Well, I just though one ex-president is as irrelevant as another. Look for the upcoming 'Gerald Ford NEVER tripped' thread in the near future.

How true. Damn that Chevy Chase for making the world believe that Ford was a clumsy oaf...

I wonder what credence the American population would have / should have given Harding had he not died in office? Especially those who supported him and then found out what he had actually done.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Isn't morality, to some extent (maybe even fully-haven't thought about it), a matter of perception?

For example: The people that bomb abortion clinics and injure/kill people, believe that they are doing a good, moral thing. Yet, those affected by the bombing (spouses/relatives) think the bombers are demons from Hell (not moral).

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It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so. Robert A. Heinlein


09 Jetta TDI
1985 300D

Absolutely -- in fact morality is almost entirely subjective. Our morality revolves around procreation and the betterment of society. If we were not social creatures (and most creatures are not), we would have very little use for morality at all.

That maybe true, but I don't think it is provably true or untrue.

I think there are some moral values that are, as GS indicates, essentially organic to our being. We build taboos around these activities because of their great power in our lives--engaging in sexual congress with animals or prepubescent children or with our offspring or parents; cannibalism is another that has huge taboos. Now in nearly every case of this or that taboo we can find some obscure group of humanity that has practiced it. But in all cases that I have ever heard of, neighboring tribes had pretty strong taboos concerning contact with the aberrant group. Most often eventually destroying the aberrant group unless that group lived in some tremendously remote and unpleasant place. Leave teh damned to live in their own hell, M/L.

There are other morals that govern less overtly biological functions that are also pretty close to universal. For instance some sort of homage to some sort of spirit world, especially in regards to food and health issues. All cultures recognize those sorts of moral values in other cultures, though they usually don't recognize the particulars of the homage or of the deities/spirits/whatever. That's one reason why, in time of war, the victors of most cultures make sure that their deities are supreme and the vanquished deities are either destroyed or subsumed.

Also, martial bonds are widely recognized by humans. It is bad juju in almost every culture to force sex on a member of the same clan/tribe/nation. It is also bad juju to have sex with somebody else's spouse, though that behavior is itself pretty darned near as universal as the supposed sanctity of marriage itself. People like sex.

But people also know that sex is some powerful stuff and needs some sort of controls or society disintegrates. Where the controls are remains negotiable.

So I think that in a lot discussion of moral universality, the side that argues against universal morals argues from the particular while the side that argues for universality argues from the general.

Take for instance the famous 10 Commandments. One could argue that the prohibitions against killing or coveting are universal and then you get nitpicked by a thousand billion exceptions since man either bit from the apple or dropped from the tree. Or you could say that it is a universal ideal, a general moral belief but not an absolute prohibition, making a moral a sort of useful suggestion, not a Law of Humanity.

Bot

So what is the difference between mores, morals and ethics?

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone