Summary
In October 2020, Samuel Paty, a French teacher, was murdered following a false accusation by a 13-year-old student who claimed he’d shown anti-Muslim bias. The girl had made up the story to cover the fact she had been suspended from school for bad behaviour.
In reality, Paty’s lesson on free speech included optional viewing of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but he hadn’t excluded anyone. The student’s story triggered a social media campaign led by her father, who, along with others, is now on trial for inciting hatred and connections to Paty’s attacker, an 18-year-old radicalized Chechen.
The school will be named the Samuel Paty School from next year.
Or people commit genocide because of a command from an entity we just assume is the source of all morality and therefore their actions and commands cannot be immoral by definition.
How about committing genocide because genetic science proves that your race has superior genes? The problem is with people’s behaviours themselves, regardless of what excuses someone uses to justify them.
We can have a discussion about the moral frameworks where that would be wrong but an absolute moral giver allows for no such discussion.
Discussion is absolutely possible as to interpretations, specifically amongst those who actually hold the reigns of power.
Interpretation can be possible, but often the driver doesn’t seem to be a genuine seeking of a moral truth but working backwards to avoid morally unpalatable conclusions or outright cherry picking and ignoring certain parts of a text. I see that as a tacit admission that morals don’t actually come from the text itself but maybe there’s something I’m missing as I’m far from an expert.
No matter how divinely inspired any text may be, it will ultimately suffer from the imperfections of the limited human ability to convey ideas amongst each other, and over thousands of years it becomes corrupt. This is obviously exacerbated by those who would deliberately seek to derive power from it, in ignorance of any truth which may have been professed at the origin.
I agree with you on this one for sure. That’s one of the reasons I think that a text is not a particularly good foundation for an absolute system of morals. I don’t know why we need to mess around with interpretations in that case.
We need a common foundation around which any coherent society can centre themselves. In order for that to propagate beyond a single generation, ideas must be passed down in some form for others later to still understand why things are as they are. We simply don’t have a perfect answer, and never will without knowing all of everything which ever has and ever will happen.
I think we can still do that without having to buy into the idea of a divine and immutable source of morals or tying our moral thinking to a specific textual work or collection of works. I’d argue we can do it even better without those things because whilst they did have a place in our history and were probably helpful at one time they have ended up holding us back particularly in recent times.