Marnix schreef:@ RogierV en Mortlach, vergeef me, maar ik ga even een flinke lap tekst quoten van C.S. Lewis, die het dilemma waar we in beland zijn, goed verwoordt en uitlegt... Hij verwoordt mijn visie beter dan dat ik dat kan, vandaar dit stuk tekst (als ik jullie zo inschat hebben jullie daar ook geen moeite mee) Het is een interessant stukje studie over dit onderwerp
Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
Ik wil er wel op reageren, maar gelieve daarna niet nog meer citaten integraal over te nemen. Ik heb geen behoefte aan een discussie met Lewis.
Niet elke vrouw die je wilde? Nee, omdat er altijd wel mannen (vaders, echtgenoten, broers) die je ballen er dan af zouden snijden. Maar als slavin in het Romeinse rijk hoefde je echt nergens op te rekenen hoor.
But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
Niet noodzakelijk. Het 'signaal' van de ene impuls kan ook sterker zijn dan dat van de andere. Er wordt geen onderscheid gemaakt, het ene signaal overstemt gewoon het andere.
Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning:
Als je naar verhalen van brandweermensen of mensen die in een rivier sprongen om iemand te redden luistert, blijkt dat die niet (altijd )het geval is. Die mensen staan niet op de oever te wijfelen en zaken af te wegen.
Here is a third way of seeing it If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call "good," always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses- say mother love or patriotism-are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people's children or countries.
Het grootste verschil en ontwikkeling in moraliteit is dan ook over welke groep mensen het gaat. Die groep is de laatste tijd steeds groter geworden, van familie, naar stam, naar land, naar wereld.
Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the "wrong" ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
De 'noot' die zegt dat je je dode medemens moet opeten is anders niet vaak 'goed', en als iemand dan toch in die situatie komt (gestrand op een berg ofzo), zal er waarschijnlijk een hele hoop moeten worden overwonnen. Je doet het dan toch OOK AL zegt je moraal dat het fout is.
By the way, this point is of great practical consequence. The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity," and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
De samenleving is wat complex geworden, dat is waar, en instinct is niet altijd de beste gids, daarom hebben we gelukkig ook iets wat dat instinct reguleert.
Other people wrote to me saying, "Isn't what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?" I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different-we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right-and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.
Daarmee kom je weer terug bij het survival of the fittest. De stammen waarvan de ouders de kinderen aanleerde dat stelen en moorden zo erg niet was, waren niet stabiel genoeg om lang te blijven bestaan. Het hersenpatroon dat dat gedrag wilde doorgeven aan volgende generaties wordt dus door natuurlijke selectie weggeselecteerd.
There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great-not nearly so great as most people imagine-and you can recognise the same law running through them all:
De regels waaronder een samenleving stabiel blijft zijn behoorlijk strikt, dat is waar. Maar ik vind slavernij en doodstraf/martelen behoorlijk grote verschillen. Vond men vroeger helemaal toppie, en nu niet meer.
When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers-people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either.
Nee, je maakt altijd de vergelijking met de moraal van de samenleving waar je zelf in zit, of de samenleving die het meest stabiel is. En een inherent mensbeeld. De vraag is maar over een Romein het beter zou vinden als slavernij niet bestond. Dat heeft niets met inherent goed of kwaad te maken.
You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
Met de meest stabiele samenleving dus.
"Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did-if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
Ik geloof dat er pedofiele kinderverkrachters zijn, en toch vind ik het fout om die mensen te executeren.
Zou wel goed zijn, aangezien hij overtuigd atheïst was, wetenschappelijk enorm onderlegd... en toch op een gegeven moment is gaan inzien dat het Christelijk geloof aannemelijk was 