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Lee Statue goes down in Charolttesvile

bruto said:
I think you enter a difficult zone here, though. If, as you contend, all morality is relative, it's hard to contend then that the morality of today is not as strong and absolute as any morality ever was. If there is no over-arching moral principle, so what? It just means that the only standard by which we can judge is the one we have now. It's a mistake I think many make when dealing with this kind of stuff. Values may not be absolute, but they're still values.
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I am not a fan of presentism.
 
catsmate said:
And it also shows a deep lack of understanding of how insignificant the 'South' was. They were being bypassed by industrialisation (due to many factors) and were on the road to 'Banana Republic' if they'd actually managed to secede.
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Yeah, had they 'won' the war and kept their independance they possibly would've been annexed after their economy failed, and instead of states would've become US territories with no representation.
 
Belz... said:
Yeah, had they 'won' the war and kept their independance they possibly would've been annexed after their economy failed, and instead of states would've become US territories with no representation.
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Not to mention they’d be facing several secession attempts themselves within years if not months. Some places would have wanted to return to the Union, others would have had their own agenda. The Comfederacy would have to pay for armies to keep these zones in control, armies they could not afford.
 
Warp12 said:
I am not a fan of presentism.
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I'm not even sure what presentism would apply here, and what its relevance would be. There are, I think, two ways to approach the morality of slavery. ONe is that it's wrong because it was always wrong. This makes those of old wrong by absolute rules, and denies them the comfort of context and relative value. The other is that whatever it was then, it's wrong now, and because values are relative, today's value is what we need to work from today. I think you have it kind of backwards, in suggesting that condemning the Confederate statues today is presentism, when what you're advocating is more like "pastism," the idea that what was once thought right must remain so even after we've matured.
 
Warp12 said:
Huh?? That sounds like legal removal, to me. Which I endorse, 100%.
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Then I don't understand what you're doing in this thread complaining about "mob rule". Less than a handful of Confederate statues in the US have actually been removed by violent mobs. The vast overwhelming majority of statue removals have been by authorities like city governments and college boards, and in those cases the only (occasionally violent) "mobs" that have appeared, appeared to interfere with their legal removal. All of the Confederate general statues in New Orleans, for instance, had to be removed rapidly in the middle of the night because ever since the city council began to discuss their removal small crowds of (white) people were appearing around them during the day, obviously intending to try and prevent that from happening.

The deadly and unabashedly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville was organized explicitly to protest against the planned removal of the particular Confederate statue discussed in the OP.
 
catsmate said:
So obviously the Federal government has the right to tell the states what to do...
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In certain things, yes.
In other things, no.
The US Federal system seems hard for a lot of people outside the US to grasp, on that states have legal powers a degree of soverenity, and are not just adminsitrive conviences for a central government.
 
BTW enough with the You Tube videos of the statues being taking down with "The Night They Tore Old Dixie Down" blaring in the background. Lost it entertianment value a long time ago.
 
Anyway since we've had another lovely merry-go-round from the Lost Cause of the Confederacy types, can we just get back to taking the statues of the racist traitors down?
 
dudalb said:
That is carrying moral relativity to extremes.
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As I said above, I don't have such a problem with moral relativity, extreme or not, but if you're going to believe in it truly, then what you must believe is that the old values, while they may exonerate those of old, can not govern what we do now. If slavery was once not as wrong as it is now, then fine, we can forgive Jefferson and whatnot, but we must then also forgive those now who demand what is right now right now. The more extreme your relativity is, the less argument you can muster against the constancy of change.
 
bruto said:
As I said above, I don't have such a problem with moral relativity, extreme or not, but if you're going to believe in it truly, then what you must believe is that the old values, while they may exonerate those of old, can not govern what we do now. If slavery was once not as wrong as it is now, then fine, we can forgive Jefferson and whatnot, but we must then also forgive those now who demand what is right now right now. The more extreme your relativity is, the less argument you can muster against the constancy of change.
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I think it's less an argument against change, and more an argument against your morality being relevant to me. I can forgive Jefferson for believing what he believed. I can forgive you for believing what you believe. I can't quite forgive you for imposing your beliefs on me, as if they weren't just relative to you. Especially not with the argument that morality changes all the time, so every change should be equally acceptable to me.
 
theprestige said:
I think it's less an argument against change, and more an argument against your morality being relevant to me. I can forgive Jefferson for believing what he believed. I can forgive you for believing what you believe. I can't quite forgive you for imposing your beliefs on me, as if they weren't just relative to you. Especially not with the argument that morality changes all the time, so every change should be equally acceptable to me.
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I suppose you have a point, but I was thinking of morality, relative or not, in its role as a social, rather than individual, value. The solipsistic viewpoint that everyone is entitled to his own morality has the potential to become a might-versus-right battle. I may not be entitled to impose my morality on you, but you, in turn, cannot on me. Relevance be damned. If it is truly irrelevant, then what I do to something you do not personally own is irrelevant and you have no kick coming. What gets done depends on who has the power to do it. And, of course, that's much what has happened thus far with regard to Confederate statues. The bigots in power have prevented others from implementing what some might consider the prevailing social values, through disproportionate power and disenfranchisement of their enemies.
 
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