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9th November 2012, 09:03 AM | #201 |
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9th November 2012, 09:03 AM | #202 |
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9th November 2012, 09:05 AM | #203 |
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9th November 2012, 09:05 AM | #204 |
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9th November 2012, 09:07 AM | #205 |
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9th November 2012, 09:07 AM | #206 |
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9th November 2012, 09:09 AM | #207 |
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In that case this has been an argument to nothing about acceptability and we should just concentrate on what to do about it.
I say it is right to interfere in their culture by means of supporting and encouraging campaigns to have honour killings stopped and to make it clear that such behaviour is unacceptable in our countries and they cannot do such and will be punished way more than they are at home. |
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9th November 2012, 09:10 AM | #208 |
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9th November 2012, 09:16 AM | #209 |
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9th November 2012, 09:18 AM | #210 |
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9th November 2012, 09:20 AM | #211 |
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9th November 2012, 09:25 AM | #212 |
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I did not think I had made it so difficult. I had researched the issue and come to the conclusion that honour killing is part of their culture, but in my view it is wrong and we are right to take action by supporting campaigns to have it stopped. I had done that by the end of page 1 of this thread.
Then you came along and started arguing against me. |
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9th November 2012, 09:34 AM | #213 |
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9th November 2012, 09:34 AM | #214 |
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Yes, but they are different cultures in other respects as well. I would lay odds that these other cultures don't perceive the same gravity of consequence for loss of family honor, just for starters.
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And even when slavery was ended in the US, the objective economic reality for blacks was largely unchanged for a century afterwards. Sharecropping, segregation, lynching, and Jim Crow enforced material conditions on blacks that were hardly distinguishable from slavery in rural America. The recognition that slavery was abhorrent was a luxury for those who didn't depend on it for the maintenance of their positions of cultural privilege. Yes, some people will sacrifice their material advantages for the sake of another, but it's not so easily done, especially if the alternative is a total surrender of ones security and protection. |
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9th November 2012, 09:40 AM | #215 |
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9th November 2012, 09:42 AM | #216 |
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This presupposes that there is no objective moral standard by which such practices can be judged. This is fundamental to the discussion. If one believes that it's possible to have an objective morality, then it's possible to view a system that allows children to be murdered by their parents as being inferior to a system that regards that as wrong.
If one doesn't accept objective morality, then it's difficult to see on what basis one can say that one culture is "better" than another. Even on a utilitarian basis, it's impossible to say that if the Afghans were to embrace Western culture, that it would lead to an improvement in their lives. We have the example in the USA of aboriginal peoples abandoning their traditional way of life for something closer to what is generally accepted. Are they "better" for it, if "better" is assigned some arbitrary value?
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9th November 2012, 09:49 AM | #217 |
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I understand that, it is not as if slavery was abolished and stopped dead and everyone lived happily ever afterwards. Just like Sati was only legal in some Indian states before the British came along and made it completely illegal and then it continued despite the new law.
Sadly I doubt honour killings will end completely. I am sure this will be similar to the campaign against female circumcision, (Female Genital Mutilation) where studies have shown tradition is by the major reason as to why it happens http://www.path.org/files/FGM-The-Facts.htm "FGM prevalence rates are slowly declining in some countries, as indicated by lower prevalence rates among adolescents (compared to older women). In Kenya, a 1991 survey showed that 78 percent of adolescents had undergone FGM, compared to 100 percent of women over 50.56 In the Sudan, another study revealed that the prevalence among 15- to 49-year-old women dropped from 99 percent in 1981 to 89 percent in 1990.57" |
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9th November 2012, 10:04 AM | #218 |
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This is exactly the point I struggle with. As a materialist I most assuredly don't believe that there is an objective morality. But at the same time, I see it in my best interests that there BE some sort of morality, and I'd like it if it were objective.
Trotsky wrote a long essay ([url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm]Their Morals and Ours[url]) about this very thing where he discussed the idea that morality has a class character. "Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed; whoever is not satisfied with eclectic hodge-podges must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character."
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9th November 2012, 10:19 AM | #219 |
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9th November 2012, 10:23 AM | #220 |
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9th November 2012, 10:24 AM | #221 |
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The majority of evolved human brains. In case you hadn't noticed, morality is a function of the human brain and it evolved so that most of us are born with certain preset values. Some people have defective moral sections of their brains just as some people have no joy and we diagnose that as a mental illness. In fact, people with specific kinds of brain damage demonstrate what happens when the moral part of one's brain is damaged.
Your position of moral cultural relativism lacks a whole body of brain neurology knowledge. Yes, people often override the moral inhibition to kill. First you have to define the person you want to kill as 'other than human'. That's what soldiers do. So the fact a culture defines looking at a boy as an offense punishable by death really is subject to scrutiny of the world body. We don't have differently evolved brains than these people. But go on, keep posting your opinion, it isn't convincing. It's naive. |
9th November 2012, 10:28 AM | #222 |
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9th November 2012, 10:30 AM | #223 |
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You might find a Google search for "the evolution of morality" will return some useful reading.
