My team got destroyed in the final Shards of Eberron session, eaten by a red dragon. In its own way it’s cool, because I don’t think you have truly experienced all that D&D stands for until your entire party is wiped out and devoured by this quintessential beast. On the other hand, I have felt really stupid lately. We made some obvious strategic errors, many of them at my suggestion (“Come on guys, let’s cut across this rubble where we only move half speed! Let’s stay clustered together so that the dragon’s breath can hit all of us–oops, I mean, so that we can’t be separated and ambushed individually!”). Maybe I’m overreacting, and I just need to stop staying up too late playing Paper Mario 2. But I still feel weak.
On the plus side, I fully embraced moral relativism today. (Yes, I realize the silliness of the preceding sentence. It’s a geeky joke; laugh. You know you want to.) It is interesting to me that when doing a Google search for “moral relativism,” the first hit is an evangelical Christian website dedicating to debunking it (whilst promoting their fictional magnum opus, of course). Only upon examining Google hit #2 does one find a fair-minded presentation of the position provided by Wikipedia.
Browsing through Wikipedia some more, I find that Skepticism really summarizes the core of my belief structure (or lack thereof). As a side note, Penn and Teller are listed on the Skepticism page as famous debunkers. Whoo hoo! And both “Bullshit!” and “Mythbusters” are listed under “TV shows and documentaries based on skepticism” (in fact, they are the only two shows listed *cry*).
But anyway, back to moral relativism: the only objective constraints on behavior are physical ones. You can do whatever you can get away with. Might makes right. This fact, however, is not as terrible as it sounds. It is basically a variation of the old proverb, “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Rarely is someone or something so powerful that there are no negative consequences to actions taken that we commonly perceive as “negative.”
I’ve believed these things for quite some time, but for some reason it really sunk in today. Everyone talks so much about what is “right” and “wrong,” but the only real usage of those terms is grounded in the analysis of objective reality. A fact is right or wrong. But those terms are completely subjective when applied to anything else. Actions were taken: fact. But whether said actions were morally “correct” completely depends on the moral system built from social constructs.
As long as there is no chance of negative ramifications from an action, that action is not “wrong.” We can continue to experiment on laboratory rats for eternity, as long as the rats can’t and/or don’t retaliate in some way. The major source of difficulty today, as far as I can see, is people who object to this practice and enforce some sort of sanction against it (e.g., as an extreme example, a group of animal rights activists bombing a laboratory). This sort of behavior illustrates that actions are only as wrong as people make them.
Now, the Christians at moral-relativism.com would have you believe that moral relativism entitles each person to his own flavor of morality, and that his actions thus can never be held against him. Not in my version of moral relativism, suckers! In my version, what other people think affects you, because they will be holding you to their standard of morality, not yours–thus my use of the term “social constructs” above rather than “personal” ones.
Lastly, there is a complication to all of these musings in that any sort of equality standard (i.e., rejecting hypocrisy) affects resulting moral systems significantly. I will analyze this idea in more detail in my next post, when I begin to outline my “weak tenets” mentioned previously.
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog.”
--Mark Twain