loss of property.
While it’s not “universal” in terms of “accepted by all human cultures,” there is one (and probably only one) moral principle which is not subject to relativism and should apply to all thinking beings. And that is the so-called Golden Rule mentioned above. I can only know about myself for sure – so things I don’t want done to me are clearly not things I can do morally to others.
And if someone does something to you that you don’t want done to you (or someone you care for as if yourself), you feel the instinctive urge to strike back at the perpetrator with equal (plus more if you consider that being in the wrong is itself punishable) unpleasantness. As I mentioned in a previous comment, I think this feeling of retribution is as universal as one can get.
While I don’t know the answer to the moral relativism vs moral realism debate, I think declaring victory for moral relativism is a little premature.
Do Not Put Ketchup On A Hotdog.
True, though grim. And, as later posts point out this was more the norm before the present day.
OK, condone this: