Your thinking seems self-contradictory to me. On the one hand, you seem to acknowledge the existence of evil in some objective sense, saying that such evil is rampant in the present time, yet you rule out the use of objective morality to evaluate our past actions. Do I have that right?
If so, then I think you'll find that you have little in common with most commenters here. If you reject the premise that Britain's treatment of Turing was objectively wrong, then the rest of debate will be unfruitful.
You're asking me about the existence of ultimate truth. That's a little above my pay grade (although it doesn't stop lots of folks from attempting it!)
I'd rather put it like this: according to the best I know, Turing was treated unfairly. I do not believe it is moral to treat somebody this way. (Morals, to me, are inherently personal)
Looking at my own life, I find things that I feel are immoral to me yet I allow them to happen anyway: modern slavery, the narcotizing of our youth with technology, or genocide.
When I see things in the past that I find reprehensible or immoral, the interesting question to me is: how did moral and ethical people at time feel about this? Why was it allowed? It seems that understanding these people for who they were -- warts in all -- is to respect them and try to understand them.
The moment I step back and start applying my values totally to another age, I stop individualizing the people who lived there. They become puppets or cartoons for me to lionize or demonize depending on my personal values.
Take Jefferson and slavery. Jefferson is one of my heroes -- he lived very close to my house, and I admire his thoughts and works. He was the brilliant author of the DOI, and more importantly, the Virginia Declaration of Human Rights.
Yet at the same time he allowed slavery -- kept slaves, in fact. There's even proof that he sired children by his slaves. What to make of that? Was he a genius? An evil slave-holder?
The truth is that he was person, who lived in his times and did the best he could. He knew slavery had to go yet couldn't figure out for the life of him how things would change eventually. He once compared slavery to holding a rabid wolf by the ears: you don't dare hold on to him, but you don't dare let him go, either.
Looking at these conflicts in people is how we identify and learn from what happened. It gives history depth, and it give us a little humility.
Looking back through history, and applying just a little bit of that humility, it seems totally obvious to me that a hundred years from now people are going to be doing the same to our generation. And I don't like it. The things I've done that are immoral I did for what I thought to be good reasons, likewise these folks with Turing. The people of this age, both good and bad, deserve our respect because that's the way we want to be treated by future generations.
It's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's a matter of all of us being human, and respecting each other for it.
So are you the kind of person who says we shouldn't try to apply objective moral/ethical standards to other cultures in the present age? I submit that there's a much greater cultural distance from modern England to modern Pashtun Afghanistan than to England of fifty years ago. Would you say that we should withhold judgement when an Afghan woman is beaten or murdered for leaving her house alone?
You say that Jefferson was "doing his best". I think you chose Jefferson to make such a statement as easy as possible for yourself. I don't believe that the people most responsible for Turing's fate were "doing their best". I think they knew they were doing something wrong. I think that the Taliban know that blowing up girls' schools (and the girls) is wrong.
This is why I say you lack a common moral foundation with supporter of an official apology to Turing. I say that it's wrong, always and everywhere, for a man to be hounded to suicide for his sexual orientation. If we can't have any kind of objective foundation, what hope do we have of stopping this from happening in the future? (that's largely a rhetorical question; I'm well aware that there have been two millennia of debate over absolute ethics, but for me this issue is clear as day).
I think that the Taliban know that blowing up girls' schools (and the girls) is wrong.
I would totally disagree with this. Unfortunately, I think that this assumption that those who are against us "really" believe as we do and are deliberately acting in a way they know is wrong is terribly corrosive to finding solutions; it implies both that we need not sincerely explain ourselves to "the bad guys", and simultaneously, that they can be convinced to stop doing bad things if we shine a light on the things they're doing, since it's assumed that they're really feeling guilty and don't believe the things they say.
You cannot shame a person into behaving properly if they believe they are already behaving properly.
