Stardate 20021001.2119

(On Screen): Steven Leed continues to feel uncomfortable with the idea that judging another culture by our standards is somehow not attached to some sort of absolute scale. This is the fourth article in a series, with his original post, my response, and his reaction to that.

Further, the fact that one's axioms cannot be proven or justified does not make one unreasonable:

"Being reasonable doesn't require you to abandon value judgments. Rather, it requires you to understand where and when you're making them, and to understand why you are doing so, and to understand the axioms on which you're basing them, and to try to understand where you got those axioms."

One wonders, however, why it is, for example, necessary to understand where one acquired one's axioms. Is it that some sources for axioms are preferable to others? One could, for example, say that it is "best" to acquire one's axioms through one's family or religious group, but isn't that a value judgment in itself?

In his original post, he mentions that he's troubled by the possibility that our judgment of some other culture might be prejudice. Part of why we have to understand where our axioms come from is in order to avoid prejudice.

If you take a 12 year old kid as an example, he'll have a pretty well-developed sense of right and wrong. But it will be based almost exclusively on indoctrination by his parents and any moral proxies his parents select (e.g. a church). His ethics will be dogma. If his parents are bigots, it's virtually certain that he will be too, at least somewhat.

When we grow older, we retain that indoctrination unless we actively work to remove it, as I did when I switched from Christianity to Atheism (during which process I discarded some of what I had been taught but retained other parts). And for someone who has been indoctrinated with dogmatic bigotry, he'll "know" a priori that certain groups of people are inferior to his own group. But if you ask him why, he won't be able to explain it. (And if you press him, he'll get frustrated and angry.)

To be an ethically mature person, one must evaluate the entire body of ethical belief to discover the axioms, and part of why we need to know where they've come from is that they may have come from someone with an agenda. Not to put to fine a point on it, some of those axioms may be evil or provably false. But until we know what the axioms are and where they came from, we can't really evaluate which ones are valuable and which are worthless.

As to whether family or church are automatically better sources than others, that isn't the point at all. There's no particular overall correlation between the source of a given moral axiom and whether it's worthwhile. Each has to be judged independently.

There's one church whose practices help keep it fresh while avoiding dogma. Every young Mormon man (and increasingly the young women, too) spends a year on a mission, where they travel somewhere else away from home and spend a year trying to spread the faith. It's not stand-on-a-box-downtown-and-scream-loudly proselytization; that does no one any good. Rather, they go door to door, and try to talk to people in shopping malls, and things like that. All of us have encountered them at one time or another. They're looking for personal contact, to engage in extended conversation.

The extent to which they actually are successful at converting people to the Church of Latter Day Saints isn't really why this is important to the church. The real reason it's important is that the best way to really learn why you believe something is to try to convince someone else of it, when the other person is actually asking good questions. I would venture to say that many times during the mission, someone will ask the Mormon a question they cannot answer. They will then go away, think about it, and learn the answer for themselves for the very first time. After a year of this, any given young person will either become disillusioned with the faith and will leave the church (which I suspect is quite rare) or will actually understand their beliefs. The mission converts dogma into living faith, and keeps the LDS vital and alive.

That's one way to do it but not really the only one. But to avoid dogma, all of us must ultimately fully analyze what we believe and try to figure out how we came to believe it. Having done so, we may discover that some aspects of it are indeed not worth saving because the teacher from which it came was sordid or stupid or misguided.

So, we are left with the idea that various groups may have opposing "moral universes," with no objective way of determining whose universe is "better." This situation can be compared to religious faith. A particular religious system may have its own internal logic which makes sense to those who accept its tenets, but to those outside the framework of the belief system, the believer's various "truths" might seem like so much nonsense. Yet there is no way to prove or disprove the tenets. The "truths" are accepted by believers as articles of faith. Like Den Beste's axioms, you simply either believe these articles or you do not.

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