Deucaon, I said that religions are not much different from one another in their approach to human ethical interaction. You made the leap of faith and concluded that I was comparing Judaism with Christianity and making no other comparison. Therfore the opnus is now on you to prove to me with links and sensible argument that there are polytheistic religions at play on this planet that condone murder, rape, torture, theft, and various other breaches of ethical behaviour. If you can do that, and you can show that these exist without censure in the same societies that overall hold those things to be unethical (this is key, so be careful with your historical examples), then I will concede the point. If you can't, then you haven't convinced me that polytheistic religions are sufficiently different from monothesistic ones. Nontheistic, philosophical religions will require similar proofs, eg "zen buddhists say it's ok to murder, and here's proof." If you can't show any religion to have significant different ethics than the society it exists in, then you have not convinced me that religions do not exist within the ethical boundaries of their parent societies. I say that as social ethics change, the religions change to keep up with them. Every now and then social norms change too much for some religious types and the religious types start killing people to preserve their way of life. Most of the time these measures fail, and the religion either dies or evolves to meet the needs of the changed people.
As for your list of proofs, no, none of those people acted unethically in order to change the ethics of society. Society evolved around them.
1. Was a fan of the social changes at play in other societies, and wishing to bring his nation in step with the rest of the world, worked to convince people that change was needed. He became a part of a movement in his nation to evolve society, and as a part of that movement he was a part fo a social development enacted by thousands of people. As a result he brought his nation from one of the most backward in the western world to slightly less backward.
2. There is nothing especially unethical about declaring a war of class against class; it's a part of human history and we condone that socially. Had Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov changed his society by serial murdering people and making furniture out of their skin, you might have something. But what did he do? He convinced people to wage war against the ruling class, a completely normal thing that happens all the time everywhere. He did not reject social ethics, and when he was done, social ethics were the same. You mention that he removed a ruling class that had been in power for 800 years. Okay, yes. He did not, as you impy, change his society. He did not remove the idea of a ruling class, he only changed the names of the people in it. Some of the things done by his party include bringing the nation out of the feudal era and into the industrial era, which meant that the people after the revolution were about 200 years behind the rest of the world, but working to catch up with it. You'll need to go a lot further if you hope to convince me that Lenin behaved outside standard operating procedures or that he fundamentally transformed the society he acted in. Other revolutionary figures, the same. I don't know of any revolution that transformed a government type from one to another overnight. Social changes have always been group decisions enacted by the bulk of the people. All any individual has ever done is to get noticed while the changes were taking place.
(Note: you're getting into interesting territory here, and you may get somewhere if you praise successful terrorist movements. I dare say somewhere in there you might find the example you need, but buried as it will be among the global history of gradual social change, it will stand out more as an exception than a rule)
3. Malcolm X may have behaved unethically here and there, but he's a bad example because he didn't change society one bit. His main contribution to social ethics was to reject slavery, which had already been done by consensus in his country nearly a hundred years prior, and to join a religion which had already been in play for centuries. He also aligned himself with changes in attutudes toward the status of minorities, changes that were already becoming mainstream by the time of his speeches and activities. He was a big figure, and lots of people know his name, but he was just a part of something that was already happening, and the changes that were taking place were taking place in courtrooms and in congress. He's about as important to the development of American ethics as your average movie star.
4. MLK made some nice speeches, but he was not the only person doing that. And he behaved ethically. Some of his detractors behaved unethically, stirring up violence at his protests, illegally taping private conversations, etc. Again, not massively terrible stuff, but certainly outside the accepted norms, and without a declaration of war. King was assassinated, which is a hugely unethical act, by folks who wanted him to stop turning attention to minority issues (and who claimed that he was dangerous). Had the unethical act of assassinating King succeeded in returning the US to a segregated or a slave state, then you would have an example of an unethical act changing society. However, it had little effect, or possibly (according to some) an effect that is the opposite of what the assassin intended. Also, it was not the work of a single individual; while there was one gunman, this is the one assassination conspiracy of the 60s that has actually been proven.
