In defense of hayabusa, he didn't say slavery was right. He was saying that right and wrong is merely a consensus of society at any given point in time and in the grand scheme of things our morality, decisions/actions are pretty much inconsequential. His comment on slavery was simply an example to highlight that our values change change and because they change they really have no value
Thank you for thinking about what I was saying. I believe you understand what I was getting at, especially about slavery. I would have thought my comments would be understood as being about "in the eye of the beholder" statement. By the time of the Civil War, strong moral arguments against slavery were common and "of course it's wrong". Thousands of years ago however it was seen as how things were. It was part of their economic system. It didn't make things more pleasant by any means, but it was a societal norm in some cultures. In order to have any understanding of how people thought and felt, in other words a collective empathy, one needs to attempt to look at how
people living in those times might have seen the world. To them it was how it was. Chances are the moral arguments we make today would not have occurred to them. I didn't think the statement and consequences thereof was that complicated but evidently I was mistaken. I'd argue that our perceptions have value, but there is no fixed absolutes that can be fairly applied when we could not have possibly walked in their shoes. That in no way implies we have to approve of slavery or a host of wrongs, but to reflexively assign our values today to Egypt three thousand years ago isn't very useful in understanding the world at that time.
Hay seems to me to me to be saying that if morality is relative then it seems illogical that there can be no absolute standard as to what morality is, not that he himself doesn't have moral belief. What Cerpin Taxt is saying is harder for me to determine. He seems to be saying that morality can't be objective but that slavery is always wrong and to me if you say something is always wrong then it is objectively wrong.
I'd say that slavery is wrong. I would rather it never have been, but to be outraged or haughty in our moral superiority automatically condemns all or most of all people in all past ages as evil, or at least so accepting of it that they might as well have been. Well I suppose one could, but that blocks any understanding or empathy of what people lived with at that time. I wonder Cerpin Taxt would say if in 500 years he was condemned because he lives a comfortable life while much of the world suffers or he sat by while the sixth major extinction event happened. By their "superior" moral enlightenment he just might tacitly support evils they consider as egregious as slavery. What would his defense be to someone who wonders "what the fuck was wrong with him"? I wonder.
But in the end it's been said that our collective morality to do actually do what is good, and throughout the ages being of aid to others would be an enduring example. Does it automatically make it correct in an objective sense. Ultimately I can't know but I choose to consider that not nearly as important as making the effort to do good as I see it.
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