Moral Blind Spots
Gerald Jones discusses how we judge the past, how we will one day be judged, and what we can do about it.
Which is basically what I attempt to do in the OPs here:
The part whereby in a No God universe it seems entirely reasonable to sustain a fractured and fragmented moral philosophy.
On the other hand, sure, “for better or for worse”.
"A moral blind spot is a psychological bias or blind spot that prevents people from seeing the unethical aspects of their own behavior, actions, or judgments. " AI
On the other hand, for countless men and women, a psychological bias revolves instead around the assumption that God or No God their own self-righteous moral philosophy reflects either 1] the best of all possible worlds or 2] the one and the only One True Path to an objective, essential morality, applicable to all of us.
Take the historically easy case of the Lindow Man. At some point in the First Century AD, on a remote moor in Cheshire, England, a young man of high birth was ritually killed, or rather, overkilled: his throat cut, he was axed in the head and garrotted, and his naked body thrown into a bog.
Contemporary Roman judgments of ritual sacrifice were harsh: Roman commentators left many descriptions of the horrific superstitious practices of Celtic human sacrifice, including rumours of huge Wicker Men into which people were herded to be burnt alive.
We share the same revulsion over human sacrifice as Caesar and friends. Yet something else strikes us: how could the Romans have condemned the Celts so harshly and yet themselves practise ritual human slaughter on a scale unseen in Celtic Europe? Mary Beard estimates a death rate of 8,000 gladiators per year – meaning that over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of young men died in arenas across the Roman Empire.
So, you tell me…
Using the tools of philosophy, what are we to make of this? Are there human behaviors so ghastly, so grotesque that no one would or could ever rationalize them? This after perusing human history to date? Even given such things as the Holocaust and any number of other “final solutions” that mere mortals have pursued self-righteously? Sometimes in the name of God, other times in the name of one or another political ideology or “school of philosophy” or dogmatic assessment of so-called biological imperatives.