What? Are you kidding me? This may be something that we won't agree on, but I chose that extreme example for a reason. Can you honestly say, with a straight face, that you believe these people think that killing innocent schoolgirls is good? And I'm not talking about the ends-justify-the-means kind of good, but rather objective good.. Do you really think that? If so, then what exactly what are we supposed to "explain" to them, and why would you imagine that they can be reckoned with at all? Wouldn't that make them, sort of, oh I don't know... totally frickin' evil to the core? How does it benefit us to assume that about our enemies?
Besides, the evidence is against you here. When the Taliban announced last month that are now devoting themselves to protecting civilians, I can't imagine that their embrace of the PR value is completely detached from reality.
BTW - This is still nate_meurer... I can't login from my home for some reason, thus the new account.
Also BTW - Yes, I am equating the folks who hounded Turing to this death with the Taliban.
I strongly recommend it! It changed my understanding of what morality is and what moral beliefs to expect in others, and deepened my understanding of my own moral intuitions.
The key insight that is relevant here is that educated Westerners (like me and, presumably, you) see morality as mostly about harm and fairness. But that view of morality is not so popular outside the West. When we see people doing harm to innocent girls we find it hard to believe that they think they're doing good. But other cultures are relatively more concerned with morality relating to authority/obedience, in-group/out-group treatment, and purity/disgust.
When people persecute homosexuals or let improperly-dressed girls burn[1] they're acting based on the purity/disgust aspect of morality, and probably authority/obedience too. I expect they also usually feel conflicted about it, because burning schoolgirls must register on the harm-based morality meter. I think the way to engage with fundamentalists who do this kind of thing is to emphasize the harm done, and try to undermine the concept of purity-based morality.
(Westerners also have some reckoning to do with disgust-based morality. It is hard to argue against infertile adult consensual incest using the morality of harm and fairness, but many Westerners still regard it as immoral, and find it hard to explain their moral intuitions. Similarly, Bush Administration-appointed bioethicist Leon Kass coined the term "the wisdom of repugnance"[2], using the argument against genetic engineering. I wish humans would abandon repugnance as relevant to morality.)
Research on morality can tell you a lot about what morals people have, but it can't tell you anything about what morals people ought to have.
I think that repugnance and disgust exist precisely because they are pretty good heuristics for things humans thrived by avoiding in general (like your example of incest), and continuing to thrive may depend on allowing your disgust to influence what you do even when you can't articulate a rational reason for it.
>Research on morality can tell you a lot about what morals people have, but it can't tell you anything about what morals people ought to have.
Yes, I recommended Haidt because the topic was whether the fundamentalists were acting according to their understanding of morality. If you're saying that research on morality doesn't yield conclusions on something like "real true morality", then I agree. But I'd add that Haidt's research helped me see inconsistencies in my morality, and in this way it's affected my view of the morality I ought to have.
I agree that repugnance can be a good heuristic for personal actions. I wish that people wouldn't impose their sense of repugnance on others, though. You know how Jews aren't allowed to mix dairy products and meat? I thought that was just an arbitrary rule until I went to Israel and talked to some Jews. They didn't just find it immoral because the Torah said so; they found the idea of a cheeseburger or a meat-topped pizza disgusting, as we might find the idea of meat ice cream disgusting. So I'm concerned that repugnance can easily get attached to arbitrary things.
More abstractly, we can view repugnance as nature's buggy hack to get us to avoid harmful things, dating from before we were as intelligent and knowledgeable as we are now. Purity-morality is just harm-morality implemented on an obsolete system. Now that we're intelligent enough to judge harm more competently than instinct (i.e. we get fewer false positives), we can and should override that judgment, when it helps us. (Trivial but real example from real life: I used to find mushrooms disgusting, just because. After Haidt got me thinking about the usefulness of repugnance, I looked up the nutritional value of mushrooms, found that mushroom-phobia was unhelpful, and decided to get over it.)
There is no objective good. If propagandistic violence towards women increases the overall birth rate, then it may well be a practical, Darwinian good.
They don't even claim to believe that killing innocent schoolgirls is objective good, so that's a total straw man. Obviously, the ones who believe (and I'm not saying all of them do, of course), believe that protecting innocent people is good, and killing evil people is good, and so on. In some cases, they and we would disagree on what "innocent" entails.