While an absolute measurement of things like beauty, love, and morality may not be as easy to pin down as pi, there is a neurobiological basis for these judgements. There is an objective component. Think of it more like a range than an absolute value, but still very much part of the material world. |
9th November 2012, 10:33 AM | #224 |
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9th November 2012, 10:36 AM | #225 |
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It's interesting that slavery has come up in this thread a few times. Nessie you're in Great Britain, right?
Per this BBC link, Great Britain took it upon herself to not only make slavery illegal in Great Britain, but to also ban trading in slavery on the Atlantic Ocean for everyone.
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Given that slavery still exists illegally, I wouldn't be surprised if slavery would have been more widely practiced legally even to this day if abolitionists had not decided to try to impose their idea of what was just on others. |
9th November 2012, 10:37 AM | #226 |
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9th November 2012, 10:41 AM | #227 |
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9th November 2012, 10:47 AM | #228 |
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Oh I see - it's our majority that gives us the right to police cultures who practice things we don't like, especially those with brains less evolved than ours, like Pakistanis and Middle Eastern types? Wow...
I hadn't noticed that. Do you have a link? OK... I was gonna ask for a link for that too, but given that's just your unsubstantiated opinion I won't bother. Thanks for confirming you're just blowing hot air out of where you sit. LOL! Yeah... Keep going. |
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9th November 2012, 10:52 AM | #229 |
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Hmmm, feel strongly about cricket I see.
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9th November 2012, 11:00 AM | #230 |
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A quick search and here is an academic study of how moral indignation about killing can be suspended
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&typ....4.bellamy.pdf That is about mass civilian deaths during wars. |
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9th November 2012, 11:07 AM | #231 |
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9th November 2012, 11:14 AM | #232 |
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The article is about how killing of civilians is still accepted and those who do it still go unpunished in modern wars. It shows the reason for that is the need to win the war outweighs the need not to kill civilians and killing civilians can be excused as unfortunate and a mistake and we have called it collateral damage. So our culture can still suspend the moral code of not killing civilians during wars.
The Afghan culture has found it self in a position where it has permanently decided that killing of daughters is OK, despite knowing killing is wrong overall and has come up with an excuse to do so called honour. |
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9th November 2012, 11:27 AM | #233 |
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Ugh... No it's not. Have you even READ the abstract? I doubt you've read the whole article - you need an academic log in for that.
This is the first line of the abstract:
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Wait.. What?! They just suddenly decided recently that they want to kill their daughters, and then retrospectively thought they could justify it by making up an excuse of doing it for honour?! Oh god. I... Oh god. |
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9th November 2012, 11:46 AM | #234 |
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Quoted out of context, strawman and then argument by incredulity. Way to go in making whatever your point is.
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9th November 2012, 11:52 AM | #235 |
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9th November 2012, 12:04 PM | #236 |
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Out of context.
You quoted "The norm of civilian immunity, which holds that civilians must not be intentionally targeted in war or subjected to mass killing, is widely supported and considered a jus cogens principle of international law" which does contradict what I have said. But then what I have said becomes clear by including the next sentence "Yet not only does mass killing remain a recurrent feature of world politics, but perpetrators sometimes avoid criticism or punishment" So I have shown an instance of how whilst killing is not accepted, given some circumstances and it becomes accepted. Strawman "Wait.. What?! They just suddenly decided recently that they want to kill their daughters, and then retrospectively thought they could justify it by making up an excuse of doing it for honour?!". I did not say it was a recent development and if you go back to the links I first posted about honour killings and how they have developed you would see how they bare no relation to what you have said about retrospective justification. Anthropological studies suggest they developed for reasons of male dominance in the society, "A complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Arab society. .. What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. The honour killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What's behind it is the issue of fertility, or reproductive power." "The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions." "... the predominantly Kurdish area of Turkey, has so far shown that little if any social stigma is attached to honor killing. It also comments that the practice is not related to a feudal societal structure, "there are also perpetrators who are well-educated university graduates. Of all those surveyed, 60 percent are either high school or university graduates or at the very least, literate." see posts #37 and #42. Argument by incredulity "Oh god. I... Oh god" |
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9th November 2012, 12:06 PM | #237 |
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9th November 2012, 12:33 PM | #238 |
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Yes it does.
Except that what you said next was:
Quote:
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Anyway; there's no point arguing over an article you clearly haven't read and are not likely to be able to. Perhaps - but it was certainly not intentional... Let's look at what you did say:
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'Has permanently decided that killing of daughters is OK..' - 'has' again, suggesting recent developments. Also using the word 'decided', implies this was not something that began thousands of years ago and evolved, but a firm decision. 'Has come up with an excuse' - 'has' again, not 'had' - this whole sentence suggests that thousands of males across the Middle East consulted each other and came up with a unified decision along the lines of "Right - we like killing our daughters, but we're gonna need some sort of excuse if we want to keep doing it. Does everyone agree on 'Family Honour?'" Now you may not think that's what you said, but can you see how it LOOKS like that's what you were saying? That's why I replied to you in the form of a question, because it LOOKED like that was what you were saying, and I was asking for confirmation. So no Strawman. Now let's have a look at your quotes:
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There's no argument there. Show me where you think there is one. Or I could save you time and just tell you that it is simply just the sounds of despair. |
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9th November 2012, 12:36 PM | #239 |
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9th November 2012, 12:49 PM | #240 |
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