Moral relativism as a moral view is incoherent. That's because by suggesting to me that I shouldn't try to impose my moral values on others, you are imposing your moral values on me.Good point since this is a perfect example of how the perception of a community ideal-image facilitates destruction of the actual community. The fact is that all living things operate within an ecology/community. Humans, and maybe other animals too, however are capable of creating an abstract image of their community and attribute ideals and other attributes to it. When the goodness of community-functioning is attributed to racial/ethnic identity, genocide becomes a logical utilitarian approach to "purifying" the community to include only those considered "racially good."
Of course, other attributes besides racial/ethnic identity can also be used for "purification/cleansing" such as when people seek to "cleanse" their communities of criminals, sloths, cowards, delinquents, deviants, perverts, witches, religious fundamentalists or other stigmatized identities. Physical removal or killing of stigmatized individuals usually only occurs when attributes are defined in terms of essentialism, i.e. that certain individuals contain undesirable traits as part of their "essence." When undesirable traits are viewed as cultural and culture is viewed as learned instead of essential, resocialization may be taken as a less-violent approach to moral conflict.
Cultural/moral relativists claim that people shouldn't attempt to resocialize each other culturally, let alone attack them violently, but the question is whether total relativism is ever truly possible to the point where individuals can have radically conflicting moral and other values and still be able to interact positively and constructively. Imo, the best hope for that is for people to have guidelines or standards as to how far they may utilize social power against those they disagree with. This requires anti-discrimination laws, for example, and rights and protections against abuses of freedom.
yay :3By the way, I concede our chess game reconstruction to you. I've played through every possible, decently played, continuation. I lose. Congratulations.
Well put. I think you're right that there is no universal (conscious) morality, but I think at a subconscious level there is instinctual morality that exists regardless of culture. For example, I think empathy occurs due to identification between self and other that occurs due to natural identification with the Other. A crude example would be that you wouldn't poke an animal in the eye because you would empathize with eye-pain, even though you identified the animal as non-human. If you DID have a sadistic desire to poke an animal in the eye, you would do so from the perspective that the animal would suffer similarly to the way a human would suffer from being poked in the eye. So there seems to be natural processes of identification that cause people/animals to approximate each other's feelings on the basis of common physiology, for example.Moral relativism as a moral view is incoherent. That's because by suggesting to me that I shouldn't try to impose my moral values on others, you are imposing your moral values on me.
It is a perfectly valid scientific perspective, however, to claim there is no absolute pre-determined morality in the species as a whole.