"Nietzsche is dead" - God
I'm honored to be one of the first of our columnist group to write for In Cogito, and I know everyone here hopes that this site will grow to become popular and successful. My first order of business then, naturally, is to introduce my basic view on society from which I will base my other columns on. In Cogito's columns are opinion based, so don't be surprised if you get offended by or have different opinions than things our columnists post. Please feel free to voice yourself by posting comments in response to the columns, or on the forums. Our goal is to encourage enthusiastic rational and intellectual discussion, and to create a vibrant community.
It is twilight now, and you are returning from your hunt empty-handed. Suddenly you see an elk bound out from the forest followed closely by another foreign hunter. This may be your only chance to feed your family in the coming weeks so, instinctively, you join the pursuit. To your extreme displeasure, his spear strikes its mark seconds before yours. He's young, too young to have a family to provide for - your anger builds.
He eyes you and moves towards his quarry, what is your course of action? Your family may starve to death in the coming frosty weeks - and genetically with it your lineage. It is imperative to the survival of all that is important(genetically, emotionally, physically) that you take all action to feed your family, even if it means transgressing what we would regard as morals. You know that he will fight you to the death for this catch - yet you must rip it from him. You must ensure the survival of your family. But even moreso, we are vessels of our genes, you only must ensure the survival of your family to be a successful organism.
From this scenario we can establish that it is necessary to transgress moral boundaries sometimes to survive. Since in our natural state we only must always do what best ensures the survival of ourselves and our family at the expense of others, we now know that in its purest form nature is a Nihilist place.
I'm sure you are glad that the umbrella of society prevents people from encountering situations like this on a daily basis. Organized society, we can all agree, is definitely a blessing. Though, if you are like me, you know that society can sometimes constrict you in undesirable ways.
These constrictions are generally for our safety, not all the times to be sure, but on the whole laws exist to keep us safe and happy. The law system of the United States and most every nation give us a set of things that are ok and not ok to do - in effect a system of morals. So if laws are morals that means morals exist to make us safe and happy.
Society is fundamentally a great covenant. Each person makes such a covenant that trades liberties for safety and happiness when a society is formed. This is a fundamental truth for every single society ever founded to date in history. Objectively all societies boil down to this.
This leads to my final observation, societies(all formed under the same covenant with the individual) create the same objective moral truth everywhere. Moral relativism is thusly naive and nonfactual. It seems wrong to us Westerners that a woman should be sentenced to death for being raped; not because our culture is so different than their culture, but rather because it violates the fundamental way we as humans form societies.
- Spero
1 comments:
The primitive man vs elk is a bad analogy. Firstly, what we regard as morals are a modern day pehenomena. Ethics, like all other aspects of humans, evolved. Thus, the hunter-gatherer in your story would have felt no moral dilemna, his instinct would simply have taken over.
Secondly, even if you did apply modern day morality to the story, you overlooked one simple solution. Since the competition for the elk is, in your own words, very young and unlikely to have a family of his own, then why not share the elk? Surely, there would have have been enough elk to feed one more mouth?
Live and let live, my friend. Live and let live.
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