moreno was, I believe, the first person to bring this subject up–and I’d like to delve further into it.
We all know about Malala Yousufzai and we understand her outrage and are trying to understand her attempted assassination. But, does moral outrage justify moral imperialism? IOW, does jihad against a child mean non-islamists have a moral duty to work toward changing the centuries old beliefs of Islamic fundamentalists?
I, of course, believe we do have that moral duty, but I’m an educated female from the United States. I’d like to see responses having to do with morality rather than individual responses to the jihad against Malala. Thanks.
Depends if you think you have a moral duty to help people. Once you accept the premise that its your duty to improve the world and alleviate suffering, than surely combating hateful and destructive views would be involved in that.
So to answer your question, yes, off course we do. However I wouldn’t use the phrase “moral imperialism” if I was you, because it sounds like it was concocted by leftists purely to denigrate people like you and I. There is nothing imperialist or arrogant about standing up for little girls who just want education.
Isn’t that a reasonable question?
How does a society know which moral values are valuable and helpful to another culture?
American morality in the 19th century promoted slavery. Racism was a part of 20th century American morality.
So you are unsure if little girl’s right to education is a good thing or not? That’s what your suggesting right? That to believe that little girl’s deserve education is a risky assumption to make?
Try to do some philosophy instead of turning this into an attack on, what you believe are my opinions of, female education.
The question is, should moral values be exported?
How do you decide which ones should be exported?
If you have some values which should not be exported then why do you still hang on to them in your own society?
If someone tried to impose their morals on your society, on what basis do you accept or reject that?
This is a strange way to phrase standing up people’s rights. Using the word “exporting”, your making it seem like their is a divide being crossed, which then raises the question should we cross that divide. But universal rights are not like commodities that have to be transferred into cultures, they are innate everywhere. So I’m not exporting anything, I’m just protecting what is being infringed upon.
Common sense for the most part.
I’m not sure what your talking, I personally do not hold onto values that I wouldn’t want “exported”.
Its going to come down to some objective moral system, like the one Sam Harris talks about.
Rights are a human fabrication. We can develop whatever rights we feel like.
So the majority decides. That is the definition of ‘common sense’.
You have the perfect moral system. An outside observer could not find fault with it? What if someone did and tried to get you to adopt his ‘improved’ morality?
An Afghan man may come up to you and say that not educating girls leads to a more stable society and a happier home life for both men and women. He can reference Sam Harris and point out that the well-being of his society is greater as a result of limiting education.
What they call “God given rights” refers to people’s ability to do something regardless of any ideas or laws that might have been formulated. A person has the right to disbelieve something regardless of any law to the contrary.
That’s just playing around with the word ‘rights’. It amounts to saying : ‘You can disbelieve’. ‘You have the ability to do something in spite of laws and ideas.’
‘Rights’ used in the context of ‘human rights’ is saying that the universe/world/society owes a person something.
A society can decide to interact in a specific way and create these rights but they do no exist by necessity. We can decide that education is a right. We can decide that owning a flat-screen TV is a right.
And then we have to decide how much education and for who. What screen size? LCD,LED or plasma?
And he could also claim that 2+2 = 5 or that religion in government is a good idea, but where is his evidence? Off course he has none, because empowering half of the population, obviously brings huge benefits.
If somebody can beat me at my own game by using reason to show that his/her morality is actually more fruitful, than I will gladly change my mind, like I have done many times before.
I don’t think so, people always had rights, even long before human rights was a popular ideology. I view rights more like mathematics, we didn’t “invent” them, we discovered them. For example, raping a child whose 6, is infringing on the child’s rights, regardless of what any culture thinks. The whole world could think child rape is acceptable, but it wouldn’t make it so.
A society could decide that PI equals 4 if they wanted, a society could decide the world is flat, it does not change the objective facts. Muslim society may say that the right not to have your religion offended is a human right, but they are simply wrong, in the exact same sense that somebody who thinks 2+2=5 is wrong.
You might want to restate this bit because it deviates from your point. If everyone accepted rape, that’s exactly what makes it acceptable - that doesn’t make it right, though.
He would point to the happiness of the people within his society. Obviously.
Then to be objective, you would have to compare the happiness/suffering (or whatever criteria you are using) of members of his society and yours.
There are benefits to not educating half the population.
And there is always the question of how much education is good/adequate/insufficient/immoral. Not obvious.
Okay, fair enough.
Psychopaths are not bothered by child rape. Perhaps they are right and everyone else is wrong. How could we know?
We say the child doesn’t like the rape, the parents don’t like it, we would not want our children to suffer it, and we would not want to be the parents. The feeling of the psycho are a minor consideration. Therefore we decide that it is immoral.
But how does that reasoning apply to less painfully emotional situations?
Do we have the right to free food? Do we have the right to free housing? Do we have the right to 3 years of education or 30 years? Unrestricted travel? Unrestricted employment? A minimum salary? Clean air? The right not to be fired even if I am incompetent at a job? The right not to be offended? Etc.
So do I have a right to a flat-screen TV? How do you know whether I do or do not? After all, I suffer if I don’t have one.
Ahh, but the universe will brutally punish you if you try to use PI=4 in your calculations. Same with 2+2=5 and flat-earth thinking. The consequences of morality are much less clear. In fact, human interactions are so complex that although the morality is entirely wrong, a society may prosper for other reasons.
How do you know anything? ANYTHING? Science, math, logic, engineering, etc—how do you know ANYTHING? I guarantee you that there’s psychopaths who won’t agree.
