I think I agree with what you are saying but I can’t be sure. Could you clarify it for me a tad (seems like a word is missing or something.)
Human can and do value different things. Sometimes even when they start out valuing the same things, different experiences/cricumstances lead them to systematize this into different reasonably similarly consistent ethical systems.
Westerners certainly seem to forget this type of thing. Do others really not so much?
Modern Westerners often identify their values as being the product of reason, which must be universal.
While this isn’t exactly rare, it is I think less pronounced in most human cultures throughout history. I think a more common explanation to “they just haven’t sat down and thought about stuff and seen we are right yet” is “they are wicked” (have different values). Which obviously has its own failure modes, just not this particular one.
It would be interesting to trace the relationship between the idea of universal moral value, and the idea of universal religion. Moldbug argues that the latter pretty much spawned the former (that’s probably a rough approximation), though I don’t trust his scholarship on the history of ideas that much. I don’t know to what extent the ancient Greeks and Romans and Chinese and Arabs considered their values to be universal (though apparently Romans legal scholars had the concept of “natural law” which they got from the Greeks which seems to map pretty closely to that idea, independently of Christianity and related universal religions).
I think I agree with what you are saying but I can’t be sure. Could you clarify it for me a tad (seems like a word is missing or something.)
Westerners certainly seem to forget this type of thing. Do others really not so much?
Human can and do value different things. Sometimes even when they start out valuing the same things, different experiences/cricumstances lead them to systematize this into different reasonably similarly consistent ethical systems.
Modern Westerners often identify their values as being the product of reason, which must be universal. While this isn’t exactly rare, it is I think less pronounced in most human cultures throughout history. I think a more common explanation to “they just haven’t sat down and thought about stuff and seen we are right yet” is “they are wicked” (have different values). Which obviously has its own failure modes, just not this particular one.
It would be interesting to trace the relationship between the idea of universal moral value, and the idea of universal religion. Moldbug argues that the latter pretty much spawned the former (that’s probably a rough approximation), though I don’t trust his scholarship on the history of ideas that much. I don’t know to what extent the ancient Greeks and Romans and Chinese and Arabs considered their values to be universal (though apparently Romans legal scholars had the concept of “natural law” which they got from the Greeks which seems to map pretty closely to that idea, independently of Christianity and related universal religions).
Thankyou. And yes, I wholeheartedly agree!