Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Moral equivalence is a term used in political debate, usually to deny that a moral comparison can be made of two sides in a conflict, or in the actions or tactics of two sides. The term had some currency in polemic debates about the Cold War .
It applies to good and bad when used in their non-moral sense, too; for example, when we say, "this is a good wrench" or "this is a bad wheel". This evaluative property of certain terms also allows people of different beliefs to have meaningful discussions on moral questions, even though they may disagree about certain "facts".
Pinker goes on to explain that "[t]he moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary voiceovers: lions are mercy-killers of the weak and sick, mice feel no pain when cats eat them, dung beetles recycle dung to benefit the ecosystem and so on.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, in her essay The Myth of Moral Equivalence (1986) [78] saw the Soviet Union's whataboutism as an attempt to use moral reasoning to present themselves as a legitimate superpower on an equal footing with the United States. The comparison was inadmissible in principle, since there was only one legitimate superpower, the USA, and ...
Cultural relativism is the view that concepts and moral values must be understood in their own cultural context and not judged according to the standards of a different culture. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It asserts the equal validity of all points of view and the relative nature of truth, which is determined by an individual or their culture.
In both wars, context made it tricky to deal with moral challenges. What is moral in combat can at once be immoral in peacetime society. Shooting a child-warrior, for instance. In combat, eliminating an armed threat carries a high moral value of protecting your men. Back home, killing a child is grotesquely wrong.
Ethical subjectivism is a form of moral anti-realism that denies the "metaphysical thesis" of moral realism, (the claim that moral truths are ordinary facts about the world). [7] Instead ethical subjectivism claims that moral truths are based on the mental states of individuals or groups of people.
"The psychological question asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments; the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the words 'good,' 'ill,' and 'obligation' are; the casuistic question asks what is the measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so that the philosopher may settle the true order ...