I would say that at least some of the Taliban are evil, sure. Does that mean they can't change, or that they can't be reasoned with, or at least intimidated into not harming people? No, though that might be the case with some. I dunno.
How does it benefit us to assume that about our enemies?
Seeing your enemies as they are can only help, as far as I can see. Assuming that they really believe what you do, but for some reason have acted as though they don't -- well, I don't think that's going to be very helpful in predicting their future actions.
Well yes, I understand that they would claim that murdering schoolgirls is good, taken in isolation. Of course the act has to be taken in context.
The distinction I'm after is this:
Nate's brand of Taliban: Blowing up this school serves a greater good, which overwhelms whatever bad is inherent in the act.
Your brand of Taliban: Blowing up this school and killing everyone inside, in this situation, is unambiguously good.
My problem is that I don't believe that the Taliban, in general and as a rule, are completely without a trace of Nate's description. If there's any evidence at all that I'm right, and I think there is, then recognizing this gives us at least something to work with-- makes them less alien.
However, I do understand your overall point about the danger of ascribing moral bases across cultural lines, and you may well be right. We've waded into territory where I'm largely a layman.
I also do not believe that the Taliban are completely without a trace of Nate's description. I just think that, as a rule, they'd see things in general as either good or bad, but not really as a mix of good and bad. I grew up in a worldview that was similarly inflexible, where an action was either a good action or an evil one, but never "kind of good" or "kind of evil"; we might be uncertain about which side it's on, or wrong about it, but the fuzziness isn't ascribed to the action or the Deity's view of the action. Possibly for this reason, I don't actually view the Taliban's beliefs as "alien", or hard to understand. I just have goals that conflict with their goals.
So are you the kind of person who says we shouldn't try to apply objective moral/ethical standards to other cultures in the present age?
I think you've reached exactly the opposite conclusion from what I am trying to say.
I'm saying that we have a obligation to apply our standards as a group to other cultures in the present age -- much more so than to people who aren't around to defend themselves.
If you believe that Jefferson knew he was wrong then I envy you -- you live in an age where you understand what is truly moral and those in ages past did not. It must feel good (and I'm only being a bit sarcastic here) to feel so free of ambiguity and nuance when it comes to reviewing other people's lives.
If we can't have any kind of objective foundation, what hope do we have of stopping this from happening in the future?
If you truly are interested in preventing immoral things from happening in the future, wouldn't your best course of action be to identify and confront those things you find immoral in the present day that nobody does anything about? Why go beating up folks who aren't around? There's so much actual bad stuff, does it make you feel better to lionize Turing and demonize his tormentors than to actually stand up against, say, the violence against Tibetians? Or slavery in the Arab world? Or genital mutilation in Africa?
When you start dealing with modern morals, you find that it gets tricky very quickly: to make a difference you have to navigate all of this stuff between you and effective action. Yet to deal with some historical injustice it's very easy: find the good guy, find the bad guy, and make some kind of symbolic statement.
Odd that you can't see that the very difficulties you face today in being moral were also faced by those in the past.
No matter how right or wrong you are about things, unless you're actually changing something it's all so much whining. Turing is a good example of somebody we can rally around and feel good about supporting -- he had a great mind and was treated terribly. But our reaction is all just so much fluff. It's modern morals: change your lightbulbs to CFI, write a check to a charity and leave the heavy-lifting to somebody else.
Just not my cup of tea.
I think if they want to Knight the guy that's a completely different thing, and it sounds like a great idea. Just not so much the navel-gazing and symbolic and empty self-flaggelation.
Jefferson absolutely did know that slavery was wrong, and he wasn't shy about saying it, or writing it into legislation-- see his first draft of the Northwest Ordinance for a good example.
I'm not getting a real strong moral-relativism vibe from you. I mostly perceive apathy.
If so, then I think you'll find that you have little in common with most commenters here. If you reject the premise that Britain's treatment of Turing was objectively wrong, then the rest of debate will be unfruitful.