trigs;325874 wrotewell now we're getting into morality. i skipped that part and jumped to my favorite since jontm brought some fun stuff up. i'll go back to morality and clear that all up too.
i'll try to keep this as short as i can.
judeo-christian morality is the dominant morality in westernized countries and this fact is simply taken for granted. the important point to know about this morality is the origins of good vs. bad and good vs. evil.
in the past, 'good' simply referred to those who were rich and successful and 'bad' referred to those who were poor and struggling. it wasn't until judeo-christian morality came along and reversed this notion. the weak and the meek became the 'good' and the rich and the powerful became the 'evil'. this is the notion that we mostly stick to today despite this false dichotomy that it was created upon many years ago.
furthermore, judeo-christian morality is similar to aristotle's virtue ethics in that both argue that there are universal morals that we must all follow and strive to achieve.* however, it is argued that these virtues might not be the best possible virtues. nietzsche, for example, argues that such virtues as pride and confidence are important as well (notice that pride is actually one of the seven deadly sins according to judeo-christian morality).
it's also important to reference another type of morality which was introduced by kant (kantian ethics). his main argument is that one cannot will something into a universal law if it creates a contradiction. the popular example of this is making a promise. you can't make a promise if you know you plan to break that promise because if that action was willed into a universal law, there would be no such thing as promises because everyone would always break them; hence, we'd have a contradiction. therefore, such an action would be immoral.
i'll stop here since i don't want to bore you guys any more than i probably already have (but we could get all into consequentialism and its varying moralities), but my point is that morality is practically arbitrary at its most basic point and it really depends on what type of morality we're talking about. however, all of them have giant holes in their functioning.
*Just to give an example, in teacher's colleges in ontario, we must take a class that specifically deals with the laws that surround the teaching profession. There is a specific law that states that all teachers must abide by all the judeo-christian morals - it then goes on to list maybe ten different ones and ends with 'and all the rest'. This is not a job description between the school boards and the teachers or anything like that; this is literally a law written by the government.