5-9. For all the scientist arguments, I don't think you've properly defined what you mean by "acting unethically" or "changing society's ethics," because now you're talkig about dudes who in some cases discovered stuff and in others rediscovered stuff (like Copernicus, whose theory of the heavens was already old news). Do you think that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity changed the way that we study science? Or had an effect on our opinions about murder, rape, torture, robbery, etc? Any business about how churches resisted discoveries by certain scientists and therefore those scientists must have been acting unethically is hogwash. Religious organisations don't define the ethics of a society, so they can't simply say "it is unethical to discover stuff we don't like." Religious organisations are just a part of society, like I've said. The biggest ones are like corporations; they may wield a lot of political power, but like WalMart, they are no more than that. Religious powers may have behaved unethically from time to time, trying to suppress discoveries because they were inconvenient and there was a fear that a change in popular science might mean a loss of religious authority (look at the Intelligent Design controversy even today). Their unethical behaviour in destroying the work or another man, or of trumping up charges against that man so that they could imprison him and suppress his work, doesn't make the scientist unethical. By the way, 4 out of 5 of the scientists you named were immensely popular in their own lifetimes, especially the final three. All were religious men, Newton deeply so (and for MC out there somewhere, not so much Einstein). Newton and Hawking held prominent positons at their universities, Newton also being a knight of the realm and President of the Royal Society. I appreciate that Sir Isaac Newton was a valuable and important individual, and that many revere him as the greatest scientist who ever lived, but what about his life or works marks him as "unethical?" How is he an example of the "unethical" man breaking with society to advance it?
10. Nelson Mandela did behave unethically, committing a small terrorist act as part of a protest against apartheid. He was imprsoned for this terrorism. 27 years later, when apartheid was repealed as a part of a growing global movement against race-related politics, Mandela was freed from prison. Loads of people who like to praise individuals over social movement acted as though somehow Mandela, sitting in jail for 27 years, had singlehandedly changed the world. A lot of these people were impressionable coeds; all one had to do in those days was to parrot notions of peace and freedom (and maybe say that you though Tracy Chapman was an unrecognised genius), and you were going to get laid. I had a lot of unethical sex in my college days, but I don't think I changed the world.
On to the rest of your post:
The business of the human sacrifices being really old, I have to side with Jm and ask what you mean by that. Are you suggesting that these human sacrifices predate society itself? If so, who did them? Did they act alone? Where did they live? Who did they sacrifice? Where did the victims live? Etc. I am not sure if you're trying to make a claim that religious practices predate society, and that therefore all social activity is defined by religion (this is garbage anyway; soccer predates NASCAR, and NASCAR is not defined by soccer). I am not sure if you are trying to say that religion existed even before people communicated the idea to one another. If so, what created it? Certainly not people communicating with one another, so are you making the claim that religion was created by God? Not that you should care much, but you'll find that I disagree. I say that it is obvious that people found a way to communicate with one another, then they established, mostly by unspoken consent, what their ethics were to be, and then they started making up shit like actual laws and art and science and religion and Beowulf.
QUOTE
Say a religious leader is using his followers to further his wealth. He states that him being rich is the will of his god. His corruption would be "good" if it didn't break the ethics of the society around him. Say if someone kills that religious leader to free the people from being exploited. The someone takes the role of the religious leader and changes it so the former ruling class has no power. That someone has just done something unethical and yet he has helped advance society.
I don't think anyone has ever done this, but ok. Society then changes so that the ruling class takes on a different name or value. But unless the religious authority held absolute sway over popular opinion (never happened), and unless the new religious authority held similar sway and changed all of the norms (never gonna happen), ie it's now ok to rape, murder, ectort, etc, where before it was not, you're just swapping one ruler for another. And in your example, the new ruler does what? He takes on power in order to give it up? ABSOLUTELY never gonna happen. But I'll bite: what society has this dude in your example created, if there is no ruling class, or the one that he creates is completely powerless? Is a society with no government to be seen as a social advance? Has this ever happened? And ultimately, does a change in government type change the ethics of a society? PS: I think this happened in the movie STARGATE. I can't think of any historical examples.
None of this addresses why you ask whether one must behave unethically in order to a. be an individual or b. change society.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 28 April 2008 - 02:40 AM
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).