Journal Profane MuthaFucka's Journal: And the answer is... 12
The foundation of all politics is morality.
Before you make any political decision, you must first have your own moral priorities in mind. When you draw up that budget, you must know what you consider to be important and unimportant. This is all based in your own moral values.
Now, define morality.
And people, try to think a little like anthropologists here. The morality that you learned at your father's knee isn't going to be the same as your brother's. Describing your brother's morality in terms of your own is not helpful in understanding your brother's morality.
Ameba (Score:1)
morality = economic expedience. The ameba figured that out long before religion and politics. It dwells in the wettest parts of the brain where the neurotransmitters intellectualize the flight and fright responses.
To be simplistic (Score:1)
Morality is the assigning of values along the continuum from "good" to "bad" to types of actions.
There are, of course, a great deal of other levels on which that question can be answered, even when restricted to the anthropological perspective. I find it most fascinating to think about it as an emergent rational understanding of emotional impulses which are selected for by pressures on a whole group.
Re: (Score:1)
And you got it, the second post.
I use an analogy of a stereo equalizer. Every knob is a different moral value, and every person has different settings on their equalizer.
Every political issue is driven by these settings. All language around the issues resonates with certain people because of the settings. You cannot understand the issues deeply without understanding how all the participants have their equalizers set.
Re: (Score:1)
Never said there was anything mystical about morality. The biological origins of morality are not really necessary for the discussion here.
My resistance to using the word "morality" specifically is to avoid the religious connotation that I have associated with it.
There's no religious connotation. With education comes the realization that the deepest thinking on morality comes from secular philosophers. We're not paying attention to what the great conservative unwashed "think" about morality. Their simple vi
I can not define morality, (Score:1)
but I know it when I see it. And you, you prof*ane m*other F*ck*er, are immoral. (Though I mean that in the nicest way.)
And the basis of all morality is self-interest. So there.
TTFN,
James
Re: (Score:1)
Morality might be imprecisely used in casual conversation to mean good or bad, or it might be used to indicate the entire field of studying virtue and vice. I really mean the latter. I'm not making judgements here about what's good or bad.
Re: (Score:1)
My comments apply to the former and the latter.
> I'm not making judgements here about what's good or bad.
Neither did I. ;-)
Re: (Score:1)
Biological instinct that reacts to its surroundings is the prime motivator for everything,
For the purposes of politics, the details can be abstracted away to make understanding easier. I do tend to view morality as having a biological base, because there are specialized areas in the brain devoted to computing ethical actions with respect to the group.
Moral thinking with respect to politics focuses on a metaphor of the family. Government as parent, and the people as children. This abstracts the biological o
I still think it's (Score:1)
"graft"
Re: (Score:1)
It's possible to derive all politics from graft, through some path of reasoning, or perhaps rationalizing. But if you have only one cause, you can't shed light on what's driving these two cases:
1. right winger who makes an abortion exception in the case of rape and incest
2. right winger who does not make any exceptions for any kind of abortion
These are two different kinds of animals, but if everything boils down to graft, you can't distinguish meaningfully between them.