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Old 09-18-2007, 10:57 AM   #32 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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this seems a classic chicken-egg question the interest of which comes mostly from claims made by ethicists, who tend to freak out when the possibility arises that ethical systems are relative. it's like they imagine that saying they are relative means that people will stop adhering to the rules. so they desperately want to see ethics as absolute: at bottom the issue is that they have so little in the way of belief in any human capacity to modify behaviours that the only way to sleep at night is to maintain that there are transcendent rules. folk in a variety of traditions from marxism to nietzschean tend to see ethics in entirely different terms, as conventions/ideology effects or as the central obstacles to human development foisted upon us by the history of an error, the consequences of which are embodied in the christian church.

so i dont know where ethics comes from and am not sure either how you'd figure it out or why the questions is all that interesting. all i am fairly sure of is that one acquires one's ethical predispositions via socialization and that they constitute one of a number of (implicit) rule sets that we use to orient ourselves in the social-historical world. but that says nothing about where ethics come from. good luck trying to figure it out. seems to me that the attempt will result in the exchange of models/hypotheses that are interesting mostly because they seem logical or pretty to the person who advances them.
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