The answer is, more often than not: “it works”.
Numbers are a purely mental construct—but they work to explain things, and build things. Same for scientific theorems, same for principles in logic. Guess what? SAME FOR MORALITY.
That’s patently false—the consequences for morality are FAR MORE clear. Chances are, you can believe the world is flat and nothing will happen to you… the only effect will likely be that you won’t plan vacations in distant places for fear you’ll fall off the edge. But that’s not a big deal. Guess what will happen to you if you believe that you should stone a girl to death on her father’s doorstep if she’s not a virgin on her wedding day? —The universe will brutally punish all of us… because our daughters, wives, and people we care about will be getting stoned to death.
Let’s not get too far afield with this topic. The XIX amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the US was ratified less that 100 years ago, after years of tribulation by the suffragists who were ostracized and even jailed by factions which wanted to deny women their rightful place in society as thinkers and innovators.
Given our (as a country’s) new-found realization that women can and do contribute a great deal to the furtherance of humanity’s overall well-being, beyond having babies, do we then have the moral ‘right’ to try to ‘force’ other nations, despite whatever culture and religious beliefs the people may have, into agreeing with our idea of morality?
It’s kind of like trying to ‘force’ a tribal government into a form of democracy that means only that they can vote in so-called ‘free’ elections, isn’t it? To me, this is a form of imperialism.
Let me go at it from a slightly different direction. Afghanistan’s government is known as a ‘corrupt’ government, possibly the most corrupt we know of in the world. Sometime back, Hamid Karzai proposed the following to the NATO nations. Would they contribute to an international fund that he could then use to bribe the taliban into not fighting in Afghanistan. His idea was met with derision. So now he’s taking US aid money–and the military pay of NATO funded troops–to bribe the taliban into not fighting in Afghanistan.
So–Who do we trust? Ourselves, with our young awareness of the value of women, or a Hamid Karzai with his knowledge of his country’s culture? Which would be considered more imperialistic in this world which sees the US as an imperialistic nation?
We return you now to your regularly scheduled program.
I think it depends on what this moral imperialism entails. My point in the other thread was primaily focused on hubris. Often when ‘we’ seek to change people from other groups, ‘we’ create more problems than when were there already. We tend to view things in isolation - we will make them stop this and if they stop this it will be good - not considering all the other affects of our actions. I am not arguing in favor of a kind of moral relativism. We might also, at least simultaneously, try to clean our own house. If the idea is that ‘we’ want to help Islamic women, we might want to consider our Foreign Policy and even things like energy management and see how this has been affecting the lives of Muslim women for the last few decades. The liklihood that we will have a foreign policy actually motivated by consideration for Muslim women is very low. It may be part of the propaganda, it may be a motivation for some people who actually do see Muslim women as human, but it is likely not what would really be going on. It certainly is not why we went into Afghanistan and Iraq or had a covert war against Iran or chose and controlled and influnced various muslim leaders. Anyone concerned about Muslim women, it seems to me, and considering actions that might be called moral imperialism, might want to consider how willing they are to look at their own leaders effects on Muslim women. Otherwise it becomes morally facile - look what those bad people over there in that other culture do to their women. This is not just about evading hypocrisy. Once you move towards the issue in a non-colonialist fashion, the effects are different.
I don’t think that the concept of basic human rights, such as the right to education, is just ‘our’ morality. There are people all over the world, from almost every culture, who think that universal education is desirable. There are very few people who do not desire access to some sort of education.
Generally the only people who protest against the concept of universal human rights are those who benefit in some way from other people not having them. Islamic fundamentalist men don’t want women to be educated because they want to retain their political, social and economic control of their countries. So, I don’t actually see their beliefs about women not being educated to be a morality, but to be a set of beliefs they have devised to protect their personal status.
I genuinely believe that morality is more universal than we think it is. People don’t want to see other people suffering, generally, unless they have something to gain from that suffering. Where people believe something because it is beneficial for them to believe it - is that really a ‘morality’, I think not.
Many girls in Islamic countries desire an education. Helping them to have that wish granted is not imperialistic. It’s their wish, after all.
One issue here is: since it is easy for, say, the Taliban, to say it is in our interests to think we have the right to intervene in their culture, our decision to help islamic women isn’t really moral for the very reasons you argue here. Another problem I see with this argument is that it assumes that we will neutrally evaluate what is really going on. We decide that really it is not a moral decision, but a decision based on self-interest. When do we get to decide this about other people? What methodology do we use to ensure this is scientific or as scientific as possible? How do we assess our own motivation? Does this leave us open to others deciding some of our morals are based on self-interest and are they then allowed to intervene in our society? Is self-interest damning? If we have a policy in a Western country that benefits some - think of certain facets of capitalism - does this mean another culture can say ‘really’ the motivation is self-interest by the rich or by bankers and they have the right to help our poor or middle class etc? Self interest is going to be a potential facet of nearly all moral rules. Last what kinds of help are allowed or justified and how? How do we determine what the members of another group ‘really’ want?
Another way to frame the issue is: if you are correct, how do we avoid the kinds of problems we have created even with our charity-based attempts to help and influence other cultures, let alone the problems we have created through embargo, behind the scenes manipulation, less complete economic pressure, military intervention, threats, IMF contracts with dictators that end up creating useless public works and huge public debt - and cash in the pockets of dictators and Western control of economies unable to repay loans, etc?
All of these scenarios can be justified with you line of reasoning - and let me make clear, I have a great deal of sympathy for your line of reasoning - so how do we avoid the problems associated with actions based on this line.
