hisannabelle
Posts: 1992
Joined: 12/3/2006 From: Tallahassee, FL, USA Status: offline
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to benji, especially, but also to everyone else. i agree that when it comes to cultural upbringing and such we get onto shaky ground. however, this is why i do believe everyone has the right to determine what they find morally acceptable and unacceptable. i find cannibalism, if the person being eaten did not die specifically for that purpose (for example, eating an relative who died of old age) to be perfectly acceptable. i find cannibalism in the hannibal lecter tradition, killing people for the sole purpose of eating them, to be wrong. but that's my own personal belief. when we start getting into the issue of cultural upbringing, things do get shaky. i'm not going to say that i have the monopoly on morality or anything like that, and i will certainly admit that my own ideas on this, like many other things, are not hard and fast and i definitely don't claim to even come close to having the answers for anything. that said, i think if a culture condones rape and it causes psychological, emotional, and physical harm to anyone because of it, regardless of the fact that it's a cultural norm, it's still morally wrong (in my opinion). because of the fact that the rapists were brought up to believe that it is right, and because of the issues engendered by that, i wouldn't necessarily condemn -them-, but whatever it was that brought them to that point. just like i don't condemn suicide bombers, i condemn a society that creates them. that said, for this and many other reasons, i condone prison not for punishment, but for rehabilitation and for the protection of society from people who act this way until they are rehabilitated. this is also why i believe firmly in researching the causes and conditions of harmful behavior, and not sitting around tossing blame on people and condemning people, but instead using that energy to work toward changing the circumstances that caused the action. like i said, it unfortunately doesn't all come out black and white, cut and dried, but we do the best we can with what we have to work with. i think that having some moral beliefs and sticking to them is a lot better than having none and saying that anything goes, personally. they both come with their own sets of problems.
< Message edited by hisannabelle -- 3/11/2007 5:21:15 PM >
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