Re: virus:"stupid" laws

Martin Glover (martin.glover@dial.pipex.com)
Mon, 19 Oct 1998 23:11:27 +0000


>Just out of curiosity, why should memetic viewpoint be fairly free of moral
>judjements?

It's a trap, isn't it? I say "memetic viewpoints should be free of moral
judgements because a memetics fan believes an analysis of The Law in terms
of self-replicating cultural agents is more fundamental than just a bunch of
statements of personal moral belief," and then you jump back and say "ha ha,
you said 'should', you're making a moral judgement!" and I cower.

>I mean, most of us definately have a moral viewpoint or as we say
>"Virian Virtues".

In effect, yeh: I guess you could see a huge proportion of culture as moral
statements of a kind... you know, newspaper articles that denounce alcoholic
footballers, basically any item of culture that takes a side and makes value
judgements... come to think about it, newspapers often seem more or less
there to tell you how to behave, rather than just to report facts.

Shit, so maybe I can't emit memes without implicitly making a moral
judgement.

>If our virtues are to be guideposts of moral thought for the
>church, then these morals will certainly have an effect on our viewpoint about
>laws.

Oh, I hadn't picked up on the intensity of the list's churchy overtones.
Wow, I spent the years of my childhood sat at the back of church going "I'm
not sure I'm convinced about all these 'morals'" and now I'm in the same
position, only on a mailing list devoted to evolutionary processes in
culture.

>You are very right though that the "laws" themselves should be free of
>moral judgements. We can all pretty much agree that homicide is bad in almost
>all situations.

Well yeh. I can say "murder is what happens when one person kills another
and that killing is not endorsed by the culture in the context of which the
killing is carried out", but at the end of the day, if someone broke into my
flat and killed one of us, I'd say things like "This is bad." So that
probably tells me what I really think. Or should that be which memes are
really dominant?