What the State Is Not
http://mises.org/easaran/chap3.asp

The Paradox of Imperialism (Origin and Nature of International Conflict)
http://mises.org/story/2383
[audio: http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/ss06/Hoppe.mp3

This is what I think:

At the aggregate level, human beings use the imaginative entity of their collective minds to create structure and thus create reality out of the abstract (that which transcends structure but nonetheless requires it). For cultures/societies/civilizations, they create moral structures out of the abstract. These morals, determined “right” by the enlightened minds of the engineers (i.e. law makers, philosophers, etc), are then systematized by the process of legal codification or the collective acceptance by society as cultural norms. This process is ever evolving, changing, and transforming.

The nebulous component of this entire concept (and of objective morality in general) is that if you believe in the existence of any type of objectivism undergirded by universal/natural law then that means morality existed before structure was conceptualized. What was the catalyst to enlightenment and recognition? Some form of ethereal force–a transcendent impetus?

Here’s where it deconstructs. Without morality you can’t have an objective structure, but without an objective structure how do you know you have morality?

Your right in saying that the textbook definition of relativism is that morality is a construct. However, one of the critiques provided by relativists is that one construct can be better than another.

Perhaps the biggest critique was provided by the very person who is attributed to the person who laid the foundation for cultural relativist thought, Kant. He argued that human beings are not capable of direct, unmediated knowledge of the world. All of our experiences of the world are mediated through the human mind, which universally structures perceptions according to sensibilities concerning time and space (i.e. time, laws, and morals).

However, as I am sure that you know, Kant sought to establish some sort of universally applicable standard in his categorical imperative.

So, we you are bound by prima facie book definitions of relativism (and cultural relativism), then perhaps there is no such thing as the ability to make a judgment. Just because moral constructs are made relative to culture doesn’t mean that one culture cannot declare itself superior to another.

Points-in-case:

Hellenism > The Rest.
Roman Virtues > ” ”
British Virtues > ” ”
Western Virtues > ” “

I am still not understanding how you can believe that morality is a construct ( that is the definition of relativism) and still be able to use cross-cultural judgments and hierarchies (which requires some objective standard). To me, those seem incompatible, but I could be wrong.

I’ll admit, cultural relativism is a good way to understand cultures but as far as relativism goes, that’s about it. I do draw the line at some point. You see, I can hold fast to my belief in constructivist thought and simultaneously condemn actions such as honor killings, female circumcision, etc. because I can believe in a superior construct–in this case, Western Civilization.

By the way, natural law is a Western construct. I suppose I do believe in natural law, in the sense that it was conceptualized with the presupposition that certain ideas that were dominant and should be adopted and implemented by everyone (viz. Western Civilization’s ideas). However, even natural law evolves, albeit for the better.

In case you missed it, let met quote myself:

… Let me provide some closure before we start to debate in circles. We obviously have a fundamental disagreement. You believe in objective morals (recognized and unrecognized). I think that system is a bit of a farce and prefer the non-ethereal, human construct approach to understanding morality. Our fundamental differences notwithstanding, we still envision the same end-result: a higher-standard of morality.

I think I speak for the both of us when I say that we believe in the evolution of morality, for the better, and that human beings are becoming a more “enlightened” race, despite our shortcomings. Our approach to the arrival at this conclusion (our fundamental difference) is the only thing that is different. You think that by human enlightenment, certain objective morals are “recognized.” I think that by enlightenment, human beings re-make, through their self-enlightened view (a new perception), a better moral structure that governs life.

By the way, quit acting like this is debate. Are we having a constructive conversation or are you trying to pin me down as an immoral heathen?

The analogy is actually very useful, so I’m not quite done with it. Yes, you can name a handful of physical truths that cannot reasonably be denied without suffering immediate consequences – like denying gravity and plummeting to your death. But as I said, that the exception not the rule. I can (and people do) deny all kinds of physical truths, and never face any consequences that show how I am bound by those physical truths regardless of my acceptance of them. You have gravity and a handful of others, I have everything ever written in geology, astronomy, molecular biology, and history. I could deny the existence of every single truth in every one of those fields, and never come to realize that I am bound by them.

So you and others can keep on denying that we are all bound by basic moral impulses that can be gradually uncovered. There’s nothing anyone can do to force you to believe in them, just like nobody can force me to believe in plate tectonics, heliocentrism, mytosis, or the holocaust. But in general, we look at people who deny those truths to be ignorant, even though they will never plummet to their death as a result of their denial.

Take gravity. It has been a physical limitation since forever. Whether you recognized gravity or not didn’t matter. It kept you grounded.

Now, see gender equality. If, according to your theory, and assuming you think gender equality is a matter of morality, it has been a moral forever and just took us dumb humans a long time to recognize. Whether you recognized it or not did matter, because it didn’t prevent gender inequality on its own.

So, this free-floating universal morality cannot hold people accountable when it isn’t recognized. Perhaps it’s true (can we really know?). But the concept is still ridiculous.

I never talked about denying what we consider moral. Drop the analogies, because I think we’ve deviated beyond the point.

I was trying to point out that the whole “uncovering” aspect of objective morality is ridiculous. The statement that spurred this discussion was your belief that certain universal truths lie dormant in space awaiting to be recognized. Do you really think there are morals that have been “floating around” since time immemorial that simply haven’t … been recognized? So, some cultures are better at recognizing these than others? How do you know who’s right–who has uncovered the all elusive moral?

Look ma! A moral!