I really don’t understand how you can be anything but a moral relativist if you don’t believe in some outside force that has the right to say what is right and what is wrong. You have to define morality based on what the majority of the people think are right or wrong.
But even though I do have that outside force, I don’t think it makes sense to call people evil when what you consider evil was normal. It becomes a useless description. Nor does it make sense to assume on faith that we are morally more advanced. It’s a tautology: we’re more advanced morally because we fit the modern definition of morality. Again, you need an outside observer to make these sorts of comparisons.
ETA: I think Rand’s point is that “we” aren’t the people responsible for what happened. We aren’t our ancestors.
No, there are objective factors such as what most people want, and humans needs and instincts. Murder is wrong, and was always wrong because very few people want to be murdered.
Your argument also pretty much absolves any evil group in history of responsibility, since naturally they thought what they were doing was right. I’ll go right on thinking the Nazis were bad guys, thank you.
When someone says “x is not OK,” all they are doing is saying “I don’t like x.” They are just expressing their opinion. But many people are not happy with that. They have to believe that they are expressing some objective truth. But they aren’t. There is no over-arching objective truth one can point to to say in an objective manner that “x is not OK.”
When we are talking about interactions between members of a society, I think we can meaningfully translate “x is not OK” into “x is not good for society.” So, in addition to expressing the opinion that “I don’t like x,” they are also saying “it is a bad thing for our society when people do x.” Of course, they haven’t presented any evidence for their position yet, and of course they are still only expressing their opinion.
When we are talking about interactions between different societies, then I suppose one could translate “x is not OK” to “x is not good for human beings.” But we are getting into pretty weak sauce at this point. Much more evidence would need to be presented to support this proposition than needs to be presented in the intra-society scenario, and people who say “x is not OK” almost invariably think they are tapping into some objective cosmic sense of right and wrong instead of trying to make an argument about what is best for humans. So, there’s just not a lot of meaning to “x is not OK” in this scenario beyond “I don’t like x.”
In the OP, we are talking about interactions between different societies. So, a claim that “European settlers shouldn’t have killed the Indians” really just means “I don’t like it that European settlers killed the Indians.” It doesn’t mean “it is an objective fact that the Europeans killing the Indians violated some universal moral law” because no such law exists.
So, I think Europeans killing the Indians is perfectly OK in the sense that there’s no way to say it’s not OK in an objective cosmic sense. But anyone is perfectly free to express their opinion that it’s not OK–but all they are doing is expressing their opinion.
If you’re bringing murder into this discussion as relevant to the settling of North America by Europeans, I’ll remind you that humankind has murdered in the name of war for as long as we’ve stood upright (and continue to this day).
This operates under the faulty assumption that the NAs would have accepted compensation. Remember, not only did they see the land as something that couldn’t be bought and sold, who says they’d want to give off their land anyway?
I suppose it could be like Manhattan, no? A string of beads. There’s some compensation. See? Doesn’t work.
I took option two to mean something akin to “find a way to peacefully coexist with the Native Americans without resorting to either cultural or literal genocide.” There was plenty of space; it could have been done, in theory, but in practice human nature precludes it, and shall until the King comes again.
Sure there is. It all depends on what you mean by the word okay (or moral, which is what I think you’re really talking about). I’ll go on at more length on what I mean by this manana or Monday.
What do you suppose the various indigenous people were doing to one another to the best of their relatively feeble ability?
The only difference between the Europeans and the natives is that the Europeans were much more competent conquerors. If Native Americans had the means and the Europeans were the incompetent, Native Americans would be running Europe with a few English and Spaniards vying for the casino biz.
And any moral principle to the contrary is a European invention. I never saw an Indigenous Peoples constitution claiming all men are created equal.
Sheesh.
And yes, I am glad for central heating, dental care and appendectomies. I suspect most Native Americans are, too.
My belief? I don’t have a belief. You are the one with a belief. You believe in some objective sense of right and wrong. If you can’t argue in favor of that belief and have to resort to name calling, then that’s your problem, not mine.
Ditto this. Just like we shouldn’t vilify Thomas Jefferson because he owned slaves. It was the standard at the time; people in the 1700’s couldn’t predict how moral standards would change in the future.
Nonsense. First, none of them would have wanted to be slaves; saying it was OK to enslave “those people” was self indulgent hypocrisy, not a different set of moral principles. Slavery, like murder and theft and rape is and always has been unethical for that reason, regardless of how common they have been.
You are also ignoring the notorious fact that they were violating their own supposed principles of equality. All men are created equal…except those over there apparently. And on top of that, the various claims of racial inferiority made to justify that behavior were factually incorrect.
This sort of argument is just an attempt to wiggle out of admitting that this country was founded by hypocrites and monsters.
Naturally, the land-owning white people of yesteryear would not enjoy being slaves…but you’re missing my point. Throughout ancient history, slavery was accepted as a normal thing, and whether or not the slaves actually enjoyed being slaves was irrelevant. The concept of global human rights did not catch on until the mid-20th century, and even today, some cultures do not consider human rights to be important (China, for example.)
Oh come now…when T.Jeff wrote, “All men are created equal,” do you really think he meant all human beings? You are right, of course, to say that they meant “us, not them” when considering who gets to the right to life, liberty & property – but let’s not pretend that our Founding Fathers were holding themselves up to be great emancipationists, especially when you consider that the Declaration of Independence was little more than a propaganda document.
No, it was quite relevant. You are buying into the slave owners’ own attitudes; that their opinions and desires mattered, and those of the slaves did not. That’s another place where these morally relativist arguments fail; they pretend to be arguing that the opinion of the people of the past was as valid as our own, but in reality they are arguing that only the opinion of the elite mattered, not their victims.
No, I think he was lying and never meant it for a moment.