[net.religion] There are no absolutes

tim (04/11/83)

A recent article mentioned that the poster believed that the laws
of logic were absolutes, and that there were likewise moral absolutes
(murder is wrong, etc.) In fact, the "laws of logic" are *not*
absolutes: they are arbitrary rules of productions which we find
useful in establishing mathematics. It's all well and good to say
"true and true is true", but it is equally easy to define a logic
in which "true and true is false" or "true and true is green wombats
from outer space". The laws we usually use are those which are useful
to us because it is easy to see a match between them and real-world
phenomena, but this matching is ill-defined and subjective. There
is nothing absolute about logic, and nothing absolute about morality.
Both depend on subjective decisions as to the validity of the logical
or moral system.

Tim

P.S. No takers on my "made in the image" challenge? I'm disappointed.

hickmott (04/12/83)

What?  Absolutely none?

				Long live Russell's paradox
				    -Andy Hickmott
				decvax!yale-comix!hickmott

debray (04/14/83)

When one says "there are no absolutes", one has in mind, presumably, some
sort of hierarchical organization of the domains under consideration.
Principles that are absolute inside one level of this hierarchy would not
be so within a higher level. For example, Euclid's fifth postulate is
absolute within Euclidean geometry, but not so at the higher level of
abstraction where we can have non-Euclidean geometries as well. Similarly,
the invariance of mass, which is absolute in Newtonian mechanics, is no
longer so in the higher level of relativistic mechanics (I call this a
"higher" level because Newtonian mechanics is a special, much-lower-
velocity-than-light case of relativistic mechanics).

To claim that "A is absolute" without specifying the domain within
which it is absolute seems to imply that it is absolute in the topmost
level of such a hierarchy. This seems to presume a finite hierarchy,
but it isn't obvious why one can't go on abstracting indefinitely
to give an infinitely high hierarchy of this sort. For example, the
law of modus ponens holds in any logic that represents the "real" world,
just because our universe is structured in a particular way. However,
we can (in principle, at least) abstract out over universes and
postulate the existence of worlds that are fundamentally different
from ours, where such a law might not hold. The fact that we cannot
possibly observe any such different world does not invalidate the principle
used in the abstraction process.

I don't think, therefore, that unqualified statements like "X is absolute"
can be defended on their own right. In the context of the above argument,
a statement like "there are no absolutes" could be interpreted to refer to
a process where, given any X that was absolute in a given domain, we could
abstract out to a domain at a higher level where X was not absolute.

Comments welcome.

						Saumya K Debray
						SUNY at Stony Brook
						... allegra!sbcs!debray