The old man was a witch! A witch I tell you!!
It’s stated (probably wrongly) the other way in the Bible - to do to others what you’d want them to do to you. The way you’ve stated it makes more sense. But still - well, for example, if I take this principle at face value, I am forced to conclude that giving shrimp to my friends is bad, because I wouldn’t want it done to me. (I don’t like shrimp.) Of course it’s a silly example, but shrimp is only the start.
There are people who believe abortion is murder. Who believe the death penalty is murder. Who believe war is murder. There are other people who would disagree with each of those.
“Murder” in that context is basically defined as “an unjust killing,” and justice is relative.
By our standards of justice, the Aztecs murdered tons of folks on top of their pyramids. By Aztec standards, those killing were neither unjust nor unlawful and therefore were not murders.
So we can say “don’t murder” is universal, but only if we agree that the definition of murder is itself relative even within particular societies. Buuuut at that point I don’t know if we can say “don’t murder” is a universal moral rule so much as a universal legal one.
Jesus was cribbing off the Rabbi Hillel, who had said: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” And yes, I agree that it makes more sense that way.
Thanks for showing me that.
I think that I (knowing essentially zero Jewish history and literature) have always taken Jesus’s statement the wrong way. Taken at face value without context, it just seems not particularly satisfactory. But Jesus wasn’t speaking to me, he was speaking to people who all knew what Hillel had said - and if I take Jesus’s words to mean “Not only what Hillel said, but add in the positive version of it as well”, it becomes (to me anyway) much more intelligible and useful. He wouldn’t have needed to introduce and explain (to Jewish listeners two thousand years ago) Hillel’s most famous statements, because - in his context - “of course everyone knows that”.
(…which just goes to show, again, that Christians are incapable of reading the Bible with any confidence, and not qualified to say they understand it, unless and until they understand all of its context and the implications it had in its own day. I’m not saying I’m so capable, I’m saying my confidence in my own understanding is low, and that I generally don’t buy other people’s confidence in their own understanding.)
What about betrayal/treason? Don’t most societies regard this as the worst offense?
The Golden Rule, in its various formulations, is universal: reciprocity is the basis of objective morality.
At its basis is the recognition that other conscious beings exist and their existence creates a claim that they be recognized, not treated as things.
The details vary; not insulting them, harming them or taking their stuff (without justification). What constitutes a “harm” and what constitutes “justification” is subject to endless debate, much of it based on culture.
But the impulse to morality is always the same, which is why some variant of the Golden Rule is found in pretty well every culture on Earth (though, naturally, much honored in the breach).
Its existence explains why we can judge some cultural practices to be objectively wrong, and why some justifications don’t hold water.
For example, some cultures have slavery in various forms; they are wrong to do so, because slavery is a clear violation of the principle of reciprocity as embodied by the Golden Rule - treating conscious beings as “things” is wrong.
In short, I am not of the opinion that such debates over morality are necessarily pointless exercises in cultural one-upsmanship - though they can be, where the debate is over purely symbolic harms that do not engage reciprocity.
For example, the example used by Herodotus in his Histories - a Persian king once asked some Greeks and some members of a distant tribe how they treated their dead. The Greeks insisted on burial or cremation; the tribe insisted that the dead be eaten; both insisted they were right. The King said something like “and so custom is King of us all”.
I would say that custom is indeed king - but subject to a constitution, and that written by the Golden Rule.
I don’t know of any cultures that condone *random *murders ; but plenty have “in situation X, it’s tolerable/encouraged to kill Y”. Medieval Nordic and Germanic cultures had a whole legal apparatus to deal with blood feuds for example (until it threatened to spiral out of control and the powers that be tried to implement “wergild”, that is to say literaly “the price of a man” where straight up murder was in some cases replaced by financial compensation). In the modern age one could point to the well-publicized phenomenon of “honour killings”, whereby a family has a “right” to kill one of their own if they feel the family’s honour has been slighted by the victim’s actions. My own country also used to, if not turn a blind eye to, at least provide much leniency for “crimes of passion”, that is to say unpremeditated murders where e.g. the husband finds their wife in bed with a strapping young buck and kills the lot of 'em. For some strange and baffling reason however the same leniency was rarely granted for women taking an axe to their adulterous husbands :rolleyes:.
Nitpick : that might not be true. We have only one source reporting on this, who was not a Spartan himself (but very much a Sparta fanboy) and who wrote about it centuries past the height of Spartan culture, instead deploring the state of the morals of his time and admonishing his peers with stories about the “good old days”. Feels familiar ? ;). Yeah, they didn’t have Snopes back then…
Recent archeo digs on the site that is believed to be where the Spartans tossed deformed or otherwise weak infants did unearth quite a few human bones, but no baby ones. It’s possible the cliff in question was used as a means of capital punishment for criminals and such ; it is also possible that one or even a few proeminent figures in Spartan nobility did do it to their kid (in a form of Ancient “media event”) and Plutarch turned it into a common or even systemic occurrence (Fake news !) but the whole mass baby-killing tale has come into serious question over the past 10 years.
That was SOP for war in those days. Compare the Trojan War. Remember that cute baby Astynax in the film? In the original he was swung against a stone and his brains dashed out.
Per Ambrose Bierce: “There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy.”
Well, which? Treason or betrayal? And have you ever read Homer? Or Virgil?
Actually, there may be one - honoring the guest. Don’t virtually all cultures condemn failing to care for and protect one’s guest?
I think we’re thinking too small here - one all-encompassing moral rule I can get behind would be “thou shalt not destroy the entire universe” (with the concomitant destruction of all future timelines associated with it / living things in it / things in it).
As an added side-bonus, that is one moral rule that all human societies and cultures have actually managed to follow!
That one’s got to be pretty high up there in terms of nearly every culture / society / pangalactic civilization buying-in and being willing to agree that it should be and remain an unbroken moral rule in their societies.
Sure, various human societies may not have been CAPABLE of this, but not all individuals are physically CAPABLE of murder or incest or a bunch of other moral violations, so I’d think the rule still stands.
Well, at least all the ones that have come along since the last time the universe got destroyed.
As you approach universality, you tend also to approach truism (“Beneficial things are good”).
To varying degrees, but I don’t think modern western culture cares much about it at all.
For example, if I were staying at your house and you told me to that I was on my own for dinner, would that be an immoral act? The ancient Greeks might say so, but we might just get a finger-waggle from Ms. Manners.
Hard to think of a single one. If there were one, it might be, “Don’t do things that are bad for *our *society.”
Many things like murder, torture, and rape weren’t considered bad if done to enemies, or not even necessarily bad if done within one’s own society, but done to the *right *people. Holocausting German Jews was fine in the eyes of Nazi Germans, for instance.
I would strongly disagree. The Nazi actions, for example, are generally considered “morally bad”. Why? Not because they offend merely our particular culture’s set of arbitrary rules - but because they offend against basic, universal morality.
It is only through the existence of such basic and universal morality that a criticism of such acts becomes meaningful.
“Immoral” might be a bit strong; “tacky” would be better. Unless you were a) a close relative, b) staying for more than ten days, or c) a much better cook than I (and even then I would supply the groceries). To be sure, I’m big on privacy for guests, so I would make a point of leaving you alone every few evenings.
But you’re on your own for fully outfitted ships and cohorts of warriors.
She, Dorothy Good, was only four when accused, and five when jailed for nine months.