Try to prove morality? Nope. Morality is something you just know. I'm no super scholar on the subject but think it's on a cultural level. To deny morality is fine if you want to justify anything you do with no consequence. We are after all social in nature so morality guides us to form laws to protect that society. Morals can and do however change and evolve. This is a lot of the reason Siskel and Ebert being old school film critics couldn't stand the at the time new wave of slashers.
Back to the doll. The face kind of looks like Marilyn Manson.
Thanks for the response. I like talking about this sort of thing. Honestly, if you were a super scholar it really wouldn't make a difference, as people who are familiar with these issues are no better at proving the existence of morality than anyone else. Honestly, you summed up your position well, and arrived at the same conclusions that I've heard from well educated people. If you wouldn't mind, I have a few questions for you. You don't have to respond of course, but I think they're interesting to contemplate.
1) If morality is something people just know, why is there so much disagreement about what morality is? If morality was intuitive, wouldn't we all be on the same page? People have been arguing over the nature of morality (including justice) for as long as we have written works. Thousands of years!
2) Suppose morality didn't exist. Would that really make a difference in terms of how you treated other people? As someone who believed in morality well into my 30's, in my experience Nihilism didn't really make a difference. I'm still compassionate, and try to be a nice guy. I don't like seeing people get hurt, and I avoid living at the expense of other people as much as I can. I'm pretty sure most people would act that way, even if they didn't feel obligated. I think you actually mentioned the reason for this: we are social in nature. People who would harm others for fun and profit, probably aren't too concerned about morality anyway. There are some Nihilists who agree with you though. They're terrified, and think we should bury our heads in the sand, pretending morality exists so we can function! (They call it "fictionalism"). It's definitely a scary thing to contemplate. It's like living in a theocracy, contemplating atheism! Where would you go from there?
3) It's true, that our society's understanding or claims regarding morality changes over time. However, does than mean we were wrong about morality, or does the nature of obligation change over time? For instance, was chattel slavery actually a moral or ethical thing to do, until it wasn't? Or were people mistakenly behaving unethically the whole time?
4) It's also true that our society's understanding of morality results from culture. However, cultural norms are the product of people getting together, and conforming in how they eat, dress, create music, perceive the universe... The only prerequisite for something to become a cultural norm, is that a lot of people have to agree on it.
Do we really have an obligation to conform? Doesn't that seem arbitrary? My mother used to say, "If everyone jumped off a cliff..."
I think the censorship of Horror movies and comic books can be attributed to a false understanding of moralism, that stems from the exact thing you mentioned in your post. People were afraid that if you allow people to glorify, celebrate, laugh at or treat sex and violence with a lack of solemnity, there'd be a collapse of social institutions. Ebert definitely felt that way, as made explicit in his review of "I Spit On Your Grave". For him, being in that theater was foreshadowing the collapse of Western Civilization! Meanwhile, I think the reason why Slasher flicks were so popular in the 80's, is that embracing the Gore became an act of anti-authoritarianism. Not politically. On a very primal level, kids questioned the rules and demands of their parents, and had fun rebelling as an end in itself. For me, most of the fun in watching horror movies involved going to the theater and cheering at all the death scenes with my friends. It was funny, specifically because we knew our parents would react the way Ebert did. We knew that watching horror movies wouldn't really hurt anyone, nor would listening to Ozzy Osbourne records, or playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I feel the same way about morality. I think the fear of letting go is irrational. We'll be fine, without it.
